First of all, let’s get one thing straight… I am way taller than Jason… That picture was taken in my mom’s kitchen a few Christmases ago… and I am crouching down so I can hug him with my knees and legs and not just my arms. I like to do that, because I know it creeps him out, and that makes me laugh. Look what a good sport he is… he is hardly cringing at all.

There are Jessica and Jason, just a little more than a week ago, the morning he proposed to her. They were in Sedona, Arizona, where he took her to a nice hotel to ‘pop the question’, and I suppose this was taken about the time that my wife and I were driving there… and his parents were flying there… so we could all surprise Jessica at the restaurant they were going to dinner at, which he sneakily set up in advance, so we could share that special day. I did posts about all this. Notice how cleverly she is showing off her new engagement ring.

To be perfectly honest, I always thought that Jason kid was batting a little out of his league… but then again, they are perfect for each other, and they are almost sickeningly happy whenever they are together… also, the truth is, I love that boy. He treats my daughter right… by which I mean he manages to somehow handle all her moods… because man, that girl is a handful… and I ought to know, I was a house-daddy before it became a ‘thing’, and that girl is high maintenance. But he keeps her happy while still somehow making her feel like she is in charge, and he doesn’t put up with any crap either… it is an incredible juggling act… something I never managed to pull off…

Another picture taken at my mom’s house over the Christmas holidays… I don’t know if that was this year or not… but just the fact that he can live in a house for a week with us and all my brothers and nieces and nephews and my crazy friends coming to visit and all of our weird family traditions and the inherent madness that goes with that season… wow.

And, best of all, from my point of view, even though, in the grand scheme of things it isn’t that important… but the kid loves me. He doesn’t just tolerate me or humor me… like most of my friends and family do… he like me. We do stuff. We are, right now, designing a computer/board game hybrid, involving naval warfare in the time of the pirates, that might revolutionize the game industry… (okay, we all know I am a computer moron, and he is doing all the real work, but I have been studying history for a long time, and I do play some games, and I am giving some good ideas and a person to bounce ideas back and forth with)… And he is the one who designs all the covers for my science fiction novels with his crazy 3-D computer modeling skillz.

Jessica made a comment once about how we were male bonding. I told her, no, we are bonding on a molecular level… and I still, when I see him, and we are having a good time, interlock my fingers, raise my eyebrows, and say: “molecular bonding, oh yeah!”