Don’t worry, I looked into it: no actual Muppets were harmed in the making of these rugs. They’re all 100% Fraggle, and completely Scotch-guarded. This was just one of a series of Seriously Ugly Crap we saw at Garden Ridge this past weekend. More to come throughout the week.
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I found this little guy at Craig’s Emporium in Oklahoma City, twice. The first one I gave to my friend Karen, who was suffering from cancer at the time and died only a few months later. Some time after she died I went back there for something and saw another one just like him; I had to have him. He now has a place of honor on the back porch.
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‘Amember this?
This photo embarasses me deeply, as it shows you my tendency toward messiness, packratting and sloth in general. Also, because the most beautiful room in my house became something akin to the tag hanging off Minnie Pearl’s hat: "LOOK AT ME, I’M WHITE TRASH!" I might as well have put that dishwasher on the front lawn.
Well, this weekend, I did: we had a garage sale. Twenty minutes into it, the neighbors were coming over saying, "You guys know that the neighborhood-wide garage sale is on May 3, right?" This transformed our stress - "What do we do with the stuff that doesn’t sell?" - into joy; we took everything that didn’t move and put it into the abandoned garage next door, to be pulled out again on May 3. Yay! Problem solved. We sold most of what we’d hoped to, making a fairly-nice chunk of change in the process.
We spent the rest of the day sweeping out the room, hosing it down, getting rid of the masses of bugs that had nested back there and cleaning the windows. It was ready; it was ripe; it was pregnant with possibility.
Sunday morning we got up early and went looking at patio furniture one last time. We’d made up our minds about a favorite set at Home Depot (available for perusal at the Thomasville website, if anyone wanted to donate us the matching bar set, say), but thought, "Mah, let’s look around some."
And here it’s time for a station break, to shout from the internet rooftops the wonderfulness of my marriage by sharing a story of something that happened during that furniture search.
We stopped at a store in Oklahoma City’s furniture district that was clearly so far out of our price range. I began to get discouraged - we knew what set we liked, and the idea of spending all day looking for a set we might like 10% better for a savings of maybe $100 was frightening to me, especially when I considered the possibility that we might become paralyzed by our options, and do nothing. The time was right.
When I expressed these frustrations to Brian he was so gracious and kind to me about it that I thought perhaps Jesus had tied him up and left him in the closet at home, taken his form and decided to come furniture shopping with me. Then I realized that, no, my guy really is just that awesome.
SO ANYWAY. We went to Home Depot, decided quickly on what we wanted. The set we liked matched a rug we LURVED. Threw it in the car - had to make 2 trips because the boxes were so huge - and came home to put it all together. We made one last trip to Target and hauled an old sofa out of the den, and viola! Check it out!
So, I think you get the idea. We were very tired at the end of this project - I also dug up the plot for my garden this weekend, adding to the exhaustion - but deeply, deeply happy. We lit up some sweet-smelling incense to give the room a nice Sam-hair-free fragrance. My mom came over, bringing along a bottle of wine, and the three of us sat on the back porch, drinking wine, and bashing George W. Bush well into the night. That’s exactly what this room is for, and I have a feeling it’s going to be worth every penny, every drop of sweat, and every sore muscle. So far it already has been, and more.
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Brian took this photo of my hands after I spent 3 and a half hours on Saturday digging up the plot where I’m planning to plant vegetables. I came inside from that project feeling very, very dirty but so manly; nothing to get your testosterone rushing like weilding a gas-powered tiller.
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From yesterday’s (late) version of Sam Fridays. Too funny not to share. (Photo links to icanhascheezburger.com)
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So, I’m a full day late on posting today’s Sam Fridays entry. But I have a good reason, a reason I should’ve let you in on on, say, Thursday, because I actually knew ahead of time that this week’s Sam update wouldn’t come until today. And I know that a whole bunch of you only read this site because of Sam, and trust me, I couldn’t be more okay with this.
Anyway, the reason it’s had to wait is because Sam, Brian and I have had a very big day today. As you know, we are currently repurposing the back room on our house, turning it from an awful storage space into a wonderful garden paradise in which we plan to spend the summer drinking pitchers of gin fizz and laughing with our friends. A big part of this process, as it turns out, has had to involve a garage sale, as the reason we were using the room for storage was that we have more, um, crap than space around here. We are attempting to change our crap-space ratio. Hence, a garage sale.
Sam enjoyed this, as we let him wander around the front yard all day without a leash, greeting our customers and generally getting into a whole lot of trouble. I admit, I had an ulterior motive: I wanted to photograph Sam getting into the aforementioned trouble. And as you’ll see, his shenanigans were a scream. First, he locked himself in the front seat of the car:
"Oh, we need some change for the garage sale? I’ll go get it! Where’s the ATM card?"
Then, the big dummy decided to investigate Buzzard, the friendly cat who lives across the street:
Seriously, I might send this one to lolcats.
Sam had a great time playing with the neighborhood kids, who mostly just tolerated him until I told him to leave them alone:
Then - the moment we’ve all been waiting for: Sam finally got to meet Pepper. This, um, did not go well.
See, Sam has never gotten on well with other male dogs, so after the introductory mutual-ass-sniff, Sam spent most of Pepper’s visit growling at the poor pup and then trying to hump him.
It was like watching an episode of Oz staged with dogs, it really was. Sam wasn’t even willing to let Pepper have his fair share of the neighbor kids’ snuggles:
So, finally, we put him on the porch and made him stay there.
All this happened before noon, and here we must take a Station Identification break so I can remind you that I live in Oklahoma, where at noon every Saturday, they test the tornado alarms to make sure they’re still working. Sam hates this with a burning passion, and hilarity almost always ensues, but it ensues elusively, and so far has proven difficult to capture on video.
Today, however, with Sam confined to the front porch, I thought, this is the day! So I got the little camera ready to videotape my dog hilariously howling his head off and trying to find the source of a sound THAT IS ALL AROUND HIM OH MY GOD WHERE IS THAT COMING FROM WHY CAN’T YOU MAKE IT STOP YOU’RE AN AWFUL, AWFUL PERSON FOR NOT MAKING IT STOP MAKE IT STOP!
But Sam? Not a cooperative dog. So what you’ll see, below, is approximately three minutes of my dog sort of half-heartedly growling at the tornado siren - or possibly at me for videotaping him - and TOTALLY NOT EARNING HIS KEEP DOESN’T HE KNOW THAT THIS WEBSITE PAYS FOR HIS VET VISITS?*
No food for you this week, Sam. But anyway, here’s the video:
Sam, NOT DOING WHAT HE SHOULD DO from Okay City Nate on Vimeo.
*No, it doesn’t. Can you imagine? We’d be going to the Dr. Nick of veterinarians. Seriously, though, that does get pretty funny around 1:30.
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This guy grows all alone next to our garage, in almost total shade. I’d say he’s done pretty well for himself, considering.
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Do you know one of the best things about being gay and in love? You can borrow one another’s totally adorable clothes and accessories. This pair of Kenneth Cole cufflinks was a gift to Brian from my mom, but I totally wear them every chance I get, which isn’t as often as I’d like, as I only own two French Cuff shirts.
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Image via XKCD.
So I just wrote a whole post about people who seem to have time in their day to argue endlessly over points of philosophy and politics on the internet. It was a little judgemental, and when I went to post it, something miraculous happened - the internet and its magic - and the post disappeared.
When that post vanished, so did my irritation, somewhat. I canceled my MySpace account a few months back because I was sick of people who listed "Acitivism" under their hobbies, because I don’t consider "Activism" to be sending out endless MySpace bulletins about how Hillary is 200% MORE PRO-GAY THAN OBAMA AND HERE’S THE PROOF!
To repeat something I read somewhere (forgive me, I don’t recall where) - arguing on the internet is a bit like jerking off to your own photo. So I’ll just say this: if you really want to be an "Activist," if you really care about the world and want to make it a better place, let me tell you about this homeless shelter I know about where you can volunteer every other Saturday.
| Interweb, It's Not Right But It's Okay | Comments (3) |
It’s rained on and off all week, and then yesterday the winds were insane, and as a result the sky filled with dust, casting a sort of frightening apocalyptic pall over everything. I took this as I was leaving the gym.
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