Adventures in Domesticity: The Couch

Okay, SO...

We moved into our new apartment, and since we still had the U-haul trailer until noon the next day, we figured we should take advantage of this opportunity to get a couch while we actually had a way to transport it. We could have just gone to DI or something and paid $40, but I wanted to see if we could get a couch for free, because college.

Someone on KSL was giving away a really nice green couch. Not a gross, someone-could-have-puked-on-this-and-I'd-have-no-idea green, but a contemporary green that would actually look nice. It looked a bit like this couch, except it had those armrests that curve on the inside and are straight on the outside:

Not your Grandma's weird green couch, is what I'm saying.

It was apparently just out on the curb and was free to whoever got there first. The only problem was, it was in Murray, which was about an hour away with traffic. Nevertheless, I decided I'd rather go on a vain quest for free furniture with a questionable history than unpack the apartment. Mason agreed to come along and we recruited my friend James to help lift it into the U-haul.

SO we had a really enjoyable, relaxing drive up through various highways and sub-highways while trying to merge with a trailer blocking our view out the back window. Despite the best efforts of other cars to get into pileups with multiple semi-trucks, we arrived in Murray. We turn onto the street, and pull towards the house only to see some jerk with a blue minivan in the process of loading the couch of destiny into their car.

Like, we literally got there five minutes too late.

There was another couch available in West Jordan, and the owner had said we could come by at 8 pm to pick it up. It was about 3:30 pm at this point, and I definitely didn't want to waste my gas and avoiding-near-death-highway-collisions quotas on going to Provo and coming back. James agreed to prolong our adventure and stop by the West Jordan house to see if anyone happened to be home.

After many, many, many detours, thanks to the stellar combination of Apple Maps and Utah road construction, we arrived on a quiet cul-de-sac and knocked on the door. A woman answered, looking confused, and I had a sudden flashback to my mission. All of my instincts insisted that I should start asking her about her religion, but instead I managed to communicate that we wanted to take her couch.

She shrugged and opened the garage, revealing a structurally sound couch covered in various types of gross. Mason and James loaded it into the car, and we agreed that it would probably be good with a vacuum and maybe some fabric cleaner. It seemed that our adventure had reached its successful conclusion.

Well, it seemed.

(Foreshadowing is hard, you guys. Also, you don't even need foreshadowing, you just need to follow me on Twitter and you'll already know what happens next.)

Ahem. Anyways.

So we're driving home on the I-15 and everything seems great. Of course, the combination of the trailer and Utah highways seems to be causing a little shaking, but we weren't worried about it.

The car began pulling to the right. We figured the couch had shifted, and kept driving.

The shaking got worse and worse. It seemed to be in line with the bumps that were regularly placed along every five feet of the corrugated road, though, so I thought everything was just fine.

But the shaking got worse, and suddenly we decided we needed to pull over RIGHT NOW. As we did so, a piece of rubber went flying past our window.

Oh.

Strangely, I had been suppressing the urge to swear over completely minor moving things all day, but in this moment, the only thing that came to mind was "shoot."

To backtrack a bit, I had JUST FILLED UP THE TIRES the previous week, and everything seemed fine then. So I'm 91% sure that this blowout wasn't due to some sort of car maintenance negligence.

Anyways. So we're pulled over on the I-15 with semi trucks whizzing past us at 70 mph, and even though the shoulder is large enough to easily accommodate our car and trailer, I can't resist the feeling that I'm about to become a Jaclyn pancake.

Fortunately, a Highway Patrol guy shows up and puts his lights on behind us, which makes me feel safer. He supervises the tire change and loosens a few lug nuts (which were initially so tight that Mason and James had to stomp on the wrench and Mason got a pretty impressive bruise from it).

We get the spare tire put on, finally, and drive the rest of the way from Thanksgiving Point to Provo. Now I'm paranoid of every strange sound or smell, which is complicated by the fact that the shredded tire is in the trunk and filling the car with the scent of destroyed rubber.

So eventually we get home, clean up the couch, and decide to go to DI for the rest of the furniture we need.

I'm pretty sure the money we saved on the free couch is going towards fixing our tires now.

Totally worth it?

Adventures in Domesticity: The Pie

This post originally appeared on Facebook. I realized I have a lot of similar stories, and decided to make a series of it.

So today I got my homework done early, so I decided to make a casserole for dinner and do the laundry. I still had time in the evening, so I was like, hey, why not make a pie?

For some background, I had a bunch of frozen blueberries in the freezer and I had decided a few weeks ago that making a half-apple, half-blueberry pie in my divided pie plate was the most logical way to use them up before moving. I have no idea where I got that idea.

So I make the pie dough, and come across my first problem: my pie crust recipe makes enough for THREE TO SIX pies. THREE TO SIX, you guys! I started panicking and trying to think of contingency plans that would let me get rid of three to six pies in the space of a week.

Then I go to put the filling in the pie crust, and I realize I've made WAYYYYYY too much apple filling. So I'm like, no problem, I made about the same amount of blueberry filling, so I'll just make two pies. I thought I was halfway to solving problem #1.

Apple pie goes great. I put it in the freezer to make later in the week. Then I get out my other pie plate, and it's HUUUUUUUGE. Guys, I have no idea why it's so huge. But the blueberry filling only fills about 1/3 of the pie shell.

So I decide, okay, I'll stop by South End Market on the way to pick Mason up from work and buy more berries. Guys, blueberries are FIVE DOLLARS for a TINY LITTLE CARTON at South End. They're out of raspberries and I don't want to pit a trillion cherries at 9:30 pm, so I end up buying $7.50 worth of blackberries instead.

Now my blue- and blackberry pie is in the oven, an apple pie is in the freezer, I have some pie crust cookies ready to go, and my back hurts.

I have no idea why I thought blueberry pie would be the best way to get rid of my blueberries, but on the plus side, between the pies and the casserole I think I've completed 90% of the cooking I need to between now and moving.

Things I Learned in English 316

My professor for my technical writing course last semester has ADHD, and he's great. This is a selection of things he's gone off topic about in class (representing about four lectures of tangents):

• Robert Frost, TS Elliott, and Shakespeare. Specifically, several poems and soliloquies recited from memory, and what they said about death and suicide. "LIFE IS MEANINGLESS!"
• How to troubleshoot your vintage Volkswagen Bug when it breaks down on your way to ski at Snowbird for $7. "So the damn thing stopped."
• A class poll was taken to see how many people would be in favor of caffeinated beverages on campus. "I have a 12-pack of Diet Coke in my office."
• Whether girls are really less shallow than guys, since they don't like to date men who are shorter than them.
• Why his high school typing teacher was terrible, and how he had to take shorthand from her the next semester.
• How he got into college without taking the ACT or the GRE.
• A story about how he got "fired" from piano lessons at the age of 6, and no piano teacher in his town would take him on. "I thought it was great."
• "This is a book I wrote about the history of prostitution..."
• An explanation of how he's trying to cut down on swearing, except "damn" and "hell," which are in the Bible.
• "Donald Trump just needs to grow up and realize he doesn't have any hair."
• An explanation of how the word "bitching" has become more pejorative today than when he was our age.
• "This is a picture of my foot in Moab..."
• Diet Coke has a distinct smell compared to Pepsi, which is crap.
• A detailed description of which documents he prefers to type and which he prefers to write by hand.
• How is Keith Richards still alive with all the drugs he uses?
• He's not afraid of bears, is totally fine with being 20-30 yards from a bear, but flying terrifies him.
• Different types of old guns and how they work.
• Different types of trees.
• Different types of women's hairstyles.
• Different types of mud.
• Different types of deer.
• The cost of parking in Seattle (which is apparently Bernie Sanders' fault).
• How complicated recycling is (also Bernie Sanders' fault).
• The merits of Orrin Hatch, who has never changed his mind about anything in his life.
• How he bought a cherry pitter from a State Fair and couldn't figure out the instructions to assemble it.
• How carburetors work, and how to maintain them in old cars.

The Completely True, Doctrinally Accurate Story of How I Inadvertently Created Donald Trump

Archangel, holding a clipboard: "All right, everyone, for today's brainstorming session Michael has assigned our group the topic of 'Minor Inconveniences of a Fallen World.' He would like them to be as ironic as possible, so let's start throwing out ideas!"

Angel 1: "Not getting enough sleep makes you tired, but sleeping too much also makes you tired!"

Angel 2: "All the tasty foods are unhealthy, and all the healthy foods are especially hard to get children to eat."

Archangel: "Good, good, keep them coming."

Angel 3: "Spiders control the population of all the other gross bugs, but they are the most disgusting and fear-inducing of them all."

Me: "Wait...guys..."

Angel 2: "Avocados and bananas are healthy and delicious, but they stay unripe for two weeks, are ripe for half a day, and promptly become disgusting."

Angel 3: "The more often you clean your hair, the faster your hair gets dirty."

Angel 2: "Actually, let's just make that true for the entire body."

Me: "Guys..."

Angel 1: "How about a disease that makes you need to pee more frequently, but also makes peeing really painful?"

Archangel: "I don't know, that seems like it would fall under the 'Illnesses and Afflictions' group. Is there any way you can tone it down a little?"

Angel 1: "What if it mainly affected women?"

Archangel: "Sounds good to me."

Me: "Wait, how does making it mainly affect women suddenly downgrade it to a 'minor inconvenience'?"

Archangel: "Well...um...uh...look, if you're not going to contribute any of your own ideas, you can't criticize ours. Do you have a better idea?"

Me: "Gee, I don't know...how about 'people thinking they're right when they're clearly wrong'?"

Angel 1: "Hey, great idea, how'd you come up with that?"

Me: "I have no clue..."

Archangel: "All right, let's put it down. Our next topic..."

Me: "Wait, I wasn't serious!"

*no response*

Me: "I have a bad feeling about this."

(image source)

Donald Trump: "I'm here to make America great again!"