Category: Marriage

Discussions about marriage in America.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood Marriage

Just SHOUT! it out…

Like most of the people I call friends, I have a touch of the Obsessive-Compulsive. I wouldn’t call my level of it a disorder, per se, but I’m definitely what people would call “anal” about things. Like cleaning. With two large dogs and two young boys, my house is definitely not spotless, but generally speaking, at any time during the week, random strangers, say…the Harlem Globetrotters, could drop by and I wouldn’t be too embarrassed.

Recently, one of my ageing dogs puked on the carpet before I could get her to the door. After sponging up as much of the bile (yummy!) as I could, I got out our handy-dandy SpotBot to clean up the rest. The SpotBot is this little vacuum thingy that you just sit on top of the spot after filling it with cleaning solution, press a button and Presto! It cleans it for you in about two minutes.

The only drawback to the SpotBot is that it’s very small. As you can see from the picture below, it cleans a very small area. In fact, this “clean” area you see before you is the result of having moved the SpotBot three times.

Now, you may be asking yourself, “Did you put bleach in the water? Cuz, you’ve got one bright white spot there.”

The answer is “Nope. No bleach. That area is just REALLY clean compared to the surrounding carpet.”  Now, I regularly use one of those home carpet cleaners, which I thought did a pretty good job, but I was apparently (dare I say, “horribly”) wrong.

Now, I have company coming in town this weekend, and a family get-together for my youngest son’s first birthday, and I have this un-ignorable bright white spot on my carpet that I will forever be explaining to people is NOT a bleached out spot and that apparently the rest of my carpet is just REALLY dirty! Not a conversation I want to have ad nauseum.

That leaves me three, no four options really.

  1. Employ the SpotBot roughly 300 times to clean the entire living room carpet
  2. Get on my hands and knees with carpet cleaner and a scrub brush and see what I can do manually
  3. Go rent a proper cleaner from the grocery store
  4. Call in the pros

Of the four choices, I don’t have time for three of them, and I don’t really want to spend money on the fourth. What to do, what to do?

You know, in the time it took me to write this, I could have moved the SpotBot twice already!

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Dad Blogs Family Marriage

Wouldn’t you like to get away…just for a day…

Ritz-Carlton Lodge CareerMom’s company gives out Pavlonian-style rewards for good work behavior. One can redeem these rewards (with a substantial markup) for all manner of things. Normally, we use them to replace whatever electronic necessity the boys have dropped in the toilet most recently, but this time, we used them to book a night at the Ritz-Carlton Resort in beautiful Greensboro, GA. Yes, folks, a Ritz-Carlton in the middle-of-nowhere Georgia.

It’s about a two-hour drive from Roswell, and so CareerMom’s folks came over to stay at our house to watch the boys. Mind you, they live about five miles away, but they find it easier to just stay at our house rather than put up with my youngest not sleeping because he hates the pack-n-play at their house.

Anyway, I didn’t realize the significance of this Ritz-Carlton’s location until we drove past nearly a mile of golf courses and were greeted by a cadre of knicker-clad bellmen. That’s when it hit me, “Oh yeah, this is where they played the 2007 PGA Cup and will host a future PGA Pro National Championship (will that be the FEDEX Cup now?).

With all this great golf nearby, do you think I got to play? Nossir—and here’s why. CareerMom likes her some spa treatments…yessir, that she does. And when you book a package deal, they won’t let one of you play golf while one of you gets a treatment. You both have to do the same thing. And since CareerMom doesn’t play, it means that for three mini-getaways now, I’ve gotten up-close and personal with massage therapists, while the closest I got to the golf course was tearfully viewing it from my room balcony.

Now I know…boo hoo me right? I HAD to go to the Ritz-Carlton, and I HAD to get a spa treatment. I know, it’s a bit petty but one of the few things I REALLY enjoy doing in my life, and I have the opportunity to do it in a place that most people only get to watch on TV…and I don’t get to do it. It IS frustrating.

Among the other notable things that happened while we were there, was getting the chance to watch two young, fairly attractive women at the pool. Let me set the stage; CareerMom and I meandered down to the pool, which overlooks the lake. We stayed there talking for a few and both turned around towards the pool so we could lean up against the fence. We both had our sunglasses on and CareerMom says, “Is that girl lying on top of another girl?” Being a man, I quickly glanced over and from what I could tell, there was one girl in a bathing suit lying facedown on a chaise lounger, with another bathing suit-clad young woman lying on top of her…also face down. Though I wanted to stare (and fantasize just a tiny bit), I tried not to look. CareerMom though, had no such qualms. “I can’t look away” she said, “It’s fascinating.” This from a woman who later that evening, as I paused to watch a “girls gone wild” commercial remarked, “Two women together, I just don’t get it.”

Really?

Anyway, we also made nuisances of ourselves later that evening at the off-site restaurant, where CareerMom ordered a filet, cooked medium, and it came back very rare. I ordered the Cajun pasta and halfway through, came across something that looked very much like a grub worm that I might pull out of my compost pile, but that the chef insisted was a crawfish tail. Either way, it ruined my appetite.

But the time flew by and we soon were back on the road. It’s amazing how much stuff you can cram into 24 hours. We left at 1 p.m. on Saturday and arrived home by 1:30 p.m. on Sunday. It was fun, but if I’m gonna drive two hours to stay at a Ritz-Carlton, I want to STAY at a Ritz-Carlton. This was just a mad-dash. For that, I could have stayed home and chased after the kids.

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Dad Blogs Family Life in these United States Marriage

Is Tithing Still Enforceable?

nontither.jpgFor various reasons, CareerMom and I don’t attend church as often as we’d like (or perhaps more truthfully, as often as we “should”). For one, most church services start around 10 a.m., which is also the time our youngest likes his first nap of the day. Another reason, and the one that is probably closer to the truth, is that we like to go to the gym in the morning and have the day to spend with the family, or to do whatever else we like. Although, on these days, we make sure and have Bible story time with the kids.

I was raised a Pentecostal and am therefore used to church services that last as long as two hours. CareerMom, having been brought up a Catholic, starts getting antsy at the 45-minute mark, a time when most Pentecostal pastors are just getting warmed up. What we’ve found though, is that by attending the early service at most churches, when the clock turns near “naptime,” the service is usually cut a bit shorter to accommodate the longer normal service that follows immediately after. All that being said, when we do go to church, we hope to get the most out of it.

This past Sunday, we got up, got the kids ready and off we went to church. After making it through the cry-fest that ensues upon dropping the boys off at their various rooms, we found our way towards the back of the sanctuary just in time to miss most of the music, which is probably our favorite part of whole shebang. C’est la vie!

As the special singers got up to sing and I prepared my “offering” envelope, CareerMom opened the church bulletin and pointed to the sermon title, “Whose Stuff is it Anyway.”

Now, if you’re not a church-goer, you won’t recognize that this title is actually code for, “Why you should give God 10%,” a title that strikes fear into non-regular church-goers everywhere. And it also prompted CareerMom to lean over and whispered, “I better not have to sit here and listen to a service on tithing.” Sure enough, when the pastor got up to preach, it became obvious that we would be treated to a guilt-fest of epic Biblical proportions Old Testament mandates on giving God his 10%.

Being a Pentecostal, I am naturally more forgiving of these little yearly requirement sermons; realizing that the Pastor probably hates giving them as much as we hate hearing them, and so when she said that, I just patted her hand and smiled. But interestingly, as the sermon went on, I found myself fascinated because though it was probably NOT the pastor’s intent, the sermon revealed to me that nowhere in the Bible, does Tithing appear as a commandment from God, or Jesus. It actually came out of law dating back to the days of the Israelites.

Now I understand that the church does many good things with tithes, but I also understand that tithes today differ greatly from tithes in the Biblical days:

  • Biblical Tithes included not only money, which is mostly what we ascribe tithes to, but also agriculture, land, whatever the person had to give (remember Cain?)
  • They weren’t supporting multi-million dollar church buildings, acres of land, HVAC costs in the tens of thousands and all the other overhead that goes into running a church corporation

So while Sunday’s service was NOT really what I had expected, or hoped for, it was also an eye opener. At this point in my life, after hearing literally thousands of sermons covering most every conceivable subject, I thought I’d heard it all—but I hadn’t. Like a lot of things I’d been taught growing up, I’m convinced that not giving Tithes will not see me burning in Hell for eternity.

So you know…I’ve got that going for me.

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Dad Blogs Family Marriage

Just keeping my big mouth shut

I work out in the gym about 4-5 times per week, going on nearly 15 years now. Since I’ve been in the gym for so many years, I’ve created an “as-of-yet” unpublished list of Gym Etiquette rules and whenever someone violates those rules, I get really annoyed.

Topping the Etiquette list are:

  • not using a towel (there’s few things worse than getting on a machine or bench and finding a wet, sponge-like spot of sweat on the bench where the previous person didn’t use a towel…ugh!)
  • standing right in front of the weight racks when you are exercising (hey, others are working out here too ya know!)
  • sitting around on a machine doing little more than people watching or reading the newspaper  (really folks, just stay home…)
  • talking on the cell phone (OMG! Get a life. Can’t you go 45 minutes without talking on the cell phone?)

My workout routine typically consists of 2-3 days of nothing but weight training, and then usually 1-2 days of half cardio/half weights. When my knees and back aren’t bothering me, I’ll jog for my cardio; otherwise I’ll use the elliptical. Regardless of what I’m doing, I always have my headphones on blasting my favorite tunes, but sometimes when you’re right next to someone being loud, you can still hear them.

The other day my knees were bothering me and I opted to use the elliptical machine rather than do my usual 2 mile jog before hitting the weights. I had been on it for about 10 minutes and I was in the zone. I mean, the music was pumping and I was tranced out staring at a spot on the wall across the gym. Peripherally, I could see people coming and going and part of me noted that someone got on the machine beside me, but I didn’t wanna ruin my buzz by looking, so I just ignored them.

About five minutes later, I noticed that I could hear this person talking on the cell phone. Trying to ignore them, I turned my music up and worked even harder. But like all annoying things, such as the theme song from The Wiggles, once you’ve noticed it, it’s in your head and you can’t ignore it. So, I turned my head to give the person next to me my most menacing stare, only to see that the person beside me was…drumroll please…CareerMom, my wife. Of course I didn’t say anything to her, opting rather to keep the peace and say, “Oh hi, didn’t realize you were there.”

I have since noted that she has a habit of talking on the cell phone while on the elliptical machine and while this still annoys the crap out of me, I just make it a point to avoid working out next to her. Needless to say, she has also NOT seen my Gym Etiquette guide, although I am tempted to print it out and just leave it lying about the house somewhere. But that would probably be mean…