The Platter is Not a Metaphor

“What is this?” he said, leaning backward dangerously as he balanced on the counter.

“You’re going to fall, and when you do I’m going to laugh, and then probably have to call 911,” she replied, ignoring his question.

He placed one hand on the cabinet door and steadied himself. “When did we get this and what is it for?”

She spared a glance for the large misshapen platter he was brandishing. “We’ve had it forever. I don’t know; I think your aunt gave it to us.”

“Yeah but what is it.”

She rolled her eyes. “Isn’t it obvious? It’s one of those stupid egg plate things, like people use at Easter. Your mom has one. It looks like a bunny.”

“For deviled eggs?” he asked.

She nodded, warming her hands on her coffee cup.

“How come we never use it?”

“Why would we?” she asked.

“I like deviled eggs,” he informed her.

“So wait until Easter and compliment your mom on her recipe. Maybe she’ll send some home with you.”

“Or,” he said, sounding as though he had just stumbled upon an important scientific discovery: “You could make some.”

She stared at him, the look on her face informing him that his proposal was not going to be approved.

“What?” he said. “It can’t be that hard. You just… I dunno, boil eggs? And then mix the yellow part with other stuff? Do we have any paprika?”

“What are you even doing up there, anyway?” she asked, possibly hoping to distract him with a different subject. “If you’re looking for the Oreos you hid up there three months ago, I ate them.” She turned to walk out of the room. “I ate them like two days after you hid them.”

He made a sound that properly expressed his outrage, but she was either too far away to hear or was ignoring him. “You can make it up to me by making deviled eggs!” he called.

“Do it yourself!” she called back.

He carefully climbed down from the counter, bringing the deviled egg platter with him and muttering mutinously. “I can’t believe you ate my Oreos.”

Mist in the Morning

My husband drives the same drive every day, back and forth to work: once in the morning, and once in the evening. It’s a lovely drive, but he doesn’t see it anymore. To him, it’s just the commute. Yeah, there are lovely rolling hills and beautiful river views, but he’s become immune to their breathtakingness.

I think we all get that way, sometimes.

This morning I rode along with my husband to work. We discussed normal, everyday things: future plans, what we were planning to give our children for Christmas. Except for when I interrupted everything with remarks about how gorgeous the scenery was. Mist was clinging to the ground, refusing to be chased away by the light of the rising sun. At one point we went down a hill and under a cloud lying low in the valley of a field. It was awesome. “Is it always like this?” I asked my husband as we pushed through a bank of cloud that obliterated the trees, clouds, and river. He shrugged. “Sometimes... A lot of the time, I guess.”

I wondered how often that sort of thing happens to me. Not that I’m often oblivious to lovely scenery, but it made me think about how often I might be failing to recognize and appreciate wonderful things in my life. I’m not the type of person who overexaggerates every disappointing moment that I experience, but I do have those times when I feel like stomping off to shout, “EVERYTHING IS THE WORST.”

But someone else “riding along” with me might be able to more easily point out the wonderful things in my life: my adorable children, my supportive parents, my awesome brothers (and their families), and my hilarious, hardworking husband. When I’m annoyed or stressed or frustrated, it’s easy for me to miss noticing that not every moment, not everything in my life is annoying or stress-inducing or frustrating. When I feel that way, I need to stop, look around, and notice the wonderful things that are always there, things that I might be too distracted or too used to having that I don’t actually see them.

My life will always have its hills and valleys, its good times and bad. But I hope that I never forget the beautiful things about it: the family I have been blessed with, friends who love me, and breathtaking views of mist in the morning.

Writing About Writing

It’s very easy for me, especially on the days that I can’t immediately think of something to write about, to let my attention wander on the internet. Sometimes it’s a good thing, because I will occasionally get inspired by a news article, or an argument about something random, or by the contents of a webcomic. Other times I will spend several hours reading the webcomic’s archives and floating in a state of non-working bliss.

Usually it’s the guilty thought of “I HAVEN’T WRITTEN ANYTHING TODAY” that pulls me back to doing what I actually should be doing, but occasionally I come across things like this.

Image property of The Oatmeal.

Earlier today I thought several witty things and amused myself, and found myself thinking, “if only I could draw, I wouldn’t have to write everything down; it would be less work.” Then I read this comic and realized that when you can draw, not only do you have to do the drawing part, but you also have to do the writing part. So really, not being able to draw is a good thing (if I’m looking at the less/more work scale).

Sometimes the only thing you can do when you’re in a state of “I’ve got nothin’” is to write about writing. You might think that “writing about writing” is the same thing as “writing about nothing,” but it’s surprising how stepping back to take a look at what you do will produce a wonderful piece. This comic, like most by The Oatmeal, is endearingly rude and half full of swears, but makes amazing and inspiring points.

As a writer, I get to make my own schedule. For me, this means that once I write something sufficiently amusing, I can do whatever I want for the rest of the day. Play video games, ignore housework, nap, whatever. Once I click that ‘publish’ button, my day is my own.

Every job has its faults, and even though this is my dream job, I still feel like complaining about it sometimes… just not to my wonderful husband who actually has real reasons to complain about his job. “I couldn’t think of anything to write” is such a lame thing to whine about in the face of his actual hardships that I’d rather write something I wasn’t happy with than admit that aloud to him. My husband is awesome.

I love the freedom of being able to write whatever I want. I remember being in school and chafing at ridiculous assignments that I had no interesting creative ideas for, and then feeling like I was set free to romp in a field whenever the assignment happened to be “write whatever you want.” Today it seems like it’s almost opposite. A day full of hours of promise, glistening with the freedom of writing whatever I want seems like oppression, but an interesting phrase, a few words, or an inspiring image can give me the structure I need to creatively produce something amazing.

Sometimes I wish there was an idea generator for the days I when can’t think of anything, a machine without feelings capable of being hurt that I could just push a button as many times as I needed to find something that inspired me. It would be better than playing the writing equivalent of “what do you want for dinner” with my friends. “What should I write about?” “Um, how about…?” “No, that sounds boring.” I suspect that when I inflict that sort of thing on myself and others that deep down I really just want to tell someone else that “your ideas are bad and you should feel bad.” Maybe it somehow makes me feel better? After all, when that situation comes up, I can’t think of anything good, so I suppose it comforts me to know that no one else can either.

An inspiration isn’t something you can control. When I get inspired (usually by a writing prompt of some kind), I can’t turn it off or walk away from it. If I sleep on an idea (or a story), it’s really hard to get that inspiration back. Several times I have ended up working late into the night on something because I knew that if I stopped, I would never be able to come back to it. “What? You want dinner? Well, I started thawing some chicken a couple of hours ago and the recipe I was going to use is sitting on the kitchen counter. Good luck with that; hope the kids like it.”

Cultivating seeds of ideas is sometimes difficult for me. Something funny will happen, or I’ll start pondering a situation and see the interesting or amusing things about it. The smart thing to do, you’d think, would be to write these ideas down somewhere so that later I can come back and use them when I needed to. And I’ve got one of those ‘somewhere’s, a google doc named “stuff to blog about” or some such. But I’ve found that sometimes, writing down that idea before it’s ready can kill it (or make me lose interest in it), just like planting a seedling in the ground ground outside too early. If it’s really a great idea, it will tumble around in my brain for long enough that eventually it will make its way out.

“Make a new friend,” The Oatmeal encourages near the end. “Learn to chainsaw juggle. Read a book. Go hang gliding in your underpants. If you have done all these things and you still don’t have anything to write about, then you shouldn’t be a writer. ...if you don’t have anything to say, then you shouldn’t be talking. And if you don’t have anything to write about, don’t write.”

It’s not like I don’t have things to write about. It’s just one of those moods you get in sometimes, like when you’re eleven and sitting in the middle of your room, surrounded by toys, and whining at your mom: “I’m bored.” I’ve got stuff to write about. I just started reading that cool Rothfuss series (Name of the Wind); there’s a rad spider who’s been living on our front porch for a week or so (I’ve been thinking about ways to start charging him rent, but I’m not sure how I’d monetize slightly digested insect carcasses); and my kids constantly pretend to be dinosaurs. There’s a wealth of stuff going on around here.

It’s hard to get rid of that mood, when you feel uninspired and that there’s nothing interesting enough going on in your life to share with your readers. So when in doubt, write about writing. You may discover that you’ve got quite a bit to write about after all.

Traffic Light Speculation

I’m pretty good at spinning fiction on the fly. I’m not bragging about being an amazing liar, but rather saying that I enjoy coming up with plausible reasons for the behavior of others, such as: “Maybe she wore those six inch banana yellow heels because she needed the height so that her dress wouldn’t drag on the floor and figured that its length would cover them up.” My husband is hardly ever curious enough about the thought processes of others to formulate theories, and so I was surprised last week on our way home from our Labor Day vacation when he explained why another motorist ran a red light.

The intersection at 17th and O Street is not the place to blast through a very very red light. 17th isn’t as busy as O, but it’s got a fair amount of traffic. That’s why I was baffled when a guy in a red car just nonchalantly zipped through the intersection down O Street. “What’s his problem?” I asked rhetorically, as I watched the several other cars that had been going down 17th Street carefully avoid him.

“He’s probably color blind,” my husband explained immediately. “The lights in this city are horizontal, and he’s probably from out of town.”

I stared at him. “What?”

“If he’s color blind and from out of town, there’s no way for him to know whether the light is green or red. This town should have vertical traffic lights.”

I frowned and googled it.

Traffic light perception (from inovasolutions.com)

Lincoln does have a few intersections with vertical traffic lights (red on the top, yellow in the middle, green on the bottom), but many of them are horizontal. In some of the newer ones, the green lights are a little bluer, which helps those who are color blind differentiate more easily, but city workers aren’t running around replacing all the green lights with blue/green ones. Apparently changing every traffic light in the city to make them safer for around ten percent of the population would be expensive.

Halifax horizontal traffic light
(by Sprocket, via wikipedia)

Other cities primarily use vertical traffic lights. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, the lights on a horizontal traffic light are different shapes. The red is a square, the yellow a diamond, and the green a circle. In countries where we drive on the right side of the road, horizontal traffic lights go from left to right: red on the left, yellow in the middle, green on the right. Red and green are swapped where they drive on the left side of the road. So if that guy ran the red light on O Street because he was color blind and thought it was green, he was from way, way out of town.

Or, maybe he was a professional low-speed daredevil who specialized in stunts of this nature, and this one was just the newest in a series of disregarded red lights to get in the Guinness Book of World Records for Most Red Lights Run Without Causing An Accident.

Mawwiage

I saw this on facebook ages ago, but it turns out
that it comes from a blog called CraftSnark.

My husband has put up with eight years of messy house and forgotten dinner preparations, but I guess he still likes me anyway. I love you, Husband!

p.s. I did laundry today! Happy Anniversary!

Adventures in Ice Cream: Reading the Fine Print

If I allow my husband to go to the grocery store alone without a list of four things that he absolutely must come home with, one of the things he brings back is ice cream. But he’s not selfish about it; there’s always one for him and one for me.

Going out for ice cream (to Coldstone or Dairy Queen) means chocolate with cherries for him and vanilla with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for me. Bringing it home from the grocery store, for him, means cherry ice cream with chunks of chocolate in it (the closest he can find to his favorite), which he then immediately smothers in more chocolate syrup. But for me, it’s a little trickier.

In the past, Breyer’s has teamed up with Reese’s to make actual Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup ice cream. But they’ve never been able to get it exactly right (in my opinion, anyway). They’ve tried chocolate ice cream with ribbons of peanut butter sprinkled with chunks of peanut butter cups. They’ve tried peanut butter ice cream (I mean, I like peanut butter, but peanut butter ice cream? Yuck) with ribbons of fudge, sprinkled with chunks of peanut butter cups. The only one who gets it right is Denali’s Original Moose Tracks. Denali (which isn’t located anywhere near Alaska but is instead headquartered in a small town just south of Grand Rapids, Michigan) teams up with various ice cream brands to get their product out to the world, so depending on your location, it could be Kemp’s, Meadow Gold, Dean’s, or any other ice cream maker you can think of. (But luckily there’s a handy locator on their website.)

Denali’s Original Moose Tracks ice cream is vanilla (As God Intended) with ripples of Moose Tracks fudge, with little peanut butter cups sprinkled through it. Sure, they’re not brand name Reese’s, but they’re just as good. And no one is trying to make me eat peanut butter ice cream.

I’m not sure if Blue Bunny was ever one of those privileged brands that were honored to sell Denali Original Moose Tracks and then had a falling out, or if they just got jealous of Denali’s success and decided to copycat.

In what I can only imagine was a super sneaky meeting involving all the creative bigwigs, Blue Bunny decided to call their version "Bunny Tracks." And none would be the wiser. It is also vanilla ice cream with ripples of fudge, but you have to be careful when buying. The 1.75 quart paper carton contains the above in addition to little bunny-shaped peanut butter cups. The 1.75 quart plastic tub, however, will try to foist a caramel ripple off on you alongside the fudge, and some kind of cheap chocolate covered peanuts. Not a single peanut butter cup to be found.

Now, don't get me wrong, caramel and chocolate covered peanuts are all well and good in their own particular... idiom, but their place is certainly not in my ice cream. And I think it's a pretty shabby trick boxing two completely different ice cream flavors in exactly the same wrapping but in slightly different shaped containers. But I guess you can’t expect much from a company that is copying coincidentally making a very similar product to that of Denali’s Original Moose Tracks.

So if you ever want to try my favorite kind of delicious ice cream, make sure your husband grabs whatever brand is partnering with Denali in your area. Or give him strict instructions to read the fine print on the Blue Bunny box. Or just send him to the grocery store alone enough times that he knows what to come home with.

That’s what I do.

Writing Prompt: Relationship Advice

One paragraph? Yeah right!
Writing Prompt #196

My relationship advice is to examine yourself very thoroughly before you enter a relationship to determine if you actually want to be in one.

If you’re the kind of person who breaks up with a significant other right before Spring Break because you know you’d cheat if you didn’t, you should not be in a serious relationship. If you’re the kind of person who breaks up two weeks before Christmas because you and your significant other can’t agree on your plans or are having endless arguments about presents, you should not be in a serious relationship.

Think carefully before you pull that April Fool’s Day stunt. No matter how hilarious it is, if your significant other is not going to find it funny, don’t do it. If you decide to go ahead and pull that prank, you’re a jerk, and jerks should not be in a serious relationship.

The summer months are long, and long distance relationships are hard. If you just want that significant other during the school year, maybe you should just date casually instead of entering into that serious relationship.

Don’t put too much pressure on yourself and your significant other around Valentine’s Day. If you’re going to be together for a long time, eventually that “special holiday” will end up being just like any other day. A card, flowers, or an extra “I love you” will do. If you cannot do without an insanely huge demonstration of love (yours or your significant other’s), you may want to examine why that is, and until then, refrain from entering into that serious relationship.

Mondays suck. If you can’t get through a bad day without taking it out on your significant other (and making them your ex significant other), then you should not be in a serious relationship.

My final relationship advice is to keep your relationship status far, far, far away from facebook. If there is some reason that you need the validation of keeping your entire social media circle appraised of every minute detail of your relationship, you may want to examine that need, and until then, refrain from entering into a serious relationship. Your significant other deserves the same kind of discretion regarding intimate relationship details that you would expect them to extend to you.

My relationship advice is to examine yourself very thoroughly before you enter a relationship to determine if you actually want to be in one. A serious relationship takes lots of hard work and commitment. If you just want a significant other so that you can change your relationship status on facebook, then you’re probably not ready for a serious relationship.

Yo

I’m not a huge fan of yogurt. I’ll eat it frozen (Ben & Jerry’s “Liz Lemon” is particularly good), but slurping it down for a snack is not my favorite thing. My daughters love it, and my husband buys it so he has something quick to grab in the morning on the way out the door. But there’s a strange phenomenon in our fridge with the yogurt: certain types seem to be tossed aside in favor of others.

“I don’t understand why he does this,” I told my mother over the phone as I grabbed a cast off flavor to favor my daughters with. “I know it’s probably just because he wants to try the different flavors, but he wants to eat the ones he likes first, but it just seems like he’s buying them all and then only eating the ones he knows are good.”

“Your father does that!” my mother replied. “I have to buy him peach yogurt. Only peach! And he just eats peach yogurt, all the time. I would think that the point of having different flavors is to try all of them; I’d want to.”

“He just knows what he likes,” I said. “It’s fun to try different things, but if you know you like something…” I fished around for a metaphor close to her heart. “It’s not like you make your steak different every time. You’re not like ‘ooh, I’ll cook this well done and see how that is.’”

“Hm, that’s true,” my mother admitted. She is a staunch defender of the rare-steak-or-no-steak agenda.

“if you’re not sure you’ll like it, it’s like you’re wasting your time.” I said. “If it’s gross, then you’re sitting there, wishing you’d eaten the thing you knew you liked.” My daughters chomped down on their Key Lime yogurt. “I win,” I concluded.

“Well, as long as it’s getting eaten,” my mother conceded defeat.

“As long as they like it,” I added. “And as long as I don’t have to eat it.”

Evaporated

Every year, without fail, every coffee establishment ushers in “pumpkin spice” season as soon after “back-to-school” as possible. This doesn’t really make any difference to my family; I don’t drink coffee, and my husband prefers mochas. But the “pumpkin” portion of the season interests us greatly.

My husband loves pumpkin pie. I like it too, but it’s not the same kind of nostalgic “every holiday season since I was a kid” love. Sure, there was pumpkin pie around when I was little, but who wants pumpkin pie when my grandma’s homemade cherry pie was around? (The answer is: hardly anyone.)

As soon as it’s pumpkin pie season, I like to make sure my husband has one. It’s one of the things that I don’t mind him consuming as quickly as possible (the eggnog is another story).

I have a really great recipe that has the normal pumpkin pie spices, plus some Chinese Five Spice, no sugar (just sweetened condensed milk instead), and a TON of eggs. And my sister-in-law told me her pie crust secret, so now I am unstoppable. It’s awesome.

Grocery aisles are tricksy. The sweetened condensed milk is right next to the evaporated milk. And they’re packaged exactly the same way, only one says “sweetened condensed” on it and the other says “evaporated.” When we bought our first round of pumpkin pie ingredients for the year, we were so excited. I left the cans out on the counter for several days to build the anticipation. I didn’t realize the can said “evaporated milk” until I had already started dumping it into the pie filling.

I immediately called my mother (because who looks something up in a book or on the internet when you can get someone with experience in baking do it for you?). She found a recipe that used evaporated milk, and got the sugar measurement for me. I mixed everything together and put it in the oven, whining all the while. My husband had a piece that evening, and said it was good. I reasoned that this was because it was the first pie he’d had in close to a year, so the happiness of having the pie outweighed the possibly-not-so-great taste. He shrugged and cleaned his plate.

Another trip to the grocery store took us past an end cap that was stocked with everything to fulfill your pumpkin pie needs. I grabbed a can and made sure it said “Sweetened condensed” on it before putting it back and grabbing another can of pumpkin. Then I grabbed two cans of the milk, thinking I could make two more pies sometime this season with the stuff I had at home, and that maybe someday I’d use that other can of evaporated milk I’d bought for something else… even though I don’t really know what one uses evaporated milk for.

We returned home and I put away the groceries, folding up the plastic bags and putting them neatly away to be used in future craft projects. I put away the vegetable oil, the tea, and the whipped cream we’d bought to go with the pumpkin pie. Then I toted the cans back to the pantry and put the new can of pumpkin next to the old one, and placed the sweetened condensed milk on top of each of the cans of pumpkin… and then looked harder. The cans in my pantry both said “evaporated milk.”

I’ll get you, sneaky grocery stores… if it’s the last thing I doooo!

Thursday in History: Snuggles

“I have come from 1983 to snuggle you!” he declared, pouncing into my relaxing evening.

“Get away from me,” I laughed, trying to push him away as he cuddled me.

“No! The fate of the world rests on snuggles!”

“‘Come from 1983?’” I echoed, still half amused, half annoyed. “Don’t make it sound like you used some kind of time travel device; you got here from 1983 just like me: seconds to minutes, minutes to hours, hours to days,...” I continued, but my logic was drowned by hugs and laughter.

On this day in history in 1983, my husband was born. Apparently, it was so that he could snuggle me.

Happy birthday, Snugglehusband.

Determinedly Observant

I am determinedly observant.

It is a trait that has come in handy in any job I have had. As a waitress, I got good at eavesdropping and picking up on visual cues. You’d be surprised how often a well timed salsa refill has kept a table from arguing with one another while simultaneously ensuring me a good tip. Or when listening to the woes of whiny, hungry child has saved the day when I swoop in with lunch, “and when you’re done, if your mom says it’s okay, I’ll get you some ice cream, how does that sound?”

I can usually tell my husband or my daughters the exact location of the thing they’re looking for. It’s not a super power bestowed on all moms, it’s simply because I happened to see him toss his wallet on the bed twenty minutes before he straightened the sheets, or that I was annoyed when she kicked off her shoes before she took a nap instead of putting them where they belonged, or watched the beloved bunny get tossed aside in excitement when her Daddy walked in the door.

Sometimes I forget that others haven’t honed their “attention to little details” skills like I have. I’ll comment to my husband on something I saw while driving down the street: “Did you see [outrageous thing]?! How crazy!” And he’ll say, “Huh? What are you talking about?”  (This is one of the wonderful differences between my husband and I. During any silent moment, he is thinking about how to ensure a brighter future for himself, his family, his work, and the universe at large, whlie I am paying attention to “what is that woman wearing?!” My husband is awesome and so am I, just in very different ways.)

Where is it
(this screencap is from Gardens of Time, which I have conquered.)

Occasionally, I torture myself by testing my observation skills. I play an online game of some kind, which either tests my memory or insists I find all objects in a certain scene.

And those games cheat.

It’s like they deliberately leave ONE thing out so that I can’t find it! I can’t decide if it’s meant to humble my bragging ways or to show me that I’m not that observant after all. Part of me thinks, “oh, it’s just a game, just go do something else and forget about it.” But another part of me is yelling, “HOW DARE YOU!! I will find this final chess piece if it’s the last thing I do.”

And I will. If it’s the last thing I do.

Sorry Abut the Mess

by Randall Munroe, xkcd.com

My house is kind of a mess.

It’s not disgusting or anything, but it’s in a state of perpetual organized chaos which I occasionally vow to put right, attack, and then stop halfway through, leaving it in a different state of perpetual organized chaos which we then have to get used to again.

My husband likes to tease me about it, and sent me this recent xkcd comic. The alt-text reads, “‘Sorry, I left out my glass of water from last night.’ ‘OH GOD I APPARENTLY LIVE IN A GARBAGE PIT.’” If it were not for my constant vigilance, our glassware would be kept by my husband’s side of the bed, containing varying levels of unconsumed water.

I can live with my organized chaos. I know where everything is. That doesn’t mean I don’t try to keep the mess from overwhelming me or apologize to visitors for the mess that I know is there just because I ignore on a regular basis. 

Really, what I’m saying when I welcome people into my home with, “sorry it’s such a disaster in here,” is “don’t look over at the pile of random stuff on the bookshelf or the papers spread loosely across the desk. I forget to make it look nice on a daily basis, so I hope you will be so good as to forget it’s there as well.”

OCTOBIRTHDAY

It’s October. And you know what that means.

OCTOBIRTHDAY

I once asked my friend Matt what his favorite month was. Without stopping to consider, he answered, “October.”

“And why is that?” I followed up sneakily, confident I knew how he would answer.

Make your own basketball for your the Octobirthday/NBA fan
in your life using the recipe for this cake on tasteofhome.com

“Basketball season starts!” he shouted excitedly.

Dumbfounded, I pointed out, “Our birthdays are in October.”

“Eh, who cares,” he answered, “Basketball!”

This conversation occurred when we were 10 or 11 years old, so perhaps this showed not his enthusiasm for sports but his wisdom at such a young age, knowing that we might not always be excited about being another year older. But who knows, maybe today he’s jumping around about counting down the days until the first NBA game of the season instead of remembering that he’s turning 30 (Happy Birthday, Matt!).

October has always been a favorite month for me. Since my Grandma’s birthday is about a week before mine, we’ve always had a family birthday party, where I could be excited that it was my birthday, and the rest of my family could celebrate my Grandma’s birthday while she said it was a party for me. The birthdays of two cousins got added to the Octoparty when I was in junior high, and then when I got married in 2006, I had to head to the calendar to write down my husband’s and mother-in-law’s birthdays in October, too.

October is a GREAT month to be born in, so if your birthday is this month too, here is a birthday high five for you. Happy Octobirthday.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, STELLA!!!

EMAIL FAMOUS

This morning I sat down at my computer to do the usual things: check facebook to make sure no one I love in Colorado has floated away (click here to read a Denver Post article on where and how you can help), maybe do some writing, and to check my email.

These are three windows I always have up in my browser: facebook, gmail, & Google Drive. Google Drive has no need for notifications, but if someone “likes” a status on my facebook wall or sends me a message, a little number appears on the tab to let me know how many pressing pieces of information are waiting for me there. And gmail always lets me know how many unopened emails are sitting quietly, hoping I’ll read them soon.

The problem is that right now my husband and I are sharing our only laptop and existing off of internet on our smart phones when the other one is using the computer. We both get email on our phones, so my gmail account is pretty much always the one that’s signed in on the laptop, since I do my work on it. It’s a big day for me when I have more than seven emails to read; I’m not signed up for a gajilliondy-five mailing lists, and my spam folder is in fine working order.

So I did a double take when I glanced at the top of my computer screen today, where I saw that I had over a thousand emails.

It only took me a second to realize that it was probably that my husband had left his email account signed in, but that “HOW HAVE I SUDDENLY BECOME FAMOUS” second was one I can enjoy looking back at to laugh.

Maybe someday I’ll have trouble keeping on top of my email, but now I think I’ll enjoy being able to read and respond to every one. And I’ll enjoy still being surprised at how many emails my husband doesn’t read.