Well, ok, actually he took a plane. The point is that Raj left this morning for three weeks. In his luggage:
What, you don't travel with 500 condoms?
He SAYS they're for the Marines under his flight surgeon care. Hopefully, lugging all of those condoms along will save him some work in STD treatment when they get back. And save you, the taxpayers, money on antibiotics.
(Related: one of the corpsmen at Raj's clinic put out condoms in bowls labeled Small and Large. As I'm sure you assumed, the Large bowl was quickly emptied while the Small bowl remained untouched. They were all the very same condoms.)
My immediate plans include a bath, dinner of wine and brownies, a new episode of What Not to Wear, and taking up as much of the bed as is five foot six inch humanly possible.
No, I am not crazy enough to make brownies when I know I'll be home alone with them. My next door neighbor brought them over earlier. I met her yesterday when she was setting out on a walk with her husband and baby. I was coming in from the grocery store and spent the entirety of our conversation clutching a huge pack of toilet paper. Naturally. I finally learned enough from previous experience to ask at the end of our conversation what her name was again, then silently chanted her and her husband's names until I got inside and could text them to Raj. We have a collective inability to remember names of people, even after having met and talked to them multiple times. We're working on it.
I did buy the wine myself, making sure it had a cap, not cork. We still haven't gotten our stuff and in a display of poor self-awareness, didn't put a corkscrew in our express shipment. We did put in my new Kitchen Aid coffeemaker though! And the commissaries here sell Kona coffee. Hot damn. Except when I pushed the button this morning, nothing happened. No coffee! And in my Left Alone in a Foreign Country hour of need! Outrageous. At least I know that Kitchen Aid will send me a new one. And it's good motivation to go run first thing in the morning since there's a Starbucks on the way home. This morning it was pouring rain though, so I made do with tea. It was...you know...not coffee.
On a happier note, our lawncare needs are solved. We are uninterested in buying a lawn mower and trimmer for our little bitty yard. My search for a lawn service turned up a 14 year-old boy who lives in our neighborhood and works on the cheap. Done. He even offered to start tonight, but my total cash on hand is one dollar. He doesn't work quite that cheap. I didn't ask whether he accepts yen.
I'm hoping to soon be very busy with unpacking, should our stuff arrive at some point. In the meantime, there's writing, running, and exploring to do. This is one of those times when it's going to work out really well for our marriage that I genuinely do enjoy being alone. I'll miss Raj of course, but three weeks isn't really all that long for us. (Wait until June when it'll be more like five months. That will be a real bummer.) This could even end up being good motivation for me to try to make some friends here.
Don't worry about me, Internet. I've got chocolate and HGTV. Zero condoms. All set.
