"If either one of us loses something, it's definitely you." Sweetie said this one day when I was looking around for something and couldn't find it and was 100% sure that Sweetie had put it somewhere where I didn't want it to be put.
Here's what happens in our house: I will need to find something. I will ask Sweetie for help. She will say "Here's the thing..." and then remind me that if I put things where they belong, I wouldn't lose them.
But here's the real thing: Who can keep track of where things go? I've got enough going on in my life what with working and sleeping and working out and wondering if there's any pizza still leftover that I can have for breakfast (there is! YAY!) without also having to remember where things always have to go.
Just consider, say, my car keys. When I get out of the car, I've got them in my hand. So I come up the stairs to go into the house and from there, I may go one of any number of places.
Some days, I come in and I'm able to go into the kitchen, where there is a chalkboard with a ledge on which Sweetie keeps her keys, and I could put my keys there except (A) there is no place to set down the other stuff I'm carrying, like my coffee cup and iPod, so I don't pause there, and (B) the ledge is right near the garbage and I'm always worried that my keys will fall into the garbage and I will have to find them by going through the garbage one morning before work.
Nobody ever wants to go through the garbage to find something, especially because we always think the thing is in the garbage but it never is, is it? It never is, making it all the worse that you have coffee grounds and spaghetti sauce and whatever that juice is that somehow spontaneously forms in the garbage.
What is that juice? When I throw the garbage into the can, it is dry. When I bag it and take it out to the garage, it is dry. But when I have to go rip open the bag at 7 a.m. while I'm wearing my suit to see if my keys are in the garbage (they're not; they're in my coat pocket but I don't know that yet) the garbage is wet with some kind of juice that I always imagine is some sort of poisonous Ebola acid and I cannot possibly wash my hands enough that day.
Sweetie doesn't worry that her keys will end up in the garbage, but, then, Sweetie never lost her keys for an entire week once only to find them in the water reservoir of the coffee pot, with no idea how they got there but with an uncomfortable notion forming that all week long somebody had been drinking coffee brewed around a set of keys and following on that notion came the notion that I was probably dying of key poisoning which is possibly a thing.
So I don't put the keys there, I put them in the basket, which is the equivalent of a junk drawer only we cleverly put all our junk in a stack on our counter, because that seemed better at the time and now I can't change the system.
The basket sits off to the edge of the counter, by the coffee, and currently has old magazines, mail, a bunch of bandages for rewrapping Mr F's head, lots of other stuff including a book that you can record yourself reading the story which my Dad gave to the boys for Christmas and which we are still pretending we will someday sit down and record, and sometimes my keys.
That's all assuming that I don't have to go straight upstairs, in which case my keys end up on my dresser (maybe?) where I have a little box for them, or into the living room where my keys will get set down by my Kindle near the computer, and so on.
Sometimes I come in through the garage and then there are even more places to set the keys.
So you see my point: There's no one right place to put stuff, and I win.
I would have more of a leg to stand on with this argument if yesterday I hadn't lost the little admission cards for our health club.
"Just so you know, it's a standing ask." This was Sweetie talking to Middle, who works at one of her jobs as an assistant manager at a diner near us, a diner that is famous for its pies and cakes. Middle gets free cake there, and she stopped by one day after work, but did not bring Sweetie cake.
Sweetie loves cake.
In order in her life, I estimate that the things Sweetie loves are:
1. Her kids.So when Sweetie complained to Middle that she'd just come from the diner but didn't bring cake with her, Middle said:
2. Cake.
3. Oxygen.
4. Me (most days)
5. Me (a few days when I have not lived up to expectations)
6. Cake, again.
"You didn't ask."
To which Sweetie pointed out that she's always asking.
Also: I think cake might be tied with at least some of the kids.
5 comments:
You need one of those like pegboard things with hooks to put your keys on. I just have a little gray pan I had to use in one apartment for silverware because the drawer was too small to accommodate my silverware holder thing. I get home and toss my keys and watch and wallet all in there. Otherwise I'd never know where the hell anything is. Just last week I was trying to find a towel that should have been washed and finally realized it was still in the bottom of the hamper and thus not washed! I lost a dish towel months ago and spoons and forks have disappeared over time. There must be some link to the 4th Dimension where these things all go.
I locked my keys in the car the other day. This post reminds me of the necessary need to keep track of where all things are at all times. I had to pay a locksmith. Yuck.
When I was a kid, my mom would come in the door from work and, within three minutes, lose her purse. I say "lose," because she could never figure out what happened to it. And why she put it anywhere when she was going to immediately need it never made any sense to me, but that's how it was. Anyway... She'd come in, lose her purse, realize she needed her purse, look for and not find her purse, and call me to find it for her. It was -never- in the same place, and, sometimes, the places I found it I would swear she hadn't even been to, yet. Anyway, the fact that I always had to find her lost stuff for her prompted me to keep track of where I put my things.
I'm in the put the keys in the same spot every time camp. I don't have a losing things problem. It drives other people nuts, but I have a place for everything and everything has its place.
My keys reside on a nail in the wall in my room.
I generally don't have an issue losing things like keys or wallets because I tend to put them where I'll never lose them: Near my Zoolander DVD.
If someone were to move the DVD then I'd have a problem. But everyone knows that they aren't allowed near the Zoolander DVD, so it tends to work out.
And your Sweetie loves Oxygen that much? Yikes. I mean, I know we'd all die without it, but we'd all die without a colon, but I don't put my colon on my list of things I love. I sort of take that for granted.
And I assume she loves molecular oxygen and not atomic oxygen. You know, right? Who could love atomic oxygen? Well, I suppose a rocket scientist probably would, but besides them I don't think it's too popular.
I'm off point here. Time to focus. Wait, I didn't have a point. I guess I'm cool then.
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