My life is going well...really.

My life has made an upward swing.

Not that it was going down. But, the beginning of this year had a lot of growing pains.

First of all, I started living with a man. Men see things in a way that is so different from women. Not just on emotional issues, but those are included, what I’m talking about is physical.

Men do not see dirt.

It is in their genetics that crumbs on the floor or the couch are just not there. A dirty dish on the coffee table? What do you mean? Where is it? A pile of Reese’s peanut butter cups wrappers and dirty tissues on top of the remote control – non-existent in the eyes of men.

And, when I mention it, it does get better. For about 48 hours. And then we get back to the normal grind. I don’t want to seem like a nag, and Sean gets guilt-ridden too easily for me to bug him about things often, that I just pick them up with everything else when I bring my dirty dishes to the sink and my garbage to the trashcan.

Another battle is taking out the trash.

In my house, my father took out the trash for most of my life. Or at least every Sunday night he’d drag the cans out front. I’m not really sure if my mom or my dad was the one who actually picked up the trash out of our home and put it in the garbage cans at the side of my house, but regardless, Sunday night I always heard my dad dragging them along the stone and brick path to the curb.

So, I bestowed this duty upon my husband. He’s a guy. Guys don’t mind things being dirty and smelly. So his one household duty is to take out the garbage.

What I did not realize is, men don’t see a full trashcan the way women do.

Our trashcan in the kitchen is the one that gets full the easiest and most-often. Somehow, the garbage that is produced from making one meal turns into twice the size of the meal itself. And the fact that it’s easier to buy pre-package, portionally-correct foods due to Weight Watchers also produces more garbage than grilling a chicken breast and nuking a baked potato for dinner or gorging yourself on a family sized bag of Cheetos until your tummy aches.

When I can no longer swing our garbage can lid back and forth, I assume that the trashcan is full. Usually I leave it for my husband to pick it up and change it after he’s put some of his trash in it and then take it outside. No, it means you take off the lid, put it halfway on the washer (where I clean our clothes! Icccckkk!), and continue to piling the trash there. So once the piling starts overflowing, I now know it’s time for it to go out. As a hint that the trash can is starting to become a mountain, I generally ask him to throw away a heft pile of things while I act busy doing something for us. When he starts walking into the kitchen I just know that he’ll come back with a full garbage bag. Instead, he’ll notice that the trashcan is overflowing, so he brings it to our half-empty bedroom trashcan.

I know he loathes it. Most people don’t enjoy taking about the garbage, but I vacuum, do laundry, windex, and wipe down all of our countertops, so taking out the garbage and occasionally mopping the floors is not such a big sacrifice.

Then of course, there’s that whole sharing a bed thing.

I’m an only child. A spoiled only child. Which translates to I-got-everything-I-wanted-and-everything-you-wanted-and-had-it-all-to-myself! So sharing was always a little difficult for me, anyway. In the past four months, I have been woken up for some of the most unusual reasons:
· Smothered by blankets and quilts and sheets
· Being colder than ice due to no covers within for feet of me
· Smushed by an arm that weighs more than half of me
· Getting random, inappropriate body parts pinched due to my husband’s dreams telling him he had to
· My pillow was stolen because my husband had thrown his on the floor
And this doesn’t even cover what my cat does!

But I digress. I digressed a lot.

Life is good. I’ve lost 11.5 lbs in two weeks! I feel happy, healthy, and more energy than I have in a while. And the stomach problems that have seem to plague me for the past few years has yet to rear its ugly head in the past few weeks. And, there seems to be an idea of a promising position in one of two places. We shall see where this leads me. But until then, enjoy the comedy that is adjusting to married life….