Well, here we go. Again. That supposed “saint” I live with is off to Canada soon to do his duty for queen and country, meaning working to keep me in Switzerland. Oh I love a man committed to a noble cause. I’m not sure how many times I’ve had to endure this foolish fending for myself in a foreign land, but I have noticed that the duration of his business excursions keeps getting longer. The universe is testing me and I’m not in the mood.

I dread these separations. Not because I miss the witty banter, the litany of compliments, the endless hours of gazing into each other’s eyes in the candlelight—I’ve been missing all that for the better part of a decade. I miss being fed. One of these times he’s going to come home to find me stiff and withered like a giant stick insect, my face covered with dried chocolate, 3 days dead from either a massive glucose overdose or starvation.

By now I’m so spoiled that I can’t recall how I kept myself alive for the 5 years when I was between husbands. I’ll have to go to the grocery store, await some instruction from the heavens about what the hell to buy and then figure out how to make food from food. It’s too much to bear. I have to go to the gym, I have doodles to write, I have to sit around waiting for my second career to magically appear on a silver platter. Where does one find the time to add cookery into that kind of schedule?

I suppose an obvious solution is found in the local restaurants. Sure, if I were the latest winner in the Swiss Millions Friday night draw. The cost of eating out here is scarier than not eating at all. I suppose another solution would be for me to man up and crack open a cookbook. Every time I do that I get inspired, really, I do. Then I try to make what seems to be the easiest meal in the whole book and somehow I end up burned, bloody, drunk and overtipping the pizza delivery guy.

At least I’ll get a break from the shocking amount of laundry that one man produces in a week and I have a nice little excursion planned for myself in Zurich next weekend. Perhaps I’ll be well behaved—more time on French study and less time scanning the internet for the useless information that seems to have replaced all serviceable knowledge in my head.

Maybe I’ll try cooking one more time and by some miracle I’ll produce a meal worth eating. Or maybe I’ll just set myself up in a cage down in the market square with a sign around my neck: “Please Feed the Giraffe.” We’ll see how it goes.