Today is Dump Your Significant Jerk Day.

To quote my elder brother (which is a mildly ridiculous thing to say, by the way, since all my brothers are elder brothers): "I'm so tired and cute." (Now you see that a certain amount of egregious self-validation runs in our family...)

I am overworked, harassed, and so sick that I wake up in the wee hours of the mornings unable to breathe because my throat has closed up. This, of course, does not stop me from smoking like a chimney, working my greedy ass off, and living on crackers with salmon spread because I'm too lazy to deal with anything more complex when my husband isn't around to scold me about my horrendous eating habits. As a friend of mine once noted, I can do just about anything except actually take care of myself.

As for the ongoing shitstorm of work, I won't bore you with the details, except to say that: Clients--can't live without 'em, can't shoot 'em.

So thank goodness for:
Jonas's new online comic strip, Graphic Detail, which has provided me with a much-needed laugh twice this week now. If you're at all interested in comics, you must check it out. And if you hear that I've expired from laughter-induced respiratory malfunction, then you know who's to blame.

Well, him or Dean, who keeps me going and giggling through the worst, bless his husbandly heart.

tea for thee
Speaking of Dean's redoubtable nursemaiding efforts, he brought me this box of awesomely funky lotus tea. It kind of freaked me out at first, because the lotus tea starts out as this extremely dubious-looking dried-out brown ball. You drop the ball into hot water, and it gradually begins to open, initially resembling a trichinobezoar (Coolness points to you if you know what that is!), but eventually blooming into an actual lotus blossom, complete with little red and translucent yellow flowers. You wind up with a cup of tea that smells (I'm told; I have no olfactory sense at the moment) and tastes divine, with the lotus sending up an occasional tiny flower from the bottom of the cup.

It's literally transcendent, in that I am so tripped out by it that I temporarily forget how wretched I really feel. I don't know where Dean got it, but you must try some if you can.