Momnesia

Livin' the Stereotype

AUGUSTA, GA. - J.C.: "So, are you gonna buy, like, a boat and gold dubloons and stuff with all your mad sales money?"
Me: "No. I don't want a boat."
J.C.: "Salespeople always end up with stuff like that."
Me: "We should probably buy a house before we buy a boat."
J.C.: "You could buy a houseboat."
Me: "Could. But we're not gonna."

Today I'm driving down Riverwatch to pick up Emmie and my husband calls on my only extravagance, a new cell phone. It was free, and the plan is actually cheaper than my old one, but I felt all reckless, splashing out $16 for a memory card upgrade so I can add more songs to it... if I ever figure out how to add songs to it at all, that is. Anyway, so I answer the phone.

Scott: "Guess what I'm going to get right now?"
Me: "I dunno. Crunk?"
Scott: "What?"
Me: "Nothing. What are you going to get?"
Scott: "A boat."

Aw, man...!

As it turns out, some dude was giving away a 44-year-old boat on craigslist, and my husband is just the kind of guy to see that and think: "How practical! A half-century-old broken-down boat!" To which I reply: "For me to poop on." I mean, he got irritated that I bought a fireplace screen for $5 at a yard sale because we might one day have a fireplace... and it was pretty. And he goes and buys a broken boat in anticipation that we might one day fix it.






Yet here it is, in our backyard - the backyard that we only rent - sitting on a trailer that my car might be able to haul if it's in a good mood that day. It has no lights, no seats and a hole in the windshield. The throttle hangs from a wire on the side of the boat, and the trailer is coated with rust. The motor works, though, and the fiberglass is in good shape - but I'm pretty certain that the yard sale we had on Saturday was for the explicit purpose of ridding ourselves on junk... not making room for bigger and badder pieces of junk.

I'm sure this will be a 2-year odyssey of biblical proportions. But I'll be honest: no matter how hard my husband works on it, I'm not getting into it until I see with my own eyes Moses part the Red Sea... or, in our case, Clarks Hill Lake.