“You’re weird,” he says. “I love you – a lot – but you are weird.”

He’d come into the kitchen to check the timer on the bread maker; it was prepping dough for the from-scratch bagels he was making. At 11 o’clock at night. Making more bagels, I should say. We’d already gone through two-and-a-half-dozen in a week, and while we did have help from the kids, it was mostly him eating bagels with cream cheese and lox at every chance he had. He’s still very much enjoying it, this person who says to me that I’m weird, I love you, but you are weird. And so he’s making more bagels.

Since I’ve been eating them too, I helped him make more tonight. He helped me bottle the first batch of kombucha earlier today, after all, and bagels, like kombucha, are easier with a second set of hands. Someone to time the boiling and pull the bagels out of the pot, and someone to paint egg and sprinkle toppings on.

“You’re weird,” he says. “I love you – a lot – but you are weird.”

Says the person who was looking at every cooler at the local big box store this evening. Looking at coolers because my charcuterie book arrived today, and it includes recipes for (salmon) lox and gravlox, along with bacon and sausage, and yesterday my mother explained that you can make a cold smoker out of a cheap cooler and some tubing, and guess how you go about making lox? Yep – cured and cold smoked salmon. The whole prospect of my getting to learn charcuterie while he gets more lox for his homemade bagels is more than enough of a reason to seriously look into the whole cold smoking process. Plus, we have an affordable salmon source once every few months, if we time it just right.

So I looked at coolers with him, discussing various ways to drill holes and seal PVC into the sides so you could pump smoke in without breaking the seal of the lid, and then we went and picked up washing powder and borax and bar soap.

“You’re weird,” he says. “I love you – a lot – but you are weird.”

He says this as he walks in and out of the kitchen, after checking his timer, and perhaps he has a point. I was sitting at the table with sharpies and big repurposed protein powder containers in my lap and on the table, writing  “Laundry Soap” in large block letters on each of them, while four gallons of homemade laundry soap was coming to a boil on the stove. But I don’t think it was the second batch of kombucha I’d just finished prepping or laundry soap bubbling on the stove that caused him to point out how he loved me in spite of and for my weirdness.

I think it was the bright blue smiley faces that I drew underneath each set of big block “Laundry Soap” letters.

I really think that was it.

He’s weird, I know – but I love him. A lot.