Grass Widow

Nick has finally got his hands on On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness—the Penny Arcade game that he has been breathlessly awaiting for months, the first episode of which was released late last night, our time.

This new acquisition first led to a conversation about time management:

NICK: I thought I’d play a bit of the game first, and then we could spend some time together.
(Anyone who has ever found themselves in a relationship with a geek has had this conversation at some point.)
ME: How about we watch something first, then you can play the game until you go to bed?
NICK: Well, it’s being released episodically, so I don’t want to run through it too quickly.
(Brief pause, while I sort this out in my head.)
ME: Hon, it really doesn’t matter whether you watch telly with me now and then play two hours of the game, or play two hours of the game and then watch telly—you’re spending the same amount of time playing.

This argument was not well received, which is why I’m sitting alone in the living room, updating my blog.

He did, I’ll admit, call me into the study to see the avatar he had created; I went slightly reluctantly, muttering “I am a devoted girlfriend,” but the avatar was kind of cute [So cute, in fact, that I’m updating this post with a link to Nick’s blog, where he’s posted his avatar picture].

On the plus side, all I can hear from the study are gales of laughter, shouts of “Oh yeah!” and “Ha ha!”, and what I would swear was “Pwned!”

It also gave me an excuse to go to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable to look up the term “grass widow.”

I knew that in using it to describe a woman temporarily separated from her husband, I was using it accurately (ignoring, for the purposes of this argument, my unmarried state.)

I didn’t know that it originally meant an unmarried woman with a child, “grass” in this context sharing some of the connotations of “a roll in the hay.”

I also didn’t know that it came into its current use in the days of British rule in India, when women would, to quote Brewer’s, be “sent to the hills where the climate was cooler and grass still grew.”

We may only be separated by a couple of rooms, but the point remains valid.