Help yourself

We have a self-help store here on post where you can go and get various household items for free. Apparently they have these types of places on all military installations, but the only one I've ever used was in Hawaii, when I used to go get mouse traps to use to catch mice that we would then feed to the wild pigs that routinely hung out in our yard. That sounds mean, I know, but what else are you supposed to do with the mice once you catch them? I mean, they were snap traps, so the mice were most of the time still alive, so you couldn't really put them in the trash can. Plus, the pigs were hungry, so it was win-win. Another reason? We were bored. We were on an island in the middle of the ocean. And contrary to what that show would have you believe, the smoke monster didn't live there in 2002.

I would like to take this opportunity to say that I love Hawaii and everything about it, I miss Hawaii and everything about it, and I pray really hard every night that the Army will call and say "Oh, we made a mistake, you're supposed to be in Hawaii, so go there RIGHT NOW."

Anyway.

So we live in field grade housing now, which is military housing for Majors, Lt Colonels, and Colonels, and I am feeling a little bit of pressure to make the yard look presentable. And by "presentable" I mean I make an effort to get out there around twice a week to pick up all the dog shit so the Chaplain who lives next door doesn't have to smell it. But here lately I decided we needed to plant some flowers.

I've never been one to plant flowers in the yard. In Hawaii we had beautiful flowers, because the weather in Hawaii is perfectly conducive to beautiful flowers, so basically you plant them and then you're done. The weather there never changes, so the flowers just live and live. But I can't remember living any other place that was nice enough to make us want to do anything in the yard. Though there was this one time in Texas I let some Hispanics cut a few branches off a tree in the front yard that were touching the power lines. So maybe that counts.

Well guess what? Self-help here on post has free flowers. You just go over there and pick your flowers and they give them to you to beautify your yard with. Everybody here has them. And you can look like a pulled together family, or rather I can look freaking awesome, because not only, NOT ONLY, do I have three kids in school, I have a disagreeable toddler I stay home and take care of, a dog, a cat, and farmville various household tasks like cooking, cleaning, shopping, etc. to do, not to mention Owen's baseball practice, and I can still manage to plant beautiful flowers in the front yard.

(I have now totally gone off subject in two sentences that I wrote, erased, re-wrote, and re-erased because I have the distinct feeling I will offend someone. There are a few of you who probably have an idea of what those sentences probably said. Yes, it was mean of me. Whatever.)

Last Saturday morning Scott and I went to self-help and picked out some lightbulbs, a sink stopper-God we are so wild it's barely legal-, three bags of mulch and 14 flats of flowers. Which, in case you don't know, is 168 individual flowers to plant into the ground. There was a limit, the guy said, of 10 flats per house, but that was only for the first little bit they had them, and now we could get however many we wanted. Well, I wanted to get ALL OF THEM, all 2 million, but Scott was all "Jennifer, they won't fit in the van and I'm not making two trips blah blah blah" so we only got 14. And when we left there I was absolutely giddy with the thoughts of just how domesticated I was going to look outside planting flowers for everyone to see.

Saturday afternoon I halfway killed myself. So what eventually ended up happening was Sunday afternoon everyone got to see me sitting in a chair on the front patio while Scott planted all the flowers. And that's fine, just fine, it was all some crazy pipe dream anyway, and I did manage to get one wife to comment "Now, THAT'S what I call gardening!" which she probably said because Scott had his shirt off. haha! Not really. Though it could have been the huge margarita glass on the table right beside the bottles of percocet and valium.

Wednesday my cell phone rang, and after I said "Hello?" a distinctly Korean man said "Hello?" so I said "Hello?" again and kind of held my breath, because this is what Koreans do on the phone. They repeat you. They are thinking so hard about what point they want to get across and how to speak it in English that when you finally answer it all goes right out the window and you kind of just greet each other for a while until they snap out of it. And the Korean man says "Starr?" so I said "Yes. Starr." This is another thing they do, they have a problem with first and last names and which order they write them and which order we write them and which order the Army writes them and really, it makes SO MUCH sense to have a bunch of Koreans doing so many of the civilian jobs here.

And the Korean guy says "Where the ho at?"

And for a few seconds I am speechless; I am trying to figure out what he's trying to ask me, because really, WHAT IS HE TRYING TO ASK ME, and finally I'm all "uh, I'm sorry?"

And he goes "We self-help. Where the ho? The ho your husband got from self-help."

WHAT THE HELL? Self-help has hos? I mean, I know Itaewon does, but self-help? ALL I SAW WAS LIGHTBULBS AND FLOWERS. My husband got a ho from self-help? So I say "Uh, ho?"

And then he goes "Yes. Ho and shovel."

OH. HOE. As in garden hoe. To plant flowers with.

And suddenly I lost all interest in the conversation.

So Scott comes home from lunch, and I tell him, and he thinks it's hilarious of course, so he goes out to get the hoe and shovel and put it in the van and I ask "Don't you think you should clean it off, it's kind of dirty."

BECAUSE EVEN AFTER 14 YEARS, I STILL HAVEN'T LEARNED.

Because of course Scott says "Nah, she was dirty when I got her, and it was all good. Hey, thanks for making sure she gets back okay."

haha. He's so funny. It's too bad he has a day job.

So we took them back, and while Scott was signing the receipt another couple walked in and the guy was all "LIGHTBULBS!" and went running in that direction. And the wife just kind of shrugged and said "He gets all excited about free lightbulbs." and I was all "That's nothing. WAIT TIL HE FINDS LAWN AND GARDEN."