I made my former boss keep a secret from his partner for about eight weeks, when I was waiting for the final offer from my new employer to come in. Which was a problem, because I worked with his partner every day.

He (my former boss) was happy when I finally gave notice because he could finally talk to his partner about it.

Thinking about it, there's actually a fair amount that I *don't* tell Aimee.

But that's because I forget to tell her.

"Did my sister call yesterday?"

"Oh. Uh. Yeah, I guess she did."

This is all too true.

I just got an email to my Yahoo account addressed to my husband--with the correct usage of his name--telling him he'd been accepted into the Madison Who's Who. I'm trying to figure out what I've sent from my address in his name that would have been sold to someone.

I don't expect Hubby to tell me everything he hears, but he generally does unless asked not to. Generally it's because he wants my ideas on how to deal with something that involves someone we both know.

Oh yeah, my default assumption for telling people things is that couples are single entities for this purpose under almost all circumstances, except for surprises.

I *think* I tell Hec most all the secrets that people tell me, though I don't know if he does the same in return. And I most definitely expect that whatever I tell one half of a couple will go to the other half.

One side effect of the whole very close couple thing is that even though I tell him most of what I hear, I don't tell anyone else. I used to be kind of a gossip (or as much as a basically shy person can be, anyway), but that's completely fallen away. Tell me something and I'm extremely likely to tell Hec (unless you ask me not to), but not another living soul.

Yeah, I've generally gone with the whole two-is-one deal on dyad communication, with a few exceptions. I tend to tell the SO every little detail of every single thing, but I suspect that's just my own neurosis. He's like Robin's, but I don't know if it's because of a privacy thing or not. He's very outgoing, and people have a tendency to just tell him things, so I think it's more that.

And then also, we really have completely separate sets of friends. Since moving here we've been more couply, but in NM my hermit needs meant that he had a separate set of buddies that I didn't really know at all. We'd like each others' friends, but we have such different social needs that they just don't really cross up. That is to say, he could tell me his friends' secrets and I would be all, who now? So he doesn't bother, generally, unless it's philosophically interesting or something.

I don't have to tell the SO everything if something is told to me in confidence, but I also won't lie to him when asked to. But I would tell the requester, not gonna happen, at the time of the request, so still aboveboard.

The only time dyad communication gets really tricky is when the relationship itself is tricky. Like our friends with the imploding marriage (and we've been through several of those. I dunno how we ended up dubbed the 'stable couple who can help you navigate your divorce.').

We had our quarterly birthday party today. Rescheduled from last Wednesday. So it was a V-day theme. I got a rose. And a heart-shaped doily with my name on it.

I don't like this week very much. I think I'm going to go home now, and seriously consider working from home on Friday.

Damn.

On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.

Not only does it make many of Bush's tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about $442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what's interesting about these cuts are how Bush plans to pay for them.

Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

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