Archives for January 2014

So yesterday we were all recovering from the Snow-Pocalypse, and all around the city there were stories of generosity, hospitality, and heroism. But sadly, I have to report that the only heroic acts taking place in our household were the superhuman efforts my husband and I were making not to kill each other. Although I don’t know if that really counts, because I’m pretty sure we already promised not to do that in our wedding vows (though not in those exact words).

I knew it was going to be a rough day pretty early on, when my husband came into the living room, looked at the conceptual sketch of someone in Seated Mountain Pose on the top of my deck of yoga cards, and said, “I don’t know what that’s supposed to be, but it looks like [graphic description of his special boy parts]. So…there went all my zen, and now I can never not see that, THANKS SO MUCH FOR RUINING YOGA FOR ME.

Then of course there was the matter of our work space. My office is the sun room, which opens off of the kitchen and, most importantly, has no door. My husband’s blatantly door-adorned office is at the other end of the house where it is warm, plus there are two big screen computer monitors, a very large table, oh, and did I forget to mention, A DOOR?! A door which, as Data would say to Tasha Yar, was “fully functional”.

So naturally, he set his computer up in the kitchen. And then there proceeded to be hours and hours and HOURS of meetings. So many meetings that there can’t possibly be any more meetings left in the entire world. All of which, apparently, could only be conducted at full volume on the speakerphone.

There’s a joke in my family that started after my brother and sister-in-law got married a few years ago. They aren’t a couple who really fight, but when they do it’s apparently conducted through what they describe as “tone”. As in, “Hm, I believe I might be hearing some tone.” So when my parents Face Timed me so that I could wish my grandmother a happy 90th (!) birthday and I was unable to unclench my jaw wide enough to form coherent words my dad said, “Oh, so it sounds like there’s been some tone there today.”

But eventually the work day ended, and we soaked in the experience of our special bonus time together by spending the entire night at opposite ends of the house.

Things have been much better today, and they opened up his office mid-morning. As he was getting ready to leave my husband turned to me and said, “You know, since I can do most of my work online or on the phone I thought about working from home again today, but I can’t get onto our office network. I think this is my computer’s way of trying to save our marriage.”

Never in life have I been so grateful for technology.

My husband gets home today from a week-long business trip to Chicago, where they’ve apparently been shipping in their weather from the outer reaches of Siberia.

“So,” I asked when I talked to him last night, “have things gotten any better? Has the temperature hit the teens yet-are you seeing any double digits?”

“Are you kidding!” he shot back. “It’s been hovering between 0 and 1 the whole time I’ve been here. It hasn’t gotten out of BINARY!”

My husband and I have been together for the better part of 24 years, and for most of that time we have been engaged in one of those “discussions” that take place between long-term partners, the theme of which boils down to, “I am right and you are wrong, and as long as I have breath in my body, the driving purpose of my life will be to get you to admit my rightness and acknowledge your error.” The particular form that our “discussion” takes has to do with a blanket that came with me into our marriage, an object designed to provide soothing and comfort, but which has instead become the meeting ground for the battle of our wills.

The crux of the argument has to do with the color of said blanket: I say that it is peach, and my husband insists that it is pink. (This, despite the fact that my mother and I bought the PEACH blanket when I was in high school to match my PEACH wallpaper and my PEACH comforter. But, whatever.)

Things have gotten so ridiculous around here that we refuse to even acknowledge the blanket’s existence anymore,  lest we accidentally refer to it by the “wrong” color, and thereby unintentionally cede victory to our opponent. (Because we’re mature like that. And also RIGHT.)

So the other night my husband came home and announced that he had downloaded an app that would take a picture of any object and then identify its color in numbers, numbers which you could then compare to a chart in order to irrevocably determine the object’s “official” color once and for all, forever and ever, world without end, amen.

Naturally we forsook dinner and immediately repaired to the room in which the blanket resides, taking a number of pictures until we both agreed on one which we felt accurately captured the color in question. (I would post those pictures here, but I’m afraid the the force of our argument surrounding them would engulf the entire Internet,  upsetting the Earth’s orbit and causing it to crash into the sun, where we would all explode into a  flaming ball of death. And I really don’t want to have the end of the world on my conscience. I’ve already got kind of a lot on my plate with this whole fibromyalgia thing.)

The next step (obviously) was to photograph some “control” objects, one which we both agreed was pink, and one we agreed on as peach. Then (of course) we created an Excel spread sheet in order to compare and contrast all the numbers generated by the app.

We then pulled up some color charts, eager to see which one of us would be crowned Victor Of The Blanket’s Color.

And what we discovered was that, not only are there MANY MANY DIFFERENT CHARTS, the values our app gave us did not appear on any of them.

Undaunted, my husband said we could convert the RGB colors into HEX values. (And here you can tell just how desperately I wanted to prove that I WAS RIGHT, by willingly subjecting myself to EVEN MORE MATH. )

We then took ourselves over to Wikipedia (The Source Of All True Knowledge) and looked up “Peach”, which gave us this:

and finally, this:

Which reads, “This box shows the color peach.”

So nobody won. Which is probably a good thing, because (for us) if there’s anything worse than Not Being Right, it’s having to live with the gleeful satisfaction of the person who is, which eventually leaves us with no choice but to stab the other person in the face in order to cause them the same kind of suffering which we’ve had to endure as a result of Being The Opposite Of Right.

So, way to go indeterminate number values. Thanks so much for saving our marriage.