My Husband

So I got half the carpets done and I need a break.  This is a lot of work.  And I'm getting old.
Carly bought some framed art at the DC and of course we broke the glass getting it home.  Still a good buy with replacement plexiglass from Lowe's.  Sometimes people ask me what my favorite color is and the answer is usually green, but I also will say 75% off sometimes.  Especially Target's 75% off.
Ah, my broken homesick heart that misses Target in the same town.  At the DC, the Sonic wasn't quite right, not enough ice in the drinks, the junior burritos were basically tortillas, but it was still okay, and Kimberly said I miss the Sonic in Greensburg (the one we go to the most, but it's an hour a way) and I said idiot, I miss the Sonic in Greenland (Arkansas, where we lived right outside of Fayetteville).  Jennifer lived between our house and Sonic and it was straight up the highway to the Kingdom Hall. 

Heaven.  So I called the girls because we have a Lowe's gift card floating around and I was going to surprise her with the glass before she got home but she took it with her.  That's how I know they got there okay, because I called and asked for that.  They are on their way, with reservations, to P.F.Chang's for dinner.  I said kind of plaintively on the phone:  "I like P.F. Chang's." 

I was not invited on their trip.  We all went to the DC and they are going to the Holocaust Museum in DC next weekend with a brother from our congregation simply because I cannot bear the thought of driving and parking in DC.  My nerves are just recovering from the DC.  Haha, a lot of DC's between District of Columbia and District Convention.

This year we had a Garmin gps navigating thing.  It was the first year I didn't have to find someone to follow to the DC.  Well, in Arkansas I was fine because we went to Tulsa and I lived in Tulsa in 1986.  That's kind of what I wanted to be married for.  I wanted someone else to shoulder the responsibilities for planning and traveling and driving and especially navigating.  Last year, we went on vacation with a family here, and they wanted to drive home separately from us, so they wrote out directions for us to take.  I got lost.  Then the thermostat went out on the Focus and we could not go over 40 mph without overheating.  So it was a very long drive home with the detour and the speed, and our AC did not work all last summer.  We went to the DC and on vacation in Ocean City, Maryland, in a hot car.  The good news is when I fixed the thermostat I said go ahead and look at the AC and it was just a wire loose.  So we sweated the whole summer away for no good reason except my assumption the AC gave out from old age and hard driving.

I am still broken hearted when I think of that drive home.  I made it explicitly clear, a condition of the trip, that I could not navigate and had to follow someone there and back, and then we got lurched.  That's what we call getting left in the lurch for the hottest longest more worrisome drive home ever.

A husband might have figured out the AC was a wire and the thermostat was about to go and where we were driving so I didn't have to know.  Sometimes I am envious, despite all scriptural admonition to put all envy aside, of the partnership marriage afford my sisters.  Jennifer told me one time that Jamie puts her towels in the dryer before she gets out of the tub so she can wrap up in warmth when she dries off.

How do you not envy that?  Jamie sets a pretty high standard, and I'm pretty sure I compare every guy I meet with him despite his curly hair just on account of that towel thing. 

Then there is the husband pillow.  I have a bolster style pillow that I sleep with in my arms.  I always have, since being a teenager.  When we lived in Arkansas, the Gass girls would come spend the night, and at that time, I had a pillow with velvet fringe across the ends, and Morgan called it my worm pillow, because the fringe looked like sausage-ish worms.  She woke up with one of the ribbons in her mouth and panicked thinking a worm was crawling inside her.

Now, it is a plain pillow, on clearance in fact for 75% off at Target, and the girls still call it my husband pillow.  Last night, someone complemented my new Fashion Bug blouse and said her husband would kill her if she spent that much on one article of clothing.  I had coupons and it was on sale.  And I thought well, I'll stick to the gps and the pillow for a husband. 

I would like one that can shampoo carpets today.