10 things you should know about marcus on our (second) 10th anniversary

Ten years ago today, I put on a white silk dress, and Marcus wore a black tuxedo, and we got married ... for the second time. The reasons we got married twice have to do with things like work visas and international moves and other complicated explanations that I won't go into now, but suffice to say that we both wear two wedding rings and always have, save for the two months in between our first marriage to each other and our second.

We celebrated our first 10th anniversary in pretty fine form (you might remember), and so, for this second 10th anniversary, since I rarely write much about Marcus on Chookooloonks, I thought I'd commemorate this day with you by sharing the top 10 things I think you should know about him.

1. He's an amazing cook. When he graduated high school, for a year he was a cook on a dive boat. He suffers from seasickness, but every day he'd trundle up from his cabin to whip up these wonderful meals for recreational divers (and, randomly, bird-watchers) on a boat called The Chalice, off the Cornish coast of England. He tells me that for that year, he smelt of rotten seaweed. Whatever, man: because of this experience, he is one of those cooks that can make a gourmet meal out of anything -- and as a result, he cooks 90% of the meals in our home. God bless The Chalice, I say.

2. He's really tall. About 6'4", actually. Ten years later, I've still not tired of this.

3. He's a talented artist. We have a few of his paintings hung on our walls of our home. He doesn't paint nearly as often as he should.

4. He is unapologetically and obstinately English. I mean, I know you already know he's English, but he holds on to his Englishness like Grim Death. He hasn't lost a bit of his accent (which is far more Hagrid than Hugh Grant, by the way), and he says things like "bloody" and "faffing about" and "silly sod" and "daft bugger" all the bloody time.

See? He's even got me doing it.

5. He's a triathlete, and an avid mountain-biker. "But, Karen," I hear you saying, "there aren't any mountains in Houston." Don't I know it, too. It drives him nuts, but he makes do with ditches and ravines and the like. He spends hours on the trails on weekends, and owns something like 7 bikes (I've seriously lost count). And if we ever go anywhere with a hill (like our recent trip to Utah this summer), I know that I won't see him until nightfall.

I, on the other hand, break a sweat running to the bathroom. Opposites attract, it does appear.

6. He's a mathematics and science savant. And because of this, there's nothing he can't fix, build, or jerry-rig. It's sort of startling, actually.

7. He doesn't try to impress people. He doesn't have "company behaviour" -- he's just genuinely a nice person, and the person you meet is the same person who will greet you 10 years from now. He's warm, and he's kind, and he's that way to everyone around him, all the time.

8. He's an avid gamer. Usually the more explosions and gore, the better. I will never be able to reconcile this passion with the gentle person of number 7 above, but honestly I don't try.

(Though, sometimes, when I watch the games he plays, I feel like I need to sleep with one eye open.)

9. There's nothing he won't eat -- except for one thing. He's generally fearless when it comes to food: he'll eat any organ meat, haggis, he's even eaten some unidentifiable thing that was actually moving on his plate when he went to Asia on business. But the one thing he absolutely, positively refuses to eat? The thing that makes him visibly gag when he tries?

Maraschino cherries. Yeah, I don't get it, either.

10. He's a wonderful husband and a brilliant father. Exhibits A-E, to follow: