Tag: Carol

Unexpected “vacation” day

The Daughter doesn’t go to school, the Wife DOES go to work because her districts weren’t even delayed, *I* DON’T go to work.

windyGoing to bed the night before a major weather pattern, I figure on one of these three scenarios, given that The Wife is a teacher at BOCES, an educational consortium, working several suburban or rural districts, and The Daughter is a student in the Albany school district.

1. The Daughter goes to school, whether The Wife goes to work or not doesn’t matter, I go to work.

2. The Daughter’s school is delayed, the Wife’s schools are delayed, I go to work.

3. The Daughter doesn’t go to school, the Wife doesn’t work, I go to work.
What I DON’T figure on:

4. The Daughter doesn’t go to school, the Wife DOES go to work because her districts weren’t even delayed, I DON’T go to work.

Now, I HAVE said to The Wife that, as a matter of practicality, if the fourth setting ever came to pass, I’d stay home. But I didn’t think it would REALLY happen.

Although I should have gotten an inkling a few days ago, before a wind advisory, when I was on a bus with some young man from one of our charter schools, who seemed to believe there would be no school for him today.

This leads me to believe that the Albany school superintendent is in touch with the heads of the charter schools regarding the weather, but perhaps NOT with the other district fellow wizards. There have been another time or two when Albany closed and other schools didn’t, around the time one of the hurricanes last year was not a real weather event in the city.

It’s a peculiar way to burn a vacation day. Then again, I didn’t REALLY want to be out there waiting for two buses each way, when it was below zero Fahrenheit, did I?

The Lydster, Part 115: Honesty

The Daughter has a very strong sense of fairness and justice.

My wife, when some bit of my loose change would fall on the floor, would claim it as her own, if I didn’t pick it up in time, and put it in her change jar. It was this little game of hers and I didn’t much mind, though it’s not as though she needed the money; she now makes more than I do.

I would start getting a bit irritated, though, when I’d leave change on the table or the bed or my dresser, usually in order to take it out of one pair of pants, before putting it into another. Somehow, this was the game taken too far, and I said as much. Not only was it boring, but it also made being home a bit less of the sanctuary I wanted it to be.

The practice stopped, though, only when, at some point a few months ago, the Daughter was staying a couple of nights at her maternal grandparents’ house. She told them that Mama was always stealing from Papa (her current terms of endearment for us). My wife’s mother then relayed this message to her daughter. The Wife realized that, perhaps, she was not offering HER daughter the best role model, even in jest.

The Daughter has a very strong sense of fairness and justice, and by her taking the situation to a higher court, this worked out well for me also.

File under: Carol is…a year older

It’s usually the little stuff that drives people crazy.

One of the admirable things about The Wife is that she has this filing system for papers. Sometimes she can even find things in it; OK, I jest, because usually, she can. But her categories are not my categories, so I can almost NEVER find anything in her system.

She keeps receipts of almost everything she buys. If she needs it, she’ll pull out the folder for the year that purchased the item. This is of absolutely no use to me because, unless it was very recent, I can’t REMEMBER what year we bought something. Was it 2010 or 2009?  Occasionally she can’t remember either.

Moreover, I get impatient wading through a year’s worth of random receipts. MY system, when I was single – still used for things that are mine, rather than hers or ours – is by type of items – appliances, pharmacy, food, and the like. She’s willing to rifle through her files, but I find it too arcane.

I do see one advantage of her system, though. When the contents of a folder are eight years old, she can toss it; not that she does, necessarily, but she could.

With my folders, I put the tabs in the back, while she puts them in the front, something that, for some reason, totally flummoxes me when looking in her files.

It’s usually the little stuff that drives people crazy. As long as I don’t actually have to FIND something in her files, it’s all good.

Happy birthday, honey.

ARA: Influences and historical conversations

We’ll have Adolf Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie.

Dear Lisa says Okay, I’ll play:
Who (living or dead) has had the most influence on your life?

I’d have to say my father. He turned me on to music, which was always in the house. He had a thing for social justice. His moodiness was something I tried to avoid in myself, not always successfully. He could be an unfocused dreamer, something I can be guilty of as well.

If you could go back in time and have a conversation with someone, who would it be? My apologies if you’ve already answered these questions before!

Well, I have, so I’ve decided to change it. I want a conversation with FOUR people, together, in the summer of 1910. We’ll have Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), who would be 21, and Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1947), who would turn 41 in the fall, and Thomas Edison (1847-1931), who would be 63, and Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), who would turn 75 in the fall.

I’d be interested to see what the other three would have to say to young Adolf: Gandhi about non-violence, Edison about creativity, Carnegie about going from being a robber baron to a philanthropist who built libraries.
***
Tom the Mayor asked:

Have you ever lost your temper with your wife? Or your daughter?

My wife and I almost never fight. We disagree, but not all that often. The last time I remember getting REALLY angry with her, and it was several years ago, was when she was in a conversation in our house with someone else. I piped in with a point, and she said, to the other person, that I had gotten said point from some specific Sunday morning talk show. After the guest left, about a half-hour later, I exploded that I don’t parrot what I see on a given talk show but take in from a variety of sources and develop my viewpoints. THAT ticked me off.

The Daughter is very sensitive; just ask her. When she was younger, just being disappointed with something she did was enough to launch her into tears. Later, when I had to prod her into doing something – doing her homework, cleaning her room – I would use my calmest firm voice, yet she’d start crying, adding “You KNOW I’m sensitive!” which actually made me laugh inside.

So, I’d say I would get agitated with her sometimes, at which point, I will take a timeout from her. To be fair to me, my wife has experienced similar things; sometimes, SHE’S the “bad” parent. Now when The Daughter writes about it, she may have a different take, but that will be HER blog.
***
A question in my spam folder:

What do you consider the best security defend agency in the country? thanks!

A well-informed populace.

The Scotland story

I did not anticipate that when she got back to town a few days later, she not only decided to go out with me, but to quit her job.

After the anniversary post, I noted that there was a sidebar story involving Scotland. Well, it’s mostly not. Shooting Parrots asked for it, as did Island Rambles, and so you all get it.

I need to explain that Carol and I went out from the fall of 1994 to the spring of 1996 then broke up, for good and reasonable reasons, it seemed at the time. She then went out with other people – her boyfriend was a particular jerk to her, but that’s another matter – and soon I was trying to get back with her. We were both in her brother Dan’s wedding to Tracy in September of 1996; that wasn’t awkward AT ALL…

Then in August 1998, I made this one last effort to woo her back. I remember kissing her at Five Rivers nature preserve in October 1998, much to her surprise. Then there was the party she helped plan for watching my first appearance on the game show JEOPARDY! on November 9. But she wasn’t there; her high-paid, but stressful job in insurance had her in Madison, Wisconsin that day.

So I did not anticipate that when she got back to town a few days later, she not only decided to go out with me, but to quit her job (which she did in February 1999), and go back to school to become a teacher again. (She had taught for two years in the mid-1980s.)

Soon enough, we decided that we would get married, but I didn’t ask her specifically, because her brother Mark was getting married to Leanne on January 1, 1999, and we did not want to upstage them. We got engaged at an Albany restaurant called Justin’s on January 16 and decided that waiting a long time to get hitched was not a great idea, given our ages, especially if we wanted to have children.

We threw together a wedding in less than four months, due in no small part to the help of my father, and, as noted, got married on May 15, 1999.

Now, Carol had planned a trip to Scotland in July 1999 with her friend Jeanne. (Sidebar: I went out on one date with Jeanne in October 1998, with the primary intent to make Carol jealous.) They had booked this trip before Carol and I were even going out again. We, as a “modern” couple thought it would be fine; we weren’t people who were “clingy” or “defined by our spouse.”

I’m in this old house I wasn’t that familiar with, the one she’d bought seven years earlier. Every creaky noise, which MUST have been there the two months I had been living there, sounded so loud I couldn’t sleep; I was pretty miserable. And while Carol had a reasonably good time, she was pretty unhappy without me for a week.

We’ve been away from each other since then, the longest when she went to Ukraine three years later, but no separation we experienced was as bad as that first one.

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