Haggis With A Side of Awesomesauce

I have been promising this post for a few days now, and I finally have a minute to sit down and write it. It's been a busy week for me. Tuesday was my MRI and I started Physical Therapy yesterday. Hopefully some answers are around the corner. This is not about me however. This... is a post about my guy. :)

I kinda like this guy that God put in my path one day. The nearly 15 years that we have been together have been filled with ups and downs (literally :)). We've been apart a lot, but it makes the time we have together that much better.

He makes me laugh. A LOT. He hates having his picture taken and does everything he can to be a goofball when the camera comes out in hopes that I will give up. HA! Our photo albums are filled with pictures like these. It makes me treasure shots like the one above, where I catch him off guard with a real smile all the more.

He needs the water like he needs food and air. It quiets his soul and gives him peace.

Even when it's 37* with 15 mile an hour winds.

He's an AMAZING father because he's a kid at heart. He has no qualms at all about whipping out a pink tie-dyed plastic shovel and...

Digging some beach chairs in the sand.

He's a modern day Renaissance Man. His bachelor's degree is in Cartography and GIS (essentially mapmaking), but he decided to get his masters in Health Sciences, specifically Emergency Management. This came in the mail last week.

In addition to finishing his Masters (above) and fighting an uphill battle (below), in the last few months he has...

Built a bed because we couldn't find the perfect one.

Painted a picture because he was having Daddy-Daughter night with Paige and that's what she wanted to do.

Refinished our perfectly nice Tres Amigos rustic pine dresser because I thought it didn't go with the new bed. It now looks just like a dresser that I fell in love with at Coastal Accents on the way back from the Outer Banks.

He also can completely rebuild a car from the ground up, can do incredible calculations in his head, and can pretty much handle anything you throw at him.

Oh yeah, and he can fly this....

What I love most about my guy, however, is his compassion, his sense of duty. He walked away from an opportunity to fly the U2 to stay in a staff job for 6 more months because he couldn't leave the A-10 community behind without giving them everything he had. Unfortunately, he walked into a battle that had been lost before he even got to the fight. By now, many of you have seen the article that has rocked the A-10 family. If not, you can read about it here. For the last six months, Den has been fighting this with his heart and soul 24/7, probably pissing off quite a few people along the way (at times, me included). I can not even express how devastated he is. In his mind, this came down on his watch, so, despite everything he worked to save, he failed his A-10 brothers and, even worse, the eighteen year old kid on the ground a world away from home with a gun in his hand. The image in his mind of that kid is what has been driving him and it kills him that everything he had just wasn't enough.

Of course, there are lots more reasons I love my guy. I find new ones every day. He's the best friend I've ever had. He's the axis that keeps our little world spinning. He's totally and completely awesomesauce.