Folks have been asking why I refer to my sweetie as “The Electrician.” There are a couple of reasons, but the most obvious is that the man is an electrician. Equally important, however, is the fact that this is my blog, not his, and I’m trying my darndest to respect his privacy by using an alias.

Lots of lady bloggers refer to their sig figs with a nickname. Penelope Trunk has The Farmer, Pioneer Woman has Marlboro Man, many women use their sweetie’s initials, and it works very nicely. I have The Electrician. He’s nifty.

I don’t refer to The Electrician as my “boyfriend” because I’m way, way too old to have a boyfriend. Remember that I teach secondary school, where a “boyfriend” is a person who texts you poorly spelled messages and is scared of your dad. I don’t need a boyfriend. I need a sweetie.

My sweetie is an excellent sweetie. He once stuffed his prized Jim Morrison t-shirt into my mailbox as a gift. On Sunday, he asked me for tissue, walked to the wall behind where I was marking papers at the kitchen table, and quietly smooshed a spider without telling me what he was doing. The spider didn’t see it coming, and –thankfully– neither did I.

When I’d only been seeing him a few weeks, The Electrician came to my godson’s second birthday party, and showed up with a massive fort he’d built for the kid out of cardboard furniture boxes and duct tape. He then played IN the fort with the little people at the party. I knew right then he was my kinda dude.

It’s the little things, man. The Electrician does all the little things. When a person does the math on that, those little things add up to a honkin’ lot of wonderful stuff.

I’m a lucky girl.

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