I am married to a clothes tyrannosaur. I think Lawyer Boy passed Clothes Horse for the win about two years ago, when he added "Clothes For Playing Lawyer" to his already-burgeoning wardrobe of "Clothes For Bumming On The Beach" and "Clothes For Drinking In." I don't know why I even bother doing laundry, because I think he is trying to single-handedly bankrupt Tide by owning enough boxer shorts to sustain his ass (literally and metaphorically) for a month straight.
One of the challenges of moving into an eighty-year-old house has been cramming all of our stuff into the trial-sized storage space provided. It is a little-known historical fact that, prior to 1940, Americans were elves. Thus the closets in our house, which was completed in 1930, are luxuriously sized to hold a full four-season wardrobe for every member of the fashion-forward elf family. This true historic fact also explains how the cast of Munchkinland was assembled for The Wizard of Oz: Warner Brothers just rolled out a yellow brick road down Main Street USA and filmed the citizens going about their day, singing joyfully and hatching babies out of eggs.
Zip ahead almost eighty years and enter Twenty-First Century Lawyer Boy, luxuriously sized for the 21st century and fully equipped to practice law, mow the lawn, walk the dog, and drink mojitos on the beach, every single day for a month, all while looking sporty and all without having to learn how to turn on the washing machine. Trying to cram all his clothes into one elvin closet was the equivalent of trying to cram a jelly doughnut into a Discman. Now I know why he doesn't know how to turn on the washing machine--in eight months, he has not once run out of clean clothes. He just learned how to turn on the vacuum last weekend. Baby steps, amigos.
Before you think I'm a mean hag just out to trash my husband, he does know how to work the tile saw, Sawz-All, orbital sander, hedge clippers, and a variety of other things that I generally ignore. We have an agreement wherein he does not have to do housework and I do not have to touch icky things. But my concern remains that if something were to take me away from the house for an extended period of time, the cat-hair tumbleweeds on the floor would grow into full-blown housecats, screaming for food, before he would notice there was a problem.
I will not lie and pretend that I do not own six pairs of taupe pants, four white shirts, and an equally essential number of pointy-toed shoes, but thanks to my loving husband, my clothes and accessories live safely in the bureau and closets in our bedroom. Upon moving into the antique house, LB graciously gave me control of both midgetine closets in the master, opting to take the dresser and closet in the guest bedroom for his own. Retrospectively, I know that he did this so that, in the privacy of a room I rarely enter, he could detonate his atomic wardrobe, showering clothes, shoes, belts, and cuff links helter-skelter across the floor and all over the furniture.
The gig was up yesterday morning, when the hospital called to say that the guest bed had been admitted after having collapsed under the weight of fourteen hoodies and thirty-seven French-cuff dress shirts.
After breakfast and before he had time to sneak out on me, I herded LB into the guest room to dig through the wardrobe war zone and return the guest room to its stated purpose, a room that guests could sleep in. At that point, a room that guests could actually walk in would have been an improvement. We pulled through his clothing for several hours, separating the keeps from the donates, the trash, and the tell your grandmother to stop buying me sweaters, eventually narrowing the pool down to the lucky finalists who earned a place in the closet. After a bit more shuffling and a tearful goodbye when LB finally voted some worn-out nubby bits off the island, his clothes actually all fit in the closet. Well, closets--he has the closets in both our spare bedrooms. Like I said before, baby steps, amigos.
With his clothes safely wrangled into submission, I headed out to Bed Bath and Bewildered for a shoe rack for my own closet, which I was able to locate only after wandering through the china, crystal, small appliance, large appliance, bedding, bathing, and Roman antiquities sections. I picked one that would hold a reasonable amount of my unreasonable shoe collection and departed victorious. Upon arriving back home, I decided to play Rosie Riveter and put together the shoe rack myself. The box proudly stated NO TOOLS REQUIRED, which I quickly discovered was a lie as I struggled to snap the metal bars into the plastic ends, resulting in the metal bars not snapping into the plastic ends, and clanging into the floor. After a five-minute concert from the wind chimes from hell, I brought in a hammer. Violence is the answer, and I had that shoe rack assembled to withstand hurricane-force winds in a matter of minutes.
And then I discovered that the shoe rack did not actually fit into my closet. Not in any way, any direction, not even diagonally, which I knew would be obnoxious to live with, but which I was willing to live with if it would allow me to claim victory. No dice. Swearing like a sailor, I worked up every bit of elbow grease I could to pry apart the rack and jam it back into the box. Back to Bed Bath and Befuddled, except a different branch than the one I had previously patronized, since I was too embarrassed to hit the same store twice in one hour.
I got into the shoe rack section and stood before the completely overwhelming selection before I realized something crucial: I still had not measured the closet! Still had no idea what I was there for. Still special like a three-legged giraffe. I whipped out my phonette and dialed LB. "Hi sweetie, can you go upstairs and do me a favor?" He did, and he measured the closet for me.
"Can you also measure under our bed? I need some storage bins and forgot to measure that, too." So he sprawled under the bed to get its digits.
"Oh, um, and can you also measure the distance from the floor to the bottom of the guest bed mattress? I didn't measure that before last time either, and I bought the wrong size bed skirt." I would say that I owe him for this, but I had already spent several hours in the company of his gym shorts and wool jackets. Turnabout is fair play.
Finally, I bought what I needed for real, and headed back home. The new shoe rack fit into the closet, and I loaded it up with the twenty-four pairs of shoes that I consider essential. But I know the new rack would hold so many more pairs if they were tiny elf shoes.
One of the challenges of moving into an eighty-year-old house has been cramming all of our stuff into the trial-sized storage space provided. It is a little-known historical fact that, prior to 1940, Americans were elves. Thus the closets in our house, which was completed in 1930, are luxuriously sized to hold a full four-season wardrobe for every member of the fashion-forward elf family. This true historic fact also explains how the cast of Munchkinland was assembled for The Wizard of Oz: Warner Brothers just rolled out a yellow brick road down Main Street USA and filmed the citizens going about their day, singing joyfully and hatching babies out of eggs.
Zip ahead almost eighty years and enter Twenty-First Century Lawyer Boy, luxuriously sized for the 21st century and fully equipped to practice law, mow the lawn, walk the dog, and drink mojitos on the beach, every single day for a month, all while looking sporty and all without having to learn how to turn on the washing machine. Trying to cram all his clothes into one elvin closet was the equivalent of trying to cram a jelly doughnut into a Discman. Now I know why he doesn't know how to turn on the washing machine--in eight months, he has not once run out of clean clothes. He just learned how to turn on the vacuum last weekend. Baby steps, amigos.
Before you think I'm a mean hag just out to trash my husband, he does know how to work the tile saw, Sawz-All, orbital sander, hedge clippers, and a variety of other things that I generally ignore. We have an agreement wherein he does not have to do housework and I do not have to touch icky things. But my concern remains that if something were to take me away from the house for an extended period of time, the cat-hair tumbleweeds on the floor would grow into full-blown housecats, screaming for food, before he would notice there was a problem.
I will not lie and pretend that I do not own six pairs of taupe pants, four white shirts, and an equally essential number of pointy-toed shoes, but thanks to my loving husband, my clothes and accessories live safely in the bureau and closets in our bedroom. Upon moving into the antique house, LB graciously gave me control of both midgetine closets in the master, opting to take the dresser and closet in the guest bedroom for his own. Retrospectively, I know that he did this so that, in the privacy of a room I rarely enter, he could detonate his atomic wardrobe, showering clothes, shoes, belts, and cuff links helter-skelter across the floor and all over the furniture.
The gig was up yesterday morning, when the hospital called to say that the guest bed had been admitted after having collapsed under the weight of fourteen hoodies and thirty-seven French-cuff dress shirts.
After breakfast and before he had time to sneak out on me, I herded LB into the guest room to dig through the wardrobe war zone and return the guest room to its stated purpose, a room that guests could sleep in. At that point, a room that guests could actually walk in would have been an improvement. We pulled through his clothing for several hours, separating the keeps from the donates, the trash, and the tell your grandmother to stop buying me sweaters, eventually narrowing the pool down to the lucky finalists who earned a place in the closet. After a bit more shuffling and a tearful goodbye when LB finally voted some worn-out nubby bits off the island, his clothes actually all fit in the closet. Well, closets--he has the closets in both our spare bedrooms. Like I said before, baby steps, amigos.
With his clothes safely wrangled into submission, I headed out to Bed Bath and Bewildered for a shoe rack for my own closet, which I was able to locate only after wandering through the china, crystal, small appliance, large appliance, bedding, bathing, and Roman antiquities sections. I picked one that would hold a reasonable amount of my unreasonable shoe collection and departed victorious. Upon arriving back home, I decided to play Rosie Riveter and put together the shoe rack myself. The box proudly stated NO TOOLS REQUIRED, which I quickly discovered was a lie as I struggled to snap the metal bars into the plastic ends, resulting in the metal bars not snapping into the plastic ends, and clanging into the floor. After a five-minute concert from the wind chimes from hell, I brought in a hammer. Violence is the answer, and I had that shoe rack assembled to withstand hurricane-force winds in a matter of minutes.
And then I discovered that the shoe rack did not actually fit into my closet. Not in any way, any direction, not even diagonally, which I knew would be obnoxious to live with, but which I was willing to live with if it would allow me to claim victory. No dice. Swearing like a sailor, I worked up every bit of elbow grease I could to pry apart the rack and jam it back into the box. Back to Bed Bath and Befuddled, except a different branch than the one I had previously patronized, since I was too embarrassed to hit the same store twice in one hour.
I got into the shoe rack section and stood before the completely overwhelming selection before I realized something crucial: I still had not measured the closet! Still had no idea what I was there for. Still special like a three-legged giraffe. I whipped out my phonette and dialed LB. "Hi sweetie, can you go upstairs and do me a favor?" He did, and he measured the closet for me.
"Can you also measure under our bed? I need some storage bins and forgot to measure that, too." So he sprawled under the bed to get its digits.
"Oh, um, and can you also measure the distance from the floor to the bottom of the guest bed mattress? I didn't measure that before last time either, and I bought the wrong size bed skirt." I would say that I owe him for this, but I had already spent several hours in the company of his gym shorts and wool jackets. Turnabout is fair play.
Finally, I bought what I needed for real, and headed back home. The new shoe rack fit into the closet, and I loaded it up with the twenty-four pairs of shoes that I consider essential. But I know the new rack would hold so many more pairs if they were tiny elf shoes.
2 comments:
Is Sawz-All what that thing's called? I always thought people were saying "saw-zaw", which makes no sense, but who am I to question the names of power tools? I don't have to know what it's called to screw up cutting part of the set with it.
And that, friends, is why I'm not allowed to help my husband in the scene shop anymore. Measure five times, cut once, I still get it wrong.
It's a Sawz-All, or as they call it on HGTV, a reciprocating saw. LB has no idea why it's called a reciprocating saw, which you would think an engineer could tell you, for pete's sake. I think they refrain fro m calling it a Sawz-All because that is the brand name of one particular (well-known) reciprocating saw.
OH my word verify is blingst! Medieval bling!
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