You Want to Kick Them Blues

While perhaps I could do without the twee tots and their proto-Lincoln Logs, I have to say that the product they're shilling certainly would have come in handy around our house last night.

Yes, I'm afraid our intended cozy little Eid el Fitr celebration (marking the end of Ramadan and the return of sensible dinner hours and non-clandestine cocktails) was rudely interrupted - cancelled, really, despite a fridge full of the requisite seafood (Egyptians don't eat fish during the Holy Month - no one seems to know why - and then gorge thereafter) - when one of the Mister's more recalcitrant molars suddenly and without warning went rather spectacularly south.  Oy.

Despite my initial fears, it is in fact possible to find a dentist who will come in latish on a Friday evening to look after someone who is in demonstrable agony.  It's also possible, I quickly learned, to acquire some black-market painkillers, fly to Egypt, book a good hotel room, stay for a few pleasant nights, and have your emergency root canal done there while still saving a startlingly considerable sum.  Even so, and in the face of Himself's agonized pleas that we do just that the instant he heard the estimate, we went ahead with the domestic (and immediate) option.  Let's hope the fickle gods of dental insurance reimbursement smile on us, because if not those crabs in the fridge are the last we're going to see for a very long time.

Suffice it to say that our weekend got off to a rocky start.  And that I'm going to be spending some time later today making bouillabaisse.

It's doubly a shame, really, as we had plenty of good reasons to celebrate.  As of this week, I am officially cleared to travel (meaning that sudden mission to Cairo might have actually been a possibility, had we suddenly and without warning lost our last vestiges of common sense).  And, in more immediately practical news, everything fell into place this week to finalize (odious business-y word) a transition for me within the wonderful world of Golden Handcuffs Consulting Amalgamated International.  

The sad news is that I will longer, for the foreseeable future, be evangelizing on the virtues of successful strategic communication to grateful audiences here and abroad; the good news is that I've been transferred to a cushy spot over in Human Resources, where I will be running a portion of the firm's Byzantine recruiting program, becoming in the process a sort of Cerberus of corporate serfdom.  Less travel, alas (still, despite the medical A-okay, probably a good thing), but also a great deal less internal administration, budget wrangling, and dealing with impossible schedules.  From what I can tell, I'll mostly get to sit around all day being judgmental, which, as anyone who knows me even a tad will agree, should suit me just fine.

So now the Mister is dozing through his Percocet dreams and I'm sitting looking out at yet another rainy, gray Saturday.  The dogs are just happy we're both home, a rarity given his usual schedule, and if it seems a bit of a waste of his carefully hoarded leave, meant to be spent in a long weekend of Eidische debauchery, I suppose in the end we'll have as good a time as we can on soft foods and limited conversation.  I have two whole weeks of leave before I report to my new duties, with absolutely no plans at all, and really on the whole that strikes me as almost as great a treat as an unanticipated trip to the Nile.  Almost.