Being a Guy

Stuff… or how I won the war.

Posted on by kwundrow

It’s strange how stuff can take over our lives.  If you’re not careful, one day your office turns into the family storage bin.  I had run a business out of my home for twelve years, offering my clients a professional and comfortable place to meet with me and benefit from my services.  At least I’m pretty sure they benefited or why did they keep coming back.  About twenty years ago I merged my practice with a local firm and my office was soon sitting vacant.  Oh I still tried to keep it as an office, but I was losing the battle.

It seemed the stuff of life was running out of space in the rest of our house and just like that it began its relentless take over.  It must have happened late in the evening when we had retired to our bedroom and then, in the darkness of night, the stuff would creep downstairs and take up position in my office.  On the occasions when I would stop into my office, I would sense it getting smaller but I couldn’t quite identify the invaders.  For awhile they hid in the closet and under the desk and this alone might explain why in my complacency, I hadn’t noticed them.  They are sneaky, that stuff of life, and I think they breed.  No other explanation could adequately explain how suddenly they were under the bed too.  Wait, the bed?  When did an entire bed sneak in here?  I couldn’t even find a room in the house from which it might have escaped.  And yet it had clearly taken up residency and now the stuff was hiding under there.

As the years passed, the office was overrun.  There was no corner that the invading army hadn’t claimed.  If only there had been a United Nations of Offices to come to my rescue,  I would still have an office and the insidious Army of Stuff could have been held within its borders and my office would still be a free nation.  But of course, I was too late to the war and my office was gone.

But wait, there is a happy ending.  Retirement left me without an office and my old office would need to be reclaimed.  I rolled up my sleeves, and yes, opened my wallet, and the war of reclamation was begun.  It has taken several hard fought months but the invading horde has been soundly defeated and sent packing.  Off to Goodwill and Restore and any other Nation of Stuff that would take them in.  Oh there were casualties, as there will always be in these type battles, but in the end my office has been restored and is thriving.

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As testament to its existence, I decided to write this piece.  My office, once the work place of a multitude of IRS forms and then the land of unrelenting stuff, is now my writing office and yes, semi man cave.  Tomorrow I will build a moat at its entrance and employ some stout guards to patrol the perimeter.  Stuff, TAKE NOTICE.  If you try a counter attack, YOU WILL BE REPELLED.  This office is mine.  Long live the King.

I never met a Chicken I didn’t like….stuffed and baked.

Posted on by kwundrow

The first telling of this story dates back to a Thanksgiving almost 40 years ago.  I was bringing my then girlfriend, now wife home to meet my family.   We were all seated around the feast deliciously prepared by my mother and as the bird was being destroyed, the story telling began.  My family consists of story tellers all somehow trained in the art by my father.  To entertain or perhaps warn my new girlfriend to the perils of our family, we were reliving, colorfully, stories of our growing up past.  I was, due to the occasion, being particularly roasted a bit harder than the others.  When I was finally able to find a slot, I decided to tell the story of “the rooster from hell”.

I need to take you back to the scene of the crime.  I was likely nine or ten years old at the time and growing up on our family farm.  One of my daily chores was to tend to the chickens.  For my readers not familiar with a chicken other than one roasted, baked or fried, they are a dirty animal to begin with.  They are equipped with tough thorn bejeweled chicken legs that they expertly use to scratch the ground, and anything else for that matter, into a mottled mess.  This is likely the reason they have those deliciously developed drumsticks.  When you throw roosters into the mix, well it only gets worse.  Roosters, by their very nature, are built to fight.  The year before, my parents had decided to add a batch, or should I say, a gang of roosters to their usual order of some fifty hatch lings.  The hatch lings had all grown, along with the now street smart gang of roosters, into a producing flock.

Each morning, I would head out to the chicken coop to collect the eggs.  Without fail, those roosters would be waiting for me, thorns drawn sporting for a fight.  They would be poised there on the roost and as I went around the coop collecting the eggs, they would one at a time come down and corner me, pecking at my legs and threatening me with their thorns.  I was a little scrawny kid, I’m just laying out my eventual defense here, and was soon not looking forward to that daily chore.

After several weeks of this relentless harassment, I had decided it was time to arm myself.  It was on this particular morning that I secreted a baseball bat into the coop concealed behind my back.  As the first rooster dropped down from the perch, I prepared to defend myself.  With the rooster coming at a full clip, I took my best swing.  My aim was good and the rooster, needless to say, went down, unfortunately for the full count.  The crime of the century had been committed and I was now a felon on the run.  Or perhaps “fowlon” on the run.  The good news was that the remaining gang took due notice of their felled chieftain and had retreated to the roost.  It turns out, chickens have memories and none of them ever bothered me again.  I had new found respect but a dead rooster to get rid of.  No way were my parents to ever find out.

The solution to my dilemma was the cow yard manure pile.  After artfully burying the victim deep within the pile, I felt I was safe.  No way would my parents have actually counted the number of chickens, let alone the roosters in their possession.  Since the manure pile would remain there until spring, my crime was out of sight and out of mind.

As winter came and went, I had completely forgotten about the body and my involvement in the heinous crime.  But then there we were, loading the manure spreader and slowly diminishing the pile, when what should suddenly appear?  As the fates were on my side, after all the victim deserved it, I was the first to spot the body.  Fortune further intervened when my father decided it was a full load and headed to the garage for some errand.  With a quick two step, I dug the corpse free and reburied it deftly within the spreader’s load.  In another hour, it would be a part of a soon to be plowed field and gone forever.  The crime of the century, buried and gone.

At this point, my story had garnered the desired effect among my siblings and as the laughter subsided, my mother turned to my father and said “I told you there were thirteen.”  I guess they HAD counted and un-be knownst to me, my parents had been waging this argument for the ensuing twenty years.  To this day, I want to believe that my dad had seen the corpse and been covering for his son all those years.

If there is a moral here, it might be that parents always know more than we think and that chicken, as far as I’m concerned, is best enjoyed stuffed and baked and then served with an ample covering of gravy.

Turkey

Happy Thanksgiving.

Hey, I’m a Guy

Posted on by kwundrow

Let’s start out with reminding you I am a male.  I think like a male and that is my excuse for what follows.  But stay with me because I will hopefully make my point and erase what ever fears have crept into your mind about where this might be going.

Women and men just don’t think alike.  Women are rational.  There is never just one consequence of an action but rather an entire landslide of events eventually culminating in the inevitable conclusion.  Meanwhile, men see things more clearly.  At least that is the idea that we delude ourselves with and use to justify our snap decisions.  We think inside the box while women think outside of the box.  Either that or they are thinking in a much larger box with several floors and a multitude of rooms.

This leads me to the discussion I recently had with my overly rational wife that spurred this blog.  I felt that if I could write this down, I might actually be able to offer some advice to any male or female that would read this and maybe apply it to their collective partnerships.  It seems that when ever I come upon some tidbit of information, which I in turn wish to share with my wife, I come up short on details every time.  As an example, and I am betting every testosterone driven male can identify with, a friend’s wife has their baby.  Be honest here, have you ever been able to provide even half the information necessary to answer the barrage of questions your partner is about to ask.  I generally provide the following information, ‘They had their baby yesterday”.  What did I miss, apparently everything that mattered.  What time, really?, what was the weight, guessing about a bowling bowl here, what was the length, seriously, under three feet best guess.  Of course I skipped sex and name because here I must admit, I should have been on at least that much of my game.

On this particular occasion, a friend had been in the hospital for a surgery that had been called off midway through.  As my wife was waiting for news of how the recovery was going, I received a text from a second friend.  He stated simply that our friend had indicated he would now actually be eating food at the wedding.  Any guy thinking in the box would take this to mean his humor was intact and he was up for eating.  Enough said.  When I relayed this text as a quote to my wife, the inquisition began.  When did he say that?  Hmm, text says 2:45.  What had our friend asked that elicited this response?  What does this cryptic message really mean?  What else did he say?  A this point I have two choices.  One, start to make up stuff and hope she can’t fact check me, or two, confess to my complete and total ignorance.  I chose option two, sort of.

I explained to my wife, and here in lies the nugget of genius, men receive information in short bursts.  It is all we can handle on either end, and more importantly, when you ask us for the information, we don’t hold anything back.  If we tell you they had the baby, that’s it, they had the baby.  Please don’t believe that you can pry any additional information out of us.  Simple, concise, reasonably accurate and woefully short on detail.  If we were asked to recap a fight it would go something like he said something stupid and then the guy smacked him.  They don’t say “That’s it folks. The fights over” for nothing.  That’s just the sum total of what that poor guy is got to offer.  Fights over, moving on.

So now you have it.  Women, lower your expectations in this area.  What we got is all we got.  You are just going to get frustrated if you expect more.  Men, I guess we can always keep trying.  In the last baby birth debacle, I got almost everything but the sex.  My response to the question “sex?”, “there must have been, roughly nine months ago I’m guessing”.

Thanks for reading…but that’s it.