Ah, the joys of home ownership continue. As if you didn’t believe me, the sporadicness of my ponderings should be the ultimate proof that I’m now a homeowner. After almost two solid weeks of having a computer disconnected from the Internet, I finally get the computer set up in the house and connected to the Internet, and I’ve spend less than twenty minutes on this thing. Something has to be wrong with me. I’ve never spent less time on a computer since, well since before I had one. Only one thing could be so distracting. It’s not college. It’s not marriage. It’s not a real job. It’s a home (I’m guessing having children will be equally distracting, if not more so, but let’s not go there just yet).
Speaking of children, the frightening thing about having a house is having one with extra bedrooms. Our house has three bedrooms, though that’s not technically true because they all share one closet, so they’re not quite up to code. The third bedroom is also more like an oversized closet. It’s something like 6 x 8 with a little alcove. The previous owners, God bless them, used this third bedroom as their master bedroom. Either they really loved their kids, or they were just nuts. Their bed took up most of the room.
Anyway (back to the children), we call this room the spare room. Or possibly the room of despair, which has a nice ring to it. Or the realm room, because that’s the name of the color we painted one wall in it. However other people don’t seem to be following our lead. One of our friends dubbed it the crib room. Now it’s true, in a theoretical sense, a crib would fit nicely in this room. But we don’t own a crib. We have no plans to own a crib. We have nothing to occupy the crib. We have no plans to get something to occupy a crib we don’t yet own. Yet the rumors persist. While talking to my father-in-law on the phone the other day he nonchalantly called it the baby room.
It’s the spare room. Period.
Yesterday I mowed the lawn. What better way to mark your country’s independence than by proclaiming your servitude to a plant species? It’s often been said that if aliens observed life on earth they would assume dogs rule the planet — after all, who picks up who’s droppings? I think aliens would find our relationship to grass rather strange. We water, fertilize, and weed the grass, nurturing it like one of our own. Then we cruelly hack it down, only to repeat the process. It’s really sadistic, self-defeating cycle.
If you haven’t notice, I don’t really care much for yard work. It took me half an hour to mow our tiny lot with our mechanized push power. Notice I said mechanized, not motorized. It’s the sweat of my brow that makes the lawn mower run, which I somewhat enjoy. There’s no need for a noisy, polluting lawn mower for a yard our size. And the push mower came free with the house. I did manage to earn myself a blister in the process. Owning a home has done wonders to tear up my hands and give me calluses and blisters you don’t experience sitting at a desk all day. After mowing my lawn for the first time I did realize that I’m going to have to buy a weed-whacker. Definitely not looking forward to that. Way too much money on a noisy machine that does way too little work. Though I can’t see a way around it, so I’m just going to have to suck it up. Such is home ownership.