Ebony's Pearls

I was kidnapped this afternoon and taken to see Coraline and have dinner at Pei Wei's.

Yesterday,I learned my youngest is getting divorced. It wasn't his idea. As far as he knew, his marriage was doing well, but his wife filed the paperwork last June. She waited to tell him until after he applied for and got a transfer to her unit, and after a long flight back from his deployment, and after a 13 hour drive at the end of that flight and left him homeless at 11:30 at night. Granted, it's the Army and he wasn't homeless for long, but she could have told him last summer. She could have told him when he took leave to be with her for her birthday. But she waited until he was eagerly anticipating spending time with her and utterly exhausted from days of travel.

That sucks.

What sucks worse is that he has no friends, no family, no familiar faces. She deprived him of all of that with her timing.

I know being kidnapped off to movies and a dinner was an act of kindness by people who wanted to send their sympathies to him by proxy.

So,for him, here's what we did to cheer him up by proxy.

If you don't want spoilers, don't read any further.

I mean it.

Stop now.

OK, here it comes.

.

.

.

.

I don't know why I never like most of Neil Gaiman's main characters,but I do like secondary and walk-on characters he writes. It's no different with Coraline.

Mind, she's young,and he does capture all the teen angst, and she does seem quick - and eventually, kind. It's obviously told from her POV, and so her parents are caricatures.

I've heard people say it's like a blend of The Matrix andNightmare Before Christmas and I don't see it. However, I would say it's like Alice in Wonderland meets Nightmare Before Christmas by way of Hansel and Gretel and filtered through Neil Gaiman.

As for dinner- Pei Wei was very good. They had three dishes without soy. And chai and mandarin orange white tea. We were pleased with it.

Now we are home, and I'm waiting to hear back from him after he reads the divorce papers through. I wired him enough money to buy the basic household stuff he'll need but lacks because he expected to move into married housing with his wife who has all of that from their wedding - bedding, towels, cook pots,dinnerware. He'll have furniture thanks to base housing.The Army was at least kind enough to put him in a different unit of the same battalion and he won't be going back to Iraq when she ships out next month. That's something.