It's Our Anniversary!

Today my lovely wife and I are celebrating 13 years of marriage.  13 years!  Wow, where has the time gone?  It's been a great run for us.  I don't know if there's anyone in the world who I could live with for that long.  And a lot of people are wondering why she's put up with me all this time.

With that said, there's always some marital battles that wage between husband and wife.  We're going through three seperate battles right now.  Oh, they're not battles, per se.  Just little skirmishes that flair up.  And I have to admit that I like to egg her on to keep 'em going because they are pretty entertaining. 

Battle 1 - I was a bachelor for a number of years before I got married.  When Cindy and I got together, she told me that she liked to have the seat put back down on the toilet when I finished peeing.  It was a struggle at first, but I was able to get into the habit.  Today, it's so much of an ingrained habit, I even do it at other people's bathrooms. 

Now 13 years later (plus nine months of co-habitating before we got married), she suddenly wants me to not only put the seat down, but to close the lid!  What is up with that?  I would think that she'd want to have the lid up in case she has to go to the bathroom real bad sometime and she would thank me for not having to waste the nanoseconds it would take to open the lid.   And, of course, I hear about it in her biting little way when I don't put the lid back down - "Oh, I see the lid is still up."  Or, "I wonder who didn't put the lid back down?"

Well, this one, I'm going to keep going because it's stupid and it's kind of fun all at once.

Battle 2 - When I first moved out on my own over 30 years ago, I bought some furniture for my first apartment.  About the only thing I have left over is a green chair that we have out in our "lodge" - our four-season porch.   It's old and not as comfortable as it once was, but it does hold some sentimental value.  Cindy hates it.  She puts a blanket over the top of it because she thinks it's so ugly.  She wants to throw it away.

First of all, we argue about the color.  I say it's green.  She says it's gold.  Now, you tell me.  Doesn't this look like lime green to you?  Cindy says, "You're color blind."  Which, in some instances, I am.  But this looks green to me. 

I had a matching chair that Cindy's son shifted in one day and broke the leg on it.  We had to take it to the curb.  (I accused Cindy of paying him to do it.  I'm surprised she hasn't had him to the same thing to this one.)  Not any more than a half hour after I put it out, someone in a pickup truck came by and grabbed it.  I said, "See, Cindy?  Someone saw the beauty in that chair!" 

Cindy said, "We should put the other one out so they could have a matched pair."

She wants to move a love seat from our living room out into the lodge.  God knows it would be more comfortable than this chair is, but I keep telling her, "NO!  We are NOT getting rid of that chair!"

I have feeling this little battle will be over sooner than later.

Battle 3 - This is the big battle.  The beer fridge in the garage.  Cindy won the beer fridge as part of a kitchen makeover in a radio contest years ago when she was living in Cedar Rapids.  I'm guessing the fridge is about 17 or 18 years old.  When she moved in with me, she said, "No beer in the refrigerator in the house!  We'll put the other refrigerator out in the garage and you can use that to store your beer."  (Geez, all these rules all of the sudden!)

Well, that was the go ahead - in my mind - to use the thing to store A LOT of beer.  And I've been doing it ever since.

These days, Cindy deems the beer fridge as evil.  Even with a clean bill of health from my doctor, she still says it does nothing but make me want to drink more beer.  Well, yeah.  That's sort of the point to the beer fridge.

However, over the past couple of years, I've noticed the beer fridge is having trouble keeping up and sufficiently cooling the beer, especially in the hot summer months.  I've had a guy come over to look at it a couple years ago, but he said it was working fine.  But it just wasn't cooling as it should.

I've said to Cindy, "It's time to look into getting a new beer fridge."  Well, that sent her over the edge.

"You are NOT going to get a new beer fridge!  That thing is going out to the curb!  You better drink up because when you come home sometime from a trip, it's going to be gone!  I'm serious!  I'm going to leave you if you get a new beer fridge!"

Ah ha!  The operative term is "new"!  I thought, "Well, then, I can get a good used one." 

Then she said, "Or a used one!"

I said, "Damn!"  She just laughed. 

She wants to bring up the dorm-sized refrigerator we have in our basement that cools pop and wine and put it in the garage.  Then she wants to buy a deep freezer to store a bunch of our food from the freezers in the two refrigerators. 

Marriage is lot of "give and take".  I think I've been pretty good over the years not asking for much.  But the beer fridge is one battle that I'm going to win.  Don't ask me how I'm going to win it, but I'll win it.  Looking back, I should have just gone out and gotten a new fridge when she was in Europe last summer.  She'd have gotten over it by now.

I think...       

Comments

[Warren]

Putting the seat back down was the toughest thing to remember when I first live with my wife. She used to go nuts when she'd find the seat up. For the sake of marital bliss I learned to put the seat back down.

But keep fighting on the beer fridge! You deserve it!

[Dirk]

That chair of yours is as yellow as the pee stains on your toilet bowl rim.