no, I don't go out in my bathrobe.

It’s no mystery to me, really, why the trips I’ve taken with Jeff in the past couple of years have gone well. It’s that I have no third parties to think about. Free from the daily obligations of home, and minus the split attention dynamic created when anyone else requires my consideration, traveling turns out to be as relaxing as it ought to be.

This morning, on the other hand, didn’t go quite according to plan. Jeff has acquired a new tendency to let Freddi the dog out the front door. Freddi is not a well trained dog. I have to take responsibility for this problem, since all the training that happened 11 or 12 years ago was pretty much up to me. Anyway, she is not such a good dog that she won’t take advantage of a situation. Jeff tends to lose sight of just which side of the door he’s on these days, and he’s apt, lately, to let a fellow critter in or out if it seems to want to go either way. So, when I heard the tell-tale open/close door sound, with too much space in between, I hurried to see Freddi standing by the lamp-post giving me that look. The look that says “ha. I know I’m naughty, but heck...it’s fun.” But I couldn’t do anything because I was still in my fluffy pink bathrobe.

By the time I’d tossed on my clothes from two days ago Jeff had taken off down the street which was bad on two counts: Jeff doesn’t know how to get back from down the street, and he was effectively chasing the dog toward busy Evergreen Road. All I really had to do was wave Freddi’s leash at her and she turned herself in, but I had by then exuded enough of my roiling sense of frustration that Jeff felt grumpy for the rest of the morning, including the hour and a half we spent in the oral surgeon’s waiting room while Gabe got his bone graft.

Freddi and I had a talk a little later, and she knew exactly what I was telling her even though she wasn’t willing to make any promises about improved behavior in the face of temptation.

But in the midst of naughty dogs, impaired spouses, and recuperating young adults, I was having one of those sandwich spread squeezed moments (which other people have in much greater abundance than I,) but still, it reminded me of why—even with a rather mentally crippled travel partner—I like trips.