Whelp. We’ve entered the final countdown. Just three more nights to go before 500 Words Before Bedtime, Year 4 turns out the lights and goes to bed.
Before we get started with the business of the evening, I do feel the need to correct some misconceptions. After I wrote about staring at a laundry basket while Donald Patrick was at a fancy hotel, and he implied that he might have “taken the laundry with him to fold in the room,” a friend texted me saying, “You know, I could even see him doing that! Lugging laundry around for you.”
Ladies and Gentlemen, no. Donald Patrick is a fine man who cooks wonderful food, prays over stunned woodchucks, and once rode his bicycle around with a roadside FryDaddy on the handlebars. I have eaten some wonderful food (though not, I don’t think, woodchuck) prepared in this selfsame deep-fat fryer and thus appreciate his urban scavenging skills.
But Donald Patrick is allergic to laundry. When I met the man, his entire laundry, closet, and chest-of-drawers system consisted of two baskets by the dryer.
We have a very clear and even division of labor around here:
-Cooking? Don/Cleanup? Sarah
-Trash? Don/Laundry? Sarah
-Fixing the plumbing? Don/Not glazing over into a near-coma during discussions with financial advisors? Sarah.
You get the idea. If you come to our house and see folded t-shirts in a drawer (which, why are you looking in our drawers? That’s very strange, and I’m not sure we’ll invite you back), you can be absolutely certain who folded them.
Phew. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get back to bowls. Today, after church, I went to Goodwill to find bowls. I did not find bowls. Well. I mean, I *did* find bowls, but they were in random assortments: Three of fancy china from an otherwise absent set of China; two standard Corelle; four exceptionally deep ones in stoneware with a flower pattern and green-painted rims. In other words, bowls that will stoke rather than assuage my current cupboard chaos.
At this point, you may be thinking, “Ollie’s? Goodwill? Sarah, do you know there are stores that actually sell bowls? Stores where you can be assured that if you walk in and ask the saleslady for bowls, she will lead you to a tastefully arrayed assortment of matching sets for a reasonable price?”
And, yes, I do know this, thank you very much. Goodness. First you’re snooping through my drawers and now you’re trying to educate me about department stores? I’m beginning to question this relationship, to be perfectly honest.
The problem is not that I don’t know where to find bowls. The problem is my conscience. Because, see, I *have* bowls. Do they make me unhappy? Yes. But are they functional? Also yes. And deriving such dissatisfaction from your freaking cereal bowls that you have to go buy brand new ones seems like a very first-world problem thing to do. I can’t justify it. It feels ridiculous.
I guess we all know what this means:
Moan about dodecahedral bowls? Sarah/Ride around on bicycle until perfect set of bowls appears by roadside? Clearly Don.
I mean, yeah, I know it’s cold, but we did agree to split chores down the middle.
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