Category Archives: husband trolling

T-rex arms

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Last night while I was making the bed (right before getting into it, because I’m at least semi-adult…when it’s convenient…), my husband walked into the room wrapped in a towel. He had just been in the bath and was searching around for a pair of underwear to put on. Once located, he dropped his towel and stepped into said underwear. Then, looking especially thoughtful, he turned to help me make the bed while asking:

“Do you ever find that, when you’re coming up the stairs and the bathroom door is open, you catch yourself doing little mini T-rex arms at your reflection in the bathroom mirror as you walk?”

I stopped and looked at him, one eyebrow raised. Random questions involving dinosaurs are normally my wheelhouse, not his. I mean, it’s not like a private wheelhouse or anything…but, you know.

“Err…no. I can’t say as I’ve ever done that”, I replied, and fluffed the pillows on my side of the bed.

As if I hadn’t said anything, he continued on in his thoughtful tone while straightening the corner of the quilt purposefully.

“And by mini T-rex arms, I mean like, full-on T-rex arms, basically. Like, RAWR RAWR I’M A T-REX.”

In that moment, I had two thoughts.

The first was that every once in a while the Universe reaffirms that I’m spending my life with the absolute right person.

The second was that I was NEVER going to be able to go up those motherfucking stairs again without at least considering doing T-rex arms at my reflection in the bathroom mirror.

 

unstoppable

 

 

sometimes a plane is just a plane

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Saturday morning Junior was at the groomer getting his hurr did and I had two hours to kill. I knew that if I stayed in town I’d end up living out one of several scenarios:

  1. I’d go to WalMart and spend way too much money on a bunch of shit I didn’t need, including but not limited to make-up that I end up never wearing,
  2. I’d go to Sephora and end up blowing half the rent money on buying all eleventy billion colors of Kat Von D Tattoo eyeliner which is my new most precious favorite thing ever,
  3. I’d eat my way through half the fast food joints on the strip because clearly I hate not only my circulatory system but also my liver, brain and colon,
  4. I’d go to Pier One and spend a small fortune on wooden giraffes (you can TRY to explain to me why I don’t need like seven of those motherfuckers but I will never believe you. NEVER.)
  5. I’d go to SuperCuts and get a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad haircut.

All of these scenarios ultimately end with tears…usually mine. I know because I’ve actually done all of them, with the exception of buying the wooden giraffes.

So, instead of subjecting myself to the clearly unmanageable temptations of downtown West Lebanon, N.H., I decided I’d drive up the hill and hang out at the airport. Not like, the inside of the airport where people are waiting around for flights (though that holds a certain appeal as well, though probably better done in larger airports where more than like six people are in there at any one time and people will get creeped out by the fat lady with no plane ticket doing cross-stitch in the corner for two whole hours), but rather out in the observation…area? Parking lot? Basically, it’s the back side of the airport. There’s a big chain-link fence to keep dingbats like me off the runways, but you can park up and watch the one or two planes an hour take off / land. There’s almost never anyone else up there, at least not in the winter, so I can sit in my car cackling at ‘Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me’ and doing my cross-stitch in relative peace.

When I got to the place I normally park up, there was a jet sitting just on the other side of the fence. It was a smallish jet, what I later learned was a Gulfstream 5. I learned that by, out of sheer random curiosity, punching the registration numbers emblazoned on the tail of the jet into Google. Not only was I able to find out what kind of plane it was, but I was able to see who it was registered to and, after a little dicking around, could actually find a cataloging of all the recent flights this plane had taken.

WEIRD, RIGHT?!

This is probably a good time to remind you that my run-away imagination is built for conspiracy theories. I wish it was built for like, writing enormously popular novels or screenplays because that would be way more lucrative and life-improving, but no. It’s pretty much all conspiracy theories all the time up in my ol’ cabeza.

So, when I was sitting there seeing all these details for the flights of this plane come up (on my PHONE, no less. We live in the future and it’s a magical place, people!), of course my brain was starting to rub its figurative little hands together, going “Yes, I can work with this. YESSSSSS.”  Pretty soon I was Googling the company that the plane was registered to (some kind of crazy hedge fund investment firm thing in Manhattan), and coming up with all kinds of far-fetched reasons why rich Manhattan-ite investment bankers would be flying a private plane to East Desolation, N.H. in the middle of January (which, trust me, is NOT the time you want to be here unless you’re a skier. Or a polar bear. And even then, your judgement is suspect). Everything from shady investment deals to covert extra-marital get-aways to a corporate team-building workshop (‘come survive the wilds of New Hampshire in the middle of January with nothing but the clothes on your back, a book of matches and three tins of Alpo’) bubbled up from the dregs of my imagination and it was altogether entertaining.

Later on when I got home and told Mark about my adventures in low-level phone-based Internet sleuthing, and questioned why all these people on Internet message boards would be talking about THIS SPECIFIC PLANE unless it was A VERY IMPORTANT PLANE, he totally burst my bubble. Turns out plane-spotting is a big hobby, just like train-spotting – people hang around airports and take note of the tail numbers of planes they see on the tarmac, then post the details on the Internet so that other people can “track” the planes. There’s even an app you can buy that lets you input the tail numbers and plot all the plane’s flights on a map.

So, fuck it. Next time I have to wait for the dog to get his hair cut, I’m totally buying myself a wooden giraffe. Maybe two.

 

giraffe

You cannot even fathom the dog-propelled chaos that would ensue if I brought this home. Junior would alternately try to hump it, chew on it, and refuse to come into the room where it resided, out of sheer terror. I need like…three.

 

 

 

 

I married a cookie licker

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I made peanut butter cookies this afternoon. That was a mistake, since both my husband and I are weak, weak people…who really like cookies. Especially peanut butter ones. I doled out a few over the course of the afternoon, then bagged the rest up and stashed them in the microwave in the hopes that out of sight really WOULD equal out of mind (which is hit and miss with us, at best).

About half an hour ago, Mark started edging toward the kitchen, looking sketchy. Just as I noticed what he was doing, he caught my eye and put on his “hopeful” look, which is kind of a cross between puppy-dog eyes and a guilty grimace. The following exchange occurred:

Me, suspicious: “What are you doing?”

Him: just standing there silently, contorting his face further to try and make ‘the look’ more convincing, presumably.

Me, laughing now: “Do you have to crap? You kind of look like you’re clenching to keep from crapping your pants.”

Him: “Can we have cookies?”

Me: “We had cookies earlier. We don’t need more cookies.”

Him: “Right, but I want cookies.”

Me: “Fiiiiiiine…”

Him, scurrying out to the kitchen, yelling back over his shoulder: “Did you want one?”

Me: “Well, YEAH.”

He came in a couple seconds later and handed me a single cookie, sheltering his other hand against his body, clearly hiding it and the cookies (plural, I’m not stupid) it contained.

Me: “How many cookies do you HAVE?”

Him, looking slightly panicked: “Three.”

Me: “THREE?!”

And then, with a look of sheer panic on his face, he took the stack of three cookies and LICKED THEM. Then, with a note of triumph in his voice he said, “And now I’ve LICKED THEM so no one else can HAVE THEM!”

I completely lost it – the kind of heaving, uncontrollable laughter where you don’t make any sound and you can’t breathe. He started laughing too, which only served to further feed the hilarity. I seriously haven’t laughed so hard since the pterodactyl incident. Half an hour later, I’m still sitting here having random outbursts of giggles over it.

IMG_20151121_105717476

“I’m surrounded by idiots. Help me.” – Junior

 

the curious case of the missing scone

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I bring treats into work on Tuesday mornings for staff meeting so Monday nights, I bake.

Sometimes I make banana bread, sometimes muffins…it really kind of depends on what I have around, what food blogs I’ve been perusing before making the shopping list, and what I feel like doing.  This week I was back in scone mode after a run of blueberry coffee cake made with the lovely local blueberries I picked and froze earlier in the summer.  The scones I had in mind to make this week were studded with dried figs and toasted walnuts, and warmed with some ground ginger, nutmeg and allspice.

I hadn’t made scones in quite a while so I had to keep referring back to the recipe a lot (baking is the only time I really ever pay attention to recipes, because way too much can go wrong if I don’t…which I have learned the hard way!  How bad can it go, indeed…), and maybe also neglected to remember that my preferred recipe only makes 12 scones.  I like to try and bring at least 14 or 15 servings to work with me, so after I had scooped out 12 nice neat piles of scone dough, I went through and trimmed a bit off each one to make them smaller and hopefully yield a few more scones in the process.  When I finished, I had 14 scones – six on one baking sheet, eight on the other.

I could almost swear to this.

Almost.

It should be noted that I wasn’t drinking at the time, either.  I just…want to throw that out there.

Anyway – so, I’m PRETTY SURE that 14 scones went to the oven, and I’m also PRETTY SURE that 14 scones came out.  I set the pans on top of the stove to cool, like I always do.  At that point Junior was spoiling for his evening constitutional, so Husband harnessed him up we took him for a quick five minute jaunt around the driveway together.  As we came inside I needed to pee so I kicked my shoes off and ran upstairs to use the loo.  I came back downstairs, went into the kitchen to package the cooling scones up, and noticed something odd…

There were only 13 scones – six on one sheet, seven on the other.

Husband happened to be coming back through the kitchen just about then, and I glared at him accusingly.

“Wha?” he said.

I pointed at the space where the scone was missing.  He blinked and shrugged.

“SCONE STEALER”, I said, pointing at him.

“I didn’t!”, he replied, without a hint of a smile.

Now, it’s not like he hasn’t nicked warm baked goods off my pans before of a Monday evening, but to be fair to him, he almost always makes it enough of a production that I’m aware he’s absconding with the goodies and have a chance to stop him if it really matters.  And even if he doesn’t, he certainly never lies about it when I call him on nicking something.  So, when I stared long and hard at him and he vehemently denied having stolen the scone multiple times without even a trace of smugness, I found I had to believe him.

And yet…I could almost swear there were 14 scones when we went outside.

Could our crazy neighbor or one of his kids have sneaked across the breezeway into our apartment, grabbed a scone and slipped back into their apartment without us noticing from 30 feet away in the driveway?  Possibly…but not likely.

Could it have been some kind of R.O.U.S. infiltration?  Again…possible, but I’ve not noticed any sign of even normal sized rodents in the apartment (thank fuck), let alone ones big enough to make off with an entire scone without leaving so much as a trail of crumbs.

Ninja pterodactyls?  Stealth scone-stealing pixies?  Aliens?

I mean…it’s POSSIBLE that I miscounted and only actually baked 13 scones…but I don’t think I did.

It’s pretty much always aliens.

Also, for the record, the next morning Husband DID admit to stealing a scone, but he was adamant that it was after I went to bed and was definitely NOT the original scone that I accused him of stealing.

Hmmm.

pterodactyl troll attack

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Our xBox (which is what we use to watch Netflix, among other things) has a Kinect…unit? Camera? Thing.  One of the functions the Kinect thing can do is operate the xBox via voice command.  If you say, “xBox!”, a little menu of things it can do for you (none of which involve putting away the laundry or emptying the dishwasher, much to my disappointment, but I digress), will pop up on the screen.  You can tell it to play the next episode of the show you’re watching, exit to the main menu, shut the console off, etc.

Ever since we got the xBox and Kinect thing a few years ago, my husband has been kind of fixated on the voice command feature.  He has a British accent and the xBox doesn’t always seem to pick up / understand what he’s saying…so I think part of the fixation is that he maybe wants to prove to the xBox that he is, in fact, in charge.

Now, I’m an asshole.  I like to fuck with my husband by trying to talk over him while he’s talking to the xBox because he gets all exasperated when the xBox doesn’t recognize him or doesn’t do what he tells it to do.  Consequently, any exchange he has with the xBox while I’m around usually goes like this:

Husband: “xBox!”

(xBox chimes and pops up the menu)

Husband: “Mai…”

Me, cutting him off: “xBox, nooo!”

Husband: “Main Men…”

Me: “No, xBox, noooo! Cancel, cancel!”

Like I said, I’m an asshole.  He knew this when I married him.

Anyway – so this morning, we were sitting around watching The League on Netflix before Husband had to go to work.  The last episode ended and true to form, Husband piped up with his “commanding” voice:

“xBox!”

The xBox chimed and popped up the menu. The game was afoot.

Husband: “Exit Netflix!”

Me: “Nyerrrrrrhe!”

The xBox went to the main menu.  I was going to have to try harder.

Husband: “xBox!”

Me: “WAAAHHHGGG!”

The xBox popped up its menu like an obedient little robot.

Husband: “Main Menu!”

Me, talking over him loudly: “Raaaah! No, xBox, noooo!”

The xBox didn’t respond.

Husband, louder: “MAIN MENU!”

The xBox popped to the main menu with a happy little chime.  At this point, I knew I was going to have to bust out the really big guns if I was going to win this game. I took a stealthy deep breath, readying my diaphragm. I used to be a singer – if there’s one thing I can do, it’s project my voice.

When my husband opened his mouth to give the xBox the “Settings” command, I unleashed what was later described by him as a reasonable facsimile of a pterodactyl cry.  Husband screwed his face up in the most precious display of bemusement I’ve ever seen on another human being and I just completely LOST it.  I went into one of the longest bouts of no-breath silent-wheeze laughter I’ve ever experienced.  I finally managed to claw my way out of it long enough to gasp for air only to get sucked in again just as hard because the whole time, I could hear Husband in the background STILL trying to talk to the fucking xBox!  The xBox must have picked up my wheezing gasping laughter, (possibly it’s programmed to pick up signs of bodily distress?), because it just sat there with the menu up, still waiting to be told what to do next even though Husband was booming “SETTINGS!” at it in what I can only imagine is his best impression of a British headmaster.  This, of course, made the entire thing all the more funny to me and I remained incapacitated, wracked with sobs of laughter, for a good five solid minutes after Husband had finally got the xBox to shut itself off and had stomped upstairs.

Moral of the story:  Even when pterodactyl doesn’t win, it always wins.

BA-KAAAAAAAAAHW!