I love Dateline. Always have, always will.  In fact, that’s how we party animals have been filling most of our Friday nights for the past few months. Nothing makes me/us laugh harder than Keith Morrison’s facial expressions and enunciation patterns during interviews. I don’t care who you are, that’s entertainment right there.

Anyway, last Friday Matt had been out of town for work for a few days so got home that night a little later than usual and all we did was get take out and settled in on the couch together for “The Bathtub Mystery” I believe it was.

Matt, exhausted from his week of training, and stuffed full from La Mesa queso, falls asleep about halfway through this whopper of an episode. I, usually the one who fills the role of falling asleep early, instead, sat straight up for the entire 2 hours, horrified at the story unfolding before me.

Episode cliff notes:  Ryan and Sarah met, became friends then years later realized the other was “the one,” eventually moved in together, got engaged, got married. He loved sports and was the quiet one. She was the loud, social one. Sound familiar?! There were even more coincidences but I’ll spare you the rest of the background. What happens next is all that matters. One random Monday night, Sarah died in the bathtub!! He was downstairs watching TV and she supposedly got bored, decided to take a bath, fell asleep in the bathtub and drowned. It was a suspicious situation (damp hair, dry body when medics arrived, in addition to lots of other circumstantial evidence); some people think Ryan did it (he’s been found guilty in 3 separate trials actually), but other’s don’t. I’ll spare you the rest of the details, but bottomline is that she was lifeless upstairs for awhile while he was downstairs Monday Night Football-ing it up.

I was so scared that night I could NOT sleep!! For the next several nights actually. We even watched a much scarier Dateline episode on Sunday that didn’t really affect me as much, or at all. In fact, I can’t even remember what that one was about. So Sunday night I literally spent the whole night sitting straight up in terror, staring into the shadows and rationalizing scary noises that night. Needless to say, I had some time to think. I realized why I was so hot and bothered: This could’ve happened to me, to us!! Ahhh!!!!

And then it DID start happening. A few days later, we were laying on the couch trying to find something to watch (Tuesdays are a terrible night for TV!) and Matt turns it to X-Men 2. I don’t like movies like that so I tell him “I don’t want to watch this.” I give him a “reasonable” 30 seconds to change the channel to the movie I wanted to watch (No Country for Old Men) and when he doesn’t change the channel, I promptly get up and say, “Ok then, I’ll just do something else I guess.” And “I guess” was said in a tone that implied I didn’t want to be doing something else, ya know?

I went into the kitchen, uploaded a bunch of our wedding pictures to Facebook and then get bored and went to our bathroom upstairs. I figured why not be productive “I guess” – I was in the bathroom wiping away old polish from my nails and applying new. Matt comes up like 1.5 hours later, I’m sure only breaking from the movie because he has to pee, NOT to check to see what I was doing and if I was okay.  

But when he gets to the bathroom, that’s not what he gets to do. Instead, he gets to listen to me tell him about how I could have been dead in the bathtub up here the last 2 hours and he’d be none the wiser because he ignores me all the time! (In reality, I have never taken a bath in the 2+ years we’ve lived there and Matt gives me more attention than I could ever ask for). That night, though, probably due to lack of sleep – I was a little whiney . Ya, let’s go with that.  

I’m literally laughing thinking about it right now. Sometimes I’m SO RIDICULOUS. At the time, though, I sat there saying how he’d probably be found guilty in the trial and we might as well start calling each other Sara and Ryan and blah blah blah. He could have gone a lot of ways in that conversation but he just simply shook his head, smirked and said something to the effect of:  “I think you’re having an overreaction, Sara. (pause for emphasis) I don’t know why you don’t like comic book movies anyway.”

I busted up in laughter. It was indeed an overreaction, I mean, even as I was saying the angry words to him, I could barely keep a straight face but went with it anyway.  I just love that he calls me out on stuff and I’m so glad to have someone around who not only does care where I am at all times, but who always know just the right thing to say.

First Time(s)

You'd think by the time you marry a person, you'd know 'em pretty well. But in just the past week alone, I've learned and experienced A LOT about and with my dear Matt:

1) He can dance.
Wellllll....he does dance. Our first dance and maybe once a drunken-polka with me is about all I've ever seen out of him. Until last weekend visiting a friend in Iowa City. I don't think in four hours that he left the dance floor even once! He found and befriended some cougars after I was too embarassed to continue dancing with him and they just ate him up. He must have commented 800 times when he finally did leave the dance floor, "ya know, I think I made those ladies' night-heck, maybe week. I mean, dancing with me, giving them all that attention, must have been great for them." I guess my confidence is rubbing off on him.

2) He's a tough negotiator.
It's widely known that I'm the decision maker, and usually the vocal, opinionated one between us. Except for on the day we bought our new car two weeks ago. I even joked with the salesman at several different points that there was no way we were leaving with a car today because again, Matt moves very slowly, especially when it comes to a big decision like this would be. But as soon as he saw my "shopping face" and could tell I'd set my little heart on that particular Equniox, a switch flipped and he was all sorts of decisive -- and a little cut-throat. Matt would offer up a price point then the salesman went to go pretend check with this manager about giving us that low of a price, because of course, "they never do that," and I sat there impressed as heck with my man's wheeling and dealing. Between all the back-and-forths, the whole process took five stinking hours, making us late for his work's holiday party, but darnit, we got a pretty good deal! I made a note to self that day:  use Matt's newfound negotiating skills to my advantage more often, as they seemed to be a little more effective than my eyelash-batting as of late.

::  As a total aside to that story, this is the FIRST brand new car for either of us. And we've totally become "those" people, parking far away to avoid door dings, scared to death of putting on mileage, etc. I've even gone as far as to declare the thing a "no eat zone." I'd definitely be a better driver today had I just gotten a new car years ago, that's for sure!  ::

3) His childhood was WAY different than mine.
I say this at least once a week, but this week this is why: we were sitting on the couch after eating dinner and a commercial for some dessert came on, forcing us into believing we needed dessert. We head to the grocery store up the street to see if we can find some individual slices of cake in the bakery (since our tastes vary so much) - no luck. So we wandered over to the frozen dessert section. My eye catches a carton of "Chunky monkey" and I (obviously) light up with desire. Matt, however, is confused. He comments nonchalantly that he's NEVER HAD BEN & JERRY'S!!! Whaaaaaat?!  This is coming on the heels of finding out the previous week that he didn't know what a golden birthday was. You know what I probably did for my golden birthday? Ate Ben & Jerry's!! Told you - different upbringings. Anyway, back at the grocery store, he laments over all the different flavor options and decides on Half-Baked. I recognized the look on his face as he took his first bite - same eyes of desire and recognition of deliciousness as me. All was well in the world again; we weren't so different after all.

It's the little things

Thursdays are Trash Day. Taking out the trash is on Matt’s to do list. He does that, washes dishes, cuts the onions so I don’t cry, shovels show and mows the grass – I do just about everything else.

I will preface what I’m about to say by saying this first:  this week, the trash did get taken out to the curb. BUT – the trash can didn’t get replaced with a trash bag. Not a big deal per se, except for the fact that I have told him before on more than one occasion that this is irritating. Who wants to go throw something away only to realize that you can’t?! This is my equivalent of “leaving the toilet seat up.” I don’t know why it bothers me, but it does and again, Matt knows it does.

So what’s a girl to do when her trash can is left bag-less? Well, I’ll tell you: I assumed Matt never listens to me when I talk and doesn’t care about the things I think are important. When I type it out like that, it seems like quite the giant leap to make, but nonetheless, that was my mental state.  I should mention that this was on a day that I was already irritated…

…Because in another test of my patience, we remodeled one of our spare bedrooms this week. Unfortunately, it did take all week because my man moves at the pace of molasses with stuff like that (it looks GREAT finished, though). Anyway, on Thursday afternoon, I finished work a bit early and went to the garage to paint the last side of the last door. Matt had sternly warned me not to get any white paint on the garage floor (apparently keeping a clean concrete floor is his weird toilet seat-esque anger thing). Despite both his warnings and advice on how not to spill, I spilled. Luckily, I noticed in time. Being a good wife, I panicked as he would have himself and ran inside to get some wet paper towels to wipe it up with. I managed to get it all off the floor before it dried--Crisis adverted. But then, another one popped up. Upon taking the towels with wet paint inside to throw them away, I realized THERE WAS NO TRASH BAG.  We just got a new, fairly fancy trash can as a wedding gift, too, and I imagined Matt wouldn’t be happy if I got white paint on it, either. Quite the predicament, because now, I had closed the door from the kitchen to the garage in anticipation of having clean hands to get back out after successfully throwing away the paint towel and washing my hands. So now I’m mad AND covered in white paint. “I’ll just throw it in the recycling can, who cares if that one gets paint on it,” I thought.  Well, we wouldn’t have to find out. “Luckily”, my dear hubby had forgotten to take out the trash can we use for recycling, so I just piled the paper towels onto that heap for retrieval later (and stored away in my mind the fact that he didn’t take it out for use later also).

All of this happening on the day I finally decide to change my beloved last name to his unpronounceable one. Figures.

Oh – AND that day happened to mark the two-week mark of when I presented him with two quotes from garage door companies so we could replace ours. (And that day was two weeks after I’d asked him to do it before getting fed up and getting bids myself). I told him, also on more than one occasion, how important it was to me that he look and help choose. Too late for that. Once I saw the liner-less trash can, what I did next was call Omaha Garage Door & Window and put down a deposit on a garage door without input or approval from him.

Serves him right….I guess?? No one has ever accused us girls of being logical when angry.

Later than night when Matt got home and settled, I casually handed him “The 5 Love Languages” book that we got also got as a wedding gift and instructed him to read “my” chapter on “Acts of Service.” In his first act of service, he apparently did read it, because sure enough, I woke up to dishes being clean and put away, the recycling taken out to garage and FINALLY, a liner in the trash can [for God’s sake]. The next morning there was also a cold bottle of water in the fridge waiting for me because he knew I’d want one ready for my Crystal Light. It really is the little things.