Random | Marriage Confessions Random | Laugh. Fight. Stay Married.

Riddle me this – how are so many people able to find pants that are the appropriate length for their legs? This just baffles me! Sadly, I was not blessed with long legs or even legs of a normal length. I’m short and sweet, with the majority of my “height” being my torso. Needless to say, shopping for pants is an unpleasant event. I usually just wear skirts.

This morning though I decided to reintroduce myself to the pants-wearing world and dusted off my work pants. Nothing fits! The pants legs are either so long that it looks like I’ve got a train on my slacks or they are so short I look like I’m wearing flood pants in winter. Not. Cool.

As I walked to work this morning I paid particular attention to people’s pants. Surely I could not be the only human with this problem. But to my dismay – everyone else’s pants hit just where they were supposed to! How is this possible?!?! Â I just don’t understand.

Where are people finding these magic pants?

2 comments | posted in Marriage Confessions, Random | tags: Clothes

Today I write from a beautiful hotel room at The Magnolia Hotel in downtown, sunny Houston, Texas. I am tagging along on a business trip with Chris to the USITT conference (United States Institute of Technical Theater). Chris won their top award this year, The Golden Hammer, and I am here technically to be his cheerleader. In actuality, I’m here because I needed to be anywhere other than my office for a while. And the parties at this conference are not all that dull…

The trip to Houston yesterday was just about the worst travel experience I’ve ever had. Let me take you through the painful steps because I am a firm believer in the whole “misery loves company” thing:

12:00 PM – Our flight from Hartford to Dallas was cancelled.

1:00 PM – We were put on a different airline flight to Newark, NJ.

2:00 PM – Flight takes off from Hartford…wait, we aren’t taking off. We’re sitting on the runway for AN HOUR.

3:00 PM – Flight actually takes off from Hartford.

4:00 PM – Flight arrives in Newark about 10 seconds before our connecting flight to Houston departs three terminals away.

4:10 PM – I plow down an 80-year old Italian grandmother and her daughter as I haul my ass through the Newark airport to catch my connection. Grandma was none too pleased and I half expected to wake up with a horse head in my bed this morning.

4:12 PM – Chris and I make it on the flight to Houston.

7:00 PM – Our plane hits “a little weather, folks,” according to Pilot Bob and bounces down the Houston runway. By the time we come to a complete stop, I don’t know whether I should throw up or burst into the Hallelujah chorus.

7:30 PM – After half an hour waiting for our luggage, we logically determine that it was not able to run as fast as we did through the Newark airport to make the connecting flight and is now, in fact, lost.

8:45 PM – All flights into Houston are canceled due to weather and no one in the baggage claim office can tell us where our luggage has been routed to. (Side Note: It would have been incredibly helpful in this situation if I had paid attention in my college Spanish classes. “Donde esta mi hot pink luggage-o” apparently does not have the meaning I thought it did.)

9:00 PM – In defeat, we head out to grab a shuttle to our hotel.

10:30 PM – We make it to our hotel, change, and head out to meet friends feeling tired, slightly nauseous from the flight, dirty, and ready for a cold beer.

It was a long day and I have never slept so good. Our luggage was delivered this morning at 8:00 AM, just in time to get ready for the day. I love it when a story has a happy ending!

2 comments | posted in Marriage, Marriage Confessions, Random | tags: Houston, Marriage, USITT, Vacation

Here’s the thing – before I got married I loved to do laundry. On my Facebook page, laundry used to be listed as one of my interests. Thats how much I liked it. I considered it an interest. I like going through all my clothes, making them clean again, folding and putting them back in their proper places. That’s just good clean fun.

Then I got married to a dirty boy and it all changed.

Now, Chris is not a smelly dirty boy. He actually smells pretty fantastic when he’s all sweaty – like firewood and soap. But he spends much of his days in either a wood shop or a steel shop building theater sets. Its a dirty job. So I expect a certain level of dirty clothes. But the amount of laundry that is generated in our small two-person household is unexplainable, uncomprehendable, unacceptable. Its like an act of God.

On any given day, the hamper and/or big blue chair in our bedroom is overflowing with laundry – socks, pants, undershirts, bras, sweaters, blouses. And it doesn’t have to be clothing either. Shoes, belts, and purses are all part of our Great Laundry Pile in the Sky. Sometimes, we lose our dog Lucy in a laundry drift.

At the heart of The Great Laundry Pile in the Sky is the fact that neither Chris or I feel like we should have to do the laundry. It’s a big waiting game. He feels like if he does the laundry, then he’ll be stuck doing our laundry for the rest of our lives. I feel like if I do the laundry its because I’m the wife and, honey, that ship don’t sail in my house. So, TGLPITS continues to overtake our bedroom, our home, and our lives.

I mentioned to my mom one day that I was making a statement in our house and had chosen not to touch the laundry until Chris did something first (this would be the picture at the top of the page…). My mom said that I should try to do one small load a day so that it didn’t feel so overwhelming (lets pause to appreciate that my laundry is actually described as “overwhelming”). But I refused. Clearly this is a mature decision. All that happened was Chris didn’t wear boxers or undershirts for a few days and I continued my silent seething. Finally, I gave in and took the laundry to a laundry mat, paid $100 and had them do it all. Chris got mad. We had The Fight of 2007 and called it a day.

Recently I’ve given up the ghost. The fact is, I need clothes more than he does. I can’t go to work without a clean shirt and pair of pants without drawing some serious looks, whereas he is right at home in a dirty shop in dirty clothes. So, I give in. I’ll do the damn laundry. But lets be clear: This is not a wife submitting to her husband, this is an independent woman cleaning her clothes so that she can to go her professional career and make money to support her family.

Nevermind the boxers with hammers on them in the hamper.

7 comments | posted in Laundry, Marriage, Marriage Confessions, Random | tags: Laundry, Marriage

We are going out of town next week and have to board our dogs, Molly (the big black one) and Lucy (the little brown one). So today we took them to the vet to have their shots updated and to make sure they were healthy as a horse…er, dog.

The first vet technician came in to weigh them. She put Molly on the scale – 56 pounds. She’s not skinny, but she’ll do for a lab. Then she put Lucy on the scale – 18 pounds. Now, Lucy is a chihuahua dauschund mix. She’s supposed to be small and dainty. She’s supposed to fit inside purses and wear cute pink sundresses. She actually weighs what a cocker spaniel should weight and looks more like a pissed off linebacker when we try to dress her up (which we stopped doing about a few years ago when she began to eat the clothing).

The vet tech smiled at Chris and me and stood up saying, “Looks like someone is going to get the Fat Lecture…” I tried to argue – her legs are too short, her head is shrinking, it’s winter weight. Nothin’ doing. She’s a fat weenie dog and she has to lose weight.

The vet was actually nice when she came in. No condescending remarks and I don’t think she roller her eyes at us more than twice. She asked if we had any health concerns with the dogs (other than their glaring weight issues) and I said that, yes, we had noticed several small lumps on Lucy’s back that were sensitive when we poked at them. The vet felt around for a bit and then looked up at me with sympathetic eyes that said, “You dumb, dumb dog owner.”

“Those, my dear,” she said, “are fat pockets.” Great, Katie. How about you make the situation even worse by pointing out the fat on your dog? Chris shot me a look like, “You just HAD to open your mouth…”

In the end, we have to go on diets. Our dogs have a limited calorie intake everyday and we have to put them both on diet dog food. Its a bummer and I know its going to piss Lucy off. She already sits around next to her food bowl if there isn’t any food in it, barking and howling like she’s dying.

This is going to be awesome.

4 comments | posted in Lucy, Marriage Confessions, Molly, Random | tags: dogs