Where's the Beef??

After a long-ass day of moving all the obscenely heavy and/or unwieldy crap we'd saved for the occcasion -- including the Armoire From Hell (after which he suggested I might want to consider pine the next time I want a piece of solid wood furniture) -- The Beef, as we affectionately call him, slept the sleep of the pooped and righteous in our spare bed. Yay! He never agrees to sleep over and I always feel bad that we work him like a serf and keep him here till way too late at night and he still has a two hour drive home, but by God we finally broke him! Or maybe we got him drunk. Whatever it was, we got to keep him overnight.

[We call him The Beef because that's the nickname given to him by a small handful of bitter lesbians who can't believe adults would have any other reason to remain on good terms with an ex-husband except to ... you know ... get him to slip you "the beef" ... and yeah, leave it to lesbians to call it "the beef."]

He brought us a bag of assorted peppers and tomatoes from his garden, so Ev made excellent omelettes for breakfast and then they puttered around with Katie's Jeep some more, making sure her wobbly tire was just a bent rim and a couple of loose lug nuts and not something worse (as we'd feared).

I stayed indoors like the sensible creature I am, unpacking boxes and decorating. :)

It's been like Christmas getting all of our stuff out of boxes. We hit the jackpot when we got into the box of Talavera pottery we bought in Mexico right before we moved. It added that last layer to the decorating scheme that moved it from merely "eclectic" into "quirky and kitsch" ... and who doesn't love it when people walk into your house and their eyeballs bounce around the room like a pinball machine?

At this point, the Beef's decisision to stay over turned against him in earnest, because the landlords showed up to get more of their stuff from around the property and one of those "must have" items turned out to be a slab of concrete that used to be a section of their old sidewalk in DuQuoin ... it has the kids' footprints in it. So The Beef offered to help John load several hundred pounds of concrete memorabilia in John's truck. He's that kind of all-purpose helpful guy.

After The Beef headed for home, Ev and I headed for Pinckneyville, where we put a downpayment on a three piece hoosier cabinet with side pantries .... whoo! Apparently we'd fallen in love with it months ago. Who knew!? Ev remembered that there was a hoosier in Pinckneyville we loved, and where in the store it was. I didn't remember it until we were standing in front of it and I said, "Oh yeah!! We love this!!" It's gigantic, and will exactly cover the big blank wall in the kitchen that's crying out for something exactly like this to store the over-abundance of kitchen crap two women can accumulate in thirty years of acquiring kitchen crap.

Then we drove home, taking turns talking about how much we got done this weekend and how much we like The Beef. Seriously -- all Beef Jokes aside -- one of the wonders of this relationship is how much I love being part of this family, and that includes Rob. Watching him and Ev tackle projects is like watching Relationship Ballet. They've known each other literally their whole lives. They grew up together, married young, raised three kids together. They work and play well together! Having grown up surrounded by people who didn't, that's a nice thing to finally be a part of.

So, thanks Rob, for the toting and hauling ... but especially for being you. Next time, no furniture moving and more chainsaw action! Whoo!

Kwach