Single Again

I had to spend the day in Idaho Falls two weeks ago for a class project. Before I left, I made Aaron promise that he would do his homework and feed himself if he got hungry. He promised and gave me a kiss goodbye, and I disappeared to Idaho Falls for several hours.

I got home at 8:30 that night and walked into the kitchen. The once-full pan of rice crispy treats I’d left on the stovetop was now almost empty. I walked down the hallway to the spare room to find my husband hunched over his chemistry book next to an empty bag of tortilla chips and a bowl with some salsa residue in it. When he turned around, I saw that there was a drip of salsa on his shirt. I stated my observation that he hadn’t eaten anything other than chips, salsa and rice crispies since I’d left. He confirmed. He was starving.

After teasing him for a while about converting back to bachelor mode and being a mess when I’m gone (which isn’t actually true), I made us some dinner. We joked about the topic on and off for a few more days, talked about how we’re glad we don’t have to go back to being single, and then forgot about the whole thing.

Aaron left for four days for a school trip last week. I hate being in our trailer alone, so I slept on my sister’s couch, did my homework and hung out with her family for the duration of his absence.

Once Aaron came home, I took stock of my activities while he was gone. I didn’t shower for two days, I bummed food off of my sister, I slept in and stayed up too late, I didn’t change out of my pajamas until 4 p.m. one day, and the one time I did have to cook for myself I ate cold cereal and macaroni and cheese for lunch and dinner.

Needless to say, I’m grateful for Aaron. I’ve never been a bachelor, but apparently I become one when he’s not around.

Box Hero

With the exception of seeing the inside of a packaging warehouse, I’ve never come in contact with as many boxes as we had when we moved in. Each gift we received came in a box. Each item that we bought to set up our house came in a box, sometimes two. Three in extreme cases.

I’ve never had to move large-scale for myself. Every time I’d moved from home to college, college to work, etc. I’ve been pretty minimalistic. I could move in and out in a few hours. Usually, all my things fit into a couple of duffle bags and four or five storage containers, with one or two loose boxes on the side. All of this fit comfortably in a small Buick.

Do you know how big the box a vacuum comes in is? Answer: about the size of a small Buick. Hence, my days of quick and easy moving were over.

After my family came and moved us in, it was up to us to figure out what to do with all the boxes. As we set up the rest of the house, all extra things went into the spare bedroom. You guessed it. All the boxes went in there, too.

Our little spare bedroom was filled, quite literally, to the top with boxes and spare “stuff” for the first week we were in our house. The room was a mess that I didn’t want in our home, so I started sorting things. I tried to fit as many of the boxes into each other as I could, but it was no use. Manufacturers purposely make their boxes just square enough and just oblong enough that, one way or another, they don’t fit inside one another. Now the floor was visible and the room was navigable. Regardless of my success, the tower of boxes remained.

Aaron wanted to use the room as a study, so we went to work organizing more things. He got a Martian death headache and ended up crashing on the couch for five hours, so I kept at it alone. I relocated the tower of boxes to the living room so I could do what I wanted with what was actually supposed to be in the spare room. It ended up looking pretty good, but the tower of boxes still loomed in the living room.

The next day, after we got home from school, I talked to Aaron about my predicament with the box tower. The exchange went something like this:

Me: Aaron, I’m not sure what to do with all these boxes.

Aaron: Why don’t we just throw them away?

Me: All of them?

Aaron: Yes. ALL of them.

Me: But, what if we just have to move again in a few months?

Aaron: We can get more boxes.

Me: (wide eyes - excited facial expression)

One pocketknife, some serious box collapsing and a small roll of packing tape later, Aaron and I had transformed our once-ominous box tower into a harmless bundle. The boxes went to the trash. Organization and space have reigned supreme since then.

Keeping the box tower in our house was just one of several silly ideas I’ve had as a newlywed wife. Aaron has a few now and again, too. I imagine that silly ideas won’t disappear entirely, regardless of how long we’re married. I hope they don’t. When we solve problems for each other, it makes us feel like heroes in some small way.

I guess even newlyweds need to save the day sometimes.

Snow Cave

In February, we hit a bit of a “school slump.” Things had been pretty hectic. Aaron’s chemistry and calculus classes had been a pretty big drain on his energy. I was responsible for planning several programs and was sending dozens of emails and placing a comparable number of phone calls every day in frantic efforts to make everything work.

Long story short, we were frazzled, tired and sick of school. Miracle of miracles, it was Friday. I only have one class on Fridays, and one of Aaron’s was cancelled. We held a family council for 11 seconds and unanimously decided we could both afford to miss one class in pursuit of sanity.

So we skipped school. Don’t tell my mom. J

I’m not normally one to flippantly skip class, but this day was special. This was snow cave day.

Many of you might not know this, but in Rexburg, Idaho snow supply is high with incredibly low demand. As a result, you can build a snow cave completely free of charge. This was lucky for us, because we were going to need quite a bit of snow.

Between our driveway and our neighbor’s, there is a big open space that was, at the time, filled with pristine, sugary snow. It was practically begging us to build a snow cave right in the middle of it.

Aaron temporarily stole our landlord’s scoop shovel (don’t worry, our landlord loves us) and started scraping snow from the surrounding area into a big heap in the middle of the clearing. I stayed inside for a few minutes to finish dishes and start on lunch. Very wifely, I know.

By the time I got my snow clothes on and went outside, Aaron had already gotten a mound nearly as tall and big around as my height built up. I’m no professional snow cave maker, so I thought to myself, “The mound is already there…what do I do? Am I too late to take part in this fantastic adventure?”

In response to my puzzled look, Aaron sent me to the car to fetch one of his skis. I was a little confused as to what purpose this served, but I went and got the ski anyway, because Aaron always has a reason for the things he wants me to do.

My assignment was to beat the tar out of our snow cave with a telemark ski. Snow caves have to be packed down and frozen overnight so they don’t collapse when you dig them out.

Though my assignment was simple, it was a little difficult to control where the ski went. I would haul it up in the air and bring it hurtling down toward the top of the cave and it would suddenly end up almost hitting Aaron in the face.

I’m pretty sure I almost killed him at least three times. What an embarrassing headline, “Local Student Killed by Ski-Wielding Wife.” Catchy, but embarrassing. At least now I know how to use a snow ski to defend myself.

To make the situation more ridiculous, Aaron was still shoveling and hitting the snow cave at the same time. Shovels and skis were constantly flying through the air, threatening life and limb. Occasionally our tools would hit or get caught on one another, halting progress. I fell down at least once when this happened.

All the while, our neighbors were driving past, wondering why on earth there were crazy people outside beating a giant pile of snow in the middle of a clearing and falling in the snow.

The explanation is simple, neighbor people. We were taking a day off.

Our cave turned out pretty well and we were pleased at making a three-day weekend for ourselves.

Am I sorry I missed class? No. I feel confident that nothing I learned in class would have been more important than learning how to wield a snow ski in self defense.

I fail to see why they don't teach this skill in school.

First Dinner Party

I made my first roast a few weekends ago. If that doesn’t classify as an important benchmark in the life of a newlywed wife, what does?

I’ve concluded that there are two things that are nearly impossible to mess up when cooking.

The first is casseroles. If you throw shredded potatoes or noodles into a pan with a mixture of other random things and leave it in the oven for 45 minutes, you’re bound for success.

The second is anything you put into a crock pot. You can put things together in a crock pot that you would never dream of putting in your mouth at the same time and somehow, in ten hours or more, it magically becomes a culinary delight.

The third week we were in our trailer, I made a tuna casserole and it made us both a little sick. Maybe it was the tuna. Maybe it was the chef. Either way, my track record for impossible-to-mess-up foods was looking shaky. I admit I became nervous about the roast.

In light of my apprehension, I did what any reasonable newlywed wife would do. I called for my mommy.

Something I learned when I came to college is that mom is the portal to all knowledge necessary for survival in the real world. There are more reasons than I can count, but I’ll share a few that come to mind.

1.      She has every cookie recipe in the universe memorized.

2.      She knows whether or not you can still eat certain things after they’ve been in the fridge for three months.

3.      She can locate anything in any grocery store over the phone, even when she’s never been to that grocery store. From 200 miles away, it still takes her less than 40 seconds to lead me to the deviled ham (or something similarly obscure) when I’ve been searching for over 20 minutes.

4.      She is the MacGyver of cooking. When a recipe calls for eggs, milk, butter, sour cream and brown sugar, and all you have is four cups of flour, tap water and a paperclip, she can still tell you what to do to make it work.

So, obviously, I called mom for roast-making information. Her step-by-step instructions made it sound easier than it could possibly be in reality.

I followed said instructions and left with Aaron for church. It really was that easy.

Three hours later…voila! Actually, it was still raw, so we didn’t eat it for lunch. But our house smelled AWESOME. I felt like the best wife ever.

Since we couldn’t eat it until dinner time anyway, Aaron had a great idea. Have friends over for dinner. So we did. Regardless of the difficulty most people have in finding our trailer, they found us after only one round of instructions. Our friends are smart. That’s why we like them.

I’d have to say, with the combination of making our first roast as married people AND having our first dinner party, this was a fantastic day of benchmarks for us.

Everything went fairly smooth until dinner was almost over. We were all chatting and enjoying just being together when we heard a slight cracking sound and our friend Brent disappeared. For a moment, I was afraid that a hole had opened up in the kitchen floor of our trailer and that we’d never see Brent again.

It turns out that Brent just broke our chair. Once we all managed to stop laughing we got him a folding chair and packed the pieces of my grandmother’s dining room chair to the spare bedroom so we could fix it later.

All in all, a memorable, and extremely funny, first dinner party.

And the roast was fantastic. I feel like an extremely legit wife.