I know what you’ve all been thinking – “Where’s God? Did she die? Has she moved to Phoenix?”

I’m still here. I’ve just been on an odyssey. I like to call it 2006: A Christmas Odyssey. It goes something like this:

Ms. God has been getting some crappy gifts from me for the last three Christmasses – not because I don’t love her anymore, but because she’s so darn hard to shop for. Every year it’s the same thing.

“What do you want for Christmas?”

“New slippers.”

“No! I can’t get you slippers. What else?”

“Surprise me.”

So I try. And the results have been surprising – pitifully so. I feared our marriage couldn’t stand another disappointing yuletide. So this year I vowed to come up with something fantastic.

“A dishwasher! Sweetie, we can’t afford this.” She was beaming. Just the look I was going for. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner. Before Ms. God left the suburbs to move in to my century-old farmhouse in the country, she had all the modern conveniences – like electricity, heat, a working stove and even a dishwasher.

“No more dishpan hands for you!” I said proudly.

“But who’s going to install it?”

“Me. I got the installation kit. The girl at Best Buy said it’s cake.”

So the next day I’m on the job. The first thing I discover is that the dishwasher needs its own electrical circuit. Damn. But, hey, after 15 years of living in a fixer-upper, you become a regular Bob Villa (only without the construction crew to do all the actual work). I could do this.

“Just let those dishes sit, honey,” I told the wife. “We’ll be up and running by tomorrow. Day after at the latest.”

Two days later, I roll the dishwasher under the counter, plug it in to its very own outlet, and… wait a minute. The situation under my antiquated sink looks nothing like the drawing in the installation kit.

“Honey, I have to go to Home Depot.”

“Should I go ahead and wash the dishes in the sink?”

“No. Let ’em sit. I’ll be done by tomorrow.”

When I got back with all the plumbing stuff, the dishes were washed and air drying in the drain board.

“That’s the last time you wash dishes like some ’50s housewife,” I told her.

I think you can see where this is going. After the plumbing, it turned out I’d need a different kind of faucet and sink, something circa 1960, at least. That meant that the old, two-ton cast iron sink would have to come out.

Not having an engine hoist handy, it was up to Me, Myself, and my new hernia Irene to wrestle it out of the counter top, through the living room, across the front yard and out to the curb. (A week later someone took it. In Lakeside you can put anything on the curb and someone will take it. I kid you not. Cathy at the feed store said she once put a 500-pound cast-iron bathtub out by the curb, and by morning it was gone. It’s some kind of anthropological phenomenon particular to Lakeside.)

But anyway.

By the time I got back in the house, Ms. God was shaking her head over the state of our old counter top.

“We’ll have to get a new one.”

“Yeah, I was afraid of that.”

“I think we’ll have to get new cabinets too. We really can’t put a new counter on top of these funky old cabinets.”

I was too busy mentally calculating the escalating price of her Christmas gift to answer.

“Hey,” she joked, “It’s the gift that keeps on giving.”

Weeks turned into months. One trip to Ikea became four. We regressed from hand washing in the sink – a la June Cleaver – to bucket washing in the bath tub – a la Ma Ingles.

As the old cabinets came out, they revealed one last, nasty little secret: no flooring underneath, just some musty old planks with daylight showing through.

“We have to put down new flooring.”

Once more into the breech. With half an hour until closing, we tore through Home Depot. “Pergo or tile?” “What color?” “How much?” Then we squeezed another $400 onto the Discover card and were out the door before last call.

On the first day of the third month since the odyssey began, we finally pushed the start button on the new dishwasher. The dishwasher hummed happily to itself. Standing side by side in the middle of our gleaming new kitchen, we shared a profound sense of satisfaction.

“This was the best Christmas gift ever.” Ms. God said.

I smiled and took her hand. “It was fun,” I told her.

“But next year,” I told myself, “slippers. Definitely slippers.”