In response to my mentioning how amazed I was that she was functioning so well (i.e., at all) considering she had the flu and only one hour of sleep:

My Lovely Wife: Hey. I’m tough. Come the Apocalypse, it’s gonna be me, your grandmother, my grandmother, and the cockroaches. You’ll see.

Heading to work.

ME: So yesterday was Talk like A Pirate Day so on the site I-

MY LOVELY WIFE: I read it.

ME: What?

MY LOVELY WIFE: I read your site yesterday.

ME: But you never read my site.

MY LOVELY WIFE: Sometimes I do.

ME: Really?

MY LOVELY WIFE: Yup. Spot checks.

ME: What?

MY LOVELY WIFE: Spot checks. I’ve got to make certain that you aren’t saying anything you shouldn’t be.

ME: But… you don’t read it because it makes you laugh or to see what I had to say or because you love me?

MY LOVELY WIFE: Nope. Spot checks.

ME: Huh.

…

For the record, this was not my first choice for most amusing conversation with My Lovely Wife today.

But now I know she’s checking.

And I have a will to live.

[Looks over shoulder. Ducks.]

Thanks to everyone for your effusive good wishes on my birthday. I had three pieces of cake, so we’ll chalk yesterday up in the win column.

I did try to convey to My Lovely Wife to sheer brilliance of the song I composed yesterday.

Alas, even in the face of a truly admirable effort — involving many hand gestures and suggestively waggling eyebrows — my conveyance failed miserably.

However, later in the evening, as we were relaxing on the couch, I heard her voice quietly singing:

Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday to you,
You look like a monkey,
Aaaaaaand… ummmm…

[Pause.]

You live in space and wear pants.

I looked at her and said, “I’m gonna blog that.”

She said, “No you’re not.”

Ha.

Shows her what she knows.

(Can’t talk long. I’m making fajitas.)

The house needs to be painted. Our bed frame is falling apart. The lawn needs to be mowed. We have nothing on the walls in our bedroom. The levels of cat hair in the corners are slowly transforming our floors from “hardwood” to “shag carpeting”. I can see eight things that need to be thrown away without even turning my head from the keyboard. The paint on our basement floor is peeling. The laundry is wrinkling in the dryer as I type this. The car still has high-velocity bug splatter from our trek to Toronto three weeks ago.

I have chores aplenty and they are crying out to the heavens to be done.

So what am I going to do tonight?

Sit on the couch, with My Lovely Wife’s feet in my lap (unless they have been shoved aside by 1-2 cats), and watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Again.

If I’m feeling industrious, I may microwave popcorn.

Priorities. I have them.

Yesterday, people sucked.

Everywhere, people would get in our way, cut us off, make us walk around them, talk too loud behind us, stand in front of us on the escalator, rev their unmufflered motorcycles too damn early, pay an entire year’s worth of bills in front of us at the ATM, make odd and inexplicable beeping noises repeatedly and when we actually made a point of asking what the noise was and when it might possibly be ending they would just shrug their shoulders smile vaguely and then continue making the odd and inexplicable beeping noises and yet if we choose to punch them in their collective necks WE WOULD HAVE BEEN VIEWED AS THE ONES AT FAULT.

THE WORLD… SHE MAKES NO SENSE.

However, it did bring us closer as a couple.

There is nothing quite as satisfying as suggesting to Your Lovely Wife that maybe we should not honour a store with our patronage after some pretty spectacularly poor customer service and having her look at you with a wicked gleam in her eye and hiss, “YESSSSS!” and then watch her plunk her intended purchases directly on the counter in front of the clerk who had finally decided to grace us with her attention and then walk away with an earth-shattering “HMPH!”

The icing on the cake was hearing My Lovely Wife — as we navigated our way out of the mall — chanting to herself, over and over again, “Urge to kill… rising… urge to kill… RISING…”

She’s pretty awesome.