Love, Jimmie

My Potential Roomate has now become Roomate, at least for the month of September.  I thought you’d like to know.  Mini has adjusted well to living with me and my felines.  She has doggie toys in every room of the house and feels secure in coming to my room for a middle of the night snuggle.  The felines have adjusted well to two added beings.  Murphy ignores that quivery dog while he stretches out like a mini sultan on my bed and Seamus still just looks at her with disinterested interest.  Both kitties hit Roomate up for food when he comes home, all meowing and fluttering their eyelashes.  We are going to have the fattest animals on the planet what with their begging and Mini snatching every single crumb that falls onto the floor.  Last night she darted under my feet to catch a hunk of shallot in midair.  Only after she chomped on it one good time did she realize that shallots are kind of gross for dogs and abandon it in a slobbery mess for me to discard.

Me, I like Roomate because now I can hand out “Boy Jobs” and keep the “Girl Jobs”.  He takes out the trash and listens to my hot water heater when it makes funky noises.  I dictate how the pantry is to be organized, lie around on the couch reading books, and hang my undies in the laundry room.  In short, we get along fabulously. 

Last week, Roomate asked me if I could help with a favor.  He prefaced it by saying it was an odd request which of course made me immediately say yes.  I’m a big fan of saying yes before I even know what I’m agreeing to which has more often than not gotten me into trouble.  But Roomate so faithfully takes out the trash without being asked so I trust him.  Trust is always based on faithful garbage carrying.

“Will you measure me for a mountain bike?” he asks.  “Sure”, I say, figuring I’ll just whip out a yardstick when I get home, mark his height with a pencil against the wall, and be done with it.  Not odd at all. 

Then he sends a link to a video on how to properly measure one for a mountain bike.  Y’all, this is a process, a lengthy one.  Still, it’s fine.  I was rocking along looking at pictures and diagrams of how to measure when I run across this one. 

Oh my.  It appears that I have found the odd.   

Before you get your panties all in a twist, thinking that I’m going to be all up in a stranger’s business with a measuring tape, you should know that Roomate is my cousin.  However, now that I have typed that in black and white, I’m not sure if that makes the measuring better or worse. 

Anyway, last Wednesday night Roomate trotted around the house in his bike shorts (really? who invented those?) and I measured (nearly) every measurable part of his body.  I figure he’s already seen my underwear that lives in the laundry room and we share a washer and dryer so it can’t get any worse than that. It is obvious that he trusts me to bandy about a measuring stick while he holds a level in his nether parts.  We spent a lot of time with that measuring tape and the level, making notes in a notebook and figuring numbers.  Turns out one of his arms is longer than the other and that I am quite the expert with a measuring tape.   It also turns out that you can only awkwardly giggle for so long before you just get tired of being awkward and stop with the giggling already and just get the job done.   

His mountain bike arrived yesterday.  We’ll see how well I did.

For those of you who want to ask if I am for hire with the measuring, the answer is no. As if . . . I reserve that sort of thing for men who are related to me and who take out the trash.  A girl has to have standards.