Its That Time Again

On Saturday the wife had a lunch date with a friend.  She brought the daughter along so that left the son and I with the afternoon free.  I wanted to shop for (2) things in particular: a basketball arcade game for our second garage and some new shoes.  I will leave the basketball game for a (possible) future blog but I did accomplish both of my goals for the day.

Shoe shopping for me means going to Shoe Carnival.  This store is great for me for (2) basic reasons.  First, the prices are pretty good and second, there are no pesky shoe salesman to offer their help or whose assistance is required to fetch your size from the back room.  No sir, you can just wander around and take your time with no salesman pressure.

When it comes to tennis shoes I like them black and with no visible logos.  Black shoes do not get as dirty (or do not look as dirty) as other colors.  As for logos, I do not like to wear clothes with visible logos as I do not think of myself as a free advertising billboard for apparel companies.  I even took off the dealer logos from my Buick.  Why should I advertise for them?  They ain’t paying me!

Shopping at Shoe Carnival is a little different for me than most shoppers.  Instead of looking at the displayed shoes until I find a model that I like, I usually just look at all the boxes until I see my size and then and only then do I look at the style to see if it meets my criteria.  It is easier this way as not all the shoes have my size available and I do not like to be anxious when I see a shoe I like only to be disappointed when they do not have my size available.  I have used this technique for the last (20) years or so.

The last (3) years though I have been extremely fortunate to find very quickly some shoes that are both in my size and meet my criteria of being black with no logo.  In fact, the store here in Kokomo has had the exact same model of shoe available each year.  The wife cannot understand why I would do this odd thing (to buy the same shoe, year after year after year).  I tried to explain it to her but I was unconvincing to her.  Despite a look of disdain from the wife (and now this year as a bonus, the daughter) I am happy that I bought this model again and have “graduated” my current pair.

Each year when I buy new tennis shoes, the old pair becomes my “mowing” shoes.  These are the shoes I wear when mowing the yard throughout the summer and fall months.  I also graduate last year’s mowing shoes to the trash bin.  I was able to get all three generations together for a photo though…

(From left to right, old mowing shoes, old shoes / new mowing shoes, new shoes)

I was also fortunate to find a pair of dress shoes that were 2/3 off and were very comfortable (I did look for the same model of dress shoes that I have now but they were no where to be found).  So I am mixing it up a little with my plain, brown dress shoes for work.  The wife will have to be satisfied with that.

Jon

Right Where I Put It

I have a policy that I adhere to whenever possible.  Everything has a proper place and if you put things in their proper place they will be there when you need them.  For instance, my keys and my sunglasses always (and I mean always) are placed on the table just to the left of our TV stand.  When I am ready to leave the house, I waste no time looking for my keys or my sunglasses.  The wife’s keys, on the other hand, are at random places.

When it comes time for her to leave (or for us to leave if we are taking her van) then we must allow ample time for “the search”.  The search usually has 2 phases.  The first phase is her remembering where she place the keys.  This is usually either in her purse or in her coat pocket.  If they are in her coat pocket then she has to narrow down WHICH coat and then WHICH coat pocket.  Once we have determined the specific coat or if they are in her purse, then the search moves on to phase 2, the search for the coat/purse.  They could be on the coat hooks by the front door or possibly on the kitchen table or chairs.  Either way, you see my point, we waste time looking for her keys.

I was reminding my son about this policy this morning when he wanted to know what happened to his USB wireless card for his laptop.  We have a basket that sits atop one of our bookshelves.  In that basket we place all kinds of devices that are for our electronic stuff.  Wireless mice, power cords, the SD card reader and the son’s wireless card.  We had spent lots of time looking for these kinds of things and so I decided that the basket concept was a pretty good idea.  After the son had taken his laptop to his room, I placed the card (which he had laid on the kitchen table) in the basket (he is not allowed to have internet connection in his room).  Despite me placing this card in this basket dozens of times, he still looks all around the house for the card.  I let him get good and frustrated and then tell him (like many times before) to look in the basket.  Now whether he thinks that the card fairy puts it there or whether he knows it is me I do not know but hopefully one day he will catch on and follow my policy.

One of the most frustrating things for me is to have to search around the house for something (usually small) that I need at the moment.  Words cannot express accurately how disappointing it is not to be able to remember where something is and to have to waste what little precious time I have on this earth looking for my stuff.  Ask my wife, I am not pleasant to be around when I am searching (say for the nail clippers as I mention in this 2006 blog).

After I (once again) gave a lecture to my family about my policy this morning, my wife headed to the kitchen to make us some breakfast.  A large percentage of the time my breakfast consists of 2 over easy eggs and toast.  I like to put 3 things on my eggs: garlic salt, hot sauce and pepper.  These three items are kept in their place on the top shelf of the lower cabinet.  As my eggs were given to me I went to the shelf to retrieve my eggs condiments.  I found the garlic salt and the hot sauce easily enough but the pepper grinder was not there.  I had just got done with my plea to my family about this very issue.  The pepper grinder goes where it goes.  Salt and Pepper, they go together.  There is no logical reason for them to be separated.  After I calmed down the wife pointed to the lower shelf of the same cabinet and indicated that the pepper was right there.  I was then given “the look” and was told to eat my eggs.

My policy evidently is just that, MY policy and not those of my household.

Jon

The Matrix and Toothpaste

Our area of the country received 6” of snow on Saturday afternoon.  As a result of this, our family was at the mercy of the weather and any plans we had for Saturday were replaced with staying in the house and entertaining ourselves.  I had recently purchased Mary Poppins on DVD and the daughter and wife wanted to watch it.  The son and I were wanting a little more action so we chose to watch The Matrix instead.  I left the home theater PC and 32” TV screen to the womenfolk and the son and I grabbed his laptop, the 19” computer monitor and the speakers and set up shop in his room.  Both movies are about 2 hours in length so we closed ourselves in and settled down for the movie.

We had seen this move a while back but I bought a copy of the DVD around Christmas time at my favorite pawn shop for $2.  We started to watch the movie once or twice in January but for whatever reason were not able to finish it.  If you are familiar with the movie at all then you know the premise and might understand why it took us closer to 3 hours to watch it as I had to pause the movie in several places to explain the movie to my (12) year old son.  To try to grasp the concept that we might all be living in a dream that we cannot wake up from is a little much for his mind but he did a pretty good job with my added explanation to help him out.  In one scene, Agent Smith is explaining to Neo why the first matrix failed.  Basically things were too perfect and not enough bad things happened in the dream thereby tipping off the brains that were in the dreams into thinking that this could not be real and thus had to be a dream.  We paused the movie for a long time in this section and discussed our own dreams.  Some dreams you know are dreams.  You are a riding a flying kangaroo or you are living with a different family for no apparent reason.  You sort of know during the dream and after waking up that it was obviously a dream.  Other dreams however have everything in place and nothing seems out of place.  These you do not know are a dream until you wake up.  With this concept fully digested we moved on to the movie.  I bought the 2nd and 3rd movies in the series (same pawn shop, same $2 bargain price) so I imagine those will take 3 hours to get through as well.

Very soon after that I had a dream.  The dream was one of those where you do not realize that you are in a dream until you wake up.  Nothing seemed out of sort.  There is just one problem.  In this dream the wife had replaced our normal toothpaste with something a little less conventional.

Now, I have blogged before about the various toothpastes that we have tried.  Our current brand is actually made by Burt’s Bees but try as I might I could not find the product listed on their website (I did find a review though just to prove to you that this product exists).  Anyway, my point is that we have not had “normal” toothpaste in quite a few years and I am seldom shocked by whatever brand (or flavor) turns up on the bathroom sink when we are near the end of the current tube.

OK, back to the dream.  The new toothpaste the wife was having me use was actually Preparation H!  This seems absurd to an outsider to our immediate family but I am telling you that I would NOT be surprised (and neither would the kids) if the wife stumbled upon some study or article somewhere that praised this product and its use in keeping our teeth healthy.  I am telling you!  This could happen in my household!  And let me remind you that this did not seem odd (even in the least) bit in my dream!

Anyway, I woke from the dream and was relieved that the Burt’s Bees toothpaste was still on the sink.  It is getting pretty empty though so I am bracing for the worst and hoping that my dream is not prophetic.

Jon

Hand Gestures

Due to the bad weather, I worked from home most of this week.  Also due to the bad weather, the kid’s school was cancelled (3) days this week and the wife did not even bother trying to get to work on Wednesday (she has Monday and Tuesday off usually).  As such, we experienced a mild case of Cabin Fever.  I was not as bored as the other family members as I indeed did have work to do.  The fever was more intense when I was on a conference call.

I have a nice Plantronics CT12 cordless phone (or is it wireless, perhaps cords are too far in the past for the word “cordless” to have any real meaning) so I can have my hands free to multitask.  This week I have been hosting many training sessions where I share my desktop so the phone is a very nice thing to have.  Over the summer though, the original headset became less and less reliable as it would cut in and out.  I priced a factory replacement and it was something like $70 (half the cost of the original unit).  Fortunately for me, the earpiece from my old cell phone worked like a charm.  Well, kind of anyway.

Since it is an earpiece for a cell phone, the built in microphone works more like a boom mike, picking up all kinds of ambient noise (like say, kids home from school playing in the next room).  This is OK for the days I am here alone with only the dogs to keep me company but not so OK when there are more living and breathing (and noisemaking) bodies around (like this week).  We have a “daddy’s on the phone” mode that everyone has to observe.  Strict silence, no talking, no movies (unless headphones are used), etc.  As such, they have to resort to whispers and hand gestures.

Now my wife is a long time user of hand gestures.  She uses them to enhance her normal talking.  As she tells a story or describes something, she will often add a hand gesture out of habit.  We have an ongoing argument about her (what I think of as) excessive use of this communication aide but more about that later.

During one meeting this week, the wife was trying to communicate to me.  She initially gave me a small kiss (a daring move when that sound could be heard on the call) and then was trying to tell me something with her hand movements.  She was making some sort of movement with her hand near her mouth and it looked like she was saying the word “teeth”.  I interpreted this to mean, “I just kissed you and, um, was, um, wondering if you had brushed your teeth yet today?”  The sign she was making looked sort of like a teeth brushing motion so I indicated that, yes, I had indeed brushed my teeth.  Several minutes later she delivered a hot cup of tea to me and only then did I realize that her motion was of someone sipping tea from a cup and the word she was mouthing was “tea” and not “teeth”.  This misunderstanding actually enforced my side of the argument that I mentioned in the last paragraph.

The wife has a habit of talking with her hands.  She uses this genuflecting mostly when it is not needed.  For instance, she would say “I was writing a check” and then also use one hand flatly opened as the checkbook and her other hand as the pen and make a motion like she was signing her name onto a check.  My point is this: if you don’t know what “writing a check” means then there is no way this hand gesture will put you over the top and get to to understand any better.  A similar situation occurs when she talks about driving a car and puts her hands at the 10 & 2 position of an imaginary steering wheel.  Again, if you do not know what driving a car is, then no amount of extra help with pantomime will assist you.  I see it as it is almost as if she feels that I am not intelligent enough to know what writing a check or driving a car means and she feels I need this extra help.  I find it a little demeaning.  As I point this out to her, it is usually met with “the look” (all you husbands know what I mean).

There are other times that the hand gesture is both not needed and actually causes confusion.  A good example would be when she was describing a friend of hers from high school.  You see, my wife was in the marching band and played the French horn.  Her friend also played this instrument.  She was trying to explain to me that you needed to have big lungs in order to play some of the larger brass instruments.  As she said the phrase “big lungs” she made a gesture with both her hands to show that her friend’s lungs (did I mention her friend was a girl) were able to meet the need.  I am not sure I can paint the picture with words here but any half wired male who saw this hand gesture this would NOT think big LUNGS but big…well big…other things.  I pointed this out (and got “the look” again) and she did (eventually) agree that her motions could be misinterpreted.  This has not stopped her though from this habit.

Jon