I Spoke Too Soon

Today at lunch, MoustachioP asked me what broke over the weekend in the house. My house has become legendary for being, shall we say, unreliable in the mere 1 month (today!) that we've owned it. I responded that nothing had broken.

Tonight, I got home from work and was happily enjoying my dinner when The Mrs. casually says, "The microwave is doing something funny."

What's that?

"Well, when I try to cook anything, the timer just runs, but it never actually cooks."

Then, naturally, I spent the rest of dinner trying to get the microwave to work. It's very difficult to get a microwave to work if it doesn't want to. Pretty much, you can unplug it and plug it back in, and you can bang on it and curse. I tried the latter approach first with no luck. So then I tried the former.

Naturally, this is a built-in microwave, so unplugging it involved removing a number of screws (7) and pulling it out of the wall. That worked just as well as the banging and cursing, but it took much longer and was not nearly as satisfying.

So tonight I broke down and bought the stupid home warranty. I repriced it at the "under 5000" sq ft price, and that came in just a little over half the "5000-10000" sq ft price. I figure I can go by the California rule that you can only claim finished square footage (which puts me around 4950) and not total square footage (which is over 5000). I'll get the microwave and range burner igniter fixed for one deductible, and then the dryer fixed for another. At the rate stuff is breaking, I'll have the warranty paid for in about two weeks.

[Editorial Note: the middle of this post got lost. I am trying to recreate, but really the original cut was an irreplaceable masterpiece. It appears the root cause of the problem is that I used the less-than sign in my text, and that completely messed up the html editor which swallowed everything from that point until the next greater-than sign as as invalid HTML, which it discarded.]

Flash back to right before dinner. I had just come home, and I was looking over the mail when The Mrs. says to me, "You need to figure out what you want to drink with dinner." This is The Mrs.'s way of saying that she plans to get everyone a drink except me, and I can GFM. I used to be offended by this. I note we are having king crabs legs for dinner again, as for some reason King Stooper has king crab legs on sale for remarkably low prices every two weeks. I say to myself, "Self, what goes better with king crab legs than white wine."

So I schlep downstairs to my bar and grab a bottle of Chardonnay from Sonoma out of the bar fridge. I come upstairs, and The Mrs. has poured herself the remainder of the bottle of cab that she had opened yesterday.

See, about 3:00 yesterday, two of the kids from across the street came over to play with The Childrens. About 20 minutes later, their mom showed up. The Mrs. offered her a glass of wine, which she accepted, and The Mrs. opened up a bottle of Napa Valley Vineyard cab that I got on sale last week.

Now, somehow, the neighbors got the impression that I was some kind of expert on wine. This happened because I was telling the story about how I had planned to move all my alcohol through Utah without getting arrested, and I tried to drink through it all but only got down to 26 bottles, and then the movers packed it all anyways. I was telling this when we were over to their place for dinner a couple weeks ago. Somehow, this seemed to get understood as I had an extensive wine collection and was some kind of expert. I let that slide, since I didn't know these folks at all at that point, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to say, "No. It was 26 bottles of liquor."

So, I'm up in the loft gluing in the banisters for the loft area, which the builder had improperly installed and thus were removable, and MaxieC discovered how to remove them Sunday morning, and I'm watching the Packers get their butts kicked by the Bears on the big screen in the family room below, and the neighbor lady asks me to tell her what she's drinking, as she doesn't know much about wine. So I say, you're drinking a red wine that I got on sale at the liquor store that's to the left at the stoplight, and they have free wine tasting every Thursday and 10% off most wines during that time. The Mrs. gives me the third degree about how I already know where and when there is free wine tasting. Truth is, I showed up there at random on a Thursday after work, and there was free wine tasting, and then I got a "welcome to the neighborhood" coupon pack in the mail that included one from this liquor store touting their Thursday wine tasting and sale.

I imagine we'll all have to run down there on Thursday.

So, the womens sit at the kitchen breakfast bar and sip wine whilst The Childrens run around in the house. It was raining. But it then stops raining and The Childrens need to go outside. Fine. Out you go. The womens follow them out, ostensibly to watch them, whilst I complete the gluing exercise.

When I come out a little while later, I find the womens sitting on the stone benches that flank one of the water falls in the water garden. The Childrens are all screaming their heads off, but it seems to be just the general exuberance for life that childrens have while in the innocence of not being in that "every day I die a little more inside" phase of life we call marriage. I play with the dog.

I toss the tennis ball for him to fetch. After about 5 fetches, he decides he needs a water break, so he goes to the pond nearest the womens, sets the ball down in the water, and has a drink. The ball starts slowly drifting from shore.

I watch as the womens, not more than five feet away, completely ignore the situation. They are deeply engrossed in coversation. I waltz myself over there to retrieve the ball before it gets sucked into the skimmer. As I arrive, I overhear The Mrs., "...and they have this thing with lasers that makes it all tight like new again, and [CherkyB] is fine with paying for that."

I know what she's talking about. But I wonder why she's talking about this with a lady she only met 4 weeks ago and has talked to maybe 6 times in her life. Then she proceeds to start listing all the various types of things I'm willing to pay for. I cover my ears and run away.

Man, you get like one glass of wine into The Mrs., and she's quite a different person. Though, I've decided that it's a good idea to buy a house across the street from people you can drink with.

Anyways, The Mrs. has her glass of leftover red, and I am opening up the bottle of white. She looks over and, vaguely reminiscent of the egg salad incident, she says, "Oh, is that white? I'll have white instead of the red," and proceeds to take her wine glass filled with red and set it down at my place at the table.

I say, "But you already have red. What do you plan to do with that?"

The Mrs.: "Oh, you'll drink it."

Me, CherkyB: "What if I don't want red?"

The Mrs.: [blink]...[blink]...

So I had a glass of red before getting to the white.

I'm an enabler.