Sorry I've been gone. But I'm back now.

I meant to post something the week after Thanksgiving, but had to travel for business. I only got home last night.

And what a homecoming. I unlock my apartment's door and turn on the light to find my boyfriend, face down and sobbing on my couch, a half-empty bottle of really expensive Scotch (which had been full when I left) on the coffee table next to him, and an empty glass on its side on the hand-knotted wool Persian rug he'd given me for Christmas two years ago.

Lucky for him, the glass hadn't had anything in it when it'd hit my rug.

So, instead of getting to kick my shoes off and relax after a job well done (and I had nothing to do with the Peruvian president's recent demise with a cocktail fork stuck in his--well, anyway, I had nothing to do with it), I had to comfort my day-trader boyfriend for a really stupid bet.

I told him to listen to my sister when she said it wasn't going to happen, but nooo, Mr. I'm-the-professional-political-options-market-guru thought he knew which way the market would flip.

I don't know how much money he put into it (though I have my dark suspicions), but he basically bet on the $1.50 per pack marijuana cigarette tax going through. Which meant he bet against the pot-smokers managing to get off the couch and get active in the system long enough to buy enough lobbyists and politicians off to defeat the measure.

Jenni told him that pot smokers don't want to work any more than they have to to support their habit. She told him that the extra tax would require them to either work more or smoke less, and keep working more or smoking less for a long period. She told him that they'd be willing to work more now, in the short term, so that they could return to their normal habits in the long term. She told him that there was no way that tax would pass.

Now all that's left is for him to tell me how much money he's lost. Thank God I keep my finances separate from his, or (given his behavior last night) Mom might be going short this month to make the minimum required payments on Dad's debt, with no way for her to make the regular one.