Why we should have stuck with hot dogs.

We make the traditional Fourth of July guacamole!

Well, the DNB makes it anyway. I watch and make helpful suggestions.

He adds 4 avocados, various chilies, and a tomato or two, and our small food processor can't begin to cope. It whirs uselessly, so the DNB takes off the top and prepares to push the mixture down into the processor blade with a wooden spoon.

I stand on the other side of the kitchen and disavow the plan.

"People always get splattered with crap when this happens in the movies," I warn.

After a moment or two, he thinks better of it and puts the top back on. Determined to have his guac silky smooth, he decides to stick the wooden spoon into the small food slot. Until he pushes too far and the spoon gets caught in the blade with a crunch.

Now we have wood chips in our guacamole. I walk into the office to use the computer.

"Go ahead and blog about this - see if I care!" the DNB shouts after me.

"I'll just leave the page open," I yell back. "Bad things can still happen."

It's lovely being right.

Nothing will make the processor process. The DNB adds milks, pounds the entire piece of equipment on the counter top, and shakes his fist dramatically in frustration. Finally, he takes the whole thing apart. As it turns out, the wood chipping incident has broken a vital piece of plastic and the blade no longer spins.

I walk back to the office.

Another reason I could never cheat on my husband.

"How was book club?" the DNB greets me as I walk in the door.

"Awesome," I say.

He walks over to kiss my forehead and then takes a dramatic step back.

"WHY DO YOU SMELL LIKE DUDE?" he shouts.

"I don't?" I reply, confused.

"Were you doing dudes at book club?" he asks, peering at me.

Of the things we do NOT do at book club, as is often the case, the first is talk about the book and second is dudes.

"I'm pretty sure I wasn't. Maybe it's my shirt?"

He sniffs my shirt.

"No. But you definitely smell like DUDE."

"I don't know what to tell you. We even sat outside to eat, so I'm not sure why I'd smell like anything other than rampant B.O. Although that's a dude smell."

The DNB frowns at me.

And then it dawns on me. "Ohhhh, smell my armpit."

He actually obliges, which is totally weird if you're not married, and then nods. "Yep. That's it."

"It's dude DEODORANT," I explain. "The tanning salon was out of girl deodorant, so I had to use the dude one. It was supposed to be unscented."

"Well, when they make things unscented they should try to not make them smell like DUDE," the DNB retorts, satisfied.

No thank you, on the baby bit.

It's been a while since I last posted, in part because I haven't fully recovered from having a 7-month-old Child to stay for four days.

OH. MY. GOD.

Although my parents have seemingly a hundred thousand children, it's been a while since I was up close and personal with a baby. Just long enough, apparently, that I had forgotten what all was involved, and two days before the Child arrived had messaged the DNB, "Am having a sudden urge for a baby."

Urge cured. This Child needed constant tending-to! Someone had to stand by to be sure he wouldn't fall off the couch or eat a stray choking hazard! He needed food, then changing, then sleep in a never-ending cycle!

It was exhausting. And I wasn't even the one taking care of him.

How the box spring got upstairs

The Second Worst Day of My Marriage, Part 2

"You can't drive a truck on this street," the cop tells the DNB. "Turn right and go down to the truck route."

The DNB is two blocks away from our house and unfamiliar with the neighborhood. The cop is not understanding.

"If you don't turn right immediately, I'm going to give you a ticket," he orders.

Fifteen minutes later, the DNB pulls up in front of the house and we begin to unload. I feel twinges of pain in my knee as I carry box after box up and down the stairs. The DNB feels it in his knee, too. He calls it something-tendon-ligamentitis-ocityishness-ly. The guys we've hired are scheduled to be done in 30 minutes, and the truck has to be back in an hour.

Sheldon, Cuz, and the Freaking Maniac are charging us an extra $100 to move our piano, even though it's the Smallest Piano Ever that was Free On Craigslist. But we get the last laugh because they didn't know that the DNB's shop is full of the Heaviest Items in the World: a homemade workbench made of solid lead and inlaid with uranium, a table saw, a jointer, and a drill press. Suckers.

The guys agree to stay until we reload the truck at the old house. There, Cuz and Sheldon begin arguing. Sheldon accuses Cuz of being on his phone the whole day and threatens not to pay him. Cuz walks off, the n-word flying, nursing his bad shoulder.

It's 9pm before we pull up to the new house again. We've been up since 6am, and the move has taken ten hours. The DNB and I will have to unload the final truckful by ourselves, but we decide to wait until morning. I manage to yank our mattress and box spring out of the truck, and we carry them up to our master suite. Except we don't, quite. The angle of the stairs and the walls and the floor makes it completely impossible to get a queen-sized box spring to our bedroom.

BECAUSE EVERYTHING HATES ME TODAY.

At first, I'm not convinced. "Maybe if we just push it like this and try to bend it some...." I say. The DNB shakes his head. "No, it'll work!" I insist, crying tears of exhaustion and frustration and tugging on the box spring. "It has to work!"

It doesn't work.

Defeated, we drag the mattress upstairs and somehow find sheets and pillows for it.

"Did you know that Cuz has a bad shoulder because he got shot?" the DNB asks me as we collapse into bed. "He showed me the bullet hole."

"WHAT?" I holler.

"But don't worry," he continues. "He was just minding his own business."

I'll get him a necktie to make up for it.

I've been trying to convince the DNB for years that he needs to buy me something for Mother's Day. I'm not a mother, of course, but everyone knows that men get worse at these things as the years go by. I figure if he's this apathetic now, there's no chance of awesome gifts when Kirby and Madeline actually arrive.

He has steadfastly refused, which is why I find it strange that this morning he decides to opt-in for Father's Day.

He wants me to make Scrapple to honor the day. It's a breakfast meat from the mid-Atlantic states; I have to order it over the Internet. Scrapple is made of all of the most disgusting parts of a pig - stuff so left over they don't even want to put it in sausage. This surprises everyone who has ever known me because I am ridiculously picky and notoriously weak-stomached. But I must have gotten a taste for it before I was old enough to read the ingredients list because it's one of my favorite foods.

"Are you making it yet?" the DNB asks, interrupting his yard work to check up on me.

"I can't, it's still frozen," I tell him.

"But..." he trails off sadly. "It's just not Father's Day without Scrapple...."

Don't Buy Drugs

I have to interrupt Part 2 of the Second Worst Day of My Marriage because you need to know the types of conversations we have before bed:

"The loft in the garage would be an awesome place to grow pot," the DNB says, randomly.

"Oh yeah, it totally would. Except it'd be a pain to water it," I note, thinking through the logistics. "You'd have to get the hose up there and it'd be looking all suspicious."

Neither of us, truthfully, have ever smoked marijuana. But apparently the DNB has growing on the brain ever since we planted our very first vegetable garden. I've always said that yard work is a slippery slope.

"Where do you even get pot seeds?" the DNB wonders.

"Ummm, the INTERNET," I reply.

"Potseeds.com? 420inmygarden.net?"

"Just say no."

The Second Worst Day of My Marriage, Part 1

After, of course, the first day of my honeymoon. Fortunately, both have less to do with the DNB's womanly ways and more to do with circumstance. Horrible, horrible circumstance.

We've rented a UHaul truck and hired three guys. It should all be over in four hours or so.

The DNB picks up the truck. Except that UHaul has "lost" our reservation. The DNB shows our confirmation email. More than an hour after our rental clock was supposed to start, the DNB parks in front of our house. When we open the back, he's pleasantly surprised.

"Oh, the guy must have included a dolly in the rental since they messed up our reservation," he says, naively optimistic as he tugs on the dolly. It doesn't budge.

Turns out, the dolly and a large bag of blankets have been affixed to the inside of the truck, mini-bar style. Break the seal and you'll owe UHaul an extra $10 or $15 dollars.

"ARE YOU KIDDING ME?" the DNB shouts. "THAT'S VALUABLE CARGO SPACE!"

He's right. The dolly and the large bag of blankets are mounted in such a way that they cannot be moved, not even to find a more convenient spot for them as you don't use them.

P.S., UHaul: I paid for a full 24' truck. You owe me $1.12.

The guys we've hired show up promptly and we begin loading the truck. One guy works like a Freaking Maniac. He's carrying giant pieces of furniture on his back up and down stairs. He drops an air conditioner, but he was carrying two, so it's difficult to fault him. The leader of the bunch, Sheldon, packs the truck. The third, Sheldon's younger cousin ("Cuz"), spends a lot of his time answering his phone and explaining to no one in particular that he has a "bad shoulder."

Three hours in, it becomes apparent that we have WAY TOO MUCH STUFF. We cram what we can into the truck and take off for the new house. The DNB drives the truck, while the Freaking Maniac and Cuz ride shotgun.

And then he gets pulled over....