Married In Ohio

The girl got her report card for the third quarter Wednesday. She did well in all of her classes except one. It always seems like there is at least one class that she doesn’t do as well as she should in. And it’s never the same class two grading periods in a row. Its like she only has a certain amount of energy to expend and it’s not quite enough to do well in all her classes.

I’m sure that its lack of motivation. In fact, when we were scheduling the classes for her freshman year in high school and I wanted to switch one of her classes, the guidance counselor said “I don’t have a problem with the scores on your admissions test; it’s the needs motivation comments on the recommendation form that has me concerned.” That’s the story of her academic life. Extremely bright but only with intermittent motivation.

I haven’t decided yet but I’m considering increasing the minimum grades she needs to play soccer to B or better in every class with an overall average of 3.5 or higher. But, what I really want is for her to be self-driven. To do more than the minimum required to keep mom and dad (relatively) happy. She’s got to want it for herself. We can’t want it for her. But, just once, I want a report card with out any “excepts…”

Our theme for this week is basketball in honor of the Men’s and Women’s 2006 NCAA Basketball Final Four Tournament this weekend. Neither California Girl or I ever played organized basketball but we still have many basketballs lying around. Both of the basketballs in these photographs are Final Four promotional items that I won by participating in various contests over the years. The Final Four isn’t as big as the Super Bowl but its still a great event sports fans.

California Girl has a cold but she still didn’t want to miss this weeks HNT photo session. Participating in HNT is a great tradition for both of us. Much thanks to Osbasso for getting things started.

We wanted to use this theme when March Madness first began but that was the week Osbasso requested everyone post Saint Pactrick’s Day themed photographs. Our theme for next week is … (Shssh, its a secret.)

I finally figured out how to lighten videos. Now the only trick is determining how much. We are still experimenting; trying to find the proper settings. We may need to make some more movies.

I mentioned when we first got our new camera that we had a movie of California Girl going down on me but we didn’t know how to adjust the color. Now that we can lighten the colors, I though that I would post it. The camera is a little unsteady; but, otherwise, it’s a good view of the action from my perspective.

One again, we’re only posting the video in Windows Media format (WMV). If you can’t play the video leave us a comment. I’ll make a QuickTime version if anybody needs one as soon as I get all the video editing tools set up.

I first started blogging because, with the exception of A Perfect Marriage, most of the blogs I read by men that discussed their primary relationship did not say very good things about the woman in their lives. Since I really love California Girl, I thought that it would be good to post about a happily married couple from a man’s perspective. So Married In Ohio began with me shouting “I love this woman” from the roof tops.

From the early days, even though I posted more California Girl was heavily involved. She read draft posts and made suggestions, she edited my replies to comments and we frequently discussed the topics in our blog. Although it was initially my creation, this blog very quickly became our blog. Over time, keeping a blog together has become one more thing we do as a couple. Just like the games we first started playing together back in college; it has become something of a shared tradition. We both really look forward to creating our HNT posts. Because of blogging, sex has become part of the regularly scheduled programming on Tuesdays.

This blog is about our life together. Sometimes, it talks about the children. Sometimes it talks about the everyday happenings in our lives. And of course, sometimes it talks about sex. Do we always talk about sex? No. But sex is a big part of our relationship. It’s not the ultimate goal; but it is very important. Having a blog allows us to discuss and explore things with others that would be difficult or impossible in real life. Somehow, I don’t think that my cube mates would understand or agree with much of the NSFW stuff that we post about. But we have hade some very frank and informative discussions with our fellow bloggers.

People sometimes ask in the shoutbox why we don’t have this or that in any of our photographs. Usually, the reason that we don’t is because it’s not us. We share photographs of ourselves doing what we do. Other than having a camera available, our explicit photographs are not staged. We don’t do things just for the photographic effect. That is not to say that we don’t have fun doing things like HNT, but when we’re with each other, our primary focus IS with each other and not what would make a better picture.

We both really enjoy and appreciate the comments that people have made about our photographs. But we are not “comment whores.” We post photographs because it’s fun to do and we both enjoy the shared exploration that comes from letting people see our most intimate moments. Do we have an exhibitionist side? Yes. After all, we are posting photographs on the ‘net for the entire world to see. Is our blog pure exhibitionism? No, it’s an electronic view of what is going on in our lives.

The wonderful people that we have met are another one of the good things about having a blog. We really wish blogging had been around years ago. Being able to discuss some of the issues in our lives then could have saved us a lot of heartache. We both understand the risk of putting as much information about ourselves out there as we have. But, so far, our blogging experience has been overwhelmingly positive. We plan to continue blogging until we don’t have anything more that we want to say. And we don’t see that happening anytime soon. So, to our long time readers we want to say thanks. And to our new readers we want to say welcome.

Well, it took forever, but I was finally able to extract two short excerpts of a movie that California Girl and I made with our digital camera earlier today. The original video is about 25 minutes long and resulted in a LARGE QuickTime .MOV file. I don’t have all of the editing tools I need for QuickTime yet so both videos are darker than they should be. Each one has audio as well. I did not equalize it so you may need to turn up the volume.

The first movie is me going down on California Girl. (You can hear California Girl coming in this one.) The second is us having sex in the missionary position.

We’re only posting the videos in Windows Media format (WMV). Leave us a comment if you can’t play them. Even though the full-length original is in QuickTime format, we haven’t yet converted these video posts back to QuickTime.

Please let us know what you think of our first video post.

California Girl land I have been working very hard recently but otherwise, life is good. We’ve even delved into some topics than we don’t usually discuss. We have a peace and tranquility that we don’t usually have. Some if it is because the kids don’t have as many activities as they do in the fall and winter. Some of it is because we have a new bed and are sleeping better. Some of it is because both of the kids are getting good grades in school. But, there is more to it than that. I don’t know why but we both feel really good. We are renewed and somehow rejuvenated. So, even though it is rainy and dreary outside, it’s warm and sunny in our home.

Several people had questions about our newdigital camera. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, we thought that we would post a picture of the camera itself in action. We usually mount it on a small tabletop tripod we have. This allows us to easily tilt the camera to the best picture taking position. The flip out viewfinder is very handy when taking self portraits. The infra red remote is quite useful as well. Of course, the best “equipment” for our photographs is California Girl. If you have a good model then everything else is much easier.

I updated our referral tracker so that it properly captures the titles of sites which do not use English characters. Now it shows real Chinese characters rather than just squares and squiggly lines. I can’t read Chinese and have no idea what the referring pages are except that they are some kind of search engine. I just didn’t like how the title was not properly displayed. I wonder what words cause our site to come up? On Sunday, 图片搜索—网易搜索引擎个性化新闻搜索热点资讯搜索 was our second most frequent referring site behind Google Image Search.

I’ve posted about how good The Girl is in soccer. I also want to mention that The Boy was second team all league in wrestling. I am very proud of him; especially considering how tough of a sport wrestling is. He earned a letter for wrestling to go with his letter for cross country. I think that he’s doing pretty good to get two varsity letters as a sophomore. And, he says he’ll probably have his highest average yet on his third quarter report card.

He’s not playing a sport this spring, choosing instead to relax and enjoy not having anything to do. That also gives California Girl and me more time to relax too. It’s hard to believe that he’s half-way done with his high school sports career. And almost half-way done with high school itself. We’re going to work out together over the summer. It will be interesting to see who’s trying to keep up with whom.

A cold wind was blowing but The Girl played her first outdoor soccer game of the season today; and it was not the best game that she has played. She made a “bad touch” when she was the last defender which led to a goal. And then she misplayed a two on one break which led to another goal. Other than those two mistakes, she played a good game; but that was too much to over come so they ended up loosing. I expected her to be mad about “playing bad” but she just said “I had a bad game. I’ll play better next week.” I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure if this was our daughter or an alien. She’s usually mad for a long time after a loss. So, it was very unusual that she didn’t take it so hard. I just hope that she’s not looking her edge.