Alice's Adventures Underground

"I think I'm going to stop eating pork."

"Why?" I - and three others - say expectantly, and in unison... knowing something good was about to come.

"Well, salt is like... the ultimate purifier. You use it to preserve food, and also to season food. You can also use salt to kill slugs. Pigs don't like salt either. So I'm not going to eat pork anymore."

"Beeeecaaauuuse... you're afraid the pig will taste like a slug?"

"It sounded better in my head."

Discussing his earliest memory after I'd told him this warm fuzzy story about how the earliest memory I have is of me sitting at the piano bench with my mother, singing: "I think the earliest thing I remember is of my grandmother yelling at me for eating a whole stick of butter."

At the Rainforest Cafe, a bunch of us were having lunch together. We all ordered and the waitress went away, brought drinks, etc. At some point after the drinks arrived and the waitress disappeared, The KoH became extremely agitated that he'd forgotten to order Ranch dressing to go with his French fries (that's the only way to eat fries if you're my husband). So he starts looking around for the waitress to tell her. She's nowhere to be seen. I remind him that waitresses always forget his Ranch dressing anyway, so he might just as well wait until the food comes and then ask for it. This is not acceptable and he notifies everyone at the table to be on the lookout for the waitress and gives me the task of ordering a side of Ranch dressing if I see the waitress while he's in the bathroom. He comes back... still no waitress. He simply cannot be a part of the conversation while worrying about the Ranch dressing, so finally he gets up and asks some other waitress to find our waitress.

A few moments later, she appears at the table and he says "I forgot to order a side of Ranch dressing with my meal... to go with my fries." She writes it down. Finally the food comes and the waitress put our meals down in front of each of us. When she comes to The KoH, she puts down his meal; he has ordered Jambalaya.... which does not come with fries.

A second later, she comes back with a side of Ranch dressing and sets it down in front of him.

He looks up at her and says, "Can I have some fries to go with my Ranch dressing?"

"We should get a jerkifyer... because I would actually eat raisins if they were called ‘jerky grapes’."

Discussing the finer points of appetizers in restaurants: "I've learned that you never order the sampler version of an appetizer. Usually they have something that you like on there, like Fried Mozzarella and something you maybe would eat but aren't too crazy about like Buffalo wings. But then the other two things on the plate are Deep Fried Cat Turds and Barbecued Pig Farts. So you look at the menu and you say to yourself, 'Gee, I'd really like the Mozzarella sticks and I could go for the Buffalo Wings if I had to but I'm just not really into the Deep Fried Cat Turds and Barbecued Pig Farts.' So you may as well just order two appetizers."

There's a famous scene in When Harry Met Sally, where Sally, while in a restaurant, and piling cold cuts onto the sandwich she's ordered, fakes an orgasm out loud right in front of Harry and the entire restaurant. I've seen this movie a hundred times, but The KoH hadn't. So during that scene, she goes through the long drawn out process of making sounds and talking as though she's having sex, finishes, smiles and then starts to put cold cuts on her sandwich and eat. There's a pause as I look at him; he looks at me... the moment brewing with sexual tension... and then he says,

"I wish I had some cold cuts."

When I was in the hospital having a c-section, the doctors let The KoH into the operating room with me. About half way through the operation, it appeared he was feeling woozy and sick so the anesthesiologist started talking to him to distract him. He was looking at the vital monitoring equipment and said, "So that's the pulse ox there... and that's where you see the heart rate right?"

The anesthesiologist, obviously impressed, looked at him and said, "That's right... how.. how did you know that?"

"I watch a lot of ER."

Sitting on the couch watching TV about 4:30 pm, he suddenly stands up, drops his pants to the floor and then sits back down in his underwear. I look at him and say, "What the heck are you doing?"

"My keys in my pocket were poking me in the leg."

"Why don't you just take your keys out of your pocket?"

He says, "If I take my keys out of my pocket, I might forget where I put them.... But I won't forget I don't have any pants on."

"Some words are just inherently funny. Take 'monkey'. Now that's a funny word. If you tell a joke with the word 'monkey' in it - you've got a funny joke. 'Chicken' is funny too - but not as funny as 'monkey'."

"We have to go to the neighborhood watch meeting tonight. Guess now you won't be able to go show those El Salvadorians (the men he works with) how it's done on the soccer field like I told them you could."

"Honey, I don't play soccer."

"Yes, you do."

"You've been married to me for three years, have you ever seen me play soccer?"

"No."

"Have I ever said I played soccer?"

"No."

"Have you ever heard me talk about having played it?"

"No...," and then exasperated, "But... you lived in Paraguay!"

I came home one day and found a large box containing an electric jigsaw sitting on the couch in plain view with a tiny pillow on top of it. "What's that?" I asked.

"What's what?"

"That jigsaw sitting on the couch."

"Where?"

"Under the pillow."

"Under what pillow.?"

"That pillow right there in plain sight."

He walks over and picks up the pillow. "Oh my gosh, how did THAT get there? It must have been the jigsaw fairy."

After spraying Eucalyptus air freshener in the bathroom, "Smells like a Koala turd in here."

Comes home from work one day and sits next to me on the couch to watch TV for a bit. After about an hour, he casually mentions: "I put my underwear on backward today."

"When did you notice that?"

"Around lunchtime"

"Did you fix it?"

"Not yet."

Three or four hours pass. We go out for dinner, do some yard work, he uses the bathroom several times. Right before bed, he goes into the bathroom and yells from behind the bathroom door: “You know, I'm either gonna have to quit peeing, or I'm gonna have to turn my underwear back around."

Trying to explaining who someone was at church that I didn't know: "You know the Smiths... he sat in back of us in church... the tall skinny guy with the dog."

"He brought a DOG to church?"

"I meant 'wife.'"

We were driving by a strip mall that was being built when The KoH was speculating about what store was going to go in that building. I said I'd heard if was a Kohl's.

"Kohl's can kiss my ass!"

Me: "These cats sure can stink up a litter box. Smelly cats."

Him: "Yep, Kitty Kat and the Funky Bunch."

While driving in the car... "Look at that lady walking in the road with a kid!" He proceeds to get immensely upset because she's walking in the road.

Me: "Why does that bother you so much? She's not in your way, she not walking toward you, she hasn't inconvenienced you in any way..."

"I can't help it, I see people being IGNORANT SAVAGES and it bothers me."

I was complaining one day about the weight I'd gained and KoH very helpfully tried to tell me that he thought it looked like I'd lost weight. I told him the scale didn't hold with his theory. "But honey, your ass isn't as flabby as it used to be."

Attempting to chime in on a conversation between two sisters about the fact that other members of their family think one of them is critical. She claimed that she was not.

"Oh yes you are critical. On a scale of being critical, you're like a ten... point... some... really big number."

After coming home from work one day when he was still out of work, I found about sixteen knives on the table. I asked where they'd come from and he said some kids had come by the house and were selling them.

"But we already have knives", I say.

"I know."

"And we don't really need any more knives."

"I know."

"Were they selling any forks or spoons?" I had to ask.

"No, Just knives."

"Then why did you buy them?"

"They were only twenty-five cents apiece! Hmmmm... come to think of it, maybe those knifes weren't a hundred percent not stolen."

While watching the Grammy broadcast where Joshua Bell (one of my favorite violinists) was playing an arrangement of Bernstein/West Side Story tunes. He came to this amazing, incredibly fast passage up in 7th position and my jaw dropped to the floor. The KoH turned to me and said, "Is he good?"

Without missing a beat, I replied lustily, "I want him so bad right now."

"Guess that means yes," he said.

"Even in tribal societies the average native only spends 10% of his time gathering food and providing for his family. The rest of the time they're just doing decorative beadwork or something like that."

During a prayer: "...and thank you Heavenly Father for the little things in life. Like the cats... and... and... (long pause) other things smaller than that. ... And bless Alice Father, because she's laughing during the prayer and she'll probably go to hell."

Praying: "Please give us the rest we need, Father, so we can be rested and hit it fresh on Monday." I start laughing.

Him: "God knows what I mean."

Me: "I'm sure he does, 'cuz that H.F., He's a real hizipp dude."

Driving through North Carolina, we were going down the road behind a police car when a cat started out into the road, coming fairly close to the police car but not close enough to get hit. "Uh oh... uh oh... uh oh. Uh on... uh oh... uh oh", was all he could get out. Then, "Whew, I thought that kitty was gonna to get it."

"I thought I was sitting next to MC Hammer." I said.

Said by The KnaveofHearts when he was about seven: "Dad, do you remember when that cow got hit by lightning?"

KoH in his sarcastic mode says, "Son, a lot of cows get hit by lightning in Nevada; you're going to have to be more specific."

KoH, Jr. pauses for a second and then says, "It was a brown cow."

While driving down the road in the car: "I think I've just hit upon something important."

"What's that?”

"Well I've just discovered the reason why I'm not gay."

"Well do tell."

"Well, I can look and women and think they're pretty or good looking, or whatever. And I can also look at men and think that they're good looking if they are... like that guy in the car over there. Now that's a good-looking man, don't you think?"

"Yes", I said. "So why are you not gay then?"

"Because I just Don't. Have. The sexual feelings. Toward the men."

"My wife is like a guy. She's like my guy friend. Really, it's the best of both worlds... She's like my guy friend that I get to have sex with. Oh wait, maybe that doesn't sound so good."

Looking for a bathroom in Home Depot: "Do you have a place for me to pee?"

"You're not allowed to publish that book if it makes me look like an idiot", he says one day as I write down another one of his comments.

"It doesn't. You take care of that." I replied.