This cactus-gram stings even more than your abandonment…

Is anyone still out there?  I know, I know, I’m a bad blogger.  Add this to the list of things I’ve tried, been gung-ho about for a few months, and then fizzled on.  You know, like my juice diet, work out plans, sobriety…  Consider this post my Valentine’s day cactus-gram to apologize for being lame.

But that cactus-gram line from Juno isn’t just an homage to how much bone-dry sarcasm tickles me, it’s because I have Juno on the brain.  NO!  I’m NOT pregnant (although human gestation seems to be on everyone’s minds these day, which is great, as long as my uterus isn’t involved).  No, it’s because my husband has actually succumbed to illness.  Every once in a while, he gets a cold, but it’s usually well-timed right dab-smack in the middle of a weekend or holiday, never during capitalist/market hours.  After all, that’s not his own time, that time belongs to “the firm.”  My husband, being the finance/work-machine that he is (the man has a calculator collection with he, himself being the largest in his collection), he usually doesn’t allow himself to get sick during his 6/7 workdays per week.

Yet today, he worked from home in the morning.  Yes, that’s right, he took an ALMOST sick day.  It took my insisting that he should not go in with a 102 fever for him to sleep an extra hour before running to the computer to make an 8AM conference call wearing no less than 8 layers of clothing and a winter hat.  After a brunch of Theraflu, takeout soup, and 2 Mucinex D, he disappeared into the bathroom and emerged 30 minutes later fully dressed and heading out the door to go into the office for the rest of the day, deliriously mumbling, “so much to do… so much to do…”  I don’t know if anyone on his team reads this blog, but if they do, they might want to invest in Purell.

He’s promised not to work late today and to have soup at home vs. his daily infusion of Chipotle.  That’s right, people, I work at a gourmet cheese shop (ooo, so fancy!) and my husband subsists on a steady diet of mass-produced burrito.   What can you do?  Not tonight, though.  I have a chicken in a pot and am making him a week’s worth of chicken soup with bow-tie noodles — if you know my husband, you know that he loves the bow ties.  And not in that fake, metro-sexual, hipster chic way that looks RIDICULOUS.  No, he came out of the womb loving bow ties and I think it’s a major part of his 20-something going on 70-something charm.  Bow-ties and long, slow walks through the park for exercise… Someday he’ll grow into these quirks.

The problem with being well-intentioned and horribly short-sighted is that it all usually ends in tears.  I decided sometime last week to finally tackle that giant bag of black, line-dry laundry that I’ve been accumulating over the last few months, and then since I only have one drying rack, I hung most of it to dry over any and every surface of my apartment — where it still hangs to this very day.  Do you know where this is going yet?  Juno references, chicken soup cooking, apartment upholstered in clean laundry…

“She smells like soup. Have you ever smelled her? I mean, her whole house smells like soup!” Yep, that’s me.  I’m Soupy-Sales.  Basically, everything I wear for the next month is going to wreak of chicken stock.  People will stop referring to me as “that girl who smells like stinky cheese” and start referring to me as, “that girl who smells like stinky cheese and chicken noodle soup.”  EVERYTHING smells like soup!!!  Between that and the ridiculous amount of heat being pumped through my co-op (only between the MOST useless hours of the day, shutting off right in time to leave you shivering in the wee-hours of the AM), I feel like an ever-plumping matzo-ball simmering in an apartment of chicken soup… and yes, I’m getting more spherical by the moment.

Oh, and by the way – I’m not giving you the stink eye, that’s just my face.