Cozy

I had a husband home from work today, which was nice. 

It’s nice to enjoy the company of the person you’re married to.  You’d think that after all these years, we’d have run out of things to say by now.  But no.  Not us.  We can chat with each other all the time, pretty much non-stop.  And when there are silences – a rare event! – they’re comfortable silences. 

It’s a beautiful thing. 

It’s weird – whenever the weather looks like this, the phrase, “Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day,” always goes through my mind.  So much for sunrise today!

Monday Marriage

And so we begin the next chapter of our life together, Darc and I.  As WIGSF put it, we have made it through “another year of holding back the urge to smother someone in their sleep.”    No idea what the future holds, but I do know that whatever it is, Darc and I will surely be able to face it together.  We’ve gone through some things that probably should have destroyed our marriage, but we found those things seemed to refine us, reshape us, and unite us in ways we’d not thought possible before.  Fire and pressure change the nature of things – like coal into diamonds or purifying gold and silver – not the least of which is our marriage and ourselves.  So here’s to the next step of the journey. 

Darc has been a busy bee, trying to finish up this latest “slurp,” as it has come to be called.  Nothing like a deadline to motivate someone.  I do what little I can to help, as a research assistant, but the work is all on his shoulders. 

And this is our last week together all day every day.  At least for awhile.  The new job starts next week and while that’s a good thing, we are going to miss each other.  You get kind of used to a person, hanging out 24/7. 

So how was your weekend?

 

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Friday Funnies

I had to chuckle at the first set – I think I’m probably guilty of a few of these! 

WORDS WOMEN USE

1. Fine: This is the word women use to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut up.
   
2. Five Minutes: If she is getting dressed, this means a half an hour. Five minutes is only five minutes if you have just been given five more minutes to watch the game before helping around the house.
   
3. Nothing: This is the calm before the storm. This means something, and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with nothing usually end in fine.
   
4. Go Ahead: This is a dare, not permission. Don’t Do It!
   
5. Loud Sigh: This is actually a word, but is a non-verbal statement often misunderstood by men. A loud sigh means she thinks you are an idiot and wonders why she is wasting her time standing here and arguing with you about nothing. (Refer back to # 3 for the meaning of ‘nothing’.)
   
6. That’s Okay: This is one of the most dangerous statements a women can make to a man. That’s okay means she wants to think long and hard before deciding how and when you will pay for your mistake.
   
7. Thanks: A woman is thanking you, do not question, or faint. Just say you’re welcome.. (I want to add in a clause here – This is true, unless she says ‘Thanks a lot’ – that is PURE sarcasm and she is not thanking you at all. DO NOT say ‘you’re welcome’ … that will bring on a ‘whatever’).
   
8. Don’t worry about it, I got it: Another dangerous statement, meaning this is something that a woman has told a man to do several times, but is now doing it herself. This will later result in a man asking ‘What’s wrong?’ For the woman’s response refer to # 3

 

 

THE THERAPIST

A husband and wife came for counseling after 20 years of marriage. When asked what the problem was, the wife went into a passionate, painful tirade listing every problem they had ever had in the 20 years they had been married. She went on and on and on: neglect, lack of intimacy, emptiness, loneliness, feeling unloved and unlovable. An entire laundry list of unmet needs she had endured over the course of their marriage.

Finally, after allowing this to go on for a sufficient length of time, the therapist got up, walked around the desk and, after asking the wife to stand, embraced and kissed her passionately as her husband watched with a raised eyebrow.

The woman shut up and quietly sat down as though in a daze. The therapist turned to the husband and said, "This is what your wife needs at least three times a week. Can you do this?"

The husband thought for a moment and replied, "Well, I can drop her off here on Mondays and Wednesdays, but on Fridays, I fish."

 

It’s Friday, laugh at something!  Just not at me!  With me is perfectly fine, but never at me.    Have a great weekend!

Keep the change pt 2

Okay, yesterday I talked about women trying to change their men and how they should never try to do that.  Today I want to talk about men thinking their women will never change and how that’s not right either.  For the record, Darc thinks I’m out of touch with this, but I noticed that YellowCat mentioned this exact same thing in the comments.  Personally, I suspect this might be more applicable to younger men the 1st time they get married and that older men, or men on their 2nd marriages, are more flexible. 

I think young men getting married for the 1st (hopefully only!) time believe the young bride on their arm is always going to be the young bride on their arm.  Ladies, tell me honestly, have you ever heard from your husband, “But you never used to …”?  It’s like they never expected you to gain weight, cut your hair or dye it, want to get a job or want to quit work.  You were supposed to be suspended in time the moment you took your vows, and heaven help you if you deviate from that in any way. 

Women change, guys, and that’s the bottom line.  Men change too but not because a woman made them.  Marriage is about adapting to those evolutions people make, growing together, exploring the new interests and perspectives, and respecting the person who is – at heart – still the person you love.  Yeah, it sounds good in text, it’s much harder in practice.  This I know.  I also know it’s worth the effort.  Many years ago I saw some marriage counselors on TV, and the question posed to them was, “What’s the number one indicator of divorce in a marriage?”  You’re thinking, “MONEY!” right?  That’s supposed to be the number 1 cause of divorce – but it’s not.  The true number 1 cause of divorce is lack of respect for one another.  The greater that lack, the sooner to divorce court.  Money is really just a symptom of respect, but is not the issue in and of itself. 

So ladies – you can’t change him.  Gentlemen, you can’t make her stay the same.  Learn it, love it, live it. 

That’s my wisdom for the day and the Falcon has spoken. 

Tune in tomorrow for your regular episode of Mundanity in The Darc House. 

~~Ness~~

Keep the change

You know, I spent the first few decades of my life not having a single sinus problem.  Then all of a sudden, a couple of years ago, my sinuses started acting like Little Miss Muffet every time there was a cloud in the sky.  I don’t know what the problem is, but frankly, I’m done now.  I’m tired of waking up with the same headache I went to bed with, and I’m tired of spontaneous breathing problems that have a mind of their own.  Noses are for breathing, dammit, now stop arguing with me and go back to doing what you do best. 

Anyway, I did manage to catch “the Catch” and the “After the Catch” shows I love so much.  It’s funny the things that pop into my head when I listen to the captains and crews sitting around shootin’ the breeze.  For instance, last night one of the guys mentioned something about how it’s hard when fishermen get married because their wives want them to take jobs that are close to home, but the man misses being a fisherman.  That statement kind of swirled around in my head for a while and I realized that’s one of the things I probably dislike most about being a woman – the assumption that all I want to do is “change my man.”  Not that it’s an issue for me now, but it has been in the past when I was dating.  My husband knows I wouldn’t want to change him even if I could.  Trying to convince dates of that was a pain in the butt, because men are so used to women trying to change them, now it’s hard for them to believe a woman who says she doesn’t. 

This is my personal opinion but if I could only give out one single piece of marriage advice (and lucky you I’m not limited to a single piece of advice because I have a blog, neener!) it would be to tell women, “YOU WILL NOT CHANGE HIM.”  I’ve known women who think this is possible, I’ve seen women leave comments on articles and blogs that they’re going to change their mates, I’ve known single women who were already planning on how they’d change any potential future husband – and they hadn’t even met him yet!  How stupid is that?!  If you cannot love and accept him as he is, then don’t marry him, you’ll only end up making both of you miserable.  It’s not worth it.  And if you bring children into such a union, they’ll only see that you think men are “not good enough.”  You’ll only send the message to your husband that he’s “not good enough.”  Yeah, there’s a cure for marital bliss. 

All right guys, sound off. 

(Don’t worry ladies, your turn tomorrow!)

~~Ness~~

Marriage and money

I did something stupid.  Yeah, quit nodding your head and laughing, it doesn’t happen all that much. 

I’ve been trying to set up FireFox and other programs on my own profile that my Beloved set up for me on his computer.  You know I love my FF add-ons!  Well, they had a new one for something called Buxfer.  It’s a financial site that tracks all your finances.  You can set up bill reminders, bill payments, balance your account, do budget stuff – all kinds of neat things and I recommend it to those who are interested.  You can go to www.buxfer.com for the full site, and you can find the FF add-on here.  It wasn’t setting it up that was stupid – it was not discussing it first with my husband.

See, here’s the thing: we keep all our financial stuff separate.  It’s something we learned after going though our respective divorces.  It wasn’t a “prepare for the worst” type of thing, it was a protection type of thing.  Our past credit history was tied to our exes, and if anything either of our exes did messed up one of our credit histories, if we had anything in joint credit, it would mess it up for the other.  Boy that came out confused!  In a nutshell, if my ex got into financial trouble, since my credit past was tied to him, if Darc and I had joint credit on anything, something my ex might do could potentially affect Darc.  Make better sense now?  Keeping separate credit on everything is something I highly recommend to married couples.  No joint financial stuff – not even the house.  You can set up other legal documents in the event of death or divorce.  If one of you loses your job, then your spouse is safe, and you may need the safer credit to help rebuild your life.  It’s just a practical thing.  And that’s a long way to explain that our finances are separate, but now you understand why.  That being said, I’m the numbers person in the family, and while our financial stuff is separate, I do ALL the budgeting and bill paying.  Essentially I run Darc’s finances. 

So I set up his financial stuff on this Buxfer site and didn’t ask him first if he was okay with that.  He’s not big on keeping financial data online, for obvious reasons.  He was falling asleep and I didn’t want to bother him and frankly, since I’ve been doing all the financial stuff for over a decade now, I just didn’t think he’d have a problem with anything I did.  And after the meltdown of my computer this week – my computer that contained ALL our financial – I figured keeping that kind of stuff in an online-accessible place was a good idea. 

Well, Darc wasn’t happy with me, and told me so, in the nicest way possible you can tell somebody that you’re not happy with something they did.  I apologized, and he understands my reasons for doing what I did.  And I wouldn’t have even considered signing up on the site if they didn’t have a nice little delete button for those who change their minds about it.  Keeping financial stuff online is a risky venture.  Not keeping it online where you can get to it in the event of a computer failure is also a risky venture.  It’s all about picking  your poisons and knowing you’ll have to choke down one of them.  In a perfect world, my bank would have a FireFox add-on I could use.  In the meantime, we’re going to give Buxfer a try.  If for any reason one or the other of us gets uncomfortable with it, it’ll be deleted pronto.  Surely it can’t be any worse than when our bank got hacked into, right? 

Right??

~~Ness~~ 

Man

There are times my husband drives me batty.  Kreestee says she sometimes calls her husband Mr. Grumpypants, and there are times I think mine ought to be called Mr. Crank-a-butt.  I say her and I send the two of them off together someplace so they can irritate each other and not us.   What say you, Kree? 

Last weekend, for reasons I’ll never fathom, Darc decided that anything he could do that would annoy the crap out of me might be especially fun.  He mocked everything I did.  If I said one thing, he said the opposite.  When I jumped at a loud noise on a TV show, he teased me – told me I had “delayed reaction jumping syndrome” and deliberately made a loud sound himself just to see if I’d jump again.  Later, he sneezed loud enough to blow the walls out, and then laughed at me for jumping at that. 

I have a box of baking supplies I keep on the top shelf since I don’t bake as often as I’d like.  Being the shortie that I am, I keep the edge of the box extended just over the edge of the shelf it’s on so I can get my thumbs under it to get it down – otherwise, I have to get a ladder because I can’t reach it.  When Darc was helping me look for some ingredient I needed, he pulled the box out to look inside it, then pushed it back in.  “No, pull it back out please, just over the edge, or I can’t reach it when I need it.”

“The door won’t close if I do that,” he argued.

“Yes it will, just please pull it out a little so I can get leverage on it.”

“You mean … like this?” and he pushed the box all the way in the back of the cabinet as far as it would go. 

“Damn!  You’re such an ass!”

He laughed.  Then he pulled the box out so far it almost fell out of the cabinet while he mocked me.  “You want it all the way out, like this?”

“Cut it out!  Why are you being such a dick?  D. I. C. K.  Dick!  Knock it off!”

All. Weekend. Long.  If there was a chance to mock or tease me, he didn’t let it pass.  He was like the proverbial little boy who dips the little girl’s pigtails in the inkwell.  I’ve had to chase him with my backscratcher – see, it’s an old bamboo one, and it extends my reach by about 18”, and if we’re sitting at our desks I can reach him with it.  Smartypants leans his shoulder over to me when he sees me coming, mocking me smacking him, “Make sure you don’t miss now!”  Oooooh that man! 

So just to get even, when he saw this over on Blame it on the Voices and asked me if it was worth watching, I said, “Yeah.  It was interesting.”  I feigned nonchalance.  (Heheh, pretend I said that with a British accent!)  [Kreestee, you might want to suggest that link to Mr. Grumpypants.  ]

Then I laughed my butt off when his head hit the ceiling.   

~~Ness~~