more on my Laura

Oh, that's so unfair. She can't retaliate. Not to the posting -- to its title. Since T'ai was a toddler, we've had this thing going, where if you catch someone saying "more on" in any context at all, you can bust them. Your response is feigned offense, "Hey, what'd you call me?" or something like that. It's terribly inappropriate to highlight "moron," particularly to one's children, and I realize that. If it helps at all, I feel sheepish about it. But I taught it to them anyway. The kids could hear it by the age of 4. "More on this story, after the break," Dan Rather would say, and one of the kids would pull a thumb out of the mouth to say, "Heyyyyy, what he caw me?" The kids still walk grammatically allll the way around an idea in order to avoid saying those two words. By now it's mostly an inside joke, something that makes you catch each other's eye when someone outside the family asks, say, for the gravy and announces that they're just going to "put a little bit more on."

This is the first year Laura volunteered, by virtue of my convalescence, to put up the holiday lights in the windows. We made it through the first year of living on quaint yet classy Main Street, Farmington without "candles" in the windows, but several neighbors dropped pointed hints about it: "Ah," they'd say, "doesn't Main Street look lovely with candles in ALL the windows of ALL the houses?" So, we got the hint, and bought a dozen electrical candles that are supposed to go on for 8 hours and then off again for 16. That might in fact be what they do, but time is relative, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the factory where these candles are made. Our house as often as not has only a few random candles on in the windows during the holiday season, some coming on at dawn, some going off at noon. No one else on Main Street has this problem. For me the lights have been an annual annoyance; each year I have taped them down, plugged them in (extension cords needed for over half of them -- it's an old house with odd outlet placement), and then I spend the next several days unplugging them and replugging them all at dusk in a futile attempt to get them all on the same cycle. It has never worked, but I wanted Laura to have her Main Street candles.

This year she announced that she would take care of the window candles -- ooookay, I thought, feeling like she (my husband, Laura; see previous post so named) had just announced that "this time I'm going to hem your pants, lovie!" She broke two lightbulbs in the process. She needed 5 extension cords, and wanted to move away from Main Street, Farmington right then and there. Laura's solution: "Let's have one candle in the center window from now on. I think it will look so nice and simple that way." As I write this, she is taking them all down but one, and muttering, "what a fiasco."

For future reference: some male and female husbands can and do hem pants, I know. That's not how we work things in our marriage. Laura generally does gross motor tasks, and I do fine motor. She transplants the hosta. I weed it. She paints large areas of wall; I do the trim. She stacks the wood; I gather kindling. She drags in the tree; I decorate it. She feeds the dog; I pull off his ticks. This division of labor is generally so clear that all Laura has to do is shout (usually in frustration) "Fine motor!" and I come running.

We took a 3-mile walk today, which I had promised myself I'd do. I'm glad I did, but now I am really tired. The fluid on my left side is back to where it was 3 days ago, and this is discouraging. I'm drinking lots of tea and water, and it seems to be going straight into that pouch of fluid. More on this later.