Ingredients:

1 Star Trek:TNG apéritif
2 fingers Oban
1 (each) chaser Buffy and Notting Hill

Result: one very amusing evening. Day Three of vacation for the worn-out engineer, in fact. By 9:30, Jeff was laughing at all of my jokes, not just the funny ones.We've gotten a little spoiled in the past few weeks; our exposure to TV commercials is fairly limited now that we have a TiVo to speed through them. Tonight we picked up on the tail end of Notting Hill, and had no buffer to zap through commercials.

So he (see Oban) and I (see mental tiredness from finishing new cat.net skin) watched commercials, and made fun of them with the best middle-of-the-evening gusto we could muster.

Until we got to the inexplicable commercial, that is. Seemingly unconnected images flashed by. It took us a few seconds before we both realized that every shot was zeroing in on the hindquarters of the people we were watching.

"What is this, a butt commercial?"

"No idea."

Enough of those odd little musings. Tonight's storms have done their damage and moved on, and we had nothing this time except a lot of wind and more rain. Even skittish Edmund slept through it, so it definitely was one of the weaker storms we've had this week.

I've been toying with the idea of giving myself a bit of a mini-vacation from posting here for a few days. I know that won't happen, though; the best way to guarantee that something entry-worthy will happen tomorrow is for me to definitively announce tonight that I want to take a few days off. So consider this an officially wishy-washy statement of saying something like this:"I really want to take a day or two off from this, really I do, I swear, but I know that by saying anything to you that I've totally jinxed things."

It was a rather late hour, later than I cared to admit, when I tiptoed in from the guest bedroom to our bedroom. Jeff was mostly awake, but not quite, as I slipped in under the covers and snuggled up next to him.

"I had bad dreams last night," I said, leaving it at that. Jeff has shared the same bed with me long enough to know that when I have bad dreams, I tend to awaken out of them only to go right back in them. The end result: a long night, filled with multiple awakenings, with little useful sleep actually acquired. When nights like this happen, I end up moving to the guest bedroom so that Jeff, at least, will get a quiet night of sleep.

Morning was almost over, but the sluggish darkness from around the mini-blinds spoke of storm clouds, making it appear much earlier in the morning. Behind my head, the rain slashed against the windowpane. Perfect. He yawned, I yawned, and pulled the covers up to my neck.

You face right, I face left.

You have your pile of CDs and I have mine. I am staring squarely at the cover to Leftfield's Rhythm and Stealth while you rip a compilation Gipsy Kings album. We've joked so long about doing this that it seems almost a little strange that at last, we're making good on our promise of finally taking our CD collection and ripping the songs to mp3.

"Ok, listen to this. See if you can't tell me who this is."

It starts nibbling at you around track 5: he's building up to something here, but you can't figure out what it is. It doesn't focus until halfway through track 6 of CD 1; probably because you're busy and not really paying much attention to the sonic hints he's giving.

Ours was pizza, pieces swiped directly from the box, fingers wiped indiscriminately on the lid to rid them of the excess oil. We sat on the little step between the kitchen and what would become the living room, laughing self-consciously at how our voices echoed in the empty room.

The floor, at that particular moment, was nothing but concrete. Our first task after taking possession of our new house was to rip up every shred of carpeting, to prepare the house for the laying-down of newer, better carpet. We'd chosen to sink some extra money into the carpet allowance we'd received from the previous owners, and we intended to get good-quality carpeting with thick padding.Our voices echoed off the walls, the concrete, the ceiling. When we walked around, the steps echoed throughout the house, and we sat there on the edge of the step, looking around at this building—floors, windows, ceilings, fans, doors—in wonder and astonishment because it was ours.