Big Announcement

There's no way to make this be anything but a huge announcement.

I'm getting married.

We haven't set a date yet, but this is the real thing.

I've been keeping things under wraps for the sake of the girls, but now that I'm sure I've found The One, there's no reason to hide it.



I met Anna through an internet dating site* of sorts.

I do have a few details still to attend to. I need a passport, as I've never been out of the country and Anna lives in Pskov. I'm told a K-1 visa will be required for her to come to Lobster Land, but that's just a matter of a bit of cash and some forms to fill out.

I know, you're checking out these pictures and saying she's a bit too young for me, but this is right. May-December relationships get a bum rap. I've known some very successful marriages that involved age gaps of ten or twelve years. What's the difference between that and 20 years, after all? Anna can fill a sort of hybrid role for my daughters: half step-mother, half big sister.

Anna is 5'11", a tall drink of water to be sure, and as you can see from these pictures, she's a dream walking. From what she's told me, Russian guys don't really go for the Amazon thing. Their loss. Suckers.



And speaking of suckers, happy April Fool's Day!

*I found this site when I was looking for, of all things, the statue I thought was in Prague of the Good Soldier Švejk for a blog post. For whatever reason, one of my combinations of Google search words came up with a mail order bride site. I hadn't thought about mail order brides since I worked for a Singles magazine that ran a lot of advertisements for 'Lovely Latin Ladies' and 'Asian Connection' type outfits.

Purely out of curiosity I did a search that revealed the delicious piece of Blondage you see here. I got to her by looking for the tallest chick who could speak English well enough for a phone call (by her own judgment anyway, I'm sure there's 'fluent' and then there's 'fluent') without going over the age of 21.

Because extreme height and broken English are all I'd really need in a relationship. Plus, you get a wife from a site that practically advertises 'Step right up, get yer own genuine Gold-digger right here!' and at least you can't claim to be shocked when she cleans you out in the divorce five seconds after she gets citizenship.

Not that my Anna would do such a thing. Look at those eyes! You just can't fake innocence like that.



Which is the part that I think really struck me about the site. I found it perversely appealing. Perversely because I realized that part of the fantasy that drives a site like this is the I-Dream-of-Jeannie-ness of it. Would Anna insist on addressing me as 'Master,' even when I protested that I didn't want her to?



The other thing I noticed was the men shown at the left of the screen with their testimonials are, well... Some guy who keeps 400 firearms in his double-wide trailer but makes six figures working in IT, wearing glasses that haven't been in style since before Anna was born. He's been in love once before, with a girl he met at a science fiction convention, and he didn't technically 'go out' with her.

I'm sure not all the guys who use such a site are creeps, just as I'm sure not all the women in the profiles are just looking for a way to Nordstrom's with a fat credit limit. In fact, the reason this has been kicking around in my head the past couple weeks is it makes such a great story.



A guy who lacks people skills but has managed to make a bit of money. He's smart and decent enough but hopelessly lonely. So lonely the chicks can smell it, the kind of lonely that feeds on itself. A girl with Hollywood looks stuck in some Russian backwater where there's not much for her. She seems exotic to him, he may not seem exactly exotic to her, but he's decent enough and he can definitely take her places Nikolai (the 19 year old guy who works the sausage stand she passes each morning and keeps hitting on her) and Uli (who promised to marry her they were nine but who is also a second cousin with terrible breath) just can't.

And maybe they even have some genuine chemistry. They both love Brazilian music and neither one of them knows anyone else who's into that. They both find the weirder Breugel paintings to be beautiful in their horror, but find the majority of his work to be exceedingly dull. They both hate Russian novels and have both read nearly all of Elmore Leonard's work. He has a way of making deadpan jokes she takes to be serious statements until time has passed, and she thinks it's hilarious when she finally gets it.

Next thing you know, they're in America, ring and a date.

Get to that first, big fight. Here's a chick who could, honestly, get any man she wanted for a little while at least, and this is not something she can be ignorant of, and she's in a new country (wonderful as it is in its way, it isn't home).  She knows, more or less, what American women think of him: he had to travel all the way to Russia to get away from that appraisal. And she can tell that her charms are not lost on the American men she passes.



In a real fight, this is ammunition too lethal to be contained. I'm not sure where it'd all go. Might make a good murder story, though who gets murdered? Maybe someone takes the guy out thinking it'll get him the girl, someone else has already been hired by the doomed guy to murder the bride, and they both bite it. Maybe work the scary Russian Mafia into things...