We Moved Our Anniversary

Our anniversary is March 10. Was March 10. We changed it.

My wife’s mom died in a car wreck a few years ago. March 10. The same day we’d been celebrating for nearly two decades. So every anniversary since has carried two things at once: gratitude for what we built and grief for who we lost. We tried to hold both. Some years it worked. Some years it was just hard.

So we moved it. March 27. Close enough to the original that it still feels like ours, and it adopts our favorite number. We’re getting matching ring finger tattoos to mark twenty years. Weird? Maybe. But we create our own rules in this house.

I’m still recovering from what I think was pneumonia. Two weeks of my body telling me to sit down. Last week I gave in and played video games. This week I got back to work, but slowly, and with a different posture. I’ve been praying before making decisions instead of after I mess them up. That sounds like such a basic thing, but I struggle with it. I think most people do. We run ahead, hit the wall, then ask God why. Flipping the order changes more than you’d expect.

The day job had a big week. I built a master schedule system that replaced a SharePoint list with 2,822 plumbing jobs, a full dashboard, chart filters, sortable columns, and inline editing. Then I built two new tools from a single meeting transcript: a weekly field report system for tracking job site compliance and a vendor material request flow that replaced a planned Power App build. Seven databases now. One colleague told me the work made him feel “bubbly.” That word stuck with me. I’ve built a lot of things that people tolerated or approved or signed off on. Bubbly is different. Bubbly means someone is excited about what’s coming next.

The side projects keep compounding quietly. $25 a month in revenue, $10 a month in costs, thirteen deployed products. The gap is still honest. But the systems are in place, the content is seeded, and the next dollar will come from selling, not building.

We’ve been unfulfilled with our home team for a while now. So instead of complaining about it, we’re creating a new one. And I joined the church softball team. It has been years since I wore a glove or cleats. I’m probably going to be sore for a month. But it’s one more day in the week doing life with church people instead of rotting at home on the couch. Community costs something. It costs showing up when you’re tired, playing a sport you forgot how to play, starting something new when it would be easier to stay comfortable.

My wife keeps crushing her workouts. She’s stronger than she’s been in years. Watching her build something that belongs entirely to her, a rhythm and a circle of friends that exists outside of us, is one of my favorite things about this season. We’re both building. Different materials, same foundation.

Twenty years. A new date. Tattoos on our ring fingers. The kind of decision that only makes sense if you’ve lived through the thing that made it necessary.