Tobyjoe is a heavy sleeper. He’s not so bad in the middle of the night. At night, I am able to wake him up without too much of a problem. It’s the morning that this feat fairs difficult. He’s just not a morning person.

I am very much a morning person. I wake up and can be out the door within five minutes and I’m happy about it. I don’t even need coffee or a shower. Just give me a toothbrush, a hair tie, and some shoes and I’m ready. It takes a crane to get Tobyjoe out of bed and then a gallon of high-octane coffee to wake him up. And then a long shower to get him motivated. He’s told me numerous times, “Michele, please don’t talk to me in the morning. Give me an entire hour of silence.” And of course I can’t do that because I wake up talking. (Quite honestly, I’m not sure how we’ve managed for this long. Some of our biggest fights have taken place because I can’t seem to abide by this one simple rule.)

There have been times Tobyjoe has surprised me. Take a morning not too long ago. I got up at around 7 AM. It was a Saturday. I powered on the Mac Pro, opened Mail, opened Firefox and then headed to the bathroom to brush and pee. When I left the bathroom, I looked back into the bedroom to check on him. He was sound asleep, arms wrapped around his head, hair sticking up everywhere, and his face was nowhere to be seen. I walked into the kitchen to grab a glass of water.

When I got back to my desk, I saw that something had gone very, very wrong. On the browser before me, was a Web page and on that Web page was a giant, ummm – How do I say it? – a giant male organ. It was huge and pinkish in color and the browser window took up my entire screen. I was confused, startled. Had I been given a virus? Had all that “Enl@rge UR pen1s” email finally infiltrated my computer? Tobyjoe was going to have a fit.

(This is all I will show from what I saw. Also, site in question is NOT WORK SAFE. Don’t go there.)

I looked over at the bed, wondering how I was going to tell him about this. That’s when I realized that the mound that contained my sleeping husband was shaking. He wasn’t having a seizure; he was laughing, laughing hard. He could not contain himself from all the laughter. And it was 7:00 AM. My husband was laughing and he hadn’t even had any coffee. I heard a giggle escape the shaking mound and then I made a beeline for the bed.

This wasn’t the first time he surprised me with online pornography, nor that site. This has become an ongoing joke for him and I am his favorite victim. He’s gotten me before and each time I am utterly baffled by it, shocked even. When I first met him he set my homepage URL to this:

This was before I really understood much about the Internet. Back then I had no idea you could change your browser’s homepage, let alone that you could customize it with pornography. No matter how many windows I opened, every one of them opened up to a fresh male organ. I simply could not get penis off my screen.

You might think that after 6 long years of being together, I would have figured out by now that it’s always going to be him behind my homepage and its sudden desire to have me rate the size of another man’s penis. I said I was awake in the morning, not smart. To my credit, however, the site in question does tend to launch a new look fairly regularly. (Not that I would know.)

I’ve spent 6 and a half long years dealing with such aesthetic terrorism and not once have I been able to get him back.

We listen to iTunes through our stereo using an Airport Express. Recently, we changed the name of our Airport to read “ROADRUNNER_SUCKS_PLEASE_CALL_IF_DOWN”. Because of that change, I needed to update some settings in iTunes and I was unable to do it alone. Tobyjoe offered to walk me through it via iChat while he was at work. When we inevitably got to the point where we had trouble communicating, he asked me to send him a screen shot.

And I did. I sent him a screen shot.