XP G+ and FB: So, Lori, why was your husband using a chainsaw at 9 pm last night?
For the last three or four years, we've been using a dirty little secret for acquiring our Christmas tree: we go to the Ace Hardware. They are literally half the price of the normal places, and they're darn good trees. For the last three years we've gotten a tree, taken it home, put it in the stand, and called it good. Prior to that we had an old stand without all the doohickeys that help stand up the tree, and it was the most dreaded experience of the holiday holding the thing as straight as possible while David tried to put the screws in correctly so the tree did not tip at an angle.
Let's take a moment to reflect my beautiful husband has a perfectionistic streak, and that trees are immune to such callous concerns. They will grow zig zaggy or tilted. But once we started hitting Ace we got some nice, relatively straight ones.
Until this year.
We brought it home and David pulled out the lights, which were strewn across the living room floor. This is important to note, because in all future machinations with the tree, we had to avoid the land mines of small LED lights mocking us from the floor.
Problem the first: the trunk of the tree was too big to fit in the holder. This resulted in the loss of the little plastic doohickeys (on the lawn, at 8 pm). A manual saw, a lot of swearing, a flashlight and some patience later, and David found the doohickeys and cut the whole thing to size...but it still wouldn't fit.
We had paid about $35 for the tree; options were buy a new tree or get a new stand. David ran out and got a new stand. Note: I'm leaving out the period of time where we "kind" of got it into the stand and tried to set it up multiple times where it tilted, and the part where the old stand was broken by this man handling and began leaking. I've had fun before. This was not it. Though I admit that if I was watching us (and not actually us), I would have been highly amused.
David went out and bought a fancy stand that helps with the tilting problem for more than the cost of the tree. Which, then, the tree refused to fit inside. I learned this, having escaped to my office to avoid either David or I saying something unpleasant in the mist of all out frustration, by the sound of the chainsaw.
Eventually, David brought it in and put it in the stand and used the magic stand and got it to stand mostly straight. Apparently, somewhere along the line mother nature tried to take two trees and put them together at slightly different angles (or whatever reason a tree does not grow straight). The bottom of the tree was somewhat damaged, and while the tree looked the straightest it had been all night, these broken branches were prominent.
This led me to ask David to try to turn the tree. This led to thirty more minutes of attempting to do so with the new stand (which has two pieces that can move independently of one another, we learned). Eventually, David got it in some semblance of order. The lights were gathered and tossed into a closet to prevent kitties from chewing them and we went to the bedroom to stop looking at the tree.
Why, you might ask, was I not helping more? Well, David and I have an agreement. I will help with the tree being straightened and picking it out, but I don't water, and I don't do any of that other stuff, because I hate, hate, hate it. This is why David never has to handle kitty latrine duties. Druthers given, I would have an artificial tree, a point I was VERY GOOD about not pointing out last night, despite the desire to blurt it out repeatedly.
So, my honey is my hero. He made it work. And he used a chainsaw. And he still loves me (even though I broke the toilet at 7:30 am). People, this is what love looks like, and sometimes, it sounds like a running toilet or an in-use chainsaw.
Let's take a moment to reflect my beautiful husband has a perfectionistic streak, and that trees are immune to such callous concerns. They will grow zig zaggy or tilted. But once we started hitting Ace we got some nice, relatively straight ones.
Until this year.
We brought it home and David pulled out the lights, which were strewn across the living room floor. This is important to note, because in all future machinations with the tree, we had to avoid the land mines of small LED lights mocking us from the floor.
Problem the first: the trunk of the tree was too big to fit in the holder. This resulted in the loss of the little plastic doohickeys (on the lawn, at 8 pm). A manual saw, a lot of swearing, a flashlight and some patience later, and David found the doohickeys and cut the whole thing to size...but it still wouldn't fit.
We had paid about $35 for the tree; options were buy a new tree or get a new stand. David ran out and got a new stand. Note: I'm leaving out the period of time where we "kind" of got it into the stand and tried to set it up multiple times where it tilted, and the part where the old stand was broken by this man handling and began leaking. I've had fun before. This was not it. Though I admit that if I was watching us (and not actually us), I would have been highly amused.
David went out and bought a fancy stand that helps with the tilting problem for more than the cost of the tree. Which, then, the tree refused to fit inside. I learned this, having escaped to my office to avoid either David or I saying something unpleasant in the mist of all out frustration, by the sound of the chainsaw.
Eventually, David brought it in and put it in the stand and used the magic stand and got it to stand mostly straight. Apparently, somewhere along the line mother nature tried to take two trees and put them together at slightly different angles (or whatever reason a tree does not grow straight). The bottom of the tree was somewhat damaged, and while the tree looked the straightest it had been all night, these broken branches were prominent.
This led me to ask David to try to turn the tree. This led to thirty more minutes of attempting to do so with the new stand (which has two pieces that can move independently of one another, we learned). Eventually, David got it in some semblance of order. The lights were gathered and tossed into a closet to prevent kitties from chewing them and we went to the bedroom to stop looking at the tree.
Why, you might ask, was I not helping more? Well, David and I have an agreement. I will help with the tree being straightened and picking it out, but I don't water, and I don't do any of that other stuff, because I hate, hate, hate it. This is why David never has to handle kitty latrine duties. Druthers given, I would have an artificial tree, a point I was VERY GOOD about not pointing out last night, despite the desire to blurt it out repeatedly.
So, my honey is my hero. He made it work. And he used a chainsaw. And he still loves me (even though I broke the toilet at 7:30 am). People, this is what love looks like, and sometimes, it sounds like a running toilet or an in-use chainsaw.