I actually went to bed at a reasonable time last night. Now, for me, reasonable is, like, midnight, but considering my usual bedtime is around 3AM, it seems positively sensible to go to bed any time when the number ends with "PM." I mostly did it because I was really fucking tired, but I have to admit, it's always entertaining to go to bed at the same time as Jamie. Most nights, he goes to bed between 11 and 12, and I follow several hours later. So when we go to bed at the same time, he gets very confused by the whole other person in the bed thing, and it cracks me up. Of course, it does mean I don't get to bug him when I go to bed (he doesn't even remember anything I do or say in the middle of the night, and it's very hard to resist having conversations with him that he won't remember.), but once in a while it makes for an amusing way to pass the time.

Hi. I'm a bad wife.

It kind of cracks me up sometimes. You hear all the bad stereotypes about shitty husbands. He never helps out around the house. He never helps with dinner. He always leaves the toilet seat up. He never changes the toilet paper. Et cetera. Except in this house, it's totally me that does all of that. Ok, I don't leave the toilet seat up, but I do leave the lid up, whereas Jamie is always very careful to put the lid down. (I hate having the lid down because if you're making a mad dash for the bathroom, as I frequently seem to do, it's just one extra step that stands between you and sweet relief.) I usually change the toilet paper when it runs out, but more than once I've just been too damn lazy to change it when there's only a few squares left. (In my defense, however, Jamie does the same thing sometimes. And it always seems to be Karen who gets stuck with the lack of toilet paper when he does it - I at least do it right before I go to bed or in the middle of the night so I know he's the one who will have to change it.)

I do make dinner fairly often, but whenever I do I expect lavish praise for doing so. Now, I am very careful to always thank Jamie whenever he cooks, but he does it a lot more often than I do. (It will probably even out a little bit now that work has settled down for me somewhat.)

But helping out around the house? My god. I am so freaking lazy. Jamie does the dishes 99% of the time, shovels the walks, rakes the leaves (depending on the season), tidies up when people are coming over (unless it's Karen and Paul, who have the dubious distinction of being not-requiring-cleaning friends. Sorry about that, guys.), wipes the counters, and does things like spending all afternoon putting up Christmas lights because he knows how much I like them. (He likes them too, and is much more anal than I am. I would have wound a couple of strands around a tree and called it a day, but he clipped every single freaking bulb to the eavestrough and wound two strands around the bannisters on the stoop. They are officially the tidiest Christmas lights I've ever had. And he did it without complaining despite the fact that I totally vetoed his preferred style of Christmas lights, which is the X-Mas!X-Mas!X-Mas! style of Vegas lights. His family, no kidding, puts up a string of regular lights along the eavestrough, which then flash, then hangs those looping multi-strand lights underneath in a totally unrelated colour, which also flash in a non-matching pattern, and then wrap other un-coordinating lights along the bannister. They then throw one of those nets over the bush and wrap some lights along the lamp post on their lawn. The whole effect is both hilarious and kind of tacky. Jamie loves it, but I refused to have it on my house. Uh, this was a parenthetical comment, wasn't it? Whoops.)

He is much more of a do-it-as-you-go type cleaner. I am more of an occasional-burst-of-energy-mass-attack-the-disasters type cleaner, so occasionally I will have a day where I'm very productive and clean half the house. I tend to let my laundry get sky-high and then spend the whole day doing it, whereas he is more likely to do a load or two every week. (Yes, we still do our own laundry. Eventually we will combine, but he washes all his clothes in warm water and I wash all of mine in cold, and we've come to the conclusion that it's just easier to do our own, and that way we can't complain that the other did it "wrong.")

The house still has boxes of my stuff here and there, five months after we moved in. Most of it is unpacked now (including all my books, a major accomplishment), but the boxes labelled "stuff" still languish, waiting for me to decide that if I haven't opened them in six months, maybe I don't need them. And yet, Jamie rarely complains, uses the boxes as a stand for his computer speakers, cleans around them, and doesn't yell at me to just unpack, for god's sake. I think he knows I'll get around to it eventually, when there's something else I want to do even less.

There are things he does that drives me crazy, don't get me wrong. (How hard is it to TURN OFF THE BATHROOM LIGHT? NOT THAT HARD.) But most days, when I sit in my chair and see him doing the dishes, I wonder how on earth I got so lucky.