Res ipsa loquitur

allheadybooks, "What's your least favorite thing about splitting your time between two houses? (My wife and I are also in a commuter marriage at the moment, and I get so frustrated every weekend when I have to go grocery shopping AGAIN because I thought I had eggs but that was at the other apartment!"

Where do I begin?

I hate trying to cook in a kitchen that isn't my kitchen, and I hate the way my kitchen tools are all scattered -- the roasting pan is in the Spousehouse but the stockpot and the fat separator are in my apartment. I'm spoiled and don't like to make bread without my stand mixer, which lives at my place, but if I make homemade bread at my place, two-thirds of the loaf will get stale because I just don't eat that much bread.

Also, I'm still shopping for a family and throwing away masses of wilted lettuce every week.

I hate always being separated from one of my cats.

I'm actually starting to spend more weekends in the apartment, even though I miss the spouse terribly, because I just need to live where I live; if I'm away every weekend, I can't go to the farmer's market or garage sales, and it's hard to make friends other than the people I work with.

I hate that the only church I'm part of is an hour away. Church friends are that "loose network" that the social scientists say everyone needs -- I don't necessarily involve them in deep conversations or intense emotions, but if I'm looking for someone who can teach me to sharpen a lawn mower blade or someone who can connect me with a possible work contact or someone to call when I've locked my keys in the car, it's great to have that big community.

I hate talking on the phone. I hate it so much. But it's that or have no contact with the spouse at all.

I think what I hate the most, though, is missing the unstructured, un-meaningful, low-density interactions that you have when you live in the same house -- when you're not conversing or working together, but you're just quietly making two cups of coffee instead of one, or looking up from a book to read someone one line.

We make 'quality time' for ourselves, but I miss the time that was just time.



( Click for question list. Still 4 days left to fill. )

indywind offers this invitation to self-indulgence: an anecdote from your real life. (Your kidlet says the darnedest things, and I love how you share overheard remarks in such a way that I can practically hear them myself).

I'll give you two, one spouse-related and one kidlet-related.

1. So I'm sitting with my laptop, and the spouse gets up to go to bed, and I say, "Could you put out the lamp while you're up?"

He says, "I will put it out, and then I will put it out," and looks at me expectantly, and when I don't get it, he says, "It's from Othello." And he goes to walk upstairs.

"Hang on," I said, "can you put out the lamp?"

"Didn't I do that?" he says.

"No," I said, "you just made Shakespearean allusions at it."

2. So the spouse and I are complaining, which is one of our favorite pastimes: my co-worker talks all day and never does any work, and his classmates are slackers who don't do the required reading, and winter came too early, and I hate talking on the phone but my brother won't text, and so on.

The conversation turns to the children of one of our neighbors, and the spouse says to the kidlet, "You're not really doing your part in demonstrating the behavior expected of a teenager, you know."

"No, because you two are doing a better job of it."

terrio prompts: What is your favorite pet you've ever interacted with (either yours or someone else's) and why?

When we were first married, we went out and got a marmalade kitten. We named him Henry. He lived less than two weeks before crawling into the underside of the recliner and dying of distemper. It was very sad.

It was winter, and -- you know how cat-lovers are always aware of the vast number of homeless strays out there without any hope of a home? -- and yet we could not find a cat. We wanted a cat so badly, and there just were none.

Finally our vet told us about a farm in a town called Good Hope where two sister-cats had both had litters at the same time, so they had ten or twelve kittens between them -- too many even for a farm. So we went out there, and we came home with Alice.

( Read more... )

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. --Archilochus

The fox knows many things, and one of them is where the hedgehog lost his checkbook this time.

OK, I injured myself cutting an ice cream cake. That has to be a new low. (And it was with the knife that I swore only to use for cake "because," I said, "no matter how many times I run it through the sharpener, it never gets sharp enough to cut meat.") So I'm typing w/right hand only while I elevate my left thumb.

The spouse said, very authoritatively, "Sit down. Elevate it. Put pressure on it. Don't stand up or look at it until this timer goes off in ten minutes." Later, when I stopped freaking out, I said, "Did you learn that on boy scouts?" and he said, "No. It's something I thought you would say."

The ice cream cake was shaped like an igloo. I spent more than an hour making it and I never even got to eat a piece.

The kidlet has 3 friends sleeping over, belatedly celebrating their 12th bday. Last time I looked downstairs, they were all on the Wii, dancing along to "Rah, Rah, Rasputin."

Doesn't everyone have words and phrases that only have meaning in their own families? I want to hear yours, too!

Walter: Sad, but not with ordinary sadness -- with that voluptuous melancholy that you can sink down into and enjoy.

For a Spanish class, the spouse was reading the poetry of Lorca in Spanish, and he read me "The Ballad of the Water of the Seas" (there's a not-great translation here). The poem has a repeating refrain of "the water of the seas" (el agua de los mares), and the last stanza says, more or less: "And you, my heart, where was your deep bitterness born?" "Bitter, very bitter is the water of the seas." So we would go around saying, "Bitter, very bitter."

Well, of course "de los mares" makes you think of Walter De La Mare, who was melancholy his own self. So eventually we wound up saying, with mock solemnity, "Walter, very Walter."

( Read more... )

When we got married in 1989, someone gave us a set of flannel sheets as a wedding present. The fitted sheet had a small pattern of dark blue and teal scattered over a cream-colored background; the top sheet and the pillowcases had that plus a border of dark blue with a teal pattern. Very pretty. We used them every winter for years.

The fitted sheet was the first to go, wearing thin in a mysterious pattern that I finally figured out was friction from my leg stubble. (I'm abrasive! Literally!) Flannel sheet sets are expensive, especially for a queen-sized bed, so instead of throwing out the whole set, I bought a fitted sheet in solid dark blue.

After several more years, the pillowcases went; this time the spouse's abrasive face was to blame. I couldn't remember where I'd bought the fitted sheet, and I couldn't be confident of matching that blue, so instead I ordered pillowcases in a teal-and-cream stripe.

Last spring, the flat sheet finally ripped. I used it upside-down for a while, but it was a bordered sheet, and it just didn't look right to tuck the decorative border in at the bottom and use the plain end. Again I couldn't remember where I bought anything, so I bought a flat sheet in a solid pale blue, and put it away in the cedar chest to wait for autumn.

I finally got the flannels out last week, and I made the bed: dark-blue fitted sheet, pale-blue top sheet, teal-and-cream striped pillowcases. The spouse said: "What sheets are these?" and I said, "Don't you remember? They were a wedding present."

We've got DSL now, and I've been celebrating by, you know, looking at YouTube videos and downloading music and doing all the stuff that normal people have been doing for the last seven years. (Anybody got any Caetano Veloso they think I'd like? Or any Dan Bern for someone who adores "Jane" but has never heard any of the other songs?)

Also, I have a new e-mail address, which is in my LJ profile, in case you wanted to e-mail me anything.

The spouse bought a new Windows laptop, which is making him swear a lot. The spouse is the classic absent-minded professor sort, and he really just wants the computer to read his mind and provide him with content so he won't have to remember that, for instance:

- "that little colorful round thing" at the bottom left of his screen is the Start icon, or that
- tech support can't help you if you use the words "thing," "icon," "button," "checkbox," "document," and "program" interchangeably, or that
- laptops have batteries that need to be charged occasionally.

Which makes me the in-house tech help. Huh.

When I get an alert on my Mac, I pretty much always know what it means. But Windows computers are always popping up alert boxes that say incomprehensible things ("Warning! You have begun to arglefrast the whoopthruster without first unhembling the manifrost! Continue or Cancel?"), and from what I've seen, Windows people just seem to be in the habit of clicking the little X and going blithely on.

These mixed marriages are always complicated.

The in-laws' Christmas sweater this year is fleece. (The very thought of a whole sweater made of fleece makes my hands sweat.) It's a shade of pale pink that no one over three would actually choose to wear. It makes me look like the large economy-sized bottle of Pepto-Bismol. On the plus side, though, it came from a national catalog. One that gives refunds for gift returns -- cash money! To spend someplace else! Off to the post office I go.

I have to wonder, though. The spouse and I have been married for thirteen years, and they've given me a sweater every single Christmas. Just how many sweaters do they think I need?

Meanwhile, three nights in a row we've been awakened in the wee hours by the bed collapsing. ( Read more... )

Spouse: So did you get any new stuff in choir practice?
Me: Yeah. We have a pretty nice setting of that "Set me as a seal upon your heart" thing and a "Surely he hath borne our griefs" by a contemporary of Bach's, only I've forgotten his name.
Spouse: [offers several names]
Me: No, none of those.
Spouse: [shrugs] He had a lot of contemporaries.
Me: Yeah. It's something we have in common with Bach. Actually we have even more contemporaries than he did.
Spouse: There, you see? Progress.