The last three days have been a string of appointments. Dentist, dermatologist, entrepreneurship seminar, client meeting, client call, allergy shot, dinner with mom, lunch with financial advisor, another client meeting. In between all of these have been the usual client projects, as well as moving back into the almost-finished bedroom and having a celebratory cocktail on the almost-finished deck.

When I arrived home in early October, after nearly a month in San Francisco, the contents of the bedroom were still in a P.O.D.S. storage unit in the driveway. The bedroom floor had been ripped up and the subfloor rebuilt, and during the ensuing weeks Barry has been painting the walls and laying down new bamboo floors. We’ve been sleeping on a sofabed mattress on the living room floor, and dressing out of respective hampers, mine in my office and his in the man-cave, with the dirties in the hallway in between.

Needless to say, we haven’t been doing a lot of entertaining of late.

Besides cycling through the same set of clothes that I packed for my trip on 9/10, I’ve been wearing the same pair of earrings since I returned: a pair of tiny silver knots. Today, with the weather in the last gasp of Indian summer, I decided it was time for a change. The jewelry I’d packed for San Francisco was in a tangled mess in a small purse on my desk next to the stapler. Already running late for lunch with my financial advisor, I grabbed the first pair I could successfully disentangle—a pair of dangly gold earrings that complemented my ivory shell. Perhaps a bit overdressed for a plate of shrimp ‘n’ grits while discussing annuities, but I was just darned sick of the little silver knots.

After lunch, I arrived at my client’s office to train her on the subtler points of Cascading Style Sheets. After the bottomless sweet tea for lunch, my first stop in her office was the bathroom. Which is when I saw the earring.

The silver earring.

The silver earring hanging from the gold earring hanging from my ear.

Bless his heart, my financial advisor, a soft-spoken gem of a Southern gentleman, as far as I could tell did not so much as glance at the extra earring hanging from my  earlobe through a 75-minute lunch meeting. He counseled me on the pros and cons of a variable annuity without once saying “Why the hell do you have a silver Aztec calendar earring hanging from the bottom of your antique gold earring? Do you realize you have a good three inches of metal daisy-chaining its way to your shoulder? Did you dress in the dark today or something?”

I will be so, so glad to have all my stuff back where it belongs.

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