Friday, February 29, 2008

Happy Leap Day

You get an extra day every four years and how do we spend it? I am going to go out with my wife and munchkin for dinner to celebrate our legal wedding anniversary. Legal you say, what do you mean? My wife and I consider our wedding day to be the last day of July 1999 we had a pig roast and pool party and let everyone that we love and care for know what our intentions were towards each other, but we didn't make it legal. It was a Handfasting and if you know what that is then I won't explain, if you don't, then that is for another post. It was on our honeymoon in the U.S.V.I. that we pick the date of February 29, 2000 to let the state know that we were a couple. The appeal of the date was that 2/29/00 only comes around every 400 years. Normally century marks are not leap years for some reason that I can't explain. So we got a friend who was also a Justice of the Peace and went to a Irish pub, ad libbed a service of I dos, drank copious amounts of Guinness and accepted the fact that we could now file a joint tax return.

Four years later on our "1st" year anniversary my wife was three days from her due date to giving birth to our munchkin. Well, she didn't come until almost two weeks later, but we had a nice dinner and prepared for how our lives would change very soon.

So even though we have actually have been married for 8 years we will always do something special every four years to mark this occasion. This extra day is a gift and you should all do something outside the box or special because you only get an extra 24 four hours every four years. We are going to introduce our nearly 4 year old daughter to the simple pleasure that is Japanese Hibachi and toast our 2nd anniversary for the second time. What will you do?

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Fidel Castro Resigns...

... and the only thing I want to know now is when can I get Cuban cigars without traveling to a foreign country? I guess that embargo finally worked, it only took 40 some odd years but we broke him.

I started smoking cigars back in 1997 just before the craze hit and I was always happy with a good Dominican or Honduran cigar and just dream of the day I would taste a Cuban. A buddy of mine smuggled some back from the Bahamas, a couple of Montecristo Tubos, and holy crap were they good. They were more than likely the best things I have ever put in my mouth. The flavor and the quality of smoke just beat anything I had ever smoked before. It then became my new mission in life to get my hand on as many as I could. It wasn't until a couple years later when my wife and I made a trip to St. Martin that I would have another Cuban. We found this little liquor/cigar store on the French side in Marigot that was run by a crazy, 5 foot tall Cuban guy named Jackie. He told us, repeatedly, that everyone else on the island that sold Cuban cigars were full of bullshit and if I paid more than $6 for one I was buying bullshit. Jackie also told us that he was the only one on the island that had the inside track on Cubans because once a year he would pay homage to the head tobacco grower in Cuban, who by the way didn't take any bullshit even from Castro himself, by bringing him a wheel of Dutch Cheese. I guess maybe the Dutch thought they could break communism but refusing to export cheese to despots. I bought a bunch off him and he was right the others were bullshit. I have been back to the island a few times since then but the store was close and his website was no more but I still would risk buying them from someone else and it is always one of my highlights of our trips to the Caribbean.

Needless to say I hope that Castro's brother brings in some democratic reforms not just for the people of Cuba but for the cigar loving population of America who is tried of circumventing a stupid law.