Marriage is WORK!!!!

Figure A

Marriage is supposed to be Figure A. Am I right? To have and hold and to love each other forever, this is what the vowels state. Why does it end up like Figure B?

Figure B

The truth is marriage is work. Day-in and day-out it is the most strenuous and grueling work on the face of the planet! Don’t get me wrong it is so worth it when it works, but when it doesn’t work Lookout! Marriage is a part of our daily lives that requires us to perform the ultimate balancing act. See Figure C.

Figure C

            Time for work, time for the kids, time for yourself, and last but not least time for your spouse. Now mind you that this is all coming from a man, so my opinions may not be the same as my female counterpart. I strive for routine; in fact I am in love with routine. Routine was not something I had as a kid. My parents divorced when I was young, and my Mom bounced my sister and me around until she found the next Mr. Right. After getting used to the new stepfather (years pass), Mom decides to uproot us again. I shortened the story but one can see the lack of routine in my life. For my adult life and for my children’s sake I want routine. Routine is good because there is a lack of drama. Who in their right mind really wants more drama in their life?

            Apparently routine can be bad for some people. And with keeping with the balancing act of life I can see how too much routine is bad. I really do not want to air my dirty laundry, but the wife said something that really stung. “You would be happy coming home to a cat, as long as it was the same thing every day.” This is So Not True! I am a dog person. Somewhere I missed the point of marriage. I thought that marriage meant coming home to the same person every day. Consistency is the key to routine. If I wanted shot down by other women, then I never would have gotten married! No Sweetheart, I chose to be turned down by you for the rest of my life. All joking aside; marriage is hard work. Anyone who tells you different is a liar! At the end of the day when you look at your spouse and you think to yourself, “all the hard work is worth it”, keep up the good fight. Work past the metaphorical “bumps in the road” and remember when marriage was just like Figure A.    

A New Leaf

I am not a goal-setter, never have been. Today I am trying something new for a change. I made a short and easy to accomplish list. Looking at it my first thought is a to-do list, but it varies from the norm. It ranges from cleaning the house, to touching base with friends and family. My hope is to achieve these goals and progress to the point, someday, of setting long-term goals. And yes one of my goals for today is to BLOG! This is something I have seriously been falling behind with on a day-to-day basis. I read others but I do not take the time to write my own. The Idiot has been cranking out some very funny ones on a consistent basis, and I would love to hear his secret.

Other than the normal everyday life, I have started the next Great American Novel! Anyways that is what I keep telling myself in my mind. I have talked about writing a book for years now and I just started. The research online tells writers just to write and the ideas will come forth. For a long time now I have been writing the book in my head, but never put anything on paper. So this week I started.

The first thing I realized was that I need a class in descriptive writing. Sure I can visualize all the scenes in my head, but I am having trouble conveying images to the paper. Any and all tips on this matter would be appreciated. I just find that I am too cut and dry. Straight to the point so my novel is lacking. Maybe blogging will help. Anyway back to my goals! Have a good day!

Imaginary Friend

An imaginary friend. Every kid has one, so there is no need for embarrassment. I told my wife about my “friend” once and she laughed at me. Now I will proceed to tell people on the internet. Most kids have a playmate; I am sure psychologists say they fill a void that the child feels that they have in their life. I do not know what exactly was missing in my life, but my imaginary friend was a bookie! Laugh it up!

Not only did I have a bookie imaginary friend, but he may have been a genie. Don’t get me wrong he was not in a lamp. The guy was in a bank vault! He had all the money, and the bastard swindled me out of my fair share. Here is what we bet on all the time: Trivia. We bet on everything that I could think of in the world. It started out betting on road signs.  I would bet my genie-bookie what road sign was coming up next on road trips I had taken before. Once in school I would bet on remembering state capitals and the location of all the states. The genie helped me out more than I will ever know, although it cost me when I was wrong.

Not to worry I only bet imaginary money. Maybe that is why I do not gamble nowadays. I learned at a young age that I was a degenerate gambler. I think my friend left around the time of my parent’s divorce. At seven I lost my bookie. Who knows maybe he will come back for my late years. You know when I am old and senile! Who is Dad talking too, Mom? “Just his imaginary genie-bookie”, the wife will say to the kids!

Too Much To Do…

Between school, work, and family life I have had NO TIME to blog! This quarter is going terrible right now. To top off the one boring class, my professor has assigned a Group Project. OH MY GOD! How I hate group projects. With my life it is hard to find time to go work with a group from school. Let alone the fact of putting myself in a room with idiots more than the required four hours every week. 

 It is a Marketing course and we have to come up with a product and sell it to a target audience. My crafty partners want to create a bullet-proof IPad case. First of all, this is the dumbest thing I have ever heard of in my life. I asked them if they were serious! “Oh yea”, they said. “Okay, and just who are we marketing this product to”, I ask? “Gangstas in da’ hood”, they say. I point out that there are not many gangstas who carry IPads. And what do they do when the shooting starts? Oh yea hold up a bullet-proof shield that is 10″ x 8″ and hope you do not die! Try again genius is what I thought about saying to the guy. But I kept my sarcasm in check and asked who else would buy the case. Their answer was the military. Come on. Group projects never work well.

I tend to do most of the work and let others take credit. Quite frankly I have seen their A-Game and it would not help my grade. Just let me do the work. College is just like my job sometimes. Now I just need to come up with a good project idea!

Back To School

Winter quarter has officially started for me. The past two days I have attended two new classes. (Granted it is only two, three-and-a-half hour classes) I know most people take more classes at a time; but it is tough to juggle a forty hour work week, a family, and school. This quarter I am taking two business courses, hopefully I am done with all the menial classes and I can focus on my major. I know it all boils down to money for the college, but why do they make you take ridiculous classes that will not help in your career. Oh yea they told me it makes me a more well-rounded person!

I took a placement test since I had been out of school for twelve years. I did not do too shabby for not dealing with writing assignments and algebra problems for that long. I placed in a mid-level English course, so my second quarter I took it to get it out-of-the-way. My professor required the class to grade two other papers, wrote by classmates, on a weekly basis. He gave us our writing assignments, and once they were posted we had to look over the other papers. The first two papers I graded were horrible. I wanted to pull my eyes out after reading what fellow college students were writing. You received grades on how well you graded the other’s papers. My first grade for grading was an F! I could not believe it! I went to the professor after the next class to talk to him about my grade. He told me that I could not just assign a letter grade, BUT I had to go through and revise their paper to make it an “A” paper. “This shows me you understand the proper grammar”, he tells me. I told him it would take forever to make his other student’s papers “A” papers, and that I did not have the time for these morons. Now I am not perfect at writing and grammar, but I know more than those guys will ever know. So at night I would preview all the papers I had to choose from and pick the best of the worst. That way it would cut down on my work. As a student in the class you picked out two students a week to grade, but once two students were reviewing one paper, another student could not revise that paper. You follow me. I know in print it does not make much sense. For example:I write a paper, a classmate reserves the right to revise my paper, then another classmate reserves the right to grade my paper. Now no one else can grade my paper that week. I, in turn, have to pick two other papers to grade. I had classmates tell me it was a race to see who was going to grade my papers every week. Why? Because I did not make mistakes! ***Tooting my own horn***

Anyway I am blogging tonight because I do not want to do my homework. I sound like my kids now. I will not speak badly about my classes this quarter on the off-chance my professors might see the blog. That or an angry classmate. All I can say about the first two nights is that it is going to be a LONG TEN WEEKS!

Listen Up Sportscasters

I enjoy all sports. I am sorry let me clarify, watching all sports. Golf is the only sport I can play without becoming too competitive. Golf is not something I excel at so I just play to have fun. One thing about sports on t.v. is driving me up a wall: all the damn statistics. They have one for everything and everyone. Watching football and listening to these stats is killing me. I have some examples and you can tell me what you think.

This is one of my all time favorites. Said quarterback leads the league; among active quarterbacks, between the years of 2008 through 2010, with at least _# of attempts. Really who is doing all this grunt work research. The announcers act like this puts the players in a league of their own. C’mon just give it a rest!

Another good one is that said quarterback has not thrown an interception in so many pass attempts. BOOM! Next flippin’ play interception, yet they don’t say,” there went that streak”. OH NO! That cornerback or safety has had _# of interceptions since God-knows-when and that sets him apart from the rest.

The dome, artificial grass, or real grass is another statistic that drives me wild. As is night games, day games, after a bye-week game. Where the sun is in the sky will soon come into play for certain players, I assure you. “Well Dick that quarterback is 83.8% accurate when there are more cumulus clouds in the sky than there are cirrus clouds”. “That is right Frank, and that running-back runs like the wind when it rains in California but is sunny in Virginia”.

Give it a rest with all the statistics. I do not get upset when they show me how they are comparing to the legends of a sport. Sure go ahead and tell me how many more yards till they break THE record.

In all fairness we would all like to have our own horn tooted. Can you imagine the stay-at-home Mom with an announcer following her around. “Well Dick this is the third poopy diaper she has changed on little Tommy today”. “I know Frank and since the sun is shining little Tommy has not whizzed on his Mom yet”. Or better yet, “Dick this is the one-thousandth time Mom has washed a sippy cup”. “Yes Frank, that puts her on the leaderboard for active stay-at-home Moms that wash dishes on days that end in Y”.

Maybe working Fathers would have a little more respect for their better halves if they received nightly updates on Sportscenter about their wife’s day. Because let’s be honest, my wife was a stay-at-home Mom. (Something I pushed very hard for considering I grew up at various baby-sitters) As soon as I walked in the door every night the wife would give me a recap of the day’s events. After three minutes I would find myself tuning her out. Yet I can watch the same episode of Sportscenter back to back. And all they are doing is giving me ridiculous statistics.

Anyone For Painkillers?

I try to make my titles catchy! I am not trying to become a street pharmacist, it is just a title that goes with the story. Years ago I worked my butt off at a small lumberyard. From time to time I would injure myself. Mostly minor things like scrapes and bruises. There was one time where I shot a nail into my hand. That was interesting to say the least. We were contracted to build large crates for another company to ship their products overseas. We had an old nail gun that would expel a large burst of air when it shot a nail. I was moving right along nailing the walls together when my coworker said I had a nail sticking out of my hand. I just thought the burst of air had hit my hand like it does every time. Sure enough I looked and there was two-and a half-inches of a three-and a half-inch nail sticking out of my hand. So I stop working and go and find my boss. He looks at me and says,”Quit f*@king off and get back to work”. I said no it is really in there. To tell the truth the tetanus shot hurt worse than that nail did.

Back to the point of the story. I messed up my back one day at work. It hurt so bad, I had never felt pain like that before. I picked up a door, like I had done a million times before, and as I lifted I twisted to turn around. Something in my back went pop and I dropped the door. The boss looked at me and asked if I was alright. I said no and told him to give me a minute. A half hour later I was doubled over in pain. The boss said I better go get it checked out at the hospital. So I left work and went to the Urgent Care. They told me I had severely strained my lower back. The doctor sent me home with some muscle relaxers and told me to take a couple of days off.

Now I am not one to take medicine. I do not even take Tylenol for headaches, I am just anti-medicine. There I was laying on the couch moaning and groaning in the worse pain ever. My wife tells me to take a muscle relaxer. “The doctor gave them to you for a reason”, she says. Finally I cannot bear the pain any longer, so I pop a pill. It takes a little bit but then I am not feeling any pain. I was actually starting to doze off. Then one quick thought crossed my mind: How does that pill know what muscle to relax.  I thought Oh Sh#t, my heart is a muscle. What if the pill relaxes my heart and I die. I scream to my wife as I frantically feel myself for a heartbeat,” I cannot feel my heart I am dying”! She is crying she is laughing so hard. “If your heart was not beating, would you still be talking,” she tells me. I swore up and down I was a goner. I could not feel my heart beat.

I forget the size of the pill, but it was the smallest dose that the muscle relaxer came in. But it was enough to mess with someone not accustomed to taking painkillers. My wife still makes fun of me about this incident. I hope to never take one of these pills again. I only took the one that time and decided to tough out the rest of the pain until I healed. She will not let me live down the time I could not feel my heartbeat.