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My husband and I had our 26th anniversary this past week. The year after the 25th seems almost not worth mentioning. So much so that my husband forgot.

He’s not someone who forgets things like that, but the pressure of his work situation lately has caused him to forget a lot of things, so I wasn’t the least bit offended. In actuality, we’re still working towards really celebrating our 25th.

Last year as our silver anniversary rolled around, my husband was unemployed for the first time in almost 30 years, and we weren’t sure what was going to happen next. It was a pretty scary time for both of us. We had a lovely surprise anniversary dinner put on by our wonderful friends, and another one from our family, but other than treating ourselves to a Canucks hockey game, that was about it. So we vowed that when our lives got a little more stable again, we’d take ourselves to Maui.

To make a long story short (and some of you have probably already read the story that I wrote last year about the Little TV Station That Could) my husband got his job back, but it has been pretty much 12-hour days ever since then. He has become the entire creative department which used to consist of 5 people. We are grateful that he is working, but you know, when you hit your 50’s you want to start thinking about winding down, not working twice as hard as you did before!

And within a few months, CHEK TV has managed to pull together and become completely independent. This past week was the first week that the entire station has been running on its own steam with a new master control and no technical support from anywhere else. Although they’re not out of the woods yet, it’s nothing short of miraculous.

Two other major events are that the well-known local anchor Tony Parsons has become part of the team and is now doing the 10 o’clock news on weekdays. I’ve pretty much watched every newscast since he started, I’m such a fan! And the station now has an agreement with the CBC to exchange news stories which is also a huge coup.

Television is still struggling and it’s anyone’s guess as to how the next five or ten years are going to pan out. But for CHEK, so far, so good.

I know that job loss and financial crisis can put a lot of pressure on a marriage, and quite often marriages break up because of it. The interesting thing to me was that we never felt anything close to that; it seemed the harder it got, the closer we stuck together.

One of my daughter’s summed it up kind of nicely in the card she gave us for our anniversary: “It’s been a rough year, but together you managed to stay strong, and without a drop of hesitation to support each other.”

I think we’re going to make it to Maui after all…