Tidy Husband

Eligible for the seniors discount and the Happy Meal deal at the same time.

  1. A Limited Time Offer

    Today just after the child got home from school, the doorbell rang.

    Our doorbell never rings. It only rings when her little friend Ethel comes over to play. We didn’t check the door cam because I could see a little four-foot shadow so I thought it was a friend.

    It was not Ethel.

    Instead, there were two young girls from the neighborhood at the door and when I opened the door they asked if I wanted to buy this:

    I have no idea what this could be.

    Yeah. I have no idea what this is either. Crafts? I see some hammer marks in the wood sooo…hammer art? I’m stumped.

    They hand it to me and say “2 bucks”.

    Wait. You want me to pay you two dollars for this…. thing?!

    Yes, they replied.

    I was about to say no when my MIL came to the rescue with two dollars in cash. Who carries cash? Mother-in-laws – that’s who. There goes my inheritance.

    I hand the two young girls the two bucks. I have never seen the girls before. I can assume they live around the corner? I have no idea.

    I do know they now have 2 bucks and we have umm….art? I guess.

    As they were leaving they said to me “We had trouble finding the house, it looks different”

    I was going to mumble something about the front door being new and then thought better about it and just wished the 2 little scammers on their way.

    But this means that the words out – we’re the suckers on the street that will buy anything.

    Maybe they saw the new wallpaper from the window and figured if we bought that – we must be willing to buy anything.

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  2. 100 Times Smarter

    She had her 100th day of school today. And because she’s big now – there was homework.

    Her task was to find 100 things and toss them in a bag. We thought that was a pretty lame curriculum so we decided to make things a bit more interesting:

    We taped 100 crayons to a poster board:

    we should have stuck with tossing them in a bag.

    This seemed like a good idea. Now that I think of it, this is very similar to the wallpaper project. It seems like a great idea until you have to do it. Who knew that gluing 100 crayons would be so difficult and tedious.

    Surprisingly, we had this done a week before instead of the night before so that gave the crayons lots of time to fall off somehow. We had to re-glue a whole bunch of them and send her off with a poster sized garbage bag on the school bus in hopes that there would still be 100 on the board when she gets there.

    Speaking of the School Bus..

    We Have Failed as Parents

    It was time for the school bus to drop her off. I waited, and waited. Then the school bus drove by. Weird, but whatever. Maybe that wasn’t her bus?

    I went inside to tell BW and we figured it was a new bus driver and she just missed the house and she will be home soon. It happened to her friend Ethel once too.

    Oh, okay. No problem.

    Then the phone rings.

    It was her Spanish teacher: “um…are you going to pick her up?”

    It took my brain a split second to catch up:

    Honey, We Forgot the Kid!

    OH. CRAP! I will be right there! I yelled into the phone while reaching for my shoes

    Today is Tuesday. On Tuesdays she has after-school Spanish lessons. We are supposed to pick her up at 3:45. It was 3:55 when the call came.

    I made it to school in record time and managed to pick up the child at 4:01. Six minutes door to door. A new record.

    Of course, I was beyond apologetic. We totally forgot. Even the child forgot as she was pulled off the school bus so she could go to class. She forgot too. It’s just too many things going on – 100 days, wallpaper, Spanish lessons…my old dad brain can’t keep up.

    We totally forgot about the Spanish classes. This is only her third time and there was a break in between for a week so we just got out of practice. Oops!

    I thought I was doing so well too as today was library day and I remembered to have her library book in her backpack for the trip back to school.

    There goes my parent of the year award.

    Tomorrow she is taking the bus home. I checked.

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  3. The Great Wall

    For 58 Years I have managed to dodge adding wallpaper to walls. Until today.

    As you are fully aware, BW is all over the decorating thing and we have a lot of pink and green to last a lifetime here. But it’s still.not. enough she says.

    I mentioned this when I wrote about all the pink but the wallpaper is now here folks.

    It’s not only here. It’s on the wall:

    I might have a seizure.

    Of course, BW loves it.

    I will say it’s interesting. She wanted to decorate the kitchen and I am told this is the last thing – save for a tear it all down and start over event. We don’t think that will happen anytime soon, because money is hard to come by.

    We almost didn’t get the paper on the wall as the logistics were confusing for both parties and of course the instructions said to work left to right.

    The problem with the left to right method is we had a door in the way. So we cried, we laughed and we figured out how to work from the right. The right seems to be in fashion now anyway..

    so far so good.

    The instructions also said to use a laser level. I did not have a laser level.

    I went to Home Depot. They have laser levels.

    Now I have a laser level. They have my money.

    Where was I? Oh, wallpaper.

    So ya. I thought it would come in little 12 inch tiles and it would be easy-peasy. OH NO. It came in big 18 inch x 10foot rolls with each roll numbered to go on in right order which would be left to right and not right to left as we decided it must be done.

    We measured. We measured again. We bickered. We measured again. We bickered some more.

    Then we just threw caution to the wind and wallpaper on the wall and hoped it would come out okay and it did. Like a lot of DIY stuff if you look too close you can see an imperfection here and there but if you step back six feet it looks like a professional wallpaper install done by yours truly.

    And lo and behold when I got to the last piece of of the puzzle and things were still looking straight and level.

    I am now a pro.

    Now. My own personal thoughts on this pattern:

    I sure hope I get used to this because currently every time I turn around I forget that we have an optical illusion for a wall now and I think to myself the time has finally come: I’m losing my vision.

    Wait, never mind. I can still see, it’s just BW’s wallpaper choices. Whew.

    Now, If it were me, I would slap on one color of paint on the whole house and be done with it. I hear “new home beige” is in style this year.

    But it’s no longer all about me and now I have BW and a six-year-old who both love the wallpaper. The dog isn’t so sure but she’s even happy because the temps warmed up a bit today so she got to go outside.

    Me? I’m happy that this stuff went up at all and that BW said she was now “done” with decorating.

    Ha. We’ll see.

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  4. You’ve Got Mail

    She grabs the remote for her new light up terrarium night light she got for her birthday and then says to me “I’m checking my email!”.

    Then it dawned on me that she will probably not even know what email is by the time she gets to use computers or phones on the regular.

    Back in the day there was even a movie based around email. We had ringtones and screensavers. We had pre-microsoft HOTMAIL. We had rich princes wanting our help with their fortunes.

    Email was big. We communicated a lot over email. We made plans, applied for jobs and shared recipes and bad jokes all though email. We probably arranged meeting up to see the email movie through email.

    Life was simpler then. You could call or email. Or leave a message. That’s it

    Now you have to have all the apps and their own proprietary messaging systems installed so that you can communicate with all your peeps. Something about blue bubbles and green bubbles not being compatible makes my head hurt.

    She won’t know what a big deal Gmail was in the day and that getting an invite was like getting an invite to the royal ball. 1GB of storage was mind blowing. Last I counted, I have 13,000 unread emails in my inbox. I have no idea what that takes up as storage and nor do I care. But, I can go back and look. I can find the emails BW and I sent when we were dating. Try and find a 13 year old text message from some long abandoned app from Google.

    There used to be a sound when you got email. Email was cool. Email was the future. You could communicate with somebody around the world! It was unthinkable!

    Now, my inbox is full of Amazon wanting to sell me something, or breaking news about more bad news – and that’s just no reason to get excited about email any more – which is a shame.

    I want an email I look forward to. One that’s entertaining or makes you think or at least gives you a minute of reprieve from the world around you.

    Here’s hoping this email is one of the good emails you get today.

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  5. A Story about Chinese Food

    To celebrate the week of surviving a six-year-old not having any formal education for a week – we had Chinese food takeout for dinner

    Not the Chicken Ball and Fried Rice kind, but the real Chinese food. From Here

    Once you have this you can’t go back. You will never eat Chinese food from a food court again.

    it’s a treat here and happens infrequently so of course the child goes wild when she finds out there’s some Chinese food in her future. She’s a fan of the leavened pancake (number 13 on the menu) and of course, the dumplings. Everybody like dumplings.

    Of course, like everything else things have gotten really expensive and Chinese food has of course followed right along. It’s now well north of $100 for enough food for four and if BW had her way we would be reaching $200 which is crazy. I have bought a used car back in the day for $200. (A 1981 Toyota Tercel) so food prices have been out of control. I fear the day we will be priced out of this Chinese food.

    Our favorite breakfast joint had to stop offering breakfast because it got too expensive for the customers and they just couldn’t make it work. This is why we never eat out. BW makes better at home and there’s usually leftovers. And by leftovers, I mean money. I don’t know how families do it by eating out. We don’t.

    Maybe that’s why the child gets so excited about Chinese food as it happens rarely. She is so happy eating it. She sings to her food, it’s that delicious. No really. There is singing.

    You know it’s the real deal and not the chicken ball variety when one time I went in and ordered off the menu and picked out a dish I hadn’t tried before and the lady behind the counter told me I do not want to order that dish. That dish is for those with acquired tastes that I did not have.

    “Try the Chicken Balls instead”, she told me.

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