The Parent Trap

Well the patio project is still on hold thanks to Mother Nature scheduling the return of early spring, and dumping enough rain to turn the work area into a soggy mess. Laying patio stones in deceptively cold and damp conditions is not my ideal work environment, so I decided to make the wife have fun. Now seeing how we are slowly slipping into suburban domestictude (aka “homebodies, and yes I know its not a word, but I don’t see you writing this, so I reserve the right to make words up as needed!”) our definition of having “fun” usually consists of sitting around watching TV and reminiscing about those days back in college where we were out partying with our friends till the sun came up. Of course now that we have reached that dreaded mid to late 20’s range, we no longer have the energy or really for that matter the desire to be out all night carousing around the town. Domestictude in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, but occasionally you have to break out of the rut and go and find people to do things with. The key however is finding people who are also not settled into domestictude, as gathering with other domestictudites tend to reinforce the condition.

It has become obvious to the wife and me that the majority of our friends are domestictudites, seeing how most are in their mid 30s and have kids. Having older friends with kids can give a newly wed couple such as the wife and I a very clear glimpse into our future. Your friends are only to happy to have you over to spend some time chatting at their place, surrounded by piles of toys, blankets and all the gear needed to equip the modern parent for expeditions out into the world, if only so they can have a fleeting moment of adult sanity and conversation not consisting of one syllable words. I think that being a parent gives you an amazing ability to translate something completely unintelligible into clear language, and personally I am looking forward to that as perhaps it will surely aid in my understanding of some of the things women (the wife) say to me. However seeing how I am a guy, this will probably prove to be futile, as guys never listen (well actually we listen but are interrupted at critical moments by that little voice in our head that says oh.. look boobies!)

I have decided that having older friends with kids is an excellent way to prevent newly wed couples from having kids to quickly after marriage. The kids are a wonderful cheap source of entertainment, seeing how all the non parents are fascinated in the cute and funny things the kids do, while giving the parents a chance to try to show off their pride and joys. The kids are all cuddly, lovable and sweet, and since we are not parents, a fairly novel thing in our life. Having all the fun with the kids is nice, and getting some good “baby love” is always good for couples who are thinking about having kids. Of course all the parents sit back and enjoy the other couples having a chance to take some of the pressure off of them for a moment. The parents all coo about how wonderful it is to have children and how life changing the experience is. They tease couples with out kids about when they are going to have kids and try to convince us that we should have kids so their kids and our future kids can play together. All this sounds wonderful, and before long you kind of have this little idea creeping into the back of your head that it might be really nice to have children.

Saturday night, the wife and I were sitting at the dinner table with our friends, their very young boys (9 months and 2.5 years old) and a couple whose kids have already gone onto college. We were all watching the boys crawl/run around and run their parents ragged, all the while listening to the parents tell us all about how wonderful being a parent is. The older parents were teasing us about not having any kids yet, and how we should probably get started when a sudden realization hit me: It’s all a big trap! The parents just want us to have kids so we can join them in their misery! They want to see how we would do on only 2 hours of sleep and having had to chase a two year old around all day long. They want to see if we can handle having a little boy play fireman while we try to change them. They want to see if we can make our kids eat while having lots of people making faces at them. They just want to fulfill the saying that misery loves company!

So on a less cynical note: Congrats to all the recent graduates out there…Way to go... It is a big world out there and there is a lot to look forward to. Remember that now that you are done with school, there is something to look forward to: A life sentence... to work!

Anyone out thre want to help prevent us from becoming complete domestictudites? Let me know!

Finally an update!

Its been a while since I last blogged, but I haven’t been feeling very inspired, in fact I pretty much have felt like being a complete bump on a log the last few days. The wife finished her vacation, and went back to work, and since she is working lots of evening shifts, it means I get some quality time with the couch, sports on the TV, and an opportunity to check my eyelids for holes. Now, with me feeling a distinct lack of motivation to do anything, and future home improvements postponed due to rain, which usually is a good source of material for my blogs) I struggled to come up with something to write about. Good news for you though, I still have that wonder of our modern age, the object that so many of us turn to for comfort and nurture, television.

Now during my bonding sessions with the couch, I also noticed a very strange trend in commercials. Now you might be thinking, “what this guy actually watches commercials?” Just stick with me here for a minute though, because I know you might think I am a bit twisted in the head (and you would be right!) but I find commercials to be wonderful source of laughter for myself. You see, I have a bit of an analytical side to me, which when combined with my sarcastic side, and my common sense side tends to see right thru marketers claims of hoards of cash, beautiful people, and miraculous drugs that are able to cure any ailment and give us a life of running thru fields of flowers in slow motion.

My poor wife has to deal with this eccentricity all the time, as she and I often watch shows together. Well watching might be a bit of a misnomer, as usually I am making wise cracks about each and every commercial, and adding my own commentary track to the latest MTV or reality drivel that tends to appear on our screen, ala one of those robots on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Now the wife has to deal with this because she is contractually stuck with me (in fact she has a clause in that contract that I have to be flattering to her on this blog or she will no longer do guest appearances,) so she usually cranks the volume up higher and leaves me to just mumble a stream of consciousness to myself. The wife accompanies the volume increase maneuver with one of those looks that I mentioned earlier, you know the one that says my husband is doing something strange and I really wish he were more like the normal kids. But I digress.

So here I am giving a running commentary on commercials when a General Motors commercial comes on touting how their vehicles come with OnStar. At first glance it looked like one of those generic On* commercials with a bunch of bland people touting how On* saved them. But wait! What is this? Where are the adults? Kids doing an On* commercial? This makes sense, as people with rug rats tend to want to be safe, and since most people can’t afford or don’t really want to drive a beige Volvo, the kids questioning their parents about who will provide the benefits of ON* seems to make sense. However, one line grabs my attention. A child who looks to be around 11-13 in age says this great line:

“Who will find my baby brother when the car he was in alone is stolen?”

Okay… stop and think about that for just one second. Baby brother: Check. Baby brother alone: Check. Stolen car: Che… Hey that’s not right! Something in that thought process just doesn’t add up! Isn’t this a bit drastic to be asking of a satellite tracking/fleet management system to also be doing the parenting? Why is the BABY brother in the car ALONE in the first place? Now why is the baby brother in the car alone long enough for it to be stolen? This commercial just seems to say “if you have the almighty On Star, its okay to leave the car running, the baby strapped in while you go and get your Valium prescription.”

Does this strike anyone else as completely absurd?

Okay I realize that this update was a bit half assed, so I will try to use my whole ass for the next one! On a side note, the kitchen got repainted, and looks wonderful. Maybe I should post some pics of our ordeals.
J

Wallpaper Ladders, and Boom.

I hate wallpaper. I hate people who feel it is necessary to put up wallpaper with no sizing underneath (Auntie M ignore this part) . I hate wallpaper borders. There I said it. I vow from this point forward, no wallpaper will be put up by me, unless it in a location that is easily strippable!

You might have gathered that I must have been dealing with wallpaper and trying to remove the evil wall treatment. The wife and I started our first phase of our Extreme Makeover Trading Spaces project last night. I come home from work and find the wife up on the counter with a large sponge and sharp putty knife, scraping away at the infernal yellow sunflower border that cheerfully leered down at us from all round the top of the walls. The wife brushes away the remains of wallpaper and adhesive that liberally shower down on her, and says

“Honey, I can reach these areas but you are going to have to handle all the high areas.”

Little did I know that this little seemly innocent comment would lead to hours of consternation, frustration and puzzlement for both of us. The wife is terrified of heights, and ladders only serve to accentuate the fear by combining a shaky platform with towering heights. I gamely agreed, as I really have no aversion to heights, or ladders for that matter. I have spent many an hour up on ladders stringing LAN cables, painting, refinishing windows sills, climbing on roofs and the like, so I probably have somewhat of a casual attitude towards ladders and heights in general.

I quickly went and changed into my work/painting clothes and wandered back into the kitchen. The wife point the areas I would be responsible for out to me, and told me to get to it. I headed out to the garage to get the new “Heavy Duty” stepladder and found myself a putty knife. I set up the ladder and prepared to start madly hacking away at that sunflower border. I had probably only been up there 5 minutes when the wife mentioned that I was doing an inadequate job of removing the remnants of the adhesive backing and that perhaps I should actually try, otherwise she and the mother in law would have to frown at me the following morning when they were painting. So I decided that I would put a bit more effort into it, and use my whole ass rather then half ass’ing it like I had been before. I redoubled my efforts, and was vigorously scraping away at the border when I hear a loud “PING.” I look around, and look to see if I had dropped anything onto the china hutch (to my right) or onto the table (behind and to the left of me.) I didn’t see anything, so I reached down to retrieve the sponge I was using to soak the adhesive off when I notice that the metal arm that braces the two legs was swinging loose, and the rivet supposed to be holding that metal arm to the fiberglass was gone and in its place there was a large gaping hole.

Now it’s amazing how when you know something is going to go horribly wrong your brain kind of kicks into this whole slow motion Matrix style vision, and you are acutely aware of the smallest detail. After noticing the missing leg brace, I detected that the ladder was starting to corkscrew and shake very much akin to the shaking that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge went thru in its final moments (you know the Tacoma Narrows bridge, it’s the one that they show on the Discovery/TLC/History channel, that black and white grainy footage of a guy running away from his car as the whole bridge trembles.) Now I am not a civil or mechanical engineer nor do I play one on TV, but I did take a strengths and materials class, and I have built enough balsa wood bridges to know that when a structure is quivering like a bowl of Jello on a fat kid’s stomach that this shaking is not a good thing. So here I am holding a deadly putty knife in one hand, a bowl and sponge filled with water in the other, surrounded by a china hutch filled with glasses, our table with the wife’s laptop on it, the stairway and very hard wooden railing leading to the upstairs, the stairway and drop of around 16 ft leading to the downstairs, and a TV the wife was using to entertain herself while stripping the wallpaper, standing on a shuddering ladder around 7 ft in the air. Thinking logically, I let out a little yelp and try to figure out what directing I should jump to abandon ladder, avoid killing myself with a lethal putty knife, avoid splashing water all over electronics, and not crack my head open on a hard railing or land on uneven stairs shattering ribs. Most importantly, damnit didn’t this ladder say it was Heavy Duty?! All this pondering took place in the space of about 1 or 2 seconds, right before the ladder finally surrenders to gravity and the fat kid on top of it sees if he can pull a Looney Tunes act and hover in mid air. Conclusion? Um yeah. There was no Matrix style jumping, no catlike ability to land on my feet, instead I probably looked like Wille Coyote right after he discovers he has ran off the cliff.

I lay there in a twisted little heap on the floor, the boom of my crashing into the floor reverberating in my ears, the sunflowers on the border mocking me, and hear the wife scrambling to my aid. She comes over and asks if I am okay. I continue to lie there, and pointedly went thru an inventory and status check of body parts.

“Foot? Check. Ankle? Check.”

I finally complete the mission control style checklist, and find to my surprise only a few thing are sore, and nothing really hurts that bad. I ask the wife how the TV and computer are, and she gets all bothered with me for asking. Tells me something about loving me and that she can buy other appliances. Of course in my head I am thinking “Hey, If you are going to fall from a ladder surrounded by electronics while holding a bowl full of water that I didn’t want to spill on everything, you would ask too!”

Of course looking back on it now, it all seems rather funny to me, and I am gratified by the fact that she was so concerned about me rather then any stupid laptop. I guess she really does love me (Honey, I never had any doubts, I just put this in there for the comedic effect!) Thankfully I was able to continue, and managed not to crack my melon on any hard railings, or crush the china hutch. We managed to get all the wall paper off, with the wife standing near the ladder (a different one my folks loaned me) bracing it anytime I moved. She nobly volunteered to go up on there, but hey she has a fear of heights, and me… Well lets just say that ladders and I are going to have to reevaluate our relationship.

Extreme Makeover.. My home Edition.

Vacation stated for the wife this week, and of course like all good suburbanites, rather then actually taking trip or time to relax, a vacation has become a time to catch up on all the things that work has kept you away from, and a time to do major projects. Well in the wife’s case, our major project is to repaint some of the rooms in our house. Now our house really probably doesn’t need repainting, what with the wonderful artsy fartsy country chic and floral patterned borders everywhere, but you know when you buy your house, you want to start making it your own. So the wife and I are once again off to our most favorite of romantic evenings, spending time at the local home improvement superextravaganzamart, looking at various colors, and trying to picture exactly how big our room is.

Now this is where the real fun begins, as there are only approximately 1 gazillion bajillion-mazijillion colors out there, and of course none of them are the color that you are looking for. To make matters worse, all the colors that are close to what you are looking for are not what your significant other is looking for. Obviously, we both went into the store with some semblance of an idea as to what the color we were wanting was, but as you start looking at colors, you start realizing that your sense of colors are no where near calibrated the same. It seemed every color that she liked was a bit to orange, and every color I liked, she felt was to yellow. We had planned on painting the room a kind of harvest gold, similar to the glaze used on some of the plates we got for our wedding, but everything that we looked at was close, but not really what we wanted.

Finally the wife and I decided to just browse around some of the different wall treatments, and maybe gather some inspiration. Now this is totally a guy sort of thing to do, but thankfully the wife is a patient woman and humors my attempts of find inspiration or guidance by wandering down the paint aisles looking at the different products offered. I am sure the wife gets very frustrated with me sometimes, especially my failure to listen to her sage advice (that or just fold up like a cheap liquor store paper bag in a rain storm and agree with her,) but sometimes a guy just has to go and figure things out for himself, especially someone as bullheaded as me. So I go wandering around the store looking at all these different wall treatments and paint techniques, and finally point at the superextravaganzamart’s Venetian plaster technique.

“Honey, lets do this on the kitchen walls, the exquisite shadings, color depths and textures would just create a wonderful atmosphere that is inviting, warm, deeply inspiring and very appealing to the eye.” (Actually I probably said nothing quite this eloquent, rather I probably stood there pointing and grunting, but hey this is my story and I can tell it how I see fit!)

The wife patiently looked at my object of my excitement, gave a little sigh of exasperation and managed to mostly camouflage the look she gives me when I do something entirely stupid, impractical or otherwise testosterone fueled. She picks up the book and skims thru it, and hands it back to me and replies “Yes honey, this looks ideal! Surely the layering of 4 coats of plaster and coloring will be easy, especially the high areas above the cabinets. I am so glad you suggested this.”

Hmmm… 4 layers? Coloring? High areas above the cabinets? Oh… um yeah, maybe that color of paint isn’t to bold after all.

Note: This will be a continuing saga over the next few days and weeks. The wife and I will be working on redoing some rooms in the house and some other fun and exciting projects. I am fully documenting this process, and will be providing many of what I am sure will be humor filled episodes for all my readers. Pictures will be forthcoming!