The rest of 2011...

By September 2011, it had become clear that Dorothy and I needed to do something about our living arrangements. Allow me to explain. About 20 years ago, there were some ethical shenanigans going on in the Ohio legislature, and those led to some changes to the law. There have been a few tweaks since, and where we are today is here: lobbyists are allowed to spend $50 per year on food and drinks on behalf of any individual legislator; there is a $25 gift limit; and essentially, lobbyists cannot give anything of value to a legislator. I have been a lobbyist for many years, but now Dorothy was a legislator, and this really interfered with our routines. We met with the agency in charge of enforcing the legislative ethics laws, and the bottom line was that the gift and food/drink limits applied, and furthermore, Dorothy would have to write me a check for rent anytime she spent the night at my place. If we went to dinner, we had to go Dutch. If we were to travel more than 50 miles, we would have to take her car - it's alright for the legislator to give the lobbyist something of value, but not the other way around. As you might imagine, this did not sit well with her, but I had some fun with it. We were already engaged, and we were planning to get married in 2012. Her appointment induced us to move the date up, and on October 26, 2011, we were married in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. This also led us to get cracking on the house plans we had been working on, and we put our respective properties up for sale in early 2012. More on that later. For the rest of the year, we worked on wills, a trust, house plans, and packing up for an eventual move to a rental house, where we would live until our new house was built. The clearing at Wyndanwood continued, and I am forever grateful to my buddy Doug Peabody for all of his help with the clearing. The other significant event of 2011 was that, after a few months on the new job, Dorothy decided that she could be a good legislator or a good attorney, but she didn't have time to be good at both. So in December 2011, she shut down her law practice. This was a major decision, and one that came with a financial cost, but it was the right decision. She is fully focused on her job as a legislator, and that is only fair to the people she represents.