Last night my husband decided to clean out our kitchen junk drawer. It's that weird long, skinny drawer that was created specifically for housing your shish kebob skewers. You know, the important drawer. Ours was crammed with all  manner of things. 

As he got deeper into the drawer, he decided to pull it all the way out of the cabinet. There were ... things ... stuck in the back.

Things that were not ours.

Such as Mary's teeth.

I just threw up in my mouth. 

Gardening Note to Self Number 425: Do not use too much mulch.

Last spring I had one of those "if a little is good, a lot is BETTER!" moments when figuring out how much mulch to buy for my flower beds. I ended up with a lot left over. The intelligent thing to do would've been store it for later. But no, I just went ahead and put it down anyway.

Beloved took one look at it and said, "That is way too much mulch."

And I completely ignored him.

Fast-forward to last week. I started noticing mushrooms. And the sort of huge black flies that come up from the maws of Hell to announce the sequel to Ghostbusters. And a ... stench. Of rotting things.

Yesterday, I removed all that mulch. I have blisters and aching muscles and the woods behind my neighbor's house are filled with a four-foot pile of half-fermented mulch, mushrooms and one-eighth of my immortal soul.

But it is gone. Lesson learned! I WILL NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.

Yesterday I finally got around to calling animal control on that varmint that destroyed my hummingbird feeder and is on its third regular birdfeeder.

"Yeah, they like those birdfeeders," said the bored woman who answered the phone.

"Can you loan me a live trap?"

"No, not for a birdfeeder. Now if he gets in your attic or something, that's different."

"Gotcha."

I hung up and moped a little. I have no intention of actually buying a raccoon trap. Last night I brought the birdfeeders inside for the night, though Beloved worries that means we'll get mice in the garage. I still haven't taken them back out there. I think the hummingbird feeder is cracked, which is too bad since I had four hummingbirds visiting it regularly -- four hummingbirds who are going to wonder why their favorite club suddenly pulled up stakes under the dark of night like a speakeasy.

All because of the bully in the neighborhood. That chittering, masked, stinky raccoon.

This is not over.

The raccoon that keeps knocking over my birdfeeders is in big trouble. Last night he knocked down my hummingbird feeder onto my newly pruned tomato plant and broke it.

"I'm calling animal control," I said to Beloved yesterday.

"What are they going to do?"

"I don't know. Maybe they'll let me borrow a live trap."

"Do they do that?"

"I don't know. I haven't called them yet."

I could tell Beloved thought this idea was dumb. However, the neighbors with the koi pond have animal control out here like three times a week.

I know what my father would do, but it's illegal within city limits. Plus, I don't know that tools.

But that raccoon has got to go. It's Caddyshack time.

Today is Beloved's birthday. And today a crew of twenty or so men showed up at our house at seven in the morning to begin replacing our roof.

The roof is wood shake, which is the worst kind of roof ever. It's expensive, it's flammable and it rots. Ours is crumbling to bits and got slammed by the hail earlier this summer to the point that we were getting water stains on the ceilings. The first insurance inspector who came said it wasn't bad enough to replace. Beloved was livid, so was the roofer, a readjustment was arranged, and lo and behold, the second adjustor agreed: New roof! Paid for by the insurance company!

I've been in a half stage of shock since Beloved told me we were getting a new roof. We've been through a lot of money and broken house issues in our ten years of home ownership, and really, I've stopped expecting insurance companies to replace anything. I'm all GET OFF MY LAWN about it in a way I never thought I'd grow -- so jaded, just like my father when he talks about parking in Omaha. I'd accepted when the sweating man huffed his way up my stairs and examined the water stains located right above my winter sweaters (is there anything so vulnerability producing as having a stranger perspiring all over your wardrobe?) that we were screwed, there would be no insurance money and we'd probably have to take out some sort of horrific loan we don't qualify for or have buckets in every bedroom to catch the water when it rained. This is my best talent: catastrophizing. I don't even stop for the mid-level crises; I go straight to the bone splitters.

The longer we've been together, the more I've ostriched about money and house-related problems. After a while, I -- feminist still -- relinqueshed the checkbook and all the balancing and math that goes with it -- to Beloved. Every time I see him sit down with a stack of bills I half-heartedly offer to help and pray he says no, which he always does, whether he wants to or not (I'll never know). When I see those numbers fluctuate, I am suddenly incapable of seeing the big picture and become positive we will be living in a van down by the river in forty days. I don't know why. I just do.

Beloved taking over the checkbook and bill balancing put a roof over my head, a layer between me and the harsh outside world. I'm fine with shouldering all things parenting, with scheduling haircuts and dentist appointments for my daughter, with knowing her shoe size at all times and exactly how many minutes it takes to pick her up from wherever, where all her friends live and with whom she's allowed to go past the end of the cul-de-sac. I can be a big girl about my career and my health and my extended family. But that one thing for which I really do need a roof is money.

I'm sitting here listening to those twenty men ripping the house apart -- literally -- and trying not to think of them punching a hole in something or falling off and landing on the cement or dying of heatstroke or smashing my tomato plants. Beloved told me to go work at Panera or the library today because it would be so loud. I'm sure he understood that I wouldn't leave because I have a sick need to think it'll all be all right as long as I'm here while it's happening. But the truth is I wouldn't know what to do if something went wrong.

There are things in life that I know how to handle and things he knows how to handle, and I hope that I am his roof sometimes. My family always told me to marry someone I secretly think is better than I am, and I did.

Happy birthday, Beloved. Thank you for being my roof.

---

From my BlogHer Book Club review of The Kid: Read, then, so we will make better choices than the characters in The Kid. That we will pause and consider what a person might have been through before we judge. That we, at least, will not see the world in black and white, because it is never, ever black and white -- which is the message I took away from The Kid, a story in which the main character never really even knew his name, never knew if he was crazy or sane, never knew who his father was, never knew who was related to him, never knew anything for sure except that pancakes tasted good and dancing was a release and that he could teach himself to do the splits with practice and discipline. Read the rest.

Yesterday I had an appointment to take about twenty in-various-stages-of-empty paint cans to the city. I'd had to make the appointment online twice, because the first appointment had to be cancelled due to my last business trip to New York.

Beloved really wanted those paint cans out of the garage. And because I know if I do this for him, he will finish the arch in the kitchen I love him, I willingly and endearingly agreed to do it.

Of course, the appointments are only in the middle of the workday.

Of course, they are located in bizarre and hard-to-find areas on the edge of hell.

Of course, they are staffed with burly men in bright orange t-shirts who wear mirrored fuck you sunglasses and won't take your even close to empty paint cans even though that can't possibly be good for the environment.

They gave me back half my paint cans! They didn't even open them to see if they were all the way empty!

Me: So can I recycle these here?

Them: No.

Me: What am I supposed to do with them?

Them: Take the lids off and throw them away.

Me: Seriously?

Them: Yes.

Me: !

Them: .

Me: Okay, do you have a dumpster here?

Them: No.

Me: You are seriously going to make me put these back in my car and drive them home to take up half of my garbage can after I brought them all the way across town to be recycled properly?

Them: Yes. Next, please!

I got back in Beloved's truck. The air conditioning doesn't work in his truck. I was wearing jeans. And the heat of my sudden, irrational, mind-bending rage was also keeping me warm.

I have no sense of direction and the GPS was hanging from the cigarette heater thingie and I couldn't hear it with the windows down, so of course I made a wrong turn and ended up getting lost on the way home from the edge of hell. I pulled into a large industrial parking lot to turn around, and ...

I spent about five minutes turning furious cookies in Beloved's truck.

Then I drove home, got the garbage can off the curb, tossed the paint cans in and went back to work.

Beloved brought me Culver's and took the little angel away for two hours so I could finish working. I have no doubt my chances for that arch are very, very good.

Just don't tell him about the cookies.

The ladybugs I ordered from Amazon arrived a few days ago in the midst of a nose-clogging heat wave. I waited until the little angel got home to open them -- I was so excited and sure she would be, too.

We pried open the package to find a little plastic container filled with wood shavings and 1,500 dead ladybugs.

I shook the container, hoping some would crawl out from under the wreckage.

The little angel shook her head santimoniously. "Their legs are all curled, Mommy. They're dead."

I actually refused to believe this. "They can't all be dead."

I shook the container again.

"I told you not to order live things off the Internet, Mommy."

I stared at her. Since when is my seven-year-old lecturing me on purchase behavior? WTF?

I stalked inside and pulled up Amazon, determined to return the stupid dead ladybugs. Let them have their funeral at an Amazon warehouse. The Amazon return process is pretty amazing -- you fill out some stuff and a Fed Ex guy shows up with a return label and you just hand him the box. The problem is you have to select a reason for return. These were my choices:

I chose "does not work properly."

Because they were dead.

But any of these would've worked, really. Different from what was ordered? Yes. Different from website description? Yes! Missing parts or accessories? Like a heatbeat?  YES! I could go on and on.

So now I guess I have to find some local ladybugs. Any ideas?

"We're taking the truck."

"Why?"

"Because we're going to the Habitat for Humanity Restore. Why on earth would we not take the truck?"

Example #8,499 of Me Being Right

Beloved had a Groupon for the Habitat for Humanity Restore. That sentence alone is some crazy shit. Charities are on Groupon now? The premise is pretty much like Goodwill -- people donate stuff and they sell it and give all the proceeds to Habitat for Humanity. It's a giant junkyard -- nothing has been shined up unless it arrived that way -- and I am so totally going back to get some wood blinds as soon as I measure my windows.

While I was waiting for a huge cart (not a cart, more of what in Iowa we would call a lowboy), I spotted one of the workers putting a price tag on a sink.

A stainless steel sink.

With all of its hardware attached.

I let it sit on the ground for approximately FIVE SECONDS, because it was $40 and my old cast iron sink looks like this:

It's chipped. It's beige. It defies cleaning products. And it stinks.

I was wheeling this baby over when I heard my name being called. I looked around to see Beloved standing protectively over a Bosch dishwasher with stainless steel innards. It's beige, not white like I wish, but the old one threw ground-up bits of disgusting all over my dishes and looked like this:

New dishwasher  = $35.

So then Beloved walked over to the TV section and grabbed himself a huge TV for the garage for $15. We walked to the checkout. I pulled out the Groupon.

A woman approached me with something like rage in her eyes.

"Are you sure you want those?" she asked, eyeing my dishwasher and sink.

"Yes."

"Are you sure you're sure?"

"Yes."

Man, people.

So I hand the cashier the Groupon. It's $19 for $50 worth of stuff. Our grand total is $90.

Beloved piped up, ever the negotiator. He's like William Shatner, that boy.

"Can you cut us a deal?"

She eyed our stuff, eyed the Groupon.

"$27.50."

My mouth fell open. So we already paid $19 for the Groupon and another $27.50 is, um, $46.50 for a perfectly fine and functioning stainless steel sink, dishwasher and television?

As we were pushing our lowboy out to the truck -- YES, THE TRUCK! WE SHOULD TAKE THE TRUCK! -- two different people stopped me and congratulated me on my find. It may have been the shit-eating grin on my face.

It only took poor Beloved three trips to the hardware store and six hours to install them both. There was that moment where I had to borrow a large pipe wrench from a neighbor whom I've met once, but don't worry, I gave him two Summer Shandys for his trouble. Oh, and it might have been 110 degrees outside.

He loves me. He hates me. He loves me. He's handy!

But it's in, it's done, and it's so pretty.

Only countertops, cabinets, floor, dining room table and window treatments to go!

Thank you, baby.

We've had a lot of hail and strong wind this year, and our roof has been suffering.* We had an insurance adjustor out last week to discuss things like the ping-ping-sized hole in the plastic thingie that covers the basement window, the hits and splits on the wood shake shingles and the water spots inside the house.

But last night -- LAST NIGHT -- the neighbors had a kickin' party with lights, a DJ, about fifty people and at least a thousand dollars worth of firecrackers. Though I'm a fan of firecrackers myself, when we pulled back into our driveway after annual trip to see the local professional display, I thought our normally quiet cul-de-sac had been bombed. Chunks of reinforced cardboard lay scattered across my lawn and the cement was littered with casings and mortar chutes. The haze made it difficult to see the children racing around holding lit punks and shouting with pyro-induced glee. I saw another of my neighbors who I knew better standing across the driveway.

"What's happening?" I asked.

"I think they have a half-stick of dynamite in there somewhere," he muttered.

After they set off some rockets that blew straight for me, we took shelter inside, where I shut off all my lights and waited them out, until they finally took a leafblower to the cul-de-sac to clean up the mess.

This morning, the little angel led me outside to show me all the parachutes she'd spied while eating her breakfast. I looked up to see at least six more parachutes on my roof.

I want a new roof, people. But, like, not that bad.

* A source of anxiety for sure, but not *the* source