Having tidied the house, washed and folded six loads of laundry, wrapped twelve Christmas presents, written three dozen Christmas cards and cleaned two cat boxes, I was a bit too tuckered to think about cooking dinner. So I asked my husband to do it instead.

Big mistake. Big, big, BIG mistake.

Ordinarily, I tend to view “man food” as something verboten. It’s simply too fatty, meaty and greasy for my system to handle, not to mention how those extra calories seem to contain homing signals within them that immediately send them to my stomach and butt.

But somehow I convinced myself that since I was tired it wouldn’t really count. What with all the things I’d accomplished earlier in the day, and how exhausted I was, surely my body would give me a pass and not hold the nutritional nightmare on my plate against me, right?

Big mistake. Big, big, BIG mistake.

VH proudly placed a plate of “Man Eggs”, as he called them, in front of me with a hearty encouragement to “Dig in!” Given the huge pile of bacon encrusted with scrambled eggs and topped with melted slices of cheese, dig was the appropriate word.

But, oh, it tasted so good!

Around 2 o’clock this morning according to my obnoxiously bright bedside clock (which isn’t nearly as reliable as, say, a Technomarine watch but was probably close enough), I woke with abdominal cramps worse than any “time of the month” cramps I’ve ever experienced. I started to roll out of bed rather than risk waking my husband with all of my groaning, only to discover that my midsection felt like someone had planted a 10-pound block of cement midway through my small intestine. So much for even thinking about getting out of bed.

By 3 o’clock, my husband was fully awake and complaining about how I’d been tossing and turning for a full hour. I explained to him that his “Man Eggs” were to blame, and thus it was only fair that he was miserable, too.

His response? “If you can’t handle so much bacon, eggs and cheese, keep me out of the kitchen.”

Thought for the day: hitting one’s spouse with a pillow repeatedly is also aerobic activity.