I’m on the second of three vacation days I booked, and I’m not really enjoying it – Andrew’s had a relapse of memory problems, which I can’t help feel was a bit convenient for him, as it began when I told him he’d been sleep-shopping, using my credit card number, and had run up a few hundred dollars on my balance. Again. This happens every few months; each time, I remove the credit card information from his Comixology account; sometimes I have to change the credit card number, because he has a photographic memory, but I couldn’t yesterday because my paycheck hadn’t come through yet and I couldn’t afford to be without a card even for the couple of days it would have taken for the new one to come in the mail. He decided to try and push the card number to the back of his mind, and in doing so seems to have scrambled his mind again. He keeps saying things like “seventy-two hours until core rebuild complete,” so I’m hoping he’ll be ok by Sunday when we go to my parents’ party. In any case he can fake normality when we’re out in public (and his mind, when he’s like this, appears to let him have his memories on a need-to-know basis; so anything that gets him out of the house also stimulates him to function better.)

Also (this part wasn’t his fault), when I checked my bank balance it was in negative numbers because I’d forgotten about the insurance payment that automatically comes out mid-month. So this morning my pay has come in, and already a third of it has gone into the negative-balance hole. I can’t spare any of it towards lowering the credit-card balance. I like my job, but they pay me $14 an hour and still haven’t paid me for the forty hours of extra work (knitting up samples) I’ve done for them outside of my office job; and I love my husband, but he’s a spendthrift manchild who cries or loses his memory whenever I do get mad enough to call him out, so I have switch to soothing-nurse mode. His pains and other symptoms are all genuine (else I’d have left long ago), but they still function to manipulate me, and I still resent it, and hate myself for being such a doormat.

So, we did go out for a bit yesterday evening – admission to the Art Gallery of Ontario is free on Wednesdays after 4;30pm, and a few days earlier he’d found twenty-five dollars in the pocket of one of his old coats, so I asked that he use it to get us dinner at one of the Chinese restaurants on Dundas. We remembered a Chizine event nearby and ended up going to that instead of the gallery, which was probably a good call because it was fun and we got to see people we knew. Today is opening day of the Canadian National Exhibition (tickets half-price), but he woke up with a migraine so we’re not going.

He’s sleeping now; I should be taking advantage of the uninterrupted time to finish the dress, the hat, the short story I’ve been working on, but I’m too grouchy to do anything productive right now.