I had a song come up on iTunes shuffle today at work that took me back to the time when I used to travel for work. A time that I am very glad is in the past.

Now, I’ve worked with and known many people who love traveling; they love going on the road - flying to another city or country, eating out, staying in a hotel, going out to eat every night.

I absolutely hated it.

More than that I hated all the people that would tell me that the travel wasn’t all that bad; or that I should just get used to it; or that somehow the money you made traveling made up for all the things that you missed. I hated the lectures about how it was such a great thing for your career - that somehow telling your son that you were the youngest person promoted to “Lord of All Databases” or that you were widely quoted in IT publications would make up for you being 2,000 miles away when he needed you.

Alex was little when I started traveling; Malinda and Steven were living at home. When I finally switched jobs, both the older kids were out of the house and Alex was no longer little. I can’t help but feel that I missed out on something.

Although the level of irritation waxed and waned throughout the years I was spending quality time on airplanes and in airports, one thing was definitely sure. I was an ass more times than I wasn’t due to the stress and anxiety that I carried around. There were many times when I’m sure that my family didn’t want to be around me; many times when I would be wondering why I was being such a jerk while I was in the process of being one.

The worst part of travel - what the late Douglas Adams would probably refer to as a variant of the Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul - always seemed to be after I would see families out and having fun in San Diego, or Reno, or London. That’s when I missed being home the most, when I wanted to be able to just sit in the same room with my kids, put my son to bed, or just go and walk the dog.

The song I heard today always seemed to come up when I was driving out to dinner when I was on the west coast, and it always reminded me of my wife. It always reminded me of our family, reminded me of us - with the exception that I don’t need much reflection to know I love her.

If you’re reading this…..well, happy birthday, baby. I love you.

Ghost Story
From A Brand New Day
By Sting

I watch the western sky
The sun is sinking
The geese are flying south
It sets me thinking

I did not miss you much
I did not suffer
What did not kill me
Just made me tougher

I feel the winter come
His icy sinews,
Now in the firelight
The case continues

Another night in court
The same old trial
The same old questions asked
The same denial

The shadows close me round
Like jury members
I look for answers in
The fire’s embers

Why was I missing then
That whole December?
I give my usual line,
I don’t remember

Another winter comes
His icy fingers creep
Into these bones of mine
These memories never sleep
And all these differences
A cloak I borrowed
We kept our distances
Why should it follow that
I must have loved you?

What is the force that binds the stars?
I wore this mask to hide my scars
What is the power that pulls the tide?
Never could find a place to hide

What moves the earth around the sun?
What could I do but run and run and run?
Afraid to love, afraid to fail
A mast without a sail

The moon’s a fingernail
And slowly sinking
Another day begins
And now I’m thinking

That this indifference
Was my invention
When everything I did
Sought your attention

You were my compass star
You were my measure
You were a pirate’s map
Of buried treasure

If this was all correct
The last thing I’d expect
The prosecution rests
It’s time that I confessed
I must have loved you
I must have loved you

I’ve been having a hard time of late getting time to write; August was a whirlwind of weddings, trips, and the MS 150 Charity Ride. It seemed like September would go a bit easier on us, but we’ve managed to maintain the same level of insanity around the house this month as well.

Football has been occupying quite a bit of time, as it always does. One of us - usually both of us - is down at the field with Alex Monday through Friday from 6pm to almost 8pm each night. Friday nights we have an hour worth of piano and drum lessons, which takes us to the four or so hours we spend at the football field each Saturday for the two games (varsity and junior varsity) that our B-Team boys play in.

Since Alex has the primo camera - Canon EOS 20D - I’ve started taking pictures of the games and posting them online at Jason-Schmidt.SmugMug.com. It’s been fun, but it definitely is quite a bit of work. Each gameday I take somewhere around 1,500 pictures which I then pull into Aperture and cull down to 200 or so pictures that get posted to the web.

I get lots of compliments on these pictures, but honestly it’s not been that hard. It’s mostly been point and shoot….then crop. I don’t do any color correction or any special adjustments on the computer. Primarily becuase I really wouldn’t have any idea as to what I was doing. Maybe someday I’ll actualy figure it out - or, more likely, I’ll wait until my dad teaches Alex then have him show me.

The other self-appointed task I’ve taken on is to get the game video online for the boys to watch. Vimeo is a free site that gives you 500MB of video upload weekly. I’ve managed to put together a little workflow that enables me to take the video, rip it to mp4 via Handbrake on the macintosh, then upload to vimeo so people can watch it in flash video. Those videos are available here.

Football finishes up in mid-October. I’m wondering what I’ll do with my newly found freetime…of course, something will probably expand to fill it.

It’s taken a few weeks to get to the point that I could write about Dave and Lindsey’s wedding. I tried a few times, but the words….well, the words wouldn’t quite come. The few times they did; well, it didn’t seem to make much sense.

I tend to take everything very much to heart, and this wedding was no exception. This was the third time I was asked to be the best man. Each and every time it’s been humbling, even - maybe especially - for a sarcastic smart-ass like myself.

Dave and Lindsey….well, their wedding was no exception. As I did the last two times, I started my pre-wedding jitters about two months before the big day. There was the background concern - “don’t make an ass out of yourself” at a general level - and the very specific best man toast concern, namely “make sure you say something relevant that doesn’t piss anyone off and that doesn’t make you sound like a complete and utter jackass”.

That second part was the more difficult bit; it’s hard to distill 20 years of friendship down into a 10 minute speech. It’s difficult to translate the emotions you feel about, with, and for two people down into words. And it probably goes without saying that it’s extremely daunting to do this in front of a large group of people that have known you since you were a snotty teenager.

I tend to obsess - sometimes this is a good thing, but mostly it’s not. During the two weeks leading up to the wedding I must have recited my toast dozens of times. I toasted Dave and Lindsey in the shower; I toasted them to my dog when I had her outside; the cats were obliged to listen to me while I cleaned their litter; I toasted to their health in the computer room at work. People glanced at me as if I were insane when I was driving - not for the normal reasons, but because I was babbling through my toast while anxiously glancing at the clock to get my timing down.

It all paid off. When I finally had the microphone in my hand everything fell right into place. Every now and then you reach a point in your life where everything is just right. I experienced this at the Cleveland Clinic with Dave and Lindsey last year, and I experienced it with the two of them at their wedding reception. For ten minutes or so I was able to stand up in front of everyone and show them exactly what Dave and Lindsey mean to me…and why.

Dave, Lindsey….love you both.

As anyone who knows me - a group which includes a vast majority of the groom’s family - I’m very seldom at a loss for something to say. I’ve never been to shy to share an opinion or tell a story. This time though….well, there are so many things that I can say about Dave - and you too Lindsey - that it’s been difficult to focus.

Dave is one of my oldest and closest friends, but that really doesn’t do him justice. I normally tell people that he’s the slightly older, furrier brother that I never had. We’ve skipped class together, we’ve been pulled over by the police together, we’ve been in a car accident together, we’ve driven to Georgia and Virginia together. We’ve spent hours upon hours complaining and arguing about local sports teams together. My children have all grown up around Dave, and my youngest knows him as “Uncle Dave” - now, I know that isn’t as impressive here since there are probably quite a few people that call him “Uncle Dave” present, but in my family it’s a bit more impressive. My parents, sisters, aunts, uncles and even my late grandpartnes all prefer Dave’s company to mine. In fact, the question asked most often at any family gathering is normally “where’s Dave?”

I can’t talk about Dave without saying something about his wonderful family. Growing up, I was always welcome at this house; if I was hungry I was fed, if I needed a place to sleep I was pointed to a bed, and if I wanted to spend a holiday weekend painting the floors of Interlock, well I could do that too! And they even paid me for it! And you know what? If my hair was a bit on the long side for prevailing social and cultural norms, well the Erstes would gently suggest that I get a hair cut. Many, many, times.

To me, one of the truest signs of friendship is being apart for years or decades…but then picking up right where one left off. It’s always been like that with the Erstes, right up to and including today.

Now Lindsey…well, let me tell you a few things about Lindsey. The first time Dave brought Lindsey over to my house - and boy was he excited, having a real girl with him and all - anyways, the first time he brought Lindsey over she showed up in a dark outfit. Now, wearing dark outfits is something we tend not to do in our house, because we have this 70 pound bundle of hair, drool, and energy we call Lily. Lily likes to be loved; so much, that every time someone comes over she drops into what we call the “happy sausage” dance where she hops around and jumps up and down and gets hair and drool all over whoever is unlucky enough to be her target.

Now, I don’t know much about women - a fact many of you can attest to - but one thing I do know is that most girls don’t like to be covered in dog hair and spit. But a funny thing happened as I moved to grab Lily at the door - before I could get there, Lindsey was down on one knee petting the dog and scratching her ears. The evening finished up with the dog on her back on the couch with Lindsey rubbing her belly. Lindsey is fun-loving and sincere; a little bit of dog hair is no big deal to her.

Lindsey is tough as well. Every year Dave, Todd, and I ride the Pedal to the Point. Every year we ask people to ride with us - surprisingly, most decline that offer; perhaps it’s due to the fact that most people don’t find the idea of riding 150 miles to be anything remotely close to fun. We have friends - grown men - who avoid us between May and September just to make sure they don’t get roped into riding. But Lindsey….well, when we asked, Lindsey said yes.

I can honestly say that the 2007 MS 150 was the worst ride I have ever been on; it was cold and raining on the second day. It was so bad that they closed the course. Lindsey….well, she kept right on riding with us without complaint. She kept riding as others dropped out and stopped. She probably wanted to kill us - in fact, I believe she looked over at Dave and I at the Lorain JVS on the second day and told us as much - but she never complained. So be warned - there is steel and grit in this new Mrs. Erste.

I want to finish out by telling you a brief story of Dave and Lindsey, a story that means quite a bit to me.

This story starts way back in High School, back in Mr. Grescovich’s Mass Media class. For those of you who didn’t go to Walsh - and it looks like that’s a smaller number than one would think - Mr. G’s classroom walls were decorated with all sorts of pithy sayings. One of the sayings read “When a friend asks, there is no tomorrow”.

Dave and I seized on that one and made it our own - in our little world, we would ask each other “hey, is there a tomorrow”, with the correct answer being “no”. It was a joke on one level, but there was substance behind that joke. When you need him there is no tomorrow with Dave. He’s there if you need him, and if you need him he is going to try his hardest to do what needs to be done. That saying - it’s a fairly strong statement as to what our friendship is about.

Most of the time up at the Clinic is a big blur for me, but I will always remember being in the room with Dave and Lindsey at one point. With a heartwrenching look of love in her eyes, Lindsey held Dave’s left hand and told him I was there while I held Dave’s right hand - in a masculine, platonic sort of way, mind you - and told him that there was no tomorrow. I can’t explain why, but I can tell you that for a brief moment then everything was right with the world. A week later, when Dave was back up and alert, I sat in a different room with the two of them, and saw the same look in Dave’s eyes. When I went home from the hospital that night I told Beth that we’d be going to a wedding.

Some time ago I read a quote that stated: “Don’t marry the person you can live with, marry the person you can’t live without”. From my perspective, you have both accomplished this goal today.

Dave, you are my brother and you have always been and will always be part of my family. Let me remind you that the most precious possession that ever comes to a man in this world is a woman’s heart.

Lindsey, it feels like I’ve known you forever. You’re truly a wonderful person, and on this, your wedding day, as you sit there looking so beautiful I just ask that you continue to do what you have done so well, and that is to take care of my friend. For we both know what a special person he is.

And to both of you, let me just remind you that in love, as in friendship, there is no tomorrow.

Please join me in raising a toast to Mr. and Mrs. L. David Erste.