Everybody must get stoned...

Yesterday was stressful. The date, 4 March, had been burned on my consciousness since Mr L'Atelier left for his holiday to the US and Canada over a fortnight ago - this was due to be the day of his return and it's not hyperbolic to say that for the final few days of the countdown, I was about as excited as any girl has ever been in the history of humanity. However, when the day itself dawned, something else sprung up onto the dashboard of my existence: my builder, henceforth absurdly nice, funny and reliable, went AWOL. At 10am, I was livid - it was Tuesday morning, my kitchen needed to be finished by the end of Wednesday so that the carpet could go down on Thursday, so that my sofa could arrive on Friday and so that I could move the rest of my stuff over the weekend. Were all bets off? Should I cancel the most precisely coordinated chain of events since the Beckham wedding? By lunchtime, I was hyperventilating with stress. By 2pm, two glasses of Sauvignon later, I was markedly calmer but still concerned. By 4pm, I had stopped caring about the kitchen and was starting to feel genuinely fearful that he might be dead. I sent him another slightly hysterical text message and crossed my fingers.

Finally, at 4.30pm, he made textual contact and informed me that he'd been doing rather a lot of vomiting. It was perfectly timed on his part - had he been in touch much earlier I would have been furious and possibly sent him a vitriolic and fractionally unsympathetic response, but at this late stage I wasn't being quite so selfish and was instead so relieved that he still had a pulse that I sent him a comforting message and forgot about it. But then - egad! Mr L'Atelier had been pushed to the back burner. Suddenly, the moment for which I had yearned had arrived. I preened, primped, put the finishing touches to his funpack and then headed over to his house for a romantic reunion. So when I found out that our first task was returning his hire car to the Avis depot, I had to readjust my mental picture somewhat. Still, we had a perfect night and this morning I'm giddy and happy and the proud owner of a beautiful new green iPod Nano for my future jogging adventures. Lucky me.

Today's big news was the result of Super Tuesday 2 across the pond - what with the hurly burly of my own life I had almost forgotten about the primaries and when I saw the result online this morning I gasped in shock. It's all too exciting. I did a test the other day on www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com and unsurprisingly I shouldn't want either Clinton or Obama to win the Democratic nomination - they're both far too right wing for my tastes - but it's a gripping contest and I am loving every second. What made me laugh was the assertion by an Israeli academic that Moses was stoned when he received the Ten Commandments. And by stoned, I mean the New Age definition, not the Biblical version meaning that people chucked rocks at him when he returned from Mount Sinai carrying the two tablets. Makes sense to me, and given the rest of the bizarre coincidences and hilariously arbitrary/accidental, grammatical/editorial errors/slips that have formed the basis of the world's Christian beliefs, this is just another nail in the coffin of my religious faith. Not that I have beef with Moses being a fan of hallucinogenic drugs, mind you - just that I'm glad I haven't altered my life's direction as a result.