Last night, Dan turned to me and with a bright smile, placed a catalog on the table beside me. I glanced at it but was making jewelry so I had no free hands to pick it up with. Straining to see it, I realized it was  Health and Wealth Raffle brochure.

Back in February, Dan wanted tickets for the Health and Wealth Raffle. He wanted me to buy them for his (July) birthday gift. I asked him repeatedly if he was going to mope if he didn’t win anything. No, he swore to me, he wouldn’t mope. I asked if he would be bummed if all he won was a blender. No, he insisted, he was going to be happy no matter if he won a prize or not. Fast forward to the day of the drawing and we didn’t win. Can you guess who was grumpy?

Also note that he still expected a birthday gift come July.

So when I saw the catalog I immediately shook my head. No. No way. Nothing doing. We were not buying tickets for the Fall raffle. “But it’s for charity!” “It benefits a hospital!” “Don’t you want to help those less fortunate than you?” “We could win a million dollars!” His statements did not convince me.

One of the prizes is also a car. If we win a BMW, he gets to drive it. If we win a Mini Cooper, I claim dibs. If we win the ugly yellow Porsche, we sell it and I get a Vespa use the money for more practical things.

Then I realized this could work in my favor. About a month ago, I found out I had won a grant. I was pretty excited because we’ve been needing new towels. (School grant money = towels, of course.) All I could talk about was how excited I was to get the towels. I browsed online sites for them and wanted to go towel window shopping. I mentioned them almost daily and sometimes got so excited, I could barely get the words out. Needless to say, Dan was less than thrilled. He finally asked me not to mention towels again until at least August 18th, the day before we get the money.

So when I realized Dan wanted these raffle tickets, I decided to use it to my advantage. I told him if he agreed to let me talk about towels as much as I wanted to for the next 3 weeks, we would buy the 3 pack of tickets. There was a veeeeeerrrrrrrry long pause. He finally sighed and agreed.

NEW towels! New TOWELS!  Towels towels towels towels TOWELS!

It’s been about 20 hours since he agreed and I have said the word “towels” at least 40 times.

It’s 148 days until Christmas. I know, it’s pointless for me to share this kind of information because that’s the sort of detail about life everyone always knows.

While wandering through Joanns the other day, I noticed boxes of Halloween stuff being unpacked. I like Halloween, but come on people. It’s still over 100 degrees outside! As I turned a corner, shaking my head at the earliness of the Halloween decor, I nearly tripped over some boxes. I began to contemplate how injured I would have to be to win a settlement when I noticed a symbol printed on these harbingers of death. Vivid green pine tree clip art was plastered on the side of each one. The boxes had wonderful labels with things like “Xmas Wreaths” and “Stockings.”

I immediately became outraged. How dare they unpack the silly Halloween decorations before the Christmas stuff. OK, so technically Halloween comes before Christmas if you want to be a stickler about things like calendars. However, don’t they realize that some of us are so close to being done with their Christmas shopping that they can taste it?

It tastes like peppermint and cocoa, for the record.

So as I stared wistfully at the Christmas boxes, I noticed a lot of the employees totally slacking off. I mean, they were focusing on things like cleaning, stocking shelves and ringing up customers instead of unpacking the Christmas boxes! If only Dan had been there with me. He normally has a box cutter in his pocket. I would have been able to snag it from him and unpacked them myself since the employees obviously weren’t doing their jobs.

It’s so hard to find good help these days.

One of the best things about living in Arizona is the monsoon season. I love the storms every night, the rolling thunder and seeing large puffy clouds swoop in from over the mountains surrounding the valley area.

A couple of night ago, Scottsdale got hit with a very fierce monsoon storm. It was mostly rain, which was a nice change. Dan and I decided to open the blinds, turn off all the lights and enjoy the lightning storm.

It would have been very romantic had we not been playing video games at the same time.

As we watched the lightning streak across the sky, I suddenly started remembering scenes from movies. You know in horror films where there’s a storm outside and the young female victim looks out her window just in time for lightning to light up her backyard? And during that swift strike of light you see the killer’s silhouette appear out of nowhere. Yeah. I stared outside, completely expecting a fisherman holding a hook to appear in my backyard.

The more I tried to ignore this sense of impending doom, the more I was certain that it was going to actually happen. And then since I freaked myself out so much I felt the need to wrap myself in a blanket, because nothing will protect you from a serial killer quite like a fluffy white blanket. Dan made fun of me for being cold in the middle of the summer but I guess that’s better than him making fun of me for being afraid of the storm.