Reader Submission: Debbie

Posted on January 4, 2012 | 16 Comments

Hi! I just wanted to say that I found your blog after searching for “everything my husband does annoys me” and it was exactly what I needed! So nice to hear that I am not alone. I wanted to share some tidbits of my own to get them off my chest and hopefully I will feel better! :) We just celebrated our 7 year anniversary and I feel the annoyances getting worse and worse…

1) No matter how many times I ask hubby nicely, “when you see that the trash can is full, can you take it out and put in a new plastic bag?” he will not. He will continue to throw garbage after garbage into the kitchen trash can until the lid will no longer close. He will ONLY take the trash outside if I myself, remove the bag, tie it up, place it outside on our front patio, and ask him repeatedly to throw it into the outside container. He will only comply if he is already on his way out to do something else. Heaven forbid he go outside JUST to take the trash out!

2) Along the same vein, the man does not understand the concept of recycling. I’ve told him over and over, not to throw dirty paper towels and napkins into the recycling. Seriously 5 seconds after the words come out of my mouth, I’ll see him wipe his dirty mouth/hands with a napkin, ball it up, and toss it in the recycling container.

3) If i see another random beer bottle cap on the counter I’ll scream…

4) The ‘ol “I’m going to lie down for 10 minutes” on the weekends that turns into a 2 hour nap (when I was the one who woke up early with the kids and let him sleep in). Meanwhile I’m struggling to entertain our 1 and 4 year old boys AND cook dinner.  Even better when he doesn’t even tell me he’s going to lie down and mysteriously disappears in the house to take a nap as if I’m not going to notice.

5) When he washes the dishes, he will not remove the existing dry dishes from the rack. Instead, he will pile new wet dishes as high as the eye can see until they are practically reaching the ceiling. Glasses are teetering and balancing on top of pots, pots on top of our kid’s dishes, etc. What is it with men and their inability to put things away??

6) He is very neat and clean when it comes to HIS things. He will step over toys and dirty laundry, yet his office desk is in impeccable order and he will chastise me if I forget to rinse out the coffee pot (he loves his morning coffee). Nevermind the 20 other dirty dishes in the sink, his coffee pot must be rinsed/washed out immediately!

7) He just loves to buy cheap crap. Just because something is $1, he’ll buy it because it’s “cheap”. Then it goes unused and ultimately thrown away. If we’re at Ikea, he’ll insist on buying $1 salad tongs. One time he bought 3 sets of them because they were cheap! Um… he doesn’t eat salad and they were never used. Our bookcase is filled with un-read books that he keeps buying from Amazon for inspiration (he’s a web designer). in 8 years together, I have never seen him finish a book from cover to end, yet he keeps buying more and more books. In his free time he’s either lying down or watching movies yet he will complain to me later that he has no free time to read his books :|

Ok I could probably go on but I think I’ll stop :) On the other end of the spectrum, he puts up with my nagging and constant reminders and never gets annoyed with me (on the outside at least!)

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“Just Let Them Soak”

Posted on September 28, 2011 | 35 Comments


My husband and I have an ongoing battle when it comes to the dishes. We do have a dishwasher but I never had one growing up. The first time I ever had one was when I bought my place several years ago and since I didn’t know how to work it, I would wash my dishes in the sink then use the dishwasher as a drying rack. Because of this, my husband thinks that I’m terrible at loading the dishwasher (he’s right) and so he wants to be in charge of the dishes…which would be totally fine, if he actually did it.

See, here’s the vicious cycle that happens all the time: (1) the dishwasher gets run but it never gets emptied; (2) because of this, all current dirty dishes simply get piled into the sink; (3) the pile keeps growing until it’s so tall and precariously stacked, something is sure to fall and break until (4) I get fed up, empty the dishwasher of the clean dishes then load it with the dirty dishes and then (5) my husband complains about the awful way I’ve loaded the dishwasher.

The other thing my husband loves to do, especially with things that either don’t fit in the dishwasher or are supposed to be washed by hand, is soak dirty dishes. The grill we made chicken on? Soak it. The gigantic pasta pot? Soak it. Wine glasses? Soak ‘em. The problem is that he’ll leave things to soak and then they’ll just sit there. For days and days on end. Then other things, like utensils and small plates get put into the pot of soaking water (which has at that point turned cold and is no longer soapy) only to end up greasy or covered in tomato sauce. So not only do the original dishes never get cleaned but then the other ones end up dirtier than when we first used them.

My husband’s idea of being “in charge of the dishes” is to pretty much ignore them until we no longer have room in the sink to stack any more dishes and we’re eating off of paper plates with our hands. We’re gonna need a bigger sink.

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Ten Years

Posted on September 11, 2011 | 12 Comments

Hard to believe that 10 years have passed since that awful day. 10 years ago today, I was still unpacking from my move back to NYC, my hometown, the city that I have always loved above all others even though I was away from it for over 10 years. I had moved back on September 8th and started my new job at a TV station on September 10th. I was going through a divorce that I thought would surely break me. When my husband at the time told me he no longer wanted to be married a couple months shy of our 2 year anniversary, I felt as if my world were falling apart.

We were living in Boston at the time, a place we moved to when he got a job there. I left an enviable job at ESPN so he could take the opportunity he wanted. And there I was in this city that I didn’t particularly like, knowing nobody, feeling adrift and hanging on to my marriage for dear life since it was the only thing I had that was familiar. Less than a year later, he made his grand declaration and I watched my future walk out the door. Immediately I knew that I had to go back home. I knew that if I were going to survive this experience, I had to be with my family, in my city. I grew up in NYC and those streets, the subway, the sounds, the smells…all of it was home to me. All of it was going to heal me so I could feel whole again.

I was lucky enough to find a job fairly quickly and on the weekend of September 8th, 2001 I packed up the moving van and went home. To a new apartment where I lived by myself for the first time in years, something that took a long time to get used to. I used that weekend to walk the streets for hours, wallowing in my misery yet feeling comforted by everything that was familiar. I felt a sense of peace that I hadn’t felt since that day I found out that “as long as we both shall live” doesn’t necessarily always hold true. I felt that this was a new beginning.

On September 10, 2001 I walked into my new job – nervous and excited. Here was a place where nobody knew me; nobody looked at me with pity as the girl that had just been dumped by the guy that promised to love her in good times and in bad. Nobody knew my pain and as lonely as that made me feel, it also felt like freedom.

And then. September 11, 2001. A day that made my pain pale in comparison to what other people were feeling. A day that made me realize how how lucky I was to have my family and friends safe. A day that made all of us forget what was going on in our own personal lives and bound us together forever. Though I was living and working on the Upper East Side at the time, about 5 miles away from Ground Zero, we could see and smell the smoke as if it were right around the corner. And the city that had always felt so familiar to me all of a sudden had an eerie feeling. People walking around with stunned looks on their faces, unable to really comprehend the devastation that was going on in our city. Wondering whether there were going to be more attacks yet not wanting the fear to win out.

We New Yorkers are nothing if not resilient. We made it through with a renewed pride in ourselves and our city. We kept going, we lived our lives but we have not forgotten. And 10 years later, as I look at my amazing husband and my beautiful daughter who both give me more joy than I ever thought possible, I know that this is where I’m supposed to be. I’m supposed to be in this apartment in Brooklyn with a view of the Empire State Building and the beams that remind us though there’s no way that any of us can ever forget. I will embrace my family, give thanks for all that I have in my life and honor those that were lost on this day 10 years ago.

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Reader Submission: Elizabeth

Posted on September 2, 2011 | 5 Comments
*Sigh* My husband’s so annoying, I could start a whole new blog called, “My Husband Is More Annoying Than Yours”! While our seventh-grader and I were off on the annual, week-long pilgrimage to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, my husband decided that he needed to take apart the oven door because the glass inside it was looking a bit gnarly. Not surprising; the oven’s had six years’ of use, and I do cook. I appreciated the thought. Unfortunately, he didn’t pay any attention to how he took it apart, and so, had no idea how to put it back together. “It just exploded in my lap!” was all he could tell me. This is what I found when I got back:
 
 
Sadly, the manual had no schematic for putting it back together, and I had very little luck Googling it.
 
But here’s the really annoying part. It wasn’t clean. Yes, the glass was nice and shiny (Good job, Honey.), but six years’ of spills and boil-overs were still in the various trims and pieces that held it all together. Guess who got to clean it and then spend half an afternoon putting the puzzle together? Yup; me.
 
The moral of the story? You don’t have to wait until National Talk Like a Pirate Day to say “Aaaaaaargh!” a lot.

 

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Mealtime Mess

Posted on August 31, 2011 | 14 Comments

Mealtimes in our household are tough. Our daughter probably throws as much food on the floor as she gets in her mouth; it takes forever to get her to eat a meal and she spends most of the time trying to stand up in her high chair. We’ll harness her in if we have to but then she’s so focused on trying to unstrap herself that she forgets about eating altogether. It certainly can be a frustrating experience. I spend most of my time trying to figure out what to feed my daughter to make sure that she has a healthy, balanced meal (though we often fall short of that) and the rest of the time trying to keep her in the high chair during these meals.

My husband, though, doesn’t seem as interested in this. On the mornings that he gets up earlier than I do, I walk out into the living room to find breakfast was a half eaten banana on the floor and various snacks strewn about the room. His idea of giving her a meal is handing her a box of crackers and letting her have at it.

Exhibit A:

Not exactly the most structured mealtimes ever. While it’s true that trying to feed her a meal in her highchair can make us want to tear our hair out, it’s something that she has to learn to do eventually and it seemed that my husband agreed with me when we discussed it. Yet, the other night when I had to work late and he was responsible for giving her dinner, wanna guess what that was like?

That’s right, she pretty much looks like a wild animal who just crawled out of the jungle and has stumbled upon a scrap of food on the ground. So, yeah…dinner was cold pizza on the living room floor. Looks like I’m going to have to take over all meals from now on unless I want our daughter growing up thinking she’s basically just like one of our dogs.

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Happy Birthday To Me…

Posted on August 24, 2011 | 38 Comments

When I started this blog 2 years ago, one of my earliest posts was about my birthday and how my husband gave me a calculator and got us burgers from a fast food place for dinner. I had thought that, 2 years later, he would have gotten a little better at the whole birthday thing. Guess what? I was wrong.

First, my husband proudly proclaimed that he was taking me to dinner and I got excited. We hadn’t been out to dinner since 5 months earlier when we celebrated our anniversary and I was itching for a night out. I asked him who he arranged to babysit our daughter and got a blank stare in reply. “Umm…Isn’t your  mother coming over?” Well, she was coming over in the afternoon but had to leave by 4:30, which I had already told him and he either (a) wasn’t listening or (b) didn’t believe me. So dinner was a no-go.

Then around mid-afternoon, I said to him, “there will be cake, right?” Here’s the thing: I don’t need or want fancy gifts for my birthday. I  have a wonderful family and that’s enough for me. I certainly didn’t want my husband spending a lot of money (that we don’t have) on extravagant presents. But the one thing I do require is a cake and a candle. Maybe it’s a superstition of mine or maybe it’s just a ritual that makes me feel good but I like to blow out a candle and make a wish for the year ahead. It’s something I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember and it’s not a birthday without it. My husband’s response to my question? Yet another blank stare. “Umm…where can I get a cake around here?”

This is when I knew that things were not going to go the way I had hoped. I told him he could buy cake mix from the store and do it himself. That didn’t go over too well. Apparently, he’s never baked a cake before and didn’t feel a whole lot of confidence in attempting it. Eventually, after much back-and-forth, we drove over to a cupcake shop and he waited in the car while I went inside and had to buy my own birthday cupcake. I reminded my husband that I would at least like a candle on my cupcake and when he ran down to the drugstore that evening, I figured that there would be one thing that he didn’t mess up.

After dinner (leftovers. yes, instead of getting a nice dinner out, I got reheated leftovers.), my husband asked me if I was ready for my cupcake. I said that I would and expected to be presented with a cupcake on a plate with a candle on top and get sung ‘happy birthday’ to. Instead, he plopped the cupcake down in front of me – still in its box. That was it. No singing. No fancy presentation. No candle. And when I expressed my sadness at not getting at least a candle to blow out and make a wish on, he actually got a chopstick out of the kitchen drawer and tried to light that. It burnt out before I even got near it.

I didn't even get dinner on a nice dish. Just the take-out carton it came in.

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Reader Submission: Chrissy

Posted on July 26, 2011 | 10 Comments

My fiance is so annoying. When I ask him to fix something, he’ll go examine the situation, then call out for me to bring him the tools he needs for the job. It doesn’t matter if I’m in the shower or cooking dinner… I am expected to stop what I’m doing or HOW ELSE IS HE GOING TO FULFILL MY REQUEST? And it usually involves multiple trips for me because he’s not always sure what he needs. He could be five feet from the tool bench, but he seems unaware of where any of the tools are. And I suppose that because I get them, I’m the one expected to put them away too, because he will drop them where he is (along with any light bulb packaging or other garbage) and walk away, task “completed.” Or postponed. Or declared impossible. Ugh, annoying!

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