Red Velvet Lounge

       So anyhoo, the weather’s getting cooler, the trees are changing colors and I’m in the market for a chiminea. If you’re not familiar with this contraption, it’s a freestanding front-loading fireplace with a bulbous body and usually a vertical smoke vent or chimney. You get them at Walmart or the McCain Mall parking lot for about $50-$100. I’ve wanted one for the back yard since we purchased our home in ’99. It was always one of those slight indulgences that I could just never bring myself to purchase. Now, for the past few weeks my wife had been telling me that the Harvest Foods on Old Cantrell was going out of business and that everything in the store was 50% off. Wait, I’ve seen chimineas at that particular Harvest Foods. OMG. I’m putting on some pants and driving myself to 2510 Cantrell Road!

      Now, I am not a rich man. I buy my clothes at Saver’s, I still eat ramen noodles even though I’m in my 30’s, so I saw what the Lord was placing before me- my chance to finally own my own little piece of watered-down Mexican history in the form a brown bulbous clay firepit.

      “Well,” I told my wife, “This is the year. This is the year that we’re going to get a chiminea. I’m going to clean up the back porch, put our daughter’s Barbie Mustang in the shed, throw a layer of Thompson’s Water Seal on the deck, and we’re finally going to have friends over for parties, dammit.”

       So it’s a done deal, right? No. I drove to the Harvest Foods at 9:00 Saturday morning and the store was already closed. Like, closed for good. The sign’s gone, the Pepsi machines have been carted off. I pulled my car up to the front of the store just to be sure I wasn’t experiencing some hangover-induced mirage (It was Saturday morning by the way). I squinted my eyes to see into the empty store. There were no more cash registers, no gumball machines, no stacks of anything. But there was one thing left in the store- a single chiminea…

       OMGWTF!!!! Is God trying to tell me something?! Was I going to die in a chiminea-related fire, and this was His way of intervening?! So many thoughts raced through my mind. Like, “Is breaking into an abandoned grocery store a felony or a misdemeanor?”

“Would it even fit in my car?” What was I thinking? I’d slipped into a chiminea-induced frenzy. I’d gotten so close. Then I regained my composure. It’s a freakin’ chiminea…

a dumb clay pot… a simple little…thing that I… MUST OWN!!!!

       I came this close.  You can’t quit when you’re this close, right?! Wrong.

The wife. The wife sets me straight every time.

 “We’ll get one next year, honey.” 

“’It’s just a big clay pot.”

“We can’t really afford it anyway.”

       Don’t patronize me, woman. You know we can afford it. You just think it’s trite. You think I won’t use it. Like the exercise bike I bought two years ago that’s collecting dust. I know that was my idea, but I could still start exercising! We could start doing a lot of things…like entertaining outdoors. I don’t know. Was that a good first blog?