Thursday, January 26, 2012

Helpful Hints from Oh Hell! Geez Louise!


The hubs and I are as different as night and day, but these differences are what makes us work.  The biggest source of discontention around here is our outlook on taking care of ANYTHING.  My motto:  If  you’re going to do something, do it right the first time.  His motto:  We ain’t takin’ ‘er to the fair.  So with that said, let’s get started on some examples of why I continue to wear the pants in this family.

CARPET CLEANING.  The hubs let Thing 1 take orange pop into the living room.  Yeah, well you can guess what happened.  Spilled, half of it.  HE doesn’t tell me.  THING 1 tells me.  I then asked where.  Thing 1 showed me.  Sure enough, glowing like a black light on blood, is a huge orange stain.  Thing 1 apologizes to me.  HE apologized???  No, this won’t do.  I said, “Honey, you know you aren’t to bring pop in here so you shouldn’t have, but Daddy also knows the rule and he’s in charge.  He shouldn’t have let you bring it into the living room.”  (Aren’t my parenting skills to be envied??) 

So the hubs comes home for lunch, I said, “Did you guys have a spill last night?”.  He stops eating mid bite and doesn’t answer me, but instead looks at Thing 1 and says, “You told her?”.  Yeah, nice play moron!!  Teach the kid to lie and withhold information from his parents.  Brilliant!!  Whatever.  Not going to give the blow by blow of that argument that was held later out of Thing 1’s earshot, I’ll just get to the point.  You see, the hubs is a dumbass when it comes to adding A+B=C.  He just goes straight to “C”. 

On any stain, (we have dogs remember), he will dab the offending spot with a towel using only his fingertips for pressure.  Remove the towel and run his hand over said spot.  If it feels dry, he’s done.  He may or may not treat spot with any carpet cleaner.  He thinks if the area feels dry on top, he’s done his job.  But is always so confused when the spot has to be treated again, and again, and again.  He even said to me once, “I don’t know why I can’t clean up spills like you do.”. 

Now the irony in this is that he works in insurance, Risk Management to be precise.  He deals with flooding and the like so should be well familiar with the term wicking.  Nope, he’s not.  I had to literally explain to him that spills on carpeting is reverse wicking in his world.  THEN he finally got it.  Not really sure where he thinks all that pop went when his towel ends up primarily dry but thinks the area is dry.  Yeah, just push that shit deep in the carpet and the padding, it’ll never reappear.  Fuck me running.

CAR UPKEEP.  Oh this one is good and still pisses me off.  We had taken our financial planners advice and bought new used cars a few years ago.  Great cars, love them, both SUVs.  My hubby’s is substantially larger than mine and while he loves it and loves driving it (I think it elevates his man status in his world), he cannot ACTUALLY drive it.  Parking to be precise.  If I had a fucking dime for every time he pulls that thing in the garage leaving me 3 inches of space to get into mine!! 

Now because I know how he is, I repeatedly told him the first week of having these cars that he needed to pay close attention to where he’s parking so we could get the doors open comfortably without dinging the other one (reminder: we have small kids = car seats.)  So what does this dumbass do about four days into it?  Parks damn near on top of me, and puts a nice ding on my rear quarter panel.  Looks like somebody took a fucking tack hammer to it!  I’m pissed b/c I’d already been reminding him.  THEN, the very next day, he opens his passenger door and is again too close to me, and scrapes his door along my driver’s side door.  I actually blew up at that one because while these cars are “used”, they were still very new and in very nice condition.  Mine is black so it shows everything.  It was wintertime, the car was a lovely shade of the dull gray haze from all the shit they spray on the roads.  After I said, “Why can’t you pay attention?!?”.  He looks over his shoulder and says, “Your car is dirty.  The dirt will protect it from getting marked up.”.  Oh, ho, ho.  REALLY?!?!?!  HE’S CLUELESS!!!  So I just took a deep breath and said, “No, you’re wrong.  The dirt actually makes it worse.”, and walked back in the house.  Yeah, his little door sweep on my “dirt” is now my own little vertical EKG reading of my rage from the grit really getting those scratches nice and deep. 

But the story doesn’t stop here.  One day we were all riding as a family and came back home from wherever in the hell we went.  He’s pulling in the garage.  He knows I’m watching and he’s determined to get it right…for once.  I’m holding my breath and my fingernails have made half moons in my palms from the fists I’ve clenched.  I’m silently chanting, “You can do it.  You can do it.”.  He makes a dramatic point of pulling very far over from my car to park and lo and behold, HITS THE FUCKING HOUSE!!!!  I said not a word.  I just got out, grabbed a kid and went inside.  He backed that beast of an SUV up, assessed the damage, reparked, came inside.  Proceeds to tell me that it’s just surface scratched, it’ll be okay, the house is okay.  Yeah, because he’s the resident scratch expert, right?  I go look at it and realize that okay, this one is easily fixed.  Some good elbow grease and wax and/or buffer will take the house’s wall paint right off.  I knew I’d be the one to do this so I just went about my day.  The next day I came home from work and he says, “Hey, I got that paint off my car.”.  I stopped mid stride, slowly turned around, afraid to hope, afraid to believe.  I said, “Really?  Cool, I’ll go take a look.”.  I went out and looked and sho’ nuff, white paint is gone, but now it looks as though a cat has used the corner of the front bumper as a scratching post.  Full on cross-hatch.  (See super duper art teacher Mr. Tonda from the 4th grade?  You were right and I would need to know about this later in life.)  Like 20 children decided to make tic tac toe boards at the same time, one on top of the other.  I’m done here.  Just really done.  I’ve no more energy.  I go back in and said, “Yep, it’s gone.  How’d you do it?”.  You can probably guess how he did it already, and you’d be right.  Fucking sandpaper!!!!!!!!!!  Do we need to have a little refresher course on touching anything gritty on paint?!?!?  I mean, seriously!!!  I just gave him the best tutorial ever after I blew up over my driver’s door EKG and he forgot!!!  (I think the shrinks call that repression – pushing those unpleasant memories to the back of your mind to forever be forgotten)  Whatever.  He used sandpaper on the paint of his car.  See, went right to “C” again.  Bravo, hubs, bravo.  Now you can wear your dumbass badge of honor on the bumper of your car.

KITCHEN UTENSILS.  I’m cleaning like a mad woman a while back.  (I go in fits.  I mean I keep a neat house always, but sometimes I get in the zone and do deep cleaning.)  I happen to spy the crock by the stove containing kitchen utensils and thought, I’ll bet there’s dust and crumbs in the bottom of that thing.  Crumbs attract mice, mice attract cats, cats scare my dogs, my dogs will freak out and throw up, I’ll have to clean it up and this will prevent me from doing my deep cleaning.  I’m good at A+B=C.  Actually I rule at it.  Well that and stain lifting, but I digress.  Maybe I should have just went with it all so I could have shown off my awesome stain lifting abilities to rub it in the hubs’ face, but it’d probably be lost on him and it would just create more work for me in the long run.  Yeah, I’ve got literary ADD today. 

Alright so I start pulling utensils and notice one of my uber nice flippers.  (If you’re reading this, what do you call them??  Everyone has a different name.)  Well, these flippers are that Cephalon brand or whatever the hell it’s called.  But it’s nice end cookware that I cherish.  I see several burn marks on the actual flipper.  Goddamn it!!!  The hubs!!!!!!!  I already knew how this happened. 

He likes eggs and will make them for himself on the weekends.  When making them, he proceeds to lay the flipper on the side of the skillet to rest as opposed to the fucking stainless steel double ass spoon rest we HAD to have on our wedding gift registry.  (Metro)  He doesn’t like to get the counter dirty you see.  Well in doing this, there are now a series of burn marks on the plastic of the flipper.  Ruined.  Once again, we have anything nice, it’s not the kids that ruin it, it’s him.  That night I just asked him if he could please not rest the spatula on the side of the skillet anymore because it’s ruining the flipper.  You ready for this one?  His response, “Is that what’s causing all those marks?”.  He was serious as a heart attack too.  I was like, “Yeah.  Add plastic to heat, it’s gonna melt.”.  Him:  “God, I didn’t even think about that.”.  Surprise, surprise.  Yet another “C” moment. 

I’ll stop the tirade at this but will also share that in my favorite ever dutch oven by Cephalon (I really need to look up that brand’s spelling), he also proceeded to use a knife to cut into a pot roast I had made.  Our little resident scratch expert, our devoted little “C” man, cue the bell….didn’t even think that knife would scratch the Teflon coating.  Thanks hubs because that pot roast WAS “fair” worthy.

1 comment:

  1. Haven't seen any blogs from you in a little while. Hope you have time to write something soon. :)

    ReplyDelete