I used to try a lot harder. Yesterday I scrolled through a bunch of old e-mails between Jason and me from when we first met and through much of our time dating (yes, I saved them ALL. Call me a packrat. Call me a dork). Maybe he didn’t catch on, but even from scanning the subject lines I remember that I was flirting with him, often trying to be clever or to reference something he might think was cool—from song titles or lyrics (especially Cure songs)

The old man is snoring
When hip hop drove the big cars
Friday, I’m in love
For dancing like you don’t hear the beat
Watch the walls instead
Life goes easy on me
Wish it were a Sunday

to Buffy or Freaks and Geeks references

Smooches and Mooches
Just another Tuesday night in Sunnydale

to movie quotes

Maaannnniiiiii!
A football is round, a game lasts ninety minutes
Those racecar yia-yias.

I was always trying to think of something that might make him intrigued (not that he wouldn’t have opened the e-mail anyway, but, you know, it added a little something, I thought). And, yeah, the conversations we started in those e-mails were pretty interesting as well. These days, if I e-mail Jason at all, it’s usually with a yawner of a subject line with the potential to get caught in a spam filter:

an e-mail
your message
trees 1
trees2
dress?
font

I feel like I’ve let myself go—gotten old, gotten boring. That said, one of the nice things about being married is that we no longer conduct most of our conversations over e-mail. Then again, it’s a slippery slope—get boring with e-mail subject lines, slack on the content of said e-mails, and the next thing you know all our communication is equally mundane: what did Simon eat today? How much did he poop? Oh wait. 

I am totally kicking myself. Hard. Earlier this year, Jason made it quite clear what he wanted for Christmas. A no-brainer, right? It really should have been. It’s just that I didn’t want to get him the five-disc ultimate collector’s edition of Blade Runner. I can’t explain why, exactly, I just really, really didn’t want to. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to have it; it’s just that I didn’t want it to be his Christmas present from me. I wanted to get him something more, I don’t know, “wifely,” I guess.

So I didn’t get it for him. (And true confessions here, I didn’t have any better ideas . . . or any ideas at all this year, so my poor husband’s Christmas from me was, well, just lame. Ugh.) He got it for himself instead. No problem, I thought.

But then it came in the mail today. And he was soooooo excited about it (I have no doubt he’ll be posting pictures and whatnot soon). And even though he admitted that he was overdoing his excitement just a little to rub it in that I wasn’t the one who bought it for him (he’s not above it), it still made me sad that I had stupidly missed an opportunity to bless my husband. I still would have thought it was a little ridiculous, and I still would have rolled my eyes at him, but I would have secretly been proud that he liked his gift so much. It would have been so easy, and I’m guessing that his joy would probably have outweighed my frumpiness about the gift I didn’t really understand. Shoulda, woulda, coulda.

Inspired by Andy’s shoe pic, this is just one of the many things that get out of control in our household. (Um, also, I didn’t leave the house today—and, truth be told, hardly left the couch—so picture options are limited, to say the least.)

Some might also call it “scooping.” Either way, Jason has to do all the work these days.

In the last couple of years, I somehow came to posess a small, mishmash set of Melmac dishes from my grandparents’ house--four dinner plates (two yellow, one pink, and one blue) and about three times that many saucer-size plates. I love, love, love these plates...more than any others (and I do know plates; some women like shoes, I like dishes). These are the plates we always, always ate from on the farm, and I know they are nostalgic for more than just me because everytime my sister or an aunt or uncle sees them they say, “Heeeey, how’d you get these?”

Until today, I was under the impression that Melmac was indestructible. Sadly, it is not so. I left a potato in the microwave and ran upstairs. When I came back down I heard a loud crack! that at first I thought was just our overactive ice maker. Nope. I was relieved to find that the bits of plate had simply cracked off of the bottom--my fear was that they had melted.

Since I couldn’t readily think of a good or crafty use for a compromised Melmac plate, I had to let it go. R.I.P., sweet Boontonware.