If You Give a Pig a Pancake

September 19, 2006 | Category: In My Life

I finally, finally got a manicure last Thursday. And it's already ruined.

Freaking TV broke.

Let me sum up.

No. Is too complicated.

Let me explain....

See, once upon a time, we bought an antique door while in New England. Then we strapped it on the roof of the van and drove it the million billion miles home - with it fluttering and crashing "thwacka thwacka THWACKA" the entire way.

70-dozen-bajillion Advil later, it was raining when we pulled into the driveway. So we untied it and carried it into the little garage at the back of our property.

"Careful... careful... ok.. HEAVE!!" *crash* "We'll take it out and strip it and revarnish it as soon as the weather clears..."

*crickets chirp*

Then, 2-plus years later, the television died.

So hi-ho, hi-ho to Best Buy, where the nice people smoked crack and decided to give US (of which, half is unemployed) no-interest for 18 months. An hour later, we're walking back to the infamous Thwacka van with a TV as thick as Volume 1 of unabridged Shakespeare and costing as much as my first semester at Loyola.

CD's hands sweating and face grim. Because my husband? Is very fiscally conservative. He loses sleep when our financial health slips from Kermit to Ernie.

However, this is a terrible reality for him because as an Icelander he is also bred to be acquisitive and gadget-crazy. He's always fighting the cat-like compulsion to bat around and buy bright shiny things like tin foil balls and Surround Sound systems.

So it's just best for him if we NEVER go into Best Buy. Where the one half of him is thinking about the cost of money and interest rates and getting nauseaus and the other side of him is thinking "ooooh! Pretty dials!"

We survive the trip. We survive the parking lot. Then he looks at me after sliding the Thinnest.TV.Ever into the van and says "next to the house and the car, this is the most expensive thing we've ever bought." He's wrong, the couch cost more but I'm not arguing the point with a 6-foot green-faced husband.

We get home, and place a plank over the stairs and roll a wheelbarrow into our living room to snag the Dead.Humongous.TV and roll it into the alley and then, with quiet pomp and a little circumstance, CD gently rests Thinnest.TV on the stand.

Which is in direct line of sight of the front foor.

Which we never lock unless we're home.

Because, frankly, the door is older than the dirt in the front yard, literally. We suspect the lock in it was made by Barbary Pirates. It can't be replaced, the holes aren't in any place useful to current lock mechanisms. The only key we have for it is the copy of a copy of a copy of a sailor man and only works on days ending in "shit!".

CD stands out on the front steps. He looks in at the new TV. The old TV weighed 250 pounds. We figured, if someone stole it we could always find the thief in the emergency room with a hernia. We got nothing worth stealing, we always said.

Yeah.

So this weekend, the "thwacka" door was uncovered during an archeological dig of the garage and pulled onto sawhorses to be restored.

To the sounds of Ziggy Marley and Muddy Waters, we sanded and sanded and scraped and sanded. And scraped. Oh, and swept the driveway.

There is a children's book called "If you give a Pig a Pancake" about how one thing ALWAYS leads to another. How, if you give a pig a pancake, you'll end up with a syrup-covered bovine in a tutu using up all your Polaroid film.

And what I'm saying is - my fingers are sore and my manicure is destroyed.

Because the TV broke.

(But worth it, maybe?)

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