Tag: living

Why NASA will never let me order furniture

imageIt wasn’t until dragging our furniture onto the patio during our spring cleaning that I realized our couches looked like they were purchased from a crackhouse garage sale. After years of having the dogs rub themselves along the front, and motionless teenagers planted on the cushions for hours at a time, they were dirty, lumpy and misshapen.

And so were our couches.

After a discussion about the merits of keeping our old set and the cost of replacing them with a new one, my wife and I decided to go ahead and get rid of our old sofa and love seat.

Total elapsed time of this conversation: 11 seconds.

That includes the eight seconds we spent covering the couches with a tarp so no one else would see them. Naturally, before going to the furniture store, I needed to measure the wall and floor space in the livingroom to ensure we wouldn’t order the wrong size couches and end up having a conversation like this:

Me: Honey, would you like me to grab you a soda from the fridge?
My wife: Only if you’re going that way.
Me: It’s no trouble. The other end of the couch is in the kitchen anyway.  Continue reading Why NASA will never let me order furniture

Life can change in a heartbeat, or none at all

imageA few months ago, I went from wearing nothing but red thong while climbing around the sand dunes, to being a first responder at a multi-car accident with a car fire — all in a span of about 15 minutes. It’s a long story that, if you aren’t squeamish (and by that, I mean about the image of me in a red thong), you can read it here. Long story short, the experience was a reminder of how unpredictable life can be, and how, in an instant, circumstances can change from ridiculous to surreal. And I’m not just talking about being at a Justin Bieber concert. After five years as a volunteer firefighter, I’ve had plenty of tapouts change family dinners to warmed-up leftovers, or the first long kiss of a romantic evening into a goodbye hug and a porch light waiting for me when I get home. They are reminders that life isn’t really day-by-day as much as we’d like to think — but is truly lived minute-by-minute.

On the morning of Sept. 18, I was reminded once again how quickly life can change. And how, in the span of a few minutes, it can hang in the balance somewhere betwen clocking back in or permanently checking out. Continue reading Life can change in a heartbeat, or none at all