Snakes.

The other night, Tamsen and I were laying in bed, trying to fall asleep, when I hear giggling from her side of the bed. "Snakes!" she yelled. "There's a couple of snakes, and they're looking at each other! Hee!"

It took some deciphering to figure out that she was talking about the numbers on the clock, in which the digital 5 and 2 looked like snakes standing on their tails, looking at each other. I recreated it as seen below:

It stands for reserve

Sometimes when we are going to sleep but aren't actually tired we end up playing word games. Like trying to come up with words that are 6 letters long and have a double letter in the middle but that would still be a word if you switched the first letter and the middle letters. For instance, the word lopped would become polled, and tipped would be pitted. Things like that. Several times we've rhymed things with the phrase "There's a bear in my eye" and you have to sing your response- please don't stare at my pie, if I married you I would die, why's there a knife in my thigh?, etc. Or there's last night where neither of us could remember what the R in ROTC stood for so we volleyed back and forth with things like rickshaw, Rambo, renegade, rambunctious, ruthless, rhino, right-of-way, rotten, until we'd listed all the R words we knew. I think I won with Rhomboid.

Dream Cheater.

More than once since marrying Tamsen, I've had dreams in which I've cheated on her. It's important to note, however, that I've never intentionally cheated on her. For whatever reason, I've either not known that there's anything wrong with sleeping with other women (making me a whore, but at least well-intentioned), or been forced against my will to marry someone else.

I had a cheating dream the other night. The first thing about the dream I can remember was being told I was going to marry someone else. "What about Tamsen?" I asked, confused. "What about her? Come over here and get married," they responded. Somewhat bewildered, I went to wherever they were taking me and got married. This new woman seemed like a less than able replacement for Tamsen. I don't remember much, but I remember her having long blond hair and a somewhat vacant look on her face. (Apologies if you think that's you.) We ended up going to our apartment and watching a movie, where she sort of flopped all over the place and fell asleep, while Tamsen gave me a look as if to say, "Seriously? They made you marry this?"

I woke up terrified that I was going to find this strange woman next to me in bed. Fortunately, I didn't. Tamsen got a good laugh out of it when I told her the next day. She tries to call me "DC" (for Dream Cheater), but for whatever reason, it doesn't quite stick. Not that I'm complaining.

I sleep with a bat next to my bed in case someone else ends up in there. You know. Just in case.

Fighting for the covers.

Since we're different heights and sleep in different positions, the covers on our bed tend to slip and slide around at night. They usually tend to favor me, so Tamsen wakes up at night and tugs on the covers to get them back. (Usually, I'm less than receptive.) In fact, it's to the point where Tamsen has trained herself to pull at the sheets when she feels them sliding away from her.

A couple of nights ago, however, I woke up to find that I was the one who ended up without the covers. Tamsen had three of the corners, and I only had one covering my middle. I floundered about for a bit, trying to find my missing cover, and eventually gave up and started tugging at the sheets. Tamsen, still asleep, felt the sheets being pulled away from her and started pulling back. Not to be outdone, I pulled even harder. We ended up in a bit of a tug-of-war until Tamsen sort of woke up and realized that half of the blanket had flopped over her and onto the floor. Somewhat sheepishly, she let me have my blanket again. Of course, I wasn't happy about this, so I flopped back to my side of the bed, cursing inwardly. As I went back to sleep, I thought to myself, "Freaking Tamsen Three-Corners," congratulating myself on the clever, alliterative insult I'd come up with.

It was only after I'd woken up that I realized that "Tamsen Three-Corners" was neither clever nor alliterative. She, of course, found this tremendously funny when I told her the following morning.