This story has a happy ending.

Sometime last summer, Dan got interested in radio controlled airplanes. When I say he got interested, I mean he became completely obsessed. Suddenly, we had bookmarks in our Web browser leading to RCA sites, magazine subscriptions to RCA publications, the whole nine yards. Except, of course, the airplane. That was a matter of much discussion. I was fine with the idea when I thought a radio controlled airplane was about the size of a toy truck. Something manageable, that would fit easily under a bed. It wasn't until we were lying in bed one night talking that Dan let slip the fact that RCA's have, on average, a SIX FOOT WING SPAN. Folks, we live in an apartment. An apartment where, like most people in apartments, we have no garage. An apartment where about every two months I try to re-evaluate what we can possibly throw away to give us more space for all of our constantly-accumulating things. So when Dan told me that he thought we could just keep the plane in the guest room, I laughed out loud. WHERE in the guest room did he think we were going to put this thing? On the ceiling? Yes, it turns out. Dan thought it would be possible to just hang the thing from the ceiling. To make a long story short, we hit what I believe is called an impasse. I was not interested in having guests smacking their heads on a large toy suspended from the guest room ceiling, and Dan was convinced that it would work. Or, at least, that's what Dan thought the situation was. In fact, it had occurred to me that Christmas was coming up awfully soon. So, I saved months worth of the reimbursement checks I got for mileage at work and bought Dan an airplane. We did a massive closet reorganization, and now the Arrow hangs from a hook in our biggest closet, where I have to say it fits better than I imagined it would. The photo up top was taken when Dan was building his plane, which meant our kitchen was covered in tiny parts and power tools for hours at a time. Now he's learning to fly it from the people at the hobby store, and he's happier than any kid you've ever seen riding their first bike. Let this be a lesson to the single women out there: No matter how old they get, men NEVER get tired of their toys. They just call them hobbies.