Love.....love will win you a mixer...

I have a new obsession, and I'm late to the party. She is the Pioneer Woman. I'm going to be just like her from now on. Not really, because she is a city girl who fell in love with a cowboy and moved out to a ranch and cooks and takes pictures and writes books and I am....none of those things. I do cook, but I don't blog about it. I do take pictures, but not artistically. I love a soldier, not a cowboy. I live in an apartment, not on a ranch. I am going to write a book one day.

The other night I sat in my chair and did not move until I had read all of this, which is her love story about her Malboro Man. I'm going to write mine, because my story is better, but do not exect it any time soon. It's long. I've written two single-spaced pages and we haven't gone out on our first date yet.

So bright and early this morning I am in the bed on the website on my iPhone before both my eyes are open, and she's having a contest, giving away a KitchenAid stand mixer (I already have one, but that's not the point) to three random people who answer this question:

“If you could meet and have dinner with one man throughout the history of mankind, whom would it be? And why?

I read all 400 answers, some of which were relevant - like the founding fathers or the CEO of BP - and some of them were typical - like Jesus, Abraham Lincoln and people's departed fathers and grandfathers - and some of them were thoughtful - like Mark Twain, Nelson Mandela or the Dalai Lama.

I never enter contests. In the history of my life, I have never won an item. Not a prize drawing. Not $1 from a scratch-off lottery card. I have won money in card games and at casinos, but I consider that something I've earned. In the last five years, I stopped entering contests, because I do not win them. But I had to enter this one. Not because I need a mixer, although she's giving away some attachments that I'm all about, or because I want her to know my name, which I really do. I answered the question to enter the contest because my answer was better than everybody else's compelling and needed to be shared.

My answer is...

Are you ready?

My husband.

The other day I got an amazing and unexpected email from a new friend who has done this Army wife thing for a while, and it contained the best description of my current emotional state, one that I had not been able to describe for myself. She shared with me that she found it easy to be a pillar of strength in the beginning of deployment and then there came a point where she could no longer be positive. That point was The Middle, when she could not easily remember what life was like before deployment, and the end of deployment was too far away to look forward to. She said "the middle was the hardest point."

Here I am, smack dab in The Middle, and it feels like shit, like I cannot remember what we would do if he were here, and looking forward would only make the time go slower. It took someone else having to diagnose me as being in The Middle, but I completely embrace it, and the suck that comes along with it. This too shall pass. My husband says so.

Back to the contest. There is no man on earth more interesting to me than Corey Allbritton right now. I would hang on his every word with baited breath. I would buy him dinner wherever he wanted and he could spend the whole dinner talking about Military Things I Don't Understand and I would smile and nod. I would get to touch him to know he was all in one piece. I would get to smell his face, which still smells like high school to me. I would get to plug in and charge the connection that is fading as this period of separation gets longer and longer. It wouldn't just be dinner. It would temporarily change my quality of life.

The world, or at least all the readers of ThePioneerWoman.com, needs to know that I would have the best dinner with My Most Interesting Man in the History of Mankind. Nobody misses Abe Lincoln more than I miss Corey Allbritton. Whether I win a mixer for saying it is bonus.

Seriously, if you don't already, bookmark thepioneerwoman.com and read it. When I make a pilgrimage to her ranch in Oklahoma one day, I'll let anybody who can prove a devotion matching mine ride with me.
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