Sorry for my super long absence! Turns out that getting a house is a lot of work. Who would have thought? But I am al unpacked, my shed is no longer half-filled with beer cans, and my basement is now clean. So I can finally sit down without feeling too guilty! I hope to be writing pretty regularly again. I hope.

Things have been good since we moved into a house. Dan'yel is happier, especially after he filled the house up with furniture. He tried to get me to come along to the store to pick it out. It was way too much, and I waited for him outside. He literally filled our house with so much furniture; there is barely room to work on anything on the floor. Of course, that's because on Earth they do that work on tables or desks. I'm trying to do that too. But it's weird.

Usually when Dan'yel goes to work, I go with him. Either I help him translate or I learn English on the machine. Usually some mix of both. But today Dan'yel has one of those long meetings that they call "briefing". So I leave before he gets started.

I have big plans for the afternoon as well. This world has something called "take out". We usually eat that on the nights that we don't eat at the mess hall. Sometimes Dan'yel cooks on the strange Earthan "stove" where you can't even see the fire. The food he makes comes from cans or tubes or boxes.

I'm going to cook him a real meal. Yesterday, Sara went to the commissary* with me, and we bought ingredients for a homemade meal. There is some meat here which resembles a Mastage… at least a little. And we got some brown-skinned vegetables the people of Earth like to eat with it.

Sara explained how to cook it to me. It all seemed so simple at the time, but now I'm pretty sure that I'm in over my head. All the things are in a pot inside the "stove". But I don't think it's on. It's not warm at all. And I can't make it work. I keep turning knobs and waiting for it to warm up before I go back and turn more knobs. Still the stupid "stove" is cold as ice.

The briefings aren't brief (particularly when my husband speaks), but this cooking is taking so long that I'm worried my husband will be home before I finish. There is only one thing left to do.

I go into the backyard (I am careful to leave the door open. I was locked out once, and had to wait until Dan'yel returned. I always keep my key with me now, but I'm also careful not to shut the door). I start pulling sticks off the tree until I make a pile in the middle of the yard. Then I go back into the house and find a lighter.

It's a nifty way of making fire. People of Earth keep them around even though they don't actually use fire that often. Except Jack, he likes to keep a strange fire close to his mouth. I take the lighter out the yard and get a good fire going. I don't have time to construct a proper spit so I just stab the meat with a stick and hold it over the fire. I throw the vegetables in as they are. After all, Sara told me that most people don't even eat the skin.

The meal is almost successfully cooked when I hear Dan'yel yelling my name.

"Out here, husband," I tell him.

"Sha'uri!" he exclaims, running out and hugging me briefly. Then he pulls me away wearing the face that Abba used to wear when he scolded me.

"I made you dinner," I say holding the meat up.

"I can see that. Sha'uri… we don't just start a fire on the grass. If we're going to have a fire often, we'd better get a fire pit. And fire wood. What did you do to the trees?"

"I…" I attempt to explain, but find that no words come.

"And Sha'uri, we've got to have a primer on the stove."

"I think it's broken!" I protest.

"Sha'uri you've got all the burners on full blast."

"But the inside wouldn't get hot."

"You turned the stove on, not the oven," he says.

"Alright, what harm is there in that?" I ask.

"A great deal!" he exclaims, with something I would mistake for anger if I thought that my husband would get angry at me. "You could have burnt yourself if you touched it. Or if fabric ended up touching it you could have started the whole house on fire!"

"I'm sorry," I say, really worried about how mad he is right now.

He looks at my face, and the lines on his own face soften a bit, "Look, I'm sorry. It isn't right of me to yell at you. It's just that I was really worried about you. I couldn't stand…" he closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them, he tucks a bit of my hair behind my ear, "I couldn't stand if anything happened to you. It would just about kill me. Do you understand that? You have to be careful."

I start to cry.

"Sha'uri," he says, holding me tight against his chest.

"I can't even make a meal for my husband," I sob. "I'm the worse wife ever!"

"Not even close," he says, pulling me away so that I can look in his face. "You're a really good wife. You are by far the best assistant I've ever had. You keep me organized, and help me translate. I can get twice as much done as I could without you. You keep my office and the house completely spotless, which is not easy when you're living with someone who is as much of a slob as I am. You are a great conversationalist. I have not been bored once when you were in the room. And you are the most beautiful creature I have ever laid eyes on. You are everything a wife should be and so much more."

I'm blushing by the end of his speech.

"And you'll learn to cook. Let's just make a rule that you only cook when I'm home. Ok?"

I nod. He starts to walk away, clearly thinking the conversation is over. I grab onto his arm to stop him.

"Dan'yel, you are an amazing husband. You took me even though you did not really want to be married. You make me feel valuable and precious every time you look at me. You take care of me. You find ways for me to take care of you, even though this isn't my culture. You explain the world to me. And your looks are…"

He cuts me off, "You don't have to lie."

I laugh.

"Of course, you don't have to be that honest," he mutters doing that self-hug he always does when he feels insecure.

"Dan'yel, how could you not know that you are one of the most gorgeous men ever to walk the face of my planet or yours?"

He blushes and shakes his head. But he also stops doing the self-hug. "I love you, Sha'uri," he tells me.

Samantha's machine has found an address for my husband to go visit. Most of the people that I know are going to go visit this planet: Samantha, Dan'yel, and Jack are all going to a place that her machine discovered.**

Dan'yel decided that I could not be trusted by myself. (He used all sorts of fluffy words about not wanting me to be lonely. But I could tell his motivation was an image of the house in flames). So I am staying with Sara while they are away.

I feel like such a nuisance,needing to be watched like I am a small child. And to Sara I am. She is almost as old as my Omm would be if she had lived.

I try to make myself useful, but there isn't much to clean in Sara's house. She keeps it pretty clean already. So she decides to give me lessons on how to cook. She uses a book while cooking. I can read a bit of English now. Dan'yel gets me children's books that are, as he says, "worthy of being read by an intelligent adult." But I can't make head or tails of Sara's cooking book. It has lots of fraction measurements in it. She tries in vain to explain them to me before we decide to cook without them. We cook by "cups" and "teaspoons" instead of this unit of measure they call "fractions".***

The first thing that we make is cookies. Sara has to do most of the measuring for them. Then she puts them in the oven and figures out by using a clock when they should be taken out. A clock is another Earth thing that doesn't make any sense to me. Sara gives me my first lesson on time, and by the end of it I understand that it has to do with hours, and that they use them so they can all show up at a place at the same time. But I still can't read a clock.

"Do cookies normally make that smell?" I ask some time later.

"Shoot!" Sara exclaims, rushing over to the oven. I'm trying to figure out what she wants me to use their weapon on and where she keeps it. She puts a piece of fabric on her hand, explaining as she does it that it is very important to do so or you'll get burnt. She pulls the cookies out and I can see that they are burnt, charred black.

Next, we attempt to make something called lasagna. One of the books I read was about a cat which was quite fond of this particular dish. **** I find this easier to make. There is not so much measuring. You just put all the meat in a dish and stir it with the stick with a flat bottom. Then you put the noodles in the water and keep pulling them out to test them until they are soft when you touch them. Then you put it all together in a certain order and put it in the oven.

The oven part is where we run into trouble. I turn the stove on by accident again, and Sara has to show me how to make sure the burners are off and the oven is on. Then we put the dish into the oven, and Sara marks the time on the clock. Then Sara forgets all about it, and reduces all of our work to a blacked mess that must be thrown away outside, because of the smell.

I'm beginning to think I made a bad choice in a cooking instructor.*****

There is not work to do in the lab while Dan'yel is away, so I spend most of my waking hours (especially the few that Sara is at work) working on the language learning software on their computer. I have been on Earth of only one of their months, but already I have finished one of the five disks, and I can understand a bit of what people say. I'm not nearly so good at speaking the language yet. But I do well enough that Sara and I are alright without a translator. (Although there are a great many things that I can think but not yet say).

The night that Dan'yel comes home, I cook for my husband the first time (or at least the first time that he didn't get angry and afraid).

"So what did you discover on the planet?" I ask him.

"Not much," he mutters with his mouth full, "This is really good, Sha'uri."

I look at him alarmed, but he doesn't even notice. Maybe the Air Force wives were right. Maybe the "classified" is starting now.

"I mean after three days of MRE's pretty much anything would taste good, but this is just plain amazing."

"What did the planet look like?" I ask.

"Oh you know…" he says, casually shrugging his shoulders.

"No I don't know! I've only ever been to Earth and Abydos!" I exclaim, stomping out of the room, and going into our bedroom.

He knocks on the door. I don't answer. After a few seconds he opens it up, and comes to sit down on my bed. "Sha'uri, I don't quite understand what's wrong here," he says softly.

"My husband leaves me for three days to risk his life on some other planet," I reply, "And then when he comes back he can't even tell me about it!"

He looks at the wall for a little bit before focusing back on me, "I'm not quite sure what you want here. Do you want me to quit SG-1, or do you want me to try to get you assigned to an SG team, or…"

"I just want you to be able to tell me about work. I know the other wives… this whole "classified"… it's just something I'm going to have to learn to deal with. I'm sorry, husband. I'm being foolish. They warned me…" I mutter, feeling like he must be disappointed with me.

"No, Sha'uri. I wasn't kidding when I said there was nothing special about that planet. There were some trees… and really that was about it. What I do is classified. But it's a little different, because you are classified too. A lot of those wives, Sara for instance, they don't even know that their husbands travel to different planets for a living. You know a lot about what I do."

"I know I don't have any right to complain. I even sit next to you and help you do it most of the time."

He nods his head, "But if something important ever happened, anything life- or planet-altering, I'd tell you about it. I'd probably be allowed to. But even if I wasn't I'd break the rules for you."

"Really?" I ask.

"Really," he says. "And have I mentioned how impressed I am that you learned to cook like someone from Earth in such a short amount of time? I've been living on Earth my whole life and I'm not nearly as good a cook as you are."

"I just… didn't want to have to have a babysitter anymore," I mutter, before I can stop myself.

He looks at me with pain in his eyes, "I didn't mean to offend you. I don't think of you as a baby that needs to be watched over. I just want you to be safe. You can stay by yourself the next time I go on a trip if you want to."

"You're leaving again?" I complain before I can stop myself.

He smiles, "I like being missed. It's been a really long time since anyone gave a crap about where I was. But no, I won't be travelling for a week or so. Sam's computer only gives us a couple of addresses a month, and Kowalsky's team is talking the other one. Actually I have five days off, and I was thinking of doing a little road trip."

"Road trip?" I ask uncertainly.

"Yes… see on Earth, when people first get married they often take a little trip. Usually it's to someplace really exciting like Hawaii or Mexico. But we only have four days, and since you haven't see much of Earth I figure just about anything would be exciting. And Jack has this cabin up in Minnesota that he said he could use."

"Cabin?" I ask.

"It's a house that…"

"You have a serious house obsession, my Dan'yel," I inform him.

He rolls his eyes, "Anyway it's really pretty country, and you'd get to drive through a big chunk of the United States on your way there. You could see your first big city and the area that we're going is in forests. You've never really seen a forest. I mean you've seen trees here, but they are all planted. None of them are natural. But we don't have to go if you don't want to go."

"Road trip," I say, smiling.

*Correct usage, not the incorrect use described in the TV show. In other words, we're talking a grocery store.

** In this story I am going with the pretense that the dialing computer would spit out addressees in the same order as it did on the show. Now this does not mean that they necessarily go to the same planets in the same order. For instance, the planet that they go to in "Children of the Gods" they do not go to in this story. They got the address of that planet from Feretti. He only knew it, because he was attacked on Abydos. That attack won't happen for a year yet. Therefore, we don't have that address. So, Teal'c has yet to join the team, and Kwalsky doesn't have a Goa'uld in his neck, and everyone is a year younger than they were when they started going through the gate in the first episode. This planet Daniel just returned from is the one that the team heads off to at the end of "The Enemy Within." Most planets they are going to visit a year earlier than they would have in the series. Which in and of itself is going to change a lot of things.

***Yes, Sha'uri is confused. That is sort of the point.

****Garfield would be a totally appropriate way to introduce an Ancient Egyptian to American literature. Most of his books (aside from the weird one with an alien which she would probably find offensive although it's somewhat applicable…beautiful alien cat…) involve very domestic American scenes. The words are decently easy to read (unlike most comics). The jokes are adult without being dirty. Most importantly there are pictures to give the English language learner clues about what they are reading.

*****I'm basing Sara's cooking skill off of the episode "Cold Lazarus" in which she burns a hot dish that her father left in the oven for her. I'm also exaggerating a little bit, because exaggeration is a whole lot of fun. But in my defense, one of my best friends in highs school had my version of Sara's cooking skills. I kid you not. Never once did she fail to burn something she put in the oven.