Chapter 6: "That's REALLY mature, saying exactly what I say... You're an Idiot!"

I think that’s pretty much all of the main stuff as far as the move goes. So with that updated, everything else will be more recent. I’m excited to get all caught up. That way I don’t have to worry so much about forgetting any of the good stuff. And let me tell you, there’s a lot of good stuff to go over. I can’t guarantee that it will all be in chronological order, but I’ll do my best.

Let me start by filling you in on our furniture situation. I have to giggle a little every time I think about it. I’m pretty sure the first visitors to see the inside of our house were the sister missionaries. So, imagine this. The Sisters are at your door. You invite them in. Normally a person might say something like, “have a seat” or “pull up a chair”. At our house, there are no such invitations. If anything it’s “the carpet is awfully nice to sit on” or “feel free to lean on the wall”. This is not due to Hunter and I having a lack of common courtesy (our mama raised us right). It is however, due to the amount of furniture that we have…or rather the lack thereof. We have a little ottoman, a little t.v. stand, a card table, and two fold-up chairs. The chairs do have cushions on them though (even though Hunter broke the strings that held them to the chairs, ha which of course he’ll deny even though I watched him do it), so that’s nice. Anyways, it was all good, because the Sisters thought it was quite funny. We’re tight now. Oh also, recently I made a couch… or rather I threw a little airline blanket over two of our big Rubbermaid tubs and put them in the corner of the living room. Hunter, who has a kind of deep love for couches having had one for his bed quite often throughout his life, was quite offended. He said that “thing” was a disgrace, and I was never to refer to it as a couch again. Of course I never heed to that demand, and probably call it couch more often because of it. A few days ago Hunter and I were both sitting the “couches” talking about something or other. He must have shifted his weight or something, because the “couch” that Hunter was on fell right in. It was pretty funny. I say he had it coming for dissing them in the first place. Another recent addition to our little furniture collection is our t.v., which was given to us by our friend Ariel. With her generous donation and Hunter’s X-box, we are no longer resigned to watching movies on our laptops. Hooray!

The next thing worthy of mention is our food situation…which reflects our money situation, but we won’t dwell on that. We’ve got to be kind of careful with what we buy, even though on the same token we probably aren’t careful enough (at least where food is concerned). Pretty much everything Hunter and I have is pooled together, including our money. Every decision we make, takes heavy consultation. When it comes to food though… I think Hunter put it best when he said, “When food comes into this house, it’s like The Hunger Games.” That’s no joke. Hunter has his own opinion on the matter, but let me shed some light on my point of view*. For one thing, I’ve been living literally by myself for pretty much the last 5 or 6 months, so if I bought a half gallon of ice cream…let’s just say it’d last me longer than a day. While Hunter is always complaining of being scrawny due to lack of nutrients, I believe I’ve actually gained weight since living here. At first I was perplexed. How could that be? I’ve come to this conclusion. Think of a sled dog. When they get food, they immediately set to work devouring every last piece of it. They can’t afford to save it for later, because if they try the other dogs will eat it. Attempting to defend their saved spoils would be to no avail either, because the other dogs will kill for the leftover food. This is how I feel. I must gorge myself when we do have food, because if I try and save any of mine for later it will most assuredly be gone before I can get to it. If I try to protect my food stash, I will surely be killed. I have begun to realize that I simply can’t keep up with the eating habits of my always-famished brother. That’s just the way it is.

 

Slipping slowly...

It’s not quite so bad now, but for the first few weeks that we were here Hunter and I had trouble thinking of enough activities throughout the day to keep us busy. In fact, we often dreaded the weekends, because there wasn’t even school to get us out of the house. We did go to a couple of dances at the institute. We’re not really dancers, but it did get us out of the house, plus there was ice cream so…how could we pass that up? We also go to FHE every Monday, and our friend Allison was quick to get our numbers and has broken up the monotony for us on more than one occasion. However, there are still 7 days in a week, and we simply didn’t have enough going on to fill each one. Most days all we could do was lay in bed, stare at the ceiling and slip slowly into madness. Our days went as follows: 4:00, wallow in self pity; 4:30, stare into the abyss; 5:00 faint from hunger; 5:30 jazzercize; 6:30 dinner with just the two of us – we would’ve loved to cancel that; 7:00 wrestle with our self-loathing (ok you guys should DEFINITELY get this movie, even though the quoting is slightly off). When we weren’t doing that, we were usually fighting. Now when I say fighting I don’t mean like arguing. I mean more like, wrestling… which is actually more like Hunter pushing me against the wall pretending to bash my face in while I slice at his arm with a ketchup packet or something. It’s good fun.

  

...into madness...

                         

Wallowing in self-pity

      

* ”The Hunger (these are NO) Games” bonus story coming soon!!!

NOTE: Hunter rarely actually gets mad at me, so when I say that he was furious about something or “beat me up” NONE of it is real. He does those things only in jest. We can usually hardly breathe during our “fights” due to laughter.