cher3–Thank You!!! I cannot tell you how many times I have tried to explain to my husband why his decorating idea (clothing choice, color combination, etc.) was “trashy” but to no avail. I guess I should just tell him that it is a woman thing. I think women have a better grasp of how an inanimate object can look trashy than men.
Born O.K. the first time…
If you are born again, do you have two belly-buttons?
Boy, I must be an insensitive lout. I think this stuff has been building up. Last Sunday I washed and waxed my car. We have half a dozen old,old,old towels nobody has used in years. I used them. She came home from work and (I swear) in no less than 2 minutes she discovered the towels were missing. How is this possible? Does she search the house top to bottom every time she returns to see what kind of trouble I’ve gotten into?
Stop Continental Drift
You could have emroidered the names on the items.
::slowly shaking head::
Somebody ain’t gonna get laid for a while.
k2dave said:
DON’T OFFER SOLUTIONS - THIS IS NOT WHAT SHE WANTS OR NEEDS
May I nominate this as The Most Important Thing To Know About Women (TMITTKAW) ?
This took me over 10 women and over 8 years to figure out. And I still keep forgetting it sometimes 
Hell, it’s the way a man thinks. Girlfriend tells about problem, Coldfire presents solution. Girlfriend starts sobbing and saying that Coldfire doesn’t listen to her. Coldfire is bewildered, and says that he DID listen, how could he have had the Perfect Solution otherwise ? Girlfriend really starts crying now, saying (another classic !) that Coldfire just doesn’t want to understand.
Coldfire
“You know how complex women are”
You diduse a laundry marker pen whose ink won’t run in the wash. *Didn’t you?{/i]
If you did the laundry once in a while, you’d know this 
Personally, I think this marriage is headed for a messy divorce.
A seminar on time travel will be held two weeks ago.
Coldfire
“You know how complex women are”
CF, you owe me a monitor AND a keyboard!
A seminar on time travel will be held two weeks ago.
Simple solution.
Sell the kid.
Voila. Problem solved.
He weathered a firestorm of agony and did not break.
And while Yori raged against his unbending
courage, we took Kyuden Hiruma back.
His loss is great, but so is the gift his suffering brought.
-Yakamo’s Funeral
First off, I’ve been doing laundry since I could reach the machine, and I’ve never heard of a laundry marker.
In defense of tenspeedjohn, I have to say that his writing on those blankets would not have bothered me. If I were worried about them running in the wash, I would have thrown them away and handled it differently, if needed, without getting mad. I likely would have just let him know for future reference what a better solution MIGHT have been.
Why? Because I’m the best wife on earth? No. Because there is NO QUICKER WAY ON EARTH to make a man stop helping then by bitching and complaining. There is nothing wrong with letting him know if something needs correcting, but you can’t make a big deal out of everything.
If this keeps up, pretty soon tenspeedjohn will be walking on eggshells, afraid to take action with the kid, afraid to wax the car, etc.
Also, maybe this was an exaggeration, but the first time I “bellowed” anything at my husband (or vice-versa) would probobly be the last. That ought to be in BOTH owners manuals
Zette
Love is like popsicles…you get too much you get too high.
Not enough and you’re gonna die…
Click here for some GOOD news for a change Zettecity
Hmmm… it appears that I’m in the process of getting a wife, as well. SO is moving in with me, and so far, I have to:
“put away” the little box of extra paint that came with my house and has worked very well as a doorstop for 2 years. Seems that it looks “messy” and is “dangerous.”
We have to now vacuum at least once a week, because otherwise the dust accumulates and he can’t breath.
I can no longer leave my shoes in convenient places, like by the front door. They must be put away in the closet.
My placemats on my table (cork, with a hard plastic top that’s easily wiped off) are “messy looking” and “get all out of place.” We must purchase nice tapestry ones that are also, by the way, a big hassle to clean.
Toilet paper can no longer be stored in the bathroom, because it doesn’t look good. It must be stored in the closet. Nevermind that the closet is outside the bathroom, and whenever I REALLY need toilet paper, I’m not in a good position to leave the bathroom and go get it.
‘Taint all women, you guys. There’s plenty o’ guys who have the same strange phobias that you like to attribute to us buns.
Tenspeed,
I’m with you. I realize that I’m in the minority here. But you have to identify your kids stuff for daycare/school or it’s gonna get lost on the quagmire of lost and found. In ten years, unless you are going to have 10 kids, it’s not going to make a difference and she would have made about 50 cents at a garage sale selling it. ( BTW, you probably make more mula and it’s easier over all, by donating your stuff to charity for a tax write off.)
Tomndebbs’ solution is possibly the best solution for a situation.
Ask yourself this: What your spouse does not know, will it kill you when he/she finds out? Worse case scenario, you sleep in a bed until the cold front passes.
Unless, of course, you wrote across the entire sheet in letters large enough to read from the space shuttle. Then, naturally, you dug your own hole. ( When your darling little tax deduction pukes all over the sheet after eating something like grape juice or blueberries, this entire discussion is a moot point.)
An alternate to this entire unpleasant marital scene is to buy some of those “This belongs to…” iron name tag things. Since neither will want to iron them on and you can argue how they never stay on in the first place, thus going back to the original laundry marker or permanent marker.
RE: The old towel scenario. Been there/done that.
Not a month after our marriage, I started finding our brand new towels in the garage. He helped open our shower gifts and helped pick out these towels, so why/how they made it into the garage for oil changes and assorted work that involved tar, cement, goo and yuck really stumped me. He pleaded not knowing just how the towel (in his hand) came on its own from the second floor to the garage.
Instead of standing on my ear and asking the moon to sing a song, I took all the good towels and moved them to a safe house in our basement. ( They are living comfortably now that their terror is over.) From my years of being a klepto and traveling, I brought out all the hotel towels I’ve swiped and that is now what we’ve used for all these years. If they get ruined, I don’t care. (They also wear so much better.)
The good towels, like Queen Elizabeth II, are brought out only for state occasions.
Also, to keep the damage down on the stains that will never go away, I bought at a garage sale a box of towels for $2.00 and put it in the garage and marked all over it " IF YOU USE THESE TOWELS TO CLEAN THINGS OUTDOORS & THE IN GARAGE YOU JUST MIGHT GET LAID BY A VERY HAPPY WIFE INSTEAD OF A CRANKY ONE."
His reaction is, " Hey, I’m getting laid…whoo hooo."
Haven’t had a problem since.
TenSpeed, listen up 'cause the Chef will now lay the wisdom of the ages on you.
A) in this instance, any logical person would agree that you are right and she is wrong.
B) (here’s the wisdom part) In any family argument, if you discover that you are right – APOLOGIZE AT ONCE. Anyone who “wins” a family argument has in fact lost it.
Live a Lush Life
Da Chef
and fix the damn stucco!
Jesus saves… Gretzky grabs the rebound… He Scores!
All this talk about holding out on sex sure makes me glad my wife’s a nympho and couldn’t hold out if she wanted to.
Enright3
aka “The luckiest man in the world”
Would you just fix the stucco.
As Red Green says “If the women don’t find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.”
Besides a little Duct Tape would fix that right up.
All right, already. I’m going to fix the stucco. And I think carborator cleaner will remove the magic marker. But I will not read any John Grey books!! Ignorance is bliss.
“On two occasions I have been asked by members of Parliament, `Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” – Charles Babbage
Now that’s a Man!
BTW, you are so dead…
Jesus saves… Gretzky grabs the rebound… He Scores!