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What
happened after the move
by Peary Perry | |
Anyone
who has been married for any length of time can identify with what I am about
to say.
Aside from the physical aspects, there is a distinct difference
between the way men think and the way women think. Trust me on this one.
As
you know, if you have been reading this for some time, we just moved into another
house. I won’t bore you with a repeat of the dangers associated with making the
actual move. This week I’d like to cover a few things that have happened after
the move.
The first is that women seem to think about a garbage disposal
the same way as a man thinks about a chipper/shredder. The one in the house we
moved into was the ever popular ‘weasel’ model and is about 1/3 horsepower. Barely
enough to chew up wet paper towels. My loving wife is used to the giant industrial
commercial grade one I had installed in our previous house. This was the 5 horsepower
(Turbo-Destructor Model 9500) with the rope pull start cord which could be used
in case of emergency. You could grind up a stump or angle iron if you needed to
do so. I think you had to have some sort of national security clearance just to
own one.
Anyway, we hadn’t been in the new place more than a week and
my bride forgot about the disposal and dropped something like a banana peel or
a potato peel down and of course, it backed up. Naturally this always happens
on either late Friday evening or on the weekend, when the repair guys are on quadruple
overtime with mileage and bonus incentives. Fortunately for us, our youngest son
is living with us until he gets married in a couple of months and he installed
the new ‘Super Beaver- 1000’ model. We couldn’t get one of the old ones since
they are no longer on the market after 9/11. I hope the people who bought our
old house are not any sort of national security risk. But, now we are back on
track and life is good once more in our happy home.
That is except for
a couple of things. First off, women think nothing of moving furniture just for
the shear pleasure of it. Men tend to leave things in place. My wife will actually
move a couch from one wall to another for some unknown reason to me. I have never
in all of my years actually considered moving all of the bedroom furniture from
one place to another …. ‘Just to see how it looks’. I know how it looks, it looks
fine. Leave it alone. You don’t see men moving duck and deer blinds from one place
to another. Nope, they leave them in the same places, year after year. There’s
a good reason for that…ask any hunter and he’ll tell you….
Second thing
concerns hanging pictures. If men hang pictures, they tend to keep it simple,
bang a nail into the wall and put the picture on the nail. Not so with women.
They will actually ‘arrange’ pictures. They will do all sorts of measurements
and then put five or six pictures on the same wall and keep them all even and
level. Men cannot do this even with one of those new laser levels. Men are used
to dealing with abstract concepts and shapes such as the skins from some prehistoric
beast or a deer or buffalo skin. Women can handle squares and rectangles such
as we see on picture frames. Men do not have this ability since in nature there
are no straight lines. Another point I’d like to make, if a man hangs a picture
on a wall, it stays hung there until he moves to another house or he dies, whichever
comes first. My wife will actually move pictures around from place to place (see
earlier comments about furniture). She doesn’t have any credible explanation for
this kind of behavior and after you have been married as long as I have then you
know better than to ask why she is doing what she is doing. If your wife engages
in this kind of activity and asks you if you think the pictures look nice, I suggest
you agree with her.
One final thought for you young men about to married
for the first time, do not under any circumstances suggest something along the
lines of… “Honey I think that picture would look good on that wall”. If you do
this, do so at your own risk since she will assume you like to move furniture
and you enjoy doing it. You will thank me for this advice many years from now.
© Peary Perry
Comments go to pperry@austin.rr.com
Letters From North America
- April 12, 2009 column
Syndicated weekly in 80 newspapers
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