So I'm off to Dallas for the week. This is the standard milk run for me - fly in on Monday, back home on Friday. I usually do this twice a month. Sometimes it's back-to-back weeks and I have the option to spend the weekend in Dallas, but Beth and Zoe are 1,231 miles away when I'm here so I do the Frequent Flyer Fandango and double up on the airmiles by flying home to be with them for 54 hours. Sometimes, though, the siren song of room service and silence and not being kicked in the head in my sleep is tempting. Committed Family Man that I am, I resist.

Much as I miss being home, I didn't mind it at all the week and a half I was in Syracuse last month. The furnace in our house conked out the day before I left and we didn't get it fixed until a few days after I got back. While I was making do in a Hilton mini-suite with functional heating, room service, complimentary cook-to-order breakfast in the lobby in the morning and complimentary drinks in the evening (yes, even the fake beers I like to drink), Beth and Zoe and Lynn (Beth's sister, newly returned from living in London, staying with us while apartment-hunting) were bundling up and hunkering down and struggling to survive the very worst Southern California had to throw at them - sub-50's overnight temperatures (even sub-40 one night!) and daytime highs that nearly inched into the 70's. They nearly didn't make it.

All joking aside, it did get pretty cold here, even though it is Southern California, home of Baywatch and wintertime tans. It doesn't matter where you are: if you can see your breath in your living room, it's freakin' cold. We were burning wood in the fireplace and running the oven with the door open and eating dinner bundled up like Eskimos. There was much rejoicing last week when we finally got the furnace fixed. Beth cranked it up to 80 the first night … and woke up with a sore throat and swollen sinuses. Go figure.

Star sighting the other night. Beth and I were having dinner prior to seeing Oceans 11 (review: Chuck says "good," Beth sez "eh") when in come David Kelley and Michelle Pfeiffer. They saw us from the entrance, waved, and came over to join us. We had a nice dinner with them, enjoyed some excellent wine, and David was kind enough to pick up the tab. But things really got interesting over coffee. David said he'd read one of my old specs and had been looking for me for months but couldn't reach me because my old agent was run over by a bus and dragged for 32 blocks before dying and thus couldn't give him my contact information. He'd been looking for me because he was fresh out of ideas for new TV shows and he knew I'd be able to help. He was so excited and happy to have finally found me that he offered me a first-look 5-year 25 million dollar production deal he'd brokered with the studio for me just in case I thought of "anything decent."

It took a while to get all the details on the offer, though, because throughout David's pitch to me, Michelle kept interrupting and asking if I remembered the time we rode the same escalator in the Westside Pavilion parking garage in 1993. I had been ahead of her and she had tried to catch up to me but had caught a heel in the escalator and had gone down and couldn't break free in time to catch up to me. Ever since, she said, she's been obsessed with the memory of me, thinking of me constantly, hanging out at that same escalator in hopes that I'd be there again, dreaming of me at night, and generally just pining away for me. Her marriage to David was a shallow attempt to fill the void left by her unrequited desire for me, and in fact her primary reason for marrying him at all was to garner a lot of publicity in hopes that I'd see a photo or a headline or a story or somehow be exposed to it and would remember our time on the escalator and finally seek her out. (That whole Fisher Stevens thing was for publicity, too, but it was just wrong on too many levels to keep playing it out.) Now that I was here in front of her again, finally, at long last, she pleaded with me to make love to her right there on the table if necessary, but she'd rather get us a suite at the Four Seasons where we could spend the next month in bed, living on room service and doing unspeakable things to each other 24/7.

Well. What was I going to do? Of course I accepted David's 25 million dollar offer; I'm nothing if not a sport and, to be honest, this whole training thing was starting to get old anyway. Then, because I'm a gentleman, I also made sure he didn't mind if I made his wife's dreams come true. He didn't, and in fact thanked me in advance for giving her the pleasure he was unable to bring to their bed. Beth, of course, was completely okay with it, and in fact encouraged me to leave right then and there and get to getting busy with Michelle because it's long been one of her fantasies for me to have sex with another woman while she goes home alone and feeds the pets and takes care of the house and bathes and dresses Zoe and does everything else around the house for just as long as I feel like being busy pleasuring another woman.

What can I say? It's good to be me.

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All right, all right, so I'm lying. David Kelley didn't really offer me a deal and Michelle Pfeiffer didn't really beg me to bed her. But, damn it, it should have been true! At least I got to see a good movie and spend a rare evening out with Beth.