"Watch out or she'll kick your peppers"

"Watch out or she'll kick your peppers" has become, much to my chagrin, a common saying in our friend group.


One thing you have to understand about C-Rock, he gets these big ideas in his head out of no where. Suddenly he'll decide he'd really like to get his hot-air balloon pilots license, or own a recyclable christmas tree farm, or open a pick-your-own hops micro-brewery (I'm not making these up). Obsession sets in for anywhere from a few weeks to the better part of a year. For instance, with the hot-air balloon thing, he would spend hours researching his potential competition, which schools offered the best pilots license program, where would be the best place to buy some rural Georgia land to launch from... and on and on.


So, maybe 6 weeks before our wedding, I get an IM from one of our buddies containing a link called monthlyjalapeno.com I take the bait and click to link to find a website soliciting pepper of the month club subscriptions.... then I notice that the 'pay now' button is linked to C-Rock. This was the first I'd heard anything about it.


Apparently, C-Rock had decided to buy the domain and start a pepper of the month club. Though he had no garden (or even a yard for that matter), no idea about regulations involving shipping of produce, and no vacuum sealer or other equipment to ship these non-existent peppers... these are all details he felt could wait until the subscriptions started rolling in.


And so the new chapter into urban farming begins... He rushed out and purchased some small soil pods from Home Depot and a habanero pepper from the grocery store. As the final weeks before our wedding approached, he obsessed over these damn seeds - gingerly moving them from the back porch to the front window to the desk in my room. (We didn't live together before getting married and his place, 'the Dungeon', got very little daylight).


Here I was, frantically dashing around town delivering final payments to vendors, wrapping up endless DIY projects, attending bridal functions, etc. and I would get these urgent phone calls, "Baby! Could you please give two drops of water to each of the 50 pods, then move them from the back porch to the window, then...." In the evenings, I would sit there folding ceremony programs by myself while he'd carefully water each plant with a GD eye dropper (MY GD eye dropper).


During the final week before the wedding, he decided the seedlings really needed 24/7 light. He built a tin-foil tent on my desk lamp. Not that I wasn't already having trouble sleeping through the night WITHOUT an illuminated desk UFO located three feet from my head. The final straw, however, was yet to come.


You may have gathered, C-Rock wasn't super hands-on about the wedding planning. Instead, he planned the entire honeymoon with only two requests from the bride: 1) it had to be somewhere warm and 2) it had to be a surprise. And so it was for many months until...


One night he had been hanging out at our favorite dive bar, Mr. C's, with some of our buddies. Afterwards, he called me somewhat intoxicated (a rare thing for C-Rock since he is a big guy and stays away from liquor). After rambling on a bit, he remembered some 'exciting news', "Oh baby! Great news!! Michael has agreed to babysit the peppers while we're on our honeymoon!" (Seriously? Some people have fur babies... C-Rock has leaf babies). "Yeah... I was planning to bring them with us, but then I found out Hawaii has strict regulations regarding bringing in plants." Silence... Did you really just tell me where we're going on our honeymoon?! "Oh! Uhhhh... no! Ha, ha. I got you!"


I had had it! As I came up my front steps and was greeted by those stupid little sprouts by the front door, I kicked them clear off my second story patio.




Luckily our relationship survived the assassination. The wedding was amazing and he resumed his urban farming once returning from our Hawaiian honeymoon. Never got a subscription though... not even one.