I know it's been a LOOOONG time since I've posted. For those of you who care, or somehow don't know, I moved to Nova Scotia about a year and a half back. Because everyone told me facebook was the place to be, I started using it. Something facebook lacks, however, is the unadulterated capacity to RANT LIKE A MANIAC!!!
It's something I feel the need to do right now. I have a feeling, nearly a premonition, that I will feel the need to do it more and more often.
Why? Two words. Home ownership.
Let's get this straight: I love D to pieces. I trust her implicitly and would travel to Hades and back for her (although because I'm stupid, I'd probably look behind me and she'd turn into a pillar of salt or something, so it likely wouldn't be an effective rescue).
We recently purchased a home. That's right. I now own a home with my lovely common law spouse. Lovely. I have to keep saying that to myself. Not bugnuts crazy. Not strap her to a gurney and inject her with valium insane. Lovely. Yes.
If I don't remind myself of that at least every 47 seconds, I get a bit twitchy.
So a bit of background. We had a birthday party for me back in April. Ah, April, when I was young and innocent, carefree and unencumbered by looming financial cliffs. I made a nice meal for my friends, had them all over for drinks, went and sang some karaoke, then came home to my patiently waiting hangover. That's not a metaphor for D. I really did have a hangover. The next day, around noon, we both woke up fresh as daisies soaked in turpentine.
We had no plans for the day, but we decided we wanted to do something that wouldn't cost us any money. "Let's go look at open houses!" D declared. "It's free, and we can get an idea of what's in our price range." This wasn't completely out of the blue since we had been saving for our down payment, but hadn't the funds quite yet.
A tip for those of you with spouses of the female persuasion: If your spouse suggests doing something that will not cost money, get out your wallet and take her to the movies, dinner, or buy her a box of frigging chocolate for all I care, otherwise you'll end up spending a LOT more. Like a couple hundred thousand more.
Long story short we found the house we really wanted to buy, scraped together the funds for our downpayment primarily by prevailing upon the generosity of our parents, put an offer down, applied for the mortgage, and yadda yadda yadda, we were homeowners. We moved in June 1st.
Okay, that's about 47 seconds. Lovely. She's lovely.
My parents recently came to visit and ended up spending most of their trip helping us with various projects around the house. We finished the risers on the basement stairs, mounted a live wire into a junction box in the kitchen, put up a clothesline, painted the kitchen cupboards, and I even tried my hand at carpentry assembling a table on which to mount the microwave. It turned out nicely. We bid them farewell after about a week, a week in which my mom tried to pay for everything (luckily D is sneaky and managed to field the waitresses and clerks for most of the times my mom tried to pay). However, my mom threatened to transfer me money for a lawnmower.
To be clear, I needed a lawnmower. Desperately. My lawn was -Who am I kidding? Was? My lawn IS- a foot and a half tall. I could hide hobbits in my lawn. First home, remember? I was surprised I needed to purchase a fire extinguisher, let alone a lawnmower.
So my mom followed through on her threat and we went to buy a lawnmower.
D and I have apparently quite differing interpretations of what that word means.
When I think lawnmower, I think a gigantic gas hog with blades that rotate at eleven billion miles a second, belching smoke and reducing my lawn to mulch in 13 seconds flat.
When D thinks lawnmower, she thinks an itsy bitsy eco-friendly push mower that requires the strength of ten men each of whom is at least twice my size to get it to devour even a foot of grass.
Because I'm a gentleman and a scholar, guess which one we got?
I just spent the last hour "mowing" the front lawn. It still looks like most of the haircuts my dad gave me. The only muscles I can still use are in my fingers and my eyes. I'm glad my fingers still work because it allows me to gesture in very particular ways at the lawnmower (and the lawn, as it's not entirely blameless).
My only consolation is that D said I look very sexy mowing the lawn. Yes. Thank you. I'm sure I will make just as sexy a corpse when I'm felled by my pending heart attack.
At least in my eulogy they'll be able to say I was eco-friendly. Yay.
Have I said she's lovely lately? I feel a twitch coming on.
