Acheivement
I just made the E laugh so hard his eyes leaked.
It was a wonderful moment and it capped off a rather SHITTY three weeks, with nothing sold and this blog unfed and therefore, my only connection to SANITY not fed or watered, or perhaps reinforced or created at all.
Not that our past three weeks have been hard as a COUPLE. I mean, we're soul mates and life mates and that is obvious to even the most casual observer, so although we do have our bad times as a couple, they tend to last shorter than 48 hours and are not, perhaps, all that remarkable, as a whole. I've been in very few "relationships", or in fact anything that resembles the word if you didn't look too closely, but I DO have a sense of what a bad relationship is and we absolutely don't have one, which is to say that we are approaching riding off into the sunset together but have no idea about the lay of the land ahead. (Are there roadside diners? Are there sudden canyons? We can't be sure.)
WHAT I'M SAYING HERE is that no one with a lick of sense or an ounce of self-preservation gets into business with their life mate at all. I said that to the E today. We were at lunch, and he suggested going on an overnight horseback ride. And with what money I have NO idea, and since its MY job in both the relationship and the business to make the money, you can perhaps understand why I'm a little touchy about that, but really I'm just as bad, because I have this inbound desire to earn enough money, and to make us successful enough, to take him to Iceland, because he's always wanted to go, and where the money for THAT is going to come from I don't know either.
ANYWAY. He suggested this overnight horseback camping trip, and he is (almost) certainly a better seat than I am, but I love animals and would love to go, and so we talked about it, as lovers do, over a table outside on a beautiful Seattle day when we'd already been to the doctor, the banker, and the bicycle maker, and I'm aware that has barely any relationship to the old poem and I'm only somewhat sorry about it. And then he said, "Well, we could maybe try a one- or -two hour trip first, to see if we handled it okay."
And this was, in fact, a very prudent suggestion, and I said as much. "That's a very prudent suggestion,"I said.
Because to be fair he has been sick for going on ten years now, on full disability, really too sick to stand up, some days, and I've been sick for about a year, but am improving, but both of those things are really quite tied to our backs, both of which might, in fact, COMPLAIN about being strapped to a horse and riding over any kind of terrain whatsoever.
And so it would be prudent to try out this horseback idea for a shorter time than, say, a DAMN WEEKEND in which you're probably STUCK somewhere OUT ON A TRAIL, right? (Although I'm sure whatever company we went through would have some way of dealing this, but still. GAH.) Hence my use of this term, "prudent."
And I followed it up with: "And in fact, I'm impressed, because I have never really suspected you of having the ability (beat pause) to do ANYTHING in the prudent fashion."
And this stud, the love of my life, looked right back at me and said, "Well. You raise an interesting point. I mean, I CAN do things in the prudent fashion, and I'd like to raise the particular example of Exhibit A, back in 1998, which I realize is before your time,* so you'll have to take my word for it. And it was exhausting and way more work than it was worth, and so I did it one time and I'll probably never do it again. But I CAN."
*The E is, in fact, only three-and-a-half years older than I am. I was most definitely around in 1998, but the man will have his joke.
