Sunday, January 17, 2021

Dishes

"Did you have company in here today?" Skylar was asking it sarcastically, and I knew that was the case, so I guess that's why I responded "just my handful of potential suitors who won't attack me in the comfort of my own home office."

The inquisitive ambush was prompted by the five empty glasses strewn across the desk where I was was working. Skylar was already in the process of reaching around me to gather them up before I even finished playfully threatening infidelity and divorce.

I don't know how it happens, really. I don't remember bringing them all into the room throughout the day. I feel like I only use one glass, shepherding it back and forth between the kitchen and my little office to retrieve water when I'm thirsty or bored. And yet, somehow half the cast of Beauty & The Beast is huddled around me by the time Skylar wanders into the house that evening, demanding to know why I've decided to be so wasteful. 

"Shall we go take a peek inside your car?" I sometimes challenge him whenever it seems like he needs a "he who is without sin among you/stone casting" lesson. Sure, maybe I gather and hoard dishes in corners of our home, but only Skylar brings them to his car.

It's the strangest habit, really. The kinds of household items he thinks are made for "on the go."

"Why?!" I yelled at him recently when he climbed into the driver's seat of his Subaru holding a glass filled to the very top with water and shifted into reverse?

"I'm thirsty," he said.

"We have water bottles!"

"We have water bottles," my busboy husband muttered as he shuffled out of the office coddling my various dishes.

He uses the same arguments against me inside the house as I use against him in his vehicle. But this is really a false equivalence. It might not make sense to gather cups and things and move them into the car or office and fail to notice the problem until they've developed a critical mass. But at least I don't fill the same to the brim and then spill the sloshing liquid to and fro while navigating lane changes on the interstate. 

He does this inside as well. 

"I made you tea," he told me recently. "It's in the kitchen."

It was nice of him, or so I thought, until I saw the large ceramic mug full of water the temperature of Satan's armpit sweat somehow defying all the laws of physics by bowing out of the top of the cup without spilling. 

"How am I supposed to carry that anywhere? A slight breeze right now would flood the kitchen!"

Skylar told me to just lean down and sip it until it was safe to transport. "That's what I do."

"No, Sky. That's not what you do. You leave it to cool and then forget about it until there's a full graveyard of forgotten teas spread throughout our home."

I'm convinced he's never actually tried tea and he wouldn't really like it if he did. He never seems to drink it. He just makes it and forgets about it. 

"Oh shoot!" he'll yell when he comes across a thermos of a chamomile he had prepared nine hours earlier and then abandoned on the kitchen counter. "Oh well." 

Then he pours it down the drain and places the dish in the dishwasher alongside two dozen glasses he had recently retrieved from the office.


Now, please enjoy some Strangerville:


This time in Strangerville, it’s our fifth birthday! Eli tries to convince a skeptical Meg that we are in for more peaceful times. And a woman deserves the Purple Heart for surviving what must be the worst dates that have ever happened.

Story

Four Dating Rules, by The Suzzzz

Production by Eli McCann & Meg Walter


~It Just Gets Stranger

10 comments:

  1. My sons use mugs and not glasses for water. They will each pick one and use the exact same one for several days in row until I decide it needs a wash and stick them in the dishwasher. My daughter seems to use a new glass every hour on the hour except I have never seen her actually drink a glass of water--glasses just appear all over the counter every day. It's madness. My daughter-in-law leaves half filled glasses of water behind as a sign that she has visited us and I find it highly amusing--if I am out (well, back in the days when we went out) when she visits, I would know by the glass that she had been here.

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    1. I do this at my in-laws. I don’t mean to leave the glass behind, but we leave and I sometimes don’t remember to put my cup away.

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  2. My husband's persistent hobby is to always leave one inch of water in the bottom of every glass he uses.

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  3. I have 2 teenagers, a husband and a 7 year old. The teenagers and husband hoard dirty dishes in the bedrooms. Surprisingly, the youngest is the most responsible. Not too long ago, I bought matching dishes and drinking cups. Cheapish cups, the cafeteria style drinking cups, I bought 16 of them. I now have 4! No clue what happened to the other 12. So now, I save my jars, clean the label off and that is what they drink out of now. I'm out nothing if they don't make it back to the kitchen because I was going to recycle them in the first place.

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  4. I'm forever buying spoons because my son loses them . . . in the house . . . or else he throws them out with his food. He throws out bowls too. I'll go to the trash can to throw something away and find a bowl with noodles in it. He also does the fill-to-the-bring thing with chocolate milk and then is shocked when it spills on the counter and floor. Not shocked enough to clean it up though. Currently, I'm missing a plate (and it's a Mickey Mouse plate so I'm none too happy about it) and about 6 spoons.

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  5. Also - was it "Blue Day" at that restaurant in the picture? Ya'll are wearing almost the exact shades of blue that the people at the other table are wearing. I never say ya'll.

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    1. Clearly that establishment has a very specific dress code. More importantly, Eli named that image file glasses.jpeg and honestly, I feel like the name has more to do with the glasses on his face (a prominent focal point in the image composition) than the drinking glasses on the table.

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  6. My new thing this week seems to be leaving almost-empty-but-not-quite cans on the desk of my home office at my parents’ house, where my cat and I have been since July (good thing too — now we’re in warm Arizona and not freezing in lockdown in DC). I don’t know how these cans never quite get finished or why I choose to move one to make room for the next one instead of throwing the old ones away since I’m clearly not going to drink the last little bit.

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  7. Ok I haven’t read your post but I am listening to the podcast and have a RECOMMENDATION! Check out Weather Underground!!! 100000% better than the standard iPhone weather app, it’s actually accurate and I check it a billion times a day. You can even select “activities” you like and what weather you like to do them in and it will give you a personalized forecast for when you should hike/cycle/walk in the next day. I love it. It is free but I pay for it because I use it so much!

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    1. That last sentence sounds weird. I meant I pay so there are no ads and I think the personalized forecast might be a paid feature. Haha!

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