captpackrat | Entries tagged with jewelry

animale and I have been together for just a few days shy of 11-1/2 years. We've lived together for about 5 of those years and we were pretty much married in all but name. Although I'd originally wanted to get married in my home state of California, when they passed Prop 8 and Iowa started allowing gay marriage, we decided to get married there. We got our license back in November, but various events kept delaying the ceremony. Part of it was that Animale wanted a date that he would be able to remember easily. 1/1/11 was a holiday, so that didn't work, we weren't able to schedule anything for 1/11/11, and I didn't want to wait until 11/11/11 (which would have been a cool number), but we finally settled on 2/2/11, which also happens to be Groundhog Day, the only rodent-related holiday on the calendar. And 22 is divisible by 11!*

At some point in the future we may have a big public wedding at a con or something, but for now, we had a little ceremony at the Magistrate's office in Glenwood, Iowa. Everyone there was really nice and enthusiastic, not the slightest hint of prejudice or homophobia.

We exchanged wedding bands made of tungsten carbide, a relatively new jewelry material. Tungsten carbide is an extremely hard substance, a 9 on the Mohs scale, as hard as corundum. The ring is a dark metallic color and is polished to a near mirror finish.