A fine and private place
Don’t get me wrong. I love the new furniture. I love having new furniture. I am ecstatic about having something comfortable to sit on in the living room.
But oh, how I mourn the loss of my computer cubby. Not that it was all that secluded from the rest of the room, but it was as close to a fine and private place I was going to get in the apartment. Now my computer desk has nothing between it and the rest of the living room. The downside of this was made apparent last night.
Last night The Prof and I watched the second of two DVD’s we rented on Sunday. The first, “Hearts in Atlantis”, was wonderful and I wouldn’t hestitate to recommend it to anyone. The second was last night’s “The Sphere”, which proved to me that Dustin Hoffman is human and capable of making very large mistakes. [What was that man thinking, accepting a role in that terrible movie?] Anyhow, we started watching early, and were done by nine o’clock. Quality time was had by all. I was exhausted when the movie ended (I’ve not been sleeping well recently) but decided to hit the computer briefly and then go to bed.
I booted up my computer to check on our forums and email, and gathered up the leavings from dinner while my PC cranked it’s laborious way through start-up. The Prof was off feeding his Warrior Princess while I did this. When I finished and sat down at my computer, he sat down in the sofa directly behind me and watched as my in-bin popped up with 27 new messages (most DD related). “What the heck is all that” he wanted to know. “New mail,” was my highly accurate, if somewhat uninformative reply.
I switched windows and checked our forums. No activity in the past few hours there. He wanted to know if I was going to hang around waiting for someone to show up … in that tone of voice. So I closed the window and started sorting my email. “Who’s all that from?” he wants to know. THAT, along with being more than a little PMS, finished punching my buttons. I muttered “fuck this” under my breath and shut down the computer. Anybody who knows me knows that if I say that, then I am indeed pissed. The Prof apparently did not hear me.
If I’m at my computer, and he’s home, then he’s hanging there in the background, watching my every move. This really annoys me when taken in context that when he’s on the computer I make a huge point of staying out of the spare bedroom so he’ll have his privacy. I even tell him that I’m going off to find other stuff while he does his computer thing. Of course, other stuff is usually either making dinner or cleaning up dinner.
It was nine-thirty at that point. I then figured I ought to go to bed. The extra sleep would do me good, and give me a chance to get over my pique. Of course, The Prof follows me into the bedroom. He wants to lie down on the bed next to me and cuddle. I want to hit the bathroom and do the usual before bed things. We compromise (i.e. we lay down on the bed and cuddle). After an hour, he finally lets me up to take care of things. I go out to the kitchen to shut some lights off, and find a tipped tumbler on the dining room table. There are ice cubes on the wood, and the placemats are sodden. I took the place mats to the sink, washed them out several times till the sticky feeling was gone, then went back and started wiping the table down. The entire process took over twenty minutes. As I’m finishing with the table, The Prof walked out of the bedroom. “I thought you were coming right back.” he said. And then, “What happened.” I said there must have been a glass of something on the table that got knocked over and I was cleaning it up. “Why didn’t you call me?” I was asked. He said he’d have cleaned it up.
The honest truth why I didn’t call him? I wanted to play martyr. I knew that if I’d told him, it would have stayed there for some hours till he got around to it. I knew he wouldn’t have washed out the placemats, but just rinsed them off (they’re cloth, not plastic, and rinsing wouldn’t have cut it). I knew that if I’d gone back to bed and left it to him I’d still be trying to get rid of him so I could get some sleep. If I wasn’t going to sleep, I wanted to at least do something constructive. And I didn’t feel like coping with the inevitable next line: “It’s the Kitten’s fault,” he said.
For crying out loud man, the Kitten did not leave the half full glass of cola on the table. The Kitten has the IQ of a pet rock. I do not expect intelligent things from the Kitten. I expect that, if something is left within the Kitten’s domain, the Kitten is going to explore it. I am not going to blame the Kitten for doing what it is kittens around the world do: investigate, and usually clumsily. It was NOT the Kitten’s fault.
No, I said none of that. I wrung out the sponge in the sink, brushed my teeth, went to bed. It was after eleven. I did not sleep well.