Regular Happy Day

Here we go. No kids for 7 days. I don't know what to do with myself. I'm sitting in the basement blogging and eating cheezits, the new "Cheddar Jack" kind. Lilly was home yesterday. We had a good day--we all went to Ernie's at 6:30 in the morning, drove Nick to school, went to the library, went to yoga. Then we went out to the local state park and hiked around in the woods, which was really beautiful. We split a chocolate malt afterwards, picked up Nick from school and went to get his glasses fitted. $240.37 for glasses. It was so beautiful and warm that we put the top down on the convertible. It's really lovely driving on these small country roads, with the leaves blowing into the car and the wonderful grassy smells of fall all around. Just a perfect day.
"Oh my god--" Nick says, "I can see individual leaves on the trees!" He was twisting his neck around, staring at things, really entranced, reading signs out loud.
I felt really guilty. For some reason, I haven't taken Nick seriously when he complains about his eyesight. I mean, his grades are pretty good and he reads all the time and doesn't seem to have any trouble playing video games, etc. Finally, at the drivers license bureau, when he was taking the visual test and kept getting everything wrong, I decided that maybe there was something to it. Nick, to be fair, can be somewhat of a hypochondriac. But guess what--he really does have eyesight problems. Oh well, better late than never.
They took off in the afternoon. I really worry about them being on the road. I think it would be safer in a plane, but my folks, who write all the checks, refuse. And I certainly don't have extra money for tickets.
After they left I went to a staff meeting at work (it's kind of a pain in the ass that you never really get a day off from the hospital--there always seems to be a reason to have to drop in)--'just an hour' but it kind of screws up your whole day, you know? I mean, you have to dress up and say the right things to the right people and I don't know about you, but I need like 24 hours at a time when I can just retreat into my schleppy myself, you know--not worry about stray chin hairs and ragged fingernails or matching socks and ironing things. This is probably why I'm not married....
The meeting only lasted an hour, but it was still a pain in the ass. I made innocuous conversation about my dog, bought everybody chocolate. Argh.
Then I went out to the farm. Jay's back from a hunting trip, and he looked pretty rough. He's filming a hunting show for tv now--he didn't actually hunt. "animal snuff films" he calls them. But he had a good time on this one, I think. We fell asleep at 9. Then we woke up about 3 hours later and made love.
"Wake up," Jay said, "the moon's up."
And it was, filling the room with magic light. You could have read by it. So we tried to live up to it. Tonksie, my little injured dog was in bed with us, because I didn't want to leave her alone at my house, and in the middle of all the action, she decided she was being left out, so she engaged in some surprise strategic licking, which made Jay yelp and me almost fall off the bed laughing-but it all turned out okay. With a happy ending, as they say in the biz.

And that's my 1/2 hour.