Last night after a long meeting I was covering for the newspaper, J met me at the door of our house with a glass of wine. I can't stress enough the importance of this moment, the many, many instances in which I've wished someone would meet me at the door with a glass of wine, just like on television. People in sitcoms and movies are always meeting their beloved at the door with a glass of wine after a long hard day. To have it actually happen was absolutely lovely. Wait, it gets even better. Sitting on the bed in the (clean!) bedroom was a bag from one of my favorite stores. As my birthday falls directly after Christmas and New Years, I sometimes get the shaft on birthday presents (I usually forgive people this grievous error and get on with my life). This year was particularly busy and although I got nothing the day of, J's been promising me a present ever since. Last night he made good on that promise and presented me with an adorable little tea pot, matching cups and a few different kinds of tea as a belated gift.

I was so giddy about all the wonderful stuff going on that I didn't even notice the most obvious surprise. A TV, it sounded like. A TV in the bedroom.

We live in a really small house and having a TV in the bedroom has never been easy. When we decided - about a year ago - to try and put this little TV we had in there so we could watch late night talk shows and all while drifting off to sleep, J had to pull this wooden garden table out of the carport and arrange it in the corner of the room so we could place the television on top. It looked kind of unnatural sitting there, wedged in beside the bookcase, and we didn't have anything fancy - like cable or a remote - but we didn't care.

That TV - the first TV - was a free donation given to us by my friend Max who didn't want it anymore. Since it was free and used, and who knows how old, it wasn't that upsetting when, while watching a movie one night, the television made a whirring sound and turned off. And never turned back on again.

That was several months ago and we never replaced the TV, or even thought about it, really. It was simply a truth. The television we'd clumsily set up in our bedroom died, and so now our only option was to read before bed, which is really my favorite anyway. Except when I get extremely pumped to watch Letterman, or when I'm feeling ambitious, Conan, but don't feel I can muster all the energy it would require to watch either show in the living room and then make it all the way into the bedroom - a yard away, at least - to go to sleep.

So when I realized that the noise I heard and fuzzy picture I saw could only mean one thing - that we had a new TV in the bedroom I was, needless to say, very excited. And! Get this! There was a remote, too! Which J whipped out in order to show me how he could switch between the four or so channels we get in there, just like magic. No more falling asleep with the TV on because no one could make it over to the corner of the room to turn it off! A REMOTE!

J explained that while out buying my present, he'd purchased the new television at WalMart for a very reasonable price - thought it would be nice for us to be able to watch a movie at night, or maybe the news in the morning every now and before even fully waking up. I couldn't agree more. It was a really great night. So I picked up my wine and sat down on the bed - I couldn't have been any more content - and told J what an amazing husband he was, and thanked him for my belated birthday presents, that I loved, and realized he hadn't heard me, so I told him again, "thank you so much," and he still didn't hear me, and that's when I realized there was no way I was going to get his attention in order to sing his praises or anything else, and that the romance of the night had sort of fizzled after a strong five minute stint, as he was very, very deeply involved in an episode of "Law and Order."