“If our next child is a girl, I want to name her Dakota.” And he’ll snort up the Dr. Pepper he was drinking and cough and carry on, and I will sit there, greatly amused. Who knows if he’s more surprised by the prospect of bringing another child into this recession-ridden world or by the idea of naming her after South Dakota (NOT North Dakota- are you kidding me?); it doesn’t really matter. It’s better entertainment than even Justified- season 2 of which premieres this week for your information.
So today, while we were talking on the phone, I caught him off guard with the following,
“I’ve already saved up $450.00 toward the new furniture.” There was an immediate chortle.
“Ha ha. That’s interesting.”
This comes with a sad background story. The couch we have in our playroom/ sun room/ the room that Kiah the Wonder Dog has ruined… is ruined. Once a cream colored couch, it is stained and sagging. The coils are broken and the cushions are ripped. If one actually dared to sit upon it, they might wonder if they were being sucked into quicksand or perhaps falling down into Alice’s Wonderland. Now, no one will ever sit on it again because the day before yesterday, Kiah peed on it, and I gave up. We agreed to throw the couch out.
I have had my eye on a new set of furniture for a while, and have been socking away money on the sly. The room it will go in is a big, beautiful room with skylights and walls of windows, and it is under-utilized. This is the very speech I gave to John after he said “that’s interesting.” He said “that’s interesting” like we weren’t going to spend my $450+ dollars on furniture- like we might spend it on something else. He is gravely mistaken. Plus, my $450 is hidden in a surreptitious location and he’ll never find it.
After my “sunbeams through the skylights warming our new furniture” speech, the conversation took a surprising turn, and John said something that caught me off guard.
“I’m going to burn our old couch.”
“Um- I think that would be frowned upon.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, by our neighbors. I think it would be frowned upon by our neighbors. And possibly the fire department. And maybe the town zoning board. And our insurance company.”
“I could take it somewhere else and burn it. Maybe I’ll take it to Billy’s yard. We were just talking about burning couches the other day!”
They were just talking about burning couches the other day. How fortuitous that a couch in need of burning should turn up.
They can burn it up and smoke it if they want, I don’t care, so long as I get my furniture. (My apologies to Billy’s wife.) I’m almost 1/3 of the way to the point-of-sale. I have great expectations for this set of furniture: lounging in the sun reading Great Expectations, drinking Dr. Pepper and snacking on chips while surfing the internet, taking a long snooze with my beautiful daughter, Dakota…
Great expectations.
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| 2-year old Ben on the couch that may very well be torched. |
8 comments:
We just bought a new sofa, and it's wonderful. Keep saving your money. It will be so worth it.
Did I ever tell you about the time I found R & L covering our cream-colored couch with mayonnaise??? Yup, slathering it with glee, as if frosting a big birthday cake. Now THAT would have made a spectacular torch!
Why in God's green earth did either of us think a cream colored couch was a good idea?
We had a couch that looked similar to yours (we didn't purchase it; it was a hand-me-down). When it was finally time to get rid of it, Bob chopped it into smaller pieces so that it would fit in our car so we could bring it to the town dump on the day that they were accepting large garbage items by residents. However, he spent so much time chopping that by the time we got to dump, we were 5 minutes late, and they were closed! So, we drove to a local construction site and tossed in a dumpster (shhh--don't tell anyone!).
I have so many memories of playing with your kids on/around said couch, but new furniture is always fun!
I'd wager that a urine/vomit/dung/dirt colored couch would be the most practical color until the children are in college, and the dog is too old to jump on the couch.
When I was young,we had a paisley couch that roughly matched that description.
Where I'm from a couch burnin' is a right of passage (of sorts)...an event to be fondly remembered and memorialized in tall tales,
Well, you can guess who left that last comment!!! I'm thinking.............. we don't need another tall tale of that sorts!!
Sorry Holly, you have to put up with this ;)
Raney (Billy's wife)
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