See, it was 10:00 on a Saturday morning, in downtown Redmond Washington ...


Not particularly apropos of the possible hooker sighting, today is my girl's and my ninth wedding anniversary. We were together for eight years before we got married, so this anniversary is significant in that it is the first year where we have officially been hitched longer than the period where we were just dating.

Last night when I got home, I happened to see the downstairs neighbor's cat up on our landing, looking upwards and muttering (I figured he was praying, and I didn't want to interrupt). As I came up the stairs, he went up the next flight, and what I saw when I turned the bend was a small bird trapped in the stairwell, utterly perplexed by the gigantic window and unable to figure out how to get back down the stairwell.

So I went inside, grabbed a broom, and between shooing the cat away and a little careful maneuvering (actually, freeze frame, let me be honest; the point of the broom was to guide the bird down the stairs. It almost worked once, then the damn thing flew right back up so I ... so I swatted it with the broom and knocked its ass back down a flight. It was frankly exasperating me. When it came back up again, I kept it moving so that it finally got tired and landed on the broom and I was able to march the idiotic thing downstairs like it was borne on the edge of a lance and finally) the bird eventually got away. The cat was pissed at me (we made up by the time he was ready for belly scratches) so while he simmered I swept all these corn flakes off of our stairs.

Soon as I was back in, Kate asked if the bird was all right, and I said "Yeah, but we gotta find whoever it was who put those corn flakes on our stairwell in the first place." Kate looked abashed and confessed that she'd put them there in an effort to lead the bird back down the stairs, because she wanted to do it humanely. You know, she didn't want to swat him with a broom, basically.

So she's a wonderful person and basically utterly necessary in my life, because I never would have thought of trying to coax the bird out like ET The Extra-Terrestrial and probably would solve all my problems by hitting them with a broom were I given the choice. You know how folks say that marriage is difficult, and it's all about compromise and boundaries and all of that? I've never really experienced that, being married to my girl is pretty easy, and the birds think so too.