Hey there. Sorry it's been a while, but I'm glad you're still coming around. And by "you" I naturally mean "SexTrackerStatistics" and "Lickity Slit Lesbians," because you good folks are really leaving some great comments. It's not every day I get wished a merry Christmas by Lickity Slit Lesbians--oh, wait, yes it is--but I'm glad you're visiting and saying howdy. I can't wait for Valentine's Day. I expect pictures.

I did really intend to do some writing between the last post and this, but, ah . . . well, I didn't, because I had important things to do, like sleep in until noon and then watch football and then mollify the wife, who was less than enthused that football games follow one another, routinely, from morning until night, without respite, and if there is some respite, it is easily drowned with a bracing dose of ESPN and Chris Berman's brassy blats of "Da Rai-Dahs!" and whoops, another game is on! That she puts up with this at all is a real testament to her patience: if someone tried this shit on me--say, putting on a Woody Allen movie, and then following it up with a Woody Allen movie, and then saying, "You know what would be fun? A Woody Allen movie" I would make perfectly serious threats of violence. Then this someone might say, "But there's only three more weeks of nonstop Woody Allen movies!" and then they'd be wrapped up in a rug exploring the crab life at the bottom of Puget Sound.

This is only one of the reasons why I love the wife: she puts up with my terrible horseshit and crippling neuroses, which is probably why I detest Woody Allen so much (well, his late stuff): I'm not that far off from him.

Well, except that I'm not Jewish, and I don't make movies, and I don't suspect that he likes football. And I don't generally fail to convince audiences that I'm boning people like Mira Sorvino or Helen Hunt; I fail to convince audiences that I'm boning people you've never heard of. Other than that, we're exactly the same.

Up here in Seattle tonight we're huddling together under the miserable dog's haunch of some freakishly cold weather. Well, for us, anyway. To Northwesterners, anything below 40 is like Dante's Ninth Circle; I keep going outside to try and find Judas buried neck-deep in our lawn. It's kind of embarrassing, especially for a guy who was raised in coldest, shrivel-dickest Idaho that I am now such a weather puss: I used to take tennis practice in basically Nanookian temperatures, and now I moan whenever the temperature falls enough to penetrate microfiber.

On my way home, I passed a dad with kid, and the latter wailed, "Dad, I'm fweeezin'!" Complete with the adorable minor speech impediment. I was cheered by this charming bit of familial street theater, and thought, briefly, "Awww." Then the kid started screaming, "BLAT! BLAT! BLAT!" and stomped mysteriously on the sidewalk. "Cut it out, Eric," said the Dad. My urge to never have children was suddenly restored: At some point, they might get cold. Who needs that? I'm perfectly capable of complaining about the cold all by myself.

The wife is also susceptible to the cold, but I'm contractually obliged to care about her chilliness, and I do: I mean, you can choose your wife, but not your awful yammering offspring, and hey, it's part of my role. Plus, I'd like her to have sex with me on occasion. So when she latches on to me and says "I'm freezing!" I of course hold her back and try to rub some warmth back into the poor thing; it is very lucky that I'm basically a walking furnace. I may not feel very warm myself, and that is because, against all evolutionary logic, I am still cheerfully giving up all of my available body heat to the outside air or whatever desperate animal that cares to wander up and grab onto me. I think even at my cellular core, my body recognizes that I'm incredibly lucky to have this woman, and so my DNA screams at my bewildered capillaries: "Code Red! She wants our BTUs!" "Jesus Christ, give it up." "This woman is a vampire!" "So what? Give up the body heat, or she'll leave us to die. I can't face any more roast beef sandwich nights."

Earlier tonight, she grabbed onto me like a chimp on a soft-shell crab: she was very cold. "Warm up my nose!" she demanded. (This is sadly not the first time I've heard this request.) I felt her nose with my cheek, and it was positively Arctic: it felt like how Lara Flynn Boyle looks. Sort of knifelike and in the Kelvin range. I rubbed her nose companionably with my face until it warmed up a bit.

Up yours, Woody Allen. If you want, I can send you the address for Lickity Split Lesbians. I could do this forever.