When Esteban asked me what I wanted to do all weekend, I replied “Get my life back in order.” Which sounds really new agey and inspirational, but honestly, between the holidays and the sickness and then the trip, I have felt as though I was in some kind of weird holding pattern. Also, the Christmas tree kept sending me baleful looks when I’d try to watch television, then would stare meaningfully at the calendar and when I’d ask it what was wrong, it would sigh and say “Oh nothing! It’s fine! I’m fine. We’re fine” and then look outside at the neighbors’ house, which is festooned with lit Christmas lights all year long and know that it just only a matter of time.
It seems very wrong that the Christmas tree, the thing that took me almost all day to put up, took less than an hour to take down. Granted, I had help from Esteban this time, but still, it did not have the appropriate amount of exertion to the ending of a season. There should have been more sweat, I think. Or at least one broken bulb. I’m all about the symbolism.
On Saturday, Esteban went over to Scotty Boom Boom’s to bottle their homebrew, which was supposed to not take very long but actually lasted almost all day, what with their celebratory breakfast and trips back to the beer making store. I don’t know how I feel about this whole enterprise. It seems as though the people who brew their own beer should be wearing flannel and have sketchy facial hair and’ yeah, pretty much Scotty and Esteban, I guess. I wish they weren’t trending so closely to type. I hate the predictable. Which is why this fat girl hides her secret devotion to Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals.
While he was brewing, I was tearing through a metric ton of laundry, and I am not even exaggerating, because I’m pretty sure that if you had weighed it, it would have been a ton. There is no room in our tiny shared closet, which is stuffed to the everloving brim. I swear I’m going to start jacking off to the Ikea catalog. All of those wardrobe systems. Kllaaarken me, baby!
Speaking of which, I have determined that the one thing stopping me from all of my plans is the lack of shelving in my office closet. You see, without shelving, I have nowhere to go with everything in Computer Room #1, which needs to be emptied so that I can stow the furniture from the dining room in there and then rip out the carpeting and baseboards and paint the sucker and then voila, instant den. At some point. For want of some decent shelves. What I really need is Martha Stewart to come over so that I can give her my credit card and let her design something for me, but alas, no Martha.
I did go to the Depot to stand in their aisle and stare sadly at some of their systems. Esteban is weirdly against my installing any permanent shelves in the closet, feeling that future buyers will be turned off since you can’t hang clothes in the closet then. Excuse me, what reasonable buyer is going to look at our house and decide it’s perfect except that the space in the extra bedroom’s closet just has TOO much storage capability? Seriously, how hard are shelves to take out? I mean, we bought the place despite the fact that room had baby blue shag carpeting, cheap wood paneling and yellow and stained ceiling tiles. It now has real walls and ceiling, new windows and glossy cherry floors. Does he really think we would have been stymied by mofo shelves?
June called me, freaking out about the new travel regulations for their impending vacation to Hawaii, so I spent an hour on the phone talking about connecting flights and strategies for the security line and what she could or could not take on the plane with her. During the course of this conversation, I mentioned the need for shelves, which perked her interest. I love my mother-in-law so much. She is the polar opposite of her son. She doesn’t procrastinate one ounce. You want shelves? Let’s put in some damn shelves. Ward, start the car! We’re getting our coats on right now. What? You don’t have the shelves yet? Ward, shut off the car! Want Dad to go and get you some shelves? Ward, start the car! What kind of shelves do you want Dad to get?
But I just couldn’t find anything at the Depot. Nothing was perfect. I then stared at the Ikea website for hours, still deliberating between just buying some bookcases or actually doing what I wanted in there, which was to replicate what Ward had done in our linen closet. Except then Esteban was all antsy about permanent shelves. I declared that we would spend MLK day driving to Ikea to see what they had, and if we couldn’t find anything, we’d just do the Ward approach and then set into motion the whole chain of events that ends with every impending project finished in time and under budget. Or something.
I also made a giant pot of chili, out of a combination of round steak and pork loin. It was pretty tasty, although holy hell, I put so much chipotle in it that it tastes like it was made over a campfire. It’s so hearty that neither of us can finish a bowl before getting overfull. We couldn’t even finish our very good bottle of wine nor the cornbread muffins that I made for dessert (with honey cinnamon butter…take that, New Year Resolutions!) and were left to lie on the couch clutching our stuffed beany tummies and moan while watching a DVD.
On Sunday, I did more laundry, folded the previous day’s laundry, and then did some more laundry on top of that, until I ran out of all forms of laundry soap (I have special soap for dark loads and other soap for regular loads and still more soap with bleach in it for white loads) and had to stop. I also made it to the twelfth level of Zuma. Which, by the way, I cannot get past. Fricking Zuma. And then I went to bed early, because on Monday, we had our quest for shelves, which involved driving 400 miles, round trip, in the truck, just to shop in a big blue box.
On Monday morning, however, when I woke up, everything was white. I trudged out to the living room and flipped on the weather channel, where the satellite coverage showed a giant blob of snot where the state of Wisconsin was supposed to be. And then the local guys started talking about accidents and how all the roads were slalom courses and how everything was going to start to freeze and get dangerous as the low pressure system kicked in and how trucks were pummeling cars with slush balls the size of boulders and then making jokes about global warming. Fucking shelves.
I got dressed and hauled Esteban out of bed, because if I couldn’t have shelves, at least I could have pancakes. True enough, there was no one on the road, because it was shit out. Not only had they not plowed our street, they hadn’t even plowed the rather major cross street and there was little evidence that the crews had even touched Main Street. We got pancakes, then coffee, then went to Target for more laundry soap, all the while the heavens were scoffing at my hubris for having waited until Monday to make the trek.
We went back home and continued to putter away the snow day, cleaning up the house, doing . After a few hours of fighting with a short story, I got antsy and announced that I was going to wander around St. Vincent de Paul for awhile. That always seems to reset my brain somewhat. I love looking for old school books and ugly 70’s plates from my childhood. I love the combinations of history and also raw potential. I sort of want to buy every one of the millions of hobnail white florist vases that end up there. I want a bucket of “pinchers”, which is what someone has labeled the collection of barbeque tongs. Everyone needs a good bucket of pinchers.
I was looking at the magazine rack when a guy walked past and said “Excuse me.” I moved, figuring that he wanted to get past me. He paused, looking at the magazines, and then said “Excuse me” again. “Oh, sorry” I said, vaguely irritated because man, do you have to look exactly where I am looking? He shook his head and said “Oh, no, I just wanted to tell you that you are a very attractive woman.”
I think I did a weird double take, one where my eyes got big, because honestly, I looked ridiculous. My hair was floopy and I had on only whatever minimal makeup I had applied hours earlier and I was dressed as though I had just come from the gym, with sneakers and track pants and a light pink Old Navy hoodie. Certainly not attractive. Certainly not very attractive.
“Oh… thank you.”
“You are. I suppose you’re married?” He glanced at my bare ring finger. I almost never wear my wedding ring because the thick band exacerbates my eczema. Stupid eczema.
“I am.”
“Well, tell him that he’s a very lucky man, because you? You are a very attractive woman. Very attractive.”
“I will tell him. Thank you.”
He walked away to examine a stack of warped 45’s and I fled, as though I had just been molested or something, which is just ridiculous, but seriously, who picks up women at St. Vincent de Paul? Who does that? Who?
I walked into the house and immediately told Esteban that I had a message for him and that it was that he was very lucky and that I was a very attractive woman, very attractive. He agreed, but whatever, dude. He’s just lucky we didn’t meet at St. Vinnie’s, or I would have made googly eyes and then fled immediately. He then told me about meeting our racist neighbor (no, not the Clampet’s although I do wonder about them) who owns the World’s Shortest Labrador (seriously, it is the best thing ever, imagine a black Lab with dachshund legs. It’s like he’s standing in a hole. He has to wear a little leather guard on his tummy so that it does get scuffed by the sidewalk! It kills me! Absolutely kills me!) and said that his camper was stolen “by da blacks an’dem Mexicans” which just makes me shake my head in wonder. Did the blacks and the Mexicans get together in a joint venture, combining forces to steal the pop-up campers from the rednecks? God, I hope so. The world needs fewer rednecks with recreational vehicles. And if there is a god in heaven, during the heist, they are also singing in unison and performing elaborate Bob Fosse choreography.
