Category: Marriage

This is it!

Friday morning we got up around 4:30am normal for a day off. I know, normal? This was it, the big day. This was the day we load up the firebird with as much stuff as we could cram in, stuff that Mitch will need for the short term and head west. Mitch was to have all of his clothes washed and packed. But as is always the case, Mitch was behind. Thursday afternoon he was to pack and load the car. Didn’t happen. Friends and family realizing that Thursday was his last day here for real and not “just fooling” came by to say good bye. He spent a large part of his afternoon catching up and saying good bye to longtime friends, friends he grew up with, friends he made along the way.

Friday morning Mitch “The Snail” poked along, finishing up laundry, ironing and deciding what to take. He was able to fit two totes in the back seat of the car (with the seat back down). He filled the totes with of his uniforms. He filled one of our largest suitcases with street clothes; slacks, shirts, underwear and socks. I filled a milk crate with all of his vitamins, four bags of Milky Way candy bars and cappuccino mix. What is more balanced than vitamins, candy bars and cappuccino mix? Of course all of these were absolute essentials because everyone knows Seattle is some remote little dinky town without benefit of Walmart or a grocery store. Yes I know I was going overboard, but what else could I do, it’s my job to take care of him.

About 10:00am I could see the signs, Mitch was poking, the longer it took him to get loaded up, the longer he could forestall the inevitable. If I let him, he would stand in one spot and not move all day. Of course this was making me crazy. I had wanted to be on the road by about 8:00am, not that I wanted to be rid of him but this was also my vacation and I wanted to spend part of the trip sightseeing. Once again a case of the whirlwind crashing into the brick wall. I walked up to him and said something really hokey.

I put my hands on his arms and said, “The journey starts with a step.” Pretty lame, huh?

That’s when he looked at me and said, “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go and leave you here with all of this.”

I told him that it would be fine and that this was going to be an adventure. This was something we’ve talked about doing, not Washington, per se, but going somewhere else. We just hadn’t pulled the trigger. Change is hard and taking that first step is the hardest. I guess fate decided we needed a nudge.

Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven Days Left

One week gone and one week to go, the Mitch List has two items completed, new tires and an oil change for the station wagon, but I don’t have much hope for the other items getting done. I don’t know how to sharpen the mower blade so I guess I’ll just keep whacking the grass, not that we have a showcase lawn anyway, more like a poster child ad showing why you should go with a bulldozer and start over. On the inside of the house, we have one last wall in the kitchen that needed a decision, sheetrock or wood planks. Sheetrock won out because we thought it would be quicker. Mitch got the sheetrock hung and started on the mudding, but has not had an opportunity to start sanding, so I guess I will learn a new skill or maybe I’ll just leave it bare, splatter paint on it and call it art.

Knowing Mitch as well as I do, I know he always waits until the last minute to start anything whether it is a project or even get ready to go somewhere. He just moves at a slower pace than me and it makes me insane. In order to shorten my list I started a hundred different projects at once and ended up with a hundred different messes and nothing completed. I started sorting through some of the accumulation of decades of stuff dividing it up into three piles, the toss pile for trash items, the goodwill pile for salvageable stuff for someone to take, and the keep pile to pack away so I can unpack in the future and go through this again. The toss piles are easy, as soon as I get a good size pile I throw it in the trash can. The goodwill pile is a little tougher. I have multiple goodwill piles ready to go to some charity, I just need to call the charity to come and get it and I haven’t had a chance to do that. I need to add “call charity” to my “To Do” list.

Poor Mitch, I feel so sorry for him. He walks from room to room looking at the chaos I’ve created with a shell shot look on his face. I think he’s gone around the bend and is in overload mode. I’m pretty sure that nothing more on the Mitch List is going to get done and I’m almost to the point where I’m ready to sell the house lock, stock and barrel as is for a fire sale price. I’d even be happy if a hurricane came along and blew it away. I’m just not really sure a hurricane can make it to the Midwest. Oh well, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

The Countdown Begins

As soon as we found out that Seattle would be our new home and we only had two weeks to get him out there, panic set in. The first thing I did was to start making lists, one list for all of the projects that Mitch would need to get done before he left, one list for all of the stuff that Mitch needed to take with him and one list for me, listing all of the things I needed to get done before I can put the house on the market and sell it. Needless to say, my list is much longer than his.

We decided that Mitch would take the firebird with him and I would keep the station wagon (for the dogs) and the truck. Because of the limited space in the car, I couldn’t send all of the really important things you need when you move, dishes, silverware, a bed, etc. His idea was to only take his uniforms and necessary toiletries.

You should have seen the look on his face, when I set out a pillow for him. He asked why he needed a pillow. I told him that when he finds an apartment and is not staying in a motel, he’ll be glad he has a pillow. He looked at me with a blank look on his face for a moment then the light came on. Oh, yeah, that will come in handy. You can sleep on the floor for a couple of days if necessary, but a pillow comes in very handy. Men, they don’t think like women at all. I’m thinking of all of the stuff he’ll need for the short term and what will fit in the car until I get the house sold and move out there. Mitch is only thinking of his very immediate needs, clothes, how to get to work and what he has to do to get up to speed at work.

As each day ended, marking the countdown to loading up the car and heading west, I could see that the Mitch list projects were not going to get done. That means I’m going to have to learn how to do some things I’ve never done before. Good thing I have a whole bunch of power tools to learn on. I just hope the house survives.

What’s the worst thing that can happen?

Time to Exhale

Now the panic sets in. So much to do, so little time. Isn’t that always the case? We found out in January that the airline Mitch works for was going to start vendoring out twenty eight stations across the country. At that time it wasn’t defined yet whether or not United was going to vendor out both the above the wing and the below the wing employees in all twenty eight stations. The plan was to seek outside company bids in each of the cities affected and pay people to come in, load and unload planes, work the ticket counter and gate for wages ranging from a third less to half of what the airline employees are currently making. Such “good” news right after Christmas was definitely not well received.

My first instinct at hearing the news was to go into survival mode, cancel the paper, cancel cable, sell almost everything we own and eat only every other day. After a couple of days I calmed down enough to realize that I might be over reacting just a bit, we could probably eat most every day. The waiting game started, which stations were for sure going to be vendored out, and was it going to be both upstairs and down or just one side? Rumors started flying, so we didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t. Were the employees affected going to get any type of severance pay or was it going to be “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.”

Word came out in February that our station was going to be one of the twenty eight stations hit and it was going to be the ramp agents going away. The next step was the options selections. The airline was going to open up the unaffected stations to allow agents to transfer to granted they held enough seniority to move there. There was also the option to retire and take an enhanced severance pay, if the agent met a myriad of requirements, age, length of service, etc. If none of the above fit then there was always furlough with recall rights. Yeah right, first they’re told to hit the road and then they might get called back.

Finally April 10th the airline published the list of cities that were available for the agents to bid on to relocate to if that was their choice or severance or furlough. Those choices were required to be turned back in no later than April 14th. Then the airline promised to return the result of each agent’s choice on April 24th. We actually received our notice on Thursday the 23rd that Mitch will go to Seattle. He has to report on May 17th, not much time.

That was when I started “The Mitch List”, all the projects that I cannot physically do, like finish the trim work, hang the last pieces of sheetrock in the kitchen, install three sheets of plywood on the outside of the garage so I can have it sided to match the house. Then it’s all up to me to do the finish work in and around the house so I can get it on the market and sold soon.

Can you imagine what lies ahead? There is so much stuff to go through and get rid of, landscaping, and just the prettying up so it will look nice for potential buyers. I’m just really glad I have a well-stocked wine rack, because I’m going to need it.

Another Career Path Option Down the Drain

I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I have learned that being a painter is not an employment option. In fact I suck at painting. The funny part about it is that I actually enjoy painting. Nothing brightens or freshens up a room better than a fresh coat of paint. Paint is also a fairly inexpensive way to update a room or house. The caveat is only if the only thing that gets painted is the walls and ceiling.

My problem is that when I paint I get paint everywhere, the walls, ceiling, floor and me. I’m really good at getting paint on me, every part of my body. I always start off with the best intentions, I am so careful; I remove all of the switch plate covers for the outlets and light switches. I tape the window, door and floor trims. I cover the floor with plastic and newspaper and still get paint on window trim, doors and door trim, and oh how I get paint on the floors. Mitch says, “It’s a gift. You definitely have a gift.” He says that after I cut myself, fall off something, like maybe a ladder or get paint in places that any other normal person would never slop paint on.

I decided to paint the living room to brighten it up and make it look very fresh. I bought two gallons of ceiling paint and two gallons of wall paint just to make sure I had enough. The first mishap happened when I was painting the ceiling the paint roller slipped and whacked the ceiling fan. I had to quickly climb the ladder rag in hand to wipe off the paint before it left a big white smear across the fan blades. After the ceiling was done I cleaned up the roller and paint tray.

The walls came next and that is when true disaster after disaster happened. I thought that if I cut in the top of the walls, window and door trim and the base of the wall close to the floor all the way around the room I would save time moving the ladder around. I still had to go back and start over moving the ladder around the room to get the roller up high on the walls. At first I was doing well, no paint slops, I started to relax a bit and that is when it happened. I climbed up the ladder, lost my balance and fell backwards off the ladder knocking the ladder one way and I went the other way paint roller in hand and across the couch and onto the floor. Luckily the couch was covered in a plastic drop cloth. But in true Susan fashion, I ended up with a nice bruise on my hip.

After that it was all downhill, I bumped the roller against the ceiling, which means I have to go back with a brush and ceiling paint to correct all of the paint splatters. The roller would drip and a paint blob fall across the window trim or the door trim. Paint droplets would mysteriously appear on the floor where a second ago the floor was covered in newspaper. It was like a gust of wind had magically whipped through the room just across the floor moving the newspaper away exposing bare bamboo. I ended up looking like I’d been dipped in a paint can. I had paint on my hands, my jeans and shirt, and even in my hair. I didn’t just have paint down the front of my jeans I also had paint on my butt. I have this ability to bend over to paint low and back into the wall I just painted. I guess it truly is a gift.

It’s not like I’m totally graceless nor have no other skills, painting is just not one of them. The funny part about this is that Mitch hates painting, but is exceptionally neat when painting. He never gets paint anywhere but on the walls that he wants to paint. I’ve even tried bribery but it doesn’t work. There is nothing he wants that will entice him to paint with or for me. I think I hate him.

Do You Want Some Cheese with that Whine?

Sometimes Mitch can be such a whiner! I mean really, come on. Saturday morning is our weekly errand day, Sam’s Club, grocery store, Walmart, Petco, etc. Plus I wanted to get five or six bags of garden soil to add to one of my raised beds so I could get my potatoes planted. We started off on our errand run with the first stop Sam’s Club.

Sam’s Club is for detergent, paper towels, supersize bottle of olive oil, etc. The grocery store for regular stuff, eggs, dairy, fresh produce, etc. that’s how our Saturday mornings go, exciting huh?

Mitch grabbed a cart and as we headed into the store I saw a large pallet of forty pound bags of garden soil for less than six dollars a bag, bargain! I walked over to the stack of bags and told Mitch that I wanted to get the dirt here. He looked at me like I was speaking in tongues or something. He repeated back at me, “You want to buy it here?”

I said, “Yes it’s a great buy!”

“How many were you planning on getting?” He looked at me with an irritated expression.

“I don’t know, maybe four or five,” I reduced the number after getting “The Look”.

He reached up and grabbed a bag off the top about five feet high and turned around to the cart and put the bag in the cart. He turned back and grabbed another bag, still giving me “The Look”. After he placed the fourth bag in the cart I said, “That’s enough, I think four will be good.” Again with “The Look”. I was starting to get a complex.

We finished up at Sam’s, paid and headed to the car to unload the cart. When we started unloading the bags of dirt from the cart Mitch had to bend over to reach into the cart to lift the bags out of the cart then place each bag in the back of the station wagon. Again I got “The Look” as he lifted each bag out of the cart and into the car. I thought, boy this is going to be a long morning. As we drove away headed toward the grocery store I tried to make conversation.

I said, “I think four bags of dirt will be enough.”

He turned to look at me and said, “It’s never enough. I know better, it’s never enough. I couldn’t believe you wanted me to put those bags in the cart, a grocery cart, not the flat push cart perfect for forty pound bags of dirt, not a grocery cart. One that I had to lift up and over and down into, a regular grocery cart.”

“Well I didn’t plan on getting the dirt there, it just happened to be there and cheap, so I thought why not. You should have said something; I would have gone and gotten you a big boy cart.” That’s when I really got “The Look”.

What a whiner, four bags forty pounds each, that’s one hundred sixty pounds, but it’s not like he had to lift all one hundred sixty pounds at once. One hundred sixty pounds into the cart, one hundred sixty pounds out of the cart and into the car, one hundred sixty pounds out of the car and carried to the backyard. It was only forty pounds times four into the cart, forty pounds times four out of the cart and into the car, forty pounds times four trips out of the car and carried into the backyard. He-man wouldn’t have a problem.

The only reason I was forgiven was that the dirt was for potatoes and I only plant potatoes for Mitch. It was all for him, really.

I Can Not Believe He Did That!

Let me preface this story first with a little background. Everyone knows our work schedule and routine is a little wacky. Mitch gets up to go to work very early in the morning and in order to spend more time together I take him to work then pick him up on my lunch hour to take him home, I then go back to work and finish my work day. When things at work are crazy as they seem to be these days and I can’t take him home, I’ll have him drop me back off at work then Mitch will come back and pick me up at 4pm. He brings the dogs and lets them run around in the field next to the building before I get off.

This week has been super crazy so Mitch has been picking me up after work every day. The dogs are always so excited when they see me walking across the parking lot that they come running full bore to meet me. I’m always watchful for any unsuspecting coworker coming out at the same time in order to not let the dogs terrorize anyone else. Orso is always especially excited and will run around me in circles standing up and barking to let me know just how awesome his day has been.

Yesterday he came running up to me excited as usual and I played it up encouraging him a bit by starting to run with him to the car. Orso thought that this was a great new game and began running along with me barking and raising up on his back legs. That should have been my first clue. Things were about to go horribly wrong. He then turned toward me and bit my left thigh. I could not believe he did that. I stopped and looked at him then looked at my pants searching for the hole because as much as it hurt I figured his teeth had to have gone through the pants.

I walked up to Mitch and said, “He bit me. He just turned in and bit my thigh!”

Mitch started laughing and said, “No he just grabbed you. He’s happy to see you.”

“When a mouth opens and teeth come together in a firm manner that’s called a bite! He didn’t grab me he bit me!” To which Mitch just laughed more. I wanted to reach over and bite him.

After we got home, I changed out of my work clothes and into my sweats and checked my thigh, sure enough there was a bruise already popping up. I’m not sure who I want to bite more, Orso or Mitch, because right now it’s a toss up.

The Finite Life

I’ve been thinking about life and how much time I have left on this earth a lot lately. Don’t get me wrong, I have no plans on dying any time soon and have no idea when I will die, I’ve just been thinking about the span of time between now and then. I’m at a point in life where I know that death will come in the not too distant future, depending on health and choices I make, maybe in the next forty years give or take.

We all go through different stages in our lives. Stage one when we’re young and know nothing about life and death, when life is long and death is a faraway abstract concept. Life is happy and safe while death is where everyone goes to heaven, even our dogs. Stage two when we’re just starting our adult lives, life is still long and we think about the here and now, with death remaining a faraway end to a life well lived. We start building a life with someone we love and begin making plans for retirement still a long way away. Stage three is when we hit our middle age; children are either grown or close to being adults themselves. This is when we start to consider death as a door around the corner but still faraway, just not as far. Retirement and a life of leisure is more on our minds than death.

Stage four is when we are of an age close to retirement, but not there yet. Depending on our health and career path we may have five to fifteen years before we may retire and ponder what we’ve accomplished and what we have left to accomplish. Stage five is when we are close to the end of life and we take stock of how we’ve lived our lives. There will be regrets and satisfaction of our past deeds.

I think I’m at stage four, I will be sixty this year, I don’t consider that to be old and if you ask Mitch he’ll tell you I certainly don’t act like a sixty year old. He constantly asks me, “How old are you?” Especially after I’ve done something a teenager would do, like drive the car into the puddles of water to make giant splashes. But now I look at what life I have left and wonder how long do I have? I picture my time left in my head as a finite number and try to figure out how long. Weird huh? I’m not trying to be depressing or am depressed I guess I just want an answer to an unanswerable question.

I think in my head that if I know how much time I have left then I will make a decision a certain way that would be different with a different time line. Screwy weird, I know. Yes I know these are the great unknowns of life and the time of death should have no bearing on the way you live your life and the choices you make, but in reality the suggestion or the hint of death plays a very real part of all our choices in life. I have decisions to make and wish I had the answer to the greatest riddle of all in order to make the right decision.

Oh Poor Mitch

I really have to get Mitch out more. That in itself is a challenge, because Mitch is a man of routine. I mean serious routine. His day consists of, get up go to work, come home eat lunch, do whatever chores he does, like laundry or ironing, feed and walk the dogs, eat dinner and go to bed. He is also antisocial for the most part, a hermit, he is perfectly happy sequestered in the house never talking to another soul as long as he can. As a severe form of torture, I make him to go the grocery store with me on Saturday morning. I talk to everyone, store employees and total strangers alike, eliciting comments from Mitch like, “Is there anyone you don’t know or won’t talk to?” To which I just smile back at him with an evil look and say hello to someone else. To make matters worse, since I have taken him with me for so long, now the store employees now talk to him too. Even the former store manager would ask where my partner in crime was on the rare occasion he didn’t go with me.

Every time we go to the store I always ask him if there is anything he would like to eat for the week, and I always get the same response.

“No I’m good.”

Can you imagine how frustrating is to buy good food and a variety too, when I always get, “No I’m good.”? It makes me want to pull my hair out. I finally got him to admit he wanted Milky Way fun size candy bars to snack on during day and that only took three years. He treats himself like he doesn’t deserve anything special. You would think he had taken a vow of poverty. This morning at the grocery store there was a sale on Keebler/Kelloggs offering all of their cookies and crackers for sale at half price. I asked Mitch if he would like something different from what we normally buy since everything was on sale. He stood there staring at all of the choices with a blank look on his face. I picked up a couple of boxes of crackers that I wanted to try and looked back at him to see what he wanted. He just stood there.

I asked what was wrong and he said, “Back in the day there was only Saltines and if you wanted something exotic you bought Ritz and you were happy. There weren’t all of these choices then.”

To which I laughed out loud and said, “You also had toilets out back and not in the house, back in the day, but isn’t it much better today?”

That’s when he got indignant and said, “That’s a totally different genre, not the same at all.”

I just shook my head and looked at him waiting for him to choose something; he finally acquiesced and picked a box of flatbread crackers. This is one of the reasons I drink.

The Chair

My long suffering husband, Mitch, is no wimp. He’s not afraid of too many things in this world. I’ve seen him stand his ground among men a lot bigger and stronger than he is and come out ahead. In his youth his father taught him to box in order to fight back against school bullies, something he’s carried over into his adulthood. But there is one thing he is terrified of, me. I can instill terror and panic in Mitch in less than two minutes flat. I know that’s bold statement but I can prove it.

Last Saturday I had him take me to Nebraska Furniture Mart to buy a couple of accent chairs for the living room. He didn’t really want to go, you know how exciting furniture shopping is to a man, but nevertheless he went. As we were walking into the building he commented, “So we’re going to get a couple of chairs to match the couch?” (Mitch likes everything to match, coffee table and end tables alike, sofa, loveseat and matching chair, you get the picture)

I shook my head and said, “No, I have something else in mind. The room would be very drab all the same color, no I want some punch in the room. You know, I want something with a bold pattern and some contrasting colors.” He turned and looked at me, eyes a little wider, like someone who’d just been told they had cancer.

“Colors, patterns, what colors and how big a pattern?” This while his left eye started to twitch.

I said, “Oh I don’t know, maybe red or orange, something bold. I’ll know it when I see it.” The twitch got more pronounced. Then I said, “I was thinking of buying two different chairs not a matching set. Something to give the room more punch.” His eyes widen and he sucked in his breath trying to picture the unbalanced room in his mind’s eye. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

As we wandered around looking at the variety of chairs, Mitch kept trying to get me to look at brown or beige chairs and I pointed out all of the chairs with wonderful patterns and colors other than brown or beige. He would sit in the ones I would point to and say how uncomfortable they were, like he would ever sit in it anyway. I found one chair that was a sort of barrel shape and had very large red and brown circles covering the chair. Mitch looked at it and I could swear he sort of clutched his chest and looked skyward as if to say, “Look out Martha this is the big one! I’m coming home!”

He said, “Do you really like this?”

I said, “Not especially, I just want to see you flinch.”

About an hour later I finally found a chair that I really liked. It was a cream colored fabric with red and brown and black writing all over the chair, almost like old envelopes and cancelled postage stamps. It had a low back and sloping arm rests, the perfect size. I could see that Mitch wasn’t sold on it, so I decided that I would look around a bit more and found another chair that was also cream colored with dark brown butterflies stamped all over it and proclaimed this was the one. Given the choice of either butterflies or antique writing, he went with the antique writing. Butterflies was just way over the top for him, I think it would have given him nightmares.

When I suggested that we buy both, Mitch was convinced that the room wasn’t large enough for two chairs. Funny, if I was going to buy matching solid color chairs, there was enough for two, but two different chairs were way too big for the room. In order to not send him to the hospital with a coronary I found a round ottoman that I liked and bought it to go in the room with the chair. This way, I have one chair and the ottoman can be used another place to sit. Genius.

Poor Mitch, what he has to put up with.