In a Couple Hours
In a couple hours I will be a married man :-)
theParagon
Skip to ContentA Singles Swan Song
This is what I wrote my groomsmen and had read aloud before they received their gifts.
By the time you read this I will have probably gone to far to come back and on my way to a life of marriage. Itís been a great ride being single and I have to thank you guys for that. I couldnít have asked for a better 22 years and know that all of you have had the same experience.
Itís time now for me to move on and trade my life as a single, in for one with a lady. The lady is a good one and I think you guys will like her as she begins to stay around longer than the rest have. However ń I am happy to say that I have negotiated my way though this trade and there is good news for us all.
Though the negotiation was hard, there is now an understanding. The understanding is ń “As long as I hold this lady as my number one priority and love her far beyond death, Iíll still be able hang out with you all and continue to have untold amounts of fun.”
I feel this is a good deal and tomorrow I will be signing the papers.
So thanks guys for being such an inspiration in my life and getting me this far. Iíll do my best to be an example as I am now the first in our group of guys to get married. Thatís not to say I wonít need snowballs thrown at my crotch every once in awhile to keep inline.
Your brother, friend and local computer g33k,
Aaron “I’m getting married tomorrow” Schaap
Tomorrow I get Married
I’m getting married tomorrow and as much as I know this is a big step, it hasn’t hit yet on how big of a decision this really is. Every day has been a simple enjoyment of the present with little or no deep thought as to how much my life may change. I haven’t freaked out or wondered what it would be like to just take off and not deal with the huge commitment I’m about to make.
To be honest - I have no ideal what to think or how to feel. I’m just going from Thursday to Friday, then from Friday to Saturday - continually moving along at a steady pace. Am I supposed to be jumping up and down and smiling uncontrollably, or am I supposed to be freaking out and trying to do all the things I wish I would have done in my single years today, before I get married?
Today I’m moving the rest of my stuff over to the house and working on a couple things here and there for the wedding. If for some reason you think that I need to do something before I get married or have any advice before I tie the knot tomorrow - Leave me a comment letting me know.
Now’s the time to have your words - tomorrow I’m getting married and I won’t have time to run around enjoying my life as a single.
Jodi’s thoughts on it all
Driving to work this morning I was thinking about what it’s going to be like for my high school friends to be talking about me in conversation and have to correct themselves when they say - “Remember Jodi Broersma … although I think she got married, something like Smith, Scott, Scap … or was it Schaap … yea Jodi Schaap … ” That train of thought brought me to the realization that this is the biggest decision I’ve made in my ENTIRE life. 4 days to go and it dawns on me that when I’m 40 I will have been married longer than I was ever single. I might have a teenager when I’m 40 - I might even have 2. And the snowball just kept getting bigger until I was wondering what kind of repercussions would hit if I said … oooops - just kidding, I’m not completely ready … I’ll take a rain check on this whole ever after with you.
In reality - I’m pumped and completely ready to get married in 4 days. Infact I’m pretty ecstatic about the whole ordeal - I mean, really. I’ll be having sleep overs EVERY NIGHT with my best friend … what more does a girl ask for?
Stability, communication, protection, comfort and someone backing me up … to mention a few. Ah, communication. He has all of these qualities - I have nothing to worry about.
Although, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m supposed to be really stressed out. I have more than one person asking me on a daily basis if everything is ready to go, am I stressed, nervous, worried or having second thoughts. I’m not stressed at all, and why wouldn’t I have everything ready, I’m getting married in 4 days … you’d think thats what the whole engagement was for or something. No I’m not nervous, but you’re making me wonder … and second thoughts mean what ??? am I wondering if I should get married at all; well I said yes - and I’ve had 6 months to rethink everything completely, and still in 4 days I’m going ahead with it …
OH-MY-GOSH I’m getting married.
Going from OS 9 to OS X
After 2 years of working on a 300MHz iMac, running OS 9.1 - I finally got the opportunity to trade in the old beast for one with a faster processor. It’s still an iMac but I’m now cruising along with a 700MHz processor, 256MB ram, and sportí in the new OS X (10.2.6).
I’ve been running OS X for a couple months already at home on my iMac and I’ve had my chance to become familiar with the new Operating System. Now that I have it at work, I’m able to fly through projects much quicker with help from various open source applications. 
Email Trouble
After the high of getting a new computer wears off you begin to realize the great need to get information from your old computer, onto your new computer. An easy task? Not easy enough, I think.
First I began to load software onto the new computer. Right off the bat I found out that Outlook Express (OE) doesn’t work in OS X. That is to say - Microsoft stopped making it for versions higher than 9.x systems.
Microsoft wasn’t cruel enough to not give you anything - they offer Entourage instead. Except, Entourage is more like Outlook than OE, and it’s not free. The free mail version for Mac is an application called, cleverly enough, “MAIL”. Mail is a dumb downed email client that is great for grandmas and children - but not power users like myself.
Entourage was fine for me but everything I had was in an OE format and on another computer. I did a couple hours of research to see if anyone else had found out a way to convert OE emails over the Entourage email format. All I could find however was a bunch of people helping PC users convert over to the Mac.
After a couple hours of wasted research - I broke down and asked our systems admin if he new anything. Oddly enough he had just figured out that problem for another guy a couple days easier and he simply suggested that I copy the “Microsoft User Data” folder from OE (on my OS 9.1 computer) and place it in “Users/%computername%/Documents/” (on my OS X machine) and I would be all set.
Turns out that it worked great. I loaded that file into the correct place and when starting up Entourage, I told it to import data from that folder. It worked great, copying my Folders, Emails, Rules, Accounts, Signatures, etc…
So that was completed.
Palm Scheduler
My next task was to convert all my Palm Scheduler information to my new machine and into some type of calendar system. I started hacking around with iCal until I finally decided to switch over and use Entourage’s built in calendar system. Entourage’s calendar is almost exactly the same and by using it - it allows me to run one less app in my Dock.
Through a 30 minutes of bang my head against the wall, trying to import my Palm Organizer data over - I finally figured out that I could just copy the whole Palm Organizer data folder over and import it from that. It worked just as well as my email problem.
Things are better
After a good day of figuring out the above details I was finally able to install the rest of my apps and start using OS X productively.
I’ve got Apache running in the background and I’m working on setting it up to be a full-fledged HTTP server for domain hosting and database testing. Possibly in another post I’ll talk about some of the things I’m doing with Apache and some of the Open Source tools that are making my job that much easier. However - at this point, I’ll be surprised if many of my regular readers are still reading with excitement - if at all.
