Complex Numbers

Alone in the Dark

My wife's taking off for a week, starting tomorrow, to go to a massive camping event with lots of bellydance workshops, leaving me to sit at home, alone, in the dark...

Wait, that's my habitat as it is.

As she's camping, she didn't want to have to bring her usual wedding/engagement ring combination, for fear of losing it / getting it stolen / it getting in the way. So I went to a jewelry store to get an alternative wedding band.

Well, actually, first we both thought that a puzzle ring would be cool.

http://www.puzzlering.com/

But there wasn't enough time to special order the kind she wanted. Maybe for our upcoming fifth anniversary, if I still have money then.

So anyway, I go to the jewelry store to get this alternative ring. I knew it should have some kind of stones, but I was hoping for maybe rubies or something else, something other than diamonds. Each diamond contains drops of blood from the slaves who wrested it from the cold, hard earth. Okay, I don't really care about that - the rock on her engagement ring is huge - I just like saying that.

I found a suitable ring, and didn't have to hock my business to buy it, but Kirstin's fingers are skinnier than most - which usually only serves to make the enormous rock on her engagement ring seem even bigger. The ring I found had a total of 1/2 carat of sweatshop diamonds inset in a channel setting. Naturally, the store would have to send it out for resizing - which might take two weeks, when she had to leave sooner than that.

Fortunately, we found a local jeweler who did it for forty bucks, but had to pull out and reset two of the slave-blood misery diamonds, and I hope her fingers don't shrink any, because the jeweler said the ring won't get any smaller.

So now all the guys at this camping event will know she's married. Whether they'll care or not is another story. Maybe I should have bought a chastity belt instead. Don't get me wrong - I trust my wife. I just don't trust other men - mainly because if I saw her, I'd try to pick her up without bothering to look at her finger. Oh yeah, that's how we met in the first place.

She gets a week of crappy showers, belly dancing and either dust or mud. I get a week of being able to leave my empties lying around, the bed unmade and the toilet seat up. I also get to finally watch movies I can't when she's around, like Kill Bill and Pink Floyd's The Wall.