Catherine and I are, in most ways, of completely opposite sensibilities and temperament. Our relationship works, thus, more because of “hybrid vigor” than anything else.

But there are a few points where we are completely in sync (which is probably equally required for relationship success).

Send us both, alone, into a new city with a camera and the photos we end up taking will have considerable overlap; we tend to focus on the same shiny bits (although Catherine is more obsessed with doors than I could ever be).

Another example: earlier this month we had our 16th anniversary (living in sin as we are, it’s the 16th anniversary of our first kiss, not of the marriage-we-don’t-have). We both ended up ordering an iPod Touch for the other; I placed an order online for hers and she ordered mine from Little Mac Shoppe.

When it became clear that the ship date for Catherine’s wasn’t going to make our anniversary deadline, I cancelled my online order and opted for an alternative palette of gifts that included giant twist ties (must be seen to be believed). But, unwilling to let the idea die completely, I stopped by Little Mac Shoppe myself, thus perhaps inducing some privacy conundrums as they knew full-well that Catherine had already ordered what I was looking for (they handled it well).

Catherine ended up persevering through the shipment deadlines and ended up pickup up an iPod Touch for me on her trip to Toronto last week. So this morning I got to place with the new-fangled pinch-n-slide interface while Catherine, alas, was left to play with her giant twist ties, needle threader and collapsing Japanese pen box.