A train of thought

There's a much-beloved blog that I link to on the side, Julia's Hippogriffs, which is funny and awesome when she describes her kids and sometimes talks about her too-attractive husband. She's written it before, years ago, almost word-for-word, and last week she wrote
I frequently read - entirely in the comments of advice columns, I admit - about how hard it is to be married. This is not my experience at all. Being married to Steve is the easiest thing in the world and every single day I marvel at how lucky I was to meet him and how bizarre it is that none of the things that initially interested me (his green/gold/brown eyes, chiseled jaw and automobile figuring largely) have anything to do with how happy I am now. He makes me laugh.
And this brings ire to her in the comments. It also bugs me because it does seem kind of neener-neener-ish. But obviously she's glossing over. He goes to his farm for a week at a time, leaving her with all three kids. She has anxiety attacks. One of their kids is a genius of some sort but also has some permanent sinus infection. They have an organized, if traditional, division of labor. He works (from home) and she has the kids and the house and the cooking. Would the marriage be harder if he had to clean more or if she worked outside the home? The way they have made their life seems to cause them no strife but obviously, that's partly personality and partly a matter of life-choices that suited those personalities.  I bristled at the "Being married to Steve is the easiest thing in the world." It IS kind of braggy but I think she's saying more than, "aren't I lucky?"  I don't think she's saying that there's no strife, just that even in the strife, there's an easy knowledge that this is the person with whom the strife is supposed to take place. That the hardness isn't about marriage--that hardness is about being a human and it's nice, when it works out and you marry someone that likes you despite the fact that you are sometimes a hard person or that he is sometimes a hard person. It's easy to fight/disagree/argue when fundamentally you know that person knows you're hard and difficult and knows that he himself can be hard and difficult and manages to still find you funny and still manages to be funny. Marriage isn't hard. Life is.

And so hard  is life when the children are throwing up on both a Friday night and a Saturday night. Why can't kids throw up in the day time? Is there a law against the light of day and viruses? Viruses are vampiric enough, no? Can't a kid say around noon, hey, I don't feel well, and find his or her way to the toilet? Must the moaning ensue around 11:00 p.m and last until 3 a.m.? And why, when the kids finally fall back asleep, why can't I go back to sleep?

However, when I slept fitfully between 11 and 3, I had a dream about my friend Craig, who died 3 years ago, maybe almost 4, while climbing in Japan. It was so nice to see him. He reminds me of Ralph Fiennes playing Voldemort. Not in the way Voldemort is evil but in the way Fiennes twists his hands around. Also, Voldemort is bald and so was Craig. Craig gesticulated a lot and in the dream, he twisted and turned his hands while he explained how he'd escaped his fall and had just taken awhile to get back to his girlfriend and his ex-wife, he told me as we sat at a very blue bar. It was a good dream.

The dream of mozzarella was close but not quite perfection. The meltiness of mozzarella: I think the mozz I made was better raw than cooked. On the pizza, it developed a slightly slippery texture that reminded me too much of milk. Maybe that's because now that I made it, I knew its root texture, which was slippery milk. Next time, I will make cheddar.