Ted, Ted, Ted

Mary and Lillian have been in Atlanta all week, schmoozing it up at the American Public Health Association convention. It’s been pretty hard, not for any practical reason — things have gone very smoothly for me and Laura so far — but because I love them both so much and like having them around. Laura, ever in touch with her feelings, has kept me updated on how much she misses them but hasn’t seemed upset about it. We’ve been staying busy. I worked at home Monday and Tuesday so I could drop off and pick up Laura at school, and in the evenings we worked on our big project. (I can tell you about it here without giving away the surprise, because I’m pretty sure Mary won’t be looking at any Web browsers while away from home.) We cleared out my old work space downstairs, which I haven’t used much since I stopped freelancing, and turned it into a nice cozy office for Mary. I moved her computer down there and hooked up the very nice 20-inch monitor, which she didn’t have room for upstairs, while Laura decorated the walls with colorful frescos of dinosaurs, spaceships and girls with bows in their hair. I threw out a few years’ worth of paper, which I’d been meaning to do for a long time. That cleared out a surprising amount of space.