Twelve years ago, Erin and I met and started a courtship. This photo is from our date # 4 adventure. We went to the Texas Renaissance Festival, perhaps the largest such faire in the country. Erin was eager to introduce me to his favorite high school hangout spot.
I was flush with a heady mixture of joy and fear — joy at the possibility of having met “the one” and fear of getting a broken heart. We conversed in medieval-themed metaphors. Erin’s armor was rather dented and scratched, but I was never into the shiny-armor type of knight. You can’t really dance with chain-mail on, so I was more of the traveling minstrel. Or the court jester (at least when a big wig and fake eyelashes were involved).
It was a hot day in central Texas – over 100 and humid. We ate greasy food and drank yucky crap called “mead” and not enough water. Erin ended up with a migraine and we probably both had heat exhaustion. It was a long drive home.
That initial bio-chemical intoxication called “being in love” has let up — freeing me from its obsessive qualities. Erin is still my champion, willing (if not eager) to put on that old dented and battered armor and ride onto the tournament grounds for another jousting match in my honor — if only to gift another story for the minstrel in me to sing about. 
And thus I sing.
