Batching

OK, truth to be told, I have been living a single man's life for the past two weeks and change.

No, nothing's wrong. The Lovely Bride took her mom to Greece for a long-anticipated tour. Nardi (short for Leonarda) has been wanting to visit Greece forever, and as she's had more problems with her hips in recent years, this might to be the last chance. So the two of them went on a church-sponsored tour titled "In the Footsteps of St. Paul". Given that the LB is pretty militantly ex-Catholic, it promised to be an interesting sojourn. But more on that later, perhaps. What we're talking about is, of of course, me.

I find I like solitude, in general, and it takes a couple days of no human contact before I start roaming the house looking for things to do. I picked up the other half of the house duties (laundry, dishes) without too much pain or unnecessary adventure. I did my own cooking, which resulted in me eating less in the evenings (since the beginning of October, I've lost 15 pounds, but most of that was due to a three-day bout with food poisoning). On the other hand, I was nowhere as culinarily active I wanted to be - I never made bread (which I often do when I'm bored), nor tried any new recipes. By the same token, I avoided breaking out the mac and cheese, so I guess that's a victory.

Oh, and I made omelets, which I never do when the LB is in the house (allergies).

My greatest challenge was dealing with the Lovely Bride's Fortress of Technology - otherwise known are the downstairs TV, where she records a lot of SciFi (sorry, Syfy) and crime shows. She has two separate VCRs hooked up that needed tapes changed at particular times, along with the fact that Comcast, in upgrading the system, has added some additional bells and whistles into the system. Oh, and right after she left, we had the time change from Daylight Savings. End result was about seven little yellow sticky notes with copious instructions on how to handle various situations. If all goes well, she gets her shows. If not, we will never speak of this again.

Also in a big pending pile is the mail. I separated it into four piles - Bills (which I paid in her absence), Bills and important stuff (due after her return), unimportant mail that MAY be important, and catalogs. Yeah, she's going to have fun.

On the lawn, I was spared any major personal effort by the fact it has rained almost every day since she left. I did manage to take down the dead and rotting tomato plants she had, pulling the last of the viable crop. Severed those up in the omelets.

The cats of course, viewed me suspiciously for the first three days, as if I were some invader in their quiet lives of following the LB from room to room throughout the day. By the end of the fourth day, Harley decided to switch allegiances and become my new BFF, following me everywhere, in hopes that I would suddenly go mad and feed her again. Victoria remained cool and imperious, condoning to sit on my lap only in the past few days.

Of course, when the LB returns, they will go running back to her. Traitors.

All in all, I think I can survive being on my own, but its not nearly as much fun (The Lovely Bride, reporting from Greece, wishes I was there, since she could drag ME into climbing various Greek peaks and finding restaurants down dimly-lit alleys). I was ill this week, knocked out with what I think was a flu bug - temperature of 101. And that was no fun at all to facing alone.

But, the LB returns tomorrow, and life returns to what approximates normal around here. But for the moment, I haven't destroyed too much, and still know I can shift for myself, if I have to.

More later,

Election Day

So this morning, as I was heading out, the Lovely Bride was eating breakfast and looking over the voter's guide.

ME: Be sure to vote.
SHE: Looking at it now.
ME: You know, I did some write-ups on the issues for my blog.
SHE: I read them. (pause) I just don't agree with them all.

This is why I have no future in politics: I can't even manage a majority in my own house (and that's with the cats not voting - something about no opposable thumbs).

More later,

Food Rebellion

So I haven't talked about cooking around the house since the Christmas Party, and for good reason. The Lovely Bride is a tax preparer, an enrolled agent who is the manager of an office for a Large Tax Corporation (LTC). As a result, the period between January and April is a bit sticky as far as cooking. Making matters worse has been my own sudden upswing of activity at work as my company accelerates on Guild Wars: Eye of the North.

Not that we aren't cooking - we're just doing safe traditional recipes - pastas, stews, the occasional spinach pie. But just as often its a case where I'm reaching for the ramen noodles for a quick late bite, or the Lovely Bride comes home late and consumes the lunch that she packed and didn't have time to eat. We get out to eat at restaurants, but we haven't quite caught up to our anniversary dinner yet.

Anyway, there is a breaking point, and the Lovely Bride hit it last week, with the approach of Easter, which in her family, is a cooking holiday like Thanksgiving or Christmas.

My first warning was last Tuesday, when I came home and found that she had whipped up some swedish meatballs, a wonderful family recipe that, surprisingly, is in the recipes section of the Tales of the Inn of the Last Home Dragonlance book. (She wrote the cookbook section, and during the test section I ended up eating a lot of spiced potatoes). The meatballs were great, served on fettuccine, and I spent most of Wednesday thinking of them as leftovers, to find out that she had found time to deconstruct two dungeoness crabs and that my crab cakes were firming up in the fridge.

Thursday and Friday I was elsewhere for dinner, but Saturday I get home from the office (yeah, I'm working weekends right now) and she brightly turned to me and said "Good, you're home. I need help stuffing the kielbasa". This is not a sexual innuendo, but rather another family recipe that eventually found its way into the Dragonlance cookbook, and the two of us made pork sausage (yahknow, its impossible to talk about it without going into a 'bevis and butthead' moment - fine, go with it) with an electric sausage stuffer.

This morning, we had kielbasa and pancakes and strawberries for breakfast. A walk down Soos Creek in the middle of the day, and tonight, we're looking forward to a lobster gerwurtz with ginger, served on a bed of spinach.

Then she has to go hull-down for the last crunch, and we go back to leftovers and convenience food for a while.

More later,

Why I Married Her ...

Picked up comics the other day.

Picked up a copy of the new Buffy the Vampire Slayer book, written by Joss Whedon.

Left it at the Lovely Bride's place at the table.

She read it and laughed at the "Nick Xander, Agent of SHIELD" lines.

And she wants me to pick up the next issue.

More later,

Hail, Hail

Yep, yesterday it hailed in Seattle - twice over the afternoon, leaving a thick, frozen crust on a lot of vehicles and proceeding to screw up the evening commute even more than usual. Add to that snow north of the city and a threat of freezing fog up on Cap Hill, and I think we've seen every except the TV-Minister-promised tidal wave.

But the Sturm und Drang did relent last night for the Lovely Bride to celebrate her Legendary Birthday. We gathered at the Melrose Grill, a excellent little steak house in downtown Renton which the LB and enjoy. All told, there were 11 of us at the table, most of them regulars for the Lovely Bride's Thursday Evening games, and included a Microsoft researcher, a social security administrator, our resident Tolkien expert (who was hit up by the NYTimes for a quote the week before), a King County Deputy (who was the first on the scene at the Skyway Bowling Alley shooting on New Year's Eve), and a newly-minted Captain back from Iraq, several tax preparers and game designers. Needless to say, the conversation at the table was spirited and as good as steaks.

Afterwards some of the gang retired to the house, where they played classic D&D into the wee hours. A good time was had by all, and with the completion of the Lovely Bride's birthday and that of my mother's (Hi, Mom!), the holiday season for me finally comes to a close.

So I guess its time to take down the tree...

More later,