The Alpha Geek just e-mailed me that he’s going up to Philadelphia later this month. He’ll be gone about a week.
Some time later, it occurred to me that my reply probably falls outside the usual sort of thing a wife will say when her husband is leaving town for a week:
“If you go by the Mütter, see if they have any fetus-on-a-keychains at the gift shop.”
Some random glimpses of turmoil, in varying degrees of force and locality:
Hanna’s been and gone. She breezed through like the party-girl friend you had in college: everyone got all excited when they heard she was coming, we made a lot of plans and preparations, she staggered in during the wee hours of the morning, blew around at random having a good time and making a mess, and then she was gone and we were left with the cleanup. There were some areas flooded, some without power, and one small community whose only road in or out got washed away. But mostly we’re fine. In my neighborhood we never lost power and didn’t even get a lot of branches down.
Meanwhile, her rowdier brother Ike is looking to crash on Texas or New Orleans’ couch this weekend. Keep your fingers crossed for folks like LawDog and Ambulance Driver, who may be stuck with this unwelcome visitor.
I’m not a big fan of getting older, but I’ll definitely be glad when I don’t have a period any more. Damn thing is getting to be a right vicious bitch. I spent most of Sunday on the couch, feeling like someone had been using my abdomen as a punching bag. I’m beginning to wonder if my uterus isn’t tearing itself loose a piece at a time, a theory supported by the thumb-sized clots I passed in the shower this morning. Seriously, the place looked like an abattoir. Fortunately my menstrual Niagra is generally short-lived; two or three days of misery and then it’s gone. Like everything else I do, I go overboard.
The Artist has achieved his learner’s permit. This means that any time we go anywhere, he leaps to the door with an eager, “Can I drive?”
So far I have left his driving practice in the capable hands of my husband, the Alpha Geek. AG has a lot more patience than I do (for example, he’s married to me), and is better at teaching people—I’ve often thought he would make a good college instructor. I don’t have any skill at teaching people anything, particularly The Artist. I think something in our personalities is too much alike, and whenever I try to instruct him we just wind up frustrated with each other.
So far he’s only been driving AG’s car. I figure he’ll start driving mine after he’s had a little more practice. Say, twenty years. Have I mentioned how much I love my car?
She never quite made it up to hurricane status, but tropical storm Hanna’s still getting a lot of attention around here. We’re already getting intermittent showers from her outer edges, and by two a.m. Saturday she’ll be making landfall.
We’re pretty far inland in the Triangle, so we aren’t expecting it to be too bad. But past storms like Fran and Dennis have taught us not to get too complacent, and there’s no bottled water or lantern flashlights left at my local Wal-Mart. When The Artist got home from school I had him help me put the patio furniture into the shed, just in case. I told our stray cat to find himself a dry place to sleep tonight.
Last year we had severe drought. I guess all the collective wishing and praying for rainfall is catching up to us now.