Anne and I spent a wonderful couple of days away, and enjoyed simply being Mr. and Mrs. Wheaton.
Thank you to everyone who shared such kind comments with us. I showed them to Anne, and we were both very touched your kindness.
Some highlights from our getaway:

• Playing Putt Putt golf together, like we do every year. Winner got a foot massage (that was me, for those of you keeping score at home. First time in four years I’ve won!)
• Walking down the pier, marveling at the beautiful clouds the whole way, then running back to the street when they opened up on us as soon as we got to the very end.
• Sleeping with the window open so we could hear the rain.
• Breakfast in bed two days in a row.
• Guinness and darts at the pub yesterday afternoon.
• Driving down PCH to Malibu to meet my family for brunch today.
• Loving each other’s company

Before we left, I did an interview with Something Awful for a Teen Magazine parody that Frolixo put up on Saturday. I can’t figure out how to link directly to SA stories, so you’ll have to scroll down to Saturday the 8th to read more of this:Thanks to Max, who gave up the link in the comments.
additional note: I guess there’s a Matrix spoiler around that interview, and more than a few people have seen the spoiler and freaked out. Sorry for not mentioning that when I originally posted this link. If you haven’t seen Matrix III yet, you prolly shouldn’t follow that link.

Exclusive Interview with Teen Heartthrob Wil Wheaton!
We were lucky enough to nab one of the hottest young stars of today for a one on one interview. Wil Wheaton has starred in a variety of movies like “Stand By Me”, and TV shows like “Star Trek: The Next Generation”. Recently has was involved in a scandal involving the accidental death of three prostitutes at his posh LA condo, but thankfully has been cleared of all charges. As we sat down for the interview, Wil seemed ill at ease, yet sipping on his rum and coke, and downing a few horse tranquilizers calmed him down. His towering bodyguards removed my belt and took my pencils away, a normal precaution against an assassination attempt against Wil.
SA: So Wil, let’s get started. First off, what’s your favorite color?
Wil:The color of money! Wait. That’s “what movie did Tom Cruise most recently ruin.” Sorry about that. My favorite color is something like the color of drying blood on the face of the ignorant in the moonlight, the silver rays reflecting off the crimson puddles. Oh, and before you look at it, it helps to huff a bunch of ether.
SA: Interesting. What’s your favorite food?
Wil: Until you’ve eaten tapioca off the firm flat belly of a whore in Thailand, you haven’t lived.

I told Frolixo that I was going to be a real profane bastard in the interview, and he totally got on board with that idea. It’s not for the faint of heart (or my mom), but I think it’s pretty goddamn funny.

When I was younger, I saw this movie. I think it was “Singles,” but I could be mistaken. In that movie, these people are trying so hard to find each other and fall in love, and someone says, “You’re the first thing I think of in the morning, and the last thing I think of before I go to sleep.”
Anne and I had been dating for about three weeks when she became that person to me.
Eight years later, she’s still the first person I think of in the morning, and the last person I think of before I fall asleep at night. I can’t imagine my life without her.
Anne, the only thing better than falling in love with you is being in love with you.
Happy Anniversary, Mrs. Wheaton. I love you to the moon and back 59 times.

When I did uploaded all my road trip photos recently, I felt like there were several missing images, particularly from Cuervo and Tucumcari, New Mexico.
Last night, I found them! They were conveniently hidden on my iBook in the ~/roadtip/images directory. Clever, tricksey, wicked, filthy, stinking little jpegs! We hates them!
Anyway, I just added a them to the Eastbound — New Mexico album, precious.

I just finished adding captions to all the Eastbound – Texas pictures in the Road Trip gallery.
I love working on those pictures, because it reminds me how happy Anne and I were on that trip.

Several people have e-mailed me this, which was in Neil Gaiman’s journal this morning:

I’m going to be a guest at Penguincon next year, mostly because it struck me as something fun I could drag my son Mike to that he’d enjoy as much as, or more than, I would, and because Terry Pratchett had a great time last year. It won’t be a usual SF convention, and the guests include lots of people I’m looking forward to meeting in the flesh, like the Slashdot people, and Wil Wheaton, who long before he was an uberblogger I knew of as The Guy Who Started the Sandman Discussion On Genie…

It blows my mind that he’s looking forward to meeting me. Neil Gaiman’s been transformed from A Guy Whose Work I Really Love into A Guy Who Has Inspired Me And Made Me Want To Be A Better Writer, so I’ll be working extra hard to not be a complete geek when I’m there.
I love that he mentioned GEnie! That was my first ever Internet experience, in the old SF Roundtable.
The first time I logged on, I was sitting at a menu prompt, and I kept getting messages from people welcoming me to GEnie. I had no idea how the system worked, so I just typed (In all caps, of course) at the menu prompt. It looked something like this:

menu.prompt>HI THERE. I DON’T KNOW HOW TO DO ANYTHING HERE. WHERE CAN I GO?
menu.prompt> Error! You didn’t use a command!
menu.prompt>IT TOLD ME I DIDN’T USE A COMMAND. WHAT SHOULD I DO?
menu.prompt> Error! You didn’t use a command!

It went on and on like that until I ended up in the GEnie version of irc, where I learned that typing in all caps wasn’t cool like War Games, but was totally lame, like Short Circuit.
When I was using GEnie, I was the biggest Sandman fanboy on earth. I even created a character in GEnie’s MUD-like thing called “Morpheus,” who I described as “a tall thin man with black hair, pale skin, and piercing black eyes. You think you’ve seen him in a Dream.”
Man, just the mention of GEnie brings back a flood of memories. I spent hundreds of hours on GEnie over the years, at speeds up to 2400 baud. I bet an archive of my sf roundtable discussions would be really horrifying to me, because I was at the hight of my teenage lameness then. I don’t think I ever spoke in AOL kiddie-speak, but my idiocy and ignorance about everything in the world really shone through.