Death Chic

It’s pure laziness to put up a post of a video but this has to be the funniest thing on the internet since Maddox began filleting children’s art:

9/11 Conspiracy Theories ‘Ridiculous,’ Al Qaeda Says

Enjoy.

I very nearly killed my dear husband yesterday evening.

It started when I sent our son of to the shower before bed. The explicit purpose of this is obvious: the kid needs to get cleaned up. The implicit purpose was to give me at least fifteen minutes so that I could finish loading a sink full of dishes into our dishwasher so that I could get the baby bathed and put to bed before finally getting the rest of the laundry folded and put away.

“What is he doing in there?” my husband asked me five minutes after the boy got into the shower.

“Algebra.”Apparently that was the wrong thing to say because he commenced lecturing me about the horrors of wasting water. Nevermind that I have lived in the Central Valley most of my life and therefore spent the better part of my 32 years in this godforsaken desert being inducted into a culture that values water more highly than meth (which happens to be our biggest export, I saw it in Wikipedia). In Central California our water-efficiency practices are second only to our ability to tolerate temperatures slightly warmer than the surface of the sun.

So go tell him to get out already, fer cryin out loud! I did not say this. I just thought it. Instead, I countered the lecture with a smile, grabbed a towel to dry my hands with and offered my best “Alright honey, I’ll go get him now.”

This however, was not good enough for my husband, whose normally reserved persona had gone Earth First on me. So while I postponed dishes and baby-bathing to tell the boy to stop draining the aquifer and towel off, my husband decided to retrieve several of our most recent water bills. (Yes, we have files of ALL of our bills dating back seven years… what can I say, I married an engineer.) He proceeded to review them with me over the wails of our now-hysterical daughter.

This was a near-death experience for my husband even though he’ll never know it. While he parsed our water bill into daily and individual usage I looked about the kitchen for ways to silence him. Kitchen knife (too messy), flower pot (his head is harder than the pot), poison (too slow)…

Wasting water is sacrilege, I get it. I don’t need some Santa Cruz County expatriate who wilts when the thermometer tops sixty five degrees to remind me that it is only by the grace of irrigation that we are surrounded by miles of farmland. Of course this lecture commences when I am elbow-deep in soapy water while a very tired infant is screaming into my ear. I took a deep breath and kept my cool.

“Ok sweetheart, (WHAAAAAAAAAAAA) I will start watching our water usage more closely. (WHAAAAAAAAAAAA) Just give me a minute (WHAAAAAAAAAAA) so that I can get these dishes into the dishwasher so I can bathe our daughter.”

“He was in there twenty minutes!” my husband looked at me incredulously. You would have thought I had suggested we teach the boy to strap bombs to his chest before sending him into a synagogue.

“Yes, and he spent the first ten on the toilet!” My daughter, having heard my voice raise began screeching in earnest.

My husband stomped off, muttering something under his breath that included the words “what the”, “acting all stressed out and shit”, and “bite my head off”.

Unfortunately I knew the matter wouldn’t die there. My husband can’t let anything go, he always has to have the last word. So I tried to keep my murderous level of annoyance in check when he cruised back through the kitchen on the way to our bedroom and told me:

“You know, you really should be quieter, I can hear you putting those pots away from the kids’ rooms.”

I came very close to writing this entry from jail.