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June, 2010

  1. Smoky Plum is the New Black

    June 6, 2010 by Wendy

    My poor husband.

    Friday  night, he helped coach at Twin B’s basketball practice. They came home, both dripping sweat, and didn’t say much other than to ask who won the national spelling bee. However, about a half-hour later, Husband walks out of the kitchen holding a bag of ice to his face and says, “Uh, I ran into Brooke’s head tonight at practice and now my eye has suddenly blown out.”

    “Blown out????” I say, blasting my migraine-plagued head off the couch. You don’t say the words “blown out” to a panicker like me unless you’re at the hair salon.  ”Lemme see!”

    He pulled the bag of ice away, revealing a Cadbury-egg-sized purple lump on the corner of his left eye.

    Ahhhhhh! What did you do now?” I shouted, or something similar that made him go, “Well you don’t have to get mad about it!”

    “I’m not mad, but it’s just why are you always getting hurt?” I said, reminding him that he was still healing from his neck injury of three days ago, when we heard Little Miss cry out in the monitor at 3 a.m. and he flew out of bed but got his foot stuck in the blanket and fell shoulder-down smack into the door.

    I took a closer look at the eye injury, which made my own eyes water.

    “Want a raw steak on it?” I asked, because that’s what they did once on The Brady Bunch, when Peter got socked in the eye by Buddy Hinton while sticking up for Cindy.

    “No. I don’t even know what that does,” he said.

    “Me neither,” I said. “And anyway, we don’t have any. How about a bag of frozen peas?”

    “What for?” he asked. “I got this!” he said, nodding toward the unwieldy bag of ice cubes in a Ziploc wrapped with a dishcloth pressed to his eye.

    “Should I take you to urgent care?” I asked, already knowing what his answer was going to be.

    “I don’t think so,” he answered, as if I had just asked “Will it snow here in Arizona tomorrow?”

    I still wasn’t sure, so I took a picture of the injury and texted it to my sister, whose husband is a paramedic. “HELP!” I put in the subject line, and then waited. They live in Michigan, and it was going on 2 a.m. there. Still, my phone rang a few minutes later.

    “Is his eye hanging out of the socket?” my sister said, repeating questions fed to her from her groggy husband, whom she jolted awake when she got my text.

    “No!” I said. “It’s on the outside, not the eye BALL.”

    “Is there fluid leaking out?” she asked.

    “I don’t know. Is there fluid leaking out?” I asked Husband.

    “I don’t think so,” he said, dabbing away the condensation from the ice bag.

    “You don’t want to mess around with the eye, I’d take him in,” I heard my brother-in-law say in the background.

    But since nothing was hanging or leaking out, we decided to skip the dreaded E.R. waiting room and just ice it and sleep on it.

    “If I wake up and his eyeball is on the pillow, then I’ll bring him in,” I said to my sister.

    Well, the next morning, I didn’t wake up next to an eyeball, but what I did wake up next to was Adam Lambert:

    photo2

    The swelling had gone down, but his entire eyelid was swathed in a deep plum color with a perfectly straight line of kohl black right by his eyelashes.

    “It looks kinda pretty!” I said, after the initial shock wore off.

    Throughout the day, I kept staring at that eye, thinking, “Now how can I get my makeup to look like that?”

    I always thought that when one gets hit in the eye, one gets a black eye. But no. This one was the perfect shade of smoky plum mixed with a hint of shimmery lavender. In fact, I have an eyeshadow palette just like that called “Time for Wine.”

    Even more disturbing, the swelling had pushed the outside edge of his eyebrow up into a nice little arch, the kind that some of us girls go through the pain of waxing to achieve. With a little plucking here and there, and the application of some guyliner and guyshadow to the other eye, he’d be make Adam Lambert and Pete Wentz look like amateurs.

    I emailed some pictures to a half-dozen family members who I thought might be be interested or entertained. (Luckily, Husband is a good sport when it comes to these things and indulges me while I make a spectacle of him.)

    photo3

    DSCN3692

    My sister-in-law said, “Well, so much for trying to do a ‘guy thing’ for a change. Maybe he should stick to princess bedtime stories.” (Ah-ha, so you do read my blog! See previous post.)

    My aunt said, “OK, if he starts singing, bumping and grinding, I’m running for the hills. But seriously, I’d take that photo with me to the nearest MAC counter and tell them to do their stuff.”

    And now if only I can get that annoying Adam Lambert song, What Do You Want from Me? out of my head.

    Poor guy. He can’t even get a decent, cool-looking shiner. And adding insult to the pretty injury?

    It came from a 13-year-old girl.


  2. Girls, Girls, Girls

    June 1, 2010 by Wendy

    Sometimes I feel bad for my husband, living in the all-female, estrogen-soaked household that he does. Last night happened to be one of those times, maybe because our evening bike ride had to be cut short after encountering a pack of javelinas and four squealing, shrieking girls wanted to high-tail it home. (In fact, our bike rides always seem to be cut short, due to some fear one of us girls develops out in the middle of nowhere, where he likes to go. That being said, I don’t think coyotes, bobcats, snakes and the dark are unreasonable fears at all when you live in the desert.)

    Anyway, I told him that he should start taking more time to pursue his hobbies, and do more “guy” stuff, like hunting, fishing or going to the shooting range. Sometimes a guy just wants to sit around and talk about trucks, and that’s just not a need I’m capable of filling. Politics, I’ll do (on a good day), but trucks, no way.

    “When? When am I going to find the time to do those kind of things?” he asked.

    “Well, I don’t know, you have to make the time,” I said.

    So about an hour or so after this discussion, he offered to put Little Miss to bed. A few minutes later, I went in to say good night, and this is what I found:

    reading

    It looks like he’s snuggled up in bed with her, reading the captivating tale of Cinderella’s Palace, right?  Only this is what I heard when I walked in:

    “Do not mix alkaline, standard (carbon zinc), or rechargeable (nickel-cadmium) batteries. Do not recharge non-rechargeable batteries. Rechargeable batteries are to be removed from the sound module before being recharged. Rechargeable batteries are to only to be charged under adult supervision. This product uses…”

    And then I figured out what he was doing. Bored out of his mind from all the princess tales he’s read night after night, daughter after daughter over the years, he decided to get creative. And read the inside cover of the page. You know, the copyright page. Only this book was one of those that had those musical buttons on it, thus all the battery talk.

    And Little Miss was listening with rapt attention! Especially when he got to the part about the book/device being compliant with FCC rules and regulations.

    Happening upon this scene reinforced my belief that he really needs more guy time and less “princess” time. But that isn’t quite what I meant.

    Oh, well. At least Little Miss is now aware of the dangers of mixing carbon-zinc and nickel-cadmium batteries.