Sometime about four years ago, my wedding band disappeared.
In all honesty, the ring was large when it arrived, although at the fitting the samples in that size fit snugly. So when I would play ball, or wash the dishes, or take a shower, I would take it off so as not to lose it.
After a couple nights of it falling off my hand while I was asleep, I started taking it off at night as well, and one morning, I couldn't find it on my nightstand.
This wasn't the first time, so while I looked briefly around the bed, I didn't go too overboard and got ready for work. But as days went by, it still didn't turn up. Cate couldn't find it either, and Elizabeth hadn't seen it. I chalked it up to the newly mobile 2-year-old boy in the house and expanded my search to the recesses of his room, the heating vents, etc.
But no luck. And I went without a wedding ring for nearly two years, which bothered me, at least a little.
When time came for me to leave for NBCSports.com in Connecticut, I figured it would be bad for for me to go empty-handed. With our 10th wedding anniversary coming up, I bit the bullet and got fitted for a new plain gold wedding band. I didn't tell Cate because I wanted it to be a surprise. On the day I left, I opened the box and showed her the ring, at which point she told me she'd forgotten I wasn't wearing one.
Two years without a wedding band proved irrelevant.
Well, today I was trying to figure out how to get our recliner out the door and into the POD, turning it on its side and upside down in the process. When turning it upside down, I heard things rattling around inside it, so I felt around and came up with a kid's sock, four pencils, a hair clip, an eraser and some other random small items. After I figured I'd gotten everything, I went back in one last time.
And found the ring.
And Cate had wanted me to take the recliner to the trash! I might not have been so copious about digging around inside if that were the case.
So while this doesn't 100% exonerate Robert, it's a pretty good sign. All forgiven.
Yesterday I made an executive decision to turn on the air conditioning. The high was only 82 in our neck of the 'burbs, but Cate was cooking dinner on the stove and it just seemed like the right move so that we weren't all sweltering long into the evening.
It turned out to be the right decision. And not a difficult one.
This was not the case last year, however. Turning on the AC for the first time in 2007 involved a fair amount of finger-crossing and some tense decision-making.
As you may remember, we had operated for most of the previous nine months under the premise that we were moving. Cate and I -- mostly Cate, since I was in Connecticut, were preparing the house to put on the market and get out of Northern Virginia.
Neither of us is particularly handy. I don't think this is a surprise to anyone reading. But we had managed to get a few projects done in the interim, taking down the outdated drapes in a couple of our bedrooms and installing blinds among them.
The house also had the original 1973 thermostat, one with all the precision of a Dick Cheney hunting trip. The best we could do was hope for the temperature to be in the range of a few degrees for a short time until it needed adjusting again. So I did a little reading on the subject and determined we could manage this project ourselves.
It was relatively easy to pick out a new unit at Home Depot at the seemingly reasonable price of $80. We had the tools we needed to install it and all was set to go when, on a January afternoon, we removed the old thermostat.
The instructions were fairly comprehensive, thankfully, and referred to two possible configurations for our old, single-zone heat pump setup -- four wires or five wires. Like seemingly everything else in this house, however, it was not standard.
It had six.
Almost all of our wires were properly labeled. Almost all of the labels matched what was described in the manual. We just had an extra wire to deal with.
We spent about a half-hour agonizing over it and just decided to guess, make sure the heat worked, and let it go. Our rationale was that we weren't planning to be in the house when we needed the air conditioning anyway.
Well, of course, the NBC job went south and so did I at the end of April. And while we held off through the first heat wave of the spring, by mid-June it was clear that we needed to bite the bullet. So we threw the switch, and voila, it worked.
And the house didn't burn down or anything.
Just don't ask us to repeat it. Thanks.
Sometime about four years ago, my wedding band disappeared.
