I meant to post this on May 10, 2008, exactly one year after I popped The Question to Ariela on the air, unscripted, live, and obviously so. But today should do just as well, for it is now exactly one month until the day we get hitched. Let me tell you about The Haro von Mogel Wedding.™

Ariela and I have been together since December 4, 2003. We knew within a few months that we were more than just together, we were an indivisible unit - a system that was more than the sum of its parts, with the emergent property called love. We were friends for half a year before we hooked up, and living as neighbors. But when we got together we were inseparable. Really. We had to flip a coin each night to decide who’s place we slept in, to keep it fair. Before we had left the co-ops we lived in (more like large apartments than anything else), we were fundamentally in an irreducible state.

Ariela was deciding what she wanted to study when we first got together, and she settled on sociology. Ariela’s real passion is music history, particularly classical music, and especially Mozart. I graduated first with my degree in genetics, and a passion for being scientific and communicating things scientific. Sharing interests in philosophy, sleeping in, talking about all things academic and nerdy, food, bees, and buttered popcorn with orange juice, it’s been a real fun time for both of us. We’re all set to build a life together. Actually, we’ve already started.

You know you’re getting married when you start talking about the sound system you’ll eventually buy 2-3 years down the road. Or when you whip out paper to re-design the Ideal Home™ and decide for yourselves what functions belong in each room. Who needs a formal ‘presentation’ living room? What a waste. When I got accepted to grad school, we made plans to move across the country and start anew. It was never a question that we were going together, it didn’t even need to be said. Read More…

(Cross-posted at Sociologique)

Yesterday morning, Ariela and I were up at the crack of, no, actually we were up before dawn, racing down to WORT 89.9 fm in downtown Madison for a show of Other Voices. from 5-8 AM Ariela was playing some classical music performed by and/or conducted by women. This was, after all, a show intended to highlight the contributions of women to classical music.

You can listen to the show online here at this link, but it is not available to be downloaded as an MP3. (This will be available from now through May 4th 2008 - on May 5th next week’s show will record over it)

For the first hour and forty-five minutes, Ariela went solo, playing music performed by women, and its good stuff if you want to listen to it. At the 105 minute mark (you can skip ahead if you want to), Ariela cut the music that was playing to introduce the next topic: Holst’s The Planets, and some of its influence on science fiction film music. Let me tell you a little about its genesis, and what happened off the air during the show. Read More…