Life Is Such A Sweet Insanity.

Earl and I decided to treat ourselves for lunch today and go to the Applebee’s that’s not too far away, using one of our holiday gift certificates in the process. Trying to stay within the realm of good health, I ordered a “Confetti Chicken” dish from the Weight Watchers menu, Earl ordered a grilled chicken salad from the same selection.

Mine was quite yummy.

Earl wasn’t as thrilled with his dish.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a fresh selection of vegetables in a salad. Unfortunately, Applebee’s felt differently because Earl had an assortment of wilted and browning salad greens in his dish. The very kind server came over and asked how we were enjoying our meal. Earl’s first response was “Honestly?” I then gripped the table in preparation for what was to follow. Actually, I was expecting his standard, “This is the worst meal I’ve had in my life”, but he didn’t say that, instead he expressed his understable disappointment with his meal. The server looked as if she had been stabbed but she apologized for the meal and offered to get another; Earl replied that he would just pick at what he had since he was pressed for time.

We were expecting the manager to come over after the server flew back to the kitchen, but the manager never arrived. The server even asked if we had talked to the manager as she had requested their presence, but apparently they don’t work during the busy lunch hour or something.

After the initial discussiong with the server, Earl and I continued to eat in silence. It wasn’t that I was embarassed or upset by his honesty with the server, quite the contrary, I’m glad he had said something. It was just that I felt that this was another notch in what I was sensing to be a bad day for him. So I broke the silence with a simple question.

“Do you think you’ve had a mid-life crisis, are having a mid-life crisis, or haven’t had one yet?”

I don’t know why I asked that, as he’s probably one of the most grounded people I’ve ever met in my life, but he shot me a look that said, “I’m am not having a mid-life crisis”, before he calming said, “Why do you ask?”. Not knowing how to gracefully dig myself out of that conversational vacuum, I simply replied with “oh, I was just curious.” Things were fine after that.

Small wonder I played it safe tonight and served up a pancake supper. There wasn’t a vegetable in sight.

When I resigned from my job at the end of this past year, I thought I would have a lot of time before school started to get some things done. I had visions of multiple blog entries everyday, following the important matters occurring in the news and accomplishing tasks on my “to do” list with unprecedented time to do so. Classes start in less than a week and I’m finding that I’m busier now than when I was working. I think I’m a little surprised by this.

I can say without hesitation that my priorities have changed considerably. Back in the “old days” I was happy with the state of the kitchen floor if we didn’t stick to it. This morning I found myself armed with the broom and dustpan waiting for the cat to finish his kibble so I could scoop up his mess. I stop Earl at the door when he comes home from work and before he gets his kiss, I insist that his shoes come off. The washer has run more cycles in the past two weeks then it did the entire month before. I’m looking forward to stopping at the dry cleaners tomorrow morning.

What in the heck has happened to me?

I used to yak on and on about how I was turning into some domestic god because I vacuumed a little bit and shoved things under the bed. Yesterday I moved all the furniture in the bedroom so I could thoroughly clean everything. It paid off though; Earl didn’t sneeze once in bed last night.

See, there’s always a bright side.

Just to keep Earl on his toes I left a voicemail at his office telling him to stop at the store on his way home as I was fresh out of bon-bons.

He brought home some mop-n-glo. He knows his way to my heart.

I think I surprised Earl a little bit today. When he got home from work, I was in the basement pulling wire through the framing for the new rooms we’re having built down there. There was also a meatloaf in the oven, ready to enjoy as soon as he had decompressed from the day’s activities.

Who knew I’d have a few tricks up my sleeve after all these years.

When all was said and done, we survived the meatloaf just fine (it was my first attempt at meatloaf) and no one was electrocuted when I finished hooking up the wiring.

It’s the little things that make life interesting. Wait until he sees what I do tomorrow with a naked chicken.

When we made the decision that I could go back to school full-time, one of the considerations was that the on-line spending had to come to a stop. I could no longer go wild on ebay and would no longer be able to enjoy the high one gets from a daily UPS visit.

Apparently the new rule applies to only one of us because Earl had two packages arrive today.

The first package was from KitchenAid. It’s a cozy cover for a our “classic mixer”. It does wonders at keeping our mixer free from schmutz and complimenting our kitchen décor. It gives one a warm, domestic feeling.

The other package contained a labeling system for the clothes closet. Earl cleaned his closet out a couple of days ago and organized everything into sections. The long sleeved dress shirts go in one part, the jeans go in another, etc. In an effort to keep things neat and tidy after the houseboy (me) does the laundry, he now has labels that instruct me where to hang what. He even has a label for “empty hangers”.

He has dashed one of my two favorite household pasttimes as I now will no longer have to play the “find the hangers” game in his closet. By the way, the other favorite pasttime is called “bang my head on the top of the oven while I clean it.”

Keeping time with the latest trends, the labels come in both an English and Spanish version. Since we are on a budget due to my struggling student status, I’ve been informed that my closet will be organized in Spanish.

Olé.

Our cat Tom is freaked out because there’s a stranger in our house this week. He keeps running up to me and looking at me with the “are you going to do something about this?” look in his eyes. Tomorrow he’ll probably start clawing me.

The reason we have a stranger in our house is because we’re having the walls in our basement built, along with a few other odds and ends that needed to be done. When the project is completed, Earl and I will be moving our offices into the basement so that the spare bedrooms can be spare bedrooms again. The recording studio is also being moved into the basement. I’m looking forward to the new “play space”.

The nice thing about this project is that my family’s contracting business is doing the work. It’s a bit of a drive for them but Earl and I both felt it was best to have someone that we know will do a good job doing the work.

The few odds and ends that needed to be completed included the hot tub leaking into the garage and spackling the walls in the downstairs bathroom and laundry room where the owner discovered he didn’t put any joint compound on the plumbing before he sealed the walls up. There’s a trap door under the guest room toilet that was never made to “look pretty”, but that’s been taken care of now.

I swear that if Earl and I ever move again we’re going to build a house from the ground up so that we know what is going where and how it’s getting put there. George (the contractor) and I discovered today that for some unexplicable reason our hot tub drains away from the main plumbing of the house, where it does a loop over the garage, dumps through a trap that can only be accessed by removing the floor under the walk-in closet in the master bath (I don’t know why we have a walk-in closet in the master bath, so don’t ask), and then goes back to where it was suppose to go in the first place. This little loopity-loop was leaking because there was apparently no joint compound on the pipe fittings.

Oy.

George fixed the problem and we made sure everything was nice and dry before he put the new trap door in the garage ceiling. It’s next to the other trap door that the previous owner’s put in when the toilet leaked into the garage a number of years ago.

Tomorrow he starts with the basement walls. Home improvement can be exciting.

Earl and I have a bucket that we throw all our spare change in. We’ve used the same bucket (an old dishwasher detergent bucket) since our first apartment and have only sat down to wrap change three or four times in the past decade. Since we don’t like fishing through change when we’re at a store or restaurant, the bucket was about three quarters full this morning. So we lugged it to one of those coin counting machines at the grocery store. When all was said and done, we had about $175 in change and after we turned in our credit slip and paid the coin counting machine fee, we left with about $166 in cash.

Since we had more money than we anticipated, we went to the mall and bought one of those Ab-Lounge machines that are constantly being advertised on television. Now the ads promise all these wonderous things will happen to those that use this mechanical marvel of exercise. Despite their claims, I don’t anticipate having six-packs abs in a week’s time, but I must admit that the machine does make it a little easier on my back to do the traditional crunches. I’ve just completed my first ride on the thing and I was able to clock in 100 sit-ups. My mid-section is killing me as I type this, but my back doesn’t feel as sore as it usually does after 20 traditional crunches.

Perhaps I’ll be able to bounce a quarter off my stomach at the end of the month.