Today is the three-year anniversary of my first date with Jess, the best thing that ever happened to me.

To celebrate, we had wanted to go away somewhere fun for the weekend. But it’s raining torrentially here in New York. And, at least according to forecasts earlier in the week, it should also be pouring in the Hamptons, Miami, New Orleans, Connecticut, and nearly every other fun, two-night destination we could come up with.

In this weather, our living room seems like a comparatively excellent idea.

Jess hates being photographed.

But when one of her clients, Brooklyn-based designer Hayden-Harnett, asked her to pose for an advertising series they were doing, she couldn’t say no.

Her main complaint about the result: the dress, shoes, and jacket were all just a bit too large. Apparently ‘small’ is a relative measure.

Nicknames Jess regularly calls me:

• Jorshie
• Joshula
• Yoshington

Things Jess has woken me up to say at 4:00 in the morning, before falling back to sleep:

• “Time to make the donuts!”
• “You smell like a ferret.”
• “Let’s do drinks.”

just said I always write about productivity and that it’s boring. So, while I had started a different blog entry about momentum and how what I do in the first five minutes of my work-day determines what happens for the entire day, I’m scrapping that and posting this instead.

This weekend, Jess and I headed out to the Brooklyn Flea, a large and quirky crafts fair and flea market in Fort Greene.

Jess is in her element at such places – she has strong taste, obsessively tracks style trends, and can somehow spot the single gem buried in a table of piled crap. She’ll pick up a necklace for $20 one week, and the next we’ll be in Henri Bendel, seeing the same thing on sale for $2000.

My own flea market duties, on the other hand, don’t really involve item selection. Instead, I’m left with bargaining down the prices of purchases, vetoing anything ill-fitting or overly terrifying, and – most importantly – navigating.

The layout of the Brooklyn Flea, much like nearly every other flea market (and perhaps the minds of most of the vendors), is a convoluted mess. So it’s my job to make sure our wandering path nonetheless takes us past all of the stalls.

This weekend, however, I slacked off on that navigation duty, following Jess rather than directing her at each turn.

Jess stopped, for example, at a large booth full of earrings, and exclaimed that this guy actually had really great stuff.

To which I replied that I knew he did. Mainly because Jess had purchased a pair of earrings from him about ten minutes earlier.

And it occurred to me then that perhaps my directing us was robbing Jess of a large percentage of the fun. Left to her own devices, any flea market would seem several times as large; given even a few minutes in between, she could apparently return to the same stalls again and again, each time excited to rifle through them as though for the first time.

Whenever she sings “Happy Birthday”, Jess belts it in a deep, operatic baritone, replete with furrowed brow and sweeping hand gestures.

It’s just one of her many distinctive singing styles, which range from quiet improvised lyrics about how she’s feeling (“Jessie is hungry and needs more sleep…”) hummed under her breath while typing emails, to an approach that could probably best be described as ‘bellowing’, and which tends to occur either in the shower or very close to my ear (the latter invariably sending her into fits of nearly tearful laughter).

Jess frequently accuses me of being obsessed with her, which is pretty much true. Since we’ve started dating, I’ve become perhaps the world’s premier Jessmologist, and I’d be happy to pen out daily, extended, painfully earnest blog entries about her and her singing and how wonderful she is.

I will, however, spare you. Instead, I’ll only share that the morning I really fell in love with Jess, after we’d been dating for a couple of months, was when she turned to me and said, “it’s nice to have a friend.”

And she was totally right. So, to Jess, my best friend and singing instructor, happy birthday wishes and all my love.

xxx

[Via [Keith](http://www.flickr.com/photos/crossfitvirtuosity)]

Next post will be as a married man.

Five days until our wedding, and the details are falling into place.

But, while I’m increasingly sure the wedding will be really excellent, I’m also increasingly sure that, if Jess and I had to do it again, we’d take a rather different tack.

Because, excellent or not, it will still be a wedding. And all our guests will have doubtless attended at least a couple of other weddings in the past.

So, the alternate plan:

Buy a case of vodka, a boombox, and a Lexus SUV. Find a cliff. Gather friends, family, vodka, and boombox below the cliff.

Then watch while someone drives the SUV off the cliff.

Far less work, far more memorable, and just about the same amount of money spent either way.

Down to the final wedding prep details.

The many final wedding prep details.