Scooby snacks

That's a picture of our side of the duplex. I tried to make sure that the pic. was taken from the angle that made it look the most haunted as that was S's initial issue with the house. What she calls a "haunted angle" I just look at as a defensible hill in case of a peasant uprising. Then again, I've been warned that I spend too much time worrying about an agrarian revolt and not enough about things like trim and primer.
I typically don't worry about things like trim and primer because they sound to me like the names of Transformers, and I'm not allowed to play with them anymore. Apparently these are the sort of words that I'll be developing and that will become a vital part of my ever decreasing vocabulary/intellect. I started the summer by checking out Heidegger, and I'm entering the Fall with a copy of Crate and Barrel raptly watching HGTV. In HGTV's defense, I found that I understood as much of Heidegger while I was reading it as when it was sitting on the floor and serving as a door jamb.
The likeliehood of an actual haunting in our house is pretty low and I reassured S that at worst we'd be dealing with Slimer and that the likeliest candidate for haunting the house was probably the next door neighbor with a mustache and a vested interest in stealing the property from us. Who, said neighbor, was putting on a costume in the evening and coming by to scare us in hopes of getting the treasure as any child raised during the era of Scooby Doo knows. I always hated Scrappy. Always.



I called a contractor today and asked him what it would cost to knock a hole in our kitchen wall and buff the hardwood floors a bit.

M: We've got about six hundred square feet upstairs that would need to be refinished.
(I wonder if he knows that I'm just making these numbers up? but I sound so convincing. Even to me, and I know that I'm full of shi-).

He quoted me a price of 6,000 dollars. As I know nothing about either of these projects I immediately accepted his offer. The funny thing about owning a home is that even after you shell out the most money you'll ever spend on a single purchase you then continue spending money on that purchase as if it needed it. The home is like the opposite of marriage, where you put in all that work while you're dating trying to fool some unsuspecting fool into marrying you then BAM! you're wearing your boxers with holes in the shorts around the house and singing to songs from High School Musical and there's nothing they can do about it. With a house, you dress up all nice take it out, and don't even get a kiss until the third date, but no matter how much you drink it never looks quite pretty enough but you're already at home with it.

That said, I'm thinking our house could really use some shutters. I wish I knew what color to make them. I wish I wasn't driving around looking at houses and admiring their shutters.

Interpolation:
If you're a smoker do you take into consideration folks around you?
Scene: I'm sitting on a bench having a nice honey crisp (in season) apple when a guy sits down on the bench next to me and begins smoking. I'm downwind of him and now I'm eating an apple and smelling smoke. My real issue is not with the smoking but that the guy didn't have the consideration to do it in a place where it didn't blow into my face. I mean, I was eating an apple. If I was eating a McDonald's hamburger by all means, puff away, I'm clearly trying to crawl into the grave as fast as I can anyhow. But if I'm eating a nice seasonal apple, please smoke elsewhere. If I'm eating a grape from South America in December, light it up.

The sad part is how much money you can save on fixing up a house by doing the projects yourself. However, I've no desire to spend my weekends buffing floors and shuttling back and forth between Home Depot. I don't get any enjoyment out of finding the right size of nickel pipe for my new plumbing or from having middle aged men making me feel inferior. I'm afraid that most of our weekends would just end with me challenging some guy in his sixties to a forty yard dash in the parking lot. And somehow, I think S wouldn't be too fond of that.

As far as I know it's pretty damn simple to cut a hole in your wall. The dudes on Looney Tunes used a saw and cut things in perfect circles. Perhaps I should stop using cartoons as my examples for how to get things done, it suggests a certain level of incompetence that I'm...who am I kidding? I'm entirely comfortable with it. I got a Master's degree, so I wouldn't have to do manual labor. Unfortunately, I got an MFA in creative writing, so I'll probably spend the rest of my life trying to earn as much as the guys doing manual labor.

Work
Co-worker: I just think they got married too young. You know, like maybe they wanted to go out and test the waters elsewhere.
Co-worker 2: Yeah, you might be right.
M: (Trying to figure out who they are talking about in our office)
Co-Worker: John and Kate plus eight.
M: (What a strange world we live in).