Important Announcement Regarding A Sudden Change In My Tax Status

This afternoon Jeff, my partner of eleven years, took off work early, came home to pick me up, and we drove to Maryland and got married in Frederick County courthouse, to cement the solemn sacred traditional American bond between a woman who needs health insurance and a man whose new job only offers "domestic partner" benefits to same-sex couples, and even if I wanted to become a gay man for insurance purposes I couldn't afford the necessary surgery anyway, due to my aforementioned lack of health insurance. So as of "1:40 o'clock pm" (direct quote from our marriage certificate) today, I am a "respectable" married "lady." My name remains the same.

True anecdote: we found out we'd have to get married for health-insurance purposes the same day the Supreme Court approved the individual mandate. I know there's some irony there, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is. And I bought our marriage license on the same day my car later failed its Virginia-transfer safety inspection, but I'm glad to report nothing similarly unbecoming happened today. 

This picture was taken about four minutes after the wedding, by a lady we met in front of the courthouse. He's wearing his clothes from work; I'm wearing an outfit culled from my closet around 9:30 last night, after I suddenly realized two things: "I ought to wear something nicer tomorrow than the jeans and T-shirts I've been wearing lately" and "It's at least 15 degrees too hot and 70 percent too humid to wear any of my good clothes." 

The guy in the statue is John Hanson, the first US president of pre-constitutional days, under the Articles of Confederation.

Savvy regular readers of this blog might remember that two blog posts ago, I explained my previous lack of posts via a long Biblical rant about how busy I've been since moving to Virginia, and included the sentence "And I DID give you guys the super-condensed version here; there's still sundry unexpected paperwork issues I must resolve, but hope to do so by the end of the week."

Foreshadowing, that was.