Like Kelly Clarkson, I was raised to be Miss Independent.  I can change a tire, for example, and repair a leaking faucet and trap giant spiders in the carpet fibers of my house and take them back outside where they belong.  I can do it all.

While I can do it all, I haven’t done even a tiny bit of it in probably, oh, 45 years – but for sure 20 years because that is how long ago I met my husband.  I took one look at that tall, agreeable drink of water – a man who carried a tire iron in one hand a giant spider trap in another – and decided what they hey, let’s let him take it from here.  Kyle will tell you I leaned so far into this plan that in the early days of our relationship, I literally leaned; if Kyle was standing behind me, I’d rest up against him like one would with a wall.  I didn’t marry him for his willingness to do stuff and/or hold me upright, but it has been a nice perk.

It has been such a nice perk, in fact, that after 20 years Kyle likes to joke that my pronouns are “We” and “Him.”  Just this morning, in fact, I walked into the laundry room to transfer a load from the washer to the dryer, and when I turned on the light, the bulb flickered.  At the same moment, Kyle happened to walk by.

“What’s up, you got a boyfriend?” He said, leaning into the doorway and wiggling his eyebrows.

“Yes, I do, and it’s very serious,” I said, because this has been our daily exchange ever since the first time he said it to me some two decades ago.  “Speaking of, Boyfriend, we need to change the lightbulb in here.”

Kyle looked up at the ceiling.  The light flickered again.

“Okay, will do,” he said.  He pulled out the stepstool and changed the bulb.  As the answer to “How many Kosiors does it take to change a lightbulb?”, for my part, I went and made the bed.

As I am aware that I maaayyy be taking advantage of Kyle’s kindness, sometimes when I say “We” I actually mean “I.”  We (the real We – our family) had a rare unscheduled weekend earlier this month after many, many months of constant activity.

“What do you want to do this weekend?”  I asked Kyle as he lounged on the couch.

“Nothing,” he said.  “What do you want to do?”

“We’ve had our family photos sitting in the storage room forever,” I said, “and they need to get hung up…AND I’M GOING TO DO IT ALL BY MYSELF,” I said with gusto and a wide sweep of my arm.  For his part, Kyle looked skeptical.

You’ll be unsurprised to hear that Kyle and I are the type of people who take a themed Christmas/Hanukkah card picture every year.  The first year of our marriage, we wore Canadian (Kyle) and American (Amanda) outfits and I sat on his shoulders.  In 2024, we convinced the boys to wear black turtlenecks and glasses and take a corporate photo a la Steve Jobs.  Obviously, I have these photos framed; and, OBVIOUSLY – no subtleties in Kosiorland – I have them printed in enormous sizes.  My big idea has always been to hang them on the stairway going from our main floor to our second, as the ceiling in that area is roughly 20 feet tall and I have a fool’s level of confidence that we can keep talking out children into taking these photos into perpetuity.

We have a bunch of gallery walls in our house (hard brag) because we love art and photos and, again, subtlety is not a part of our lexicon.  We (Kyle) hung them all, and all without anything but a drill, a measuring tape, and a level.  For this gallery wall, however, because the frames were oversized, I thought I’d take the advice of Pinterest and cut the shape of the frames out of craft paper – or, in my case, undesirable wrapping paper.  The plan was this: 1) cut the frames out of wrapping paper; 2) mark where the hangers go on said cut-out wrapping paper; 3) hang wrapping paper on the wall in perfectly-measured increments; 4) drill hanger screws, or whatever they are called, in the aforementioned hanger-marker spots; 5) remove paper and hang actual pictures; and 6) revel in glory.

I should have known this was a bad idea from the very first frame.  I should have known.  Because the wrapping paper started curling and crinkling almost immediately, and it’s harder than you’d think to mark where the center point is on a wire hanger, and, also, it took me something like ten minutes to do one frame.  Nevertheless, I persisted; after TWO hours, I had all of the frames cut out and labeled (that was a fun game: playing “match the frames to the cut-out wrapping paper” after I cut out three or four and realized the frames backs were in different locations) in wrapping paper.  To reward myself, I took a day-long break.

The next day, I hung the wrapping paper frames up on the walls.  I should have known this was a bad idea from the very first frame.  I should have known.  Because it turns out a wrapping paper’s favorite state is curled up back on a roll.  For every wrapping paper frame I hung on the wall, the one next to it fought against both its tape and our semi-gloss paint until it flopped back into a roll on the stairs.  Nevertheless, I persisted; after TWO MORE HOURS, I had the wrapping paper frames hung up.

I sat down on the top step as Kyle rounded the corner to come upstairs.

“Ta da!  Time for the drill and screws and to hang…” I said, just as one of the wrapping paper frames extricated itself from the wall and rolled down to the main floor.  I let out a very, very, very long string of swears.

“Maybe I’ll give you a hand,” Kyle said.

“No,” I said.  “But okay.”

Long story short, Kyle hung 100% of the gallery wall.  He made a valiant effort to use the paper guides and gave up after my careful measurements and notations turned out to not match the actual frames.  He freeform hung the rest in about 30 minutes.

“Look, we did it,” he said, gesturing to the wall.

“Yes, we did,” I said, balling up the last of the wrapping paper and tossing it in the trash.

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The photo above is of my serious boyfriend and me.

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This week on North Dakota Today we talked about Rose Ryckman, my Nice Person of the Week, as well as a camp for budding composers. (Valley News Live)

Mott’s Derek Mayer has built a tractor museum to display all of his grandfather’s toy tractors. (KFYR TV)

Bismarck’s Rhythm Records held the second-annual “You Name It Festival” in honor of National Record Store Day. (KFYR TV; Found from “Oops Only Good News”)

Fargo’s Lindsey Burkhardt, director of the ND Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Task Force, is North Dakota’s Mother of the Year. (Valley News Live)

The UND Fighting Hawks Dance Team took home 3rd at the NDA Collegiate Dance Championships in the Spirit Rally Division. (Facebook)

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