Burning the Midnight Oil

It's just about midnight and I should be a good way into writing my review of The Producers, the show we saw tonight. But I can never come home from a show and just sit down and write. I have to fritter away some time reading Facebook status updates, the e-mail, playing a couple of games of Free Cell, getting something to eat and finally, after thoughts of the show have percolated sufficiently in my brain, starting the review.

In the past, I would start the review and once I had a feel for how it was going to go, I would go to sleep and finish as soon as I got up in the morning. But the new person who handles reviews comes to work earlier than Derrick did and I can't get away with that now. She likes to have it when she gets to work, around 6:30 a.m., which means, I can't go to sleep until I get the review written.

It's been kind of a strange day. The caption for the Photo of the Day yesterday said that Walt had returned home from his week-plus in Boston, but that wasn't quite accurate. He had left Boston at the time I wrote yesterday's entry, but his flight path home included a plane change in D.C. (at Dulles) and, on arrival at Dulles, first hearing that there was a flight delay and then that the flight had been canceled. So the airline put the whole flight (nonstop, D.C. to Sacramento) up in a hotel, where they checked in at midnight and had a wake-up call for 3 a.m. because their flight departed at 7.

According to the airline web site, this was a special flight and it was due in at 9:40 a.m. here. It takes about 30 minutes to drive to the airport and I was just on my way out to the freeway when I got a text message from Walt saying they had just landed. Must have been some tailwind!

Whenever Walt is away for a length of time, like a week (or in this case more than a week), there is always a little readjustment to make when he comes home. Things that I do or don't do while he's gone are things that he doesn't do or does do when he gets back. Little things like turning off my fan before we left the house, to save that bit of energy that the little thing uses up. But the fan is very old and very temperamental and if you turn it off, it takes 20 minutes before it gets up to speed again when you turn it on. I know that, but Walt doesn't, so when I came into the warm office, I expected to sit down and have the fan blowing on me, but it was turned off...and it took, as I said, 20 minutes before it got its engine up to speed again (I understand that--it works the same way before I get my engine going again!)

With there being another person in the house, I have to cook regular meals, not pick out of leftovers in the fridge. Stuff like that. I know Walt has those same mental adjustments to make as well. I am not an easy person to live with, I realize. In a day or two we are back in sync again, but it's always the minor adjustment of having to share a house again.

We also have a houseguest again. Cappy is back, his "Mom" headed off for a week. I agreed to take him back, since it worked out so well when he was here for 2 weeks. Unfortunately, dunderhead me, I thought he was coming on Wednesday and when I looked at my cell phone in the car on the way to the show (I had left it in the car the day before), I had a message from Cappy's "Mom" that she would bring him by within a couple of hours. I had to call her to tell her I was in Sacramento and wouldn't be home until 10:30 p.m. She was supposed to be on the far side of Sacramento at that time, but we made arrangements to meet in mid-town, and then she decided to stay in Davis after all and wait for me, so I felt guilty about that.

Cappy and the other dogs, who were such good friends a month ago, are going through the same re-adjustment that Walt and I are going through, getting back together again. You can feel the undercurrent of tension, which will be gone by the time the four of them share breakfast in the morning. But readjustments, even fairly innocuous ones, are always a bit awkward.

...and now that I've written this and frittered away sufficient time, it's time to tackle that review....