Dear George,
Since I began this blog I’ve
been including a brief weekly item called “Everyday Foibles.” The stories there chronicle various
quirks, mishaps, and idiosyncrasies that have caught my eye, whether at home,
out in public, at my office, etc.
Needless to say, because we spend lots of time together, a number of
these anecdotes are focused on transactions between my wife Katja and myself. I decided to reproduce a few here. They are some mix of amusing,
foolish, embarrassing, and/or revealing.
Occasionally I wonder if alien seed pods have hatched in our basement
and taken over the people who used to live upstairs. See what you think.
Love,
Dave
Just how old is
“old”? Katja and I were listening to the discussion on NPR
about swine flu. I asked Katja if
she were going to get vaccinated this year. She said she didn’t plan to because they were only going to
make the vaccine available to children and old people. I thought this over and finally
suggested that we might belong to the category of “old people”. Katja screwed up her face, but she
didn’t say anything. Then I added
that I understood that old people were a low priority for getting
vaccinations. So, even if it turned
out that we were old, we might not be eligible. That ended the conversation. I never did get Katja’s final opinion about whether we were
old people or not. I meant to ask
her later, but it slipped my mind.
How I Failed the
Retirement Test. During her last year at work Katja fell
and broke her arm, and she was bedridden with severe pain for the first week. I
stayed home most of the time, doing minor tasks and trying my best to keep
Katja comfortable. Full-time
care-taking wears on your nerves though.
When I sat down to do something on the computer and Katja called from
the bedroom, I walked in and complained, “Every time I sit down to work on
something you call me.” Katja
looked downcast. Then she said, “I
don’t think I’ll be retiring any time soon.” I asked why that was.
She said that being home together 24 hours a day had been pretty much a
failure. Feeling defensive, I
claimed that being home with a broken arm wasn’t a good test of what retirement
would be like. However, Katja was pretty
certain it was.
The First Day. Monday
was the first day of Katja’s retirement.
It looks like it will be a huge adjustment. I realized this when I said after lunch, “Do you mind if I
go to the fitness center?” I’d
been going off to the fitness center four times a week for two years without
asking anybody’s permission, so my own sudden deference made me uneasy. Later at supper Katja said that she
would like to go on a tour of the Grand Slam Tennis Tournaments, starting in
Australia, then proceeding to Paris, London, and New York (plus the Italian
Open in Rome, even though it’s not a Grand Slam). I said meekly that there are eight months between the
Australian Open and the U.S. Open in New York. Katja said that we’d come back home for short stays in
between. I simply munched on my
celery sticks and decided the best policy was to keep quiet.
Retirement Transitions. There’s
been a large container of Pretzel Rods sitting unopened on the kitchen counter
for several days. Hungry at 10
p.m. the other night, I asked Katja if I could open it. She said no, that she was taking it to
work in the morning. I reminded
her that she had retired several months ago and no long goes to work. She laughed and said she was going to
the agency to drop off money for the weekly lottery pool. She planned to bring in the Pretzel
Rods for her colleagues when she stopped by. I observed that she’d already sent in a pound cake earlier
in the week, but Katja said that she’s also responsible for bringing in the
pretzels. How often, I asked,
would she be bringing in the pretzels?
Probably forever, she said.
I thought about complaining, except that I still have an office at the
university and go to work nearly every day. I guess we are both suffering transition difficulties.
Financial Creativity. On
Saturday morning I asked Katja her plans.
She said she was going down to Saks because she had $350 of credit to
spend. I always get a little
paranoid about these things, so I asked if she had had to spend $3500 to get
$350 worth of credit. Katja said
no, that she had the credit because she had mistakenly paid her Saks bill
twice. I wondered if Saks wouldn’t
just give her her money back if she paid the same bill twice. Katja said no, Saks would only give her
$350 worth of credit. I thought
that was outrageous, and I volunteered to go with her and talk to the
manager. Katja clarified, though,
that they would give her the $350 back, but they wouldn’t correct the mistake
until the end of the month. I
suggested she just wait till the end of the month, but she said she didn’t want
to wait. I protested that she
would be spending an extra $350 that she hadn’t even planned to. Katja replied that I probably wasn’t
going to buy her an Xmas present, so she was going to buy her own gift. I found it hard to argue with her
reasoning. I just asked her to
please not buy me any presents.
She promised she wouldn’t.
Mystery Unloader. When
Katja got up the other morning, she said, “Thank you so much for unloading the
dishwasher.” Still half asleep, I
said, “What? I didn’t unload the
dishwasher.” “You certainly did,”
Katja said. “I put a load in at
bedtime, and now it’s all been put back on the shelves.” I asked her if she’d taken an Ambien
before going to bed, and she said she had. “I think what we have here,” I said, “is a case of Ambien
Night-Time Dishwasher Unloading.”
Katja was absolutely certain that that wasn’t the case. I claimed that when men take Ambien
they put their tools or their guns away, but they definitely don’t unload
dishwashers. Katja shook her head
in disagreement. I said the only
other possibility was that a cat burglar had come in and done it. Katja didn’t think that was
likely. Now I guess we’ll never
know.
How Wives Lose Their
Glasses. We were going to the opera recently. When it came time
to leave, Katja said that she couldn’t find her glasses. Grumpy and
frustrated, I started searching along with her. I tried her purse, then
scoured the bedroom, including under the bed, behind the bedside table,
etc. No luck. I gave Katja a haughty, even arrogant lecture about how to
be better organized (have a place for everything, keep everything in…blah-biddy
blah blah, etc.). Then we checked the bathrooms, the kitchen, the foyer, the
sunroom, the whole house. I even looked in the glove compartment of the
car. We were running way too late, and, very irritated, I suggested to
Katja that she wear her prescription sunglasses instead. Just as she was
getting them, I stuck my hand in my sports jacket pocket. I was surprised
to find a pair of glasses there. I pulled them out -- they were Katja’s
glasses! Having mistaken them for my own, I’d put them in my jacket
pocket as I was getting dressed. I sheepishly handed them to Katja.
She was remarkably calm and pleasant about it, especially after suffering
through my self-righteous harangues. I drove fast -- we made it to the
opera just in time.
Bargain Shopping. When the
cable guy came last week, he discovered that our downstairs TV was no longer
working. Somebody had told me
recently that Wal-Mart was selling good TVs for a hundred dollars, so I asked
the cable guy if that was a good place to go. He said sure, or maybe H.H. Gregg. At breakfast on Sunday I asked Katja if she’d like to go to
Walmart to get a new TV. Katja
replied that she doesn’t shop at Walmart.
So I looked in the paper.
H.H. Gregg was having a sale that included a 32-inch TV for $279. I showed the picture to Katja, but she
didn’t like the looks of it.
“What’s the most you would spend?” I asked. She said seven hundred dollars. I complained that we almost never watch TV downstairs, so we
didn’t need a fancy set. Then I
asked if she’d like to go together to H.H. Gregg. She said no; she preferred to go alone. “Would you promise to get a 32-inch
screen and spend no more than $400?”
I asked. Katja said
yes. I volunteered to go to H.H.
Gregg myself, but Katja said she would take care of it. I came back from a hike with the dogs
several hours later, and there was a brand new, very large and fancy
flat-screen TV. I didn’t ask Katja
the price, but, even though the screen was a lot larger than 32 inches, I doubt
if she would have paid more than $400.
Air Conditioner
Skirmishes. Katja and I have never been in synch about air
conditioners. I personally think
they are Satan’s handiwork, while Katja regards them as a basic human
necessity. We have a silent daily
conflict in our house. Katja
constantly sets the A/C thermostat at 69 and I constantly reset it to 73. Neither one of us ever says anything
about this. We just keep changing
it back and forth. The same thing
happens with our car. I don’t like
to use the car air conditioner unless the temperature is above 95, whereas
Katja automatically turns it on when driving, even if it’s cold out. When the air conditioner stopped
functioning on our relatively new Honda, I asked the mechanic if the problem
was that it had been set too low too many times. He said no, the unit is constructed run at any
temperature. The fluid level had
simply dropped too low. Then our
home air conditioner unit stopped putting out cold air. I again asked the repairman if that was
due to the thermostat being set too low.
He had obviously heard this question from many husbands. His advice was to just leave it set at
whatever temperature one’s wife liked.
So that’s what we do now.
Helpless Husbands
Department. Home alone, I thought I would have a peanut butter and jelly
sandwich, but all I could find was the bread. Finally I found a jar of cherry preserves in the cabinet,
but no peanut butter. I called
Katja on her cell phone and asked where the peanut butter might be. She said she wasn’t sure but suggested
I look in the cabinet. When I said
I already had, she suggested the counter near the Panini grill or the
refrigerator. I’d looked in those
places too. She said she was
sorry, but she didn’t know. I said
I thought she might have a visual image of where it was. Disappointingly, she said she
didn’t. I gave up and had two
peach yogurts instead. When Katja
came home, she looked in the cabinet and immediately found the peanut butter on
the top shelf. It was turned
around backwards so the label wasn’t showing. No wonder I couldn’t find it.
G-mail Comments
-Vicki L (4-8): Wow David, That was a great blog - it made me feel like I had a week
long stay at your house… Love, sis
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