Morning, day 2

By my reckoning, I've spent over 120 nights away from home since we moved here, or about 1/3 of a year. Four whole months. On those nights Wifey is solely responsible for everything to do with putting the kids to bed, and then turning out the house, and then going to bed herself. She never, not once, mentioned to me that we live in a house that makes the Amityville Horror look like Cinderella's castle.

How in the hell does she do it?

I'm laying in bed listening to all kinds of shit last night: heavy breathing, footsteps upstairs and downstairs, boards creaking, kids occasionally murmuring in their sleep, and noise from outside that was definitely some psychopath checking the windows to make sure they're locked.

But oh my God! I don't know how to lock the windows! Shit! What if she left one open? What if, right now, some seven-foot CHUDD-eating monstrosity is looming over me with a rusty chainsaw planning on sodomizing my vacant eye sockets as I scream for mercy?

So, in short, I kind of had trouble sleeping last night. Finally I drifted off into a fitful, nightmare-plagued sleep.

When I groggily came awake, I was pleased to find that my head cold, which had migrated to my vocal cords, had decided to come north for better climes and was back in my head. So I felt like crap.

Finally I dragged myself out of bed. I found the girl quickly, but the boy was nowhere to be see.

*whew* All that worrying for nothing! How could I forget that the monstrous evil infecting the house would go for the youngest kid first? Silly me.

So I was unrolling the fire ladder to go out the window (because I figured that, like Chucky, my zombified son waited downstairs to slaughter us with a cheese grater) when he pops up from under a pile of sheets and yells "BOO!"

I pissed my boxers.

Once we'd gotten everything cleaned up, and I'd threatened to murder him, we went downstairs for breakfast.

My head throbbing, I went for the one morning cure that solves everything: coffee.

I am the only coffee drinker in the house, and I only drink caffeinated coffee. It's not that I have anything against decaf, it's just that if I'm going to waste my time fiddling about heating water and mixing in coffee and whatnot, I want some kind of payoff.

Drinking decaf coffee is like being a lab rat trained to hit a button to not receive a pellet.

So I open up the coffee container and find that IT'S FREAKING EMPTY! I mean, really, is it so hard for Wifey to keep my coffee thing full for me? Apparently it is. But she doesn't care, because she's six hundred thousand miles away laying on a beach with some thong-clad muscle man massaging her toes.

First she curses the house, then she flushes my coffee down the toilet.

After a lot of rooting around, I found three different kinds of decaf tucked away in the cabinets. WTF? I guess those 120 mornings when she wakes up alone, she's making decaf coffee for somebody who isn't me.

We'll see who gets who with a cheese grater when she gets back, indeed.

Finally I came up with a stopgap solution (scraping enough coffee out of the empty container to make a lamentably weak brew that taunted you with its inefficacity) and made myself some coffee. I felt marginally better.

"What do you want for breakfast?" I ask the children.

"I want a special breakfast!" the Girl says. "Because mommy isn't here. Pwease?"

Sigh. Okay. So we rooted through the "special breakfast" stuf, and found Blueberry Cheescake muffin mix, which mommy hates. So we had a very special father/daughter bonding time making blueberry cheesecake muffins.

They boy, meanwhile, played his DS and ignored us fully.

When I bit into the first muffin, I remembered that Wifey wasn't the only one who didn't care for these things; they taske like lard with artificial blueberries in it. Ugh. But the girl liked them, so she ate mine, the boy's, and hers.

After breakfast, thwarted in my drive to defeat my cold with coffee, I decide to go with the other sure-fired cold cure. "I'm gonna take a shower," I said.

"What about my breakfast?" the boy asks.

"Get whatever you want," I say.

"But she got something special!" he says. "Why?"

"Uh," I didn't really have an answer for that.

"Because he loves me more, duh!" she says.

He starts to get mad at me when I cut him off. "Hey, only one of my children scared the piss out of me this morning!"

Defeated, he slumps off to go get his own breakfast. Daddy wins!

So I decide to come check e-mail, because I didn't get a call last night about Wifey getting in, so there's probably a note on e-mail. And what I received there simultaneously filled me with dread and delight:

"Dear Passenger,

Your 10:30 AM flight has been delayed until 2:35 PM. Because you will then miss your connecting flight, we have booked you on the following flight: 8:30-9:45. Thank you for your understanding."

The e-mail from Delta arrived at 10:45 PM. That's right: it came well after the plane left. Now, really, how can that possibly be of any use whatsoever? And, unless I missed my guess, given the time change it meant that Wifey (who goes to bed around 10 PM) was up until 4 AM her time trying to get to her destination.

Man, is she pissed. I'm sure flames are shooting out of her eyeballs. I'm only hoping she didn't strangle some airport person and end up getting hauled off to jail.

So why does this fill me with joy?

Duh! Because I'm not there, idiot! When your wife is in full-on Godzilla mode set on destroying everything and everyone around here, you don't want to be present!

Plus, I still owe her for the hex on the kitchen, the lack of coffee, and never telling me that this house is terrifying at night.

It's now 10 AM. Time to face the day.