Approximately 47 seconds after I got the back porch painted — giving it a brand new start in life, a chance to reinvent itself from impenetrable junk repository into organized junk repository — The Beloved Husband stepped in.

“I’ll reorganize it,” TBH selflessly offered, sidestepping the long Honey-Do List I’d generously worked up for him. (We give and we give and we give. That’s what makes our marriage work.)

“Okay,” I said, “but don’t throw away any of my crap without telling me.”

Freshening up the porch is one of several recent efforts to repair and refurbish the 103-year-old behemoth we call home. These undertakings are certainly in response to the global economic crisis: If we fall off the grid and have to convert our house into an urban homestead/fortress that we can’t venture out of except to harvest root vegetables from what was once a lawn, I want it to look nice. But also, it turns out that many of my dad’s adages are true…in this case: With assets come responsibility. The porch was beat, and I’d grown sick of looking at it every time I walked through from the back door to the kitchen.

Several days after the tarps came up and the VOC’s had dissipated, I was picking adorable turkey figurines out of the trash bin and TBH had reconfigured the porch into a curing room.

Once he set up the metal hanging rods (repurposed trashpicked closetware courtesy of moi), TBH had no choice but to call in the Poet-Butcher, his partner in meat-curing crime. Off they went to Restaurant Depot, where they purchased 80 pounds of pork shoulder. Or was it butt?

Much bleaching of kitchen surfaces and soaking of intestinal casings later, here is the result. Every day, the perfume of butifarra, chorizo and garlic sausages grows stronger.

“What if they drip, the way they did in the guest room?” I asked. The porch was so shiny, so bright, so grease-free.

“I’ll put pans under them.”

I stifled a whimper.

Meanwhile, the beagle assumed a new command post, forsaking her cushy bed for a fragrant promise, a savory dream.

Last night, I was not only deeply offended by Joe Wilson’s (R-SC) outburst during the President’s Health Care address, but I also wondered if he would have felt so free to be that rude to a white President. Offended citizens jammed Wilson’s website within minutes, and within hours he issued a very direct apology. He let his emotions get the best of him, he said.

(On that front, Clarence Page’s column in today’s Chicago Tribune today makes a good point: “[O]ne has to wonder why Wilson would be so surprised that he would lose control during Obama’s speech. Since the full text was distributed to members of Congress beforehand, Obama’s debunking of the illegal immigration myth should not have come as a shock.”)

I’m not alone in asking this question about the possible link between incivility and race, as anyone on facebook will know, but here’s the larger teachable moment that comes out of it for me–an opportunity to look within, honestly, and ask whether my fellow progressives and I have similarly impeded civil discourse in the recent past.

Check out this site: cafepress.com. The site itself is a neutral print-on-demand operation, but under its “What’s Hot” category, there are both pro-Obama and Anti-Obama sections. I was on cafepress.com the other day, and in the same spirit that I sometimes land and stay on Rush Limbaugh when I’m skimming across the dial in a rental car, I clicked on the Anti-Obama section. I was all of the following: Offended, upset, disturbed, disheartened…the list goes on.

Here’s the question. How different are these from some of the anti-Bush slogans I enjoyed and supported?

“Bush Lied; Thousands Died”
“If Only Barbara Bush had practiced birth control”
“Somewhere in Texas, A Village is Missing Its Idiot”
“Worst President Ever”
“If Only He Had a Brain”
“Viva Imperialism”

The truth is, some of those still get me going. Some of them I dismiss as being not my temperament, e.g., “Buck Fush,” and then some are just as physiognomically-based as the anti-Obama slogans that I find racist, e.g., “BUSH: Seriously, just look at him. What a moron.” Or this one, which mocks a learning disability and judges the quality of his sobriety: “George W. Bush: Dyslexic, Dry Drunk with a Messiah Complex.”

Generally speaking, I run with a pack that got good home training, that is well-mannered in the face of disagreement. But for the first time, I wondered how my own barbed expressions of dissent might end up contributing to an impasse that could have terrible consequences for us all.

Today was to be Day Two of the IRS audit, and we were forewarned to clear an 8-hour block. As it turned out, we got in and out in one hour, zip zip, in part because we decided to take an unjust but small hit on the home office. We’ll pay 15 bucks a month for the next five years, and frankly, it would have been worth a lot more to get out of that Kafka-Meets-Adaptation nightmare.

But there was truly an upside, as you’ll see in this photo of beloved husband (and tax preparer) John in the lobby. Look above him! 44! There he is! I know we’re beginning to see that Obama’s not perfect, but still — how cool is this? Made my heart proud.