When I do get a chance to get out and about - like on my recent work beach trip or this past weekend when I went to visit my sister in Athens, and she gave me a guided tour of four of the town’s 42 bars - I don’t want the night to end. I’ve become known as the girl-who-doesn’t-want-to-go-to-sleep.

So I’ve been analyzing myself to figure out where these feelings are coming from, and I realized that I never really partied it up when I was young and single and practically required to be irresponsible. I’ve done surprisingly few “wild and crazy” things.

I didn’t realize just how mild-mannered I was compared with everyone else until I started reading a recent Comment Diversion at Pajiba: Scathing Reviews for Bitchy People on worst prom memories. I was shocked at all the wild shenanigans that went on at 90 percent of these people’s proms. While my proms somewhat sucked - both years my date fell through at the last minute and I ended up going with my also-single best friend, and at least a few people thought we were lesbians (which mortified me at the time, though now I wouldn’t care) - they were innocent affairs, with only the slightest hint of alcohol.

I was raised Southern Baptist, which made me feel guilty about virtually everything teenagers might enjoy. In the movie Grease, Rizzo could’ve been singing to me:

Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee
Lousy with virginity
Won’t go to bed till I’m legally wed
I can’t - I’m Sandra Dee!

And …

I don’t drink
Or swear
I don’t rat my hair
I get ill from one cigarette
Keep your filthy paws
Off my silky draws
Would you pull that crap with Annette?

I was constantly protesting being labeled a goody-two-shoes or a nerd, but in restrospect it’s clear I totally was.

Then I went to college and announced to my dormmates that I’d sworn off swearing for religious reasons (I was at the tail end of what I call my Turbo-Baptist phase). The sophomores snickered and said, “Ah, just wait. You’ll be cussing like a sailor by midterms.” And of course, they were right. Without my mother and regular Sunday services to make me feel guilty, I began a delicious spiral of sinning, doing most of the things I’d been too scared to do in high school.

Still, my sins were pretty minor. I only drank enough to make myself sick one time and promptly learned my lesson; I never had a fake ID; I never smoked even one cigarette; and I never tried pot or any other drugs. Nancy Reagan taught me well - I just said no.

Then, the summer after freshman year, I met a handsome, church-going fella named Darwin. From then on my partying ways were put on the back burner because I was too obsessed with my future husband to do much else other than canoodle with him.

We got married when I was one month shy of 21. For my bachelorette party, my friends and I had to go to the next town over because they had some bars that let in people 18 and up.

In our first couple years of marriage, I didn’t feel like partying. I wanted to stay home with my hubby as much as possible. When I had to go on business trips, I’d pout and sometimes even cry in my hotel room because I missed Darwin so much. When I was home, I was clingy and complained mightily whenever he had obligations that took him away from me even for a few hours.

But over the years, I grew up and mellowed out and felt more confident in our relationship. I no longer felt insulted when he didn’t need to spend every waking second with me. I no longer needed to spend every waking second with him, either.

I changed in other ways, too. I stopped feeling guilty about religion stuff, I converted from someone who voted for Bush in 2000 to a Jon-Stewart-worshipping liberal, I embraced my own and others’ nerdy/quirky tendencies, and I became much more open-minded in general.

So in a way I feel like I’m only just now becoming who I really am. That timid high schooler afraid she’ll go to hell for one of any number of minor infractions, that clingy newlywed completely dependent on her husband to entertain and fulfill her - they barely seem familiar to me anymore.

And this new person - this freer person - isn’t ready to settle into a routine for the rest of her life. I want to travel with and without Darwin, I want to meet new people, I want to stay up late having conversations, I want to write for real, and yes, I want to party it up a little bit. I’ve always been terrified of change, but now here I am longing for it, even going out and looking for it.

Trouble is, I think this restless person I’ve become lately makes Darwin a little nervous. Maybe even makes some of my other friends nervous. Okay, maybe even I’m a little nervous.

But that nervousness is also part of the thrill - at least it makes me feel awake.

The even better news: I’m going to the beach this week on my final work retreat. Sun and surf + alcohol + last hurrah with dearly loved co-workers = my idea of a good time.

Also, the website didn’t plummet into oblivion the moment I quit, like I feared. It’s speeding right along, in fact. Mom and Dad are each working 80 hours a week and eagerly awaiting the day when I can dedicate myself full time to assisting them.

Also, also, I’m going to see the musical “Into the Woods” this weekend, I met a potential new friend, my Internet friend S just did something very big and awesome, things between Darwin and me have been terrific lately, and he and I have made a no-fried-foods pact that we’re sticking to pretty well. My dress pants fit better already - not that I’ll need them!

So today I am a happy camper. By the day after tomorrow I’ll be sunburned and crabby despite my best efforts, but for now I’m basking in the glow and ready to crank up my “beach songs” playlist.

Shake well and serve.

I quit my job today. We all knew if/when the costume website started doing well enough, I would no longer have time for what essentially amounts to two full-time jobs, and of the two, the website would win. I was (and still am) excited about that prospect - working from home, being free to travel more, matching my schedule to Darwin’s so I can see him more, setting myself up for my someday future as a baby-making vessel, having more energy to exercise and more time to write fiction and, yes, even work on the house.

But now that the day is here, I’m more scared and sad than I expected to be. I got this job straight out of college as a wee babe of 21. It’s the first place I started going by my husband’s last name and the first place I had real responsibility. The first place where I had my own office that wasn’t just a space carved out of a storeroom, and the first place I got to give people assignments and make peace between warring parties and handle crises.

It’s the only real job I’ve ever had, and - while I complained about it mightily sometimes - it was really a pretty good one. I couldn’t have asked for a better boss, and over the years I’ve met so many nice people - both the people I’ve worked with and the people I’ve interviewed for stories, some of whom still call to chat or send me Christmas cards.

Also, I got to say I was a magazine editor. My senior year of high school I decided I wanted to be a magazine editor, and in college I was one of the few people I knew who never wavered from her chosen major - journalism. I loved everything about it then. I loved working at the college paper (I was a copy editor and then a designer), loved the frenetic newsroom and the late nights, loved tweaking a sentence to make it better, and best of all, loved piecing together a puzzle of quotes and information into a fine little story.

While editing the exact same kind of stories month after month for the past five years has killed the love a bit, I’m still sad to be leaving behind my chosen profession. I write all the copy for the costume website, I write this blog, I might do some freelance writing for my former job, and I hope to write more fiction, but officially I won’t be a journalist anymore.

Also, I’m sad to leave my friends at work, who I somehow didn’t realize I had so much affection for. Today a parade of people came through my office, all eyeing me sideways and saying, “I heard a rumor you’re leaving.” When I confirmed it, J sat silent in the chair and looked devastated. T said, “You’re one of the good ones.” C said, “Who will I go to now to talk about [fill in the blank]?”

Of course, it isn’t goodbye just yet. I will be going on one last work trip with them in a couple of weeks, and I will likely be in the office at least another month or two, since I said I’d stay on while they searched for my replacement.

But the truth is one day soon I will be gone. I’ve wanted so badly the independence of working from home, but now I wonder if I’ll be desperately lonely without my daily dose of heated movie discussions, whispered gossip sessions, tales of New Orleans vacations gone wrong, complaints about the sales people, and the same old quips we make every month about the more tedious sections of the magazine.

Now my only business contacts will be my parents, customers with questions, and sales reps on the other end of a phone line.

I’ll make an effort to keep in touch with my former co-workers by phone and e-mail - some people who left still manage to stay on the radar - but it won’t be the same.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m genuinely excited about the new job. The website offers me independence and a sense that my actions have a direct, positive result. If I add a new product and we sell one that same day (as has happened before), I know I’ve accomplished something. And the website is mine; it is my baby. I share in the profits, and I am a partner in decisions. If I want to try something new, I just try it and see what happens. Since I was a kid, I always fantasized about starting businesses and making money, so if you think about it, that actually predated my journalism dream.

In addition, I can save $200 a month on gas and have that hour and 20 minutes every day to do something else with. I can take a language course or a cooking class, and I can go walking with my neighbor in the mornings. I can revert to my natural night-owl tendencies and be productive in bursts separated by periods of doing whatever I want. And if things continue to go well, I’ll make more money doing it.

Still, I’ve never been fond of change, and this is the biggest change I’ve made since the one that landed me in this job in the first place. It terrifies me, and as it looms, the old way starts to have a hazy glow of nostalgia about it. Even compiling another new products section and editing another technical article begin to seem tragically romantic.

And the fear sets my mind churning with all the worst-case scenarios - the website could suddenly and inexplicably drop off the face of Google and sales could shrivel to a trickle, or I could be so lonely and depressed in this house alone that I could eat a pound of brownies every day and eventually have to be hoisted off the couch with a crane. Or even with plenty of time and no writing burnout, I still couldn’t finish so much as a short story, let alone muster up the courage/motivation to submit it for publication anywhere.

So now is where you say reassuring things - you’ll love working from home, you won’t miss oversleeping every day and being so late you have to put your make-up on in the car, you’ll love the independence, you’re saving the environment by not commuting to work. Anything, people, please. Make the bad thoughts go away.

Twice already, Darwin has installed temporary fixes to delay the inevitable gutter replacement, but for the past few months whenever it rains, it pours - literally. Right out of the split seam of the rotting, rusting, green-tinged bottom of the gutter, right onto the brick steps.

This is a bad situation for many reasons:

1. You get dirty water dumped on your head when you try to enter or exit the house after any rainstorm.

2. The mortar is being pummeled out from between the bricks.

3. All the moisture is causing a layer of fuzzy green to grow on that side of the steps.

4. It’s a rotting, rusting, green-tinged piece of metal right over the main entrance - not pretty.

5. Water + foundation = very, very bad.

It’s to the point where this gutter could spell doom for our entire house if we don’t replace it. And with the warm, wet Alabama spring already well underway, it’s high time we did something about this mess. Trouble is, we’re being our usual indecisive selves - should we hire a company to come out? Will they even come for one little gutter? Should we hire a handyman? Should Darwin attempt to replace it himself? How does one even replace a gutter? Can one be bought? How much does it cost?

I need to do some research, but with what time? I’m already working essentially two full-time jobs, an issue which is about to come to a head. Maybe one day soon I will be able to concentrate again and finish up some projects around this hovel.

Not that I’m complaining. Okay, maybe I’m complaining a little. My first trip was fun, but the other two are strictly work-related and were/will be jam-packed with activity. I’m already tired, and I have four days of work and suitcase-living ahead of me, away from my hubby and my animals.

And yet I keep daydreaming about all the trips I want to take. We’re going to Amsterdam in a couple of months, and I’d love to go back to New Orleans, and my sister and I want to go to Washington, D.C., and I want to go back to NYC, this time with Darwin.

Then there are all the projects we need to get finished around the house once the weather turns warm. Then, before I know it, Halloween will be back and I’ll be completely insane.

So I guess I should just get used to a faster pace. Fewer days lounging on the sofa, less time watching TV, less time in a squishy office chair - guess that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I’ve actually lost 6 pounds lately without much effort. If this Easter candy from Mom doesn’t sabotage me, I’m on track to get a little healthier while I get my frequent flyer miles.

My friend and I were discussing it this morning, and she pointed out the similarities between the Torso Situation and the Motorcycle Situation. I didn’t want Darwin to have a motorcycle. They’re dangerous, and the thought of him driving one frequently really freaks me out. I told him repeatedly - even tearfully - how I felt about him getting a motorcycle, hoping he would snap out of it and realize that it wasn’t worth it to make me live in a state of (perhaps irrational) terror every time he’s out on it.

I wanted to say, “No, you can’t have a motorcycle,” but ultimately I’m not his mother and didn’t want to be the person to tell him his lifelong dream could not come true. Financially, we could afford it, so my last line of defense was gone.

He chose to ignore my feelings on the issue and do what makes him happy. Now at last he has his Harley, and he’s tickled pink. Seeing him so giddy makes me feel a little better about the decision, but I still get a knot in my stomach when I think about him riding it.

In the Torso Situation, Darwin is trying the same tactic - telling me makes him jealous, telling me it makes him uncomfortable. Telling me that even though he knows I’m not going to run off to Germany with this guy, even though he knows I love him, he just doesn’t like it. He wants to say, “Stop talking to him,” but ultimately he knows he’s not my boss. If I choose to continue chatting with Torso, I’m making the same choice he made with the motorcycle … to ignore his feelings and do what pleases me.

So I should just do what I want, right? Weeeeelll … they say two wrongs don’t make a right. Some would probably say a vehicle purchase is nowhere near as important in a marriage as questions of fidelity. I don’t know.

The past few days I’ve been in Vegas with my mother at the Halloween trade show, and in our many phone conversations while I was gone, neither Darwin or I mentioned Torso. We babytalked on the phone in our usual obnoxious fashion, and everything felt completely normal between us. Still, I suspect if I mentioned even the country of Germany, he would start pouting again.

Certainly, if it upsets him that much, it’s not worth it. I just keep hoping it will stop upsetting him. That it will become routine, that Darwin will see he’s still the one I love, and I can be friends with Torso, and maybe Darwin can be too. When Darwin and I go to Europe in May, I would like us to meet up with Torso for drinks one night or maybe detour to his city and have him show us around. I think Torso would be open to that, but at the moment, Darwin is decidedly not. When I mentioned it a few days ago, he said, “I don’t want to meet him because that would mean you seeing him again.”

So I guess I’m just in a holding pattern for now. My plan - if you can call it that - is just to wait and see.

Edited to add:
If anyone is wondering how I would react if the shoe was on the other foot, it has been. A few years ago, Darwin had a close female friend. They worked together, and they chatted on the phone every day. I was jealous and had a bad vibe about her, but I didn’t feel I had the right to tell him to stop being her friend just because she was a woman.

Eventually, several months into the friendship, I did tell him that I wasn’t comfortable with how much he talked to her. I think it was after an evening when she called while we were out to dinner (which she had a knack for doing), and Darwin sat talking to her on the phone instead of to me. Even then - even knowing the woman didn’t like me and strongly suspecting she was interested in Darwin in a more-than-friendly way - all I did was ask him to please not talk to her as much on the phone. I said I trusted him but not her and that I thought it was better if they scaled back their friendship. He instantly agreed and said he wouldn’t call her anymore at all. I insisted it didn’t have to be that strict, but he was almost eager to end it. I think he was getting bad vibes from her at that point, too.

Shortly after he stopped calling her, she went totally psycho and started spreading lies at work about him, including saying he married me for my money (what money?). It was a huge fiasco, and all the things she said made me even doubt Darwin’s side of the story, but eventually I realized she was just nuts.

So anyway, I feel my little friendship with a man across the pond is minor in comparison. And having gone through that ordeal before, I’m not going to make the same mistake Darwin made - being completely oblivious to the opposite sex friend’s more-than-friendly feelings. I’m completely confident that Thorsten is not going to hop a plane and try to come steal me away. He’s not going to go psycho and try to break up our marriage with lies. He’s a grown man and knows exactly what this is - a friendship that can only ever be that.

We met Thorsten (pronounced Torsten) late on our first night in Germany at the Hard Rock Cafe. He and I hit it off - the kind of instant rapport you don’t find every day - and exchanged contact information. It seemed a shame never to speak again to a person you got along with so well. He knew I was married, so I didn’t see any harm.

Still, I didn’t expect much to come of it. We’d e-mail a couple of times, maybe, and that would be that. I didn’t mention to Darwin that I’d exchanged contact info with a dude - I told him briefly about all the different people we met in Germany, but he wasn’t that interested in hearing about my trip, since he was preoccupied with buying a motorcycle. For a while there, whenever I talked, I could see his eyes glaze over with the daydreaming, and as soon as I’d shut up, he’d say something about the motorcycle.

Meanwhile, Thorsten seemed plenty interested in what I had to say. I found I enjoyed writing to him. It was entertaining to have a pen pal who lived in a different country, spoke three languages, and traveled around hop-hop-hop to Berlin, Hamburg, Heidelberg, Hannover (all in one week!) for his job in a way that was kinda fascinating, since those places are so far away and interesting to me.

I didn’t mention this to Darwin, since there was nothing to say, really. I e-mail with dozens of people every day, both for my job and for fun, most of whom I’ve never met in person and most of whom I never mention to Darwin. Not because I’m keeping secrets but because he understandably doesn’t care much about what’s going on with some random stranger in upstate New York or wherever.

But then Thorsten called me on the phone. I’d invited him to do so because I got the impression he was more comfortable speaking English than writing it. I guess I wasn’t thinking about what Darwin might think of some German guy calling me out of the blue.

On the phone, I acted like a giggly weirdo because it was awkward talking to this person on the phone for the first time and because Darwin was in the other room giving me funny looks. When I got off the brief call, I didn’t hesitate to tell Darwin who it was and fill him in on the situation. I expected him to be mildly jealous and then get over it. Instead, he got increasingly silent and his brow got increasingly furrowed. I kept bugging him, teasing him, telling him the truth - that Thorsten and I are just friends, that I’ve never given Darwin a reason not to trust me, and that this guy lives in Germany for heaven’s sake so what’s the big deal?

That was Sunday, and he’s still not entirely over it. One minute he’ll be fine and the next he’ll be glowering, and I’ll say, “Stop thinking about it,” and he’ll say, “I can’t.” He’s asked me a thousand questions about Thorsten, about the minute details of how we met and how we parted, about the rest of our trip and whether I saw him again (I didn’t). He’s told me it was “bad judgement” to give a guy I’d only known for two hours my contact information, and I’ve told him I have a right to have male friends if I want to and, once again, this guy lives in Germany - what am I gonna do?

I’ve never seen him this jealous. I work mostly with men and have to go on business trips with them at least a few times a year, and now and then I’ll sense Darwin is jealous when I mention individuals. But usually he denies it if confronted - he’s never gone so far as this time.

I’ve come to the conclusion that something about Thorsten (who he calls “Torso”) really threatens him, and some of the comments he made last night indicate it might be language. Darwin knows I’m deeply interested in learning languages and that I’m impressed Thorsten can speak three so well. Meanwhile, poor Darwin is apparently carrying around some hurt feelings at me for correcting his English grammar one too many times. “You say I can’t even speak English right,” he said, and I felt so terrible. I’ve been a grammar hound since elementary school, when I would - very annoyingly, I’m sure - correct my mother’s grammar instead of the other way around.

With time, I’ve gotten used to Darwin’s rather unique way of mangling the English language, and I mostly find it charming now rather than grating. I honestly do try not to correct him, but sometimes I can’t control myself.

Last night we had (another) long talk about the Thorsten Situation. I stupidly thought Darwin was over it and tried to tell him some things about Thorsten - how he plays golf and has a one-eyed cat - and how I sent him a photo of Darwin and me together. I thought that would please him, diffuse him, but it just fired him up again.

He pouted, and I cajoled. I admitted I like having someone to listen to me and pay attention to me, that I like having friends who I can talk to about things Darwin’s not interested in. I reminded him he has friends he can talk to about things I’m utterly bored by - motorcycles, for example.

Eventually, Darwin started acting like himself again. He smiled again, looked me in the eye again, fell asleep on the couch again. By the end of the discussion, he said, “I can’t say I’ll stop feeling jealous,” but in his way, he gave me permission to be friends with Thorsten. Which is good, because I’ve hated seeing him unhappy but I also wasn’t eager to bow down to the will of any testosterone-fueled man telling me who I could and could not talk to.

Now, to preserve the peace, I won’t be speaking the dreaded T-name in Darwin’s presence again. If he asks, I will tell. If he doesn’t, I’ll assume he doesn’t want to hear anything more about it.

So what do you think, dear readers? Am I being unreasonable? It’s the eternal question, When Harry Met Sally-style - can a woman and a man be “just friends”? I would like to think the answer is yes - especially if they have an entire ocean between them.

I didn’t feel this way when I got back from Italy. I instantly missed Venice, even on the plane home. But this trip, though shorter - brief, even - wore me out completely. This is not to say that Munich and the surrounding areas weren’t delightful - they were, they were! I think my fatigue can be blamed mostly on the fact that Kristen and I never managed to get on a proper schedule.

The first day we arrived in Munich at 8 a.m. (which was like 1 a.m. for us) and walked around the pedestrian city center for a while until we could check into our hotel room. We saw the Glockenspiel on the front of the New Town Hall do its cute little performance, and we climbed a winding staircase in the Old Town Hall tower to visit the charming toy and teddy bear museum. We ate delicious, fresh-baked, chocolate-filled croissants in Marienplatz.

Then we went back to the hotel to crash. I’d slept maybe an hour total on the flight, and Kristen was worn out, too, so we fell into a dead sleep until well past dark. We woke disoriented and had to do some fancy math to figure out what time it was, since Kristen didn’t know how to change the time on her watch (which was set on Central Time), and my cell phone was still stuck on Atlanta time (Eastern Time). This problem continued throughout the trip, so that whenever we needed to know the time, we either had to add 6 or 7 hours, depending on if we were looking at her watch or my phone. Or subtract 7 hours if I was trying to set the alarm to wake up in the morning. It was a mess.

That night we finally made it out of the hotel room by 9 or 10 and found an Italian restaurant that had an English menu and at least one English-speaking waiter, who they assigned to us. This was the first of two delicious Italian meals we had on the trip (the other was at a place a tour guide recommended, La Vecchia Messaria), which were just about the only times we felt satisfied food-wise. Kristen doesn’t eat red meat, and I’m not overly fond of it either. We refused to eat sausage or any kind or mystery meats or pretty much anything on display in the shops. With that and all the running around we did, I actually lost weight on this trip!

That first night we also went to Hofbräuhaus, the most famous - and nowadays touristy - beer garden in Munich, which was just as much fun as everybody says it is. I even tried a beer, though I hate beer and found that Munich beer is just as beer-y as everywhere else. We met all kinds of nice people - Serbians (non-embassy-burning ones, we hope), Scots and Germans - there and, after it closed, at the Hard Rock Cafe bar across the street, though we felt like total loser Americans for going to an American chain while in Germany.

The rest of the trip was spent similarly - wake up early; try desperately to find something to eat; figure out the train station; barely make it in time to meet tour or train; almost die hiking an Alp; see amazing sights that make our jaws drop, hearts flutter, or eyes get misty; feet hurt, oh, oh, how they hurt; come back to the hotel in the afternoon and crash; wake up after dark; now with our stomachs grumbling, try to find a restaurant still open at 11 p.m.; on alternating days, go to a bar; wake up next morning feeling like ass. Rinse and repeat.

Fortunately, the things we saw and the people we met were worth it. Well, some of them were. On our day trip to Salzburg, Austria, we took The Sound of Music tour, which I admit could’ve gone better.

At the first stop, the bus left us while we were using the port-a-potty. Yes, we are the kind of idiots who get LEFT by a tour bus. We were stranded outside the city center - nowhere near walking distance for two gals still sore and weakened from dragging themselves up an Alp the previous day - and after a few irate phone conversations with the tour company, we managed to catch a cab to meet up with the bus at another stop. We missed the “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” gazebo, which we were looking forward to the most, but the cab driver told us all about how it’s not that impressive and wasn’t built to last, and that made us feel a little better.

Back on the tour, we tried to squash our bitterness toward the tour guide and enjoy ourselves. Though the connection to The Sound of Music was tenuous at best, we still enjoyed seeing the sights around Salzburg, especially when the bus took us up into the Lake District past lots of dazzling lakes and the adorable villages clustered on their banks. I can’t even describe how beautiful the Alps were.

I took a ridiculous amount of pictures everywhere we went on the trip, except in Dachau, where I couldn’t muster up the desire to take souvenir photos of the crematoriums or the cold, cold prison cells. The day we went there was the coldest of the trip - rainy with a bitter wind - and it was hard to imagine standing in that barren roll call area for hours at a time in such weather, and worse. It was a moving experience, and we left there sobered and chilled to the bone.

The best place for photos was Neuschwanstein Castle, which was stunningly beautiful and was surrounded by even more stunningly beautiful scenery, but the climb up there was really bad. Everyone says it’s a hike, but man - it’s REALLY A HIKE. I think the poor tour guide seriously thought I was going to collapse and die at any moment. Even I wasn’t entirely convinced I would survive it. I blame it on the flu. Still, I’m never trying that again unless I can be sure the horses and carriages will be running!

Okay, I’ll stop now. I could tell you every single detail of every single day, but I already made my sister sit through that - it took two installments to tell it all - so I’ll spare you. Instead, here are my zillion and one photos:

Kristein in Germany photoset at Flickr.

And I’ll sum up the trip this way: I had fun, but next time I go to Europe, I’m taking a watch I know how to set!

Edited to add:
I’ve had a request for more details, so here you go! Some random moments from our trip:

I even had to go into work yesterday, fresh from my flu diagnosis, to gather up materials to work on the story from home. I touched nothing on my way in and out, and I shut the door to my office and posted a Quarantine sign on the door because a closed door at work usually inspires curiosity and makes people pop in to ask why, exactly, your door is closed.

The good news is the doctor says I should be completely better and uncontagious by Monday. He prescribed Darwin some of the anti-viral medicine, too, so maybe he can ward off the flu entirely.

I caught it from my mom, who caught it from my dad. It all happened so fast, and it’s really no surprise we three caught it considering how stressed we’ve been essentially working two full-time jobs each.

I can’t wait till my vacation. Now if only I can stay awake long enough to finish reading The Packing Book and listen to a few more One Minute German lessons, I’ll be all set!

(Excuse me if this post makes no sense - I almost fell asleep four times while writing it.)

An inventory of the room included the following:

The extra vintage light fixtures I bought cheap on eBay intending to have them rewired but never did.

The extra rugs we bought cheap at auctions and haven’t found a place for yet.

The extra Eastlake bed we’re planning to replace ours with one day when we get our master bedroom finished. Ha.

The extra fainting couch that will also go in said master bedroom in case I should need to faint or sit down while pulling on boots.

The extra clothes that haven’t fit me since 2002.

The extra clothes that do fit but are off season.

The extra curtains we took down from the living room “temporarily” two years ago.

The extra wire hangers - I hate wire hangers, don’t use them myself, yet we somehow have an enormous stockpile of them.

Besides the extras, there were some typical junk-room things - a taxidermy deer head (yes, I said a deer head); a jewelry box I crackle-painted four years ago and never finished; mismatched luggage; two boxes of stuff I keep meaning to donate; a box of cookbooks that belonged to my late uncle (including In the Kitchen With Miss Piggy); expired bottles of hot sauce from some long-ago Christmas gift basket; touch-up paint for my car; a bowling ball some friend of Darwin’s gave him; two mandolins; and a box of things from Darwin’s bedroom at his parents’ house, including a Rambo action figure, a poster from Wackadoo Zoo (a play in which Darwin starred in elementary school), and a vividly embarrassing Valentine’s Day card from me covered with a sappy collage of happy couples and containing the words “eight-month-i-versary.”

Now, most of that stuff has found a “home” elsewhere in the house. I finally put those cookbooks on a shelf, which made me happy. Darwin hung the deer head up on the wall in the bedroom, which made me less happy, but at least it’s out of the floor.

So about the same time this big empty room became available, our neighbors offered us a full size mattress and box springs. We decided that antique bed should no longer be wasted leaning against a wall - we should set it up and have an extra guest bedroom.

We rolled out one of the extra rugs, set up the bed and measured the width, and Darwin quickly cut some slats from leftover boards around the house. I found some sheets and an extra side table for a nightstand, and we were ready to go. It looked so pretty and promising!

But when we went to put the box springs on the bed, we ran into a problem - it didn’t fit. We hadn’t bothered to measure it because we thought beds and mattresses were standard size. Silly, silly us not accounting for the fact that nothing is ever simple or standard with old stuff.

We almost broke the bed trying to force the box springs inside the frame. Finally we gave up and extracted the now-wedged box springs with some effort. Now we measured and discovered the mattress was 2 inches too long. Maybe this was a weirdo mattress, so we went and measured the other one in the guest room, but it was the same, too.

*SIGH*

So now the room is all cleaned out, a lovely bright rug is down on the floor … and the bed is propped against the wall once again.

Still, I no longer feel that slumping-shoulders feeling every time I walk into the room. I feel a little jolt of pleasure because this room is no longer “extra.” It is tidy and attractive, and it has a purpose.