McMansions and Widowers

Time again for my bi-annual blog posting.

Today I told Julie (jokingly, I swear) that I wanted a McMansion. She didn't specifically know what one was, so she looked it up on Wikipedia. She reports that they are even worse than she dared dream. In fact, we live just two sub-divisions away from a land of McMansions - large houses that are cookie-cutter-ish and closely packed enough not to be worth anything near the 600k they cost. Of course, Julie being Julie, she could not just limit herself to researching the horrors that are McMansions, so she looked up the Wikipedia entry for plain-old Mansions. Apparently, we are now going to spend our next anniversary in a 1100 year-old castle in Gloustershire. I guess the gardens are amazing.

One of the specific mansions that she ran across in her web search was a 100,000 square-foot place with 325 acres in Pennsylvania called Whitemarsh Hall. It was commissioned in 1916, notably demolished in 1980, that Edward Stotesbury, an executive for a JP Morgan subsidiary, built as a wedding gift for his second wife, Eva. Julie wondered if any man could actually be that dumb, considering that having a second wife necessarily meant he had a first wife, so did a little digging and found out that he had been a widower for 30 years before getting remarried and building this (and three other) mansions for his family and new wife. I think Julie might be starting a novel on the firebombing that would have occurred if he divorced his first wife and she was still alive when Whitemarsh was built for wife number 2, but I digress.

Here's what I don't get. If a baker makes bread, a builder makes buildings, why isn't a widower the person who makes a widow? Instead, we call a man who's wife has died a widower, which is logically incongruous. In this case, the woman who died should be called the widower, or at least the widowerer, if we were still going to insist on calling the man a widower, which I have already established as dumb. If you can explain this to me, please write in and let me know, because I want to ask you why you subscribe to this idiocy. Rage against the machine, man!

Introduction

Before we move on to the meaty content, as Sean's wife, Julie, I'd like to tell you a little about what you can expect from this blog.

I have known Sean for an almost-unmeasurable length of time and if I have learned nothing else about him, he has a great ability to fleshe out the almost-invisible questions of life and convince you of their great importance. Some of the things I trust you will be reading about soon include "Ducks v. Geese: Turf Wars?" and "The Comparative Advantages Between Wii and Playstation 3." If these seem trivial to you now, I know you will soon be convinced otherwise.

A little about the man himself: Sean is 25, has lived in Minnesota most of his life, works as a software developer, has a beautiful and crazy-smart wife (shameless self-promotion, I know). He loves children, animals, video games, Anthony Bourdain, and the woods. He hates an empty Brita water container, pickles, sauerkraut, blueberries, and bananas. He has two great parents and two crazy brothers. Oh, and he's a year away from his second-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do.

So, read along as Sean expounds on some of lifes lesser-known-yet-important questions. Leave your comments, your thoughts, as well as amused and enlightened.

Random Stats:
Height: 5' 11"
Weight: 180
IQ: probably a million
Amount of time he spent at work today: 10 hours
How hot he is: a lot, like a piece of man-candy
Video Games Currently Playing: Galactic Civilizations II, Final Fantasy XII, GBA Super Mario World
Dream Occupation: World Traveler/Software Company Mogul