In Which I Brag About My Husband Ad Nauseum

Good morning, everyone! Thanks for waiting so patiently for me to get home from my endless trip. I'm finally back and trying to pretend that it wasn't 2:30 in the freaking morning Pacific time when my alarm went off this morning. I had a decent trip home yesterday, except for the 4-year-old boy in my row who, when we began descending for landing at Dulles, began shrieking, "We're falling out of the sky! We're going to crash!" Even more alarmingly, he was laughing hysterically and seemed thrilled about the whole thing. His vegan, curly-haired mother responded, "Sam, honey, shh. The other people on the plane don't like to hear that. Honey, shh!" It didn't work, and he continued predicting our imminent deaths for 45 minutes. Then we landed and he jumped on my head in an attempt to be the first one off the plane. Cute kid.

So anyhow, I promised you an update on the King, so here it finally is. First of all, he's doing well and is more or less safe. He's been gone nearly a month out of the three that he's scheduled to be gone, so I think I'm safe to 'fess up to where he's been. I'm sure most of you have assumed he's in Iraq, but actually he's not: He's in Afganistan, specifically in Kabul, which is the capital. The reason I couldn't tell you that before is because his job is this fancy high-security super-secret thing (no, I'm not breaking any laws by putting this on the Internet, I promise). You're probably thinking, "What a pretentious bitch, making her husband sound all important and making us think he's off getting shot at in Iraq like all the real soldiers." My apologies; I'm really not pretentious and he really does have a pretty important job in the area of security. And it is dangerous there, although CNN has stopped bothering to report on Afganistan--it's old news, right? Two days before the King flew over there, a suicide bomber detonated outside the building he's working in. Nice.

He was there once before, two years ago. He was sent to Afganistan two weeks after our wedding, just a few days after we got home from our honeymoon. He was gone for three months that time too, during which I sold our house, bought a new one, and moved all our belongings into it. I also very nearly had a nervous breakdown from sheer terror--I didn't sleep more than two or three hours a night the entire three months. It's better this time, but I don't know how the families of the men in Iraq do it, especially when they've been there FOR OVER A YEAR. It's just insane.

But I digress. So, he's over there now, doing his fancy schmancy security thing in the interests of national security. Or so they tell me. He got a terrible flu the first week he was there, but assured me that he'd gone to the doctor and gotten some antibiotics:

Me: "Good, I'm glad you're taking some medication to get better. Be sure to take all of it--don't stop until you run out of antibiotics."

Him: "Yeah, it was weird though. The doctor had to send all his real drugs to Iraq because the guys there don't have enough supplies, so he bought my antibiotics from some Pakistani guy he met on the street."

No, I'm not kidding. Please write President Bush and thank him for his part in making my husband take medications that will probably cure his cold but give him cholera.