D i e n u

I am happy to announce that, if the apocalypse comes, Randy and I are preparing for being prepared.

We’re starting our very first vegetable garden. Right now, it’s just some chopped-up dirt in our backyard, but come summer, it’s going to be a luxurious, verdant 8′x6′ patch of awesome.

Check out the ground-breaking ceremony:

 

 

Is there anything sexier than a skinny white guy with a pickax? I don’t think so!

Almost as exciting as our chopped-up pile of dirt that will someday be a lush garden is our custom-built compost bin:

 
You never saw two people get so excited about eggshells in your life. I have a feeling for the first couple of weeks, Randy and I are going to be fighting over who gets to go out and turn the compost. I can’t wait until we get some usable mulch!

(Yes, I am eagerly anticipating mulch. I think this makes me an official grown-up.)

After pondering a number of ways to accomplish this goal, I decided the most effective would be a massive purge.

It took me several painful days. There were so rough moments. But hundreds of books are now in the ever-growing yard sale pile. Along with two bookcases.

So now I only have what can fit into one medium-sized bookcase in my living room.

It wasn’t fun, but it was time. I realized that I was probably never going to read a Foucault book again. That I was holding on not to the book but to some idea of who I was when I still read books of that nature.

And I figured it was time to let that go.

The last of several piles to go. These were the hardest to give up.

But look at my nice clean bookcase.

I can’t believe I was about to get rid of my Norton Anthologies. Those babies are the last link between myself and the English major I used to be. Thank goodness Lauren brought me to my senses. I pulled them out of the yard sale pile. Probably the first rescue of many, I have a feeling.

…is getting a new calendar.

Randy and I have started the tradition of getting the most ridiculous calendars we can find. (Well, I sort of dragged him into the tradition by gifting him a ridiculous calendar every year, until he expressed a desire to have more say in the process.)

Examples from years past:

The 2007 “D is for Dog” Calendar

(Our 2006 calendar was a gift from a friend. It was nice, but not noteworthy in its oddness.)

The 2005 Ferrets Calendar featuring Ferrets playing musical instruments (I think this is the one that made Randy decide he wanted to be included in the calendar selection. He said the ferrets weirded him out.)

2004 was a calendar featuring dogs made out of fruits and vegetables. And it came with stickers!

We were at the mall yesterday when we saw that the seasonal calendar kiosk had slashed their prices by 50 percent. It was time to go calendar shopping.

Randy lobbied hard for the Trout of the Month calendar. Which, I admit, would have been awesome. But it was kind of a weird shape. And a wall calendar must, above all, be functional. I tried to convince him that we needed a calendar featuring some neo-Hansen two-preteen-brothers boy band, but that was dismissed as “creepy.”

Things were starting to get desperate. But then I saw it. The perfect calendar for us. A little bit of whimsy balanced with a dead-serious approach to the subject. A sense that the calendar photographer saw this as an opportunity to make some real art, not just tell people what day it is.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet our 2008 calendar.

The 2008 Precious Piggy Calendar

Pigs, dressed up in little outfits, shot in gauzy black-and-white, a style similar to many of the wedding photographers whose portfolios we reviewed.

January featured a baby piggy in a birthday hat, eating cake. There is frosting all over its little pig nose. Randy did not appear to be as overwhelmed by the preciousness as I was, but I’m sure he was just covering up his feelings, so as not to ruin his manly cred.

Life doesn’t get much more exciting than this.

Even a dumb wife who doesn’t properly read instructions and a persistently dripping elbow joint couldn’t keep Randy from achieving his goal of total dishwasher domination.

Look at him all up in it:

He spent several hours there this morning and only said about a dozen naughty words in all that time. I was so proud.

There were a few moments when I thought the dishwasher would best him, but my pajama-d knight was triumphant in the end.

No white horse, but who needs one when you’ve got a sexy hat/slipper combo like that?

Our dishwasher is installed and, two “rinse-only” test cycles later, seems to be functioning perfectly. And Handy Randy cooked an egg on our new stove today, proclaiming it “pretty f’ing sweet.” We’re waiting to build up a full load of dishes before we put the dishwasher through a full wash cycle. (We are in a drought, after all.) But, at the risk of being hasty, I’m going to call our new appliances a hard-won, but still sweet, success.

When you are trying to install the brand-new dishwasher you’ve spent over three years lobbying to buy, you would be intelligent to avoid breaking off anything attached to said dishwasher.

Especially if the attachments you feel tempted to detach are the little silver brackets on the top of the dishwasher that are supposed to attach it to the underside of your counter.

Brackets that are not replaceable.

Sure, there may be a section in the instruction manual that says, hey if you don’t like these little tabs, go ahead and break them off.

But you would be intelligent to ignore that section. Just like you would be intelligent to avoid convincing your husband that “we don’t really need these little tabs.”

Because, if you do not heed this warning, you will attempt to open your brand-new, long-awaited dishwasher, only to have it tip forward on you because — SURPRISE!!! — you actually did need the little tabs you thought you could just break off.

And when your husband discovers that you broke off the tabs you really shouldn’t have broken off, he won’t remember that he was complicit in this act of tab-breaking-offage. He will just get mad. At you. And maybe put his screwdriver into the toolbox with just a wee bit more energy than is necessary.

He might even mutter something under his breath that sounds suspiciously like, “I knew I shouldn’t have listened to you.”

Which will likely make you very upset. So upset, in fact, that you break into tears and scream something along the lines of:

“People make mistakes, OKAY!!!!!!! We can’t all be perfect like YOU!!!!!”

Then you might have to run into the bedroom, where you will probably fling yourself upon the bed and cry your little heart out, convincing your husband that he is the meanest person on the planet when, in reality, you’re just really pissed at yourself for being a stupid idiot who breaks things off the dishwasher before she knows whether or not breaking things off the dishwasher is really such a great idea.

And then you may remember all the other times you and your husband tried to install something, which might lead to the realization that every one of those occasions ended in almost exactly the same fashion as the aborted dishwasher installation.

You’ll probably start worrying that this means your love is doomed, because what kind of couple can’t put together a bookcase or install a freaking dishwasher without kicking toolboxes or turning into giant crybabies.

Fortunately, just as you’ve convinced yourself that you need to start looking for a studio apartment somewhere, your husband will probably come into the room and, in that voice he only uses in situations such as these, will say, “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

And you will probably sit up and reply (rather snuffily), “I’m sorry I broke the dishwasher.”

And then you’ll have to plan the third trip to the big-box hardware store in two days.

Unless you get smart and just keep your mitts off the little tabs. Or, better yet, just sit on the couch and enjoy a book, popping in every once in a while to hold a flashlight or get a screwdriver or “push this thing in while I hold this thing so I can see if anything’s getting in the way.”

It all comes out the same in the end, but the latter option doesn’t include a red nose and puffy eyelids.