Me: I hurt my ring finger yesterday moving firewood.

She: Badly?

Me: No, not badly, but it is a little sore and swollen this morning.

She: Can you still use it?

Me: Yes, but I can't get my wedding ring off. You're stuck with me until the swelling goes down.

Exhibit A: Ten Reasons You Should Date a Geek

Exhibit B: Ten Reasons it Isn't Always Easy Being Married to a Geek

Exhibit C: Top Ten Reasons Geeks Make Good Fathers

Me: We have an important milestone coming up.

She: Oh?

Me: Yes. Tuesday, December 20th. It's 150 months since our wedding.

She: (rolls her eyes) Of course. How could I forget.

I was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with She Who Puts Up With Me a few nights ago. It was one of the third season episodes where we get to see shy, bookish Willow as an evil dominatrix vampire in an alternate reality.

It was obvious that the actress was enjoying herself a great deal playing the dark twin to her usual character.

"Wouldn't you like to have an evil alter ego?" I asked She Who Puts Up With Me, who is one of the least-evil people I have ever met.

"Of course," she answered, then quickly added, "but just an alter ego."

As everyone knows, admitting that you want an evil alter ego is the first step to obtaining one. So, for the benefit of my lovely wife and anyone else who might be thinking of an evil alter ego, I present....

The Evil Alter Ego Questionnaire (Female)

Instructions: There are no right or wrong answers to this questionnaire. Your Evil Alter Ego specialist will use your answers to help create your personalized Evil Alter Ego. If you have any questions, or are unsure about anything, feel free to discuss it with your Evil Alter Ego specialist. A healthy two-way dialogue is essential to creating a successful Evil Alter Ego.

1) Which type of Evil Alter Ego are you most interested in:

(a) Criminal mastermind
(b) Dominatrix
(c) Russian spy
(d) Femme fatale
(e) Vampire or other supernatural creature

2) Which of these factors will be most important in motivating your Evil Alter Ego to commit evil acts:

(a) Money
(b) Sex
(c) Overzealous and/or misguided idealism
(d) Hatred of men/women/children/puppies
(e) Boredom

3) Please describe in 50 words or less a defining life event which could have led your Evil Alter Ego into a life of evil.

4) Which of these best describes the relationship your Evil Alter Ego will have with men:

(a) Men are useful for lifting heavy objects
(b) Men are helpless pawns in your plans
(c) Only one part of a man is the slightest bit useful, and it isn't his brain
(d) The human race would be better off, really, if women could clone themselves
(e) Meals On Wheels

5) Which of these best describes the attitude your Evil Alter Ego will have towards sex:

(a) What else is there to life?
(b) It pays the rent
(c) Sex makes men so....pliable
(d) Ick, cooties!
(e) Doing evil deeds makes you horny

6) What sort of evil name would you like for your Evil Alter Ego:

(a) Not enough vowels
(b) Umlauts and accents
(c) A hint of noble blood
(d) Disarmingly innocent
(e) Double-, triple-, or quadruple-entendre
(f) "Paris Hilton"

Thank you! Your Evil Alter Ego specialist will use your answers and the Evil Alter Ego discussion sessions to help you get in touch with your inner evil self. This will help us create the ideal customized Evil Alter Ego just for you.

Valentine's Day is always tough for me. She Who Puts Up With Me has a birthday only two days before. What do you do when there's only two days between your wife's birthday and Valentine's Day.

She always tells me that She doesn't expect anything for Valentine's Day, but I know better. You can't just forget about it.

There are two approaches: either do something small for one of the two events, or do some sort of combined gift/recognition.

For her birthday, She wanted a weekend retreat at our favorite resort Up North. So, I have arranged for childcare and reservations, and we'll be spending the last weekend of the month just a mile or two below the Canadian border. They've had something like seven feet of snow this year. Cool.

For Valentine's Day, well, I can't say yet, because I haven't given it to her yet. Let's just say, I'll be giving her a smile and a giggle.

For Christmas, I got a bar of really, really dark soap called "Mud." It is supposed to be enhanced with mud from a thermal spring somewhere. Whatever.

I discovered that this soap, being so dark, can also function as a very effective crayon. So I wrote a little love note to She Who Puts Up With Me on the tile in the shower. "Note" might be an overstatement, since it was "I (heart) U" in six-inch-high letters. Nevertheless, it had the desired effect the next time she stepped into the shower.

Give her a big, sloppy, sucking kiss on the forehead, and say, "Darling, you know I love you for your brains." It should at least get a laugh, and women like men who make them laugh, right?

(Anyway, that's the theory. She Who Puts Up With Me didn't even smirk. I was kind of miffed. Maybe I should try again when she's actually awake. Naaw, I have a better idea: I'll post it on my blog to see how many other women think it's funny, as a sort of petty emotional revenge. Yeah! That's the ticket!)

I found a place online which was selling expired glow necklaces for $0.25 each. These are the chemical lights which you often see at fireworks shows: they're 22 inches long and have a connector so you can turn it into a glowing choker-type necklace. Or, you can connect several together to form a long chain.

I bought 200, for $50 plus shipping.

There were a couple of duds, but they still worked OK for my purposes.

Last night, while She Who Puts Up With Me was putting Scooter to bed, I activated and connected together enough of them to loop around our bedroom four times, using Scotch tape to attach them to the walls. Then, two strands down the stairs for a sort of runway light effect on the staircase.

Turning off all the lights, the effect was quite impressive, to say the least. They gradually faded through the night, but still had some glow left by morning.

The best part was when Scooter poked his head in the doorway this morning, about 6:30 AM, while it was still dark outside. "Wow, cool," he said, then ran off to play computer games. By the time he came back up, I had already cleaned up.

"Where did the glow stuff go, daddy?"

"What glow stuff? I don't see any glow stuff."

"There was glow stuff here before."

"You must have been dreaming. There's no glow stuff here."

After I had my fun teasing him, I gave him a leftover glow necklace.

This is what I brought back from Miami for She Who Puts Up With Me.

Mr. Wonderful says 16 different phrases, including such gems as, "You take the remote. As long as I'm with you, I don't care what we watch," and "Actually, I'm not sure where we're going. I'll just pull over here and ask for directions."

Surprisingly, Scooter, our 4-year-old, thought it was so funny he wanted to take it in for show-and-tell.

....and some aren't.

But the real romance comes from showing that you really know and understand someone.

I bought something to bring home for She Who Puts Up With Me. This is not the kind of gift which screams Romance, as would, say, a dozen red roses. She won't be enjoying it by candlelight (at least, I hope not). But that's not why I chose it.

I chose it because it will make her laugh out loud at the sheer lunacy of it. The Cheez-Whiz factor appeals directly to the quirky sense of humor we share.

I'm guessing that she'll take it to work and put it on her desk, and every time she sees it, she'll think of me.

Now, how much more romantic can you get?

P.S. So I don't ruin the surprise, I'll post pictures after she's seen it.

She Who Puts Up With Me got home with the kids just before dinnertime tonight. The fridge was full of leftovers, so dinner was a breeze.

As always, I brought stuff home with me. For the kids, New York T-shirts. Scooter, the oldest, is still young enough that he's thrilled to get clothing as a gift. He'll probably wear his shirt for the next four days in a row. The twins, being under two years old, didn't really care, but it never hurts to get them some more clothing.

For her, I brought home a giant 7-ounce Hershey's Kiss, which I bought at the Hershey's Chocolate Store in Times Square . I replaced the little slip of paper with one I printed up reading, "A GIANT KISS TO MAKE UP FOR ALL THE LITTLE KISSES I MISSED." The custom paper is actually something they can do for you at the Hershey's store, but they're rather limited in what they'll print on the paper. Only ten words, for example. So, I did it myself with our labelmaker.

Then, I make sure we got all the kids off to bed promptly.

Draw a big bubble bath for She Who Puts Up With Me. She certainly deserves it, after flying solo with all three kids for a week. I went a little overboard with the rose-scented bubble stuff, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Then, build a nice crackling fire in the fireplace, and the rest of the evening is ours.

I have to be very circumspect about this, just on the off chance that She Who Puts Up With Me actually reads my blog. On the other hand, why should she be any different from everyone else?

Let's just say that there's a store very near the hotel which is entire dedicated--in a unique Times Square, New York kind of way--to her favorite product in the whole world.

This could have some definite potential.

Updates as they develop. Film at 11.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, perhaps, but having to be away from She Who Puts Up With Me always gets lonely.

I've been traveling for business for something like seven years now, and one thing never changes. Unless circumstances prevent it, I call home every day. Even if all I can do is leave a short voicemail, hearing her voice always makes it easier.

Nothing beats a crackling fire on a fall evening.

Just before bed last night, I brought up some firewood. We have a fireplace in our master bedroom, and it is something I highly recommend.

As an aside, when we bought our first house (over ten years ago), we had a fireplace in the living room. "Our next house," I declared to She Who Puts Up With Me, "will have a fireplace in the master bedroom." She didn't take this very seriously at the time, but I proved her wrong.

As it happened, the firewood was dry enough to burn well, but had just enough moisture/sap/ant colonies to put on a crackling, hissing, popping show for a good 90 minutes. This is something gas fireplaces will never replicate.

There's nothing quite like falling asleep, cuddling in front of a crackling blaze.