House Husband Messes Up And Forgets ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING!
House Husband Messes Up And Forgets ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING!
On her return from China, my wife entered the house to find dishes in the drying tray. The dishes included a suite of small bowls ideal for the serving of ice cream, and her female brain jumped to the conclusion that, in her absence, I and my three-year-old daughter had been pigging out on ice cream.
My protestations that, no, no, we had eaten nothing but broccoli, yogurt and water cress were ignored. Plainly, the BAD label had been hung around my neck, and I would have to lift my game to restore myself to my wife's good graces.
That night, my wife had a horrific nightmare in which she was being machinegunned while lying in a minefield with bits and pieces of exploded North Korean slave laborers pattering down upon her. On waking, she realized that this was not a dream but a memory. This realization did not, apparently, make things better for her.
I had recently (by a means which I am not presently disposed to disclose) got my hands on a movie by the great comic master Charles Chaplin. The movie is THE GREAT DICTATOR, and is a spoof on Adolf Hitler, Mister Nine Million. I thought a little light relief would be appropriate to the situation, so fired up the computer and set Charles playing.
But, unfortunately, the movie opens in 1918 with scenes of trench warfare, and the subsequent humor involves, amongst other things, an unexploded artillery shell, jolly japes involving grenades and that kind of thing. Not exactly what the doctor ordered.
As my wife was seriously breathless, my own guess was that what the doctor would order, if he set eyes on her, would be a blood transfusion. The bottom line on being machinegunned is this: you leak. Having leaked quite a bit of blood, my wife must surely be low on red blood cells, and this is one of the things which can cause breathlessness. (There are other causes. Try running up and down the stairs in the Empire State Building some time and you will discover at least one for yourself.)
I persuaded my wife to call an ambulance, and she ended up spending the night in Meijin Hospital with good red blood flowing into a receptive vein, and with some "we'll take a shot at doing this a little better" surgery scheduled for later in the day.
Once I got home, I was tired, so, after delivering Miss "I Am Three" to the daycare center, I flaked out on the couch to catch up on some sleep which had gone missing in the night.
Later, on waking, I realized that the peace and quiet left me free to take some photos of the baby chaos which dominated the household landscape. So I did so. I wouldn't have been able to do this unless my daughter was at the daycare. But she was. And would remain there safely until ... what's today? Saturday. Okay ... until 1230. So what's the time now? 1330.
No, it can't be! But it was. Time flies when you're having fun. It also slips by unnoticed if you're sleeping. I then realized that I hadn't bought food for the evening meal, and it was my turn to cook.
Okay. First reclaim the daughter, then think about shopping.
By the time I'd reached the daycare I'd figured it out, and daughter Cornucopia and I headed for the supermarket. En route, she saw the library, and wanted to go there. So, on returning home, we gathered up the library books and headed to the library. Which was closed.
So we revisited the supermarket to buy two things I'd forgotten, Canola cooking oil and margarine.
Before going shopping, I always make a shopping list. Then, when I'm in the supermarket, I gather up things from memory. Then, just before heading to the cash register, I check the gathered things against the shopping list. This procedure is intended to be a kind of training tool.
But tody I was intellectually arrogant enough to think that I could skip the shopping list. ("Shopping list? We don't need no stinking shopping list!)
That, it turned out, was a mistake, though I had remembered to buy the most important thing on the list: another tub of Lady Borden chocolate ice cream.
After the library and the supermarket, we then went to Tsutaya to return two videos and to borrow four more. By the time we headed home, it was windy and pitch dark, and furious cold rain was falling, as a typhoon had come sneaking in. We were soaked by the time we got home, to find my wife waiting, and looking a little better than she had at the hospital.
I heard about her trip. She'd been pigging out in Shanghai on crab (now in season, apparently) and on Peking duck (a little greasy for her taste, apparently.) She had two very classy Chinese yin and yang T-shirts for me, and a fun story about a corpse.
The corpse was lying by the road connecting Shanghai to the airport, and a fellow tourist told my wife that, in China, people don't like to call an ambulance because, if you phone one, you have to pay for it. So - this at least is what my wife alleges that the tourist alleged - in China, if you have an accident, you need money so you can bribe someone to make that expensive telephone call.
With Charles and Hitler in mind, I thought of giving this blog entry the tile "Machineguns, Roadside Corpse and Genocide and Other Jolly Japes." Then I thought that might somewhat in bad taste, so I canceled that idea.
I did get dinner cooked, by the way: salmon, scallops, baked potatoes, rice, edamame (boiled soy beans) and tobinoko (flying fish eggs). I was all set to dish out ice cream for dessert, but my wife insisted, no, it must be fruit. Or vegetables. No broccoli being left, we ended up settling for a nashi.
On her return from China, my wife entered the house to find dishes in the drying tray. The dishes included a suite of small bowls ideal for the serving of ice cream, and her female brain jumped to the conclusion that, in her absence, I and my three-year-old daughter had been pigging out on ice cream.
My protestations that, no, no, we had eaten nothing but broccoli, yogurt and water cress were ignored. Plainly, the BAD label had been hung around my neck, and I would have to lift my game to restore myself to my wife's good graces.
That night, my wife had a horrific nightmare in which she was being machinegunned while lying in a minefield with bits and pieces of exploded North Korean slave laborers pattering down upon her. On waking, she realized that this was not a dream but a memory. This realization did not, apparently, make things better for her.
I had recently (by a means which I am not presently disposed to disclose) got my hands on a movie by the great comic master Charles Chaplin. The movie is THE GREAT DICTATOR, and is a spoof on Adolf Hitler, Mister Nine Million. I thought a little light relief would be appropriate to the situation, so fired up the computer and set Charles playing.
But, unfortunately, the movie opens in 1918 with scenes of trench warfare, and the subsequent humor involves, amongst other things, an unexploded artillery shell, jolly japes involving grenades and that kind of thing. Not exactly what the doctor ordered.
As my wife was seriously breathless, my own guess was that what the doctor would order, if he set eyes on her, would be a blood transfusion. The bottom line on being machinegunned is this: you leak. Having leaked quite a bit of blood, my wife must surely be low on red blood cells, and this is one of the things which can cause breathlessness. (There are other causes. Try running up and down the stairs in the Empire State Building some time and you will discover at least one for yourself.)
I persuaded my wife to call an ambulance, and she ended up spending the night in Meijin Hospital with good red blood flowing into a receptive vein, and with some "we'll take a shot at doing this a little better" surgery scheduled for later in the day.
Once I got home, I was tired, so, after delivering Miss "I Am Three" to the daycare center, I flaked out on the couch to catch up on some sleep which had gone missing in the night.
Later, on waking, I realized that the peace and quiet left me free to take some photos of the baby chaos which dominated the household landscape. So I did so. I wouldn't have been able to do this unless my daughter was at the daycare. But she was. And would remain there safely until ... what's today? Saturday. Okay ... until 1230. So what's the time now? 1330.
No, it can't be! But it was. Time flies when you're having fun. It also slips by unnoticed if you're sleeping. I then realized that I hadn't bought food for the evening meal, and it was my turn to cook.
Okay. First reclaim the daughter, then think about shopping.
By the time I'd reached the daycare I'd figured it out, and daughter Cornucopia and I headed for the supermarket. En route, she saw the library, and wanted to go there. So, on returning home, we gathered up the library books and headed to the library. Which was closed.
So we revisited the supermarket to buy two things I'd forgotten, Canola cooking oil and margarine.
Before going shopping, I always make a shopping list. Then, when I'm in the supermarket, I gather up things from memory. Then, just before heading to the cash register, I check the gathered things against the shopping list. This procedure is intended to be a kind of training tool.
But tody I was intellectually arrogant enough to think that I could skip the shopping list. ("Shopping list? We don't need no stinking shopping list!)
That, it turned out, was a mistake, though I had remembered to buy the most important thing on the list: another tub of Lady Borden chocolate ice cream.
After the library and the supermarket, we then went to Tsutaya to return two videos and to borrow four more. By the time we headed home, it was windy and pitch dark, and furious cold rain was falling, as a typhoon had come sneaking in. We were soaked by the time we got home, to find my wife waiting, and looking a little better than she had at the hospital.
I heard about her trip. She'd been pigging out in Shanghai on crab (now in season, apparently) and on Peking duck (a little greasy for her taste, apparently.) She had two very classy Chinese yin and yang T-shirts for me, and a fun story about a corpse.
The corpse was lying by the road connecting Shanghai to the airport, and a fellow tourist told my wife that, in China, people don't like to call an ambulance because, if you phone one, you have to pay for it. So - this at least is what my wife alleges that the tourist alleged - in China, if you have an accident, you need money so you can bribe someone to make that expensive telephone call.
With Charles and Hitler in mind, I thought of giving this blog entry the tile "Machineguns, Roadside Corpse and Genocide and Other Jolly Japes." Then I thought that might somewhat in bad taste, so I canceled that idea.
I did get dinner cooked, by the way: salmon, scallops, baked potatoes, rice, edamame (boiled soy beans) and tobinoko (flying fish eggs). I was all set to dish out ice cream for dessert, but my wife insisted, no, it must be fruit. Or vegetables. No broccoli being left, we ended up settling for a nashi.
posted by Hugh Cook at 2:00 AM
1 Comments:
Like what you write. Like how you write, too.
Like your recalled conversations.
edotgdot.
"Welcome to China," I said.
"I'm still at Narita," she said. "I forgot -"
"To put on the rice. I know. I just found out."
"You know where the rice is, don't you?" said my wife.
"No," I said.
Ignoring this assertion, my wife told me to take four cups of rice and put them into the rice cooker. Then fill the cooker to the "4" level. Then press the TORIKESHI button. Then press the button on the right.
Since I bookmarked it, I'll be back.
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