Category Archives: Then I found $5.00

Home again, home again! [Or perhaps more appropriately, whereIlive again, whereIlive again.]

Yesterday, I put on my blue suede shoes and boarded a two hour flight from RDU to Albany. Every minute had all of the pent-up, gleeful anticipation of Christmas Eve—I was just silly excited to FINALLY see my husband again! I married that man because if there’s one thing that Sweet Home Alabama taught me, it’s that marriage means you get to kiss your husband whenever you want.

And I want. Distance puts a damper on that, thus distance=not okay.

Leaving this time was an enormous  step up from a the first time that I left RDU to fly back—that time as I sat at gate A25, I was valiantly fighting the lip-quivering urge to  ugly-cry like a small, emotionally disturbed child, and trying to determine which of my friends would be most likely to come pick me up, hide me in her bedroom closet and NOT tattle on me for ditching my flight.

Don’t hate me for my emotional stability and rational decision-making.

Reunited at long-last, Kellan and I arrived back at our apartment and I melted all over the tile kitchen floor because ROSES. Not only had my devastatingly handsome husband carefully arranged pink and yellow roses in a mug [Bless him, he couldn’t find the vase!], but every inch of our apartment was spotless. He’d even folded up the bathroom towels just the way I like them because the man knows that his wife is neurotic and nothing gets me like a well-folded towel.

Hello, Sailor!

Amusingly, a quick perusal of our fridge showed that like a dog to it’s vomit, a husband without his wife will return to his old ways and  four rather suspect pieces of deli turkey,a box of instant mashed potatoes [a phenomenon that I am utterly convinced will usher in the fall of human civilization as we know it] and an oversized package of mini kit kats presented too much of a culinary challenge for a Tuesday night. Serendipitously, every Tuesday some of Kellan’s buddies from work partake a little tradition that they like to call “Taco Tuesday”, and when Kellan offered to take me I felt like Mary Bailey when George offered to lasso her the moon. [“Do you want the moon, Mary? I’ll do it. I’ll lasso you the moon.” BestillmybeatingHEART.] Now, rumor had it that Taco Tuesday is hallmarked by cheap margaritas and cheaper tacos, and so I didn’t hate it when an over-packed restaurant necessitated a game-time switch to a quaint little brewery called Druthers, where Kellan and I ordered matching his-and-her steak and spinach salads.

Unfortunately, there were no leftovers and so Fancy and I are off to the grocery store. Wherever it is. :)

Now let’s get one thing straight right off the bat, here: I am NOT that newlywed girl that sits around burning the roast and oversalting gummy mashed potatoes. Please. My Mama taught me better than that.

Also, this is not 1953 and there are no roasts in my house.

Kellan and I have been married for two months as of today, and to celebrate this auspicious occasion, we’re driving to the airport and getting on separate his-and-her planes. He’s leaving on a business trip, I’m going home to Tarheel country, and we plan to reunite back in the frigid north in twelve days.

Not that anybody’s counting.

The love of my life and I have yet to spend two consecutive weeks of wedded bliss in the same place, which has left a well-beaten path from our front door to the Albany Airport. Now I don’t know if you’re like me, but when I know that I’m leaving town, I spend the last couple of days before my flight attempting to avoid the grocery store and simply use up all of the leftover food in the fridge so that nothing goes to waste. While seemingly thrifty and responsible, this inevitably means that dinner at the Dickens’ house the evening before a trip evolves into something akin to one of those bizarre Chopped challenges. Except instead of making an appetizer in twenty minutes using figs, prosciutto and a leg of lamb, I’m attempting to conjure up a main course out of stale tortilla chip crumbs and one limp carrot.

Disappointment. It’s what’s for dinner.

Call me Martha Stewart without the criminal record and weakness for Guatemalan craft stores. As you might have gathered, I haven’t exactly been a shimmering paragon of wifehood since we said “I do” on March 2^nd. In fact, Kellan walked into the kitchen last night, took one look in the fridge and promptly deemed it the “Dickens dustbowl of 1930”.

Welcome home, honey.

In related news, very few people make me laugh as hard as my husband does. This, however, was no laughing matter. Mind you, the delivery was coming from a devastatingly handsome man whose diet was fueled by high fructose corn syrup, artificial dyes and would-you-like-fries-with-that? just a few short months ago. The same man who once googled “how to defrost chicken” after sticking a block of frozen chicken into the oven. [Back off, ladies. I saw him first!] The bar here is not unattainable. …truthfully, I think the bar may simply be “food-on-a-plate”. A paper towel would suffice in a pinch.

Sigh. I think this means that I ought to reevaluate my system before I get chopped.

The good news is, Kellan took me out to breakfast this morning to celebrate two months of “I pick you”, and I am mostly confident that it had nothing to do with the fact that even the chip crumbs were gone.

Mostly.

North Carolina, I’ll see you tonight!

My sweet husband celebrated the week of my birthday by taking me to a charming local coffee dive called Professor Java’s every single night for the most divine decaf iced caramel latte of my LIFE. Or at least of this month. Professor Java’s is the kind of place that makes me want to pierce my nose, stop brushing my hair and go buy Toms all in the first ten, glorious, hipster seconds that I walk in the front door and then I’m all OHISHOPATJCREW. And if the fact that I’m ordering decaf at 8:00 PM isn’t a glaring testament to the unavoidable reality that I’m getting old and boring, I don’t know what is. My college self would kick me.

Kellan and I justified this casual extravagance by paying for each cup of coffee entirely in change. If you know me, you know that there are few things in life that I love more dearly than paying for a latte in quarters and dimes [fine, and the occasional nickel] because everybody knows that change is not real money. Thus, caramel lattes purchased with change=free. Kellan’s Duke education rendered him incapable of understanding this higher-level math for the first eleventy-billion times that I explained it to him, but I think that he’s finally catching on. This may or may not have had something to do with the fact that I speak to him in the voice of Simba’s criminal Uncle Scar when he tries to discard of his change instead of putting it in the dirty ziplock that I carry in my purse.

It’s a thug world, and I’m just living in it.