Christmas every week!

My wife travels quite a bit for work. I’m sure it is inconvenient for her at times but she never complains. We talk daily and with the modern power of Skype we even get to see each other a couple of times between weekends. But Fridays, yes those marvelous Fridays are like Christmas around here. As my wife unpacks her luggage, she always seems to have squirreled away the stuff that she knows will make me happy. Like a kid, I’m a bundle of nerves anxiously waiting to see what’s in my wife’s ’magic suitcase’!

Well by now you have guessed it – my thoughtful spouse brings me home FOOD mostly! Yeah, I literally have a kitchen wall cabinet half-filled with those little coffee bags from hotels. I never buy coffee, Sweet and Low, Equal, or those little red straw stir-sticks anymore (who uses ‘em anyway). Eventually, these mini coffee bags will get deposited into one of two larger cans – Regular and Decaf. and everything else awaits our guests.

Now depending on the hotel de jour, my wife might bring home bags of tea, microwave popcorn, nuts, muffins, toiletry items, and most recently, a bag of Soft Scrub laundry detergent? We don’t feel bad by taking advantage of the hotel niceties since first off, she has paid for the room, and second, we actually give a lot of the booty away to good causes. We both belong to an aviation group called Women With Wings in St. Louis. They regularly collect shampoo bottles from hotels and mail large packages of treats and needs for the troops in the Middle East. Beyond that, there are the Boy Scouts and various shelters who a couple of times a year can always use a bag of hotel goodies for the needy.

While being a temporary bachelor has a few advantages like sitting in the dark working on the computer at odd hours, but eating savory food is not one of them. For my wife, being on the road has some advantages too, (Treadmill & cable TV) but restaurant leftovers usually go to waste. Well this most recent trip was the best yet to solve all of our problems. Believe it or not, tucked securely in the bottom of my wife’s bag, between the shoes and dirty clothes was a GLORIOUS HALF-RACK OF BBQ RIBS swaddled tightly in a plastic hotel dry-cleaning sack! If that were not enough, the cache contained a small heart-stopping (literally) cup of crumbled cheesy bacon chunks, three fluffy dinner rolls and a crabapple-sized ball of cinnamon honey butter as a caloric exclamation point.

O.M.G.?!! (to quote the modern texting teen) – I cannot tell you the eternal joy and love that momentarily filled my heart before it rapidly descended Southward to my grumbling gut! Right then and there, we should have called in a minister to renew our vows because it‘s clear that this woman is PERFECT! In fact, come to think of it, I’m not sure of WHO I married at all … I am beginning to suspect that she’s actually SANTA?!