I'm heading down to DC to visit the Sister this weekend. I'm even leaving the office early today to avoid the traffic.

The drive will take about 4 hours. I haven't had a solo road trip in many years. And this will be the first time the Husband and I will be apart since we got married.

I've packed a lot of cds to entertain me along the way.

Well, not that I'm going to be lonely. Driving down Interstate 95, I have a feeling I'll be surrounded by other people!

A post by Tara earlier this week reminded me of some childhood memories.

Remember the elementary school lunches, with the plastic trays?

I learned a lot of big words by reading the print on the sides of the cartons.

There was a short sentence: "If it's Borden, it's got to be good!" followed closely by an arrow indicating "To Open" and pointing upward to show from which end you should pry open the little triangular corner.

Well, in my little kid's mind, I always put the two sentences together:

"If it's Borden, it's got to be good to open!"

But sometimes the carton wouldn't open. And I would struggle with it, while the image of Elsie the Cow gazed up at me, taunting me.

Her vacuous smile infuriated me.

"It's Borden, and it's NOT good to open!" I would yell, to no one in particular, full of the impotent rage of a second grader.

In the end, I'd end up with a ragged, jagged milk carton edge, that would scratch my lips when I tried to drink it.

I still have a lot of anger toward Elsie, for false advertising and cruelty.

Yes, the brilliant and razor-like legal mind you see before you now was not yet fully developed. But the seeds were already being sown by this childhood trauma.

The Husband and I received our Certificate of Marriage in the mail last week, from the City Clerk's office.

Everything looked fine, except for one kind of major error.

In the space for the name of the marriage officiant, the Certificate states that we were married by one Mr. William Wallace.

So I guess he wasn't captured and tortured after all. In fact, he has survived to this day, and apparently is an official marriage officiant registered with the State of New York.

I really wanted to leave it as is, so we could tell everyone for the rest of our lives that we were married by Braveheart.

But in the end, practical legalities won out, and we had to go and get it corrected.

Still, intending no offense to the very nice priest who married us, I like to think of what could have been.

We could have had the paparazzi at our wedding...

In the several weeks that I've been married, I've been trying to be more domestic. This has included cooking dinner as much as I can, so that the Husband and I can save money and enjoy at least one meal together every night after a long day of work.

This has been difficult, as cooking does not come naturally to me.

It's in my genes. My parents have told me that neither of my grandmothers was a particularly good cook.

And as for my dad, my mom says the following: "I'm lucky he's not a very picky eater."

The Husband is a much better cook than I am, and insists that he doesn't care if I ever cook. But I look upon this as a personal mission - I want to improve my cooking. And as long as he's willing to be my guinea pig, I'll keep trying.

So far my success has been mixed.

One the one hand, I've made some great dishes.

On the other hand, every time I start puttering around in the kitchen, he gets up like Pavlov's dog, and opens the living room windows.

He knows that as long as the air is circulating, I won't set off the smoke alarm and inadvertently summon the Fire Department.

We're already working well as a team.