This evening finds me wondering where have all the page hits gone, nearly 40 yesterday (an unusually high number, my average is more like 15-25/day), down to zero all day, none since around one a.m. yesterday evening. Where's the European Union, plus other nations on the continent that I'm not quite sure are in the Union or not? If I ever had to go on Jeopardy or Millionaire I would have to bone up on on the list, who's in it and who's not. Anyway, I find myself worrying (I realize how absurd that is). Perhaps you're sleeping. Or working. Or - and this is the worry part - did you fly home for some reason? Is everything all right? I have to have faith. Keep the faith. That's always been a struggle for me. Because people change their minds.

Besides that, the house is very quiet, I've been trying to gauge my mood and figure out what to write. The baseboard heats and a floorboard creaks. The air is deliciously fragrant with spices. I made the Indian chicken dish again. We've had it the last two nights in a row and polished it off, and this morning I asked, could you go for that again? And D said, absolutely, so I marinaded a package of chicken thighs with fresh ginger, cilantro, cayenne and black peppers, sea salt, and a ground mixture of clove, cinnamon stick, cardamom seed (popped out of the pods), cumin, and grated nutmeg, smooshed in a baking pan with spoonfuls of plain yogurt. It must be the spices, but that dish is unusually warming and satisfying on such a frigid day.

I don't mean to bum out but this is the kind of day it's been: I just missed Stella the Artist because I needed to turn down the radio in order to think & write; D and I had about the bazillionth repeated fight over birdseed. We're out of it. Oh. Well I have no cash. Well maybe I have some. I did - $13. It's one of my pet peeves, running out of things. So then he mocks me, like a petulant child. Oh excuse me one of your pet peeves, and he does some mincing mocking gesture. Yes, it is, and I feel entitled. Then Mr. Marxist says to me that I'm entitled to some of my pet peeves and not others. Whatever, I reply. He did go get the birdseed, and filled the feeders too. (I just hate the sight of little birds struggling at empty feeders - they'd be elsewhere if we hadn't led them on.)

My husband despises me and shut off all the love because I grew older and weaker and whatever happened to my head and now I don't earn an income. So he's feeling all resentful that Ms. Seven-Sister graduate, whom he had assumed would be his lifelong ambitious career-woman paycheck lifting him out of poverty, isn't the one earning a living. I could go on. But I won't. But this is the state of our marriage. I have reverted to the useless European bourgeois-bred artiste and now D - who'd fancied himself an artist too but never did a single thing about it - resents that he's supporting me.

It's very upsetting, and I feel as stuck as any Ibsen character, Nora or whoever. It seems that I just wasn't meant to be here. I deeply resent that I loved D for a very long time, and thought we had a happy marriage. We never had children. And now - not now - but for the last several years, when his heart in a tantrum left the building, and mine too finally took flight, he resents supporting me. I resent that he's supporting me too. I don't even have the excuse of children. It's all very warped and confusing and it makes me angry. I do not even recognize the man I had originally married. I don't think he has Alzheimer's - a basis for not recognizing someone's changed personality. I think that he was very comfortable with me for a while, didn't have any serious responsibilities, and now that he does, he's extremely resentful and aspects of his self rear themselves all the time.

In his Marxian view, I guess everyone - me - is supposed to be slogging in the coal mines all the time. And so he resents that he's working for a living. Why isn't he more efficient? Isn't he charging enough for his services? He works every single day, not a day off. True, he gets out of the house late and is usually home for lunch - isn't that nice? It's not as though he's up before the crack of dawn sitting on some commuter rail slogging his way to a pitiless job in the city. Or away from home for weeks on end, etc., etc.

Yes, so that was the kind of day I had. No Stella, Penelope barfed twice, copious dripping quantities, not - mind you - on a hard surface that I could easily wipe, but rather on the runnered stairs, and on a pretty hooked rug.

I can't think of anything else that went wrong. I'm here, I read more of the study of Bonnard (am intrigued by the lives of artists, I think, something that clearly our culture pays only lip service to, except for the certified, flank-branded Great Ones), there is wine in my glass, kerosene in the furnace, fragrant dishes on the stove with the promise of a hot delicious meal to come. My heart is full of love as always, even if p-o'd in a few other aspects, and I just got a page hit - the first all day - from Slovenia, landing squarely on - appropriately enough - my Mais non, Emma Bovary, c'est moi post from a while back.

Ah, darlings, I truly truly hope all is well with you, each of you. I love you very much. And so there it is.