A Tale of Three Church Signs - A very naughty post

A Tale of Three Church Signs

Attend if you will to my tale. In the small humble neighborhood of Blaine, there live three churches of distinct variety. I have not visited any of them, nor do I comment on their denominational affiliation. However, the approach of each church to the Lord and Savior is writ large upon their church signs. It is this part of the tale on which I do make so bold as to comment, yea verily and remark I will.

As to the first church, it might be said that they are of the kind that makes the dew of the lemon seem overly sweet. Written each week on their sign is their loving message to the community at large, its basic portent is thus - you are going to hell. A lovely sentiment; made especially ironic by the fact that the church’s name is Blessed Hope. I’m uncertain which part contains the hope, the assurance of your hellbound state or the fact that you will soon pass this sign at 40 miles per hour which means you will only be able to absorb half your daily allotment of condemnation. To a fellow Christian, it is like one of those horrific car accidents that your brain absolutely compels you to look at. By the end of the week, be assured that you will know the full context of the scorching coals of judgment being heaped upon you. One must be careful not to be sipping a libation when passing said bastion of hope, as one might accidently inhale the contents while gasping at the audacious use of scripture. For example, the warm and caring message to us all for Christmas was not the sweetness of the Virgin Birth, nor the beauty of the heavenly host’s singing a message of love, it was instead a miniature diatribe about how the glorious heavenly Father knows his own. The subtext was obvious. Those of you who aren’t among the chosen known, should sniff the air carefully, for that IS brimstone you are smelling.

The second tale is the one that pains me most. A bright spark has gone from the Christian lexicon. Where once the sign was clothed in clever pithy sayings that would cause even the hardest of atheistic souls to squeak out a laugh; alas, now it has de-evolved into the kind of trite tripe that we Christians are so delightfully known for. This particular sign is just down the road from the Domain of Hope and the juxtaposition of the two never ceases to amaze. All of the aforementioned signs and even the last of them, are of the laborious plastic letter-by-letter affairs that some poor soul has to change and figure out how to make an M into that ever-present extra E. Even after the fall of man, oops, I mean signage, the messages were at least happy…ish.

The favorite epigrammatic offering came late in the summer and was of such an unexpected ilk, that this writer nearly drove off the road. After a delightful season of witticisms and drollery, the sign simply said “Sign Broke…Come In for Message”. Brilliant! Many a time I almost called to tell this church what a light they were. For truly, what can be more liberating, more community building or more loving than the apt application of humor. For one shining, even sparkling moment, we band of merry Christians were not the doltish, lugubrious lot that we are so oft portrayed. Instead we were transcendent and even winsome. Then came the end…sigh. Overnight, like the fading of Brigadoon (obscure musical reference), the wit disappeared. The galaxy lost a shining presence and alas, we Christians became, once again, culturally moronic. The sign the very next week said, “What’s the best vitamin for Christians? B1” I hesitate to tell some of the later offerings, lest some convert to Buddhism out of shame – the Buddhist’s temple being right across the street and easily within reach of the distraught.

After the tales of the first two, one might be hesitant to approach the third, for fear that one might completely loose heart. Fear not faithful one, there is hope. In all of my wanderings, there is one sign that has set itself so completely above the others, that my pen fails to find a reference pristine enough to grace them. Their name is Kingswood Church. Without fail this sign contains nothing but blessing and the sweetest morsels of thanksgiving and praise. So far I have seen every church in the neighborhood graced with the following “God Bless (insert name) Church” and the delightful “Come on in, we know you’re curious.”   Oh I am.

When they are not busy blessing their “competition”, their sign proclaims the frequent meals and groceries that they give out to anyone in need in the community. If you know the church world, wishing God’s best on another church, especially one in the same denomination, is tantamount to the Green Bay Packers praying for the Vikings before the big game. A simple tale, but one that leaves a pleasant taste.

In the vein of Aesop’s, what lessons do we take with us from these three signs? Perhaps just this, even as there are many types of people in this world, there are just as many varieties within each category of people.  There are great doctors, there are terrible doctors, there are noble drive-thru people and there are the ones that can’t be bothered to look at you. Thus it is with Christians. We come in all manner of clothing. There is the Blessed Hope kind who wear undergarments so tight that their righteousness squeals every time they move. There is the second kind whose underwear went from Victoria’s Secret to red flannels. Then there is the third kind at Kingswood who don’t worry if you have holes in your underwear when the ambulance comes. They know that it is really not about underwear at all, but instead is about genuinely loving a Savior with arms wide open, stretched out to receive. It’s more important to them to make sure that you know that your life matters. Your life matters not only to the one who created you, but your life matters to them. They may be rich people, they may be poor people, they may be white, brown, purple or blue, but whatever kind of people they are, they know how to love and surely, that sign, points to God more than any other. Period. End of story. 

The Joys of Insomnia

The joys of insomnia............................... there are none.

Insomnia is like this, there are two sides on a raging river. From the awake side of the bridge, you can see the peaceful land of sleep. The clouds are fluffy is a blue sky, deer and bunnies frolic in the tall grass; that you know is as soft as a down filled bed, the good kind with no feathers, only down. It is a peaceful land with wildflowers and beauty that smells like fresh baked bread and honey. In my world, it IS the promised land! You know that when you get there your night is going to be sweet, satisfying and deliciously refreshing.

The side of the bridge that you currently reside on is bedtime land. It too is a sweet land filled with goodnight kisses from your spouse, a light nighttime snack, a soothing read and peaceful darkness. Ahhhh...

Then you try to cross the bridge into happy sleep land. You are minding your own business as you confidently walk towards the bridge. People do this every night, how hard can it be. You are at peace in your knowledge that soon you will be there, happy and blissfully asleep. You spot the newel posts that frame the lovely entrance to the bridge. Oddly, one of the newels comes off in your hand like the one George struggles with in It's a Wonderful Life. Hmmmm... that's not good... You go to place your foot on the sweet wooden bridge and stop dead. There is no bridge! Your foot dangles over a precipice that is suddenly a seemingly endless drop into a rushing brutal torrent of whitewater crashing between the two sides of your night. You yank your foot back - whew! That was close!

As you are congratulating yourself on your narrow escape from doom, you suddenly realize that you are still on the awake side. The sleep side is beckoning you, everything in you yearns to answer the call. But you are still here. Ah, therein lies the eternal problem. Bridge out. No sleep for you! You don't panic, after all you have done this a million times before, you just need to not panic. Okay, it took my husband 10 full seconds to fall asleep. If he did it, you can. Suddenly you notice that there is a clock ticking. It is a metaphorical clock, but the universe wants you to be certain that you hear the click of every passing second. No problem, You got this.You can overcome the ticking, the blackness, the knowledge that you are alone in the universe and no one is going to keep you company for the next eight hours. No big deal... you relax on your comfy pillow and await bridge repairs...

The second hour your comfy pillow has now become those little sticker thingys that you used to step on barefoot in the summer and they clung to your foot and jeans like a limpet and take you 20 minutes of precious summer time to pull off. The cozy dark now has your neighbors motion activated light being turned on once every five minutes by a rabbit whose trying to break into show business and is practicing its bows by the spot light from the neighbors garage. You are suddenly keenly aware that your husbands breathing sounds like the sleestak in the original Land of the Lost series. And the blankets are hot and heavy... no, too cold and light... wait... no... hot... cold...cold...hot...pretty much whatever you need them to be, they are not.

By the fourth hour you have turned into a mewling babe. You stand on your yucky side of the bridge and gaze longingly at Happy Sleep Side, while whimpering in the dark. You have become pathetic. If you had your childhood blankey and a baby pacifier you stole from a passing baby, you would use them.

At four and a half hours, you have this momentary lapse in your awakeness. You think you might have fallen asleep! You are so excited you wake yourself up to tell your self the wondrous news! Oh Crap!

By hour five you realize it is hopeless and you decide to read a book. Any book that is within reach, because it doesn't really matter what it is, you are only faking reading it. Your brain knows that you are only trying to stave off panic.

As you start dis-associative rocking, you listen to the clock ticking, tick...tick...tick...tick...tick...tick...tick...tick...timing your whimpers to the metaphorical clock almost sounds like music...okay...maybe not...the fetal position isn't so bad really...yup, you are pretty much hosed.

Only two more hours of this torture and you can get up and go to work so everyone can comment on how tired you look and you can spend the day reminding yourself that you liked your co-workers yesterday and yesterday they didn't look like extras from the Orks in Lord of the Rings. You realize your perception may be skewed.

Tonight you get to try for the bridge crossing all over again...yippee...

Written at 4:42am...sigh...

Remodeling the House - A survival guide

How to live through a house remodeling project.

Step one. Flee the house.

If step one is not possible, gird yourself for pain. Not just regular pain, but unrelenting, seemingly unending pain.

You go into it absolutely certain you know what to expect. Sure, you innocently think, they are going to put up some new walls, knock into my old ones and join the two in a new and harmonious space.  Riiiiiight.

The first clue that this might be a bit more than you expected is when they dig a giant pit and it rains. I didn’t make room in my brain for a swimming pool, but I had one. Thankfully all the ground in Blaine is sandy soil and the water drained away. Remind yourself not to think about the dumb guy in the Bible who built his house upon the sand and the rains came tumbling down. Then they pour concrete into the hole and make it pretty. And the rains come tumbling down. Now I have a concrete pool. No really, I don’t want a pool. So we wait out the water, depending on evaporation to rescue us. Days pass. We now have a floor on top of the newly dry concrete hole. And the rains come – we are starting to feel Noah-ish. Our wonderful contractor had come back on his own time to put the world’s biggest tarp over our semi dry new floor to protect it. However, the rain overcame the tarp and made it into a giant plastic funnel that was neatly slanted to run the water into the now covered concrete hole AND our basement. We now have water in our dryer vent and in the cat litter. I gotta say, scoopable cat litter is only a boon when there is not a flood in your house. One possible use for wet scoopable cat litter is to cement the ark we are now trying to convert the house into. Seriously, has the Army Corps of Engineers looked into this stuff?!?!?! It’s like some kind of super-material.

We have the world’s best contractor, so please note that the things that happened were not his fault, but rather the capricious nature of remodeling.

In all our newlywed brilliance, we decided to tackle the porch remodel this year as well. Because we are idiots. Well okay, it actually turned out okay, thanks to the brilliant work of my husband’s brother and  a week’s worth of back-breaking labor. We now have a mostly done porch connected to our mostly done remodeled house. Mostly done.

There were three weeks of brutal temperatures this summer. The first was during the porch remodel.  You know, the one we decided to do ourselves. If you have not read my rant against the ravages of summertime, please do so now. We will wait… now you understand how I feel about that lovely season (bleck). The second wave of disgustingly hot weather was the two weeks we were without air conditioning. Now for most people this is just something you endure and then you move on to the cooler days of autumn. I am not most people. I tried, I really did. I tried not to sweat like a glass of ice tea in the noonday sun, I was not successful. It was the closest I have come to wanting to murder the chipper contractor guys that came to the house every day. They seemed not to understand the nature of the atrocity they were perpetrating on me… I digress. We eventually got our air back and I moved back home from hiding out in cool dark places like Golum in Lord of the Rings.

The next overly dramatic moment comes when you realize that they really meant it when they said they were going to unhook your appliances… All of them.  No running water on the main floor and no stove. We moved all the food and the refrigerator into the office. We have been living in there for three months. At the beginning, it all seems worth it because you know what is coming; a lovely home. Two weeks into microwave cooking and eating the garbage they serve at fast food restaurants, you begin to have strange dreams. I had several that involved me in a gingham apron with a spatula in hand, flipping burgers over a hot stove…and this was NOT a nightmare. I actually WANTED the apron and I would have worn it if I could have had my stove back. Betty Crocker fantasies aside, I never want to eat out again. At least not at any restaurant that is a bargain. 

There was of course one near tragedy, I think these are a prerequisite for remodeling. Our house was created in 1961, apparently it was a good year for house building because our house has “good bones”. One of those bones is a truss that runs lengthwise across the house and because of previous codes, it is a very long truss. My husband and I were sitting in our half done, soon to be kitchen, and we happened to look up at the truss – you know, the one holding the whole house up? And there, beautifully spaced, were 3 perfect holes drilled into our main truss in a vertical line. It was basically a perforation in the truss, so it would know where to collapse the house. Sort of a “tear along the dotted line” kinda thing.

We sent a text photo to our contractor with the picture of the holes and inquired if this was some new pressure relieving technique, or was it possible that giant, junky, mutant woodpeckers had been in the house. After our contractor regained consciousness, he considered the fact that he might need to take apart the entire house (the newly remodeled part) and start over to correct the damage. We were thrilled…it would only add another couple months to the drama, opps, I mean remodel…

At this point I thought it would be fun to describe some of the more…interesting subcontractors that we have met.

Exhibit A is the electrician. For some unknown reason most of the electricians I have met are rather eccentric. Perhaps because they live on the edge of electrocution they have developed some sort of cloak of crazy. Ours was a tall blond guy who periodically popped into the house, and waving a drill around, started putting mysterious holes everywhere. I, of course, had to know. Why is my favorite question. I’m a bit like a two year old that way. Apparently the holes were used to string all the electrical through the various joists. So the next day when he came again, and again started with the holes, I was beginning to wonder if he was an escaped extra from the movie “Holes”. This time it was because the first time wasn’t good enough. Hmmmm… All this leads back to what we like to call the “perforation”. It was not giant, junky, mutant woodpeckers, it was a half- crazed, hole fetish electrician! Fortunately our magical contractor was able to fix the perforation without dismantling the entire addition. This was after several calls to the truss engineers…who knew there were truss engineers?!?

Exhibit B is the Concrete Guy. I’m not sure what it is about concrete that automatically makes these guys into curmudgeons, but if you look up the definition of curmudgeon, one of the Concrete Guys is going to be there.

First, they talk as if there is an invisible cigar poking out of one side of their mouths at all times. A toothpick is too small to be worthy of the visual. Second, for some reason they appear to have stock in Carhartt - in endless varieties. Thirdly, even if they just won the lottery, they talk to you as if someone just stole their wife, shot their dog and ate their deer limit, in other words they are crabby! This is not your ordinary crabby, this is stewed over, slow cooked, masticated, crabby.

Our particular curmudgeon wanted to know what we wanted to do with the dirt. Now this is not a question I get asked everyday, so I, of course replied, “what dirt” – did you feel the earth tremble at the thought of my gaff?  Apparently any idjit knows that there is a vast quantity of dirt that has to be done away with when the Concrete Guy gets there. Who knows where dirt goes? I certainly don’t. When I innocently and smartly said “dirt heaven?” I felt a chill go down my spine. The look he gave me made me hear that song from Redemption - the one from Appalachia. By the way, your life really does flash before your eyes when someone is going to bury you UNDER the concrete.

Exhibit C is my favorite. He is our contractor’s co-laborer. One morning I awoke to the entire house swaying as a titanic boom was repeated over and over. Naturally curious as to why our house was moving, I went downstairs and peeked around the forbidden plastic barrier. One note about this barrier. There were large swaths of plastic sheeting hanging from our ceiling at various places. It was rather fun-house-ish. There was something magical about those barriers, mystical stuff was going on back there and mysterious noises were issuing forth. Anyway, I peeked in and saw one of the young guys with a sledgehammer joyfully pounding away on some piece of the house. When I say joyfully, I mean grinning, whole body dancing, all out glee! When he paused for a moment I said “you really like your job don’t you?” He responded with “I LOVE MY JOB!” and cheerfully went back to pounding away. He was like that the whole time. Ebullient.

Our remodel just finished yesterday. The guys have all gone and I felt like I was losing part of my family as they drove away. We have lived with them for months and somehow they became part of the landscape, almost as though they built themselves into the addition and now we were less without them. I confess I’m okay that the concrete guy is not sitting on my mantel, but some of the others I would have kept.

The contractor was amazing and I highly recommend him for any project you have. Our house is Shangri-La, and the artistry put into the simplest things is incredible. Even when the project got “interesting” our guy was willing to go all the way back to square one if necessary to make it right. Integrity, It is a rare quality.

My new husband and I survived a porch remodel (ours) and a house remodel, all in the first year of marriage. Hmmmm…maybe we are idjits…

Summertime

Off the beaten path this time. I have a need to talk about summer and the sun. This is not just a need like “I need a diet coke” this is a need like “I need oxygen”. I am afraid that if I do not give in to this compulsion, I will go splat against the wall as my brain explodes like a june-bug when you step on them because something that freaky looking ought not be.

First let me begin by saying that my husband and I have an agreement. I get to whine all summer and he gets to whine all winter. Seems fair…on the surface. You see I am convinced that my seasonal hatred is much more arduous than his. These are the things I compare. In winter I do not have to be afraid to cuddle up to my hubby. It is, in fact, a pleasurable experience because he has a little furnace in his body called a working metabolism, I do not. So cuddling up is wonderful and cozy. In summer there is a distinct possibility that our skin will actually meld together from the insane heat and the parting of our two bodies may do lasting and irreparable damage. Plus, the added heat from his internal furnace may just be enough to cause my eyeballs to melt. Only in summer do I have to risk my life to snuggle up to him.  

Then there is this little factoid. In winter, one can always put on another layer of clothing. In fact, I can keep going until I look like the long lost daughter of the stay-puft man. In summer you can only take off just so much before becoming illegal (in public). Although if the shorts on these little girls get any shorter, we may have to arrest them all.  So if your internal temperature is as delicate as Scarlet O’Hara in the early years, then you are just out of luck. You are going to melt just by putting on your eyeglasses.

Then there is the evil orb. Most people call it the sun. I prefer to refer to it as the scorching, moisture sucking, eye-blinding, temperature pushing, evil round thing in the sky. In winter, this orb is much more reasonable. It gilds the snow with diamonds, sparkles on the frost covered limbs of the trees, changes ordinary landscapes into a pristine fairyland. In summer a horror-fest is unleashed upon hapless mankind. Suddenly the sun is right on top of you. You walk out the door and it pounces on you like a stalking cat. It seeps into your pores instantly heating your skin, until you feel like you’ve been spitted and are slowly roasting over the universe’s fire. Your eye’s automatically close as they are assaulted by light so bright one expects to hear a voice demanding to know where you were last Tuesday night. Forget breathing, that ain’t gonna happen. In fact there is the very real threat of charring your lungs into some sort of carbon simply by taking too deep a breath. Then there is the actual burning. Because it is not content to simply make your skin FEEL like it is burning, oh no, it is going to ACTUALLY try to burn the skin right off your body. Those of us with pale, delicate skin attempt to foil this evil design by wearing spf that could protect a suitless astronaut standing directly on the surface of said orb, however, even this is not enough to spare us the spread of unwanted freckles and painful redness. Not nice.

Let’s talk about sweat. Some of us are blessed with the ability to daintily perspire, a gentle glow, a sweet flushing…and some of us are not. I am not. I sweat like a farmhand. Now that is just what you want your new husband to think of when he sees you. Instead of standing there in a gentle glowing aura channeling Scarlet in that pretty white dress, my beloved sees a hairy knuckle, shirtless, overall wearing, chaw-chewing, sweat-stained, sticky, farmhand with sweat pouring down like a waterfall…charming.

You may now have the idea that I hate summer and pretty much everything about it. You are incorrect. I loathe it, I abhor it with every fiber of my being. There is only one thing I like about it and that is between 70 and 75 degrees and the song made famous by Ella. Everything else is icky.

Whew, there I feel better! Now I have officially declared war on the icky sticky of summer!

Happy air conditioning!

Sincerely,

Your mildly opinionated host. 

Marriage the First Year - The Lawn

The Lawn – I have spent my adulthood living in Townhouses. As a single girl, I saw no reason why I should mow and shovel. I do not have the putter with the lawn gene, so purchasing a single family home seemed counter-intuitive. Because of this decision, I have missed one very important fact.

You people are crazy about your lawns! Seriously!

There is an old movie called the Stepford Wives, it is about this community where the women are programmed to be perfect wives. I have further stretched this concept to include those freaky-deaky little neighborhoods where a builder came in and spit up 18 identical homes, including identical landscaping. My situation is a little more subtle. As you drive through the neighborhood, a trend appears out of the mist. Each and every lawn is perfect. Now I’m not talking a rough approximation of a golf-course, I am talking weirdly, utterly, perfect. I keep expecting to see Willy Wonka walking towards me, telling me that each blade of grass has been manufactured and lovingly tended to by its very own Ommpaloompa. This scares me. The only variation in these sparkling emerald lawns is the shade of emerald. It is as if each homeowner had a personal consultation with a color specialist at the Home Depot. “No I don’t like the Emerald Isles, I’ll take the Pea Puree Green.”

As you progress through a 3 block stretch, you will notice that ALL the lawns look like this. Until…(insert ominous movie music here) all this sylvan splendor comes to a screeching halt, not a mild stand on your brakes halt, but a roadrunner and Wylie Coyote kind of cliff halt. Now in front of you is a lawn that looks like it has been tended to by a demented flock of sheep. While there looks to be some form of mowing done, one would posit that either the sheep or a scythe was used. As you may have guessed, this verdant mass is my lawn.

Now to be fair, there are reasons. Yes, they are mostly lame excuses, but here they are none-the-less. 1. There is a patch of totally untended, unmowed weeds by our patio. We call this the game preserve. There is a fearless baby bunny living there who loves to sit under the screened patio windows and look my cats dead in the eye while enjoying dandelion leaves. Now honestly, if you had the cutest baby bunny living in your weed patch and thoroughly enjoying the wild salad that has been spared the blade, would you cut it down? I think not…I hope not…maybe?  2. My youngest son has inherited the mowing duties this year. Our lawn is large, so we do one side of the house each week. Since my boy is a genius, he has figured out how to s-t-r-e-t-c-h that week into almost two. This means that the lawn fights back when he mows it. Now is it fair to fault him for the weird tufts that get missed between each row? He precisely lines up the lawnmower, not the blades of the lawnmower, just the lawnmower. We are correcting the difficulty, but that means the lawn has a trendy multiple mohawk look at the moment. Then there is the need to not hit the tree roots at the base of the trees, so they all sport a foot high skirt of what passes for lawn at my house. Strangely, the root circumference seems to grow each week. In only a few more weeks, he won’t need to mow at all.

Then there is the slight problem of not really having a lawn at all. While my neighbors could all passably be in a great lawn spread of Better Homes and Gardens, ours is not really grass, it is a lovely viney substance called creeping Charlie. Believe me when I say that Charlie is a creep. Then there is the clover, the violets, the stalky stemmy things that look like prairie grass. Basically, we are the botanical garden of weeds. Unfortunately, I have a hard time summoning up the desire to care that our lawn should be condemned, or possibly torched, or perhaps the earth should be salted and not grow anything for the next 100 years. Instead I have this weird fatalism about it. I drive through the pristine neighborhood and pull into my driveway and survey the land before me. Then I snort. Not a ladylike titter, no a rip roaring snort while saying “Wow, that’s a really bad lawn!” Is it wrong to take pride in being the best of the worst? I feel so deliciously anti-establishment…hmmm…perhaps I should have stayed in the townhouse.

My biggest problem is that I have a reoccurring nightmare that the neighbors will rise up, gather their pitchforks and torches and come after us for lawn abuse…it could happen…after all, it is the suburbs…

The ART of Mommy Hood

When I was a little girl I would proudly bring home my art projects to be displayed on the refrigerator until they were mysteriously eaten by the cat and disappeared, now why the cat wanted to eat my artwork I never did quite understand. To be fair, my mom still has my attempt at an elephant from 2^nd or 3^rd grade. The elephant’s nose never quite worked out, so it became a squashy-legged dog instead. When I reached high school my most creative endeavors were neatly stored in a folio.

Now I know that times change and things progress, but I must protest some of the progress! As a newly minted mother of three boys, (my new sons, by my new marriage) I must ask you, what has possessed our school system? Really! I have about 8 vase thingies of varying sizes, shapes and colors. I’m not sure if you can actually put water in them, or even if they are really vases. Perhaps they are the mysterious vessels for some sort of teenage ritual I know nothing about. How would I know, I’m new at this. Then there are the short pottery thingies … what on earth is a pinch bowl?!? And what is it for!?!

Today, I became the proud recipient of a life-size plate of a paper mache rueben, complete with potato wedges. No, seriously! The plate is better than my own dishware and the reuben could feed a small third world nation. What am I supposed to do with this? Am I now required, under some mommy oath that I never got to hear about until it was too late, to keep said paper mache sandwich until….oh my gosh, how long am I required to keep this?!  I’m now looking at a ceramic life-sized piece of strawberry cake that I know was made by one of the older boys and it’s still here! Is there a statute of limitations somewhere? Is this stuff written down? Why didn’t I know about this?!

Okay, I’m back - short break for breathing into a paper bag.

A short word about the incredible creativity of my boys. I am enthralled by their ability to make these amazing projects. Shoot, when I was in school we considered ourselves near genius if we could draw a life-like tree! The scope of their creativity is astounding. Any project they are asked to do is done with excellence, and I am proud of them! 

The problem is that this whole situation kicks in my conspiracy theory gene. Is this the art teacher’s way of sticking it to the world on behalf of teachers everywhere? I voted for the referendum for gosh sakes, I know you are underpaid and overworked. Really, I know! Please don’t send home anymore ceramic heads that would do a witchdoctor in Bora-Bora proud. I now have to stare at those unblinking eyes FOREVER! I’m sorry! Whatever I did, I’ll make it up to you! Please, I’m begging you, let me take you out to lunch, let me pay for your next pair of shoes, I’ll do anything if you’ll just stop sending home wire jellyfish!

The worst part is that I know there is more coming. There is a mysterious Cardboard Project that has yet to make an appearance. I’m afraid. Really. Seriously. Afraid. And next year is Ceramics 3! Am I a bad mommy if the cats eat a few of these projects…OH, THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED TO MY ARTWORK! Bless you mommy, I now understand! 

The First Year of Marriage - Part 3

Blankets – I have always been someone who did not want to share her bed. Ever. With anything. No stuffed animals, no cats, no dogs, no sisters, no friends on a road trip trying to save money on a cheap hotel – no one. My path in life was a much harder one to trod. To date I have shared my bed with a squashy tootsie roll pillow, 3 cats, a 125 pound Great Dane, my sister and various friends at various times. I have not enjoyed it. I did not find it comforting to have another being beside me. I did not want to be touched while sleeping; leave me blissfully and unconsciously alone. The closest I came to having a husband in bed was the Great Dane. It went something like this. “Okay Katie, bedtime, get in your kennel” to which my dog obediently plopped in her kennel, gave me a soulful look as though I were torturing her and sighed as only a Great Dane can sigh. Around 2 hours later, when I was at my most vulnerable and droozy with sleep there would suddenly be this full force compression on my chest as my clumsy Dane puppy plopped her 125 pounds on me. It was like a nightly practice for CPR, only I was the test dummy. I really was the dummy, because we repeated this pattern every night for months; yet somehow I was always surprised. Slooooooow learner. Trying to move a Great Dane when they have decided to stay is akin to trying to move the Great Pyramid of Giza with those furniture slider thingys  – not going to happen… The next morning I would awake clinging to the vertical side of my bed by my fingernails and sheer cussed stubbornness, while the Great Dane was ecstatically, fully stretched out with her head on my pillow. Sigh…

These experiences gave me little hope for peaceful slumber in my married life. I fully expected to give up sleeping as the price for marital bliss. Imagine my surprise to find that not only do I like sleeping in the same bed as my husband, but I actually can’t go to sleep without being in my “spot” curled on up his shoulder. Shocking! That spot is like finding out the mirage shimmering in the distance really is water in the middle of an oasis. In my opinion, every night, of every year spent without that spot was a thirsty desert experience.

There is only one teensy, tiny, itsy, bitsy, little problem. I hardly think it worth mentioning, but without it, there would be nothing to blog about [grin]. Blankets. My husband steals them. Actually, I think steals might be too strong a word, perhaps cocoons into them would be better. My husband has no body fat. Like none. I work very hard not to break that "Thou shalt not covet" commandment over that one, but it’s really hard. It makes me feel like I’m living in a Jack Sprat poem. Because of this one terrible flaw of his, he seeks warmth like a missile. Usually this means I wake up shivering and having to go to the bathroom. Now, one does not necessarily lead to the other, but the bathroom trip is inevitable.

I need to note, that there are few things in life more miserable than waking up in the middle of the night freezing cold AND having to go to the bathroom.

After the necessary trip to the necessary, I am faced with a dilemma. What once was my long, lean, stretched out husband has become this tight, squished up ball of Beloved and blankets. The first time this scenario played itself out, I did what any loving wife would do and I unrolled the bundle and took my side of the blankets back. Then the most horrifying thing happened! My husband, in his sleep emitted the saddest sounding  whispered  “Brrrrrrrrrrr” and lay  there unconsciously shivering until the cold half of the blankets warmed up. I felt like I kicked a puppy and pulled the cat's tail all in the same night. Nobody warned me about this! I thought all these blanket stealers were hardened criminals, capable of the most heinous criminal acts like leaving one’s new bride out in the cold. But no, I find that they, or at least mine, are simply skinny popsicles in need of a defrost cycle. So now, I lie there thinking, should I or shouldn’t I unroll the husband burrito? Warmth or love, now there’s a real dilemma! Perhaps I should just wriggle my way into that burrito!