A Relaxing Sunday Evening At The AssVac

This is something that happened a few weeks ago but, since I'll be busy today, I thought y'all might like to have this little nosh to chew on. Don't forget to follow the link in the previous post to read more of genius me...

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but Johnny’s Irish. Which means he has an Irish sense of time. Which means, well, which means he’s late. For everything.

If we have to be somewhere at noon, I tell him eleven – and we get there at 12:30. For his own plane reservations I have to hide the confirmation sheet and lie to him – progressively earlier every time, because he’s on to me. And it only works when he travels domestically, because all the flights to Ireland leave at the same time, and he’s been doing this much longer than I have, so he knows.

The thing that makes me nutsest, though, is mealtime. (“Nutsest,” it’s a word. Right, Humpty?) He will ask me at 6:00 a.m. what I want for dinner (at which point I don’t know and never have), then not start cooking it until 7:30 (p.m., of course) and dish it up at 10:00. At which point I’ve usually eaten something else and gone to bed.

Because see, I get hungry. Now yes, I do often get rumblies in my tumblies just crying out for a smackeral of honey before bed. But when I get really hungry, I get bitchy. I start running around like an ant trying to accomplish something, anything, and not achieving it. Picking things up and putting them down, rambling on about nothing, and snapping at people. Especially in traffic. Some days I think I’d be better off driving drunk than when I’m hungry.

And the worst part is, the hungrier I actually get, the less hungry I think I am. Nothing sounds good, I feel sick, I don’t want to eat anything. Yuck. Who eats things? Johnny has been known to lie to me, as well. “Pull off here,” he says, “I have to pee.” Then he comes out of Dunkin’ Donuts and thrusts a bagel at me. “Eat this,” he says, “for god’s sake. Before I kill ya.”

This Sunday I actually managed to sleep in, which I never do. I slept till 8:00, wrote for two hours, then got back into bed with my newspaper. I was lounging comfortably, thinking about a smackeral of honey, when Johnny padded in and asked if I might want a hamburger.

For breakfast? No. You mean for dinner, right?

No, actually he meant for breakfast. Was that weird?

Yes, but… yes, I do. I do want a hamburger for breakfast. That’s not weird at all! That’s the best idea you’ve ever had, Love, and—

We don’t have any buns, says he.

Have I mentioned that he doesn’t drive?

So if I wanted a hamburger for breakfast (which I now did, really, really badly) I was going to have to get dressed and go buy us some buns. At which point I might’s well just drive through Burger King.

I said I didn’t want to, and he said we could have hotdogs instead, because we did have hot dog buns, but I said hotdogs weren’t hamburgers and I really did want hamburgers for breakfast. I was hoping he’d offer to walk up to Tedeschi’s and buy the cheapy plastic kind of burger buns, but I forgot that he was broken and therefore not walking anywhere (I keep forgetting that, actually; I’m really not the bestest wife a man could ask for). So we compromised. I’d go, but I’d go when I felt like it. Which wasn’t now.

And which also wasn’t until I was too hungry to wait any longer, and so I told him we’d have hamburgers for lunch and ate me a tomato sandwich. For breakfast. So?

I finally did go and get the buns and some other things, long about 1:30 or something. I know because I was listening to This American Life on the radio in the car and the theme was how love is the ultimate sacrifice or some such blah-de-blah.

Now of course the tomato sandwich that I ate for breakfast had only gone down at like 12:30 itself, so I certainly wasn’t ready for lunch yet myself, and Johnny had taken a vitamin on an empty stomach and made himself sick. So we went back to our corners, I with my papers and Pa with his SciFi channel, and waited to get hungry…

5:00 Johnny started getting things ready in the kitchen. Sliced tomatoes, onions, lettuce. Gathered relish, mayo, ketchup. Yum, yum, I thought. And then he sat back down.

5:30 I announced that I was going out to start the fire. Not the grill, mind you. The fire. In the chimenea. I didn’t want to step on any toes, but I thought perhaps if I started moving us in that direction, I might get us that much closer to dinner time. Because one thing I also know about my husband is that, when he announces that it’s dinner time, you aren’t going to be putting any food in your mouth for at least two hours.

6:00 he joined me out there, but he said he didn’t think we needed to start cooking yet. I allowed as how, no, I wasn’t exactly starving, but he had to agree than when I said “Cook” he should say “How hot?” He agreed, and so I read to him for a while from The Glass Castle (good. Depressing).

7:00 I said “Cook,” so he lit the grill.

7:10 “It isn’t hot enough.”

7:20 “It isn’t hot enough”

7:30 “Oh just put the damn things on!” (That would be me, starting to get snappish.)

7:35 He finally puts them on, and at 7:40 turns them over and sits down. It’s getting dark.

7:45 Johnny goes in to use the bathroom. I get up and put the buns on. I knew it might be a little early, but I wanted to eat a freaking hamburger as soon as it was cooked, and I didn’t care if the toasted bun had cooled back to room temperature by then. It would be better than having to wait one extra minute on the flip side.

7:47 Johnny comes out. “Where are the buns? You didn’t put them on already, did you? Oh, no, they have to come off. It’s too early.”

I tried to explain the thought process above, but I was spluttering. At the not-thinking clearly stage, I wanted to tell him to take them off himself, but for once remembered he was broken. All I managed to come up with instead was “Fine. We’ll eat raw buns!” I stormed over to take them off the grill… and when I raised the lid, I watched the fire fade and die.

We were out of propane.

It’s not as bad as it sounds; we did have a spare tank full and waiting. But the spare tank was in the basement and had to be brought up and attached, which is always a pain in the ass, and I have a bad back and Johnny has a bum knee so there isn’t any real right answer as to who should have to do it, so I did – and have I mentioned I was hungry and I get bitchy when I’m hungry?

So let’s just skip ahead to me getting it attached and getting it re-lit and then forgetting that when you turn up the gas to light it, then you have to turn it down or else your buns (which never did come off the grill) turn into charcoaled hockey pucks that smoke up the neighborhood.

Then let’s skip past me throwing the buns out into the encroaching blackness and yelling “Let the fucking raccoons eat the burger that I’ve wanted since this morning, I don’t care!”

Let’s, in fact, also skip over me saying “Screw you. Good night!” and stomping off into the bedroom…

And, well, if we’ve skipped all that it wouldn’t really make any sense if you saw me creeping out into the kitchen and back into the night with two fresh buns for toasting. If you saw me toasting both and dressing two burgers in the dark and leaving one there for Johnny, who still sits there at the chimenea, silently watching. And who really hadn’t done anything wrong except be Irish.

Because, no matter what I may have said about raccoons: I really, really did want to eat that hamburger.

For breakfast.


PS In case you're wondering, the electrician just showed up. Electrician #4, I believe. And we're outta here. Let's hope he doesn't rob us of all our precious valuables while I'm letting strangers drill holes into my head...