I'm never cooking again. Part 2.*

Remember that one Thursday night when you tried to make a ham?

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

That's how it's going to go in about 3 days. For now, though, the other white meat is on my blacklist.

First of all, who makes meat that's the same color whether you buy it cooked or uncooked? Pork producers, listen up. Inject some White #4 in there or something, because pink is not the new cooked.

"So is it cooked or not?" the DNB asks, warily.

I shrug.

"Oh, it's bleeding," he says as he eyeballs it from all sides.

"Let's go with uncooked then," I reply. Fearing this, I've cut off some chunks from the massive, pink, bone-in, uncooked monstrosity I somehow thought would be a good idea. They're lying sadly in the oven. I've been basting them with brown sugar and honey every 15 minutes.

"I don't know how to tell if the chunks are done," I tell him, poking at them. They're the same color they were when I put them in an hour previously.

"Maybe a meat thermometer would have helped?"

I stare at him.

Eventually the meat is done, but the baked potatoes take another thousand hours.

"No really," the DNB says when we finally eat. "It's pretty good."

He pauses. "Really good!"

"I hate cooking."

* The DNB insisted that I title this "Part 2" because he's sure I've threatened this at least once before. Haha, sucker. It's been like 3 dozen times.

What's it like being a huge jerk?

I peer at the DNB's face.

"What's it like having hair around your mouth?" I ask.

"Oh, I don't know..." he pauses. "Why don't you tell me?"

I smile sweetly as he cracks himself up.

"I'm smiling," I say slowly, "Because I'm thinking of all the horrible things I'm going to do to you when you're sleeping tonight."

In celebration of 9 years of together-ness.

"What would you do if I died?" the DNB asks me. 

"Figure out how to spend a million dollars," I reply, not joking.  We're watching Hoarders. "If I died, would you have trouble getting rid of any of my stuff?"

"Totally. I'm very sentimental."

"What about the couch?"

"Are you kidding? It has TONS of memories. It was the first piece of furniture we bought together..." he sighs.

"What about my old kitchen table?"

"I couldn't get rid of that!" he insists.

"It wasn't even yours! You weren't even involved with that purchase."

"Yeah, but I remember sitting at it."

I roll my eyes. "Let's talk about what's really important. How about my shoes?"

"I'm trashing them all."

"Fine. Then with my million dollars I'm buying a brand new Louis Vuitton bag," I say. "And I'll tell everyone it's what you would have wanted."

Non Sequitur

"So does the football not need to be touched by someone from the opposite team to make a kickoff a live ball?" I ask. 

"I don't know..." the DNB says. 

We continue watching the game.  My mind wanders. 

What I think is:  I need to go to the gym this month.  Hardcore.  Like every day.  Like twice a day.  It's more fun to work out with a buddy.  It would be awesome if the DNB had more time to go when I go.

What I say is:  "I wish you would go to the gym."

"WHAT?" the DNB turns to me, his mouth full of deep dish pizza.

"Oh, I guess I should've finished that sentence.  With me." 

Everyone in my family is 3 years old.

We return from our anniversary dinner to find my parents at the kitchen table, discussing something boring.

"Well, how was it?" my mother asks, smiling broadly.

"Oh great," I reply. "The food was amazing!"

Both parents stare at me with giant grins on their faces.

"So it was good?" my father says.

"Nothing was . . . uncomfortable about the evening? Nothing . . . awkward?" my mother chimes in.

"Ummm, no." My parents are totally losing it.

"Why don't you take off your coat?" my father suggests.

I do, and both of them start giggling. I twist around to find a clothespin attached to the back of my sweater.

My mother is about to pee herself. "I put that on you before you left!" she cackles.

"HONEY," I say pointedly to the DNB. "Remember how it's us against the world? You're supposed to watch for these things!" Then I pause, remembering. I let the host take my coat as we entered the restaurant. "So everyone in that very fancy dining establishment saw it. Probably they were all making fun of me."

"Yes," my father replies solemnly. "We've been getting calls . . ."

Still in Love 2009

We celebrate our anniversary!

On the way home from dinner, we listen to our ipod's Anniversary playlist.  Opinions differ as to when it was originally created, but theories suggest 2001 or 2007.  Either way, it's a lovely mix of touching melodies: Ben Folds "The Luckiest," Nat King Cole "L-O-V-E," and Bloodhound Gang "Bad Touch."

When "Save Tonight" comes on for a little late-90's nostalgia, the DNB gets mushy.  "When we were dating long-distance," he says, "this song used to make me long for the day when we could really be together; when we wouldn't have to say goodbye after only a day or two."

AWWWWWW.

He sighs, and I pat his hand lovingly.  "It's so different now that we're married," he continues.  "It's like . . . it's like you never leave."

Wherein things go from bad to worse.

We play a family game!

We are visiting my family in Virginia, and the assembled crowd includes my parents, all 4 of my siblings, two spouses, an exchange student who's been living with my family for three years, and two of the three Buds.

The game, announces one of my sisters, plays like written Telephone. Each person gets a stack of paper. On the top sheet, we are to write a saying or a phrase. Then we each pass our stack to the left, and the next person interprets the phrase in a drawing. Another pass, and the third person must - looking only at the drawing - write what they think the original phrase was. And so on, until each stack has passed completely around the group.

Oh yes, hilarity ensues.

My brother selects as his phrase, "I have a dream..."

This gets passed to my father, who draws what appears to be someone lying in bed either dreaming or smoking.  Just say no, kids.

Next, my sister interprets this as the following:

We'll ignore the fact that a delightful fluffy cloud of dream-smoke does not a nightmare make. She passes the stack to me, upon which the whole thing heads downhill.

In my zeal to make sure the "boy" part of the phrase is understood, I draw an anatomically correct stick figure. I also clarify the bad dream portion by including another stick figure being shot. Seemed straight forward enough to me.

APPARENTLY NOT because the DNB passes this bad boy on to my mother. "MORNING WOOD?" I shriek when we review the stack later.  Leave it to us to ruin a perfectly nice family game.

"Well, it definitely looks like the person is dreaming about watching a porn shoot," he defends himself. "Imagine how I felt having to pass that phrase on to your mom!"

Fortunately, my mother is sweet and innocent, and interprets this in the nicest, mommish way possible: morning, with a neat pile of logs.

This she hands to my other sister, who does her best.  Ah yes, the old "the rooster crows in the morning at the 3 logs" saying.  It's a classic. 

My brother-in-law interprets this beautifully, with a careful depiction of a rooster crowing at precisely three logs.

Our exchange student is the last to receive the stack. Maybe in Korea chickens comment instead of cluck?  Even Asian animals are smart!

 

AHAHAHAHAHAHA.

"Ok, so I found the perfect candidate for the MTV show 'Made,'" the DNB emails me during his last shift in the Emergency Department. "She needs to be made into NOT A TOTAL DORK."

He explains the situation the next morning. An 18-year-old girl comes into the ED in a wheelchair with her parents at 11:30pm on a weekend. Her chief complaint is back pain. The DNB examines her, and learns that a kid threw a rock at her.

This seems horrible at first. Except that it happened THREE DAYS AGO. Oh, and the ROCK HIT HER BACK PACK. IT DIDN'T EVEN HIT HER.

"Well, it touched my back when it rolled down," the girl explains to the cops her parents have called to investigate.

The DNB coughs and avoids making eye contact with anyone.

"So let's just think through the physics of this," the DNB says to me, interrupting his story. "Let's assume the girl had SOMETHING in her back pack. A notebook, a textbook, something between her delicate body and the rock. How big did that rock have to be in order to hit her back pack and still cause back pain three days later?"

"A small boulder?" I suggest. "Did it knock her down?"

"No! I promise, in my expert medical opinion, it did nothing to her!" the DNB shouts. "My guess is that her World of Warcraft connection went down and she had nothing better to do with her Friday night."

"OH!" he continues. "And then she has asthma. Of course she has asthma. She has to have asthma. And she wants a nebulizer to take home. I suggest that, for an 18-year-old, an inhaler will be just as effective and work much more quickly. She tells me she wants the neb because SHE'S NOT COORDINATED ENOUGH TO BREATHE AT THE RIGHT TIME AFTER SHE PUSHES THE INHALER. Are you serious? You can't figure out how to breathe? You've only been doing it every few seconds for the past 18 years!"

Yeah, if you thought doctors don't make fun of patients, let's just put that myth to rest.

"What do you think, is she a theater kid?" I ask.

"Nah, she's too timid for that.  I'm guessing she played the clarinet in band her freshman year and then dropped out.  Band is already full of people who are social rejects.  If you get rejected by the social rejects, you may as well drown yourself."

"Yeah," I reply, "That wouldn't be too hard.  Just tie a rock to your back pack..."