Paul Rocks When He's Not Scaring the Bejezus Out of Me

We arrived home from Utah late on Saturday night and I didn't want to go home to my house because a) it would be cold and dark, b) I'd have a long hike up 3 stories with heavy luggage in the cold and dark, c) I had no edible food in my refrigerator and d) I wanted to stay at Paul's house. So I stayed at Paul's house.  That meant I had to go home yesterday morning to leave all my luggage, warm up the house, start some laundry and do a quick fridge inventory.

When I got home it was 43F in my apartment.  And a second smoke detector had gone on the fritz and needed a new battery.  When I got home from Arkansas a couple of weeks ago the smoke detector in my room was dead and beeping.  Yesterday the main one in the hallway that controls all the others was dead and beeping.  That one beeps even after the dead battery is removed so that you can't get any peace until you feed it a live battery.  I dumped out an ounce of sour milk, half a dozen single servings of leftover peas, lasagna, guacamole and other assorted rotten foods.  I started a load of laundry and wrote a short grocery list.  Then I left to pick up the kids.

I spent the rest of the day driving to southern Colorado and back.  When we got home we were tired and a little hungry.  I forgot all of that though when I opened the door and saw the Christmas tree lit up.  I knew I had not turned on the lights that morning because I remembered looking at it a couple of times and thinking how sad and lonely it looked with no lights on.  And even if I had turned the lights on, I would have turned them off before I left because I am both paranoid and cheap.

Immediately, my mind raced to all those horror stories about people coming home to strangers in their houses.  Because, you know, an intruder waiting to rob and kill you will always turn on your Christmas tree to lure you into a sense of security, right? Right. I considered sending the kids out into the breezeway so they could get a head start running while I searched the house for the bad guy but it was about 15F out there and deep down I didn't really believe there was someone waiting to jump out and grab me.

Instead, I called Paul and said, "Did you come over to my house today?"  I figured there were a bunch of reasons he might have needed to come over, like to get some wine or to borrow a baking dish or maybe he left a jacket or something here last time he was over. Lots of reasons.  And that's why I've given him a key and such.  Paul said, "Why do you ask?" so I said that my Christmas lights were on and I wanted to be sure I wasn't about to be murdered.  He said, "Maybe Santa Claus did it."  By this time I knew he had been over and so I was going about my business in the apartment, taking off my coat and turning on lights and stuff.  Then I saw my television on the floor of my bedroom.

I went back to the living room.  I opened the television cabinet.  There was a beautiful Sony 32-inch, 1080p, plasma screen HD television sitting in that cabinet.  And it had a cute little red bow on the corner.  It was all connected to the Roku and everything.

I began to freak out in a minor way and the kids around me began to freak out in a major way.  Paul was laughing and saying, "Breathe, breathe, you have to breathe!"

See, I had been planning to buy a new tv for our family with the bulk of our Christmas budget.  I told the kids about it but I told them that it would wait until after the holidays were over and things settled down and I could find a good deal.  But I hate shopping for this kind of stuff.  I know nothing about electronics or what constitutes a good deal.  Plus, getting it home and hooking it all up are things I do not excel at.  If fact, I quite stink at that.

So Paul took care of all of that for me.  Isn't he awesome?  It turns out we got a lot of tv for relatively little money because it was an open box item at Best Buy and Paul is good at the haggling bit, too.  It cost just a tad more than what I was planning to spend so I'll pay Paul back what was in my budget and we'll call it good.

And you know what else?  Paul replaced the batteries in my dead smoke detectors, too.

P.S. This blog is 3 years old.