This morning I propped myself up in bed and turned on the television for a few relaxing moments of watching the “Today” show before having to succumb to the reality of the day and the fact that I had to go to work. J was in the shower and Mina and I were cuddled up, still in the realms of last night’s sleep, when I sneezed an incredibly forceful sneeze. It’s that time of year in North Carolina when the pollen is falling and creates unnatural-looking neon yellow patterns on cars and sidewalks. Everyone is congested, everyone talks about the pollen as though nothing else in the world, no news, no tragedies, no natural disasters, but this pollen exists. Well, I, like everyone else, am susceptible to this horrific rite of spring and so the sneezing is no surprise. But this sneeze…I felt certain something had come out. You know, something of the body had been emitted from my nostrils. So I checked around, grimacing, ready to find some disgusting relic of my nasal passages. I didn’t find a thing. Nothing. Nothing on the bedspread or pillow or on my body. I decided I just might have been mistaken about what had seemed to be a rather fruitful sneeze. J exited the shower a few minutes later and came to join Mina and I in our early morning love nest. He was watching Katie and Matt rhapsodize about the Michael Jackson child molestation case for only a few moments before he arose, sharply, from the bed, and said, “Something’s on my arm,” and ran into the bathroom. I hid right down under the covers, immediately aware of the atrocity that had taken place. “I think it’s snot!” he shouted, making all the appropriate faces. I hid deeper, under the covers, torn between pretending to be just as befuddled as he, or tell the God awful truth. I decided to come clean. “The snot? Yeah, I think I know where that came from…”

This morning I decided to take action and make us some coffee rather than my normal ritual which is to ask J to make it, thus stroking his ego by telling him that he makes it so much better than I do. Which is true. And also a good way to get someone to make coffee for you.

This morning I really didn’t do much better than that, though, because as I stood there in my bathrobe I asked J, just one more time, to please show me how he does such a good job of getting it strong enough, but not too strong, my problem when it comes to undertaking this seemingly simple process.

He got all business-like. And cocky.

“We’ve been over this,” he said, but not annoyed - more like, proud, more like “Oh-I’ll-show-you-you-unworthy-but-grateful-bottom-dweller. I’ll show you my ultimate skills, which you’ll never attain, by the way.”

First he took the spoon I was holding right out of my hand.

“Not this one.” He got another from the drawer. “This one.”

He scooped an enormous amount of freshly-ground Verona blend from Starbucks into the spoon.

“That,” he explained. “is too much.”

Shook a lot back into the tupperware. “That? Too little.”

“Just feel it out,” he continued, and with that scooped what I now know is the perfect scoop size, Oh knowledgeable mentor!

After the required number of scoops were placed into the filter, he turned on the water.

“Cold water! Cold.”

Since he was staring me down I felt the need to reply. “I never use hot,” I offered. Reasoning wasn’t provided, just the hardcore, definitive process. I was a fortunate spectator to watching God-given talent, THE talent, execute that process.

He showed me his scientific method for measuring the right amount of water, which surprisingly, involved some carefully-placed deviations from the regimen.

“See, about a cup. That’s about right. Even if you’re off the mark a little. It’ll be fine.”

After pouring it all in, he shut the lid with a final snap of the wrist. Click.

“Now you plug it in and just hit this button.”

“Yeah, I know how to do that part.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

Seriously, is this really him writing a blog?! I’m going to post a comment every day UNTIL YOU NOTICE ME, DAVID!

http://lionsgatedirectors.com/duchovny/index_flash.html

I put Cecilia in the car this morning to her great delight, and drove off to the inevitable yearly check up, which loosely translates into yearly money-making scheme for the vet, in layman’s terms.

Cecilia loves the vet, mostly because it means people touch her and give her treats. She sits, she stays, she lays on her back exposing her tummy and asking for rubs with that face…that face…all things she fails to do when we have guests over at home. When people come over, she jumps and licks and basically loses control out of sheer joy. It’s as though she gets it that these other humans in the office setting are professionals, and worthy of her obedience.

So I’m sitting there adoring my perfect dog as she is adored, in turn, by the assistants and veterinarian who attend to her. “She’s so good! Good girl! Good GIRL CECILIA!” I’m over-abundant in my praise, but she deserves it after wagging her tail while they jab her with a needle and draw her blood, while they do the “recommended” feces check, ramming a plastic stick up her ass, while they clip her nails, a service they offered and in a heartbeat I’d said yes. It was a proud morning.

When it was all over and I approached the check-in desk and they said “your total will be $230″ in all seriousness, only then did I look down at the dog, sitting ever so nicely, waiting, head cocked, and wonder how “good” she really was.

When I get home, she better have some dinner waiting for me, damnit.

I was thinking this morning that it might be funny to try and fool the two or so people who regularly read this by saying something about the wedding being off or J having taken another lover, but where’s the fun in that, huh? “The wedding’s OFF!” Not funny. It’s hard to really get people on April Fool’s day in a way that is actually fun for all persons involved.

My freshman year, Erin and I posted up signs on the girl’s bathroom on our floor, stating we’d dropped our sea monkeys in the shower. We had sea monkeys, so the trick was a good one. But if you really think about it, who cares? Sea monkeys never live beyond the stage of being the size of tiny pinpricks anyway, right? Plus, wouldn’t they have just been flushed down the drain by the shower? The great thing was - people noticed, and didn’t like it. Girls were worried about showering with sea monkeys. That was a good joke. The fact that those same sea monkeys died just after or right before the joke - I can’t remember - at the hand of some evildoers watching them for us for the weekend (who gets a babysitter for sea monkeys?) who then tried to save them from the tile dormitory floors with a teaspoon - makes the memory slightly bittersweet.

Another good one was when I called my little brother from a friend’s house when he was 9 or 10 or so and very into building replicas of the Titanic and collecting Native American kachina dolls and told him he’d won an art award. This was believable as the kid was and is a great artist. I disguised my voice and started asking him a bunch of questions, like how old he was and where he got his inspiration. Then I asked how his bowel movements were, and he hesitated only a second before he muttered, “Um, fine…?”