I thought of this while I was making a comment in a thread asking about those button stapler gizmos.
In that thread, I fessed up to my Naval laziness when I used duct tape to hem up my dungaree uniform pants, figuring that it was better than my buddy who used staples.
Surely anyone who knows how to handle a needle and thread is shuddering at this very thought. I know my wife laughed when I told her. If I asked her for a list of stupid things I do, I’m certain it would be lengthy.
On the flip side, I noticed that in the room I am in, there is a phone extension cord stretched taught from the nightstand, tightly around the legs of the bed and some other furniture, plugged in the jack on the other side of the room. You can’t move the phone a quarter of an inch. She does stuff like that all the time – it works, and nobody sees it, but it drives me nuts. I would probably be too lazy to run a proper wire inside the wall, but at least I would get a longer wire and staple it to the baseboard.
Don’t even get me started on how my sister-in-law patched up a fist-sized hole in her bathroom wall by filling it with wadded newspaper and finished the job using paper mâché, painting directly on top of that. It has an odd rippled look, but she’s quite fine with that.
His: Whichever car he is driving he must do so with the gas tank firmly on E…I can’t count the number of times he’s run out of gas AND left one of the 5 gas cans we own sitting in the back yard. But if I get below 1/4 tank he goes ballistic!!! And yes, I have reminded him many times to put a *frakking gas can in the trunk!!! *
Mine: Unplugging and turning off every electronic gadget in the house at night before bed. I turn off all the power strips, unplug the phone chargers, lamps, coffee maker, etc. I’d unplug the clocks and the fridge if I could get away with it. Drives him crazy.
Another one I do that he thinks is silly is that I must hide all cords. Lamp cords, TV and phone cords…I find all sorts of ways to disguise them because I cannot. stand. cords. I want a wireless world!!
Mine’s different :I don’t give a rat’s patootie about name brand foods. My Hubby, OTOH, must nosh on Miracle Whip, sure-nuff Hostess Cup cakes, etc. To me it’s just food. I can get away with cost-cutter brand flour, cornmeal mix etc. because it’s all made into the final product. His dog is fed Purina … my dogs eat Kroger brand; and you can’t tell the difference in their health. Oh well.
This issue is just about the only source of friction in our marriage.
I’m not talking cheap with money or being thrifty, but cheap with energy, time, resources, etc.
He wants projects and activities planned precisely and implemented with meticulous attention to detail.
I want things done.
Some current examples:
Our bedroom closet. He wants vented oak shelves, gliding drawers, crown molding. I want a f***ing closet. 4 months – my clothes still hang on the back of the door in the guest bedroom while our closet plan on paper is nearly complete.
Date night. A simple matter of dinner and a play turns into a circus ride due to his anal compulsion to time activities down to seconds. We are regularly late or running to events he scheduled with the precision of a German watchmaker when a little less thought and planning would have resulted in a leisurely, more enjoyable evening. In his own defense he’ll say, “But look at how much more we did this way!”
Vacation. Same as above, except now that we have children I refuse to let him micro-manage us into a screaming, whipped-up, snot-nosed frenzy. He gets to design the schedule down to nothing more specific than “morning - afternoon - evening” and we let the fun seep in through the gaping holes in his agenda.
Once soap is a sliver, it gets throw away. My husband tried to make me use it, he tried to make soap melds. He learned that just gets old and new thrown out. I have never been poor enough to use a soap sliver that looks like it could cut me, and I have been poor enough to go hungry and use newspaper as toilet paper.
Also, I make him rinse the dishes. His family feels this is a waste of water and time. After a few soap free meals he came around and realizes my way is the right way.
One thing he still tries is to use dishrags until they ferment and to wipe the table with the dishrag. It stinks. If a dishrag stinks, I throw it out. I let him use a dishrag for one day, and if I catch it at the sink longer than that, if it doesn’t smell, it gets thrown into the laundry pile or thrown out, usually out. Also, on the rare occassions which I do dishes, I use a fresh rag each time.
I occasionally impress upon my wife the need to provide the right amount of time for joint compound to fully cure prior to sanding and painting of walls. 3-5 years is a good start.
If my wife didn’t already have an account here, I’d swear you were her. I get very anal and antsy about planning our vacation schedules, and it’s led to some unhappy discussions. I tend to want to squeeze everything possible into a trip, particularly if it’s somewhere we’ve never been before. The minute I find out where we’re going, I’m on the internet trying to schedule every last detail. She is almost completely opposite and wants to be as spontaneous as possible when traveling.
I’ve tried to back off a little because I know I drive her insane, but I haven’t been very successful. sigh
When wife and I stay late in NYC for the night and travel home, I always get out at the subway station near the taxi stand, where she is willing for the bus. I figure the 20-30 (or more - late at night, the Q37 runs on the schedule whenever the driver feels like it) minutes I save is more than worth the ~$10.
Another spontaneous gal with a microplanner vacationer husband here. We compromise. We go on separate vacations. Works like a charm. Okay, not really. Or at least, not all the time. But we do split the time - he’s allowed to plan no more than three activities in one day for two-thirds of the days we’re going to be there (wherever “there” is), and the rest is follow-our-noses time. I find I can put up with a lot more organized church tours and bus schedules if I know that I’ll also get time to laze around the pub with a pint chatting up the locals and maybe wander through an obliging park we happen to stumble upon. Likewise, he can take a lot more “wandering” if he knows we will get to go hike two miles through cowshit and barbed wire to look at the ancient rock marking the middle of Ireland (which, by the way, looks nothing like a cat, name notwithstanding).
Cheapskate shortcuts: I’m fine with pretty much any store brand food item, with a few exception, where he’s a label hound. He even insists on Tyson brand boneless skinless chicken breasts, because the Aldi ones are “too big and meaty”. :rolleyes: Little does he know that I still buy the Aldi ones for cut-up dishes, and save the expensive tiny ones for whole service.
He’s utterly incapable of throwing anything away, so we have all sorts of mismatched, not-quite perfect for the job things filling purposes far greater than their intent. His old poster frames from college, for example, cracked and yellowing which he thinks are “just fine” to hold our not-concert-poster artwork. Or the fugly pressboard closet shelves that don’t exactly fit on top of the filing cabinet, so they’re propped on one end with a few old books. I’d rather get rid of the old junk and find something more ideal for our current needs.
He also saves every bit of paper that comes into his life. Yesterday I cleaned out one of the file drawers, and found things like a blank (not-filled-out) application for Perkin’s loans for the school year 1993-1994. He thinks it’s easier to just save everything and file nothing, under the assumption that we probably won’t need it, but “you never know”. I’d much rather put the time in to sort and organize what’s really needed when we get it, rather than digging through 10 years of Taco Bell receipts to find a copy of my kid’s birth certificate. (On a related note, I now find that the huge ugly-ass metal 4 drawer file cabinet he has sitting in my dining room, instead of the modest and much cuter wooden 2-drawer one I wanted to get (which would have matched my dining room furniture), is not really necessary. Once I shred the crap we don’t really need, there’s only 2 drawers worth of stuff we need to save!)
My dog rolls her toy under our bed. I asked mr.stretch to build something to prevent this. After several months of his not building it, I did it myself this past weekend.
Had mr.stretch built it, the wood would all be the same thickness and height, and he would have built the “box” out of three pieces of wood–one for each side and one for the foot of the bed (the head of the bed is against a wall).
I am way too lazy to get out the saw for this project. So I made the box out of three pieces of wood for one side, two of which were 1/2" plywood and one of which was 1" cedar. I connected that wood using old strapping and various screws. I then used three more pieces of 1" cedar to make the part for the foot of the bed–overlapping them as necessary to make entire thing the right length. I had one piece of nice hemlock that I’d been saving for something and I used it on my side of the bed. I connected these three things together using some old L brackets I found in the garage.
Mr.stretch did not notice that Loki wasn’t rolling her toy under the bed. I brought my project to his attention…now I think he is quietly going mad.
On the other hand, I put things away. Things have a place and if they get put there every time, they can be found every time. Mr.stretch does not share my habit of putting things away. He is always losing his stuff. That would be okay, but he loses our stuff, including things I might want to use. This is something he is working on, though.
One thing that I have inherited from my boyfriend is this: I used to buy tissues and always have a box in the bathroom. My boyfriend always just used toilet paper. So after about a year of living together, I have adopted his cheapskate ways, and now we just use TP for everything, no tissues.
Her: Why do you always buy such cheap jeans? They rip after a few months, and you look like a bum.
Me: Honey, they’ll have grease stains on them within two weeks. I’m not smart enough to change out of nice pants before I do something that’s going to ruin them, but If I only paid $11 for the pants I’m wearing then I won’t care. And if I were worried about looking like a bum, I’d probably shave and cut my hair more often.
When we started to plan for a 14 day stay at Disney World I saw all the signs: Countless hours logged on ears.com, guidebooks arriving in the mail, maps…oh, the maps, maps, maps, maps. So I quickly worked up a roadblock in the form of a compromise. I made an agenda grid in Word with time blocked off into the aforementioned Morning-Afternoon-Evening and inserted a few hyperlinks here and there to things I wanted to do. He sobbed (sobbed!) in appreciation. We shared the document over the next few months, grew it and rearranged stuff. I had to delete all his entries for individual rides, complete with estimated line-times he’d figured by averaging the times posted by riders on ears.com. By time we were ready to go we had a complete, interactive, color-coded agenda (with art) we both could live with. We carried paper copies in the parks with us and consulted the document on laptop in the hotel room before bed each night.
Sigh And they said a marriage between a flighty artist and an anal IT geek could never work.
Clothes, mostly. The majority of my wardrobe is stuff that I’ve had for 8-10 years. I like to wear things until they are literally coming apart at the seams. I’m still roughly the same size I was in high school, and it’s not like khaki pants and polo shirts really go out of style (though I did need to replace all my jeans when the '90s baggy look went out, and I’m sure my extensive collection of plaid button-up shirts dates me a bit ).
My wife buys new clothes a lot more regularly, and her standard for “wearable/not worn out” is a lot higher than mine, I guess.
Oh, clothes. I own two pair of jeans for work and two pairs for weekends around the house. I own two pairs of sweats for weekends and after work. I own appoximately 30 t-shirts that I wear to work, and then another bunch for non-work. Some shorts and cotton tanks tops for summer. A few sports bras, some white cotton undies. That’s it.
Mr.stretch still has all of his work clothes, plus his casual clothes, plus his extensive collection of Patagonia for hiking. He has more kinds of socks than you can shake a stick at, and since I hate socks, I borrow his when I need some.
He has 7 coats to my one. He has 3 pairs of boots, multiple pairs of sneakers, and other casual shoes. I have work Birks, garage Birks, my winter slip-on mocs, and my interview Keds.
We’re very different on the clothes side of things.
