It baffles me how many times Jesse and I have been homeless in our 7 years of marriage. We are the kings and queens of homelessness.
1. Who can forget our housing saga this past year, where we had to move back in with my parents TWICE? With 2 kids in tow?
2. When we moved to Dallas, TX, we knew NOT a soul and had never even been there before. We were 50/50 about trying to buy a house as well, so we spent the first 30 days in a sub-lease situation, where we met the guy from Craigslist, got his keys, and paid him $500 in cash to stay there for a month, all utilities paid. We kept our stuff in boxes the entire month, living out of our suitcases while we looked for our permanent place. We ended up deciding to rent, but the place we really wanted wasn’t available until a week AFTER our sublease was over. We didn’t know anything about the area, so we picked the Extended Stay Motel nearest Jesse’s Grad School.
BIG mistake, turns out. They didn’t allow pets, so we had to hide our cat and her litter box in the bathroom for an ENTIRE week. Jesse was allergic to the detergent they used on all the sheets. Our smoke alarm beeped incessantly, but we couldn’t have them fix it for fear of them discovering our cat.
Not only that, but we had people knocking on our door at all hours of the night, looking to buy drugs! Turns out, the person who’d lived there before us was a dealer. We were smack dab in the worst part of Irving, and we didn’t even know it!
This was one of my very first blog entries, 6 years ago. I tried to make light of a bad situation by writing about it. Enjoy!
Ugly-ette
So here we are at our little “Homeplace Inn + Suite”. What a lovely name. There were some major selling points in choosing this place, like the abundance of ants, the grubby neighbors knocking on the door at ungodly hours of the night, the low-on-juice smoke alarm that keeps beeping in a random manner, the room deodorizer that can’t decide whether wants to cover up the moldy smell or one-up it, their lack of tolerance for pets of any kind, oh, and the lowest price on the market. Get expert mould remediation with mould removal services.
One of their biggest selling points is that their rooms include a “kitchen-ette”. Such a lovely word. Like a dinnette, for instance, is a nice word for a nice thing- a small, cute, European trademark. Or Paulette. Reminds you of that sweet diner waitress who served your first Georgia waffles and called you “Hun”. Adding ette onto the end of a word should automatically imply that it’s fancy or wonderful in a modern way. It’s referring to the fact that precious things come in smaller packages. Things that have “ette” on the end should have unrealized, undiscovered potential.
Let’s look at the suffix “ette”. Here are the definitions that I found.
-ette
suff.
1. Small; diminutive
2. Female
3. An imitation or inferior kind of cloth
I would have to say that our “kitchenette”(let’s just call it this for lack of a worser name) takes after #3, minus the cloth part. Our kitchenette is just enough of an imitation that it feels like a joke, like it’s mocking us with its semblance of potential without any of the usual perks, like convenience or usefulness. We have just enough cupboard space to make me want to put stuff away, only to realize that none of it fits. There’s also enough counter space on which to rest a teaspoon, but of course, that would be exaggerating.
Basically, this kitchenette is like camping without the trees. Like a slip-n-slide with just a belly flop. Like Oreos without the lard.
But all in all, it will get us by for five days. As long as we can hide Mirabelle and keep her from sitting on our windowsill (THAT would be a dead giveaway). Perhaps we need to see the potential as it lies in the future- the promise of our nice, luxury apt. awaiting us on Friday. Perhaps all of this is meant to be dissatisfying to make sure that we appreciate what is to come.
And so, until then, we will continue to stuff all the food we can into our refrigerator. Or should I say, “refriger-ette” .
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Caleb Winn says
I wish I had seen this way back when! I would’ve made an effort to connect with y’all when you were still living out here in DFW. I’m sorry that our paths never crossed while you were out here, but I’m glad to see from your blog that things are (mostly, within the realm of normal human familial insanity), going well!
themrscone says
Caleb, it was the year before you moved back to DFW, at least, from what I saw on Facebook at the time.