Breaking news in my backyard.

Our evening meal of "Bang Bang Shrimp" and a veggie side consisting of summer squash, tomatoes, corn, onion and garlic had been prepped...all was ready for me to watch the final hour of The Masters when I grabbed my iPad to look at work email.

John Buckner on the assignment desk had just forwarded a tweet from the Fort Lauderdale Fire Department about a plane crash and the location was two miles south of where we live.

I yelled at John to join me and he became my driver.

Would that Periscope was already developed for Android! I have an iPad with it loaded but it was on the charger. My phone was too but it had 40% so I grabbed it and left the ability to live stream behind.

We got to the corner just east of the crash and police directed us away. The WSVN live truck arrived a minute behind me and we both wended our way through the Calvary Chapel parking lot in an effort to get a closer view.

John is a good navigator in this circumstance although I don't see a "Nightcrawler" existence in our future.

Liane Morejon, the Local 10 reporter arrived moments later and took over.

John and I went home and I made dinner.

Four people died in the crash and at the end of the day, that's what I'm thinking about tonight.

Veintiocho años!

The older we get, the faster the years go by.
It's once again time for my annual accounting of "the little things" that are really the glue that keeps John and me together.
This all started in 2009 when we lived in Baltimore and our anniversary sneaked up on me. I made the first list in lieu of a card.
So here we go:

1. I love that you keep insisting that I learn Spanish. It's probably not going to happen but you should keep nagging me. (
2. I love how you enjoy writing controversial things in the sand and then wait for a tourist to come by. And how irritated you get when nobody notices.
3. I love your silly selective memory. "Do I like this food? Have we seen that movie?"
4. Shopping with you at Kohl's can be a blast but please don't make me watch you try on seventeen pairs of jeans even though I love your butt.
5. I love our Sunday picnics at the beach and your scientific approach to planting the umbrella in the sand.
6. I love your slavish attention to our cars, every repair bill for the past decade carefully saved and filed in that ugly cabinet that I will never convince you to discard.
7. I love how much fun you have with brother-in-law Bob.
8. I love dreaming of a Murphy bed for our den so we can have even MORE COMPANY during the winter months.
9. I love that you impishly hide the United Methodist church cup that I like to drink from on Sunday mornings, as if that would stop my OCD for that particular habit.
10. I love how you actually enjoy being introduced as "the long suffering John Phillip."
11. I loved our New Year's Eve party--taping "2015" on the champagne flutes that we didn't get to use last year.
12. I love that we are both losing our hearing at the same time.
13. Subsequently, I love the hysterical laughing we do when we replay something we've missed on a TV show three times and STILL CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT'S BEING SAID.
14. I love that you continue to feed my addiction to Crocs sandals. My comfortable shoe fetish!
    
15. I love it when you get a wild hair, take me on a whirlwind trip to somewhere and act silly.
16. I love how you love old things.
17. I love how you understand why an occasional visit to Whole Foods is therapeutic, even if we don't need anything.
18. Consequently, I love how you stare at the cost of olives and try to find the least expensive. Which I tell you will taste bad. So we buy the good ones.
19. I love how mad you got when the printer stopped working and when I got it fixed again, the first thing it spit out was the FTD flower order for our anniversary. 
20. I love going to garden shops and looking at plants with you even though our "farm" area is pretty small.
21. I love how this year, you finally have a chance to win it all in the NCAA pool we enter every year...and how frustrating it is that you used my name on the potential winning bracket.
    
22. I love discovering new places with you on weekends.
23. I love how you look at the back of greeting cards to see how much I spent.
24. I love how much you enjoy talking to our kids on the phone.
25. I love how you have embraced my current Fitbit obsession even though it means I don't want to go on as many bike rides as I used to.
26. I love how you let me buy kitchen gadgets galore whether we need them or not. C'mon, that egg steamer is awesome!
27. I love how you compare every dog you see to Dottie and none of them compare.
28. I love falling asleep, holding hands.

Thanks for another great year, honey!