Still breathing. Some of us are drugged and all of us are bruised but we're still breathing.

This past week, despite the forced Snice (snow/ice) vacation in our homes, has been very educational for me.  I learned about ice damming - where ice builds up on your roof and melts from the underside and into your house.  Only in our case, it was ice building up on the front steps and, when the rain started on Saturday, not letting it run off the front steps and into the yard but back into the brick and down into the basement where we had the last few remaining cardboard boxes stored.  The cardboard boxes filled with totally useful things like Husband’s entire DVD collection of ‘Friends’ and my treasured copies of ‘Waiting for Guffman’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ featuring my grandmother and Lawrence Olivier. Cardboard boxes that became a soggy smelly pulpy mess filled with contents that weren’t much drier. 

This is what my studio/office floor looked like in the aftermath.  That is wet bamboo flooring on top of the table.  Flooring that will someday be the basement floor - if it's not too damaged and we can fix any future damming issues.  

And under the table - wet smelly stuff, stuff and more stuff.  

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And then I learned that when Tigger the Dog - who is not a fan of the cold and wet and didn’t listen to my panicked “Slowdown! Slowdown! Slowdown!” after her morning bathroom visit - when she hit the brick steps at high falling speed, it wasn’t at all as funny as her sliding off the driveway had been earlier in the week.  Seven hundred dollars, four staples and a cone of shame not funny.    

And I learned that Husband is a sucker for that dog.  This is a picture of him at 12:30am trying to coax Tigger the Dog into the cone of shame so that she wouldn’t lick her wound. 

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And this is Tigger the Dog giving him the “Why do you hate me so much when all I give you is love?” look.

Half an hour later, Husband gave up, got her a dog bed from another room, put it next to his bed and let her sleep cone-free in her drug induced coma next to him where he could touch her if she moaned in the night. 

And I'm pretty sure he would have done the same had Tigger the Dog been a cat.  Despite what he said at the emergency vet's office when they went off to put a serious dent in our credit card - "If this were a cat, I wouldn't bother.  I'd just ask them if they had any spare ones in the back." 

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And I learned that after almost ten years of marriage, I still like the man I married.  Being stuck with him in a house for a week while he had a serious case of the man-flu could have resulted in death or divorce but really just highlighted the things we do well together.  We are a good team – sometimes a loudly yelling one – but overall, a good team.  

Of course after my fall on the ice on Monday, his fall on Friday and Tigger the Dog’s fall on Sunday, we are a very bruised and broken team but we are a team nonetheless.