Husband Follies Episode 14: Earning A Merit Badge in Sealing Things

I have discussed many times before about my husband’s engineering type personality – and if you haven’t read this funny Huff Post blog of mine on it – it is a MUST.

At any rate, my husband Gary, who is fun and funny most of the time, goes off on lecturing tangents and discourses quite often. I have to stop him and point out what he is doing when he does this, because he is mostly unaware that he comes off as “lecturing.” He also maintains a slight air of superiority about his way of doing things, but you can’t change human nature even with superior methodology.

So yesterday, we were having a very enjoyable day together when out of the blue, he decides to tell me what he had for lunch the previous day. He had home-made nachos from chips that were at least four months old.

Actually, I could not be less interested in what he had for lunch, (Note: hearing about food makes me hungry at inappropriate times because I am like Pavlov’s dogs) or about the chips being four months old, but I knew he was about to launch into his “Importance of Sealing Things Properly” lecture so I started paying attention so I could mock him afterwards.

Did you know that things get S-T-A-L-E if you do not properly seal them? That it ends up with wasted food? That air-tight sealing is essential for keeping chips fresh?

According to my husband, a Chip Clip does NOT do the trick either. You must take the air out, roll the bag properly until no trace of air can sneak in and then clip it. He has demonstrated this technique, needlessly I might add, numerous times for me. To no avail.

This is a pet peeve of his. Now that dad is living with us, Dad is worse than my children or me at re-sealing things so they are air-tight. We try to keep things my husband likes out of his reach in our closet pantry. We leave Dad snack ziplock bags of things to take.

My husband began to say how he was taught as a youth how to re-seal things so they stay fresh in his youth, and he doesn’t understand people who were not taught this skill. His whole family knew this skill and used it regularly. Important: This is just one of many life skills my meticulous husband was taught as a child, and his creative, much-looser-about-things and-life-in-general wife was not.

He finished his story about his lunch of chips with melted cheese with “and even the littlest broken-off chips at the bottom of the bag were as fresh as if I just opened the bag.” He was so proud of himself, he was actually beaming.

I turned to him, got close to his face and said, “MAAAAARVVVVVALOUS!”

He started laughing quite hard at my over-reaction, and I must say that’s why he puts up with me because I keep him laughing even when I am mocking him.

Still, he reiterated that it was an important life skill to know how to hermetically re-seal a bag and I should not mock it.

I replied that it was a life skill so important, that I wished I could give him a merit badge for Re-Sealing. If the boy scouts don’t have one of these merit badges, I hope someone will forward this blog and they will reconsider this as an “important life skill” enough to award one.

This made him laugh again. And then he knew: “You’re going to blog about this, aren’t you?”

YUP.

It’s hell having a blogging wife sometimes. If you didn’t know that, ask my husband. He gets to lecture, and I get to blog about it. It’s a marriage made in Heaven.