That’s it. My husband knows me too well. Either I’ll have to develop an entirely new personality, or give him a good sharp rap on the head with one of our many hammers so he forgets a few of my fundamental traits.
Here’s why.
This weekend, I decided to do the spring tune-up on my car. Swap out my snow tires for all-seasons (yes, I used my click-type torque wrench to torque the wheel nuts to spec), do an oil change, top up fluids, inspect brakes and boots and belts for wear, all that sort of thing. And clean the car.
So I’m on my knees wielding the vacuum cleaner wand when Hubby pops his head into the garage. The following dialogue ensues:
Him: Oh, how nice of you to offer to vacuum my car!
Me: Yes, startlingly nice. In fact, unbelievably nice. *continues vacuuming her own car*
Him: How much do you charge?
Me: More than you can afford.
Him: Do you take credit?
Me: In God we trust. Everybody else pays cash.
I won’t bore you with the entire exchange, but in the end, I kindly offered to leave the vacuum out so it would be handy for him to vacuum his own car. Lest you think I’m a cruel and heartless wife, I’d like to mention that I did, in fact, have a nice dinner cooking in the oven at the time. I do try to treat him reasonably well.
Anyway, I finished up by washing my car and polishing its glass inside and out before I returned to the kitchen to finish making dinner.
The very next day, we went for a drive in his car. About a block away from our house, he said casually, “Wow, this is the cleanest my car has been for a long time. Except for that strip of dust on the dash I couldn’t reach. And nobody cleaned the inside of the windshield.”
Then he leaned over and committed the most brilliantly diabolical act imaginable. He drew his fingertip through the dust on the inside of the windshield in a criss-cross pattern right in my line of sight.
I tried. I swear to God I tried.
I lasted for ten whole seconds before I caved.
And he looked over at me scrubbing the entire passenger side of the windshield clean, and he laughed.
I’ve been married to him for too long.
Author Diane Henders 
Pingback: Crack Popcorn | Diane Henders
Almost makes me ashamed to be a member of the male species. Terrible thing he did to you ( I will have to try that technique out on my wife).In the mean time, I will feign indignation for his devious behavior.
LikeLike
Nice acting job. Thanks for that. 🙂
LikeLike
And after the nice dinner, who washed the dishes?
LikeLike
He washed; I dried. Yet another of the many reasons I like to keep him around. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
I truly want to call your husband a diabolical bastard, but a part of me is smirking…and I know you must be, too? Bad-bad little boy husbands help us to never take ourselves too seriously or grow old ourselves. At least, that has been my experience. ( do I hear a limerick in your head?)
LikeLike
You’re exactly right! I had a moment of speechless shock right after he did it, and then I started laughing so hard I could barely manage to stammer out the word, “Dickhead!”. Love that man. 🙂
LikeLike
That is so wrong. I think I would definitely have to find a clever way to retaliate.
LikeLike
Maybe we can collaborate – let me know if you think of anything sufficiently subtle and evil.
LikeLike
Good laugh, Diane. Glad to hear you’re torquing up those nuts properly! I think I’d have closed my eyes and tried to sleep till I arrived. But there again, I’m not married to him 🙂
Cheers!
LikeLike
Ah, Nigel, where were you when I needed you? That would have been a perfect solution. I think it requires more self-discipline than I possess, though. 🙂
LikeLike
I’m with Tom on the technical stuff about the car. I suggest one of the hammers..though maybe the lightest tap would do…wouldn’t want to cause much damage to that evil though funny mind of his 😉
LikeLike
Good point. It could be tricky to find the exact combination of location and force that would make him forget my inconvenient traits while still remembering vital things like “must take Diane out for dinner tonight”.
LikeLike
LOL! Brilliant. Still, I’m amazed you let him live. *evil grin*
LikeLike
I’m saving up for a truly creative retaliation, when he expects it least – and when I finally figure out something appropriate. I don’t think I can top him in subtlety, so I may have to go for blunt force.
LikeLike
Diane, the techie description of what you did to your car went way over my head (you talked the what :S? …I have the same expression when a mechanic explains anything to me about my car!), but, when you described the hand-written cross on the windshield, I had an overwhelming urge to scrub my computer monitor! Funny post! 😀
LikeLike
Yes, the secret is to leave the dust intact. As long as it’s in a nice, uniform layer, it’s fine, but as soon as there are visible clean spots, I have to clean it all. 🙂
LikeLike
Diane, I know *exactly* how you feel. The nice folks in my office will occasionally place a few staples or a punch-out from a three-hole punch on the floor of our office, and then time how long it takes me to pick them up, not knowing why they were there. Bastards.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Bastards, indeed! That’s a rotten thing to do a poor innocent OCD sufferer.
LikeLike
Diabolical, yet effective. I’m sure you’ll find a way to get him back.
LikeLike
I’m trying. It’s hard to beat that for sheer subtle evil, though.
LikeLike
It wasn’t evil at all. It was efficiency, you were there and just needed to be properly motivated.
LikeLike
…you see what I have to deal with?
LikeLike
lol, om-goodness, I’m still laughing! You guys are simply two peas in a pod, especially in a car…lol.
I can really appreciate a woman using a calibrated torqe wrench on lugnuts but, do you use it in with grease or anti-seize 🙂
LikeLike
The spec is 100 ft-lbs, and I’m actually capable of over-torquing them (as I discovered to my chagrin last autumn) so I have to use the torque wrench. ‘Cause nobody likes their nuts over-torqued. And proper lubrication is essential. 😉
LikeLike
I am impressed! And over torqued nuts is never a good thing…lol
LikeLike
Please explain to me the difference between ft-lbs and lbs-ft. I have yet to hear a good explanation. As a side note, I have not cleaned the inside of my truck for four years. Things pop in, stay awhile, and pop out. It seems to work find. All joy. HF
LikeLike
“Fine” damnit! Not find. God, kill me now and prevent me from making another typo! HF
LikeLike
Oops, busted! Technically, I wrote it wrong. Ft-lbs and lbs-ft are both the same unit of measurement, but engineers usually write the notation differently to differentiate between torque and work.
Torque and work are not the same thing, despite the fact that they’re measured using the same units. Torque is typically noted in lbs-ft; work is typically noted in ft-lbs. They’re both measurements of force x distance, but ‘work’ is force applied in the direction of travel and ‘torque’ is force applied perpendicular to the direction of travel.
That said, the notation on every torque wrench I’ve ever seen has been in ft-lbs.
Now, aren’t you sorry you asked?
And I like your strategy of cleaning the truck. I had to clean the car for safety’s sake. By the end of the winter, I’m up to my ankles in the pea gravel that gets caught in my boot treads and tracked into the driver’s side. If I didn’t shovel it out in the spring, I’d sprain my ankle trying to step into the car. 🙂
LikeLike
So a criss-cross pattern means “please clean this”? All this time I thought my hubby was writing “hugs.”
LikeLike
Sad but true. Sorry to burst your bubble…
LikeLike