pizza, pie and cold duck

Yesterday was the big day! Well, the anniversary of the big day. Yesterday, Jerry and I celebrated our first anniversary! (And my best friend Kathy celebrated her second anniversary! Happy Anniversary Kathy and David! And while I'm making happy wishes, Happy Birthday to my Grandpa Henry who celebrated his birthday yesterday and Happy Anniversary to my parents who are celebrating their anniversary today!!)

Initially, we had big plans for our anniversary, but in some ways they dwindled, in others they just changed. In the end, the big day was celebrated over spicy chicken pizza

pecan pie

and a bottle of cold duck.

Oh, we alsobought a new microwave, since ours was damaged in the move:

This may not seem like the most romantical of celebrations, but there's more to our anniversary celebration than what we did last night. Initially, we had booked a room for this coming weekend at a resort near the Romantic Road. We had planned on seeing some castles, relaxing at the resort, and visiting Munich. After the trips to Berlin and the move to Grafenwoehr, we were honestly a little tired out and needed a break from travelling! So we decided to postpone the trip. Because of the deployment, it is unlikely that we'll be taking it any time soon, but we do plan to make our way to that part of Germany in the future. Instead of travelling, we plan to buy a piece of furniture to commemorate our first anniversary. We thought it would be nice to celebrate our anniversary in a way that will be with us for a long time. We plan to mark the piece somehow with the date and the fact that it was purchased in honor of our first anniversary. Should the time come that we no longer want the piece of furniture, we'll keep the part that is marked. Yeah, we're cheesy like that :-) For our first piece of furniture, we're specifically looking for a nice dining table. We're going to explore some furniture places in local towns this coming four-day weekend. One place in particular has an open house on Sunday and features all hand-crafted furniture.

During Jerry's weeks off last month, we also added to the tattoos that we're working on together. We started the tattoos last year with matching hearts, symbols of our marriage. This year, we added another heart, with a reverse color-scheme to mark the first anniversary. We added other elements as well and are beginning to see how these tattoos will grow over time. Though we added mostly the same elements, we've created different patterns. They have nearly healed, so pictures will be coming soon.

Since the big weekend was out, we then decided to have a nice meal in the area. Later I decided that I'd rather make a nice candle-lit meal at home. But, because we only have one car and Jerry had it at work yesterday, I wasn't able to get the ingredients early enough in the day to make the special meal I had in mind. I had thoughts of using the new microwave to reheat a very tasty meal I had made a few days ago (chicken parmigiana stuffed with spinach, mushrooms, garlic and mozzerella!). But then we just thought we'd stick to our favorite: pizza. And we really made it special by adding some pecan pie and cold duck! Neither of us had ever had cold duck...it's like a red champagne. I thought it was pretty gross, but it was pretty funny toasting our anniversary with cheap champagne in our plastic party cups! Jerry mustn't have thought it was that gross, because he polished off the bottle!

We also exchanged sweet and sappy cards and I've been promised some flowers...a big deal from a man who doesn't like to give them :-) Cards from across the ocean and e-mail cards and wishes from family and friends rounded out our anniversary. I feel very blessed to have such sweet and thoughtful people in our lives, and of course feel blessed to have found the man with whom I hope to celebrate many, many anniversaries.