The boys have some friends over tonight for a sleepover, so that's "fun." Actually, it's not bad with these kids. They are pretty mellow, unlike some of Lil' S2's other friends, who were up at 1:00 am playing football at the last slumber party over here. Somehow I slept through that, and S had to deal with it. That's a role-reversal. Usually S knocks out at like 8:30 pm, and it's on me to make sure the kids go to sleep (or at least pretend to go to sleep) at a reasonable hour. But all is good as I type this -- three kids are playing video games on their iPads (two with each other) and one is watching Godzilla vs. Kong (not to be confused with Godzilla x Kong, I've sadly seen them both). So, they're killing their brain cells with screens, but being totally chill while doing so.
The kids who are over are the same kids whose house our boys went to last weekend. I'm not sure exactly why we're having sleepovers on back-to-back weekends, but I don't have a problem with it. It's like a home-and-home in college football. Actually, we wanted to have the kids' parents over for dinner, because they are our friends, and we enjoy their company, but the wife wasn't feeling well, so just husband came over. But the wife and husband didn't communicate very well, so we thought that the kids weren't going to stay the night, and Lil' S2 threw a temper tantrum, but then they did, so it was a tantrum for nothing (aren't they all, though?). That's pretty typical with this couple. They are super cool, but they are all over the place all the time. A big part of it, however, is that the wife has legitimate health issues (hence the not feeling well), and so she has to peace out from everyday life sometimes and take a nap or otherwise go incommunicado, and so texts and such don't always get seen immediately. But it's all good.
Although, it did lead to me grilling in a rainstorm. I was waiting for them to come over before firing up the ol' Coleman, but I finally had to just start without them, because it was already almost 6:00 pm and severe thunderstorms were in the forecast starting at 7:00 pm. Well, they came early, and they came about five minutes before I had finished grilling. The skies just opened up and dumped buckets of rain, drenching me and the grill. I wasn't sure exactly what to do, so I closed the top, went inside, grabbed my raincoat, came back out, waited a few minutes until I was sure the meat wouldn't give anybody salmonella, and then scooped everything onto a platter and booked it inside. I remembered to turn off the grill and close the propane valve, but I got paranoid that I didn't. So, I went outside again in the pouring rain to double-check. However, I forgot my glasses, and I couldn't actually see which direction for the valve was "Open" and which was "Close". So, I just went back inside. I didn't get my glasses and go back outside again. My OCD has some limits. (Although, I did go back out again after the rain had stopped. The valve, of course, was closed.)
In other news, we are switching the kids bedrooms. Why? No reason. S just wants to change things up. I don't really get it, but sometimes she wants to rearrange things, and doing so suddenly becomes the most important thing in her life. Like, we had this sofa in our living room. We had had it for years -- we moved it from our old house. It was still in pretty good shape, but it started getting a little saggy, and it was really thick and heavy, and didn't fit the aesthetic anymore, so S decided we should get rid of it. Fine with me, but we couldn't find anybody who wanted it -- even for free -- so it sat in our living much longer than S would have preferred. And I swear that thing damn-near led to a divorce (not literally, but you know what I mean). Every morning the first thing out S's mouth was how much she wanted to get rid of that couch; every evening the last thing out of it was how she couldn't believe we hadn't gotten rid of it yet. Pillow talk isn't much fun when the only topic is a sofa bed.
You know, I can't even remember now how we actually got rid of it. Huh, kinda weird.
Anyway, I was fine with the kids switching rooms until I found out that that also entailed moving all the furniture from one room into the other. (I guess our kids have personalized dressers.) After learning that detail I became greatly annoyed, because that requires some manual labor -- not a lot, but certainly enough to spoil a day or two. It's like, Hey, you know how moving really sucks and everybody hates it? Let's do that for fun this weekend!
Whenever S embarks on a project like this she always says, "Don't worry, you won't have to do anything," which is nonsense, of course. I mean, let's break this down for a minute. You want to move big items of furniture from one room to another, and you're telling the only person in the house who can lift things heavier than a dining-room chair that he won't have to do anything? And it's a no-win situation for me, anyway. Either I help, and spend my precious leisure time pointlessly moving furniture, or I don't help and feel the resentment of S boring into my soul.
But, I do have to give S credit. In order to move a bed frame that was too big to get through the door, she took a picture of the bolts holding it together, went to Ace Hardware this morning, showed it to an employee, bought a ratchet set, and then came home and disassembled and reassembled the bed frame almost completely on her own. (I did help a tiny bit.) She did all this while I watched women's soccer. (Trinity Rodman!) See, we're a modern-day progressive couple, not beholden to traditional gender roles. That's what I'm going with, at least. It sounds better than me just being unsupportive and lazy.
Until next time...
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