I don’t know about you guys, but as a kid growing up in the late 80s-early 90s, I LIVED for my Wednesday night Unsolved Mysteries.  Oh, Robert Stack, how you beguiled me with intriguing tales of long lost siblings, the ghost of Billy the Kid, and the likes of El Chupacabra.  (You even had me convinced that my parents had adopted away my twin at birth.  That is, until my mom produced my birth certificate to set me straight.)

We have recently had a mystery of our own in my household.  The past few weeks I have carefully purchased enough deli meat to make sandwiches for our lunches, and yet every week, we have run out by Wednesday or Thursday.

Little did I know that one afternoon I would walk into our kitchen and stumble across The Mystery of the Disappearing Lunchmeat revealed!

What you are about to see is not a news broadcast.  The following is a re-enactment of an actual eyewitness account.  (note:  the re-enactment could not be filmed at the actual crime scene, due to a Bad Lighting Situation.  And also due to a Dishwasher in Pieces and Cluttering the Kitchen Floor Situation.)

Seems innocent enough, right?  A dog looks up adoringly at her owner.

The owner speaks:  “Hello Holly.  Would you like to play a game?  You’ll like this game.  I call it Silence of the Labs.”

The narrator starts to get suspicious:  “Hey, wait a minu—”

“OH THE HORROR!  WHAT AM I LOOKING AT RIGHT NOW?”

“Is it over?  Did I black out?  Why does my dog smell like Honey Ham?”

As you might have gathered from my cookie post, Josh has some pretty odd sleeping habits. For instance, he is a sleep-eater. Often we wake up in the morning to find an open bag of Doritos in the middle of the coffee table, and Josh will shake his head and say, “Well, I guess I ate some chips last night.”

Around the time of our first Christmas as a married couple, someone gave me a tin of fudge. The next day Josh kept bugging me to make some brownies or a cake or something, anything with chocolate (and I thought the girls were supposed to have the chocolate cravings?)

I wasn’t in the mood to bake. Okay, let’s be serious here, I am never in the mood to bake. Me + Baking = dangerous. I once fell asleep while baking, only to wake with a start and run into the kitchen hollering “CHESS SQUARES!”

It was too late, our house smelled like burnt sugar and cream cheese for a week, and I am pretty sure we had to throw out the pan. Annnnyway, let’s shift the attention back to Josh now, shall we? In lieu of the indoor bonfire I was sure to create upon attempting baked goods, I suggested that he calm his inner chocoholic with the gifted fudge.

Josh: What fudge?
Me: You know, the fudge. The tin of fudge I brought home last night.
Josh: Um.
Me: …
Josh: Well, I saw an empty tin on the counter this morning–
Me: No, it’s not empty, there are at least 30 pieces of fudge in there.
Josh: It was definitely em– oh.
Me: Wait.
Josh: …
Me: Are you telling me that you ate an ENTIRE tin of fudge in your sleep last night?
Josh: …
Me: Wow, how are you not dead?

I am okay with these weird sleeping habits, even though finding half-eaten containers of junk food scattered around your house is a little off-putting. I don’t even really mind when he asks me if I’m “depreciating” in his sleep after watching a real estate show, or telling me “where the trail ends” during a particularly vivid dream after a day of riding dirt bikes.

But I have to admit, his latest nocturnal escapade really threw me for a loop.

I was enjoying a nice, relaxing sleep, when all the sudden Josh sat straight up in bed, looked around, and BOLTED out of the bedroom like something was chasing him.

I lay there dazed for a moment, wondering if I should get up and help him–maybe he thought he heard a burglar or something? But um, I am kind of ashamed to admit this, but it would take a lot more than that to get me out of my comfy bed. I was channeling my inner Jim Gaffigan:

You ever been asleep at night, and you’re awakened by a noise, and you’re convinced there someone breaking into your house and they’re gonna kill ya? But instead of getting up, you just go back to bed.

“Oh what is that a murderer? I gotta get some sleep, can’t kill me if I’m asleep!”

That’d be embarrassing… you get to heaven: “Hey, how’d you die?”

“Oh me? I was too lazy to get out of bed. Yeah, I heard the guy in the kitchen and I thought I had an hour.”

So I just stayed in bed and kept very still and listened for signs of danger. All I really heard was Josh opening and closing the refrigerator, so I figured we were safe. Eventually he came back to bed.

Me: Okay, WHAT. was that?
Josh: There was a flying fish chasing me.
Me: …
Josh: (shrug)
Me: So I guess if we ever get attacked by flying fish, I’m on my own?
Josh: I guess so.

Exciting things are afoot.

Maybe.

I’ve really been digging the term “afoot” recently, so I could be just inventing an excuse to use it.

In any case, I think we can all agree –exciting or no– things, they are: afoot.

Goodness, sometimes my vocabulary and I are obnoxious.

P.S. I have solved the previously unmentioned Mystery of the Disappearing Lunchmeat. Look for photographic evidence in an upcoming blog!

This afternoon I breathed a sigh of relief as I stood in the Honda parking lot and opened my car door with a simple pull of the handle. You see, Friday night Josh pissed himself off royally by yanking too hard on my driver-side door handle and breaking it to the point that the only way to open the door was from the inside.

I like to think of it as karma’s way of saying “ha, ha!” after all the times he has warned me that I am “too rough” on things like door handles and cell phones and dishwashers (though coincidentally, all of those things have broken recently. Suspicious.)

He was way angrier about that broken handle than I was, even though I am the one who’s been having to contort my body in various ways just to get inside my car. I say it was worth the sacrifice to be able to say to him, “You know, maybe this wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t so rough on things,” and watch his head nearly explode.

The lack of a working door handle has presented some challenges (mainly trying not to moon my neighbors as I streeeetch across the console,) but hey, I’m a resourceful girl, and I’m no stranger to improvising when it comes to a less than perfect car. Heck, I spent the better part of my senior year listening to “Hit ‘Em Up Style” via a shower radio draped across the passenger headrest after my Volvo wagon’s tape deck stopped working.

This morning I had to remove the battery from my cell phone after it got stuck in locked mode AGAIN (which, AT&T?  I spent my extra birthday money on this ridiculous phone so I could use the super-fun slidey text keyboard thingy that I am honestly too old to be excited about.  I did not buy it so that I could watch it refuse to respond to my “unlock” commands.)

Anywayyyyyyy.  Before replacing the battery, I paused and, without thinking, blew into the phone.

Now.  Some people might be perplexed by my behavior.  But I know there is an entire generation out there full of people who know exactly why I reacted that way: we are the Nintendo kids.

When your game of Super Mario 3 froze just before that leaf gave you your raccoon suit, what did you do?

When you and your Power Pad lost the long jump competition because your screen was suddenly filled with jagged pixels, what did you do?

That’s right, you ejected that cartridge and blew the dust out.  Even now, I catch myself blowing on a DVD even when I know good and well that it’s skipping because of scratches, not dust.

I gotta wonder how every kid in Mrs. Yoos’ second grade class knew that trick.  I guess any of us could get creative when our beloved video games are threatened.

My friend Jennifer and I once MacGyvered our Super Nintendo with a paper clip shoved into a coaxial cable.  Apparently we feared electrocution less than life without  Uniracers.