Squash, Inc.

I live in my in-laws’ basement. They live upstairs. We have almost entirely separate living quarters, other than we use the same entrance and the furnace and storage rooms are downstairs. That’s entirely fine with us. We like them, we think we’ll keep them.

One of the best parts about living with my in-laws is that they’re mostly home all day, and whenever I feel like being funny all I have to do is go upstairs and make them laugh. They make a good audience. Another great thing about living with them is the great food.

They have approximately two years’ worth of food stored in the aforementioned storage room. That is, two years worth of food for their original family of ten. They’ve cut back a little bit in recent years, so it’s probably now only stocked to two years’ worth of food for about five people. If I ever run out of some sort of ingredient that can be found in cans, boxes, or otherwise durable packaging, I can always find it in the storage room.
My father in law makes his own flour. I haven’t purchased flour since I got married three years ago, and I doubt I will have to for a long time to come. There’s a lot of flour in there.

But the crown jewel of the food storage system is the garden. My father in law has a great garden, and we get all sorts of vegetables from it. He also has fruit trees, and berries. It’s great to be able to go outside and pick a zucchini the size of your head, and know that it is truly, 100% organic and perfect.

A couple of months ago, my father in law gave me a squash, which I saved because at the moment I was pretty tired of squash, and I am proud to announce that I used it today! Not all of it, because I am saving half of it for something else. (It’s really big.) I also realized today that by the time Styx is ready to start eating vegetables, we will have a full-blown garden in the backyard and she’ll not only eat free vegetables, they will be totally organic and free of scary pesticides.

Not to mention three times the size of her head.