I’m trusting my instincts a bit, although that comes with a down side. I can’t seem to look away from the wreckage of our national politics. I don’t have anything new to offer.

So, my instincts are to shut up. Fair enough. I still can’t look away, which means I can’t focus on something else, something trivial and unimportant but, y’know. Entertaining, maybe, or at least a change of pace. I got nothing here.

This is not entirely true. There’s always the weather.

We’re definitely in the season now, up here, out here, whatever. I spent the summer without a space heater in this room, just no rush to replace the one that stopped working last spring, and it was fine but I paid attention. The weather widget on my desktop gets noticed first thing in the morning, and it flirted with the high 50s occasionally but rarely got cooler than 60 (this was something of an anomaly for our summers, in fact, these lows that didn’t get that low).

Now we’ve apparently skipped those pesky 50s. It was in the high 30s last week for a couple of days, but mostly the mornings are 45-ish. It’s autumn.

The new heater is fine.

...

I sometimes make my wife laugh by being a grouch. I do this on purpose, although there’s a method here.

I blow off steam about irrelevant irritants online. She knows that I know the solution. I don’t have to pay attention. I can mute, block, disengage. It doesn’t have to affect my life at all.

Still, it’s fun to imagine a world in which everyone behaves the way I’d like them to. I roll my eyes at Instagram friends who post endless photos of their pets. I could accept one a day. Five seems excessive.

Or the people who post godawful photos! Blurry and distorted. I don’t get it. Take another one. Like it’s any of my business.

The oddest one of these is nicknames, though. Since I first started reading writers who do what it is I ended up doing, scavenging among the detritus of ordinary, boring life for moments that are illuminating or at least amusing, I’ve been annoyed at nicknames. And mostly for spouses.

I understand it. If you’re mining your personal life for anecdotes, you might not want to expose your spouse or partner to unwanted invasions of his or her privacy. You make up a nickname, then. I remember a local writer who used to refer to his wife as The Unpleasant Mrs. Jones, or something similar. Always got on my nerves.

I have a problem with anonymity, I know. I long ago stopped reading most people who write anonymously, or ignoring them for the most part. I think these are all political writers, people with strong opinions who don’t want neighbors or potential employers to know where they stand. I get that part, but I can’t get interested when they hide their insights behind nicknames and pseudonyms.

Otherwise, I cut people slack and don’t usually spend much time fussing about it. If you want to write personal stuff, for whatever reason, and you’d prefer to stay anonymous, your call and none of my business. I read people like this all the time, never think about it.

Unless they use nicknames. Working on that.

The point is, I put my name on everything I write, so I have to exercise some judgment. Sometimes I don’t exercise enough and I screw up, but this is rare after all these years.

I used to refer to my wife as the Rev. Missus occasionally, on social media only, but that was more of a joke than a nickname, since I tend to use her name a lot. I also use my wife a lot, which comes from the schism between family and other intimates who use only her first name, and the rest of the world, who call her by her first and middle names. The latter feels awkward to me, but the former does too, since it seems too familiar. So I punt to the generic.

All of this to say, my wife has returned from sabbatical, back at school, back at church. She’s doing well, rested and eager.

I returned to church too, after three months of pretending to disappear. It was nice but different, and I was immediately drafted to run the A/V system, which gave me a job and a way to ease back into the community.

This is what I’m doing here, in case that wasn’t clear. I write 800 words about nothing, hoping to ease back into the world without being distracted by castles or cathedrals. Or politics. Or squirrels.

Or spiders.

Or nicknames. There. That’s about 800.