Cakes, cheating, and a touch of schadenfreude.

Yesterday, we celebrated my mother-in-law's birthday. And as is my tradition, I waited until the last possible second to get her gift, even though I had the idea already. (It was a Fiestaware pasta set.) It was a very nice dinner, even if the cake was... interesting. One of the recipes in the family cookbook had a large, glaring error that did not become apparent until the cake was baked. Apparently "4 teaspoons of baking flour" is not nearly the same as "4 teaspoons of baking powder," and if you add extra flour to a recipe instead of baking powder, the cake does not rise. It tasted kind of like Play-Doh, only more dense and with icing.

Anyway, Sarah and I were at the mall after church, doing our last minute shopping, when we ran into a girl with whom I used to work. She was having lunch in the food court with a man who was most conspicuously not her husband. She was totally unashamed, and I wouldn't have noticed her at all if she hadn't called me over, so she was not in hiding at all. (I guess you wouldn't go to a mall if you were hiding your boyfriend.) She proceeded to tell me that she and her husband were getting divorced as a result of her acquiring this boyfriend, but that she and the husband were living in the same house because both of them were unwilling to make any overture that the court might interpret as "not wanting full custody" of their two daughters.

I cannot imagine living in such a situation. First, to have a boyfriend and a husband at the same time seems like a lot of work to me. Not just the obvious "work," but the constant pull of both people on your time would be exhausting. Then, living in a house with someone I was married to but allegedly "hated," yet still shared children with would again, be exhausting. Trying to explain to my children why Mommy was going on a date while they stayed home with Daddy - again, exhausting.

You heard it here, folks. I love my husband and can't wait for him to come home (that's a subject best left unaddressed right now) but if I should ever feel differently, I won't be getting a boyfriend. Too exhausting.

Of course, once I heard all this hot gossip, I had to call a friend who knew this person and tell her the whole story. My friend is engaged and living with her fiance, and his point of view was that if such a situation ever were to happen to him (highly unlikely, in my opinion), he would make her life "a living hell," and he would have hot girls over all the time. He also suggested that he would buy a hot tub and host hot tub parties full of hot girls and beer.