Almost.

I am in placeholder time, the time between fully here and fully there in which one's thoughts are distractedly trying to root in both places at once and -- usually -- failing miserably.

The twitter repost script is turned on, so you'll see my increasingly nervous natterings as the trip inches ever closer. it feels real now, real like the fine layer of cat fur Tenzing deigned to place on my bags tonight.

Jeff is gone to Seattle already; words sneak back east of his doings and his travels. The stories await my arrival for the telling; all I have right now are Adam's snapshots of Jeff, so familiar and yet so far away.

A little voice inside my head said,
"Don't look back. You can never look back."

A day late, but for once, perhaps not quite a dollar short.

We are not date-obsessed people. We have spent anniversaries apart over the years. We passed 'couple' and 'handful' and are rapidly lazing our way toward double digits, and yet ... here we still are.

Perspective says how utterly young and naive we were on that day. We probably haven't learned much, but at least we have a mortgage to show for it.

Already?

Website as excavation project: 2000, 2001. Skip ahead a bit, and here we are again, well past the no-longer-newlywed stage and into the haze of The Early Years. Five years, come and gone, and right now, we are gone, holed up and quiet, in a bed not our own in a weekend that wholly is.

When I was in Arkansas this past weekend, my grandmother was surprised when I told her that it was our anniversary this week. "Five years already?"

"In the grand scheme of things, it's not many."

I make no secret that domesticat.net isn't an open book, despite the regularity and honesty of my words here. Certain subjects are off-limits by choice; my friends may learn many things about me by what I publish here, but the overwhelming majority of my relationship with my spouse remains a subject not for public consumption.

Rather ironic, the rain returning. Just what I needed; an excuse to settle in and write, with cats and spouse tucked into bed earlier than usual, and a movie whose finishing hinges upon the return of my normal attention span.

It crept up, slow and steady, as the day went by. Any southerner knows it—the traditionally blue sky dulled to a white haze by the low-lying clouds. The heat of the day triggers these storms; they come in late afternoon and early evening. If they clear before sundown, the result is a soupy, humid mire; if the storms continue past sundown, some actual cooling-off takes place.

Running errands at two p.m. in the atmospheric soup left me breathless and sweaty. I went home, changed clothing per Kat's instructions, and met up for the casual Wednesday night dinner at the wondergeeks' apartment.

Which, to my almost-total surprise, turned out to be neither casual nor at the wondergeeks.

Well, I think the two-year mark is when you can stop calling yourself a newlywed. It's about time, too. I hate the moniker "newlywed"—brings up nasty images of things like 'The Newlywed Game.'

That show makes me cringe. There's something about making cutesy fun of your significant other's private details that just makes me recoil in horror. I would be horrified to have some of my personal details (like the ones disclosed on TNG) blared out for everyone to see while they're having their afternoon scooby-snacks.But hey, that's me, and I'm an incredibly private person…who just happens to post her journal online. So what. I never ever claimed to be consistent.

I'm contemplating cutting my hair while I'm in D.C. later this year. Something drastic. My hair is nearly halfway down my back—it grows, bushy and weedlike—and it's that time of summer where I start thinking, 'What if I cut it?'