Yesterday evening, just after the time at which my friendly neighbourhood GP closes up for the weekend, I started getting an occasional pain in my kidney, a pain which became progressively more sharp as time went on. You don’t have to be Marie Curie to know that this is either a kidney infection or a kidney stone, and you don’t have to be Albert Einstein to begin fervently praying for Door A: Infection.

Since “screaming in agony at 3 am” seemed like a sucktastic differential diagnosis method, I took myself off to SouthDoc. Last time I did this, they left me on the floor of their waiting room while my appendix ruptured and I departed in an ambulance; this time, I came home an hour and a half later with a barrel full of antibiotics and painkillers. Comparatively speaking, I think we can chalk that one up as a win.

24 hours later, I am delighted that this appears to definitively be an infection, because while I feel like complete shit, I am not screaming in agony whilst trying to piss an object just slightly wider than your average ureter. And for that I am very, very grateful.

I am also very, very weirded out. Most of my marriage is a battleground for possession of the thermostat; I run around barely clad in monkey pants and a vest, screaming like a menopausal hotflash harridan for my husband to turn the bloody heat down while he sits there fully dressed complaining that he’s cold.

At the moment, however, I am huddled in a miserable heap on the sofa, wearing a long sleeved shirt, a sweatshirt, a bathrobe and a sleeping bag, and I cannot get warm. Meanwhile my poor husband is sitting next to me in a t-shirt, basking in sub-Saharan heat and sweltering to death.

But he looks damn cute in the monkey pants.

Despite the fact that I am the antithesis of a brazen careerist – I don’t do corporate hierarchy, and I am goal, not money, motivated – I am a long time reader of Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist. There’s something refreshing about reading someone who is even bitchier and more acerbic than I am, and while I don’t always agree with her, I appreciate her willingness to continually put well-supported but unpopular views out there. Unpalatable doesn’t always mean wrong.

Often, she writes about women and work, a topic near and dear to my heart. Today she’s revealed that in the aftermath of her divorce, she’s hired a household manager to the tune of $50,000 a year. And before you start laughing, let me tell you: if I had it, I’d do it. And I don’t even have kids.

Of all of the sage advice my mother has ever given me, some of the smartest is “Every working woman needs a wife.” I hired a housekeeper about 10 years ago when I lived in a flat that was, quite literally, a shoebox. The loo was smaller than an airplane bathroom and the shower was in the kitchen. And despite the fact that I married a kick ass guy who does both all the grocery shopping and all the ironing, we still have a housekeeper.

There is a reason these wonderful women are referred to as “household help.” They help keep the household up and running, and more importantly (for me at least) they provide the reassurance of there being a human being out there who’s actual job it is to help you.

That’s worth a tremendous amount to me. When we have eaten out of the freezer because we’ve been utterly broke, we have paid the housekeeper. When we have not bought each other holiday gifts, we have paid the housekeeper. When we have not been able to pay the light bill, we have paid the housekeeper.

There’s a lot of talk about outsourcing these days, and a lot of people who do what I do who outsource pieces of work to other people and even other countries. I’m fine with that in theory, but I’m way too attached to what I produce to do that. So while I can’t outsource graphic design or HTML, I can outsource fridge cleaning and carpet hoovering.

To be honest, I’m jealous as hell of Penelope Trunk. Because I’ve got a housekeeper, but I really need a wife.

So as the weather turns a bit warmer and plans for summer firm up, it appears my husband is leaving me, again. This time it will be a week for the Glastonbury Festival and four weeks for the Edinburgh Festival. He booked his ticket for Glastonbury last night, at which point I told him to hand over his credit card because fair is fair and I too am getting the hell out of Dodge.

I have said this in advance of every summer for five years in a row. The mistake I have made up until now is trying to book a July holiday between his June and August commitments at a time we can both go away and to a destination we can both agree on. Every summer, we have completely failed to tick these boxes, and I have found myself facing a chilly September with not nearly enough air miles behind me.

This year I said “sod that for a game of soldiers” and let Aer Lingus have its pilfering way with me. Direct flights are a bit limited, but considering that I live in Cork, I’m delighted to have an airport at all and am not really going to start bitching that I can’t jet into Cannes on a whim. Of the available options, I have no interest in going to Berlin, I’ve already spent a lot of time in Rome, and I’d be happy to go to Spain again except the rest of you will already be there. So five minutes after demanding my husband hand over plastic liberty, I picked a destination very nearly at random and booked tickets to Prague.

I know absolutely nothing about Prague except that I’m staying at the Pension Museum. I assume this means there is a museum nearby, and that sounds nice because I enjoy museums, particularly when I have no idea what’s in them. I imagine there will also be coffee, books and whatever incarnation of Czech pastry passes for breakfast at noon.

I both love and like my other half but I have a deeply ingrained habit of traveling on my own. We are not the same person and we don’t have perfectly aligned tastes, and I have this suspicion that nothing will exhaust a marriage as much as 40 years of constant compromise. That just sounds hideously frustrating. So for five days in July, there will be museums, graveyards, bookstores, fabric and bead stores.

There will not, however, be tents, mud or any kind of portaloos.

My dad used to tell this joke. When you’d complain about one of those days when everything had gone wrong – you woke up, slipped on dog puke, fell down the stairs, broke your ankle, hopped to the kitchen, realised your phone has been cut off of and you couldn’t call an ambulance, tried to administer first aid in the bathroom, and then noticed you’d somehow managed to lock yourself in there, he’d say “Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the theatre?”

While that is an old and very nearly completely true story, it is also pretty much what the last two weeks have been like. In other words, two weeks of miserable, epic Fail.

In all the incarnations of my blog I have been pretty much transparent. Were my archives online, which one day they will be, you could read about everything from heart break to politics to writing a sex advice column for a top shelf men’s mag to the fun ride that was a temporary psychotic break complete with my dead grandfather dropping in for a chat in my kitchen. You could, in short, read about the experiences of a woman in her mid-20s, which somehow fit into a different box of reality than a woman in her mid-30s.

Things are different now, and I’m not so transparent these days. Especially these days. Something happened, it was outside my control, I took the ride and I’m here to not tell the story. Sometimes, that’s just how it rolls, and I’ve decided today that that’s okay when it has to be.

I’m in the middle of returning all outstanding emails, and completed sites will begin to appear very shortly. I have a delightful pile of Xanax at my side, and frankly that and PhotoShop are enough to get me through the day and pending projects out the door.

Posts may be a bit light as I catch up, but we now return you to your regularly scheduled broadcast. Thank you for standing by.