GrumpysMonkey

I was chatting with friends this weekend and it struck me that I utter that statement a fair amount. “Back when I was married… err, married before…” But I’m married now. Happily. Very happily. So why does this statement semi-regularly come out of my mouth? It took me a couple of days, but I think I realize now why I say this.

My married life is divided into two pieces. The first piece, the bad piece, lasted almost 6 years. Yes, there was some good in there, but really, I knew from the beginning that things were not good and the amount of time I spent miserable was, well… the majority of the marriage.

The second piece, the good piece, has lasted less than 18 months thusfar (no, there is no portent of doom here or any reason for anyone to worry. We are very happy and never have I even had a fleeting thought otherwise.). This time that I have spent married and happy is just a small piece of the time I spent married and miserable. So when I am telling stories about the married and miserable time, my brain just seems to assume that married = miserable = not where I am now.

It isn’t that I don’t think I’m married. John is my husband. I have never been tempted to refer to him as anything else since we married. Emotionally, we were “joined”, long before the actual legal ceremony. If you ask me what my husband’s name is, you will only get John’s. If you ask me if I’m married, I will immediately answer yes. Yet somewhere in my brain, the assumption is that since I’m happy, I’m not married (since married = miserable). I expect that as the time I spend married and happy grows, and the time since I was married and miserable also grows, I will eventually stop uttering this phrase and it will merely become “when I was married to my ex” or “in my old life” or something like that.

We were supposed to be in central Mass today. In fact, in about an hour we should have been going out for dinner with John’s family to celebrate his parents 50th anniversary! Unfortunately, we are home in Seattle. Why?

That’s about a foot of snow on our patio. It snowed last Wednesday night. We got about 3-4 inches and lots of ice. This meant that on Thursday (the day we were supposed to fly out), we couldn’t get the car up the hill. So we called JetBlue and moved our flight to Friday night (for free… they were allowing anyone flying through Boston that day to reschedule for free).

On Friday, we put chains on the car and drove up the first street and parked. Ok, all good, we can use the chains to get up the second hill. Except for the fact that the chains fell off. Apparently we have crappy chains and we didn’t put them on very well. So we got stuck again. We trudged back home, resigned to lose some money on our flight since we’d have to cancel. But then… the phone rang. It was JetBlue. They CANCELLED our flight to Boston that night. So, we got a full refund! Turns out Boston had a ground stop and they weren’t letting any inbound flights take off.

At that point, we resigned ourselves to spending Christmas at home, alone. We’d love to be in Central Mass. We’d love to be with John’s family.  I love his family. I would love to be with them for Christmas, even moreso since we haven’t seen them in a whole year (well, we saw his parents this summer, at least that’s something). But we haven’t seen the kids or his sisters in a year. But, at least we got a full refund on the flight so we can find a time this spring to go back.

Sunday was supposed to be the day that Seattle basically closed for business. Winds, snow, freezing rain… it was supposed to be Snowpocalypse 2008. For what it’s worth, every time we get snow here in Seattle, they dub it snowpocalypse. Seattle just doesn’t operate in the snow.

So yesterday morning, we bundled up and went walking for coffee, lunch, and supplies for the next few days. It was lovely out. Cold, clear, and very icy. But I managed to walk about 2 miles without falling, a huge feat for me.

We split up after lunch, since John walks a lot faster in the snow than I go and he went to the grocery store. He came back home carrying a Christmas tree! My wonderful husband carried a 4 ft Christmas tree home (along with a huge and heavy bag of groceries) well over a mile!

We’ll decorate it today since… well… we’re pretty much trapped in the house. It started to snow about the time I got home after lunch yesterday (3:30) and it just kept snowing most of the night. We’ve got about a foot total so far and it’s off and on snowing again today.

Hopefully we’ll be able to leave the neighborhood in a car by Tuesday. Reports are that it should warm up just a bit by then. Right now it’s 30 and that’s the warmest it’s been in a few days. But we’ve got enough food, enough liquor, and plenty of blankets and logs for the fire. I’ve got a few days to figure out what to make for Christmas dinner. It will be a quiet Christmas, but we’ll be together, and that’s what’s important. It’s too bad we can’t spend Christmas with either of our families, but we’ll be with both of them in spirit.

• I’m not eating that. It’s got weird stuff in it, like arugula!
• She’s like a breath of fresh air (speaking of Sarah-you-have-to-pay-for-your-own-rape-kit-Palin)
• Who needs to text message? It’s a waste.

How in the world do I come from these people? I love them, but I don’t understand them and I certainly don’t agree with them very much.

You’ve probably noticed that our IMs, Twitters, Facebook status updates, and replies to any but the simplest emails have been rather… negative. Well, it’s been a rough few weeks. John’s job has pretty much taken over our lives and made both of us miserable.

It really hit home for me when I realized that one of my few "rules" of life was broken by his job. You see, when I was married before, we had a TV in the bedroom. Over the years, the TV in the bedroom was on whenever we were in the bedroom. As you might expect, this sort of ruined any chance for intimacy or even conversation in the bedroom. So when I moved out on my own, I decided that never again would I have a TV in the bedroom.

There are more reasons for it than just intimacy though. I have sleep issues and one of the first things a sleep doctor tells you is to remove all distractions from the bedroom. No computers, no reading, no writing, no work, no TV, no video games. The bed is for sleep and sex and that’s it.

We’ve done very well with this up until this new job. Sure, I read in bed once in a while, but that’s definitely the exception rather than the rule. The treadmill is in the bedroom, and I bring the computer in there sometimes when I’m on the treadmill, but the way the bedroom is arranged, that half of the room is really separate from where the bed is. So overall, until recently, the bedroom was exclusively for the two uses I referenced above.

But this new job requires John to answer the phone 24 hours a day. If he misses a call, he needs to call back within 5 minutes. So his work phone (and email) migrated into the bedroom. Even if I was OK with him working most Saturdays, I was (and am) most definitely not OK with work in the bedroom.

So that’s a little of what’s been going on. We’re working on it, and if anyone was worried at our twitters and status updates, we are ok. We love each other, and no matter what crap life throws at us (there was also major boat sale disappointment this week), we will figure it out.

But if anyone has a line on a community related position in Seattle or Bellevue or Redmond that has an opening and little to no on-call work, John could really use a new job.