Tag: humor

The Gutting of the Bathroom or Will Our Marriage Survive the Remodel?

Today it officially begins.  My first day of vacation and the start of the Gutting of the Bathroom.  We have the most hideous master bath in the world, (my opinion).  So we (me) decided that we would take a week’s vacation and totally remodel the bathroom.  I mean how long can it take?  We’re taking out the ugly tub and even uglier vanity with the wood grain laminate countertop.  Who puts a wood grain laminate countertop in a bathroom anyway?  The sink had started to chip and crack.  There are two 70’s refugee globe lights hanging from swag chain over the vanity and one huge honkin mirror on the wall, complete with chips and backing scratched off.  I’m not sure how mirror backing can come off when it stays on the wall, but oh well.  When the lights were hung, evidently the person didn’t have a hole saw and cut a square hole so that the square edges of the holes peek out around the circular caps of the lights.  Very attractive and stylish too.  There is also a can light hung on the wall next to the toilet, to help you see for the ever important reading that men do in a bathroom.  The lovely can light was also installed using the square hole for a round cover.  But there is no light by the bath tub, guess you don’t really want to see that well in the shower.  The linoleum on the floor has cracked.  There are three closets just inside the doorway as you walk in giving you a cramped feeling that the walls really are closing in on you.

But all that goes away starting today.  We are going to move the tub/shower to where the vanity was.  Two of the three closets are going away forever.  In place of a vanity, there will be two pedestal sinks and a cabinet between them that is actually two pieces, the base cabinet will have a granite countertop on it and the upper cabinet will be hung on the wall and have sides that meet the base.  There will be two much smaller mirrors and there will be NO swag lights in there anywhere.

So far, we’ve argued over every piece for the bathroom.  Mitch has traditional tastes and I am more modern, contemporary.  It has almost gone to blows in the home improvement stores.  I had almost come to the conclusion that this marriage will never work, because our tastes are so vastly different. 

First is was the tub.  Mitch declared that we could only have a one piece tub and shower combo.  “Because no matter how careful you are or how good of a job you do caulking, the damn thing always leaks.”  Try finding a really nice looking one piece tub/shower combo, there aren’t that many out there to choose from.  Then is was the sinks.  I found a really nice looking square pedestal sink that he hated, saying it looked like it was institutional.  The really big argument came with the cabinets.  Nothing readymade really grabbed either of us.  I was willing to buy unfinished and make it work, but Mitch hated them all.  He found a custom cabinet shop and went to talk to them without me to get some design ideas and costs.  I just knew that custom cabinets would cost a fortune, granted they would be worth it, but I am working on a budget and figured the cabinets would bust the budget.  Surprisingly, the price was very reasonable, so now Mitch and I could focus the next argument on the design of the cabinet.  I said he is traditional, well if you have a fireplace mantel with a candlestick on one side, there needs to be a candlestick on the other side.  That’s Mitch.  Make me crazy.  This is when I started to doubt our marriage.

We finally found the tub by accident, we had gone to buy tile for the floor and there high up on the rack on display, was a one piece tub/shower combo that I actually liked.  I had Mitch drag one of those ladders only for use by store personnel over for me to climb up on and check it out.  We bought it on the spot and called one of our friends to come and load it in their truck and take it home.  We found two very nice oval pedestal sinks at a plumbing supply store and ordered them.  After long heated debates, Mitch took me to the custom cabinet shop so that I could look at and touch actual cabinets instead of sketches on paper.  We made a decision and now it’s on order.  Things are starting to gel.  I still have to go get towel bars, mirrors, faucets and lights (without Mitch), but I think we might make it.  I’ll keep you posted and let you know how our progress goes.

Clean Dogs Inside and Out

Just when I thought that nothing would surprise me about the dogs, I am totally amazed at them.  We are getting ready to gut our master bath and remodel it.  That is another story in itself.  In anticipation of the demolition, I removed everything from the closets and put the contents in boxes and placed the boxes in the living room.  I secured all of the medicines and harmful chemicals, but wasn’t too worried about the candles,  soap and some of my makeup samples.  Silly me.  We came home from work to find that dogs unknown as of this writing had eaten two bars of Dial soap and half of a bar of Super Eight soap.  Why?  What would possess a dog to eat soap?  Yuck! 

So far no involuntary bubble blowing, no gas or diarrhea. Normal massive appetite.  I just don’t understand what was so tasty about soap.  Maybe all of the frequent bathes has caused them to like the taste of soap.

Just another shining example of the intestinal fortitude of Labrador Retrievers.

Tug of War – Our Favorite Game

Road Trip (2nd excerpt)

The plan was that we fly into Boston, catch a bus to some bus stop, wait for owner of the car to come and pick us up and drive us to some unknown location to look at the car and if all goes well we pay him the cash, load up the car and drive home.  I had never done anything like this, so needless to say I was concerned that we would fly halfway across the country to have our heads bashed in, robbed and left in a field to die by a serial killer like on TV.  I know, I watch too many cop shows. 

The owner of the station wagon showed up and was very nice, but a typical car salesman.  After some more haggling, we paid for the car, loaded up our luggage and headed out to the highway.  After driving the wrong direction for about 30 minutes, going toward Cape Cod instead of west to New York, we turned around and got on track to upstate New York.  Our road trips are always an adventure.  We don’t make hotel reservations and drive until we get tired.  I only have one rule.  NO creepy roadside motels.

The drive through upstate New York was beautiful. We were a little early, the first of September, so the trees hadn’t turned yet, but it was still beautiful.   I loved the Finger Lakes and all of the vineyards and wineries, I was in heaven.  We tasted many wines and bought lots of bottles of wine. You know me, stimulating the economy.   Good thing we had just bought a station wagon to haul all of my finds.  How timely. 

After the Finger Lakes, we drove up to Niagara Falls.  We got there late in the day and didn’t have to pay to park, or get in.  Which was nice.  There were still a ton of people running around taking in nature’s strength and beauty.  But no one was willing to ride a barrel over the falls so that I could take photos of the historic event.  And I take awesome photos.  What a bunch of wet blankets.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first excerpt and this one, come back for more.

Road Trip (first excerpt)

Mitch bought the Buddy Mobile, a 1978 Chevrolet Caprice Station wagon in 1999.  He bought it to replace his 1976 Chevrolet Suburban which had 300,000 miles on it and was very tired. We used it to haul Buddy, our yellow lab, around town and for all of our gear for hunting.  It was a good reliable wagon that got lots of abuse.  Mitch replaced the engine in it in 1995.  It was like a Timex watch, it took a lickin and kept on tickin.  It went through two engines and about 3 tons of dog hair and drool.  The air conditioning went out a few years ago, so in the warm weather with all of the windows down, the dog hair would swirl around like a mini tornado inside the car.  No matter how many times we would vacuum and clean the car, there was always dried dog slobber and nose prints on the windows.  There was also the aroma of “Eau de Dog” in the upholstery that no amount of little green trees could eliminate.

People would point at the dog heads hanging out of the windows as we drove along.  Sometimes I wasn’t so sure that people weren’t also pointing and laughing at us.  The car definitely was distinctive.  Well it now had over 300,000 miles logged on it, so we decided it was time to retire it and buy something newer for the dogs and hunting.

After I gave the go ahead to look, Mitch went on an online search for the best fit for the money.  He searched cross country and even got into online auctions on E-Bay.  We ended up as the high bidder on a 1995 Chevrolet Caprice Classic Station wagon.  Much newer, only 15 years old instead of 31 years old.  We are definitely moving up in the timeline.  Oh, did I mention that the car was in Boston, Massachusetts?  Since we live in Missouri this meant “Road Trip”.  Because I like to multitask, we decided to combine flying to Boston to check out the car and if it met our needs, then we would turn the drive back into a mini vacation.  I had Mitch pick up travel books from AAA for all of the states that would be on our journey home.

Charlie Makes a Great Pillow

Great White Hunters? (final excerpt)

Mitch waited until Todd left and said, “There are never any birds in these places.  My father would take us into the woods all the time and there were never any birds in the woods.  Oh well, let’s go and get this over with and then we can head over the hill and down into the back side of this field.” 

Against Todd’s advice, Mitch decided that we would both go down into the draw.  The draw had a mixture of snow and frozen mud.  There wasn’t really any easy way down the slopes into the draw.  The good news was that there was a wide open area with very few trees that I could use to slide down to get in the middle of the draw, because I could tell it was not going to be a question of if I was going to slip and fall, but when.

Once down in the draw, we both started off toward the other end with the dogs going back and forth, in and out and not having the trouble I was having keeping my balance.  What looked like snow up top was actually ice-crusted snow up close.  Carrying the gun, not falling on my butt and dropping the gun was immediately more important to me than “no birds.”  Not too safe, huh.  Mitch got up ahead of me about twenty feet and saw what Todd was talking about.  At the backside of the draw, there were birds everywhere.  There were chukars and pheasants just milling around the tree line and the junk farm pieces.  He couldn’t get close enough fast enough.  The dogs were on the birds making them scatter and fly.  Mitch started shooting his gun at the birds and nothing was dropping.  I was down in the bottom of the draw trying to get up the slick icy sides of the slope.  As I was crawling up the hillside, I could hear the gunfire and the birds cackling and the whump whump whump of their wings flapping and Mitch cussing and yelling for me to get up there and help out, and I couldn’t get up the hill.  Just as I had crawled almost up to the top, the shotgun sling slipped down my shoulder.  As I grabbed a tree root to pull up on, the shotgun slid off my arm and slid down the hill back to the bottom.  I looked at the gun at the bottom of the hill and then turned my head back up to where I had almost reached, just inches away from level ground, debating whether or not to slide back down to the bottom of the hill.  I was seriously considering just leaving the gun down there, but I couldn’t, it had been a Valentine’s Day gift.  Still holding the tree root, I turned and sat on my butt.  Then I let go of the root with one hand and pushed off with the other.  Sliding down the hill with only lycra running tights and canvas field pants as a buffer between my backside and crusty ice. 

Mitch was still shooting at birds and screaming, “Susan get up here!  Where are you?  I can’t do this by myself!”

Digging my heels in to stop my slide at the bottom, I just missed a close encounter with a large tree stump.  I yelled, “I’m trying, but I can’t get out of here!”

I picked up my gun and crawled upward again.  I realized that day, that not giving up is essential to hunting.  By the time I finally got out of the draw and topside, all of the birds were gone.  Mitch didn’t hit anything.  Oh yeah, we sure cleaned out the birds for Todd; they flew over the road to the neighbors land.

Great White Hunters?

This year we have been experiencing a real winter, with cold temperatures and snow.  Mitch told me this would be “real” pheasant hunting (you mean all the other times weren’t?).  This was going to be a short trip, just a weekend trip with an overnight stay.  So I didn’t need to pack my whole wardrobe, I was reminded.  But I would need to think COLD and pack “warm”, in other words, my whole wardrobe.  Can’t have too many layers. 

When we got to Todd’s preserve there was another group of hunters just heading off in the direction that we normally went.  Todd came walking over to us and we caught up on what had been going on since November.  The morning was cold with a strong wind out of the north and there were heavy clouds, looking like it could start snowing soon.

Todd said, “I’m going to take you to a different place to hunt this morning.  It’s over by my house and there are lots of pheasant and chukkar that have escaped and are just hanging out around in that area.  I want to get that area cleaned out.”

It didn’t matter to us where we hunted as long as there were birds, and this sounded like it would be just too easy, so we said sure.  We loaded the dogs back into the car and followed Todd over to the property close to his home.  Mitch pulled the station wagon in and parked alongside Todd’s truck.  We got out and surveyed the area.  We had never been to this area before and felt kind of special, like we had made it to the inner circle or something.  There was about 200 acres of more land that Todd owned.  To our left was a corn stubble field, in front of us were small hills and down over the hill was a wooded area.  But Todd wanted us to work a small wooded draw off to our immediate right.  It started at the road and went back into his property about the length of a football field.  It wasn’t very big at all.  Along side of the draw on the left were old junk, parts of some farm machinery, tubes that looked like they were part of a silo and various other sundry items.  On the right side of the draw was where he kept some cattle at the edge of his family lands.  So we had to be careful about shooting in that direction.  Down in the draw we could see a winding creek and open ground with no cover except for the tall trees growing out of the draw.

Mitch was clearly skeptical and we were both a little disappointed.  We thought that we were going to “hunter’s heaven” and here we were standing at the edge of what looked like a huge waste of time.  But outwardly Mitch didn’t show any of his disappointment to Todd.  Todd told us to start at the street and work our way to the back and we could go to our left and work the cornfield and after that we would go farther into the fields.  Todd suggested that one of us stay up top on the outside edge on the right side of the draw and the other one go down in the middle and work our way back.  Todd said he had some things to do and would come back by in about an hour and see how we had done.

My Snow Dogs?

I’ve noticed that this year the dogs aren’t as excited about the cold and snow as in years past.  The trio would wrestle and play, eating so much snow that I would have to stop them for fear of an impending stomachache.   AJ was and still is content to stay fairly close to me and be ever watchful.  Charlie used to run as fast as he could through the snow with his head down scooping up as much snow as he could, dining and dashing, so to speak.  This year he has started lifting up a paw to shake off the cold and not showing the past interest in “snow to go”.  Orso is still young enough to want to run full steam at either AJ or Charlie and slam the closest victim to the ground, which usually provokes a sharp growl and a biting snap followed by a show of contriteness on Orso’s part.  Then it’s game on, but it doesn’t last for nearly as long as last year. 

Yesterday I was home working on getting ready for this year’s taxes, and thought that I should take the dogs for an outing, but when I looked for them, all three were snuggled down on the bed, sound asleep.  They have definitely embraced the indoor life.