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On our recent vacation to Whidbey Island, I found these little quiz books at the local “everything” shop.
And because I have a devilish sense of humor, I bought them. When Dave saw them he said, “Oh Great” and then he prepared himself for the worse.
These are the kind of questions I had to answer about him:
#2 Does he have his tonsils?
#9 What is his shoe size?
#42 How many times a day does he brush his teeth?
These are the kinds of questions he had to answer about me:
#5 What is her favorite color?
#11 How often does she shop for groceries?
#36 Has she ever used a power saw?
See, it starts off innocent enough, and I have to say both Dave and I were doing quite well on our respective quizzes.
#73 Which one of these CAN’T she do? A.) Touch her toes B.) Stand on her head C.) Jumpstart a car or D.) Rewire a lamp.
Uh, yeah, I can’t do any of those…
How about these:
#48 Does she know who Pythagoras was?
Whatever…
#14 Would he like to ride into space?
Totally, he would be there in a second. I, however, have to be drugged to ride in an airplane.
But then a few zingers found their way into the game, for example:
#26 Which one of your women friends does he find the most attractive?
Let’s just say I got that one right. Not because he admitted it, but because he turned bright red and opened a beer.
#89 Is there anything you (he) can do that SHE can’t?
No. I can even pee standing up, if required. Oh, wait, he can swim the butterfly. Take it from me, my butterfly is pretty darn ugly. I also cannot do calculus.
#43 What would she say about the idea of a strip club a mile from your home? A.) “Where do I sign to protest?” B.) “Makes no difference to me!” C.) “Great!” or D.) “Hmmm, Wonder if they are hiring?” Well, since the high school I used to work at is RIGHT NEXT to a strip club (I kid you not), I am gonna go with C. Okay, just kidding.
Of course, now when some creep out ther googles “strip club” my blog will come up. Lovely.
So, if you are bored this summer and looking to torture your husband, pick these little gems up. Or better yet, give them as wedding gifts. The groom will thank you, I am sure.
On Wednesday I attended the wettest soccer game ever anywhere since the world began.
One VERY wet soccer player!
I mean, we folk in Seattle are made of a hearty stuff when it comes to rain. Being wet is an enevitable part of our everyday lives. Everything around here is “Rain or Shine”…. Come to our outdoor sleepover, rain or shine…. We’re having a Luau, rain or shine…. You are invited to our wedding, rain or shine…. If we don’t include the caveat of “rain or shine” on everything we do, we would sit at home watching rain drops run down our window panes. Depressing.
But Wednesday’s soccer game took the warning “Rain or Shine” to a whole new level. Let’s just say NOAH would have been intimidated. When I realized that the raindrops actually hurt as they fell, I had Dave call the assistant coach of the soccer team and ask if, perchance, this game would be, well… rained out. Oh no, that doesn’t happen, he said. And so off I went with a carload of 6th grade girls and Ty, who insisted that he loved the rain.
Mud Puddles
What resulted was 90 of the wettest minutes of my life. And I was on swim team. The girls were soaked to the skin within 3 minutes — aka the walk from the car to the field. The parents had various rain protection devices with them — aka, boots, umbrellas, and a stoic attitude. Ty and I huddled under our newly purchases “sports-brella” which is a giant, oversized umbrella designed to sit on its side, like a cave. Ty said to me, “If we had to live in this sports-brella, that would be so sad!” Agreed. When Ty realized that staying dry was hopeless, he headed straight for the puddles. Well, I thought, at least I don’t have to go to a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.
The good news is that the players had a good time and that when we got home there were hot showers and chili dogs waiting for us. Processed meat never tasted so good.
Not long after I met Dave I learned something that was (and still is) more than a little disturbing. He LOVES spiders. If he spots a spider crawling along the floor or wall he says, “Hello friend,” then goes and gets a glass to rescue the spider by scooping it ever so gently up and releasing it back “into the wild” as he likes to say. I guess what he failed to understand was that part of the allure of having a boyfriend- then fiancee -then husband is that they are here to smash bugs and, yes, spiders, into oblivion so I do not have to reside with them….ever.
The only time he ever deviated from his rescue plan was when we found the largest, crunchiest, gnarliest looking spider crawling along our kitchen floor. I mean, this thing was TROPICAL it was so nasty. At the time we had this wonderful cat, Bree, who likened herself a huntress (and proved it on more than one occaision). As I stood atop the kitchen table, Dave — as usual — ever so gently put our largest drinking glass over the top of the spider, but then he said, “Here Kitty Kitty.” As Bree approached the caged spider, Dave lifted the glass and Bree had herself a nice tasty spider morsel for dinner that night. I can still hear the crunching. When I asked him why this type of death for his friend the spider was okay (as opposed to being squished by a shoe or waded up paper towel) he came back to his old standard. “Well, the spider died in the wild, eaten by its natural predator.” I guess he failed to consider that large jelly jar styled drinking glasses to not randomly descend on spiders in the wild.
Last Friday, however, the world was made right — tilted back into balance, if you will.
The temperature had reached 65 degrees here in the Seattle area and so we decided to dine al fresco for dinner. As we were wrapping up our meal Jade – age 14 – noticed the smallest little spider on the table, crawling right along the edge. She pushed back her chair and started to do that high pitch talking that only dogs can hear, “OOOH, a spider… ooh….ooh…” Well, I said, why don’t you smash it? “Nooooo….!!!” she screeches. Okay, I say, you have two choices. You can smash it or you can pull “a Dave” and rescue it and release it into the wild. “EEEEWWWW,” she says. “EWWWW!!!” She then curled herself into a ball and started to shiver.
“Oh” says Ty — age FIVE — ” I know the choice!!!! DESTROY IT!” He then leans over with his napkin, smashes it into bits and smiles at me.
Problem solved.
I can now rest easy at night.
But we all had to vow not to tell Dave.
So, as Dave and I are climbing into bed last night, I take the opportunity to tell him about a couple of back-to-back nightmares I had the night before. I am not prone to nightmares but these two were especially vivid as they both dealt with Ty being in mortal danger and me, the mommy, being fingertips away from saving him but not being able to. I normally don’t talk about stuff like that as I don’t believe in putting stuff like that out there. But last night I needed to shake the dreams by telling my husband. He listens and does the much needed nodding and cooing. Then he says, “Ugh, sometimes I have waking nightmares where I imagine something happening right before my eyes.” I nod… oh, we are being so supportive to each other right now. “Oh yeah, like when you’re walking down the stairs carrying Emme and you have this flash of yourself tumbling down while you’re holding her?!?!” We sorta sit there and nod. Sigh. I feel satisfied in our mutual comiseration of morbid thoughts. And then Dave says THIS:
“Well, we all know about the double slit experiment.”
What-huh-huh-huh-eh?
Well, no actually, I don’t, I inform him. Oh, he says, you are just baiting me, aren’t you? Correction, husband, you baited me with your weird science-teacher talk and now, I fear, I am in for some rudimentary lesson in physics that I know… know I can live without.
Well, the double slit experiment is pretty well-known, he says. Great. Now I am being insulted as well. Perhaps I am the only person in all of the world who has never heard of this COMMON, well-known, probably on Sesame Street experiment, but, please, continue. So, he tells me that if you take a piece of common cardboard and put two slits in it and shine a light through the two slits, one gets a pattern on the opposing wall that looks like stripes because (and this is where I have to take his word for it) two electrons are interacting with each other to create the pattern. But, oh and here it gets really really crazy, if one turns down the intensity of the light so that only ONE electron goes through the slit, you will still see the same pattern on the opposing wall. Even though, he says with a gleam in his eye, there is only one electron passing throught he slits. You can imagine my chagrin at never having heard of this amazing experiment.
But it gets better.
But if only one electron is passing through the slit, he ponders, where is the other electron? The one needed to interact with the original electron and therefore create the striped pattern? I hold my breath. Well, says Dave, we can’t prove it yet, but the most PLAUSIBLE (this word is very important so remember it… plausible) explanation is that the other electron is in an ALTERNATE UNIVERSE. Are you saying that in some alternate universe I actually fell down the steps with Emme???? NO, but there are zillions and billions of alternate universes. And guess who came up with this whole thing, he asks? I shout out perhaps the only famous scientist I know, certain of success: EINSTEIN!! No, Dave says….. it was GOD. And this is all coming from a man who refuses to watch LOST because it doesn’t make sense.
A moment of silence passes and then I say: Go get my computer! Oh good, he says, you’re going to Google this, aren’t you.
Nope. I am going to blog.
Tomorrow we are going to analyze a Shakespearean sonnet before bedtime and then discuss Dante’s 9 circles of hell… one of which I was on during the discussion of the double slit experiment. Stay tuned.
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