Sunday, August 17, 2008

Dorine - The "Lost" Years

Every now and then I come across an old photograph of Dorine, dating to the time of her first marriage (1978-83), that makes me eat my heart out not to have been her love in those days (notwithstanding the fact that I was on a mission or at BYU during much of that period). This photo, which probably dates to 1978, is the "worst" one I've seen in that regard: Dorine looks so young, fresh, and achingly sexy that it almost kills me to know she belonged to someone else!

Fortunately for me, she was still attractive, and fairly young, when we married in late 1984 (and she still looks hot compared to most women her age), but, well, a person is only twenty years old once. I call that entire era the "lost" years -- not "lost" in that they served no purpose (after all, Dorine had Kristy and Heidi by her first husband, and her first marriage instilled in her a certain maturity that fueled her interest in me later), but "lost" in the sense that I missed out on something fantastic. If being married to Dorine for the last 23+ years has placed any great mental burdens on me, that's number one on the list.

Our New Gate

One of the goals we had for the summer was to replace the trashed-out double gate on the east side of our house, and now we've finally accomplished it! Years ago, Dorine's brother Brian knocked out a cinder-block wall, and installed a double gate, to facilitate the storage of snowmobiles (on a trailer) in our back yard; however, Dorine's family no longer owns snowmobiles that run, and in any case the landscaping in our front yard prevents vehicular access to the side of our house. Nonetheless, we knew that putting up a new double gate would be much easier than replacing the original cinder blocks, so we stuck with it. Note that we used pre-fabricated squaring/hinge kits, which make it much easier to build gates from scratch. (Also note the old gate in the background of one of the photos -- you can see how awful it was.) Now if we could only get going on our budding jungle of a back yard!