One year ago today I was tooling around Lancaster, Pennsylvania with Mrs. PopCulteer, Mel Larch, celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary. We’d spent the week visiting candy factories and toy shows and had a blast just being together and doing fun stuff. The above picture is not from that trip. That’s a 2018 Chicago photo I haven’t posted here before. At the right you can see us from last year’s trip, outside the Boyer Candy Company in Altoona.

One year later, everything’s still all right, because we’re together, but we didn’t go on any special trip due to the pandemic. In fact, we didn’t make any special plans because Wednesday is Mel’s day to go work from the office instead of from home, and with the day falling in the middle of the week, our options were limited.

Back in 2014, when we snuck off to Chicago to get married on the stage of Steppenwolf Theater, only a few folks knew in advance, and when we mentioned it on Facebook, we sort of broke the internet, small-scale. We’ve done cool stuff every year since to mark the day, but this year the fates conspired to put the world on pause, and we’re not crazy enough to rush back into living life as though nothing has happened.

So instead we’re making our sixth anniversary our first low-key celebration– No gifts, no trips, no fuss–just the two of us.

As such, I’m not going to spend the day slaving away at the computer. So this is today’s PopCult post. I’m gonna go make a cake or something.

We haven’t given up on doing cool things, we just aren’t willing to sacrifice our lives for Wall Street. Just last night we were making plans for future trips, once this pandemic is safely over, in a year or two. In the meantime, there’s nothing wrong with being quietly happy to be together.

If you want, you can find photo essay and video coverage of last year’s epic trip by scrolling down and looking at links from August and September 2019.