Friday, December 07, 2007

Sleep Deprivation and Spousal Alienation

Well, I was going to take a day off today; but I've become addicted to watching the numbers on my sitemeter creep up after I post, and I just can't stop.

Today went fairly well, considering I had 3 hours of sleep last night (and not consecutive, either). David kept waking up barking, so I put on 2 coats and wrapped him in 3 blankets and opened the living room window and let him breathe in the blessedly cold, dry air. Larry came down at one point (no doubt motivated by my hissing at him, "How come I'm always the one getting up?") and, thinking that David needed a hat, placed his own rabbit-fur hat on David's cold head. This maneuver upset our little vegetarian very much, even though no flesh-eating was involved (on our parts, anyway). So we went with wool instead, the shearing of which (we assured David) in no way hurt the sheep, aside from perhaps leaving it a tad chilly in the evenings for a week or two. This conversation seemed a bit surreal at 2 in the morning, but we're used to things being rather weird around here.

So now I'm waiting for the rest of us to come down with the sore throat from hell just in time for our annual Chanukah party. Theo has cooked us up about 75 latkes, which better be enough, because I am sick of cleaning up the greasy post-frying mess. We've got the life-or-death homemade applesauce from last fall, the dreidels (an important detail - the year we spent in Rhode Island, I had to crash a Chanukah party at a local synagogue and beg for a dreidel), the pennies to gamble with, the candles, and the Chanukah napkins. Gotta have the Chanukah napkins. I would have splurged and gotten the plates also, but the stores were sold out. Hot item, those plates.

Maybe I should clean up the house, too. And paint some more gray stripes on the living room wall, just to confuse people. Larry went out and bought a non-returnable 5-gallon pail of the paint color we had tentatively (and I cannot stress tentatively enough here) agreed upon for the living room. And now the color (or at least the stripes of color) look not quite right to me. More blue than grey. Maybe a bit too light. I tried to express my misgivings to him, but all he could do was to shake his head and mutter something about 200 dollars.

So....I am going to shut my mouth and let him paint the whole stupid room with the wrong color and when he is not looking I am going to smear the color I want, the right color, the color that doesn't look blue, on top of it. Because trying to talk about this problem would not be good for our marriage. I am confident that Larry will eventually come around to the point of view that my happiness is worth a heck of a lot more than 200 lousy bucks.

I don't know how many years of marriage it takes to make 2 immature people grow up, but it is definitely more than 17.

Good night!

18 comments:

  1. I hear you! My eldest is 26 now but the little ones guarantee that during the last decade I'm down to an average of 4 to five hours a night.
    Best wishes
    This is my calling card or link"Whittereronautism"until blogger comments get themselves sorted out.

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  2. What is up with all these nasty bugs going around this year?? It seems like, by the time the last of us is recovering from an illness, another comes down with something else. SOMEONE IS ALWAYS SICK! Maybe I should just move out into no-man's land and I can homeschool my kids and we can have our own animals and a big garden and we can stay away and we won't catch all these nasty little bugs.
    Neh, I would miss chocolate too much.

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  3. valarie - forget it. I homeschool, and we have winters where it seems that someone from the CDC should come up here and figure out what the heck is going on. But then there are winters where we barely get sick at all. No rhyme or reason to it.

    And homeschooling doesn't guarantee against head lice either. Believe me.

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  4. Didn't your husband ever hear that the key to a happy marriage is listening to the wife. It really is true, you know.

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  5. Dont you just love husbands who have to be told to help out? I have heard that there are husbands out there who will get up and let the wife stay asleep since she had such a hard day with the kids, and deserves some time to sleep too. I don't know if its true - but I have heard stories.

    Let him paint the house and live with the grey for a week or so, and I bet you will stop thinking its wrong. Or maybe not.

    I talked to my father in law about the color of my house and he said its the color of the fruit sapote. I have no clue what a sapote is, and he told me its a like pink color, and that my husband has painted the entire house - inside and out - that color. Yet when I googles sapote its like an orangish melon color. So I don't know what color the house is. *sigh* I am SO picking my own colors out at Home Depot to send down before I leave.

    ~Jennifer

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  6. I'm thinking it takes at least 54 years...a rough estimate, of course.

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  7. Yeah, those site meters are addicting. My husband is starting to give me dirty looks when he sees me on the computer. (Does he remember how he is with football on Sunday? No, of course not.)

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  8. mrs g. - oh, okay, then - I won't hold my breath.

    motherwise - I tell my husband I'm editing photos...

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  9. I stained the porch steps and decking a cranberry color that looks okay with the house, but the old terracotta color looked better. Then, in a whim of fancy, my son (18) decided to help and start the front porch steps with the cranberry. Of course he ran out of time before getting to the porch floor, so now my front porch is two tone in a not so complementary way...and I have 50 garden club members coming here in 10 days for a Christmas tea. Please... a four day break to 60 degrees so I can get the floor done! Is that so much to ask? Where's global warming when you need it? Need I mention there is three inches of snow in the front yard?!!!

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  10. I hear ya about watching the sitemeter - It's become my most annoying OCD habit (more annoying than checking mail every two secs as at least if I get mail, it may require a response).

    rock on,

    aitch

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  11. Yikes. I don't think I want a sitemeter on my site . . . I would get too fixated on the numbers! Ignorance is bliss for me!

    Even if it's the wrong paint, try this: dim the lights, place candles everywhere, and no one will ever know. This also works well when you haven't had time to dust.

    God bless, and I hope you are all feeling better soon.

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  12. I'm sorry your baby is sick and I too hope it doesn't pass onto the whole family. I loved the paint story and that last line was PERFECTLY funny! Take care and have a great day. Kellan

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  13. This cracked me up: "I don't know how many years of marriage it takes to make 2 immature people grow up, but it is definitely more than 17."

    My grandparents have been married 64 years and they still have tiffs, so I am going to say...never.

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  14. Hahaha - on so many levels. We, too, had a painting "issue" in our house, and over the same color problem, too, funnily enough. Those grays are tricky! We ended up with SILVER - like for real, SILVER, like right out of a spray can! - but because it was the third time my husband had painted the walls, I just couldn't make him do it again. So I'm waiting another year to spring the news that we have to do it. And the growing up thing. I was just thinking that very thing the other day... I could be a better parent if I wasn't a raging cranky teenager myself!

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  15. Colors that change when you get them home. GRRRR. Husbands, even after twenty two years. GRRRR.

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  16. I'm in the middle of preparing our playroom for paint, and I must admit, if there's any perk to divorce it's that I get to pick my color without debate. Then again, if I pick wrong, it's all my fault...

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  17. good luck with the paint color! We've been in our house a little over 7 years now and STILL haven't done much in the way of painting or decorating because neither of us can make a decision about what color things should be, or figure out getting supplies into our budget, etc. At least it'll be a change, for awhile, even if it's the wrong color blue! I'm SOOOOOOOOOOOO tired of cream colored walls EVERYWHERE

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  18. Yeah it takes more than 18 years too.

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