home alone

I was just about to write about how much I am loving sitting in my living room with the door open, listening to the croaking frogs and chirping crickets, feeling a gentle nighttime breeze. But then I saw a 1-inch - I kid you not - black ant crawling along the couch toward my toes and, well, the magic's gone. Why does nature have to be so ... alive and crawly and unexpectedly large?

Anyway, I lured the ant onto my journal and was going to gently shake it out the door but it was moving so fast across the cover that I just threw the whole journal outside and then retrieved it when things looked safe.

It's probably just as well. The house is more boring with the door closed now, and Abe's out of town, so I'll probably just go to bed. I stayed up way too late last night reading Brandon Sanderson's Alloy of Law. An early bedtime would be good.

Every time Abe goes out of town, I get excited at the prospect of going to bed early. Wow, is that really as lame as it sounds? (Yes. Yes, it is.) One of the hard things about marriage is coordinating bedtime. It's much better to go to bed at the same time as your spouse because you can talk and cuddle your way to sleep (otherwise I either start counting numbers or try re-writing movie scripts in my head, both of which are surprisingly not very interesting). Plus, if your spouse goes to bed later than you, then he (I mean, he or she) may wake you up when he (or she) opens the door, gets a toothbrush, goes to the bathroom, or gets in bed. Sometimes this causes unpleasant feelings because you wake gasping, bolt upright in alarm, and then mutter something caustic and utterly unintelligible.

Anyway. What really happens when Abe goes out of town is that I stay up even later because the house is too quiet. And I've got an entire evening to myself so I feel the need to make good use of it. And it's more complicated to get to the bedroom because it's dark and I'm alone. So I have to turn on all the lights between where I am and the bed, and then go back and successively turn each of them off, following my little trail of light and goodness to my covers.

But I think I'm ready for bed now, not only because of my ruined nature soundtrack but because I'm done drinking a cup of cocoa that doesn't taste very good. The packet had been sitting in our cupboard for a while and had a "best by" date of November 17, 2011.

Good night.