Happy wife happy life I told him again today. I asked him to get me six packs of tasty bites kashmir spinach.  I even described it.  Spinach with little cottage cheese cubes.  Plus one pack of the lentils that we sampled at Costco.  He came back with spinach and potato shit and three packs of some other garbage.  He never gets it right.  Then he argues about it. He argued LOUDLY in the street, at the street fair about why, with the very limited time we had to shop in Taxco, Mexico, why it was ok for him to shop for his sister’s and mother’s souvenirs.  He felt that he wanted to get that chore out of the way, first and quickly.  And then use the remaining time, to shop for me.  And there was nothing wrong with that.  I see it this way.  In all the time we have been married, his mother and sister had taken far more vacations than us and never brought us back souvenirs–never, ever.  (they define tightwad) I was an aspiring jewelry designer / metal smith.  I had planned this very short side trip, special, just for me to see this silver jewelry town.  We weren’t scheduled to go.  But instead of taking a bus directly to Acapulco from Oaxaca, I took this bus that had a transfer in Taxco.  It was less than an hour.  I didn’t feel it was at all necessary to buy his mother or his sister a gift from this town at all.  I didn’t think we owed them any gifts, but if absolutely necessary, get it in Mexico City or Acapulco or the land of handicraftts–Oaxaca.  This same thing happened before we were married at Disney World and on our honeymoon in Hawaii, but that’s another story for another day.

We have a young teenager, still growing and very skinny.  I asked the dumb asshole to make skinny boy a roast beef sandwich to take to school.  I walk in to see a very sad, weak looking sandwich and he’s putting back the package of roast beef.  Why is there so little meat on his sandwich?  I ask  Because there is too much for one sandwich so I split it in half, so that you can make another sandwich tomorrow.  OK, so skinny boy gets to starve after lunch for two days, instead of having a nice over stuffed sandwich today and something else tomorrow, you get my point.  This is always his way of thinking.  He  comes back from the grocery store with enough meat to feed three out of the five of us.  Why?  That is the amount that will fit on the broiler pan.  My argument that I can cook twice in a row never flies.  Why don’t I just shop for the meat? you ask.  He withholds money from me.  That’s another story for another day.

If certain food is on sale he buys and buys.  Not a big deal, except that we have so little space in our ONE bedroom NYC apartment that we are raising 3 teen age boys in.  We would have enough space, except for his collection of garbage including boxes and boxes and boxes of magazines from the 80’s and 90’s and other such garbage but that’s another story for another day.  I tell him not to buy so much spaghetti, as spaghetti is cheap anyway, so he’s only saving maybe $.25 cents a box and we have no place to put it.  Also, the grocery store puts spaghetti on sale every week or two.  He doesn’t put food away, as he has no problem with mess, stuff just being out on the table, counters, floor.  He once asked me what my obsession is about with not having stuff on the floor. He comes home from the store and puts the bags of groceries, well just where ever.  So this morning I start cleaning up the kitchen, and there’s a bag of  six boxes of spaghetti, soaked wet.  Someone put a glass of water on the table, but since there is no room on the table because it is full of bags of unpacked groceries and his dishes that he doesn’t put in the sink, it fell over and soaked the bag.  The wet boxes of sale spaghetti had to be thrown out, so much for the sale, such is our life.  He just doesn’t get it.