So That Happened

Please excuse this unintentional blog hiatus. My days are filled with sunshine and soccer, The Biggest Loser and white peaches (which are, after Mauro Rosales and my cat, the greatest things that have ever happened to me). Here are some of the more momentous happenings in my life over the past several weeks: 

1. Mish and I drove to Tacoma this past weekend to help my former professors Bill and Tiffany build raised vegetable beds in their backyard. While digging a hole for one of the posts, Tiffany unearthed (literally!) a wire. Upon inspection, she noticed that the plastic casing was slightly split. When Bill got home and was briefed on the situation, he halted work with the assumption that the wire was live and therefore extremely dangerous. "I probably shouldn't tell him that I touched it without gloves," Tiff whispered when he was out of earshot. Not three minutes later she announced to Bill, "I have something to tell you! I know it's not a live wire because I touched it with my bare hands."

2. All I have to say in defense of this next one is at least we laughed. So here it is: To measure where the posts of the raised bed would sit in the ground, we used a very precise and fool-proof method of measuring on an uneven surface (a giant mound of soil) with a bent tape measure, using pink tennis balls and a fallen branch as our markers. Which worked spectacularly, as you might assume, until Tiffany's dog decided he wanted to play tennis and until Tiffany's 4-year-old daughter "found a stick" protruding from the corner of the dirt Everest. Imagine our surprise when we lowered the bed onto the ground and the holes were...let's just say not ideally placed.

3. While shoveling dirt into a new pile, Mish was explaining to Tiffany that she didn't want to give birth. Her intentions are for me to be her surrogate, or "broodmare." If there's one thing I love more than children, it's being thought of as a horse who's only valued for her uterus. And, because that wasn't flattering enough, the other morning Mish complimented me on my bright future as a mail-order bride. "I would order you," she said over breakfast, "and then set you free. Like a caged animal." Excuse me while I go muck my own stall.

4. Mish's family is German and mine, at least a ways down the line, is Polish. Keep that in mind for this next bit. I spend my mornings reading on the couch with my cup of tea. Often Mish will scooch herself next to me, thereby appropriating the majority of the couch for herself and ousting me to the outer regions by the armrest. Our obsession with all things Holocaust has thus led to the use of "Germany" as a verb--as in, "Stop Germanying the couch, Mish!" It doesn't help that I unwittingly introduced her to "Springtime for Hitler" from The Producers. Now the lines "winter for Poland and France" and "look out, here comes the master race!" follow her around like emaciated Jews strung to a rope in Auschwitz.

Back next week with more stories of things that have happened.