Growing up

My brother was here visiting last week, for the first time in three years. Not that I haven't seen him in three years, just not in the Inland Empire. So, we spent a lot of time talking and lounging and playing Rock Band and eating and watching TV both good and bad and generally staying up a little later than I normally would, and sleeping in. On weekdays I get up at 6 and for me sleeping in is something like getting up at the ripe old hour of 8:30, but when I asked Ty what time he usually wakes up he said, "Ohhhhh, I don't know. Sometime between 10 and 11." Because he stays up late doing things like playing in three bands and planning a beautifully nomadic trip to South America, and I stay up "late" editing church newsletters and working on my thesis. And so when he said 10 or 11, I thought, oh good, because that meant I could sleep in AND sneak around getting things done in the morning and avoid being a mega boring married work machine during his waking hours.

So one morning at around 9:45 I called Brad's mom to check on a few things, including how those muffins I made recently were treating her. And as a mega boring married work machine I thought, hey, while I'm on the phone, why don't I sweep the house?! Our brooms and dustpans and mops and Swiffer-type things are all hanging in the stairwell that leads straight to where my brother was sleeping, so I knew I'd have to gather that broom very quietly. So I tucked the phone between my shoulder and ear, slowly opened the door at the top of the stairs, took the broom off the hook, and promptly bumped the mop hanging next door, which in turn knocked EVERY SINGLE OTHER MOP, SWIFFER, DUSTPAN, ETC. clattering and thundering and colliding down the entire flight of stairs, where they landed within several feet of the couch where Ty slept.

Or so I thought. It turns out that he had woken up a little bit early and was watching back-to-back episodes of Top Chef. Meaning, I was upstairs being boring and worried about keeping quiet, and he was being just as boring downstairs. So he put all of the brooms and dustpans and mops away and came upstairs, and I made him watch The Rachel Zoe Project for a while before we went to a coffee shop, where I did boring work stuff and my co-grown-up did the New York Times crossword puzzle.