This evening Farmer H jumped up from his seat on the long couch and straightened a painting hanging over the fake electric fireplace mantle in the living room. "Huh," you say. Humoring me in the way of people who do not really understand where the conversation is going. Let me fill you in. There are several levels of huh-ness going on here.
To start with, Farmer H was not in his La-Z-Boy, even though he spent most of the day on his knees on the back porch, replacing rotten boards. Not replacing rotten boards with other rotten boards. That would be kind of stupid, even for Farmer H. He was replacing rotten cedar with new Wolmanized. Not womanized. Wolmanized. Pressure-treated dead wood that lives a long time. Even after this day that brought him to his knees, he let me sit in the La-Z-Boy for seven minutes while I was waiting for the corn muffins to finish baking. What a gent.
Farmer H has a thing about selected items in disarray. He cannot stand for a door to be left partially open. Like when you just push it to, yet don't latch it. Like the kitchen pantry. Why do I want to yank on that lever of a French handle to open the pantry every time I am seeking some foodstuffs to warm in the oven or heat in the microwave? It's so much easier to pull it open and skip the yanking. Of course, it doesn't bother him to leave the bathroom door and the bedroom door semi-open. As in not pushing them back against the wall when they're open, but leaving them in no-woman's-land where I ram into them in the dark. He also has a thing about lights being left on, unless they're the lights in the garage which he forgets to turn off. And about water being splashed around the big triangle tub in the master bathroom. Ahem. It's a tub. Shouldn't he have made it splashable when he installed it?
Now, to address our art collection. Farmer H used to frequent a certain private club bar before we were married. Before he even met me. Let's just call that place the Community Tavern. He would stop by every evening, have a bar pizza, perhaps consume an adult beverage, and put his dollar in for the daily drawing. The owner/bartender was also a painter. Farmer H believes in supporting local businesses, so we have a couple of her works strung up around the Mansion. It's not like she's a Rembrandt. But there's a story to go with the painting.
Anyhoo...getting back to The Straightening. I was shocked that Farmer H made this move.
"Oh, come on. You're probably just moving it from straight to crooked."
"No. It didn't look right."
"I don't recall any catastrophe causing that painting to slip."
"NOW it's straight."
"You know, don't you, that every light switch plate and electrical outlet plate in this house is not straight, right? That they all slant at the same angle? So you've just made your painting slant at that angle, too."
"I don't know, sometimes when I get to looking at stuff over in the BARn..."
If you think he was going to admit that things he installed were also crooked in the BARn, you've got another think coming. He went off on a tangent about how simply buying insulation instead of piecing it together from sections he salvaged would have actually been cheaper that free, what with it costing about $150 for the new materials at Lowe's.
Welcome to my life.
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