Nathan Russell Photography

Fess up, who here was part of Columbia House? You know, Columbia House. Back in the days of CDs you’d get 15 CDs for a penny each plus $20.00 shipping and handling, and then in exchange, you were “obligated” to buy 10 CDs in two years at the low club price ($45.95 plus $20.00 shipping and handling).

I can’t even tell you how many times I joined columbia house. I’d say about every 6 months or so, I’d rip that cardstock ad out of People magazine and check off the 15 CDs I wanted for a penny each. The choices were pretty limited, and usually there were only like 6 CDs I really wanted so then I had to find another 9 discs, but at a penny each, it was still a good deal. (This is how I first discovered some of the greatest acts of all time. Bobby Brown, Yanni, Bel Biv Devoe.) Then, the trick was to get that first regularly priced CD in the mail, and just hold on to it for as long as possible. Don’t open it, just keep it safely stowed away for a few months, and pretty soon, you’re getting threatening letters from Columbia House demanding that you pay for the CD. Sure, it probably isn’t good for your credit score, but when you’re 12 you don’t have a credit score, do you? So you let 5 or 6 of these letters come, which is a trick, because you have to confiscate them from the mail before mom and dad sort it and wonder why their pre-teen is getting bills in yellow envelopes marked FINAL NOTICE.

Then, when you’re confident that Columbia House is not interested in continuing its partnership with you, you put that CD back in the mail marked Return To Sender, and back-date it by about 5 and a half months, and voila, suddenly you don’t have to meet your 10 CD minimum, and the 15 penny CDs are yours free and clear. Then you just wait for next month’s People magazine so you can sign up again. It was a brilliant plan and I used it to build the most impressive music collection in my high school (if by impressive, you mean completely lacking in direction, and bordering on schizophrenic). I always wondered how Columbia House could possibly be making a profit. I mean who’s dumb enough to fulfill that obligation? But people must have, because they’re still around.

Well, this post isn’t really about Columbia house. It’s about my marriage. This past July my amazing wife and I celebrated our 10th year of marriage. And when I say celebrated, I mean we chased an entire tube of chocolate chip cookie dough with a bottle of Totts and watched The Devil Wears Prada on FX. Again.

This is a travesty, yes, but the truth is, we’ve been so busy lately, and busy leads to exhausted, and exhausted leads to spending any and all down time in stretchy pants that better-accomodate large amounts of fast-food binging and TV on DVD marathons. We’ve been using all of our time off to focus on photography projects for so long I don’t even remember exactly what real time off feels like. If I do occasionally get a night off, I just sit here in my underwear on the couch drinking orange fanta and staring at my closed laptop, feeling guilty for abandoning it. The good news is, we’re in this together, (me and Amy, not me and my laptop) so I don’t think she’s too mad at me for not planning something amazing for the big 10. Also, after I cut the tube of cookie dough in half, I let Amy choose which side she wanted. Sharing is caring.

But surprisingly, I think we both felt a little let-down. Yes Meryl Streep is amazing in that movie. Yes, the second bottle of Totts was better than the first. That’s maybe fine for a 9th anniversary, but 10 years, that should be something special.

So, We decided to join Columbia House.

Sort of.

We Joined the Zagat Wine Club, which basically based their business plan on the wild success of Columbia House. They send us 15 bottles of wine for like a dollar each, and then every couple of months they send us a case of reds. Only the difference is the case they send is really reasonably priced, and I don’t have any intention of sending it back after six months of withholding payment. (People don’t think it’s as funny when you’re in your 30s.)

I got the idea a couple of nights ago when we decided to open a bottle of red to go with dinner and I went over to the wine stash to find this.

What you see there is 3 bottles of white and 1 bottle of rosé that we keep around because as good wine drinkers, we feel we should. We’ve been trying to start a small home collection of wines for a couple of years. We’re not trying to invest in wines, or anything. I’m not going to hold on to a bottle so that in 20 years I can tell my kids I can’t afford their college over a glass of Bordeaux. We Just want a nice, balanced home collection of drinkable wines, so we can open something up on a whim, or have friends over on the fly. But we suck at it. We drink it faster than we buy it, and when we do buy it, we tend to go straight for the wines we know because that wine section at Central Market makes me hyperventilate. Eventually we end up with this exact scenario, a couple of ratty bottles of neglected whites that don’t compliment our cookie dough at all.

So I decided we should do something nice for ourselves to celebrate a decade, and there’s more than one way to celebrate. Maybe a spectacular getaway to Spain isn’t going to happen this year, and maybe the closest we’re going to get to a nice meal is super sizing our McDonald’s that we’re eating in one hand while we’re processing photos with the other. But that’s not the only way to say “thanks for putting up with me for 10 years.” 6 to 8 giant cases of booze is another good way. And maybe this way, on our eleventh anniversary, instead of Totts we’ll have a nice Zagat-approved pinot noir to chase that cookie dough with.

We’re pretty excited. All of us. Maisy’s been watching for the UPS guy all weekend.