My wife is my hero. There's so many reasons for it, but this morning it's because she figured out how to put the spacebar back on my laptop. Before she came downstairs, I had fumbled for a good twenty minutes, stymied by such a simple mechanical task. When there's work to be done in a stressful time, losing your spacebar is about as frustrating a minor emergency as one can have.

It started because my darling cat Chloe has developed a fondness for sitting on my keyboard. While she ignored my wife's Thinkpad for years, something about the soft-springing feel of my Powerbook's keys has made it her favorite spot. Needless to say, this has contributed to my work life immensely. I'm not sure which of my clients have received bizarre emails from her, but I'm certain there's a few, never mind the disk files she decided I didn't need.

Two days ago, she tracked some cat litter pellets upstairs with her, which of course got lodged below the keys. For days, I lived with a new kind of stress ... which key won't work today? The pellets kept moving around, finally finding themselves underneath my spacebar. This morning, stupidly, I decided to start ripping keys off. Trickiest of all is the spacebar.

There are times when life closes in around me, as though circumstance were conspiring to teach me the simple importance of things, and this is such a time. In the last month, I've learned that four of the closest women in my life are battling life-threatening illnesses (two human, two feline); I've weathered some sustained sibling disagreement regarding my mother's inheritence; I've put damn near all of me into this software project, only to watch morale seeping away in the team, mostly because of my own blundering grumpy frustrations.

But when your spacebar goes ... all I can say is that my wife is a hero. This post wouldn't have made much sense without her.