1) In every relationship, no matter how much you might like or love someone, no matter how much regard you might have for that person, there is always something that you could do without. Something baffling, irritating and getting-you-to-the-end-of-your-roping. I have no idea what it is about me that does this to my husband because he doesn't talk of such things. He's a burier - covering the negative with so much emotional and intellecutal flotsam and jetsam that whatever it might be will likely never see the light of day.

I, on the other hand, am an obsessor and will give the irritant so much mental bandwidth that it builds and builds, swelling like a blowing-up balloon until POP! it finally bursts and covers everyone nearby with a fine coat of spit.

And so it is now with our clocks. We have Living Room Standard Time, two varieties of Kitchen Standard Time, Laptop Central Time (not to be confused with Desktop Central Time), Bedroom Standard Time and Basement Standard Time. This bothers me To. No. End. I have a deep need to know what time it is exactly. I suppose I'm very American in this regard, but there you are. My husband has an equally great need to know approximately, within three or four hours or so, what time it might be. Clearly this is not a deal breaker between us, as we have been together for almost 14 years now but I am reaching one of my bienniel outbursts on the subject. These are never pretty and my insistence on temporal consistency is not nearly as endearing to my husband as my tendency to drop a bit of dinner down the front of my shirt every night. (Aside: my dearest would like me to point out that part of the problem is that two of the computers in question have their own minds on the subject and resist attempts to reset them to something resembling accuracy. He is right, but that doesn't explain the remainder of the problem, now does it?)

2) The above picture notwithstanding, today (and many days before this) is a gray, cool, rainy, miserable mess. Again. Still. Always. I seem to spend a lot of time complaining about the weather (and, alas, never doing anything about it) so today I decided to try something new, at least for what is ostensibly mid-spring. We are having a pajama day, refusing to change into day clothes and casting about for a few remaining logs leftover from winter with which to have a fire. I am rereading Amanda Hesser's Cooking For Mr. Latte. Although I do not know Ms. Hesser, reading her book is comforting to me because it reminds me of cooking and eating for friends and, especially, the cooking I did for my husband when he was just a guy I was seeing. I haven't found any friends here in Charlottesville who like to shop, cook or eat the way I do. A fun outing for me is to walk around the farmer's market deciding what to buy and eat later that day. I like to buy a vegetable I've never seen before and figure something to do with it, or browse around a wine shop debating for an hour what bottles we should buy to go with dinner. So that's a part of my life that I miss, but reading this book kind of brings it back for me, or rather reminds me of what it's like to be with people who think about food and ingredients and have fun with it all. It's a nice book for a rainy and kind of lonely day.

3) It feels like a baking day to me. I have a pound of butter softening but do not yet know what I'll make. Maybe some cookies or a cake. Maybe cookies and a cake. I've been feeling brioche-y lately but it might be too late in the day to start something like that.

4) Warning: I am about to type what has to be the most obnoxious statement in the English language. Ready? The Boy Wonder has been accepted into our first choice kindergarten. Oh, for the love of God. Not sure if we're going to take them up on it yet, because we have a lot of issues surrounding buying-in to this whole business. Still, I'm a little proud (o.k., a lot) that they recognized his Ability to Engage in Dramatic Play and Creative Expression to be as wonderful as I know it is.