Date Night

This has been one of those crazy weeks that keeps me running from one appointment to the next. Thursday I drove to Minneapolis to write an insurance policy: 500 miles round trip, but I made a thousand dollars and helped some people, so it was worth it. Some weeks I don't know where the next dollar is going to come from, so I'm scrambling to and fro to make something happen. This was such a week.

Although I often work evenings, I almost never work Friday nights. Jane and I have "date night" every Friday, and I look forward to it. After the kids are quietly asleep in bed, we head for the sofa to watch a couple of episodes of East Enders, a British soap opera with lots of screwed up characters. Being a Brit, this is a way she can connect to her past and her country. We've been doing this for awhile (ok, about 4 years) and I'm hooked! I gotta have my EastEnders.

The episodes that air on our local PBS station are exactly 5 years old. Sometimes, if something really big is about to happen on the show, she'll call her mom in England and try to figure it out in advance. Jane was in the UK in September and she watched a couple of current episodes. It is interesting to watch the show, and to know just a smattering of what the future holds for the characters. For example "Mark" is still alive in our world, but over in England, he's already dead from aids. Too bad for Mark -- he's pretty happy right now in the episodes that we're watching.

So why do we waste our time on five year old soap operas from a land far, far away? EastEnders on a Friday night is like eating comfort food. Its an oasis at the end of a turbulent week. It signals that we've made it through the week. Getting to EastEnders is a goal, something to look forward to. Its sort of like our secret code: no else in this town that we know follows the show. It's our reward. An Oreo cookie for adults. You get the drift.

And if anyone knows how Grant Mitchel dies, please send me an email.