In a small house with a lot of people, it takes work to find the time to be alone. When most of the people in the house are children, it takes work, careful planning and elaborate attention to detail to have any adult only time. Tonight, the youngest two children were sleeping in their own beds. The girl teen was out of the house on a date. The teen and tween boys were happily discussing computer games. A window of opportunity opened and I raced to take advantage of it. I arrived in our bedroom to find my spouse sitting cross legged on the bed. Wearing rubber gloves. Staring at a rectangular box. Waiting on me to do comic book archeology. Sigh.

It was not the way I had planned to spend our time alone, but how long could it possibly take to do a comic book inventory? Weeeeell, if you pull out one single copy at a time, read the title and volume number aloud and put it back in the box before repeating the process, it takes a very long time. “Spiderman #x … Spiderman #y … Spiderman #z … ” A comic box holds 150-200 comics and after pausing to stare at almost each and every one, Doug finally reached the back of the box. And screamed. He stood up and slooowly and increasingly loudly read the volume number. “…ten, eleven and twelve! I’ve got all of them! I have the whole Watchmen series!”

I suggested that Tommy would really enjoy reading the comics. “WHAT? These can’t be opened. They’re not for reading.” Umm, okay. I made a mental note to watch Toy Story 2 with Doug in the near future. We were now half an hour into the brief time between Evan falling asleep in his own bed and Evan wedging himself in between Doug and I in our bed. Doug returned the comics to their vault/closet and I thought he was done with the evening geezing. Dressed as Dr. Manhattan, Doug raced to his computer. He tweeted and texted and googled for half an hour.

Doug finally returned to our room and focused on something that wasn’t a comic book for a period of time that I will leave to the imagination. Except, as soon as there was a resting point in that non-comic book activity, he went back to his computer to read about his comic books again. So, I went to my computer and blogged. “What are you writing about?” “You.”