Deb and I are fond of the HBO fang series True Blood. While the plotline sometimes goes to dippy places, for the most part it’s quite entertaining. The dry comedy never fails to crack us up, and the characters grow in complexity over time. I’ve got no use for this whole zombie fad, which I think, hope and trust will fade away like a crappy dream, but some of the vampire stuff is pretty good.

One of our TB traditions, as I’ve mentioned in the past, is strawberry milkshakes with a ton of red food coloring in them. She makes them with Splenda and low sugar ice cream, and they are surprisingly good. The strawberries? Dumped frozen straight into the blender. That thing can’t last much longer.

Last night I came upstairs just before the show, having heard the construction work noises of the blender going to work on the fruit. Before I got around the corner, Deb lamented in her traditional way (at the volume you’d use to address a gathering of deaf elderly people):  “Jonathan! I screwed up really bad!”

“What happened, dear?”

“LOOK!”  I did.  The blender was full of green slurry. “I was trying to mix colors and I forgot that blue and yellow don’t make red! I’m so sorry!”

I started laughing so hard I doubled over. My wife is a brilliant woman in the many areas where she is brilliant, but when it comes to chemistry, physics or biology, they barely register. She was and is entirely capable of forgetting color mixing while cooking, though she would never forget it while painting (at which she is quite capable). Between gales, I reassured her: “It won’t taste any different, dear, it’s fine.”

“Noooo! I can’t believe I did this! It looks like Shrek puked in our blender!”

“It really is fine, dear.” And it was, if you didn’t mind imagining strawberry flavor colored emerald green. We watch the show with the lights off, which made that a little easier. As I believe wise old colonial horndog Ben Franklin once said, ‘in the dark all cats are grey.’ We started to watch the show, with all its nudity, violence and adult themes (everything you want!). Except that every so often, I’d turn and laugh at her.

After a while, I said, “Dear, I just figured out what would be perfect for this.”

A sidelong look of foreboding.  In resignation:  “What?”

“There needs to be a Vulcan vampire show. Can you imagine Spock as a vampire? We could drink this every time!”

“You’re weird.”

Many of our conversations conclude with those words from her.