Post Holiday Blatherings

Happy New Year! (Can I still say that, even though it's January 2 and I've been conspicuously absent from these parts since the 28th, which I will say instead of "last year" because I don't want to sound like a total asshole? I can? Okay, good. Thanks.) I hope everyone had a very enjoyable holiday. As previously mentioned, our household spent the time between Christmas and New Year's trying to recover from our various ailments. Turtle has been making up for a week and a half of not eating much by eating anything and everything he can get his hands on, provided, of course, the food he can get his hands on is stuff he enjoys eating. Hide your pancakes. It's just not safe.

Oscar has been playing his Lego Star Wars video game until all hours of the night and early morning. Two nights this week, he has stayed up until past 3:30am, attempting to clear various and assorted game levels. middleageddad will tell you that he is merely trying to avoid coming to bed until his oversexed wife is fast asleep, thereby circumventing the need to haul out the old "not tonight, dear, I have a headache" excuse. But that's not it. Really. He's just really excited about his new game. I know this because there is not nearly enough sex happening in the Cymber household lately. Not even close.

As for myself, having realized my dream of getting a $200 gift certificate to Target, (a better gift than the Holy Grail, in my opinion) I have been spending a great deal of time buying and filling containers. Yes, containers. I've been in quite the organizational mood lately. I bought containers for my Christmas decorations and containers for the Turtle's toys. I bought a bigger container to put Turtle's little containers into. I have containers all over the place. It's so perfectly uniform and does wonders for the whole Stepford Wives look I'm going for in our interior design. Oscar is, naturally, baffled that he could buy me a gift certificate to Target and see it spent in two days on something other than books, music, small appliances or other fun things. But he is happy to indulge me.

Besides, I did buy an MP3 player, finally, too. I wanted one to make it easier for me to listen to music at the gym. My cd player wasn't cutting it (no way to hang on to it) and the music they pipe in over the speakers at my gym is hit or miss. Sometimes you get a great dance mix happening that gets the blood pumping and your body moving, and other times you get a weird rap/alternative/WTF?? mix that I can't imagine anyone finds motivating. Of course, now that I have an MP3 player, I need to figure out how it works. I say that, but what I really mean is "now that I have an MP3 player, I need to hand it over to Oscar so he can figure it out for me and then show me the bare minimum of what I need to know." That is why I married a techno-geek, right? Right.

It's not that I can't figure it out for myself. It's more a "why bother?" thing. I am fine knowing the basics, but Oscar will start asking me in-depth questions like "Can it do THIS?" or "How do you make it do THAT?" That would be fine if he took "I don't know" for an answer, but this is Oscar we're talking about. My not knowing the answers to those questions will start a whole philosophical debate about how I never read the instruction manual and why don't I read the instruction manual and maybe IF I read the instruction manual, I would know the answers to his questions. It ends up being a long, drawn out thing and by the time we're through, we're each exasperated with the other and there ends up being no sex that night. And I'm sure this goes without saying but Oscar + Cymber + Exasperation - Sex = A Very Very Bad Thing. It's a complex marital equation, I know, but I'm very good at math. You can trust me on this one.