Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

Why I Love My Husband So Much: Reason 2

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He always sees the good in me.

This weekend we were playing a new video game featuring characters from the X-Men series of comic books. I’m playing as “Storm”, the character who can harness the power of weather.

I’m a bit directionally challenged , so I told him, “It’s a good thing you’re the one in charge of getting us around, because to me it looks like we’ve come back to this same exact room about 27 times.”

“That’s OK, baby,” he replied. “Some of us can read maps, and some of us have lightning.”

My Back Is Still A Little Sore, But The Nerdiness? Is Alive And Well

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As I believe I’ve mentioned before, I frequently find myself having hot, sweaty, lustful thoughts about cleaning products. The most recent object of my obsession has been this, the Sonic Scrubber.

sonicscrubber

Words truly cannot describe the joy I felt in my heart when I found this at my local Kroger and was able to purchase one of my very own. And then, for MANY days afterwards, the second my husband got home from work he would be accosted with up-to-the-minute reports of my progress in The Battle Against Soap Scum.

Meanwhile the rest of the world has been getting all caught up in that new book and movie called “The Secret”, which is all about learning how to understand and apply the Law Of Attraction to the various circumstances of your life. I was actually introduced to this about 5 years ago, but the recent press on this subject has made me think about what kind of changes or additions I’d like to make to my life.

So I took a little inventory of how things have been going, and then I had myself a little talk with the Universe.

Did I address such issues as money? Career? Relationships?

Nope.

“Universe,” I said, “I could sure use a bigger brush head for my Sonic Scrubber so that I could clean more of my shower in less time.”

And then, the next time I went to Kroger, what to my wondering eyes did appear?

attachments

Seriously? There might have been some drool.

But wait-the Universe wasn’t finished yet. Because a few days after that I went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and I found THIS:

ultimatescrubber

I couldn’t wait to get home and show this to my husband.

His response: “So, are you gonna take the other one back now?”

…

WHAT?! W-hh-yy would I ever do that?

“No,” I said, trying patiently to explain. “Because now? I have 8! Interchangeable! Heads!”

And people? The fact that all he did was sigh slightly and walk quietly away, leaving me to my passionate love affair with cleaning? That. Is love.

Mr. Fix-It

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My husband is really, really good at fixing things. It is rare that we have to call in the help of a professional, but every so often we do. Like in the following situation.

Me: I can’t wait to get this mole removed.

My husband: I can take care of that for you.

Me: Thanks, but I think I’m gonna leave this to a trained professional (aka, “my dermatologist”).

My husband: Oh, what, like you think she took a class in “Removing Funny Things From People’s Bodies”?

Me: Yeah, actually I do. LOTS, as a matter of fact.

And Lo, The Truth, It Doth Hurt

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Yesterday I taught a Spanish class in which one of the students happens to be my husband. We were doing a sentence completion exercise, and one of the other students asked me how to say “space travel”.

“Well ‘space’ is ‘espacio’,” I began.

“That sounds like a word you just made up,” interjected my husband (who, I feel compelled to point out, has attended all of six Spanish classes in his life as opposed to my (::cough::Master’s Degree in Spanish::cough), as he reached for his Spanish-English dictionary.

“So, what does the dictionary say,” I asked, with just a wee bit of testiness in my voice.

“Espacio,” he replied.

“Oh really? It says exactly what I just told you two seconds ago?” I taunted, feeling the sweet wave of vindication rush through me.

“Wow,” interjected one of the other students. “I’d love to see what arguments are like in the Ryan household.”

“Well, we have had to pull out the Almanac occasionally,” I said, in the tone of one who has just admitted to Bringing Out The Big Guns.

“I bet they Google everything and then one of them is like, ‘Hah, I can type faster than you so I win’,” continued the student, officially destroying for me any remaining vestiges of pride and vindication.

Ooh, man-the truth? Really does hurt.

Apparently This Is How You Use Your Powers When You’re An Engineer

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If I had to identify one of the most outstanding characteristics of my personality, it would unfortunately have to be my Stunning Inability To Locate Myself In Time And Space. I get lost all the time, so often in fact that there now exists a Greatest Hits Collection of my best “getting lost” stories:

-the time I got lost leading a group of friends who were helping us move into our new house

-the time in grad school when I got lost on The Loop in Athens, GA-it was a LOOP for crying out loud, with a FIXED NUMBER of places you could go. Eventually I HAD to find something that looked familiar-and called my husband (then boyfriend) who was in grad school in Atlanta to announce that, “It’s pitch black and I have no idea where I am. Oh and by the way, I’m completely out of gas and am running on fumes. And even if you wanted to come and rescue me you couldn’t, because there’s no way to tell you how to find me. Tell my parents I love them.”

-the time I was driving down Interstate 85, headed to the same place I’d gone every single Monday night for an entire year, missed my exit, got off the highway, turned around, and headed back in the opposite direction (because, HELLO, that’s supposed to work!), somehow ended up on an entirely different Interstate and had to call my husband to guide me home so I didn’t accidentally end up in Alabama.

-the time I was in Phoenix and had to physically drive to the airport in order to change my ticket so I could fly home early. But I didn’t actually know how to get to the airport from my hotel, even though I had driven that route only 4 days earlier, so I called my husband and asked him to guide me there. (I don’t think he minded that much, because it did give him an excuse to fire up Google Earth). Then I had to drive back to my hotel, the exact same way that I had just come only minutes earlier. But I got lost again and had to have him reverse all the directions for me verbally in order to make it back safely.

I truly am one of those people who needs to wear an ID bracelet at all times. But instead of having a medical alert mine would need to say, “While extremely proficient in exploring the realms of the mind, wearer is completely incapable of navigating herself around the physical world.” [Read more…] about Apparently This Is How You Use Your Powers When You’re An Engineer

Secrets

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A couple of days ago my husband and I were sitting on the couch catching up on this week’s episode of NCIS. The Director of NCIS, played by Lauren Holly, was talking to Special Agent Gibbs, played by Mark Harmon, about a case they were working on involving a man who was engaged to multiple women at the same time. She was talking about how even if you are in a relationship with someone, you may not really know them. They might be keeping secrets from you.

“I don’t have any secrets from you,” I told my husband.

“I know!” he replied. Due to some quirk in my own personal makeup, I can neither lie nor keep secrets. It’s like any kind of secret information is a foreign body in my system, and I must vomit it up and out as soon as possible in order to keep my system running smoothly.

“What about you?” I asked him. “Do you have any secrets?”

“Nope,” he said, and we went back to watching the show.

In the next scene Dr. “Ducky” Mallard is talking to Agent Gibbs about the corpse he is examining. “I got a hunch and I decided to trim his (the corpse’s) nose hair,” said Dr. Mallard.

At this my husband pauses the show (all hail the awesomeness of TIVO!), leaps up off the couch, and says, “Oh yeah, I do have a secret from you.”*

Oh, dear sweet Lord In Heaven, I thought to myself, completely panicked. What the hell kind of secret does “nose hair” remind you of?!

“Um, that’s okay, dude,” I said, backing away from him. “You can just go ahead and keep that particular secret to yourself.”

*It turned out all right, though. For some reason I still don’t completely understand, that just reminded him that he’d brought me back a present from Mexico.

Chain Reaction

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Have you ever had one of those days where you have clearly mapped out everything you need to do that day, but Thing #2 depends on Thing #1, and Thing #3 depends on Thing #2, and everything is woven together in an interlocking chain of Stuff That Is Not Getting Done because you can not, for the life of you, figure out how to complete Thing #1? Well the other day was like that for me.

Normally this is entirely my fault, since Thing #1 is usually something like, “Put on clothes.” (Dammit, you mean there’s no naked grocery shopping today? Well, forget it. There’s no point in even showing up for this day then!) But this day was a bit trickier, because Thing #1 was, “Make The Vacuum Cleaner Not Smell Like Poo”. [Read more…] about Chain Reaction

Why I Love My Husband So Much: Reason #1

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He “gets” me.

Today my husband invited me out to lunch, and as we were eating I was telling him how I was kind of nervous about a meeting I will be attending tomorrow. Everyone is very nice and very welcoming, but they have the entire agenda planned out Minute. By. Minute. and everyone has a specific title that you must use when referring to them, and basically there is just a lot of protocol, all of which I am completely unfamiliar with.

It’s not that I don’t respect those kinds of things, or that I purposefully want to be disrespectful. It’s just that I’m nothing if not non-conformist, and I’m afraid that the stress of trying to follow all of those rules will just build up inside of me until the point where I lose all control over myself and just start screaming out “ASS! ASS! ASS!”in the middle of the meeting because I can no longer take all the pressure.

Not only was my husband not horrified by this confession, he actually thought it was pretty funny. And then he offered an extremely insightful comment on my situation, saying, “Hm, kind of like Tourette’s by stress?”

Exactly.

See? He really gets me.

Why I Love My Husband So Much: Reason 6

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Image courtesy of Free Photo.

His sense of humor, as evidenced by the following conversation we had when discussing what to plant in our front yard.

Me: “I like things like sunflowers and daisies. I want to plant happy flowers, flowers that welcome you to our home.”

My husband: “OK that’s fine, but I really don’t think that there are any flowers that actually tell people to go f*#@ off.”

I Really Do Learn Something Every Day

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Today is the day when we put the sprinklers out to water the lawn in preparation for the warmer weather. This is an ex-tre-me-ly involved process which involves detailed diagrams, complex mathematical calculations, advanced satellite imagery, and multi-layered topographical and geological surveys. At least, it does here at our house.

And what I learned today is that At No Time during this process is it a good time to request of your husband that he help you locate some AA batteries for the camera so you can take a picture THIS INSTANT, because you just figured out a funny way to blog about what he’s doing.