Moving Day

Blogger is shutting down FTP publishing. That means that my days of using their service unfortunately must come to an end.
Because I host other content at my mikesilverman.com domain, I can't turn over the entire domain to a Blogger Custom Domain solution.

I decided to move to WordPress. I think they have the most features of the various free non-self-hosted tools, and they certainly look the best on an iPhone. I'm also going to make use of Tumblr as a media hosting backup (especially since this account limits me to 500 MB of storage). As always, Twitter will probably remain my primary gateway to the world of shameless self-exposure.

Just to make things clear, everything about this "old" blog will remain right here. I'm not deleting it. All the links will continue to work. It just will never be updated again. The main mikesilverman.com URL (http://www.mikesilverman.com) will likely shift from redirecting to this old blog to be a general portal to all of my various social media and other sites, as well as the the wedding stuff.

My new blog, which I hope will be updated more frequently (I have stuff to say which can't be limited to 140 characters!) is right here:

http://mikesilverman.wordpress.com


The URL for the RSS feed for the new blog is:

http://mikesilverman.wordpress.com/feed

Thanks, and see you on the other side.

Permalink

I've added a permanent link to the complete archive of wedding information on the right side of the blog. Everything is organized there chronologically and in one place. I still have some work to do. I plan to add some more photos, clean up the page, and add more and better video links, but at least it will all be in one place.

The day that was

This was an amazing day, and it is hard to put into words. It started early; we got up at about 6:00 and were out of the hotel by 6:45...we decided to walk the half-mile to City Hall to work off some of the nervous energy. When we got there, the crowd was fairly small, but rapidly grew as massive swarms of media, well-wishers (including the San Francisco Men's Chorus) and of course other couples gathered on the steps. Notably, there was also the signs of at least one healthy segment of the economy -- the wedding business, as various photographers, caterers and other members of the wedding-industrial complex plied their wares.

I took a few pictures of the area, including San Francisco's absolutely beautiful classical City Hall building, when we took out the Kansas flag, to get a picture of ourselves with it...this ended up being the equivalent of throwing a bucked of chum into a shark tank, as a swarm of photographers from various services joined in taking pictures. Our cousin Lisa showed up...she is a second cousin who works in Oakland, and we were honored to see her and ask her to be the actual witness for our license. At this point, the ABC folks re-wired us, and we spent about half an hour being interviewed by various organizations (NPR, local SF news, etc).

Finally, at 8:00 AM, the doors to City Hall were unlocked and a semi-organized line formed. Once inside City Hall, everyone had to pass through a meta detector. This were somewhat disorganized felling at first, but it turned out that the county has basically set up a pretty streamlined process, helped along by dozens of volunteers, who were helping with marriages while still doing their ordinary duties. The woman who helped us actually fill out our license, as well as the gentleman who actually officiated at the ceremony were both employees of the county health department for example...it was very touching how these civil servants were volunteering to do this!

The whole process kind of felt like a kind of dream, like we were on a ride where you just kind of keep moving along. After swearing that our information was true, we sat with the gentleman who would do our ceremony (as aforementioned) who led us upstairs to an alcove to the side of the huge rotunda.

The actual ceremony only took about 5 minutes, but they were the among most moving 5 minutes of my life. He spoke a few paragraphs of text about the meaning of marriage, about the journey through life with one's partner and the tenderness of affection. After a bit, both Dave and I were welling tears...as was the officiant, and even the ABC news producer. Finally came the traditional "do you take this man....to have and hold, in sickness and health...for as long as you shall live?" I was near crying by now, but I said "I do" loud and clear, as did Dave when it was his turn. Then came a brief ring ceremony, which was kind of anticlimactic, since we had our rings from 9 years ago. Still, Dave switched his ring from right to left, for the first time (I've always worn it on the left). Then, the words were said: "By the power vested in me by the State of California, I now pronounce you spouses for life."

We were married under the law. Dave and I hugged, and whispered the Jewish prayer of thanksgiving. After which, wet-eyed, everyone congratulated us, and it was done. Dave and I were married.

After saying goodbyes to the deputy marriage commissioner, we went back downstairs, where we went to one office to pay $13 for a notarized copy of our license. Then we went to a second line to actually get the certificate, which was enclosed in a nice blue folder. A few pictures were snapped, and then we walked out of the City Hall, holding up the license to cheers from the crowd outside (this happened for all the couples).

We were pretty exhausted at this point -- we said a few final words to ABC, then said goodbye to the crew. Then goodbye to cousin Lisa as well, who we'll see in New York in a few months. Dave and I spent the next hour or so soaking up the atmosphere outside. We talked to a few other reporters, hung out with a group from the local gay-affirming synagogue, and finally, drifted away, down the steps, across the street, and into the city.

It was an amazing day. This blog post doesn't nearly do it justice -- there's really no way to put down on words what it was like. A memory to last a lifetime. I have never seen more positive energy, more love, more excitement in one place in my life. It was collective joy, and individual joy. But most of all it was about me and Dave.

I do, and we're done!

It was an amazing and emotional morning. Dave and I were pronounced legal spouses for life at 9:05 this morning. I will be back later to post much more detail and our experiences and thoughts this day!

Link Whore

Dave and I have a new column in the February issue of The Lawrencian. It's about gay people and computers. Well, specifically about Macs and PCs and gays and straights.

Go read it now.

That is all.

Andrewlanche

I got an incoming link by Andrew Sullivan who shares my lukewarm reception of I Am Legend. This is probably the most people who have been by my blog since the olden days, when it was hand-written on papyrus or something.

Some of today's visitors have left some really good comments on the Legend post below, so go read 'em if you haven't already.

Anyway, welcome, and watch out for zombies.

The long month

Sunset over the Lake of the Ozarks

June was a long, hard month, filled with a combintation of difficult events, including the passing of my grandmother and Tova suffering an bout of severe illness that required extended hospitalization. Add to that the fact that I spent over a week during the month traveling on business and it seems like there was almost no time to catch my breath or do much of anything.

Still, June is finally over, and July, at least, has started off well. Tova is healthy again, and Dave and I just got back from a relaxing week with the family in the Lake of the Ozarks, where I got to spend quality time with my family and my niece and nephew. My father bought a new toy for the family, which we thoroughly enjoyed too!

Anyway, I am back in Lawrence now, and hopefully I may even start posting regularly again.

I read stuff

Check out the link on the right side of this blog. Now you can automatically know what perverse and un-American claptrap I am currently reading, conveniently ready to be copy and pasted into a report for Homeland Security.

Fun with Blogger Templates

Please pardon the mess as I experiment with blogger templates and the look and feel of this blog...I've made a backup of the old template, so I can always go back if I need to!

The answer is true

I am testing some of bloggers new features. Hopefully this post will have a nice looking title and a comments page that works.

I upgraded my Blogger account

I finally switched to Blogger's "new" gmail-based system, which is now out of beta. I figured I would give it a whirl, but I am not too optimistic about the legendary glitchiness of Blogger being fixed. This morning, for the first time in two weeks I made a post to my blog, and for two hours Blogger wasn't allowing me to publish. I am this close to switching to WordPress; I probably would have switched already, but WordPress doesn't allow for publishing to custom domains unless you (a) pay them and (b) give them DNS control of the domain, which means you can't use it for anything else.

It's not like I have been writing much here, but I want to get back into the swing of things and starts hitting this thing regularly, so at the minimum it would be nice to be able to depend on my blog solution you know, actually working when I want to use it.

So for now I will probably stay with Blogger...and who knows how long "for now" is?