First of all, I’d like to thank you for being so kind to me after all that whining. I appreciate this community and your understanding and your gentle words more than you will ever know.

Anyway, here is some randomosity! Because that is apparently all I am good for these days! And also I needed something to replace yesterday’s overlong drivel!

* So remember last week when I was all “It’s nearly sixty degrees! And all the snow has melted! Spring has sprung, whatever that means!”

Yeah, then this happened:

And this (yes, that is a tree encased in ice):

Lest you brush this off as merely poor photography, let me tell you of the great pain and anguish I went through to procure these poor photographs.

I went out onto my cold balcony, in bare feet, baring my tank-top-and-workout-pants self to the poor sap who was outside chipping ice off of his windshield.

And also? I think I touched a bug of some sort when I opened the screen door. Since I couldn’t see the bug, it is likely wandering around my home now, ready to leap out at me when I have finally relaxed into thinking that it was not a bug but my jumpy imagination.

* Perhaps you read the above description of my clothing and thought, “Good for her! She’s working out!” I am nothing if not brutally honest, Internet. So I cannot allow you to operate under that delusion any longer.

I WAS wearing a tank top and workout pants, yes. I was also wearing a sports bra. But there was no working out. I mean, I had thought about working out. But lest you think that I simply got too busy to work out, well let me disabuse you of that notion as well: There was no specific plan to work out.

In fact, I had donned the workout clothes completely independent of whether I would work out or not. I do this quite often. Far more often than I actually work out.

I do it for two reasons:

Reason 1: Wearing workout clothes makes it easier to exercise. Should I suddenly decide to break into a push up or something, I won’t be hampered by floppy pajama pants.

Reason 2: Wearing workout clothes makes me feel better about opening the door if a package gets delivered. (Which, hello! Birthday coming up in mere days! I fully expect to be inundated with packages!) (Not really.) I feel very weird about opening the door if I am clad in bright pink pajamas bottoms and a white t-shirt and no bra. First of all, no one needs to see me in jammies. (Or braless, for that matter. I’m not Sue Ellen Mischke.) Second of all, I always imagine the delivery person to be silently judging me for being home and in my pajamas in the middle of the day. And delivery people don’t really take kindly to pajama-clad women shrieking at them about how they work from home and these are not pajamas but WORK CLOTHES. So I typically freeze in my tracks (ie, stop typing) when I hear a knock at the door.

But if I’m wearing workout clothes? I have no problem answering the door! Because, for all they know, I am on my way to the gym! Perhaps I am even a fitness instructor type person! Tada! Automatic legitimacy!

* The other day I went to the grocery store and broke my own rule about using the self-checkout line. In my defense, I went into the store with a very short list of Things to Purchase. In fact, I grabbed one of those super small, two-decker carts that hold two grocery baskets. And instead of putting a second basket on the bottom decker (deck?), I filled the space with three twelve packs of Diet Coke. So really, I was just noodling around with one small basket.

But somehow, by the time I was ready to check out, my basket was full.

Still though, it was just ONE basket. How much can one basket hold?

So I surveyed the impossibly long lines at all of the checker lanes and got into one of the super short self-checkout lanes.

And then it turns out I had ten thousand items. So many that they piled up at the end of the conveyor belt and the computer had to scold me to bag some of them because it was blocking everything.

Of course, there was A Dude behind me, probably with one or two items, who was clearly impatient and shifting repeatedly from one foot to the other and vividly hating me for going through the self-checkout with ten thousand things. Which made me start sweating.

I tried not to let him bother me, though, and tried to be as swift as possible. Of course, just as his impatience reached a fever pitch, I entered the Produce Portion of my basket. Which meant that I had to weigh each item and then type in the item number and BAH.

To make matters worse, I bought two bottles of wine. Which required a checker to come over and make sure I am 21 (HA.) and key in her little “it’s okay to let this boozer through” code.

My groceries were so backed up that the checker started bagging my groceries for me, which was very nice and much appreciated.

So, lesson learned: My initial belief that there should be a self-imposed item limit at the self-checkout lane was RIGHT.

* Speaking of wine (yes, we were, several paragraphs ago), I love tasting different wines. But I don’t know a huge amount ABOUT wine. I mean, I know the basic differences between the grapes… And there are a few labels that I can recognize as being Very Good or Very Average. But I don’t know much about years. And there are thousands of wines that don’t include the few I know. When it comes down to it, I really couldn’t go to a wine store and pick out a great bottle.

So instead of picking wines by knowledge, I pick wines by the label. Because if you are tasting wine, it might as well have a pretty label or a fun name, right? So I end up picking things like Red Guitar… Little Black Dress… And Goats Do Roam.

Clearly, I get this trait from my father. Remember The Princess?

* Let us all take a moment to send some sympathy and positive energy to my husband. He hasn’t had a day off in… Weeks. He’s either been working or interviewing. His schedule since last Friday looks like this:

Friday: Wake up at 6:00 am. Work until 5:00 pm. Pack. Leave for Interview Location at 6:00 pm. Arrive at hotel at 2:00 am. Fall asleep at 2:30 am.

Saturday: Wake up at 6:30 am. Go to interview at 7:00 am. Interview from 7:15 am to 1:30 pm. Drive around Interview City until 4:30 pm. Drive home. Arrive home at 12:30 am. Prepare various and sundry things for work the next day. Fall asleep around 1:30 am.

Sunday: Wake up at 6:00 am. Work until 10:30 pm. Do Assorted Random Things until midnight. Fall asleep at 12:30 am.

Monday: Wake up at 6:00 am. Work until 5:30 pm. Go out to dinner with med school colleagues. Pack for two interviews. Fall asleep at 1:30 am.

Tuesday: Wake up at 6:00 am. Get ride (from loving wife) to airport. Depart for Interview Location.

This is just a small snapshot. It has been like this for weeks now. And the day he returns home from this next interview? I will pick him up from the airport and we will drive directly to the next Interview Location.

Poor guy. He is working so very hard.

* Perhaps this goes without saying, but driving 16 hours in the span of 30ish hours is NOT ADVISABLE.

* On the way home from the last Interview Location, I woke up my husband about two hours before we reached our house because I had Had It. I was tired. The road was starting to look less like a road than a winding chain of lights. I was beginning to have trouble judging distances. I had waited as long as possible, to give him a good two hours of sleep, but I was worried that my driving was about to enter the realm of danger reserved for People Who Text and That Weird Guy Driving the Red Pickup Who Seemed to Be WATCHING A MOVIE.

So I woke him up and demanded that he talk to me to keep me alert. And we started talking about babies. Because – as anyone who is kept awake at night by worries already knows – there is nothing better for alertness than Fretful Topics. So I started listing all the things that terrify me about pregnancy and motherhood. (To some of which, by the way, my husband replied, “That is so ridiculous I am not even going to dignify it with a response.”)

Honestly, he’s probably right. But if you can’t share your Crazy with your co-potential-future-parent, then who can you share it with?

Also, it seems pretty important to let your co-potential-future-parent know the exact level of Crazy you are, just in case he wants to bow out.

I think we have both decided that we are about 51% on the Pro Side of Having Babies. (For ourselves, obviously. I am pretty much 100% on the Pro Side for Other People Having Babies. Except in a few cases that I will not mention because I feel too mean.) By the way, 51% is an average. Some days, I am 75% Pro. Other days I am -10% Pro. So it evens out to about 51%. Ish. Sometimes.

My husband feels that Having Babies is the next logical step in our marriage. Which I guess I sort of agree with? Although his reasoning that “everyone expects married people to have kids” seems oddly similar to the “everyone has their ears pierced” argument I used back in elementary school. To which I feel the urge to reply, “If everybody expected you to jump off a bridge, would you?”

By the way, I STILL don’t have my ears pierced. So. Yeah.

Certainly our parents seem to feel that Having Babies is the next logical step. Now, I don’t want to give you the impression that they are pressuring us to procreate. In fact, three of them are fully in the We Will Not Bring It Up Unless You Do camp. One of them, however, likes to reference grandbabies all the time. But less in a pressuring way than a hopeful I-just-want-you-to-know-I-would-be-over-the-moon-if-it-happened way. (Actually, the other three parents would also be over the moon. But they are carefully keeping their distance from the topic.)

Of course, this weekend I mentioned how my face has been breaking out terribly lately – like, full on acne-style rather than the regular occasional crater-y zit – to one of these parents (spoiler alert: Not my father-in-law) and that parent asked very casually if it might be the result of going off birth control? And I had to say, “Nope, not so much,” and, in the process, perhaps dashing the visions of imminent grandparenting from this parent’s mind.

* I doubt that you come here to read about the status of my birth control. But I’m guessing that as I settle into my fourth decade, babies will be more and more on my mind. So if you are uninterested in Talk of Babies, BE WARNED.

* Hmm. We seem to have detoured down some sort of baby-related wormhole. Let us change the subject now.

* My book club meets tomorrow night. We read Water for Elephants this month which I felt mainly “meh” about. However, the deeper I got into the book, the more I felt compelled to keep reading to see what happened. So I suppose I eventually upgraded from “meh” to “like.”

* Each month, our book club meets at a different person’s house. And the host makes a full dinner. I happen to know that this month, our hostess is making lasagna. Which is making me very nervous. Because I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met a lasagna that did not include tomatoes. And I hate tomatoes. Haaaaaaaaate. They are right up there with organ meats and straight-up gristle in terms of how much I loathe them. And since I’m much more likely to encounter a tomato than, say, a heart… Well, they are probably at the top of my list of Most Hated Foods.

Yes, I know you are just supposed to be polite and eat things, even if you don’t like them… But tomatoes make me gag. And I think gagging during a meal slash book discussion is probably not what most people would call “polite.”

So I am fretting over this meal, and trying to determine if there’s a way to surreptitiously de-tomato-ize the lasagna.

* Speaking of food, my husband and I went to a little “Mexican” restaurant on Saturday after his interview. The atmosphere was very College Dive – beaten-up wooden floors… crumb-speckled, faded-wood booths… food spattered plastic menus. The wait staff were dressed in Bedroom Floor Chic – mainly grubby t-shirts and jeans. And the best thing I can say about the food was that it was edible.

But the service was fantastic. Our waitress was new, so a seasoned waitress hung in the background to make sure the newbie was doing everything right. When I asked for hot sauce, they brought me two tiny dishes of different hot sauces. I asked for no tomatoes, and they not only remembered that (you’d be surprised at how many waiters simply ignore that request), they brought me the tomato and cucumber salsa on the side just in case. They were attentive without being overbearing. Friendly. Helpful. And when I asked if they had wi-fi, the senior waitress said they don’t normally allow patrons to use it, but she would get me the password right away.

It reminded me of just how critical good service is when it comes to a dining experience. It can turn a crappy atmosphere and mediocre fare into an above-average meal. Likewise, poor service can make delicious food in the hippest, hottest restaurant seem unappetizing.

* It is snowing again, with renewed vigor.

Well, Internet, that’s all the news that’s fit to print.

Hope you are doing well on this lovely Tuesday!