I was all set to start this post by making fun of Will for watching 90210 or some other CW crap because he’s too lazy to get up and change the channel.  Then I turned around to make sure I had the show right and realized that he is actually watching Reaper which is totally okay for a twenty something dude to watch.  Oh well, there will be other opportunities for me to say “guess what Will is doing?!?”

Honestly though, I was kind of hoping that, for this moment anyway, he was being lazier than I am because I honestly just said this out loud:

“I want to crochet, but it’s too much work to get out the yarn and get it set up and then actually make stuff.  I just don’t have the energy!”

People, whining that took more energy than it would have taken for me to just get up and go get my yarn.  But, um, it’s “girly” week here at the Steiner-Farley compound so I blame it on my raging hormones and cramps.¹

In other, non related to laziness news, I have been trying to come up with ways to cope with the massive amounts of time I will be spending in Texas with no internet connection.  I am perfectly capable of spending eight days sitting on my bum watching television.  Heck, that sounds like a mighty fine vacation to me, but only if I get to choose what is on television and Will’s Dad and I? Do not exactly have the same taste in viewing goodness.  I like fiction (for the most part).  I like involved stories and characters I can care about and dialogue that makes me squirt soda out of my nose it’s so funny.  Will’s Dad likes the Discovery Channel and all of its reality shows (when he was here in September we watched an entire season of Ice Road truckers because that’s what was on) and shows about guns and shooting guns and how guns were made for shooting and the various people who were famous for shooting guns and the guns that they shot.   I? can handle the Discovery channel and shows about guns for a couple of hours.  And then I kind of want to pull my hair out.  Though I do enjoy biographies and historical documentaries from time to time.

I’m thinking of taking the fancy schmancy camera with us and playing around outdoors and taking photos.  I’ve been looking for an excuse to spend a bunch of time playing with the camera.  This could be it!  What better way to avoid the conversations in which I am forced to defend my registered as a Democrat status (AGAIN) than “sorry, I have to go take pictures of all of the blades of grass in your yard!  See you later!”

The problem is that we want to keep the packing pretty light.  We are already taking both laptops (Will is determined to find WiFi somewhere even if he has to park his Dad’s truck in someone else’s driveway and steal it whereas mine will be more of a DVD player that will rarely get used) and I was hoping to take some yarn on the plane.  Oh that I could afford a Kindle but, that ship has not yet been built, let alone had a chance to sail.  Taking the camera (no way in hell am I going to check it) is one more thing to lug around crowded airports as we fly there and fly home.  I like the idea of one (flat) backpack.  I do not like the idea of having to fork over money to hire an airport sherpa.

Oh my! My life is so hard! I have to many fun ways to fill empy time!

As I sit here typing this blog post Will is in the kitchen making dinner.  On purpose.  Voluntarily.  My arms, they are bruised from the pinching.

When he got home from school and found out that we were going to have the apartment to ourselves for a while (certain someone is over at a friend’s house doing laundry) he looked at me, eyes wide and excited, and said “Bed Bath and Beyond!”

Lest you think that is some kind of weird Will and Erin code for “drop those pants” Will was honestly getting excited over a trip to Bed Bath and Beyond.  For the last few days we have both just been craving hamburgers (the fact that our cravings are starting to happen in tandem is just a wee bit alarming) and Will? makes the. best. burgers. Yum. Apparently he’s been dying to buy one of those hamburger patty presses and decided that only Bed Bath and Beyond had them.  So off we went!  Not quite as “va va voom” as you hoped, eh?

One hambuger patty press, one french fry cutter outter, one vegetable slicer, one mortar and pestle later we ran screaming from the BB&B sales guy who kept showing us really neat and expensive kitchen gadgets that we didn’t know existed but had to have after seeing them.  (For the record we’d been thinking about buying each thing we ended up buying for a long time but this sales guy? He really was Bobo The Persuasive Fraggle).  From there we went to WinCo for the burgers, fries and salad fixings and now we are home.  The first season of Scrubs is in the DVD player, Will is in the kitchen cooking (giggling “newwwwwwwwww tooooooooooooooyyyyyyyyyyyyys!” every once in a while) and I am sitting on my arse and blogging from the couch.  That contented sigh you just heard? It was totally from me.

This morning I got up and my first thought was “I’m going to try out that stair stepper thing today!”

Our apartment complex has a teensy workout room with a treadmill, a stationary bike, a weight lifting thingie (it’s one of those kinds with all sorts of different weight lifting stuff all bolted together to save space) and one of those stair steppers.  I will not lie.  I have been fascinated with the stair stepper thing ever since I first watched Legally Blonde and it showed Elle reading her textbooks while working out on it.  In my brain this single piece of exercise equipment is what will save my health and my ass from becoming so large and flabby that I need an extra cart to carry it around whenever I go anywhere.

The stair stepper thingie was broken when we moved in and stayed that way until sometime during the last few months when it either got fixed or the owners bought a new one.  I discovered its magical-now-workingness last week when I went in to use the treadmill and thought I would try it out after I ran for a while but after ten minutes on the treadmill I realized that dying sounded much more appealing than doing any further movement (remember, am weenie).

Today though, today I had a plan.  I was going to go into the workout room and use that stair stepping thing! I was going to bounce up and down on those fake stair pusher pedals! I would look like my own slighly pudgy version of Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde and Charisma Carpenter in that episode of Veronica Mars and every other super in shape chick you’ve ever seen at the gym who was climbing those invisible stairs to nowhere while making it look easy as pie!  My heart rate would go up! I would be healthy! Except… Um…..

I need to preface this by reminding you that it took me a few tries to figure out how to properly work the treadmill and how to adjust my speed so that I wouldn’t either fly off the thing or have to put all of my weight into every step to get it to move.

Because I? Couldn’t quite figure out how to get the thing to work the way I wanted it to.  I mean, I understood the basic cocncept:  Climb on contraption. Push down with one foot and then the next.  Simulate act of climbing up many many flights of stairs at, preferably, a quick pace.  The movies! They make it look so easy! My experience on the stair stepper thing went something more like this:  puuuuuuuuuuuuuussssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh down.  Puuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuush down with other foot.  Puuuuusssshhhhhhhhhh  puuuuuussssshhhhhhhhhhhh  slowly but surely as if I was trying to haul Santa’s giant-ass sack of presents up thirty flights of stairs that had steps that were two and a half feet high.  Eventually I realized that I did not have to push the steps all the way down (causing me to do a weird lungey/ladder climbey move only more awkward), but still, I could not get any sort of rhythm or equal height of steps going.  And I kind of felt really stupid and was glad that I was in there by myself.

So.  There was no bobbing, no pony tail swinging, no looking all agile and fit and trim and in shape.  But I did experience a muscle burn fairly intense so I’m pretty sure I managed to work something even if I did not look at all good while doing it.

I know that almost everyone who reads this blog has already gone back to work for at least a few days, but for me work doesn’t start up again until tomorrow morning.  A couple of months ago, when we weren’t sure how many of my future in-laws would be invading our home or how long they would be staying, I made arrangements with my clients to be “offline” from December 15-Jan 5.  That’s three weeks of vacation.  I worked like crazy (I ended up working over a few of my first vacation days but that’s okay) to finish up my projects.  I cleaned my house from top to bottom, inside and out.  I was ready for the in-law invasion.   And then it effing snowed.  Instead of coming to us and spending weeks of time in our home, we ended up going to them for a couple of days.  This has left me with quite a bit of free time to veg and watch Will play video games on the PS3.  It seems surreal that everything goes back to “normal” tomorrow.

Except it doesn’t.  Not really.

Some readers will remember some friends of ours who were having marital troubles.  They’ve spent about six months trying to find a way to stay together but it looks like that isn’t going to happen.  When everything first started going haywire, Will and I offered up space in our home as a “worst case scenario.”  For a while it looked like we were free and clear but now it turns out that he could be here as early as Wednesday.  There are not enough swear words in the English language to describe how irritated I am.  This is the same friend who forgets that Will and I exist until he needs a favor.

Am I a bad person?  I want to help our friend.  I hate that his marriage isn’t working and that he is miserable.  I want him to be happy.  I also don’t want somebody who is not me or Will to move in here indefinitely.  I don’t want to have to put up with even more video game noise.  He won’t have a job, which means that he can’t help with rent, bills or food costs.  He is already whining a little about how he wants to bring up his desktop computer, his twenty inch television, his queen sized bed and his futon frame and mattress–after I told him that he’d only have about a third of a 10×10 room in which to store his stuff.    Does it make me a bitch that I find this annoying and have to fight the urge to point out that we don’t have to take him in at all?  Never mind that now I’ll be trying to plan a wedding in the presence of someone whose marriage has just ended.

We first learned about his needing to come up after all early on Friday morning.  I waited until now to post about it because I had to work through the massive nutty that my brain staged after we got the text message (AT FOUR THIRTY IN THE MORNING).  I know that it probably won’t be as annoying as my brain first feared.  I knew that I needed to work through my staggering over-reaction (there might have been tears and ‘I thought we were done worrying about other people’ whimpering).   But still.  I’m 30.  I thought I was done having roommates (besides my fiance obviously) until I bore them from my own loins.

In other news….or original topic news….  I’m looking forward to getting back to work tomorrow.  It feels a lot like the night before the first day of school.  I don’t think I’ve ever gone this long without working in my entire adult life.  I kind of like the feeling of a fresh-ish start.  I feel kind of like I should go buy a new binder and a few packets of loose leaf paper!

This has been a week of daytime unmotivated slack assedness accompanied by late afternoon/early evening "oh crap, I really need to get this work done!"ness.  Evenings are typically when I write my blog posts so…there you go.  A handy excuse for not having posted since Tuesday.  Tuesday! I am a blog SLACKER!

Really quickly, for those of you who don't read Jen's blog, you should head over there right now.  She has exciting news!  Jen writes one of my favorite blogs and I've been reading her for a few years now.  I am so incredibly excited for her, so I want all of you to go over there right now!

For those of you who were around before I re-launched the blog and who remember the ongoing saga of "whether or not to leave the window open at night," Will and I have finally reached a compromise and what's more, Will is the one who came up with it!

For those of you who weren't around or who just like to hear the same things over and over again, Will and I have been going around and around this one argument over whether or not we should leave the bedroom window open at night.  It got pretty hairy during the impromptu heat wave in May and then went away when the temperature dropped back down into the 50s.  For the last week or so, though, with the heat being in the "normal summer" range, the argument has come back–only this time it has been as a "no you can have your way" "no you can have your way!" "no, you should win," "no you should" competition which I blame solely on the residual schmoopyness from getting engaged (and if you don't think I'm going to ride that train until it just won't go anymore, you are sadly mistaken).

The basic argument is this:  Will wanted to keep the window open and the fans on at night because it was hot.  He says that it is perfectly safe to keep the windows open at night because, in the event that someone tries to break in, well–Will is a big believer in the second amendment. I, on the other hand, say that we live in a ground floor apartment and why invite trouble?  What's more, in order to be prepared to confront someone who might want to break in through our GROUND FLOOR APARTMENT'S OPEN WINDOW, you need to sort of, you know, hear them coming and even though we have some great big shrubs right under our window that they would have to push through, when you have three fans blowing, the noise is unbelievable and there is no way we would hear anything especially since Will does not wake up to the smallest sound like I do and he's the one that is comfortable with…the second amendment.

We've tried compromises.  We've tried a dowel in the window while leaving the window open and the fans on.  Me? No sleepy.  We've tried leaving the window open and the fans off.  Neither of us slept much.  We've tried closing the window and bringing in a fourth fan.  I slept okay but Will swears that he was overheated all night (we'll ignore the fact that he woke me up at 2AM by yanking the blanket up around his ears).  We've tried leaving the window open and the fans on right up until the minute we go to bed and then closing the window and letting the fans circulate the colder air.  No dice.

Then, the other day, Will comes home and annouces "I have figured out a compromise to the window issue" and I thought "oh crap" and immediately envisioned booby traps and spring loaded thingies in the bushes outside the window or Will deciding to sleep in the living room until the winter time.  I was visibly cringing until Will pointed into the corner of our "dining room" and said "Bert!"

Bert is the portable air conditioner we bought last summer when we were living in our hellishly hot Roseburg apartment.  Since we moved up here, however, he's sat in the corner collecting dust because, for the most part, our apartment stays a good 10 degrees cooler than the outside world (bottom floor, almost no direct sunlight.  It's beautiful).  The other day I actually patted Bert and said "poor Bert, sitting there with nothing to do."

Now he has something to do!

Bert is currently sitting in the corner of our bedroom pointed directly at the bed.  He is only turned on at night while we are sleeping because we don't want to jack up our electricity bill and, because we keep the door to the bedroom closed at night he keeps everything lovely and cool.

It feels a little bit counter intuitive to turn on the air conditioner and then use a blanket, but I've decided to let that go.

In other news, for the 4th we are pulling out the counter top deep fryer and having deep fried hot dogs! It sounds incredibly disgusting but oh my god they are gooooooooooooooooooooood.  I think I will have three.  Happy Holiday Weekend!

There are few tri-word phrases that scare me more than

"Don't kill me…"

And of all the things I worried about as I jumped off the couch to see why he thought I would kill him, I did not for a second I would come face to face with Will holding out a gigundo bag of coffee beans. Apparently there was like a three jillion gallon bag of beans that got divided up between the people at his work and he thought it would be a good idea to come home with a large plastic bag of beans to keep in the freezer.

When I say large? I mean the bag held somewhere around eight pounds of coffee beans. Do you know how much space is required to store eight pounds of coffee beans?

And do you know that we already have four pounds of coffee beans in various storage locations in the kitchen because someone (who is not me) insists that if we find the right flavor of coffee, he'll start drinking it at home and not buying it every morning?  Because? We have coffee in the refrigerator and coffee in the cabinets and do you know what? Will?  Drinks tea.

You know, when I said that if I could find a way to make coffee smelling potpourri I would?  I was not entirely serious.