We are remodeling our kitchen and finishing our basement. We’re in the planning stages at the moment: picking out cabinets and making appointments to have the kitchen measured, crying over estimates, wondering if we should bother, wondering why we didn’t do it ten years ago, all that kinds of fun stuff.
The guy doing the work calls us up today and says he’d like to come over tomorrow and frame the basement, to get it out of the way while we wait for the cabinets to get ordered and get closer to arriving, before he demolishes the kitchen to the studs and vacuums the dead mouse bodies out of the walls. Tomorrow? Yeah! Tomorrow!
So, my husband and I go down to the hole basement and start moving crap around in order for the guy to have enough room to work. We have a lot of crap. A lot of crap we don’t need and don’t remember buying, owning, or wanting. We’re moving it all around, and it occurs to me that I’ve got to pay to renew my domain names. Shit, I’m thinking, as we’re moving all this crap around. Here we are, about to spend a bajillion dollars on a pretty major home project. How might I casually mention to my husband that I’m about to spend $45 to renew domains on the blogs I rarely update anymore?
Yes, it’s only $45. I’m aware of that. But when you’re about to spend a bajillion dollars, and you’re worrying about not having enough to do the project right, well, $45 seems like a lot. When you go to get a general quote on the cabinets, and it appears that they will cost nearly double what you had (stupidly) estimated in your head, then yeah, $45 is a lot. It’s enough for me to have to worry I will get the “you want to spend how much on some gay little hobby?” look. I hate that look.
So, we’re moving stuff around, and hubby informs me that we are going to have to shift the gun safe over a bit so that the guy can get behind it to do some framing. This gun safe, mind you, weighs several tons. I have no idea how we got it down there, and it is definitely going to stay down there forever. I don’t know the combo to this gun safe, so I haven’t the slightest idea what’s in there. If you had asked me a few hours ago, I would have said, oh, a handgun and a couple of shotguns.
Well, I’d have been wrong. Very wrong. And while it is probably not a good idea for me to go rambling on about the number of guns in my home on the internet, let’s just say that he pulled these guns out of the safe and laid them on a table, so that they wouldn’t get damaged while we moved the cabinet. Then, he asked me to help him take out all the little boxes of bullets (or shells, or whatever the fuck you call them. The things that go in the gun, that when you pull the trigger explode out the end and into something alive, causing it to no longer be alive) and put those on the table as well, so that they wouldn’t get all shifted around and spill and all.
There were a few bags of smaller bullets (or shells, or rounds, or whatever). There were several boxes of larger ones.
I gazed down at this mini armory and thought to myself, “I wonder how much all this crap cost?”
I turned to my husband and said, “Where did all these guns come from? And how much did they cost?”
“I knew it,” he said. “I knew I should have sent you upstairs and should have just done this myself.”
“I’m just wondering and all because I was all tense about spending $45 on renewing my domains for a little hobby that I have recently had flagging interest in, but am swearing I will start doing again with a vengeance, and I’m looking at these guns and all these bullets, and I’m trying to remember the last time you went hunting.”
“Don’t even start. Seriously.”
“Just curious, is all. I guess I can renew those domains right now and not feel even a twinge of guilt. Thanks, honey.”
He put his hands on his hips and looked at me all serious-like, and said, seriously, he said this: “Honey, just remember that when the world ends, and all our friends and neighbors come over here, hoping that I’ll be able to protect them and shoot them some dinner, that I’ll have…”
“Plenty of guns with which to shoot them off our property?”
“Exactly.”
So there. A post. It may not have been all that amusing, but I wrote one. And I renewed my domain, even though I did seriously consider not doing it. I considered giving it all up.
But a couple of things happened, besides realizing that I could pay to renew them without any guilt. One, the Duke of Earle continues to stop by and wonder about where I’ve gone and what the hell has happened to my babblingness. And two, Megan mentioned VikiBabbles when she was interviewed in an article (see previous post). It would be pretty pathetic if people read that article and came to my blog, thinking that anything Megan reads must be amazing, and they found it had been taken over by some hacking porn site because I didn’t pay to renew the domain. And, I don’t want to disappoint the Duke.
I’ll get my babble back if it kills me.
Tomorrow, my daughter and I are going downtown to have lunch at the Wolfgang Puck restaurant at the MCA with my mother and check out some exhibits. We’re going to hit the beach (provided they are not contaminated and closed). We may do a little shopping on the Magnificent Mile. We’re going to spend the night down there, high above Lake Shore Drive, and entertain ourselves by watching people crash into each other on the S curve. We’ll go for a nice walk along the lake in the morning. We’ll return late afternoon, to find that our basement has been all framed in.
Then, I’ll take a shower and go to Bunco.
I would think I could find something to write about somewhere along the way.
