I’m singing Old MacDonald which is a nursery rhyme with farm animals and their sounds. My husband is joining the kids and me for the first time, and I pause to let him choose the animal.

Me: “And on that farm he had a…”

Husband: “Soybeans.”

Me: “Soybeans!?”

Husband: “My grandad owns a farm, and he grows soybeans; he should have them in the song.”

Me: “Soybeans don’t make a noise, you need something that makes a noise. What noise would soybeans make?”

Husband: *After thinking for a second.* “Whoosh?”

And so, with a whoosh whoosh here and a whoosh whoosh there, we had a new verse for the song.

Some gay friends invite us over to watch a movie, and we end up picking a film called ‘The Big Gay Musical.’ One of the husbands is Chinese-American and is trying to find a version with Mandarin subtitles.

Husband #1: “What’s taking you so long?”

Husband #2: “I just Googled ‘gay musical.’ Do you have any idea how many hits there are for that?”

To preface this story, our house used to be the mansion of the mayor back during the colonial era.

Frankly, it’s a kinda s*** house: It’s poorly insulated, and there are a lot of weird stairways and corridors that used to be methods for the servants (and possibly slaves) to get around during the colonial era. And don’t get me started on getting a wifi signal through chunks of limestone.

The ONLY reason we live here is because of our obsession with old things.

Anyway, my husband was attempting to hang a German cuckoo clock from the 1860s on the wall when he accidentally stepped on the cat and went tumbling THROUGH the wall, revealing a secret servant’s passage that had been papered over and forgotten.

He curled his body around the clock and was able to mostly protect it. He was less able to protect himself; this resulted in a hospital trip. Anyway, this particular servant’s passage was cut off from the rest of the house.

We wandered through it; it was creepy, but all the other openings to this particular passage had been papered over. Still, plenty of stuff had been left in it: The worst of it: Ancient, dry-rotting Barrels of Gunpowder and flour, not sure which was scarier.

We also found some antique light fixtures, intended to hold candles. A couple of landscape paintings of presently unidentified locations that are PROBABLY somewhere in Delaware? An extremely tarnished silver serving set, and a bunch of really old Bibles in a box.

So… the gunpowder (and flour) in particular was scary to find, because both of those things explode, and given that the house had, since construction, been wired for electricity and gas and the wiring was, uh… knob and tube? And some of the wiring went through the walled-off passage? NEAR the barrels of flour?!

Yeah. That was scary as f***.

My wife sent me to the store for ground sausage, and I came back with sausages, leading to this conversation.

Me: “I’m sorry. I should have realized you meant ground sausage from context. You only asked for one package, but a pack of sausages wouldn’t divide evenly between everyone.”

Wife: “Whenever I send you to the store, I remind myself to write like I’m communicating with the fae, and I forgot to do that, so it’s my fault too. It’s fine, I can cut them up.”

I’m not sure if that was more offensive or funny, but I’ll have to be more cautious about reading the shopping list going forward. For the record, one, we are both autistic, and two, dinner turned out fine.

When I was in college, I dated one of two identical twins. A lot of people gave me s*** about it.

Friend: “Do you have threesomes?”

Me: “No! That’s incest, eww!”

Friend: “Well, how do you tell them apart?”

Me: “That’s quite easy: My boyfriend had a distinct, and very cute, pattern of freckles across the bridge of his nose, and his sister is cisgender.”