Posts Tagged ‘wife’

Pine Nuts — Bad Snack Choice 1-31-12

I used to love pine nuts.  I consider them a mystery food which made eating them something exotic.  Though I assume they’re a natural food, I really don’t know what they are or where they come from; the bottom of a pine cone?  I recently discovered a plastic sack of them in the pantry.  I tossed about 30 handfuls of them into my mouth over about five minutes as I watched a Lakers basketball game on TV.

The next morning, I awoke with a powerful metallic taste in my mouth.  Nothing I ate could get rid of it. Over the day, that metallic taste became the focus of my existence.  Everything I ate tasted horrible and the same. I was no longer experiencing the Epicurean adventure I expect every meal and snack to be.

A day later, with the metallic taste still in my mouth, my only thought was that something was terribly wrong with me.  I didn’t tell my wife, but she should have known something was up because I was more snappy with her than I had been in a long time.  In my mind, I ran over the list of imagined horrible things this could be, and quietly scared the crap out of myself.

Never the less, I didn’t want to spend the money on a doctor visit even though I was convinced that this was serious.  Finally, I confided to my wife my potentially urgent medical condition.

Knowing me as she has for the last 10 years, my wife didn’t offer any support for this new mystery ailment but she did give me the stink eye.  She has held my hand through other hypochondriac medical issues before.  She instructed me, in a tone only a wife can give, “type into Google metallic taste in my mouth.” and “food tastes horrible.”   Just thinking about the money I’d save by not going to the doctor lifted my spirits.

The answer was there alright.  Surprisingly, I’m not the only one who thought eating a bag of pine nuts was a good idea.  According to posts on the medical answer sites, eating that many pine nuts can ruin your taste buds for weeks.

I don’t know what relieved me more, finding out that there were scores of fellow idiots who eat as many pine nuts as me, or that nothing was wrong with me.  Either way, my outlook immediately improved, even though the metallic taste stayed on for another week.  Armed with the knowledge that I had blown out my own taste buds I ignored the awful taste in my mouth, turned on the TV to a Clippers basketball game, laid down on my couch and ate two tasteless king sized Milky Way Bars.

Autopsy for a Dead Toilet 10-24-11

I have the best father-in-law in the world.  He likes me and I like him.   Eight years ago, he proposed to me by telling me I had to marry his daughter.  I did.  We visit him every few weeks and he pays for gas, groceries, and restaurants when we are by him.

There are no problems in my and my father-in-law’s relationship except one.  He lives in a cheaply constructed house.  I’m in construction (a house painter) and know bad work when I see it.  Whomever designed and built his house should be put in the Idiots Hall of Fame.   The Three Stooges couldn’t come up with the stupidities that this house has.  Every light switch is behind the door.  There is a five foot square bathroom with three doors that open up into it.  How can that be?  I have to close the other two just to open the one.  If I wanted to make money, I could sell tickets to his house as The Museum of the Stupidest House Ever Built.

His poorly built house has inserted a question mark into me and my father-in-law’s special relationship.  It seems that  my wife (his daughter) has branded me a “toilet clogger,” and no matter who clogs the toilet, everyone accuses me of doing it.  I’ll admit, I have clogged my share of domestic and international toilets, but I plunged this one and it shouldn’t have overflowed.  Seems my wife forgot that the toilet didn’t work, used it, loaded it, and flushed this toilet.  It flowed all over the second floor and poured down through the light fixture into the dining room.  How appetizing!

My father-in-law, a man in his mid 80’s, is a proud do-it-yourselfer. He lifted the toilet from the bathroom floor and carried it outside.  He isn’t a delicate man and things that bother me don’t bother him.  So, he didn’t care when the toilet sloshed it’s contents on the carpet as he manhandled it down the staircase.   There was some kind of primitive male one upsmanship going on here.  He shot me a look as he dragged the toilet downstairs.

The toilet sat on his front lawn the entire weekend for all the neighbors in the cul-de-sac to see and admire.  It also sat there proudly as a monument to the fragile state of our once strong bond.

Since my wife is my father-in-laws only daughter, she is perfect in his eyes.  Blame quickly turned to me as the clogger.  I insisted it wasn’t me who caused the trouble.  The only problem with his toilet was his daughter, but I wasn’t about to turn her in.  He was adamant that I was to blame and started to treat me differently.

His whole family (many cousins were at the house that weekend) argued about causation and blame.  Finally I suggested that an autopsy be performed on the toilet.  My wife agreed that this was the only way to find out if the toilet was defective or someone (fat and sloppy) clogged it.  Sometime later, when no one noticed, my father-in-law took a hammer to the back of the toilet and broke it open.

I didn’t see or hear the results of the autopsy.  My father-in-law didn’t say another word about it.  My wife didn’t say anything either.  Maybe it was me, maybe it wasn’t.  Either way, that problem causing toilet is dead and gone.

Peeing Sitting Down 5-15-11

Where is it written that men have to pee standing up?   Around a year ago, I started sitting down when I peed at home.  There are a few reasons for this.  First, I can’t stand a dirty home.  One day the sun was shining through my bathroom window at the perfect angle as I was peeing, I saw how much pee splashed out of the toilet and onto my walls and floor using the traditional male pee in the standing position.  I’m the type of person who realizes his toilet walls are coated with urine.  Second, I like comfort and there is always a trade magazine or something to read in my bathroom, and I might get lucky and have to poop also.  Why miss this opportunity?   So, I pee sitting down when I’m at my own house now.

My bathroom is much spiffier now that I sit down to pee.  There are no pee drips on the floor in front of the toilet and the rim is always sparkly clean.  Moreover, the seat is always down.  I should be given an award from the International League of Women.  My wife tells me that I am a superior male specimen.  This is bathroom behavior befitting the perfect man she tells me.  We’ve all overheard women talking about how gross men’ s bathrooms are and men know they are right, but until now there was nothing we could do to help.  Now I consider myself a leader in promoting a new American bathroom hygiene paradigm.

I now feel entitled to encourage my male guests to sit when they pee at my house, but my wife gets livid when she hears this.  She thinks it’s over reaching to tell guests how to behave in my bathroom.  It’s a topic that needs to be discussed though.  Maybe I should start a Facebook page preaching the benefits of sitting down to pee.  I could get a million fans for my page.  Unfortunately, the American male may need more time to evolve, and they’d probably all be women plus me.

Egg Yolks 5-13-11

I dined on runny egg yolks tonight.  With cholesterol scares and being told egg yolks were a heart’s public enemy number one, I haven’t eaten egg yolks for years.  I watched enviously as others ate their yolks and suffered no harm.  I kind of remembered how good they tasted, but not really.  Had I really remembered how good they tasted, I would have had them more often. Well, tonight I decided to live on the wild side.   

My wife was cooking dinner tonight and offered me eggs.  She said she would make them sunny side up with runny yolks.  Boy did she make them.  Now I remember how delicious yolks are.  The taste briefly transported me back to my childhood.  I had a flashback to when I was four years old and was eating my Mom’s perfectly cooked runny eggs.  I enjoyed them then, and I enjoy them now. 

Looks like egg yolks are gonig to be welcome guests in my house again.

2-17-11 Women and a Man Taking a Dump.

Maybe because I’ve been working out for the last few days, I took a dump this morning.  Even a morning dump is a welcome development in my middle aged stressed out life.  Unfortunately, that private and somewhat special event wasn’t private this time.

As what felt like a glass studded tree stump slowly and painfully emerge from my rectum, I was robbed of my man moment when my wife flitted into the bathroom to happily list her days activities for me.   I didn’t request a listing of her daily activities and told her to leave the room.

What I find hard to understand isn’t that my anal sphincter quickly recovers from this trauma, or that my wife feels that I’m not entitled to any privacy,  but how my wife always wants to talk to me when I should be unavailable to her.  Is it her or all women who don’t understand?  I consistently have to banish her from my presence when I’m unloading my packed colon, how many times do we have to go through this exercise?  Is there something in the wife constitution that makes her want to be near me during this special man time?

My turd dramas don’t concern her and she happily tells me all the little things she has scheduled today.   After I finally got rid of her and looked forward to finishing up what I like to call “my quiet moments,” my daughter walks in holding her nose.  Now she has some questions for me.  I couldn’t order her away as I did my wife, and I answered her questions.

She told me to put down my magazine to hear what she had to say.  Maybe this is where little girls learn that they can speak to men in the middle of the quintessential man activity.