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"As I alluded to in my previous post, I&amp;#039;ve had a little time on my hands with Rex gone. Sadly for Rex, this didn&amp;#039;t translate into getting the walls repainted or my garage work bench cleaned off.  *Sidenote to Rex: In case you are reading this, which of course you aren&amp;#039;t because you&amp;#039;re too busy going to dinner and staying in a fancy hotel in NEW YORK CITY not that I&amp;#039;m jealous or anything, you bastard: I really am going to paint those 1960&amp;#039;s wood photo frames that have been leaning against the file cabinets for two years. They&amp;#039;re going to be bright pink, and instead of containing photos, they are going to contain cork board. And they&amp;#039;re going to fit perfectly over Pip&amp;#039;s iron bed and shabby chic bedding \u2013 which I don&amp;#039;t have. But man, when I do get it all together, it&amp;#039;s going to look adorable. Hey, when your flight lands... after you stop at the house to say hello to me, and before you go back to work where your boss has your neck in a vice, can you put the daybed&amp;#039;s frame together? It needs a good screw. (Yes, so do you. Ha ha.) Back to this post. So I&amp;#039;ve had some time on my hands, which meant I could finally put a book in my hands. In just a few days I finished Sleeping With Ward Cleaver. Written by a first time author, Jenny Gardiner, it tells the story of a frantic housewife who gave up an exciting career to have kids. What used to be hot sex between her husband and her has morphed into the lukewarm passion of June and Ward Cleaver. What they used to find adorable about each other they now find irritating as hell. Um... I can&amp;#039;t relate to that at all. And I&amp;#039;m sure none of you can either.  While the author isn&amp;#039;t going to win the Nobel Peace Prize for this particular contribution to literature, it&amp;#039;s a fun sassy read that brought some peace to my mind. If someone I don&amp;#039;t know can write about the same things that I write about every week, maybe this lack of sex in marriage thing is more universal than women want to admit. In fact, it helped reinforce my beliefs that sometimes things get stale. But, like a good romance novel, there is a happy ending. And like any marriage, there can be a happily ever after, too. It just takes work.  And so, my goal for next week (because I always have goals \u2013 I&amp;#039;m irritatingly optimistic that way) is to clean off that work bench once and for all. Then I&amp;#039;ll have room to paint those trinkets. Then I&amp;#039;ll be able to hang them over my daughter&amp;#039;s bed. And maybe, with a cleaner work space, Rex will be more inclined to add that screw in the frame that will keep her bed from wobbling. And then, with the excitement of a task completed, I will make our bedframe wobble a little bit. Like the ending to Gardiner&amp;#039;s book, it might be fun to turn to my own little Ward the next morning and say, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think you were hard enough on the Beaver last night.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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