Love,

Your Devoted Wife

That means a lot coming from a geek.

Yesterday was the first day since Mike got back that I got to come home to him from work, one of my favorite things, and we celebrated by… falling asleep on the couch while watching a home show. It was fabulous. Until Bonsai wiggled her way up to put her head on Mike’s pillow, and then she licked his nose. Nap over. Sigh.

Tomorrow is Saturday and we’ll celebrate that with one of our favorite married traditions, waffles and chai!

I’m glad you’re home dearest.

Can you please take out the trash when you get home? It’s full.

I’ve taken lots of pictures with my new camera. I haven’t posted many… I should get on that. I’ve gone frisbee golfing and hiking with friends, and since Mike’s been on vacation this week i’ve read a bunch of books and stayed up way too late watching Friends on DVD. It’s interesting to see the habits I get into when I’m on my own. Overall I think I’m healthier when Mike’s around - I don’t eat chocolate all evening, or lay in my hammock reading books for hours on end, or watch 4 hours of TV. Although I did mow the lawn! And I hauled all the old furniture out of our bonus room. It’s fun to see what I can do on my own, but overall I’m much happier when I’m part of a partnership. When I don’t have to take out the trash, even if i do have to wash more dishes. And I have someone to lean against when watching dollar movies off of iTunes. And someone to make chai for and share Saturday breakfast with.

When Mike and I were out for a sunny day on the town a few weeks ago we discovered Bakery By the Lake, home of cheesy herb rustic swirl bread and my constant favorite now, bagels! I’ve been popping by so often lately to pick up a bag of four day-old bagels (a positive steal that way - and that’s four bagels, each 1 day old) that the girl behind the counter asked me today, when I was exclaiming about how much I love their bagels,

“Didn’t you buy two bags of bagels just a few days ago?”

Me: “Ya… but I ate them all”.

Counter girl: “Well at least you admit it!”

I suppose I could’ve clarified that I’d given one bag of those bagels to my in laws, but regardless - we do indeed enjoy those bagels.

I’m actually excited to go to sleep now so i can wake up tomorrow and eat a nice, toasted cranberry bagel spread with melty butter.

I had just started surfing shoe sites (piperlime, sierratradingpost and other dangerous locals) when Safari “quit unexpectedly”. Thousands and thousands of shoe pictures were gone, instead leaving me staring at the peaceful Bayview floathouse picture I have as my desktop.

At first I reacted with “hey! stupid Safari. give me back my shoes!” But then sensation returned to my brain and realized I should be thanks Safari for looking our for me, and go to bed.

The actual surgery sucks. Anyone who tells you “it’s a piece of cake” is lying, or the valium they give people helped them forget. It only takes about 10 minutes, but it just… sucks. (Patty, if you’re reading this, stop now. Seriously. You won’t like me if you don’t.) It doesn’t hurt much, and I know statistics say it’s pretty safe, but it still sucks to have your eyes held open and then have antibiotic goop smeared under your eye lids, five kinds of drops dropped in, a suction ring applied, flap cut, laser zappage (really the least unpleasant part actually) and finally the worst part of all, which they don’t warn you about - dum dum dummm - they rinse the corneal flap with some sort of liquid/water thing to make sure there’s no debris before folding it back over your eye. This doesn’t sound that bad. But it is. Because it you can feel it. And it feels like they’re rinsing the inside of your eye ball. It’s really, really hideous. For me, anyway, it was worse than the smell of burning eye ball, and the suction ring pressure. But I handled it all like I trooper by thinking nasty thoughts about the surgeon and the assistant girls who kept saying perkily “you’re doing great!”. Grrr.

But AFTER all that (and after 5 days of sleeping in a plastic mask, of which I shall not post a picture, unless I can get Mike to model it) when my eyes healed a bit - it is splendid. I can see so clearly! And in the middle of the night! And when I shave my legs in the shower! And the very very very best part, at least so far since I can’t bike or ski for awhile yet, then that will be the best part, is that I can walk outside when it’s raining or snowing and not get spots on my glasses. It’s amazing. Because there are few things more annoying than getting spots on your glasses while your bundled up and wearing gloves and thus can’t easily dry your glasses. I know, my life is hard. But still. I saved up for 3 years to have this done, and I’m so so happy.

Today Ampersand and I walked down to the mercantile to buy some dinner supplies. With typical spring consistency it was sunny when we left and raining when we came back. And I didn’t care. I walked around an extra ten minutes just because I could.

Here is me, after 30 minutes in the rain. Obviously not raining all that hard, but that’s good because it’s still unnecessarily wintery here.

Tomorrow we call the vet and start over with asking Why did this happen? It’s possible he has epilepsy and will continue to have seizures every so often. If he continues this pattern (not that twice quite makes a pattern) he might have a seizure about 9pm, while sleeping by the fire, exactly two days after the last full moon. Those are the similarities as I can see them between the two events… last time we were watching Letters From Iwo Jima, and we thought maybe the flashing lights and sounds of war triggered it, but tonight we were reading quietly - so maybe not that. Maybe it’s his dogfood. Maybe it’s the carpet. Maybe it really is the cycle of the moon. I just wish we knew… but having a dog as part of your live, and loving him as we do ours, means accepting uncertainty and emotional pain every now and then.

The rest of the time, Ampersand is our ray of fuzzy sunshine, spreading joy wherever we go.

And then, just as we finished watching Ratatouille - in high def woohoo!- off the new iTunes rental dealy (awesome, by the way, if dangerous and expensive) Mike said his stomach didn’t feel quite right… and he spent the night getting up every two hours.

Today I woke up feeling like I’d been run over the a bus (the evil tetanus bus!) and knew there was no way I could manage being on my feet doing chaos control all day at work. Mike slept in until 9:30, bolstered by my 7am run down to the Bayview Mercantile for gatorade type drinks. They didn’t have the lemon lime one Mike likes so I bought him 8 different kinds of sports drinks. Thank You Mercantile! You have saved me many a time, whether it be for late night ice cream cravings or urgent medical provisions.

Thus, we spent today in the living room on our red couch and comfy Ikea Poang chair until our butts fell asleep, reading books (me) and watching MASH (Mike) and all of the first 8 episodes of Big Bang Theory.

Also enlivening our poor pathetic sick souls to no end was this HILARIOUS spot-on kitty cartoon about a cat trying to wake up his owner. We watched it quite a few times, proving laughter is if not the best medicine, right up there with puppy pets and stretched out kitties on my lap. Hope she wasn’t watching the cartoon, not that she needs advice on how to be cute and evil and annoying when we’re trying to sleep. It is truly hilarious, and I encourage everyone to watch it! You’ll have to go find it though, because I’m too lazy/tired/melted not to mention too ignorant to post a link to it. They just had the link on Cute Overload.com, one of my favorite cheer me up websites. Get right on that, then.

To any other people who are sickies out there, you have my sympathies. I would bring you gatorade (Mike’s traditional sick person drink) and healthful rice and steamed veggies in miso sauce (my mom’s food for sick people) if I could. Since I can’t, I’ll send happy feel better wavelengths your way. And seriously, go watch the kitty video. Probably funniest if you actually have or have had a cat of your own, but watch it anyway.

And I get done, hooray! minus a short double check on grammar and such in the morning (rather later in the morning) when I’m more awake and have remembered how to blink, and I take a little stroll around the internets to relax my brain before falling into bed (I’m going to be really crazy like back in the college days and not brush my teeth, gasp!) and what do I discover?

There are people I know awake on the internets! Posting pictures to flickr and blogging and other such actions that for some reason I thought stopped happening after 10pm because that’s when old people like us go to bed these days!

Now it’s 1am. I haven’t seen 1am since the last time I took an evening nap and went to bed at 10 and then woke up in the middle of the night because my sleep pattern was all mixed up.

I just remembered though… I might feel like i’m back in my college mode, but I have to get up tomorrow at 6:30 and go to work until 6pm. And do dishes. And walk the dog.

Good night internets.