April 08, 2005
Those kind.
The days tend to start the same, regardless of whether I am hot-footing it on a train to London or spending the day in my pajamas glued to my PC and two phones (yes, it's that bad). Unless I have a super-early meet and have my alarm set, Angus' alarm goes off first (both of us only use our mobile phones as our alarms. Truly, deeply sad.) He gets up, dozy and cute, with his hair smashed into a flattened shape in the back and sheet crease marks on his cheek. He shuffles into the bathroom and locks the door and I take a moment to come to. The bed is comfy and wam and there are invariably two little wadded up pieces of kleenex floating around the bed looking like forelorn mice. Because my beloved Angus snores. Loudly. So I keep kleenex under my pillow to tear off sections from to stuff my ears. Said kleenex often wind up getting pushed behind the bed so from time to time I move the bed and remove what looks like a Johnson and Johnson factory from behind it.
Relationships are all about compromise.
I get up and make coffee. We make real coffee in this house. Good stuff. None of that Sanka or Nescafe watery rubbish here, we like the strongest possible coffee that will smack you upside the head and twist your colon in its threatening fingers. We boil water in the electric kettle (I compromised on that front, but we did buy an electric kettle that whistles when the water's boiling, so best of both worlds, really). We grind the coffee beans in the electric grinder and use the Bodum. And-this is key, here-I try to make sure my favorite mug is ready every morning.
My favorite mug is, in my opinion, the world's greatest mug. I bought it at Culloden in Scotland, and the mug is painted in bright colors with an enormous smiling cartoon-like Loch Ness Monster on the front. He is wearing a Scottish tartan hat and the whole mug is curved like the back of a sea monster. Not exactly the tribute the fallen clansmen at Culloden deserve, but I love my wonky mug (except when the satellite guy came to install our satellite. I gave him a cup of tea but the only mug we had clean in the house was this Loch Ness one. Since the satellite guy was Scottish, he was not amused).
After Angus has showered, I go in. Sadly, our rented home not only doesn't have a power shower, it doesn't have a standing shower, so you have to sit down while showering and holding the hand-held shower unit. Seriously. Sympathy gratefully received here. I shower with all my Lush products and with two rubber ducks looking on, and I always have a song in my head. If I am alone and confident the neighbors aren't home, I will sing at the top of my lungs. If I am not alone, I keep it to myself.
This morning's ditty was Grease's Born to Hand-Jive, which is an unfortunate selection if you forget you are holding the shower nozzle in your hand.
Then it's time for Angus' blood pressure check. His follow-up doctor visit is this morning, so we will at least get some answers (and I am arming myself for battle with Angus He swears he will not take medication, and while I am a pushover for love, I have limits. I am also very frightened.) It's been an interesting week armed with a sphegmometer in the house. Angus often doesn't want his blood pressure taken and it's occured more than once that he's sprinted naked from the room in the middle of undressing, so I follow his cutely rounded white butt as he whips around the house trying to avoid me, while dragging the blood pressure monitor and a pen and paper and shouting: "This isn't optional, dude! Get your butt back in here!"
After playing our own home version of doctor, we then get dressed
Him: Why are you wearing socks with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on them?
Me: They were the top pair in my drawer when I just reached in and grabbed them.
Him: That's not on. It's not Christmas.
Me: I'm lazy. And Santa is so watching you.
Angus leaves for work and, if I am working from home, I arm myself with a bottle of water and wearily log in. I post on my blog and then spend the day working. Usually my entire day is taken up with conference calls with my team (which I usually greet as I log in as the chairperson as "Hello my Chickens/Ninjas/Grasshopper/Babies") although sometimes I am on conference calls that just require my attendance in some form of "needing a warm body count", so on those I am free to surf the web. Free to pay bills. Free to draw up lists to places I want to holiday in, with little stars beside the ones I really want to go to but know that Angus doesn't (please can we go to the Maldives? Pretty please?).
When the day is done around 6:30 I whack dinner in the oven and power up Sims2 before Angus gets home somewhere around 8 or 8:30. We eat together and then it's TV time. If it's yoga or Pilates night, I go off to yoga/pilates and then head home. I sometimes dread those classes as I am still the new girl. I hate being the new girl. I would rather just know it all so I could be left alone. My self-confidence is bad enough, I do not need to be in a Gumby position just to hear a resounding "Helen, we must lengthen the body and feel the stretch, we must move into the breathing. Can you raise your ass higher, please?"
We're not that big on TV in our house, but there are some shows we love. Desperate Housewives is a big one here, as was the show Life Begins, which just concluded but that's probably ok as it was getting a bit too melodramatic for me. And since I love me some catastophies so it has to be pretty dire for me to be sick of it. I have just discovered the show Dead Like Me and I absolutely love it, and we are both big Jeeves and Wooster fans. We also watch a show about salvage yards called Reclamation, which we watched last night.
We sipped some wine and he rubbed my back and let me lay on him (men that will let you lay on them are keepers). The show shows you some amazing finds while, at the same time, shows you things way out of our league. I would be happy to buy a 3rd century Roman sarcophagus for £50,000, let me just go rush off and get my checkbook! Or: 14th century stained glass? With my cats and clumsy track record that'll be perfect! Last night they showed a place that had over 30,000 antique shoe lathes. Said lathes were used as the molds for making shoes about 50 years ago, and the chap has two whole walls covered floor to ceiling with them. He takes one off and shows how it is hinged and cracks it open.
With the sound of the hinge, Angus and I follow up with an "Oooooh" sound. We now both want some of those shoe lathes. Badly. So it might not be candlesticks now, it might be lathes that come out of this. What the hell we would do with them, I don't know (learn to juggle? Doorstoppers? Start making shoes and call each other Gepetto?) but we are truly victims of marketing.
Bedtime comes and we fall into bed, allowing wandering fingers and a bit of How's Your Father about 40-50% of the time. I go and drain afterwards and then curl up in the sleepy embrace of my boy, happy and warm, as he drifts off to sleep.
Then I reach for my kleenex under the pillow.
Posted by: Everydaystranger at
07:49 AM
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