You know, sometimes it’s easy to forget how crowded our senses are in the modern world, between TV and the Internet and all the other electronic windows that we use to keep a grip on our lives. It’s only when all that stuff gets turned off that you really hear it for the first time – the quiet, the peaceful silences – and appreciate what exactly you’ve given up for the sake of having 24-hour, non-stop, in-depth coverage of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and all their goings on.

So Saturday night we just unplugged. Kristi returned from her sister’s baby shower – I’d been spending most of the day playing Metal Gear Solid 4 (which by the way, I would love for Christmas, just sayin’) – and at about 5pm we just shut it all off. TV. PS3. Laptops. Email. Cell phones. The works. We only left on music, our wedding soundtrack streamed from the house server. Everything else: down.

We started a fire in the fireplace and broke out Risk.

Kristi had never in her life played Risk before. I hadn’t played since I was a kid, but still had fond memories of playing it in childhood with my younger brother. Kristi remembered her father playing it all the time with family friends and telling her, “You don’t want to play this.”, which just made her more want to abandon her adventures in Candyland and to discover more about global domination. When we first bought the game last week, she mentioned that the rules seemed complicated; I insisted it was just a badly written rulebook. It took a little coaxing to get her to play.

And then she proceeded to roundly kick my ass. Up one side. Down the other. Brutally. Without mercy. And all I can say there is.. I may have lost, but dammit, I made Peru a damned expensive territory to win and hold. Those Peruvians don’t take kindly to Venezuelan aggression, even when hopelessly outnumbered.

But then again, neither do Mongolians – as my Japanese forces learned the hard way.

We fixed a candlelight dinner – shrimp scampi over linguini, caesar salad and bread – and just enjoyed the unwinding quiet of a cold Saturday evening by the fire. Then we broke out the Scrabble game and went to war again, a long bloodmatch that resulted in an exhausted, last-punch-from-the-mat draw. By then, it was about 10pm and we were getting tired; we went to bed and read together until Kristi fell asleep. Then I read a little while longer, turned off the light and turned in.

We’re going to start doing this on a weekly basis. It’s a great way to unwind and reconnect after a long, stressful week – for me (as I told Kristi the other day), it reminds me of driving to Cocoa Beach on Friday nights, before we met. Especially during really stressful times, I needed that once-a-week getaway, an hour or so to walk a quiet, warm beach at sunset, talking to the fishermen and marching my feet through the summer surf, and then driving home listening to Friday Night Eighties on a local station and maybe stopping for a coffee at Barnes and Noble on the way. I used to do that just to stay sane; by the time I got in the car to start the drive home, I’d be so completely unwound I might as well have been stoned.

Saturday Night Unplugged reminded me of that, only better because now I can share an unwind night with my wife. So yeah, I’m glad we’re going to keep doing it. I’d highly recommend it to anyone.

NEWS UPDATE: WE BOUGHT THE BED! I’ll let Kristi tell that story, but as I write this I’m waiting for the delivery guys to show up. The mattress was expensive, but we found the one we wanted, and especially the one we needed: a Simmons BeautyRest, California King size, we both just fell in love with it. And we got a good deal on both the mattress and a new headboard/box set to house it.

By the time Kristi comes home from work, the guest room bed will be GONE. And thank God. We both hate that cheap, mushy thing, and I’m looking WAY forward to relegating our current bed to guest room status and then getting a good nights sleep tonight.

Lord oh lord: free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last.