Odds and Possibly More Ends

Storm
A torrent of rain pounded against the roof just after Meg left for work. The wind blew dark clouds from the south, accompanied by the occasional lightning strike and thunder clap. Water poured off the terracotta tiles in streamlets, until the side yard was a river several inches deep.
I sat under the back yard overhang avoiding most of the water spraying in from the side and watched the whole affair for a half hour.
An half hour? A half hour? I’ve had the a/an question come up in my mind numerous times this last week. I’m not sure what the answer is. When I speak in my dialect of English, I say “a half” and "a history," but I also say “an hour.” I realize that [h] is really the unvoiced vowel of the sound that follows it, which affects the ultimate determination of the a/an preceding words that begin with [h]. Nonetheless, the vagueness of which to pick irks me.
Where was I? Oh yes, the storm. The storm was the strongest I’ve seen since we moved to this house, and certainly the most water I’ve seen pouring off my roof in one sitting. I started to fret that the river forming on the side of my house is going to flood my house or undermine the foundation. The ground on that side, for whatever reason, was designed to slope towards the house, which is never a good idea unless one intends to build a moat next to the house. Fortunately for me, my moat seeped into the ground shortly after it stopped raining.
Invasion of the Diary Snatcher!
Last week, whilst sitting on the back porch trying not to be bored, I pulled up my diary post about Politics and Healthcare on Meg’s iPad (while it’s the type that does not connect directly to cell phone towers for an extra fee, I did manage to connect to a neighbor’s unsecured wifi network). I’d been talking to Meg about writing about healthcare and wanted to get her opinion about it. I handed the iPad over to her and contented myself to reading an atheist blog with the considerably smaller screen of my iPhone.
She read the diary post, remarking about a few lines here and there. Meg’s mom joined us on the porch, and despite it being about 10 AM*, asked us if we wanted a beer. We both declined, and she retrieved a Heineken from the fridge and her own iPad, and we sat in relative silence looking like an Apple commercial.
* Meg’s mom is quite a sober, pleasant lady. She just happened to want a beer, is all.
Meg started to read backwards from my latest entries. I started to wonder, Uh oh, what if I have something in there that I don’t want her to read? My mind raced back through my entries, searching for damning ones. I thought about one in particular, the one about my business trip to Anaheim, in which I said:
My mind drifted with my imagination, wondering what it would be like to sleep with MB. We’re both married, and she’s never shown an inkling of interest—and even if she did, I would never bite. Just my stupid imagination. She’s good looking—pretty black hair, nice shape, tan skin, white teeth when she smiles. She also is smart—I’ve worked with her with numerous projects, and there are few people smarter at the credit union. I’m married, I reminded myself, and let the idea drift away as the conversation continued.
At the time I had made the diary entry private, since the whole post talks about co-workers, with truncated names. And also for admitting that I felt attracted to MB. Especially because I admitted that.
I’ve never told Meg about it. She’s aware that I get aroused by other women. She’s said a number of times that she’s fine with me looking at porn, and she looks at porn now and then herself. She isn’t aroused by porn like I am though, and is usually much more aroused by erotic stories or “sexy situations,” as she calls them.
But I’ve never talked to Meg about getting attracted to MB, because, well, it was different. MB is a woman I know in “real life,” not some pictures of a woman I found online. It felt much darker, since there was the real possibility of straying from my marriage vows, and had to censure my own thoughts, thoughts I’ve never had for the women of porn.
So the damning entry with my admission of attraction for MB lay in the reading queue for Meg. And Meg’s a speed reader. I briefly contemplated deleting the business trip entry and hoped she didn’t read it yet. I even excused myself and carried my phone to the upstairs bedroom, where I brought up my diary and looked at the entry. Should I delete it? I looked at it a long time, and then shut it off and plugged it in to charge.
“What are you doing?” Meg asked, walking into the room.
I jumped. “Plugging in my phone,” I said, omitting the part about deleting a diary entry before she read it.
“I feel like going fishing,” she said, setting the iPad down on the dresser. “Want to come with me?”
As we headed out, I flipped on the iPad and saw that she was on an older entry already. So she’d read it. Did she care?
Later, while we lay in bed in the dark, I said, “I hope I didn’t offend you with anything I wrote.”
“No, no,” Meg said. “I’m glad I got to learn a little more about you, the things you don’t tell me.”
Perhaps that was her hint to things I’d written about MB, but I think Meg just meant it in general. Relief started to trickle back into me. She wasn’t angry or jealous.
“I was surprised at all the times you said I was unhappy,” she continued. “All those times I’ve said I don’t like my job.”
“You do complain about your job a lot,” I said. “I hope I didn’t make you feel bad?”
“No—it was just surprising. I’m sorry I complain about my job so much,” she said.
Meg Gets a New Job
Meg actually did get a new job. She found out today that she will be transferring to work in the Cardiac ICU on August 19th. She’s currently working on a general step-down unit at a hospital. They make her a charge nurse quite a bit, which she absolutely hates. Once she transfers to ICU, she won’t have to be a charge nurse anymore.
As she read the ICU manager’s email today, she swung around in her charge, squeaked a few excited words, and kissed me. That’s the Meg I like to see.
Super MVD Fee Calculator
Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to think of a way to make a super MVD fee calculator for work. Some sort of simple Adobe form with underlying JavaScript formulas, and PDFs of all the necessary MVD forms following, which will fill out automatically. Something tells me it’s overambitious, that it would be too complicated for staff to use.
Hell, I’d use it, but I’m not a Member Service Rep anymore.
I’ll probably table the idea and return to it a few years from now.
I’m always coming up with little technological projects to make everyone’s lives better at work though. My mind works six months faster than I can actually get work done. I wish I had taught myself programming languages earlier in life; I sure could use some JavaScript and Visual Basic knowledge these days.