In Which Ms. Ravelled Impersonates an Evil Troll…

Click on this link. Look at the picture that accompanies the article, and then at the title of the article. Then look back at those flowers and tell me, does anything strike you funny about them?

I subscribe to that newsletter because I am a passionate [if non-practicing] believer in marriage. And I also have a non-prurient interest in what constitutes “healthy and normal” intimate relations, should the day arrive when I am able to be a practicing believer. My field research has left me, umm, a bit shell-shocked.

That subject wasn’t something that I wanted to discuss with my parents. Therefore, I didn’t know how to discuss it with either husband. [Well, I *did* have a brief discussion with First Hubby when we became friends again six years ago, but it was perfectly chaste and entirely philosophical.] And when I mentioned a concern to my gynecologist, thirty years ago, he gave me some specific advice that might have been useful if I hadn’t gotten embarrassed and started doing multiplication tables in my head to drown him out.

I now have a female gynecologist; I could probably ask her, if there were a need. Which, presently, there is not.

I think most of us want to know that who we are and what we want, in any aspect of our lives, is normal. And I think that that certainty is crucial in our intimate life, if we have one. To know that we are cherished by our beloved, and to able to stand confidently before our Maker because our relations with our beloved are apropos.

[Is it warm in here, or is it just me?] Time for a little comic relief.

1. Firstborn called me from work yesterday, asking if I need more boxes. Which I do. She said that she would bring me about eight, with lids; one of her coworkers had built a fort of empty boxes around the desk of another coworker, who was away from her desk. And that as soon as the second coworker [who apparently has no sense of humor] cooled down, they would take down the fort and carry the boxes out to Firstborn’s car.

2. My chair at my desk at work has developed a moaning squeak when I scoot around on the carpet protector. I think it’s in the key of Q. And it’s not a reek-reek-reek kind of sound, more like a woah-oah-oah. As if a tuba were trying to give birth, with trombone descant. [Hovanhess would be pleased.]

3. I am having wonderful learning experiences while riding the train. Today I was surrounded by young men going home for the weekend from Job Corps, to visit their mothers for my least favorite holiday. The young man who was sitting next to me was talking to the one across from me, and he used the phrase “smoked him like a Philly bl*nt”. I wasn’t sure that I’d heard the whole phrase, though I got his meaning. When the other two young men left the train, I asked if I had heard him correctly, and the very proper businessman sitting across the aisle cracked up, “Pffft!” If he’d been drinking coffee, we would all have been baptized.

I can’t wait to see the expression on LittleBit’s face when I repeat the story to her. [She just about died last week when I told one of our elders that I will be “going to church in the ’hood” after I move. I will be living in a transitional but respectable neighborhood. My new ward is urban and umpteen kinds of diverse, and the meetinghouse borders a somewhat iffy neighborhood, and I am not worried in the slightest, because I know that that is where I am supposed to be.]

Cue Billy Joel.

Tune in tomorrow for a road trip, two acquisitions, and a photo or two.