All posts tagged: marriage

Haircuts and love.

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The WideEyedSpouse had a haircut this morning. “How’re you getting it cut?” I asked while backing the Smooth Ride out of the WideEyedGarage. (And I should not have been talking while doing this. There is a 1 cm gap on the driver’s side and a 4 inch gap on the passenger side with lawnmowers and doorframes and stuff so…concentrate!). The Spouse did a little dance step. “You know, like the guy in the movie with the dancing.” I hit the brakes. It was mesmerizing watching this in the dim garage, his just out of bed hair waggling around unpredictably. “Huh?” I had nothing. I leaned partway out of the car window, trying to see and hear better. Did that just happen? “The movie with dancing, you know.” He did another little dance step with some jazz hands to the side. The garage keys in his hand jingled. I had the sense he couldn’t really get into it because he was stuck in the small space between the Smooth Ride and the Mighty Pathfinder. “Wha?” I …

My heart is a like a neutron star, dense and heavy.

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My heart is like a magnetar, dense and heavy and a thousand times magnetized. Four weeks from this day I will board a flight to the far away field location. I will have no phone, no lights, no motor car – ok, we do have a satellite phone for emergencies but not much else. Our sole luxury is the outhouse we are taking with us. Stacks of long underwear, socks, field pants, and equipment are growing in the front parlor. This is remote field research. My heart is heavier every hour. I look at the WideEyedSpouse and I think, I won’t see you for weeks and weeks. I pet the dogs and I worry – will you be ok while I’m gone? Wiggins the Ancient Cat creaks by, I fret, will you be alive when I come home? The weight in my chest is a coalescence of the open wide joy of learning that I was going to have a funded research program this summer. As the time for leaving grows closer, the plane tickets …

A vexing loss in the spousal competition.

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I’m not saying that the WideEyedSpouse and I compete against each other. That would be a gross exaggeration. However, it is nice to get a win every now and again, to be better at something, like say, concocting the best dill pickle or power shifting in the powerful Mach 5 (the demon on wheels, my Mini Cooper S). Of course the decision as to who is better at any given event is subject to in-house debate. Data proofs and examples are required during the win-lose negotiations. We may query the dogs for their perspective. The judges, Spouse and I, are not impartial. It has happened that I determined myself the winner regardless of the Spouse’s contrary findings. It’s all in good fun. Mostly. Yesterday an external judge gave the Spouse a win that will haunt me for decades. We have had exactly the same number of Olympic recurve-style archery lessons. Six. At them, we stand side by side at the range and are coached as we shoot. We have almost exactly the same gear, except …

17th Wedding Anniversary: Furniture

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No traditional gift is defined for the 17th wedding anniversary. Evidently, being married for 17 years is somehow unremarkable. A middle anniversary. One where you aren’t newlywed, nor have you achieved anything truly notable. It is just part way along the long haul. It is Indiana if you are stuck driving from New Jersey to Minnesota. It is Iowa if you are taking the interstates from Buffalo to Phoenix. Not interesting, not there yet (whatever that means for wedding anniversaries), but at least making some progress. In modern gifting etiquette, the 17th anniversary gift is furniture. I am disappointed in this because at first I read the chart wrong and thought it was porcelain. I need a new toilet, a new bathroom sink, and a crown to replace a fracturing molar in my maxilla. Porcelain seemed just about perfect. But furniture? I guess the giftie list inventors figure that by 17 years the kids and/or dogs have pretty much ruined anything nice you ever had. Maybe it would be a nice anniversary present to sit …

Twenty things I could have bought with the $20 I lost yesterday.

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1. 2,000 pieces of penny candy. Two thousand. 2. 20 minutes of satellite phone time to talk to the Spouse from the remote fieldwork location. 3. 2 dozen Paula’s Donuts. That’s 24 items of pure deliciousness. 4. Two tickets to a Buffalo Bisons game. 5. 20 Mega Millions lottery tickets. 6. A shovel. 7. 6 bags of Family Size potato chips. 8. Gas for a scenic drive to Olcott and back, with a stop at Reids Hot Dogs. 9. A really big bale of toilet paper. 10. Contact lens solution, pickles, potato chips and fair-trade coffee at Target: the intended purpose. 11. A dog chair. 12. A dog license renewal. 13. A marriage license (17 years ago). 14. 180 dukie bags for dog walks. 15. 2 completely drinkable bottles of wine, or one wine-in-a-box (Equivalent of 4 bottles – stays fresh for a month. Just saying.). 16. 2 6-packs of quality beer. 17. Almost 3 months of Netflix. 18. Approximately 60 showers, 8 dishwasher runs, 5-10 loads of hot water laundry (whites and dog beds) …

You say that like beer would somehow impair my ability to be awesome.

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Actually, I didn’t say it like that at all. It was a simple query about the wisdom of the action being taken. We were having a rainy and cold Saturday evening. The husband was fussing with the 1920s ceiling light we found at Buffalo Reuse last weekend. It was tucked up in a back room of that cavernous, dark, and very, very grungy retail outlet for parts yanked out of “green” demolition projects. Stacks of tiles torn from bathroom walls (the husband is still fighting an infected cut from one of those), old toilets (I mean used toilets, really really used toilets), doors, windows, tin ceiling chunks, and other house bits are piled next to only slightly worn tanks of corrosive fluid. Anyway, the husband had just discovered that with careful use of Bon Ami he could remove the filth crust of nearly 100 years to make the molded milky glass of the light gleam like new. All that remained was to replace the dangerously inept 1970s era rewiring with new, legal, and safe wiring and …

Why Can’t My Husband Find the Ketchup?

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Men and women see the world differently. This isn’t my opinion; it’s a strongly supported scientific hypothesis. Men and women perceive space and the items in it differently. I wrote an article about it. I think about it all the time for my work. But for some reason I never applied my ivory tower notions to my household.  Why does my husband have to lean into the refrigerator hunting the ketchup? It’s been on the same door shelf position in all 11 of our households over the years. It isn’t rocket science. The man memorizes the URLs of hundreds of routers and switches and techie stuff for his work. But he can’t reliably find the ketchup.  It just isn’t his fault. Evolutionary psychology tells us that men learn large territories and routes through them, while women learn smaller areas in greater detail. Back in the day, men were hunting the big game over days of effort. Women were taking care of every other detail of life, including feeding themselves and their families using their detailed …