I don't want to give the impression that we have any ill feelings toward our new house; if anything, we take turns whispering sweet nothings to its various rooms, and at any given hour you can hear one or both of us yell from wherever we happen to be—the dining room, the ridiculously large kitchen that has room for its very own bistro table, the garage—"I'm just deliriously happy!" But, we do have one itty-bitty complaint: we don't currently have an intact master bathroom window. There are shards of a window, sure, and you couldn't actually break in unless you wanted to risk puncturing this or that limb, but there's a very sizable hole where glass should be. Now, we don't hold this against the house itself—it's the real victim in all of this—but it does put a small blemish on our otherwise blemish-free first few days in our new home.
When we first toured the house, a good month ago, we were promised the broken window would be fixed by the time our lease kicked in on March 1 but when we arrived on March 1 the window looked remarkably unfixed, almost the same as it looked when it was broken, strangely enough. And because of this, I may have lost it a bit. See, if there's one thing I hate—one thing that causes me to boil over with rage and turn into someone whose blog you would not enjoy frequenting—it's being promised one thing and delivered almost nothing that resembles that promise, especially when my money is involved. In short, if I'm PAYING you, go ahead and FOLLOW THROUGH. (Do I get angry when my $25 Old Navy jeans form holes in the knees? No—I'm getting what I paid for and all that. Do I get angry when my $79 Banana Republic heels break in half? Yes, I do. Do I get angry when my Taco Bell dinner causes me to writhe in pain at two in the morning? Not at Taco Bell, no, but at myself, a little bit. Do I get angry when my $24 fajitas aren't sizzling when brought to my table? You betcha.) So when I fork over an amount of money that I won't specify but that did have a comma jammed in it somewhere in order for you to get all your shit taken care of so our moving day is pleasant, and I show up to find your shit is exactly as it was, I may spew expletives. And I won't apologize for it.) Then when you promise (even offering to put that promise in writing!) to have the window fixed on Monday—two days after we moved into the house—and I come home Monday night to find it still not fixed, well, real-estate-man Ken who once asked me for a written testimonial, you're kind of dead to me and my testimonial would not help you with business, let's just say that.
Oh and guess what? It snowed last night! In Texas! In March! In our bathroom!
But even as I draped a fleece blanket around me to brush my teeth last night and even as I took the hottest shower a human can possibly take without burning off all seven (?) layers of skin this morning to counter the icicles forming on the cabinets I still honestly said to Mike, "Baby, look at us. We're home." He nodded and smiled back at me. When my grouchy, hard-to-please husband can overlook having to kill the largest bug I HAVE EVER SEEN because there are no clear boundaries between the bug's home and our home, then you know this house is exactly what we've always dreamed of.
I do foresee the smiles ceasing completely, though, if the window is still broken tonight.
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In totally unrelated news: This morning, as I got out of my car at my voting location, a small, old man decked out in a ridiculous amount of cowboy paraphernalia (boots, hat, belt buckle the size of, ironically, Texas) hollered at me, "Remember us in there!" And I nodded politely because I truly didn't think he and I could share a similar stance on the hot-button topics, and when he spit out a puddle of chewing tobacco, I felt even more confident in my initial thought. But as soon as that spit froze up on the icy ground he finished with, "Vote for Hillary!" A refreshing lesson in stereotypes, that was, and I wasn't just being polite when I turned around and said, "I will!" And I did.