(Sunday Paper, Year IV, Issue 18)

I don’t do this a lot, so I think it’s OK if I get a little lovey-dovey this week.

This week, Kathy and I will celebrate our fifteenth wedding anniversary.

Which is a decent chunk of years.

We don’t have any plans to do anything special to celebrate…

And maybe if I write something nice enough here I won’t have to get anything too nice for a gift.

I’m kidding of course.

I actually feel pretty good about our anniversary system: I have kind of a scrapbook that each year I put pictures in from the past year since our last anniversary.

So it’s a nice little keepsake of all of the years we’ve been married.

(And each year I think Kathy is surprised all over again by it. And even though she’s a faithful Sunday Paper reader I’m not too worried about spoiling the surprise this year by writing about it here - I wouldn’t be surprised if she forgot all about it by Wednesday.)

I feel like I should do more for number fifteen, to be honest. For our tenth anniversary I sent out a letter to most of the people who were at our wedding and asked them to share a memory and then I had an old wine bottle from a winery we visited on our honeymoon and I put all of the notes inside the wine bottle. Maybe we should revisit that for number fifteen…but I have nothing as nostalgic planned for this milestone.

My copout gift is all the work I’ve been doing in the yard - we’ll be able to celebrate our fifteenth summer as a married couple with a nicer yard, and that’s worth something.

But I actually didn’t mean to write only about fifteenth anniversary gifts here. (Read: Brag about what a good anniversary gift giver I am.)

I was just thinking about the last fifteen years and how far we’ve come.

We’re a good team, Kathy and I, and I feel like we’re only just hitting our stride.

I think we’ve started to figure out our strengths and what weight each of us carries in our partnership, and, to be honest, I’m figuring out how to be an adult in a way I don’t know I did in, say, the first fourteen or so years of our marriage.

I think we’ve done a pretty good job - both as husband and wife and as we’ve become mom and dad.

I might have some room for improvement…but I know one thing I aced:

I found the exact right person to figure it all out with.

Comedy and Writing

*Softball started this week, so Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights were spent at the softball fields - and running from there to other activities. Things are crazy in May, as I’ve told you before. So there wasn’t much happening in either the comedy or writing departments. BUT, I did finally receive a couple of freelancing checks, so I feel like a rich man.

And on Wednesday night I had a show at The Comedy Studio. (So Kathy had the softball duties, which I had Thursday when she was at her last class of the semester…see, it’s all a give and take - we have a good partnership.) I had a really good time - I tried some of my material in a different order and I worked in something new, and it went well. But this was the kind of night where I kind of needed a fun night at The Comedy Studio more than The Comedy Studio audience needed me to entertain them. (Though I feel good about accomplishing that too.) It was just a really nice respite from all the May craziness ahead.

Believe it or not Saturday is the next Comedy Night at Exhibit ‘A’. I’d love to see you there - tickets are still available and you can get them by clicking here.

Running (or Things Kevin Helped Me With This Week)

*HIt a big milestone in the running department this week: On Monday I did a 60-minute run. I had planned to do this last weekend, but you may remember the weather was dicey. (As it was the rest of the week - so the early-week run was my only one.)

I’m pretty sure I’ve only done a run this long once or twice before in my life. So I think I’m heading in the right direction as far as conditioning. I’ll try to do this again sometime this week - but it has just been nasty out.

Notes

*Quick quiz on fifteenth anniversary gifts. Any idea what the anniversary gift for number fifteen is? Answer at the end of the Notes section.

*Kathy and I were really clicking on all cylinders this week. We had our youngest’s first Communion party on Saturday, and getting ready for it all week was a good team effort. We work well together, and that’s what kind of spurred me to write this Sunday Paper. it was a good party - the first such one we hosted at our house in quite a few years.

*Here’s a timely sad story: I dropped my favorite yellow bowl on Friday evening. It was a yellow cereal bowl from Crate and Barrel that was one of two we had and that the store has long since stopped making. I broke the first one years ago. But this one held on for a long time. It was getting chipped and this drop didn’t shatter it, but left enough of a crack that it has to be put out of commission. But the reason this is timely: It was a wedding gift. So it’s been in use for 15 years…and the cousin who gave it to me was at the party on Saturday. So at least that bowl got a nice proper goodbye, because I was able to share that story with my cousin before the bowl went into the garbage.

*Big news from the Sucich household: After talking with a friend about spoilers after Avengers: Infinity War and thinking I would never watch any of the Avengers movies because it just seemed like too much work, I got caught up in the Avengers: Endgame hype and Kathy and I decided we’ll spend the next 22 weeks or so watching all of the Marvel movies. I just can’t get over the intersecting timelines and I’m super-intrigued. After going back and forth about whether to watch them in their release order or chronological order we opted for the latter. I’ll probably write more about this someday - but bottom line is we watched Captain America Friday night as a family and really enjoyed it.

*Maybe I’ll write about that online - you can Like the Facebook page to see if I’m writing about it there, or you can follow me on Twitter to see if I’m writing about it there. (Although it’s likely to be a lot of Mets tweets, to be honest.)

*OH! This was a big part of my week. Tuesday night I went with my oldest daughter to Fenway Park. As is my wont, I tweeted the Red Sox organist, Josh Kantor, a song request. And - for the second game I’ve attended in a row - HE PLAYED IT! (This one was actually my daughter’s suggestion - Vampire Weekend’s ‘Harmony Hall’.) It was well-received on Twitter. It was a very exciting part of the night.

*OH! again. I also had my doctor’s appointment on Tuesday. It went well. I am healthy. So that was nice. The thing that was supposed to happen that I hinted at last year did happen and that part of my body is healthy as well.

*So the traditional fifteenth anniversary gift is crystal. The modern gift (they do a traditional and modern list now…not sure why) is watches. I got neither for Kathy.

*Today is my sister’s birthday, and she’s spending part of it here with us after coming up for the Communion party, so a special happy birthday message goes out to her.