dirty/clean.

My dishwasher has been working just fine since I fixed it all by myself. Well, it worked as well as it ever did. It's not a particularly nice dishwasher, but it came with the house.

It cleans off the food crusties just fine. But then it puts them somewhere else, specifically in the bottom of all the drinking glasses. So I guess it didn't clean the dishes so much as move the gunk. You know those novelty coffee mugs that say something cheeky on the bottom, so that when you get to the end of your morning joe, a little joke is revealed? Every beverage was like that at my house, except at the bottom, you'd find stuck-on pieces of unrecognizable crud which I assume used to be food.

Josh insisted that the solution to this problem was to pre-wash the dishes before we put them in the washer, so that the crusties never made it to the dishwasher. I resisted this with every fiber of my being. A good modern dishwasher did not require pre-washing. The fact that we did not have such a machine was irrelevant; it was the principle of the thing. My solution: don't look at the crusties if they bother you so much. I mean, it had been through the wash, so it was clean and safe to use, it was just a little unsightly. When the queen comes over, we'll wash some glasses by hand real quick.

Finally, he got fed up with arguing about pre-washing. He unloaded the dishwasher and pre-washed everything in it, then loaded it back up again. He ran the washer, and lo and behold, no little crumlins all over the glasses. So what, big deal, my solution also works.

One day soon after that, I saw a little folded piece of paper stuck to the dishwasher with a magnet. It said "Dirty" in red magic marker. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that the back said "Clean." Cute.

When I asked him about the new dishwasher decoration, he said, "Well, that's so you can't complain that you can't tell when the dishes are clean or dirty."

"I hadn't made that complaint."

"I was predicting that you would."

I made no comment. Inside, I thought, Ha! How little you know me. For your information, had I opened the dishwasher and been unable to tell if the dishes were dirty, then by my slovenly definition, they are clean. Why he felt the need to put the clean dishes in the dishwasher, when they clearly could be put away in the cabinets, is beyond me. He's a real sweet man, but he doesn't know much about housework.

Since then, I have gotten used to the whole washing-the-dishes-before-we-wash-them thing. In fact, I got all crafty about it.

Two things: 1.) The tiles in older Scrabble sets are not uniformly shaped. 2.) Taking a Scrabble set to Goodwill when you know it is incomplete is probably a jerk move.

Someday, though, we will buy a good dishwasher that doesn't need to be mollycoddled, one that will actually wash the dishes, rather than just move the dirt around.

neighbor dogs.

All my neighbors have dogs. And so there is a corner of my backyard that meets the corners of their backyards, where all our dogs can meet and sniff through the fencing, wag their tails at each other and discuss how one day, they are all going to bust out of their respective joints and go chase the geese in the pond across the street. Or maybe they just bark at each other. Not my dog, because she's stoic.

Of course, the wildcard situation is Gail's section of the four corners. Because she has so many dogs, I really just try and avoid having our dogs out at the same time. It is a certified ruckus. And I guess that's really her problem, but it's no big deal to keep my dog inside sometimes so hers can be outside. I admit it, I have a soft spot for my crazy neighbor, and I don't want the other neighbors to be mad at her.

This was all working reasonably well until Syrus came to stay. I think Syrus may be provoking Gail's dogs. Or maybe his very presence is provocative enough. In any case, whenever Syrus is outside, Gail's dogs go NUTS in a way that they do not do in reaction to my little old pitbull.

This has coincided with a sudden newfound ability to breach the chain-link fence between our yards. Or maybe it's not so coincidental. In any case, we sometimes find ourselves with a few visitors. One of the hounds can just climb the fence and jump right over, which is downright impressive. Some of the littler ones are able to squeeze themselves under the fence. However, only one of the three that can manage this are able to squeeze back into their own yard. Gail always apologizes profusely, and I try to convince her it's not a big deal.

Saturday night, we were outside, grilling chicken wings and enjoying the magnificent weather. I let the dogs out, then immediately wished I hadn't, as a cacophony erupted next door. We got our dogs back inside, then realized that we had three extras. The rest of them were still all bunched up in one spot at the fence, barking their heads off. Gail was in the midst of them, frustrated as anyone would be in that situation, even if it was a situation that probably occurred weekly and was completely and totally brought upon oneself.

It was dark and hard to see, but I could see a few little shadows running around in our yard. I approached a terrier, who allowed me to pet it once before barking at me and then sneaking back under the fence. I thought I saw something over near the compost bin, reached blindly toward it and found something vaguely cocker spaniely. I figured out which end of it I had and then switched to the other end: I have yet to meet a dog that can resist The Butt Scratch. A little bit of that, and it was docile enough that I could pick it up. I carried it over to the fence and held the wriggling body out to Gail, my arms extending over as some half dozen dogs continued to go nuts.

And then one of those suckers jumped up and bit me!

I cried out and jerked my arms back.

"Are you okay?" Gail asked.

"I think one of them got me," I said, trying to be as non-accusing as possible while still informing her that excuse me, ma'am, one of your dogs just bit my elbow.

"Are you sure it wasn't the fence?"

Sigh. I did not answer, but left Gail to her dogs and went into the house to inspect the damage. On the way in, I passed Josh, who had finished putting our dogs away and was on his way over to the fence to try and evict our trespassers. We were tag-teaming here.

In the bathroom, I inspected the injury. I had a couple of small swollen-looking areas, and one tiny place that shown blood red. It had been a warning bite - hey, you, quit putting more dogs over here, we got enough! I washed it with soap and water, then applied some antibiotic cream on it. My first dog bite - how thrilling!

I headed back outside. It was strangely quiet. Gail had put away the dogs on her side. She had to do some of them one at a time, dragging them by their collars. There were still some critters rustling around on our side. A black blur came up to me, ah, my old friend Brownie. After a few seconds of Butt Scratch, she was laid out on my feet, tummy side up. Gail came back and Josh handed her a dog, she disappeared again as she led it inside (I think it was that cocker spaniel again). Finally she came back and we handed her Brownie. Josh put an extra pallet in front of the spot where the little dogs had tunnelled under; we'd just have to take our chances with the hound. Gail promised to get her privacy fence up real soon. She's had the posts up for months. I'm not holding my breath, but again, I don't really mind the crazy animal foster home that sits next to mine.

The next morning, my elbow was sore and lightly bruised, but no festering wound, so I guess it's all fine. I thought about letting Gail know that hey, one of your dogs is a biter, but Josh pointed out that she probably already knows.

returned for postage.

So, I'm a doofus.

My nephew Lincoln's birthday was last week. At the beginning of the month, I picked a card out for him out of my stash, wrote him a note that probably didn't make any sense, then made up for it by sticking a little cash inside. I did the same for my niece Callie, whose birthday is today (Happy Birthday, Callie! Your card will be late!). I sealed up the cards, addressed them neatly, then put them in a little metal container I keep on the table in the foyer for just such a purpose. A couple of days before Lincoln's birthday, I pulled out his card and dropped it in the mail.

Did you notice which step I left out?

The really doofussy thing is, I've done this a couple of times lately. About a month ago, I found out that Josh's grandmother's birthday was coming up. Like, the next day. Not to fear, I have a card just for such occasion. Okay, not for the occasion that I'm marrying into a new family and do not yet know everyone's birthdays, but the occasion that a birthday card is late. That one, I've got. Plus, I've got plenty of Easter cards that I can just cross out "Easter" and write "Belated Birthday" over.

I sent her the card, feeling very smug about myself. I totally rock at being a granddaughter-in-law! But ARGH!, a few days later, the card came back, RETURNED FOR POSTAGE. My mail carrier must think I'm an idiot. It's probably best to not think about what our mailpersons think of us.

So now the card was over a week late. I did have a handy excuse for the extreme delay, even if my excuse was my own lack of understanding about how the postal service works. I simply found a bigger envelope, put the card in, stamped envelope and all, and sent off the whole thing. I wrote a little message on the back of the envelope to the effect of "Sorry this is so late, you'll soon see why." Honestly, it's kind of brilliant. For all she knows, I could have sent the card on time in the first place.

A couple of weeks later, I got a card from my future grandmother-in-law in the mail. I opened up the envelope...and found another envelope. This one had been addressed to me as well, but it was stamped RETURNED FOR POSTAGE. Inside that envelope was a card that thanked me for the birthday card, and also remarked at how wonderful it was that I was not afraid to be myself.

If you were me, would you be afraid to be myself?

So, she intentionally sent a card without a stamp, so that it would be sent back to her and she could then put it in another envelope and send that to me. What kind of crazy family am I marrying into?

fifty things.

So, since I've already gone and admitted that I read Fifty Shades of Grey, I'll tell you what happened at our book club discussion. While I feel that our book selections are hit and miss, the discussions are regularly excellent. When I have to read a book that is painful to get through, I consider that my admission price to attend and participate in the meeting.

No one loved the book. We rate them from 1 (hated it) to 5 (love it forever, yay), and the highest rating was a 3.5. I gave it a 1, and gave basically the same reasons that I wrote about last week. Most people who said it was okay said that it was a page-turner and it kept them entertained. The discussion was lively.

Here are some random book club things from the meeting.

Thing 1: Romance, the genre
I did learn a few things about romance novels. One of our regular members is a woman in her seventies who writes (and publishes) these sorts of books. She used to be a judge on some kind of panel that gave out awards. There are specific rules within the romance world, some of which vary by the publisher. Since the genre is acknowledged to be pretty formulaic, I guess this shouldn't be a surprise. For example, Harlequin requires that the male love interest be rich. Romance novels are also required to have a H.E., which stands for a happy ending. Seriously. You can't make this stuff up. This woman said that the writing in this book was truly bad, but did say that the author did something unusual by tying the explicit scenes to the main conflict.

It made me think of musicals - the way sometimes the songs don't really have anything to do with the plot and sometimes they seem almost natural. It's like that. Except with sex. I think maybe romance novels are just not for me. I would've liked it much better had there been elaborate song and dance sequences instead.

Thing 2: Bad Writing
After several of us mentioned the awful quality of the writing, a woman asked us what we meant by that. She thought we were talking about the grammar. We pointed out the repeated use of the same phrases, and then the topic went somewhere else. I wished we could've stayed on that, because it was an interesting question. Mostly, I wanted to say that there aren't actually rules, because a sufficiently talented writer can break them all and make it seem natural. Art is cool like that.

I did gleefully tell Josh about the lady's question. Language comes so naturally to him that he doesn't understand the way other people react to it. To hear that some people not only can't tell the difference between good and bad writing, but have never before contemplated that there was a difference, made him a little sad.

Thing 3: Bad writing
A woman at work, who knows that I read a lot, was asking me about books that I liked. I wasn't sure how to explain it. Good ones? I dunno. She said she only liked real page-turners, otherwise she got bored. I thought to myself that that meant she didn't actually like books at all. I went through my shelves to find some books she might enjoy, ones that were quick-flowing plot-wise, but well-written and with interesting themes and ideas. Before I could lend her any, she found out that we were reading Fifty Shades, and she specifically asked to borrow it. Sigh. Then, as I was reading it, I couldn't help but think that she would probably really like it.

Something that became clear to me at the meeting was that different people read for different reasons. While I found the wretched writing distracting, a lot of people mentioned that the writing was poor, then said they liked the book anyway. They also said that not liking the characters didn't keep them from enjoying it either. They mentioned the same things that I did, yet their reactions were completely different.

Romance novels seem to be mostly escapism. While I frequently enjoy movies that are merely entertaining, rather than educational or throught-provoking, I want more from my books. So it was unfair to think that my colleague doesn't like books, she just wants something else out of the experience than I do. And as a result, I'm better able to answer what kind of books that I like. I want to learn something or think about something in a way that is new to me.

Also, the writing should be good, whatever that means.

Thing 4: Steak at home
When I was complaining about the male love interest, how he didn't appear to be anything more than hot, rich, and mysterious, the other women seemed to think that was plenty for them. Again, that comes from the perspective of what is essentially a fantasy book. And it's true, in a romantic comedy, that would be enough to fill a ninety-minute film. But the main conflict of the plot was that the female lead wanted more than sex from the relationship. And I just felt like there wasn't anything more to this guy.

These women also made jokes about looking askance at their husbands/boyfriends after having read about the drop-dead gorgeous bazillionaire (someone said she needed fifty shades). I don't think anyone's actual relationships are in danger. They were just jokes that you can make with a bunch of other women. I laughed, but I didn't really feel it. Hot and rich is not enough for me, I want someone to talk to! I do not need to fantasize about a made-up man, because the real-life man I have kicks his well-tailored pants up and down the street.

So yeah. Romance is probably not my genre.

gellhorn.

I started reading a book this week, called The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn. The author was a war correspondent for pretty much her whole life, and the book is a collection of articles she wrote from various wars. Various is right. Basically, wherever the war was, she went. The first chapter is from the Spanish Civil War, then she goes to the start of the Winter War, from there to the Canton Front, and then we finally get to World War II proper. I am in the midst of that war now. Later, I will get to chapters about Vietnam, the Six Day War, and the wars in Central America.

The articles are beautiful and perceptive descriptions of life in the midst of war. She spends time with civilians living in cities that are shelled daily, makes excursions with soldiers, and tags along on a hospital ship on D-Day. She has a real affection and openness for her fellow man and a wonderful eye for seeing the surreal situations created by war.

Gellhorn is angry about war. She makes me angry about it, too. She hates it, even though by the end of her career, she has to concede that it appears to be an inescapable part of the human experience. She compares it to the last option to save ourselves, one that we resort to repeatedly.

War, when it has any purpose, is an operation which removes, at a specific time, a specific cancer. The cancer reappears in different shapes, in different parts of the human race; we have learned no preventative medicine for the body of the nations. We fall back, again and again, on nearly fatal surgery. But the human race has always survived the operation and lived.

She compares this nearly fatal surgery to nuclear war. While non-nuclear war is awful enough, it only kills those in the present. By poisoning the air and the earth, nuclear war kills off the future, too. The human race may not survive the operation.

I don't remember where I picked up this book. I'd never heard of Gellhorn before, and I was amazed at the fact that there were female war correspondents during the period when she was active. She very rarely refers to it at all, except to explain that she had to sneak into a particular area, because the military brass was reluctant to allow a woman in a combat zone.

I looked her up on Wikipedia, and I was amazed to find out that she was Ernest Hemingway's third wife. I confess that I was more than a little amused to see that the marriage fell apart because Hemingway couldn't handle having to compete for her time with her work (Hemingway: "Are you a war correspondent, or wife in my bed?"). After reading The Paris Wife for book club a few months ago, I've been irrationally angry at Hemingway for being such a pig. And then I was mad at book club, for making me read a fictionalized account of an abandoned wife, when we could have read the actual work of a woman who did something more noteworthy than marry someone famous and famously difficult.

I hope to stop being angry at Hemingway soon. For the moment, I'm consoling myself with Gellhorn.

sy-guy.

We have a new roommate. Two, actually.

Josh's brother, Trevor, had some sort of falling out with his former roommate. I don't know what happened. And Trev has some roommates lined up for November, when a couple guys he knows are getting out of their lease and moving to a new place, where he can go with them. Until then, he needs a place to lay his head. Actually, he could probably couch surf the whole time, but he does need a place to store his guitars (five of them, sheesh!).

So he is living in our spare room. He is a good tenant, quiet and keeping mostly to himself. He does have a 90-pound rottweiler, but luckily, our homeowner's insurance policy covers dangerous dogs.

Trevor adopted Syrus about six years ago. He had been badly abused. He had a bandaged wound on one of his legs, which healed in a couple of months. He also was scared of, like, air, which took longer to fix. It was pathetic, to see what should be a terrifying beast being scared of his own shadow. Anytime a new person came in, Syrus would back away until he ran into something, at which point he would jump and then run from the room.

That's why there is such a thing as a dangerous dog. Because people are jerks.

But now Syrus is a new dog. He is confident and secure and unafraid. He's also very mellow, well-trained, and obedient. Syrus, more than any other dog, convinced me that dogs could live in the house. He and Trevor have some sort of mind link, such that Syrus starts obeying the command before it's given. They are a good pair. As much as Trevor gave Syrus confidence to be a great big dog, Syrus gives his master, whose need for solitude is great, a companion who doesn't feel like an intruder.

I love having Syrus around. Besides feeling like I've got the best-protected house around, it's good for Remix, who does not get enough time with other dogs. She's much better-behaved and has not chewed the futon since he moved in (I think she thinks Syrus owns the futon, whereas we could never convince her that we in fact owned it). She follows Syrus around with her current favorite de-stuffed animal, hoping that he will want to play. And sometimes, he does. Since he is older, he is content to sleep most of the time. But after Remix has stood there, tail wagging, gently wapping him in the face with a disgusting slobbery toy for five straight minutes, he will sometimes consent to rip the toy away from her. Or at least, he tries, and then the game is afoot. As a former baby sister, I relate to Remix. And I'm glad she has someone else to pester, because it used to be me getting wapped with that smelly toy. Sometimes, they play tug while both of them are lying on the floor. It's a lazy game, like thumb war or arm wrestling, except that they are testing their neck and jaw strengths.

Syrus watches TV. No, I mean he actively watches it. And if there are certain things on, he will get very excited. Animals are a specific trigger. He will run up to the TV and watch it from a foot away. He will snuffle and growl and bark at it. And if the action onscreen is particularly thrilling, he will jump at the screen. That's not such a problem with our circa 1995 box tucked up and away inside an entertainment center, but when he's visiting friends with nice big flat screens, that could end in tragedy. It's still hilarious.

Syrus also sheds. Sooooo much. Remix has short hair, and so while she also sheds, it sort of blends in to the floor. However, Syrus hair gets wafted by the breeze created by people walking by and accumulates in little fluff balls in the corners. I gave him a good brush down (and swept the floors), which seemed to help. It also seemed to make him love me with his big doggy heart. It is always nice to be loved by a dog, but while Remix pretty much beams love at anyone who looks at her, Syrus is more reserved. I feel accomplished when I can get him to wag his little nub of a tail.

A friend of ours told us that when Syrus moves out, we're going to want a puppy. Ugh, no. But I could see how we might want to get another dog, though not another big dog (two big dogs could probably overpower me on a walk if they were both pulling in the same direction, or rip me apart if they weren't). That's a few months away, though. For now, we'll enjoy our well-protected household.

trash.

Last month, a woman with a Yankee accent went off on a rant at book club. She did not like the book and told us so in no uncertain terms. She said book club had really gone downhill lately with the book selections. "I mean, this is just trash," she concluded. I couldn't help but snicker, because I hadn't liked the book either.

This month, we read Fifty Shades of Grey. Sigh.

I have not been looking forward to this month. As soon as I saw the title on our list of books to vote for, I felt a deep fear in my heart that the other bozos nice ladies in the book club would pick it. I was horrified at the idea of having to read it, not just because it was a smutty book, but because everyone in the world knew that it was a smutty book. It was on the news! I have my mom use her Amazon Prime account to order books for me. This time, I blushed at the thought. I usually read during my lunch hour in an empty conference room. I imagined having to sneak the book around so that no one would see me with it. I prayed to the book club gods that the other ladies would show good taste and pick some other crappy book.

The book club gods let me down. It's possible that such a specialized diety does not actually exist.

I am not anti-erotica. I don't really read it, because it makes me uncomfortable, but I don't have a problem with its existence. Whatever people want to write in a book, that's fine. Whatever people want to read in a book, that's fine, too. Yay for books. Fifty Shades is not trash because it's a sex book. It's trash because it's just not very good at all. The writing is bad, bad, bad. The same words and phrases are used repeatedly. I suppose you could say that's an artistic choice. After all, the protagonist and narrator is a young woman, freshly graduated from college. It's not entirely unrealistic in terms of how that character might talk. But who wants to read a book narrated by an idiot? Every time she might've had a thought, she just says "Holy crap" or "Whoa" instead. There is no reflection at all, just reaction. Holy crap.

As for the love interest, ugh. His main qualities appear to be that he is really, really, ridiculously good-looking and richer than Croesus. Also, he's mysterious, in that sometimes he's sorta not a jerk and other times he is definitely a jerk. Gosh, don't you want to read a whole book series about a man like that? He does use his vast wealth to send food to Africa, so that's something. And he likes classical music. He has some cool and interesting hobbies, but those mostly underline his privilege, rather than any sort of zest for life (Life is pretty zesty when you're a bazillionaire). But mostly, we are told over and over how hot he is, the way his copper curls glint in the sun, the thrilling way his pants hang on his hips. I like a nicely-tailored pair of pants as much as the next woman, but I need a little more than that. The narrator gushes about how very sweet he is, because he remembered what kind of tea she liked. Aim high, sister! He does buy her lots of expensive presents, and then uses them to stalk her. He has significant control issues, but that just means he cares.

Oh, he's all messed up inside. That's what the mystery is hiding, a profoundly broken person who is incapable of having a relationship with another person as an equal. His control issues are supposed to be from a bad childhood experience. Being stupid rich, which allows hims to buy whatever/whoever he wants, probably doesn't help.

I can totally see the appeal of the broken man story. Are you kidding me? I love a project. A sad man who needs the love of a strong woman to overcome his troubled past to become the man he is capable of being? That's a great story! It's just that the reader is never given a reason to believe that this guy is worth putting in the work for. There's no indication that he had the potential to be anything more than the moody and entitled jerk that he already was. I guess we were supposed to take her word for it, but she was too busy talking about how his steely grey gaze made her muscles clench down there.

Yup, it's a sex book, which means that periodically in the badly-written narrative, there is a badly-written sex scene. But it's just sex, because the dude's issues make him incapable of "making love." I suppose in later books, once his brokenness has been healed by her love, there will be a badly-written love-making scene.

The book ends with our heroine leaving her lover's penthouse apartment in tears, having finally concluded that this relationship will not work (uh, spoiler alert, I guess). It's not even pretending to be anything but a cliffhanger. And yet, I got to that cliff and I sorta shrugged and wandered in the other direction, tossing the book over my shoulder as I went. I will not be devoting any more of my time to these characters. I will thwart the obvious ploy to get me to buy the next book by writing my own conclusion. As far as I'm concerned, they stay broken up, and they will continue to be generally awful people in their own separate lives, the end.

special agent.

Yard sales have been pretty uninspiring as of late. I've missed several weekends from being out of town, but on the weekends when I was around, it seems like there were very few sales. On those days, I usually end up hitting thrift stores instead. After all, my house is not going to fill itself with junk!

Yesterday's ad listings were similarly slim, but a couple of church sales had me hopeful that it might be a good day. It only takes one good sale to make the whole day worth it. There may have been one good sale yesterday, but I didn't go to it.

But at my last stop, I happened across a brass plaque sitting with a bunch of scrap metal. It was about a foot high, shaped like a badge, and had the following lines inscribed:

Special Agent
Office of Special Investigations
Department of the Air Force
United States of America
The Inspector General

I thought it was pretty cool. I guess "Special Agent" is sufficiently vague that it could mean anything, like being seven and the teacher asking you to be her special helper for the day. I asked the guy manning the sale where it had come from. He said that the sale was for a guy who had Parkinson's and was being moved to a nursing home. He also said that the guy had been some kind of government agent. He didn't seem to know very many specifics, which was odd to me. If he didn't know the old guy, why was he running his estate sale?

Then he said he wasn't sure if the plaque was for sale. Since it was brass, they had been planning on taking it to a scrap yard to see what they would get for it. But he went off to ask someone else what he might ask for it.

He came back and said $10, and I felt like that was just too much. I mean, I liked it. It was cool, but $10 was more than I usually paid for something to just hang on the wall. I said no thanks, then headed back to the car.

I felt kinda bad that this old guy's house was being cleaned out and sold by people who didn't seem to know or care much about him. And if the people who are clearing out your home don't care about you, who does? Who will save your awesome brass plaque from the scrap heap so that your whole career is not melted down and forgotten?

I guess the best you can hope for is that some strange lady with eccentric tastes in decor will come along and claim her own heirloom.

wedding flan.

Back when Josh and I were still working under the assumption that we were going to be paying for the wedding, we were brainstorming on ways to save money. We talked about how to encourage people to take pictures during the reception and then upload them to a single site. We discussed who we knew who had particular talents that we could exploit call in for a favor. We got to the topic of cake. I don't care much about the cake, as long as it's delicious. Bad wedding cake is such a disappointment. But it seemed like a big burden to ask a non-professional to do a whole big wedding cake, and we don't know anyone with special cake skills.

But we do know a lot of people with regular cake skills. Most people know a couple of good dessert recipes that they whip out for potlucks. So we came up with the idea of crowd-sourcing the cake. That is, rather than find one person who is good at baking to make us a massive cake, ask a bunch of people to make us a regular-sized cake or two. And it wouldn't have to be just cake. There could be pie or cobbler or cookies. There could be banana pudding or tarts or flan! We thought that this was a great idea. It would give people close to us an opportunity to be an important part of the day. It would be delicious. It would be unusual, yet we could still do all the traditional cakey stuff (cutting ceremony, toppers, freezing a piece) that you would do with a white, tiered cake. And there is pretty much something for everyone. Don't like wedding cake? No problem, have some wedding flan. ¡Arriba!

I shot off a mass email to everyone in my family, telling them about our great idea and asking for contributors. I made it clear that there was no obligation to participate, and that those who did would have complete freedom over what they wanted to bring. I could not have been any nicer about bothering people to make me free cake so that I didn't have to pay for one.

The response was...tepid. That's okay. I am used to my relatives thinking that I'm a bit weird. I strong-armed most of them into agreeing to help, even if they thought I was nuts. Josh thinks it's a great idea, and that's why I'm marrying him and not those spoilsports. And I think that once people see it, they will get it, even if it's not something they would have done.

My dear sister sent me a heartfelt email about how this was a terrible idea that I was going to regret. She countered that cake at a wedding is not automatically wedding cake, as I had said in the mass email. She and her husband agreed that they had really liked their cake (it had a fountain!). She even offered to chip in on a real wedding cake. It was sweet.

My response was that just because they enjoyed their cake and look back upon it fondly, that doesn't mean that if they had not had it, they would miss it. Also, and this is something I keep returning to, whatever you do at your wedding will be special to you because that's what you did at your wedding. It is a self-fulfilling specialness. The ring is The Ring because he bought it and gave it to me. The dress is The Dress because I picked it out and wore it. None of these things are special on their own. We make them special. It's like a mind trick we can play on ourselves. All we have to do to impart specialness to completely unspecial objects is to associate them with the day that we vow to spend our lives together.

My mom got married in a red gingham dress that she made in home economics class. It was not a wedding dress, and yet it was her wedding dress. So maybe cake at a wedding is not automatically wedding cake (except in a strictly linguistic sense). But, as the bride, I say that this is my wedding cake, and so it is. Years from now, we will look back and think about all those cakes and pies and flans and how glad we were that we did that. Isn't that neat?

In case you are still not convinced, and some of you are not, I have come up with another way to turn regular cake into wedding cake. There is a secret ingredient that you add. Ready? I'll tell you.

SYMBOLISM!

Our "cake," actually a table full of various desserts, is the combined effort of many people. There are many flavors, consistencies, and styles. But each was made with love by someone who loves us to celebrate our love. Individually, these various desserts are the people in our lives who have contributed to us becoming the people we are. Together, they make us, in a scrumptious smorgasbord of influences. This is our union. And you can eat it! Mmm, symbolism.

good dog.

Last night, we were out on the back porch, enjoying the evening cool. The days are no longer blazing hot, but you have to wait until dark for the mosquitoes to go to bed. And then you can go outside and listen to the owls and the whispering of anonymous night creatures. The empty lot next door, which has been reclaimed by Mother Nature, houses unknown beings. Sometimes it seems like our little wire fence is the only thing keeping the lions and the tigers and the bears at bay. We heard the rustling of branches and tree leaves, followed by a hollow thud, as if some large animal had fallen out of a tree. It sounded big. It was probably just a possum. Or if it was a mythical hell-beast, at least it was one of the clumsy ones.

Suddenly, from inside, came a rough bark. Remix is not a frequent barker. In fact, it took so long for her to bark when we first got her that we were worried that her previous owners had removed her bark box. She progressively got more and more vocal as she lived longer with us, but most of her communication was more like conversation. I can't speak for all pitbulls, but ours can be very whiny. Finally, one day, she did bark, and it was a great big scary bark, just the kind that will reach the ears of anyone who might be lurking outside and make them think twice about breaking and entering.

We weren't lurking, but we figured we should go check out what our dog was trying to tell us. We went back inside to assess the situation. She was standing near the back door, looking towards the kitchen. There was a rattling noise coming from the stove. It was the pot of rice, about to boil over, the lid rattling from the force of the steam. Oh, time to turn down the temperature.

I went over to lower the heat and stir the rice. It took a second, but then I suddenly realized: GOOD DOG! A pot of water boiling over or a cup of ruined rice is no big deal, which is why I hadn't worried about going outside while the rice was on the stove. But anytime the dog wants to let me know that there is a potentially dangerous situation going on in the house, then that is just fine with me.

She was quickly rewarded. There were treats, butt scratches, and a game of tug with a stuffed manatee, as if she had just mastered a new trick after weeks of training. But one of the great things about dogs is that you don't have to teach them to protect their packs.

lunch hour.

The first stop was the bank. I have a safe deposit box at the main branch on Wade Avenue. Having such a thing makes me feel like a grown-up, with special grown-up things that need to be kept in a safe and separate place. I mostly just have a bunch of paperwork related to home ownership (grown-up). I don't even know what most of them are about, but I had to sign copies of them, and by gum, if ever anyone showed up on my doorstep and demanded to see them, I'd have them. Or at least, I'd be able to get them immediately, given a half hour drive to Wade Avenue, as long as it was within bank hours. I'm on a waiting list for a safe deposit box at a closer branch.

Something else that I keep in the safe deposit box is the title to the car, and it was that which I needed. I needed it so that I sign the back of it while a notary watched me so that he could then put down his official I Saw This Happen stamp. Then I would give it to some local tow truck operator, who would take it and my car with the tree-shaped dent to an auction house. Four to six weeks later, I will get a statement that says how much my car raised for the public radio station that plays a bunch of jazz. This is not to be confused with the public radio station that received the donation of one of our cars four months ago. I get a tax write-off, but honestly just being rid of the thing is enough of a weight off my shoulders. If ever you want to just get rid of a junker and don't care what happens to it or whether you get any money for it, this is a convenient way to do it. And then you can talk about how you donated it to charity, aren't you a nice person?

I was in and out of the bank in minutes, car title in my purse. And then what? I'd killed less than half of a lunch hour, and despite my opening sentence, really the only stop I needed to make was the bank. It was hot, and that made me decide that I wanted bubble tea. Then I thought, no, there's no need to go out of my way to spend three dollars on a novelty drink, no matter how refreshing. Then I remembered that my mom had asked me to get her something at the Asian grocery store. And that's fine, because I can buy a refreshing novelty drink as long as I have a reason to go to the store in the first place.

Have you ever had bubble tea? It's silly. It looks silly and it tastes silly, and it's so silly that it requires a special straw, also silly. It's some kind of iced tea with milk, and they add little chewy things they call bubbles, but which are actually tapioca. You drink the tea, and sometimes the tapioca bubbles come up through the special silly straw, so you can chew them. They don't have much of a taste, but the texture is fun. If you eat all of them, though, you get that same weird feeling in your stomach that you get after a gummy worm binge. Full, but not sated, as if what you ate expanded. For all I know, that's exactly what happens.

I called up my mom's email on my phone, because I couldn't remember what I was supposed to get for her. I walked confidently into the store, ready to fetch some shichimi togarashi. And then I realized that I had no idea what shichimi togarashi was. Some kind of mushroom? So I googled it and found out that it was a spice blend, which at least helped me get to the right aisle of the store. I looked at the many, many packages, but none of them appeared to be the right thing. But then again, a lot of the packages were not in English. An official-looking man with an official-looking clipboard was in the spice aisle, so I showed him my phone and asked if he had this, not even bothering to make a go of the pronunciation. He thought for a second, then walked over to a shelf and tapped authoritatively on a small spice bottle before walking away. Nothing on the bottle was in English, except for the brand name. I tried to compare the characters on the bottle to the characters in the Wikipedia article. They seemed pretty close, and I figured my mom was not likely to know the difference anyway. Besides, I felt silly examining a bottle that I could not read even a little bit.

On my way to the register, I happened to find myself walking down the candy aisle (okay, I diverted myself there). I love Asian candy. It is inexplicable and delicious. I examined the packages, which gave only a slight indication of what might be inside. I picked up one, realized it had some kind of fish paste in it, and said, "Ew!" as I put it back. A man came around the corner as I did so, and I worried I had offended him. Silly white woman doesn't appreciate good candy. The Asian grocery store makes me worry about stupid things like that, mostly because I feel so conspicuous in the first place. He might think that kind of candy is gross, too.

I couldn't figure out the candy packages, so I picked up some mango-flavored Hi-Chew, because I know that it is yummy. Between that and the bubbles in the bubble tea, I had such a gummy tummyache that I didn't eat my packed lunch until after 4 in the afternoon. It was totally worth it.

broughton brownies.

I bought a new-used cookbook a few months back, when we were checking out a thrift store that happened to be having a book sale. It was the Capitol Cook Book, distributed by the James T. Broyhill for Senator campaign. Back in 1986, a furniture heir was running to represent North Carolina in the United States Senate. He'd been a representative of the 10th district for twenty-some years before being appointed by the governor to fill a Senate seat vacated by a guy who died. Then he had to actually get elected to the Senate seat, which he did not, and thus ended the political career of James T. Broyhill.

Yeah, that's all pretty boring. EXCEPT. I happened to have grown up in North Carolina's 10th district. More specifically, I share a hometown with the Broyhills. Lenoir is not much of a place, but we had furniture factories.

In the course of his Senate campaign, Jim Broyhill released a cookbook. I guess he gave them out at fundraising events. According to the excerpt on the back cover, there was a previous edition of the Capitol Cook Book, perhaps made during one of his earlier congressional campaigns. I dearly wish I had a copy of that earlier book, but surely any existing copies are going for millions on eBay are rotting in some basement in the 10th district. Also according to the back cover, the "booklet was authorized by and printed at the expense of the Jim Broyhill For Senate Campaign."

Pretty much everything you see in the secondhand market feels like fate, but it was pretty weird that I, a woman from Lenoir, happened to find a twenty-six-year-old Broyhill campaign cookbook in a Raleigh thrift store. Of all the people who come through that thrift store, how many had come from the 10th district?

So I paid a quarter for it, just to look through it (actually, I looked through it at the store, clutched it to my chest, and said "I MUST HAVE IT."). The first section is mostly Broyhill family recipes. And then the rest of the book is full of recipes supplied from various politicians. I found this part hilarious, even though I was annoyed that the recipes were credited to "Representative and Mrs." You know what? I bet Pat Roberts has never made a pumpkin chiffon pie in his life, so we might as well give credit to his unnamed Missus (I looked it up - her name is Franki).

I do not recognize all the names, though I suspect they are probably mostly Republicans. You can make the Secretary and Mrs. Caspar Weinberger's Apple Rum Cake or Congressman and Mrs. Trent Lott's Chicken and Wild Rice Casserole. While Strom Thurmond the man might make me cringe, his (and his Mrs.) recipe for barbeque sauce looks pretty tasty. The last couple of pages even have recipes courtesy of the Reagans. I intend to make the Gipper's Mac and Cheese, because, well, why wouldn't I? The recipes are mostly pretty simple and a lot of them sound good.

I was nearing the end of the book when I came across something that I instantly knew I needed to make: Broughton Brownies. I laughed and laughed and laughed.

Just like I was one of the few people in Raleigh that would have any interest in James T. Broyhill's campaign cookbook, the people who might get a kick out of Broughton Brownies have to come from a specific place, say around the 10th district.

Needham Broughton was a prominent North Carolina businessman in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He gave the state a lot of money, so he has a high school in Raleigh named after him. His nephew, J. Melville Broughton, the 60th Governor of North Carolina, was the namesake of Broughton Hospital, located in Morganton, North Carolina (in the 10th district!). That's nice, isn't it? Had a hospital named after him.

See, Broughton Hospital is a mental institution. We can all agree that it's not very nice to poke fun at mental illness, you can bet your britches that little kids growing up anywhere near Morganton used Broughton Hospital in their insults. You know, yo mamma so crazy she had you at Broughton Hospital. Or something, I never was very good at those kinds of jokes.

At some point in high school, I met some girls from Raleigh, and they talked very casually about how they went to Broughton. Of course, they meant the high school in the nice part of town. But I didn't know that. I was amazed that not only does the loony bin apparently have a high school attached to it, the kids that go there don't even know enough to be ashamed of going there.

I made Broughton Brownies for an office potluck. I did not tell anyone where I got the recipe, because A.) it would require too much explaining, and B.) it would ruin the fun I had watching them all eat asylum brownies. They had nuts in them, too! GET IT?

The recipe makes a dense and dry marbled brownie. They're not bad. I imagine that if I had to spend some time in Broughton Hospital, I would develop a complicated relationship with such delicious symbols of my incarceration and mental instability. Josh went on and on about how they were no good, because they did not have nearly enough chocolate in them. He did this while shovelling them into his mouth. Once I pointed out that he had eaten them all, he revised his statement to say that they were not actually brownies. I'm okay with that explanation. It would make sense to me that Broughton Brownies are not actually brownies. They just think they are.

GET IT?

peacocks in the front yard.

"Did you ever notice that a bathing suit allows you to wear a dress over it that would be completely inappropriate to wear over regular underwear?"

Whoa, deep.

I did not hear the response to that question, because I was just walking by. I was coming back from the keg station, carrying a beer over to the tent where my chair was. It was a slip 'n slide party, but I was not wearing a bathing suit. I was wearing a dress, and since I was wearing it over regular underwear, it was reasonably concealing. Under the tent with me were two other women. One of them was also wearing a long dress, no bathing suit, while the other was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. She even had a jacket, which she attempted to use to keep the sun from burning her shoulders. I offered her some sunscreen, but she said she had to go to work soon anyway. The other tent and the rest of the yard was inhabited by women in bathing suits and the kinds of dresses that you can really only wear over bathing suits.

Why would someone go to a slip 'n slide party and not wear a bathing suit? Actually, let's back up and ask another question: What is a slip 'n slide party?

Presumably, you know what a slip 'n slide is. It's a long piece of plastic with a irrigation tube on one side. You plug it into a garden hose, which makes the plastic very wet and very slidy, so that little children can take a run at them and then slide faster faster faster all the way to the end, where they will either land in a pool or get a bunch of grass cuts on their tummies. Commercial slip 'n slides are not recommended for adults, due to danger of spinal injury.

You're quick, so you've by now figured out that a slip 'n slide party is a party where there is slipping 'n sliding. However, I was at THE slip 'n slide party. It gets the definite article because it is an annual event. A fellow that we know throws a party at his house. He gets a couple of kegs, supplies a bunch of food, hires a band, and constructs a massive slip 'n slide going down his inclined yard.

Since this party has been happening for a few years, the slide construction is down to a science. First, there is a thick layer of carpet over the grass going down the hill. There are rolls of carpet on either side to prevent people from sliding off to either side. A thick layer of clear plastic covers the carpet. At the bottom is a giant inflatable pool. Last year, the pool was more of a kiddie-variety, and a couple of sliders with too much momentum bounced right out of it like skipped rocks. The water comes from a holey hose that is strung from tree to tree across the top of the slide.

So now you know all about slip 'n slide parties in general, and also THE slip 'n slide party in particular. Back to the original question: why wasn't I wearing a bathing suit?

I agonized over that decision, let me tell you. Aside from not particularly wanting to shave my legs, I didn't want to appear in public in a bathing suit. Good old-fashioned body shame. I looked at the other women, all tan and thin in their suits and tiny dresses. I consoled myself that they all probably hated their own bodies, because that's just the way women are.

That's all old news, though. I'm not here to talk about how women hate their bodies (well, except for those previous five paragraphs). Because there was something else that I could not help noticing. Just as the women were all either self-consciously covered up or uncovered, so were the men. Some guys kept their shirts on even as they went down the slide. Others paraded around shirtless, tan, and toned. Some preferred that you not look at them, while others competed for your eyes. It was equal-opportunity body shame (and eye candy) out there.

That's probably not a new thing. I just never noticed it before, because I was too busy worrying about myself. It was funny to me, actually, to see men worrying about their appearance, like they ought to know better. With their brightly colored swim trunks, I couldn't help but think of peacocks.

And then. Over there, under the band tent. There was a guy who kept his shirt on. It was a tee shirt meant to look like a boy scout uniform. He also wore a ridiculous pith helmet and some silly sunglasses. He was not covering up, nor was he strutting, though his outfit did draw attention to him. It made me wonder what kind of person I was, that out of all the peacocks in the yard, mine was the one in the pith helmet.

the march 2 bug.

Before I fell in love with my house, another person did. Well, I never met him, so I can't say for sure how he felt about it. All I know is that he put an offer down on it, the offer was accepted, and he went under contract. It might be that he bought it for a hated mother-in-law, or perhaps he just wanted a place to keep his howler monkeys. In any case, four days before he was going to sign the papers for the house, he lost his job. That meant that he couldn't get his loan, so he couldn't get the house.

Then came me. I went under contract and I had a month to think about that poor guy who lost the house so that I might buy it. I was terrified that something would happen that would prevent me from buying it. I stopped talking on my cell phone while driving that month, because I didn't want to get in an accident. My logic was that if I totaled my car and had to buy a new one or if I had sudden overwhelming medical bills, I might not get the loan. As soon as the house was mine, I went back to driving and talking on the phone. Remember kids, it's okay to do potentially dangerous things, as long as you are not under contract to buy a house.

I was also afraid of losing my job. This was in the scary days of early 2009. We'd all watched the stock market plummet and the unemployment number grow. No one had been let go at my company, but I had the least seniority. I seemed like the easiest cut to make.

I took off work on a Friday to sign the papers and buy the house. Up until quitting time on Thursday night, I lived in fear of being laid off and I did not use my cell phone while driving. Friday, I bought a house. While driving from the lawyer's office to the house, I called my mom.

Monday morning, two people were laid off at my office. I was not one of them. I felt relieved, of course. But it made me wonder whether it would have been worse to have been laid off before I bought the house or after. I would not have gotten my wonderful property, but then again, I wouldn't be newly unemployed and 130K in debt at the same time.

* * *
This year, on the second day of March, whenever any of our customers fired up our product, they were greeted with an error. And then the program crashed. That was it. No one in the whole world could run our application on March 2. When we all got to the office in the morning, the people overseas had encountered this problem hours before. People were unable to do their jobs because our program was not running.

That's a pretty bad bug.

We have a web site where customers can report problems and get help, either from other users or employees of the company. One of my coworkers happened to check the web site on the night of March 1, when those foreign customers started complaining. He found the problem and posted a message on the web site about how to fix it. We were all properly impressed the next morning when we saw his message, which was posted at 1:03 AM.

The bug was a simple math error, and the fix was to add an equals sign to a comparison (greater than or equals, rather than just greater than). The buggy code was a couple of years old, and disaster would only happen on March 2. It hadn't come up in previous years because there was no code that called the bad code. As it happened, I was the one who called the bad code, but of course, we all blamed the person who wrote that very bad code in the first place. First, because it really was his bad code, and second, because he'd been one of the people laid off a couple years ago. The general rule is that the last person to leave a company gets blamed for all the bugs.

The really funny thing is that he was laid off on March 2, 2009, which I remember because I bought my house the Friday before. And so it was like some spooky revenge that he set into motion on his way out. I don't think he did, but after spending a morning scrambling around reassuring angry customers whose very expensive software product suddenly quit working, it was funny to think of it that way.

thingies.

Thing 1: Put 'er there.
Someone at work sent me a video that had told the story of a half-dead pitbull puppy showing up on somebody's porch. The person was going to take it to the pound because of all the nasty things they'd heard about pitbulls, but a soft-hearted sister convinced him not to. Fast forward a year, and the dog is happy, healthy, and knows all kinds of tricks. I watched this and immediately felt bad that my dog could not pick which hand held the coin. She can sit and lie down and roll over. But I thought it would be neat to teach her to shake paws. Then later, we'd move on to teaching her to bake cookies, use the toilet, and fold laundry.

She learned to shake in about two minutes, and I felt like an idiot for not teaching it to her sooner. I also felt sort of irrationally angry, as if she had known how to shake the whole time and yet had not told me. Why hadn't she come up to me and offered her paw when we first met?

Thing 2: Jeepers Creepers.
I've been buying up interesting books to rip up and turn into paper decorations. Among those books were three organ music books that I bought because they had sheet music on colored paper. Once I found myself the owner of an organ (and after I had cooled down about that fact), I dug them out and gave them to Josh, who immediately sat down to learn to play "Jeepers Creepers, Where'd You Get Those Peepers." The books had specific instructions about how to use all the befuddling buttons on the organ, such as the spectretone setting. Sometimes it is cool that I happen to have just the right thing already stashed somewhere, and sometimes it's actually a little embarrassing. Either way, I guess Josh and I deserve each other.

Thing 3: I found a feather.
I now have two feathers in my house, picked up outside and kept for being beautiful natural objects. The other one is blue with black stripes. They are kept tucked into the trim of the shade on my beloved bird bath lamp. Like anyone who spent a lot of time outdoors as a kid, I've found enough feathers to make at least one mismatched flightless bird, but I can't recall ever having found a red feather. I don't know that something as ho-hum as "I found a feather" counts for a Thing for someone out of elementary school. But I did take a picture, and then I wrote this little paragraph, so that counts as enough, right?

I found a feather. It's red.

committed.

Last week at work, my cell phone rang. It was an unfamiliar number, out of my area code. I let it ring. Ten seconds later, it rang again. I figured it might be important, so I answered. It was the American Red Cross, asking me to make an appointment at a donation center, because blood supplies were critically low. I sighed at being tricked into answering the phone and thought that they always say that their blood supplies were critically low.

In case you were wondering, yes, I do believe that mine was about the most selfish possible reaction to a plea from the Red Cross. I realized it immediately, and as penance, I made an appointment to give blood the following morning.

They call me, because my blood is magical. Know how? Well, they can take my blood out of my body, and then if someone else loses a lot of blood, they can put my blood into their body, and that person will then not die from lack of blood. See? Magical. What? You say your blood is magical, too? Well! You should get on down to the Red Cross!

I've given blood bunches of times, but I've never actually gone down to the Red Cross for it. My donations have always been a part of a blood drive. In the last few years, all of my blood donation has taken place on a bus. I consider myself to be committed to blood donation. I always sign up for the blood drives, even though I sorta hate doing it. I don't mind the weird questions about trips abroad and I like the cookies at the end, but I will never get used to the part where the needle goes into my arm. However, there doesn't seem to be any way around it.

But it occurred to me that if I only give blood when it's convenient to me, as in when the blood bus comes to my door, then that is not very committed. Only driving out of one's way early in the morning implies commitment. Or something. Once, I worked at a blood drive at church, and an old man came in who had donated multiple gallons over the course of his life. It takes eight donations to make a gallon, and you can safely donate about six times a year, so it takes a while to rack up gallons. That guy was committed to giving blood. Someday, when I am an old lady, and I go visit the Red Cross, the volunteers will be amazed at my lifetime giving record. They may even clap, while I smile modestly. No, no, it was nothing. Extra cookies? Well, maybe just seven one, to be polite.

Unlike the blood buses, which have little room for decor, the Red Cross' walls are littered with art meant to inspire your bleeding. Once, at that same church blood drive, one of the sponsors had her fourth-grade class draw artwork for placemats. There were a lot of pictures of syringes and blood drops. The American Red Cross chose a different route, displaying framed posters featuring women in WWI era nurse outfits. One of these nurses was holding her arms out plaintively, begging you to either join up or take her blood. She looked a little like a zombie. There was also a set of Disney posters, featuring Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, and Donald working for the Red Cross. The Minnie poster was particularly striking - Minnie comforts a little girl while a tornado pulls apart a house in the near background. That's great, Ms. Mouse, but shouldn't we get underground now?

The nurse asked me if I was here for a double donation. I'd never heard of such a thing, so I said no. In fact, that sounded kinda dangerous, since they're usually pretty strict about how often you can donate. But they were talking about a double red blood cell donation, where they take twice as many red blood cells, but give you back the platelets and the plasma. They use a special machine. I said no, but decided that I would look into it later, because I am committed to blood donation. The double donation is something they ask only of people with type-O blood (~90% of the population can receive O-positive blood, while everyone can receive O-negative).

It was really cold in the Red Cross, just like it's always cold on the blood bus. That's intentional. Because there is already a danger of people passing out (you know, from having their precious bodily fluids taken out of them), a warm or even comfortable temperature would only make that worse. If you do feel like you're going to pass out, they point an oscillating fan directly at you. Sometimes they put an ice pack on your chest (guess how I know these things!). Anyway, the cold is a necessary nuisance. When I was waiting for my turn with the nurse, a lady sat beside me reading a book, with a folded blanket in her lap. It was clearly not her first time at the Red Cross. She was committed to blood donation.

Finally, I was sitting in a right-arm bleeding chair, shivering but otherwise comfortable, considering that I was having my life-force drained out. The TV was set to CNN, which was reporting that someone had shot a bunch of people at the Empire State Building. Though it sounded sensational, it turned out to be just another of the awful things that happen every day. I guess that's why the Red Cross always says their blood supplies are critically low.

I always feel upbeat after a blood donation. It's a very easy and very good thing to do. But I felt better than usual that day, the difference being that I had gone and done this, not that I had happened across it and said okay. I am committed.

embrace the mystery.

A couple of Sundays ago, on the way home from the Lutheran Church we've been attending, Josh said something about joining up. And I said, whoooooa there pardner, isn't that just a bit hasty? I mean, I like the Lutherans and all, and these specific ones are swell, but I'm not sure I'm ready to put my name on the books. I dunno, I just don't feel Lutheran, you know?

It was the only church we'd tried. Josh picked it because it was the closest Lutheran church to our house, and you like what you know. I know, because I had already eyed a tiny Methodist church a couple miles out in the country. We'd talked about getting back into a church habit for a while. We'd both grown up in faithful families, and we missed church. Drifting back to your childhood faith in your late twenties is maybe cliche, but here we are.

I personally was intrigued by the Unitarians. I wanted to give them a try, just to see what the service was like. My only impression of them was that they were a place for people whose beliefs didn't seem to fit into any of the approved boxes. I wonder how many people in the pews of other churches have personal beliefs that are different, even at odds, with the messages being preached to them every week. The Unitarians seemed to be embracing that: "Hey, there's lots of ways to think about these questions, and frankly, it's impossible to know, but let's get together, sing songs, and talk about how to be good people." Josh did not trust the Unitarians ("They're not even Christians." "Some of them probably are, and I bet most of them are down with Jesus."), but was willing to try out a service. But we never did, because the only church is twenty minutes away. So I guess if you asked how interested I was in the Unitarians, the answer is less than twenty minutes.

But the Episcopal church was only five minutes away, closer than the Lutherans even. So I said, hey, let's give them a whirl. And Josh said okay, because he trusts the Episcopalians.

It's funny searching for a church together, because we each have different ideas of what we want out of it. He grew up with a few different traditions - first Baptist, then Lutheran, with a dash of Catholic school thrown in. He likes high church, with lots of rituals and candles and robes. I grew up in the archetypical old country church, a Methodist community that was constantly on the verge of dying out with its elderly members. I like small churches, with strong connections between members. Neither of us can abide contemporary music.

The Episcopal church was smallish, with traditional music - so far, so good. And their service? Well, Josh referred to it as "really high church." A good Lutheran would come to the Episcopal church and say that they liked it, but that there was kind of a lot of ritual. There is a procession coming in and one going out. There are lots of opportunities to sing, even if you're not in the choir. There is a reading from the Old Testament, a Psalm, and a excerpt from the New Testament. And then, there is a reading from the Gospel. The two acolytes and an altar boy have a mini parade down the middle aisle, leading a priest carrying a book. They stop halfway between the front and the back, and the priest reads a little good news.

I'm not actually sure if the guy was a priest. They had four people in robes up front. I think they all had different titles, which confuses the heck out of me because I don't know the difference between a priest and a rector and a vicar. In my low church tradition, we had a preacher and that was it.

The first time I experienced high church, I was confused and frustrated the whole time. I always felt half a step behind, even though everything was listed in the program. I guess I've been to enough of these services to be able to follow it, but it has still mostly felt...empty. Rote. Like I was following a script. But at the Episcopal church, I sorta got it, and I honestly can't say if the difference was in the church or in me. Maybe I had enough of a feel for the flow that I was able to actually pay attention to it rather than fumble to keep up the whole time. But it didn't feel empty and rote, it was solemn and reverant. Maybe my problem with high church was that it hadn't been high enough. Or maybe I just really wanted to like the Episcopalians.

The sermon blew my mind. I grew up with well-meaning but not particularly insightful or inspired sermons. Small country churches are really more about the good salt-of-the-earth people in the pews, because they can't afford a good orator up front. The Lutherans, despite being a larger city church, were similar - solid messages, but not something you'd go home and discuss further. However, because of all their liturgy, the message was generally brief. The Episcopal priest spoke from the aisle, using no notes. He started with a story from the Kabbalah. And he talked about not interpretting the Old Testament literally.

I looked around, waiting for the angry mob to form. Obviously, my experience with Christianity has been very limited. I knew there were some who read the Bible as symbolic, but I figured they were isolated sects who lived off the grid and shunned outsiders. I was used to places where if you called the Bible's literal truth into question, ladies would start fainting.

The priest talked about the specific story of God raining manna from heaven. He said we should not think of this as literal bread falling from the sky. Nor should we try to explain it by saying that there was a certain type of flowering bush that produced something similar to what is described. After eliminating those two options ("supernatural literalism" and "historical realism"), he ended the message. I waited. If it's not A, and it's not B, then there must be a C. The preacher is supposed to tell you the C! But if there was one, he didn't mention it. At first, I thought it was a glaring oversight, but then I decided that was the point. The church was not telling me what to believe. They had addressed a couple of interpretations and outlined the downfalls with them, but then they left the rest of it to me. They embrace the mystery, and I really, really like that.

Mind blown.

The Episcopalians may be vague on their interpretations of Old Testament miracles, but they are emphatic about loving Jesus. They have Communion every single Sunday. It's right there on the front page of the bulletin, under the church's name - "Eucharist-centered worship." While I teased Josh about how often the Lutherans communed ("You know, the way the Methodists do it, they don't have to do it again for months. Much more efficient."), I've accepted that some people really like the holy meal.

The Lutherans intinct, which is a fancy word for dipping the bread into the wine and then eating it. Growing up, we got little shot glasses of grape juice at the Methodist church. The Episcopalians share the cup. You have the option to intinct, or you can forego the wine altogether. We took a when-in-Rome attitude. I think I've used a communal cup maybe once before, but I've never had the priest hold the cup up to me as I knelt. I felt profoundly humbled by it, and once again, I felt like I was being introduced to a whole new Christianity. Are the Episcopalians different or am I?

As we left, Josh said we could start going there instead of continuing to court the Lutherans. I was relieved, after feeling like I'd dragged him there when he was all ready to get his Lutheran card stamped and sign up for a retreat at Lutheridge (or was it Lutherock?). So. Episcopalians! Who knew?

*Note: When I talk about big groups of people like "the Methodists" or "the Lutherans," I am speaking about the specific congregations that I am familiar with. There is great variety even within denominations, because it's a big world.

husqVARNA!

It was time to buy a chainsaw.

A couple of years ago, a tree fell in our yard. It missed the deck by about an inch. Josh said he'd chop it up and we'd get some free firewood. Because when you live at the mercy of trees, the best you can do is pray that they don't hit anything and then enjoy burning them in retaliation when they do. I sent an email to my brother, who is my official tool expert, asking about axes. He recommended that I get a gas-powered axe made by Husqvarna.

Josh said no, real men uses axes. I said whatever, bought the ax, and let him do the work.

A month ago, a tree fell on two other trees. The combined trees, a mighty woody force, fell on Josh's car. They also fell all over the driveway and onto some smaller decorative trees that actually fared much worse than the Toyota. A neighbor walking by offered to let us borrow a chainsaw. In fact, lots of neighbors stopped at the bottom of our driveway to marvel at nature. Some of them offered help, others offered unhelpful commentary like "That's a big tree." Undoubtedly, they all considered why the lot of us are stupid enough to live around all these leafy monsters.

Josh said that he would chop it up. And he probably would have, except that it was really hot outside, and he had to work a lot of hours, and did I mention that it was hot? Record-breaking temperatures. Real men stay inside in the conditioned air.

I told him about the friendly neighbor with the chainsaw. Shrug. I said, I will buy you a chainsaw. He said he didn't want one, because . I said that while I respected his silly-illogical-real-macho-reasoning, dear, but the task will never get done this way. LET ME BUY YOU A CHAINSAW. Seriously? Most men would love to have some nice woman offer to buy them a chainsaw.

I sent an email to my brother, who still recommends Husqvarna. I looked up chainsaws online, sighed at the price, then cheered myself by saying "HusqVARNA!"

We went to Lowes on a Monday afternoon. We'd gone to the post office earlier, because they used to have Lowes coupons in their change-of-address packets. This is very dishonest. You should never take a change-of-address packet unless you are moving. You should not go to the post office for free coupons just because chainsaws are $300. Do not do this. For one thing, the coupons aren't even there anymore.

Being thwarted at the post office prepared us for our next thwarting at Lowes. They had two Husqvarnas, but not the size we needed. I pouted, and consoled myself by saying I would now have time to order Lowes coupons off eBay, possibly sold by unscrupulous persons who live near post offices that still give away coupons. I said "HusqVARNA!" some more.

Tuesday afternoon, I drove up the driveway after work, and I noticed that the tree situation had been taken care of. I could tell that whoever had done it had used a chainsaw. It probably made him feel powerful, like a real man.

The thing is, Josh didn't do it. There was no note, no nothing. Someone happened along and chopped up our tree. Maybe the person who owns the vacant lot where the tree used to grow, maybe some neighbor who felt a little sorry for our pathetic attempts at home maintenance. I wish I knew who it was, so I could bake them some cookies. So now we have lots of free firewood, and still no chainsaw. Maybe next time.

cheese and crackers.

After booking a reception venue, the next thing to look at was catering. We had hoped to hire a friend of ours, Big Rig, who is a real, live chef at a restaurant. He's the guy you call to work the grill at a party, just because he likes to do it and always does a bang-up job. We must have each thanked him several times for cooking up so many chicken wings at Josh's birthday party, and the next time we saw him, he mentioned that he was interested in catering the wedding. He was already doing the food at the wedding of another friend of ours, and he was confident that he could handle our 150-guest affair.

I was intrigued. It was the kind of thing that could turn out brilliant or terrible. We would have total control over the menu, and would be basically just paying for the food, with a little extra thrown over to Big Rig. I have no doubts about the man's cooking, and I was willing to be convinced that he could handle food on a mass scale. Plus, I liked the idea of people asking me who was doing my catering and then me getting to answer, "Big Rig."

It was not meant to be. Big Rig would need an on-site kitchen, and short of offering up Josh's mom's house, we couldn't figure out how to make that work. Also, most reception venues are very picky about caterers. Some of them insist that you use their own. Others have a list of approved companies. On none of those lists did I see "Big Rig." They don't know what they're missing.

The venue we chose has a list of accepted caterers. If we choose a different one, we can have them added to the list of accepted caterers, for a fee (which covers the administrative cost of...something or other). I started with the list. Several of them had very delicious-sounded menus available, and I was excited about getting to go have a tasting day where we picked out our own menu. Then I started looking at the prices, and I lost my appetite.

I thought about that money, still sitting at my parents' bank, that I had turned down. I thought about a honeymoon. I thought about the car we would need to buy for Josh. I realized that we could pay for the wedding ourselves if we really, really scrimped on the festivities or if we went into debt. A fresh new debt is not how I want to start my marriage. But neither did I want to serve my guests cheese and crackers in the church basement. Having these kind of expensive demands for my wedding made me feel very shallow. If you can't afford the wedding you'd like to have, I guess you can't have it, right?

I called my mom and asked if the Sandra Wedding Fund was still available or if they had already picked out a new pontoon boat. She laughed at me, and said of course, it's yours, shall I write you a check? She didn't want to eat cheese and crackers either. And this was what the money was for - me to have the wedding I wanted, and what I wanted was a fun party for everyone. I'll happily wear the Goodwill dress and some borrowed pearls, but it was important to me that people actually have a good time. I want good food, alcohol, and a band. Is it less selfish if my wedding demands have to do with the things that are for everyone?

I knew that the money was still mine for the asking, but it was a very humbling phone call. Not just because I had already made a big deal about paying for it myself, but also because I don't like the idea of taking money from my parents. It's like I think that not paying my own way all the time makes me less of an adult, even when it's money that has been set aside for years for this very purpose. They're not supporting me, they're giving me a party. That's what I tell myself. I also tell myself that it's stupid to feel bad for failing to live up to a requirement that I pretty much made up on my own.

As soon as I got off the phone, a huge weight was lifted off of me. I was able to look at caterers' websites and not get a worryache. But then I quit after about five minutes, because this wedding stuff overwhelms me.

And the piano sounds like a carnival.

One Thursday evening, not too long ago, I came home and found an organ in my living room. No, Remix had not brought me the still-beating heart of my nemesis, it was the musical kind. An electric organ, six feet wide and extending four feet out from the wall, with a huge speaker on each side.

I don't know what you guys think about all the silly things I admit to owning or the enthusiasm I have for what even I would call junk. I recognize that my tastes are not universal. So it's totally okay if you assume that I was really happy to find the organ. It's fine if you figure that this was something I wanted, as I know I have given you every indication that all I want out of life is a bunch of crap to put in my living room.

Actually, I was really very pissed off.

I had seen this organ before. It had been sitting at the Durham Rescue Mission Thrift Store for months. It was the kind of thing that I admire briefly and then move on, because c'mon, that thing is huge and ridiculous. It would be an incredible thing for someone else to own. Unfortunately, Someone Else turned out to be my fiance, who had thoughtfully set it up in the living room and then left it for me to find while he was at work.

Surprise!

I fired off some angry, angry text messages. I said unkind things. When he said it would grow on me, I compared it to cancer. I. Was. So. Mad. I briskly walked the dog, and I was still mad. I cleaned the floors, and I was still mad. I wrote in my journal, and that just made me madder. I went out in the backyard and pulled weeds, and that helped. Then later, after he got home from work and we were both there staring at it, we had a good old-fashioned in-person fight.

She said: Do not bring giant things to live in the house without discussing it with other house members.
He said: ORGAN!
She said: Could you not wait until you saw me to talk about it? You could have called from the store. Did you have to have it right that second?
He said: ORGAN!
She said: So when you were driving to go get the band van and find three friends to help you move this thing into the house, during all that, did it never occur to you that I might not want it?
He said: ORGAN!

Basically, Josh really really really wanted the organ. He thought it was beautiful and amazing, the desire for it was self-explanatory: ORGAN. He'd wanted it from the first time he saw it, and only recently had it been marked down enough to consider buying it. Once it got to that price point, he was convinced he had to act at that very moment, before someone swooped in and bought it out from under him. He further assumed, like maybe you did, that I would really want it, too. I mean, if I was okay with the sarcophagus, why would the organ be any different?

Answer: I had been present at the purchase of the sarcophagus, therefore my approval was implicit. Also, you could fit like ten mummies in that stupid organ. Fourteen, if four of them were cats.

I felt a little sorry for him. His enthusiasm, which I had swiftly and deftly murdered, was very earnest. He had even talked to me earlier in the day, after he'd bought it, and it was all he could do to not spoil the surprise that awaited me at home. He was so sure that I would love it, just like he was sure that someone else would buy it if he did not (Note to self: Josh very bad at estimating other people's desire for electric organs). Then I compared it to cancer and hurt his feelings. I felt bad for ruining his new toy high, and I could see why he would figure that I would be okay, even happy, about it. But I reserve my right to be angry about giant musical instrument purchases made without consultation.

It would be hilarious if it happened to someone else (as I'm sure you well know). I bet there are lots of folks out there who buy ridiculous stuff that their significant others do not want. I don't know what those other ridiculous things are, but I think that for most people, it is not an electric organ. This is a common situation, made unique by the fact that it's us. Someday, I hope that I will find it funny. Right now, I do not, even as I play it up for laughs on my blog.

I am accepting it, because there is not much else I can do. The next morning, when we were no longer fighting, but the sight of it still made me burn inside, he remarked about how he was going to be glad that he bought it every day for the rest of his life. And I felt the rest of the room fade away so it was just me and the organ in all the world, as that phrase echoed in my head, "the rest of my life." I'm going to marry this man, which is marrying his stuff. The movie of our marriage will have a soundtrack full of carnival music.

"Why couldn't you just have gotten a piano? I like pianos. Pianos don't stick out so far or have huge speakers."

"We can still get a piano."

"And get rid of the organ?"

"No, we'd have both!"

"It'll be a really cool piano. And we'll put the organ on CraigsList and find it a good home with someone who will play it and love it."

"It has to be a reeeeeeally cool piano." A pause. "A player piano."

"That would be amazing." Pause. "Challenge accepted." We shook on it.