Random Crap Update

Hey, y’all!

Shortly after the Hideous! Dreadful! Stinky! raffle, I took off to sunny southern California for a few days to visit family – which, of course, threw me off of my mojo and it’s taken me all this time to get to where I can post again.  Also, we ate out for every meal every day and I ended up flying home feeling like a busted can of biscuits in stretchy pants.  Blah!

Incidently, what you don’t want to do when you have your plus sized ass crammed into an airplane seat is pick up the latest edition of Sky Mall and start flipp’in.

I've never had this problem - but thanks, Sky Mall
I’ve never had this problem – but thanks, Sky Mall

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While I was grateful to have the whole row to myself, my legs were pushed up against the seat in front of me and I am still nowhere near being able to fly without a seatbelt extender. This is the last year I need a seatbelt extender.  I actually bought one on eBay because it’s embarrassing to ask for one on the plane.  I’m really looking forward to the day I can mount it on my wall alongside the bra extender I was able to dump last year. All in due time.

I have some more news on my 2013 goal of making exercise a consistent habit and some fun projects I’m working on, but I have to save it for now because it requires several more blog posts…so stay tuned. I’ve got another blog post on target for tomorrow, assuming Hot Mess Hubby doesn’t drive me insane by then…and he’s been giving me a run for my money lately.

For example, spring is coming.  Kevin and I are amateur gardeners.  Actually, amateur may be too kind.  We’re really more like dipshit gardeners.  We have no idea what the hell we’re doing, but we have a lot fun trying.  In our first year of gardening, I planted three pumpkin seeds.  Why?  Well, I’m a city girl and I thought I needed to plant three pumpkin seeds if I wanted three pumpkins for Halloween.

Yeah.  17 pumpkins is what I got…from 3 pumpkin vines that had taken over a third of our backyard by the time we yanked the vine up.  Super genius!!!

pppatch
As you can see, we had to keep at eye on the dogs so they wouldn’t get lost. And look at how tiny Dyson was!!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But this isn’t about my gardening idiocy, it’s about Kevin’s.

We got the Burpee seed catalog in the mail, so we hunkered down excitedly to decide what we were going to plant this year.  For me, there are some obvious choices:  rosemary, basil, oregano…lots of herbs.  We already have garlic in the ground.  Before I know what’s happening, hubby shrieks “Ooh!  Loofah!!!  Let’s plant some!!!”

Sweet jump’in Jesus.

I have to be careful with Kevin – because if I flat out say no, it just makes him want to do whatever stupid thing I said he couldn’t do…but my reaction said it all.  He began excitedly planning the loofah harvest while I managed to gasp out a huge “No!!!”  He looked like I kicked a puppy right in front of him.

Kevin:  But you love those things!

Me:  Yes, and I have one.  I don’t want 50 of them!

Kevin:  C’mon! It would be way cooler to give to the neighbors than stupid pumpkins…

Seriously, sometimes the man renders me speechless.  I can see it now.

Knock, knock, knock on my neighbor’s door.

“Hi, neighbor! We just harvested the garden and I thought you could use this loofah. Because, you know, you look like you could use it.”

Somehow that doesn’t seem as much fun as passing out pumpkins to all my neighbors on Halloween…and all the parents who drop their kids off at my neighbor’s in-home day care…and then carving the six I had leftover for the front porch.  Maybe I’ll just plant one pumpkin vine this year.

This post isn’t meant to trash the hubs.  As husbands go, mine is pretty awesome.  However, I did mention on my Facebook fan page this week that Valentine’s Day was the 10th anniversary of the World’s Worst Marriage Proposal…which, of course, prompted everyone to demand that I tell that story.  So here we go.

Kevin and I were shack’in up at the time.  Yep…living in sin.  My sister actually gave me the “Why buy the cow…” speech when we first moved in together, which really pissed me off at the time because I had a genius plan to ensure that I kept my honor.  I told Kevin that we could live together for 1 year and then we were either getting married or breaking up.  Because that’s what you want to do to any guy…give him a deadline and a bunch of requirements as your relationship gets serious.  Classy.

We moved in together on Valentine’s Day in 2002, so by the end of that year I was thinking I might get a proposal.  I’m pretty awesome to live with, so it was only a matter of time.  Or so I thought.

We’ve been married almost ten years, so I’ve long since figured out that the best way to ensure that he won’t do something is to heap a big ol’ expectation on him.  Back in 2002, though, I hadn’t figured that out.

Our birthday came (we’re born on the same day)…nothing.  Christmas came…no proposal.  New Years came…nothing.

As we neared Valentine’s Day, I began to realize that he was just going to ignore my rules – even though I kept repeating them in a super subtle way.  No matter how many times I brought it up, he just humored me and changed the subject.  So, with the super fantastic melodramatic flair that I was known for back then, I began simultaneously preparing myself for the end of our relationship and planning a super romantic Valentine’s Day dinner.

Happy Valentine’s Day, sweetheart. It’s 4:37 pm…exactly 1 year after you moved in.  I packed all your stuff.  Get the fuck out.

Dinner wasn’t exactly the romantic feast I’d planned.  I had spent most of the day obsessed with how I was going to get over him, so I hadn’t done any chores.  I had clean laundry folded all over the dining table and every dish in the kitchen was dirty.  I burned half of our dinner.  I ended up just shoving the folded laundry off the table and resorting to some paper birthday plates I had leftover from the cat’s birthday party I had the previous year.  (I’m totally not kidding.)

When we sat down to eat, I was already trying not to cry.  I had put his perfectly wrapped Valentine’s Day gift on the table, along with a card that was certain to prompt the most heartfelt marriage proposal ever, right?  Nope.  Instead, he heartlessly ripped open my perfect wrapping and said “Oh.  Thanks, babe.”  And then he dug into his dinner.

It’s hard to see your food when you have tears in your eyes.  After a few minutes of silence, Kevin looked up at me and said “Oh, I got you a card but it’s in my truck.  I’ll get it later, ok?”

I told him not to bother.

Now, this is normally the point where even the most inept ass would realize that they’d gone too far…but not my hubby.  He puts his fork down, lumbers down to his truck, comes back upstairs, and flips it to me across the table.

I open it up…and it’s not even signed.

Not. Fucking. Signed.

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At that point, I started really crying.

Kevin goes to get a pen, writes something in the card, and hands it back to me.  I throw it on the pile of laundry.  He gets it and hands it back to me.  I realize this is going to go on forever until I either read the effing card or push him off the balcony, so I open the card.

 

Dianne, I’ve never been as happy with anyone as I’ve been this last year with you.  Will you please do me the honor of marrying me?

Or something like that.  I’m not going to dig the damn thing out of the “Need to scrapbook” bins I have hoarded upstairs.

He thought he was being super clever and throwing me off by behaving like an insensitive ass.  What he really did was convince me that I was unworthy of a thoughtful proposal and that I had guilt tripped him into the one he’d just presented me with.  Even now, ten years later, I still insist he only did it from guilt…and he still insists that he planned whole thing and that it was an act of genius that I simply took the wrong way.

Oh, and the ring?  He had his mother’s ring from her second marriage (not to his father) that he rescued from a pawn shop and had kept for years intending to give it to some lucky lady like me – but it needed to be repaired.  It was missing a diamond and was too small for plus sized fingers.  Plus, it had been rolling around with a bunch of loose change in his desk drawer for a year and needed to be cleaned.

Kevin spent the next ten minutes convincing me that the whole thing had been his genius plan to throw me off and then when I finally said yes, this is what he said:

“Okay, well…go get the ring!”

Seriously, he said that.  Nothing says I love you like “Baby, I’m too busy trying to choke down this charred steak you made for me so get up and go get your dirty, broken engagement ring from my desk.”

Worst. Proposal. Ever.

(He later stated that if he had taken the ring to be repaired, I would have noticed and then the surprise would be ruined.)

I would never let him get away with that crap now, but he would never do something like that now.  We’ve both grown in a million ways since that day.  He’s made me  stronger.  I’ve made him softer.  I’ve lost count of the things he’s taught me – and yet, just recently, I told him I couldn’t think of one way that I’d done the same for him.  I asked him to give me an example of something I’d taught him.  Anything.  He couldn’t.

Instead, he looked at me and said “You just make me a better person.”

Aww.  How can I not love that?

Five years of friendship. One year of shack’in up. One God-awful marriage proposal. And here we are almost ten years later, arguing about planting loofahs in the backyard and why it’s not okay to put fish fossils on our kitchen backslash (I’ll save that story for another day).

Sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason…sometimes love is just love.

Happy Valentine’s week.

(Comment here and share your bad romantic stories…you know you want to!)

Meant to be
Meant to be

8 thoughts on “Random Crap Update

  1. I met my husband in a gay bar on valentine’s Day 1996, where I was celebrating the news of an impending child with my at the time husband. When hubby walked in with a girlfriend of mine (she was the lady who sells roses in bars) I knew within minuted that I would someday end up with that man. Luckily, my ex took off with my girlfriend, and current hubby needed a place to stay. He moved in with me and never left. It’s been 17 years. And he proposed to me in the dairy department at Wal-Mart.

    1. Wow, Violet…that IS meant to be! Two straight peeps meeting in a gay bar. The universe really wanted you two together!! LOL. Isn’t it funny how that works out?

  2. My husband and I have one of those awkward “how we got together” stories, that maybe I’ll post about someday too. I can tell you this…one day in December 1999 he brought me home a dozen roses after he got off work. He handed them to me then hopped in the shower. While I opened the wrapper and was putting them in a vase, there was a beautiful engagement ring tied to one of them. We’ve been together since, married since 2005, and have a beautiful son. No official proposal, but it worked for me!
    I loved this post. You rock!

    1. Thanks for sharing that story, Dina! You’re right, not a smooth proposal by any means…but I guess we should be fair and consider that the guys may have some fear and apprehension when it comes to the possibility of getting a “NO!” in reply. Maybe he figured if he was in the shower he couldn’t hear you freaking out about how to say no…but would be happily surprised if you were wearing the ring as he toweled off. LOL.

  3. There is a whole back-story and all, but suffice to say our “love story” is not exactly one for the scrapbooks. When Eric and I moved in together, I was at a very bad place in my life (the part where he rescued me is romantic), and I was estranged (by choice) from my family. I told him that if he ever asked me to marry him, I would say yes. He took that to mean he neede to ask right there in the car. I still said yes.

    We did look at rings, but we were far to broke to be able to afford anything. I decided to do a quick wedding, since I didn’t think our families would want to take a part anyway. We set a date…. Two weeks later I found out I was pregnant.

    So, everyone assumed we had a shotgun wedding. We told the truth, but whether or not people believe us is whatever. I have since reconciled with my whole family, and we all get along pretty well. There have been a couple times Eric has tried to make me feel better about our the whole non-proposal/wedding. Once, after we were married for a tear or so, he took my ring from the bathroom and got down on one knee in front of me. I begged “please don’t do this while I’m eating a bag of chips!” He did. I still said yes.

  4. As I recall we were sitting on the floor in the dark, side by side with our backs up to wall in our shack up apartment when he said something like, “Well we could get married, if you want.” I agreed and a couple of weeks later on April 1, almost 35 years ago we did just that. At first he was about as romantic as HM Hubby, but over time he learned a lot and so did I. We weren’t perfect but we were perfect for each other and the two daughters we have are make the world a better place! Almost 10 months ago the sweet man who taught me much and learned much himself died from brain cancer. On Valentine’s Day while I was cleaning out a drawer in his desk I found some Valentines I had given him through the years, along with a card or two he had yet to give me. One of them had a tiger on the front and said, “I miss you something fierce!” I doubt that there is much missing in heaven, but boy do I ever miss him! Love is forever!

    I can’t even tell you how many times he “planned” something which I took wrong! I used to think that if only we thought about things the same way life would be much easier! Well, it would have been, but it certainly wouldn’t have been as interesting. One of the things I now miss the most is his out the box way of thinking about things! Who knew?

    Enjoy the journey! And whatever you do, keep writing!

  5. Just read this, and coincidentally, it’s after midnight so it’s our 13th anniversary. So 13 years ago in February, my shack-up sweetie (I was divorced from my first husband of 15 years) wanted to go to Reno for Valentine’s Day weekend. Nice thought, but we were broke, it was snowing over Donner Pass, our car heater was broken, and I felt like I was coming down with the flu. He still wanted to go, I still said no, and it became kind of an argument. Frustrated, I finally said, “Why do you want to go to Reno so badly?” And just as frustrated, he answered, “I wanted to surprise you for Valentine’s Day and get married!” I said, “That’s sweet and romantic, but it doesn’t change the fact that we’re broke, it’s snowing over the pass, the car heater is broken, and I think I’m getting the flu!” He wanted to get married on Valentine’s Day so he would never forget our anniversary…so we picked the very next holiday on the calendar — St. Patrick’s Day. No friends or family present, got hitched at the Justice of the Peace in Reno, no reception or wedding cake — but the whole town partied with us!

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