There's clean and then there's wife clean

It’s interesting how men and women have different versions of clean.
A guy could look at a room and think, ‘Yup, that looks good to me.’
A woman could look at the same room and wonder what kind of barbaric hand-to-hand battle had occurred to make such a mess.
The difference is most noticeable when it comes to spring cleaning.
For a guy, spring cleaning means moving the couch when he vacuums. For a woman it means dismantling the couch, vacuuming every square inch of it and reassembling it to better than original.
When it comes to cleaning, men and women just do things differently.
For example, a few years ago my wife tried a little experiment.
There was a pair of clean wool socks next to my side of the bed. My wife was determined to leave them until I put them away.
After a few weeks, she was astounded they were still there.
“Those socks have been there for weeks and you haven’t even noticed.”
To which I replied, “That’s where you are wrong. I did notice I just didn’t care. There’s a difference.”
I figured the socks weren’t hurting anyone, they were out of the way and if I needed them I knew where they were.
Spring cleaning for a guy means going through his closet and throwing out a couple of shirts that are too torn to wear even under a sweater and digging out the several pairs of pants that have mysteriously shrunk over the winter.
For a woman, it means hauling every single item of clothing out of the closet, trying each item on, assessing their value and comparing current fashion styles with what they have to determine what goes and what stays.
The process can take days.
“Does this still look good on me?”
“Yes it does.”
“No, I don’t think it does, I’m going to get rid of it.”
That’s what I meant to say actually, but I decided to say something else to see if you were on your game or not.
Helping in this area is not something for a man. Ladies, for future reference, call a friend to come over if you want an opinion on clothes.
Unless it is lingerie, most guys are not too interested in what you dig out of the closet.
And please, do not ask the question every man dreads, “Does this make me look fat?”
Even prehistoric cave men knew the answer to this one.
When the little woman threw on the latest in Wooly Mammoth fashion and looked at hubby while asking the infamous question, even a walnut-brained Neanderthal new enough to grunt, “No dear,” lest he get a brontosaurus bone upside the head.
The lady of the house could weigh slightly less than a Volkswagen Beetle and the universal answer would still be ‘No.’
The most frightening area of spring cleaning is the kid’s rooms.
Grown men have fled in terror as the missus’ eyes glass over with spring-cleaning fever and she seeks recruits to help with the task.
The woman will dig into the job with energy typically reserved for a piranha feeding frenzy.
Every toy car, gadget and plastic super hero has its own specific place.
I did not know this. To me, everything with wheels went in the car bin, super heroes went in another bin and whatever did not fall into those categories went in whatever bin still had room in it.
Again, for the cleaning-crazed woman of the house the job is an all day affair. For a guy it’s a two-hour task broken up by time spent playing with some of the cooler toys.
It is times like this I am thankful for weeds so I can get out of the house where all I have to worry about are bee stings and burning nettle.



Copyright 2016 Darren Handschuh

Sorry ladies, we really don't know how you feel

Ladies, if I may, I would like to offer some free relationship advice.
I would like to talk about communication between men and women - neither of whom actually speak the same language.
Men can communicate, but not in the same way you ladies can. When guys get together there is tremendous communication about important things like hockey, cars, the job and other matters men can relate to one another about.
What men rarely talk about is emotions.
"Y'know Bob, when you said my moustache looked cheesy, it made me feel all bad inside. It made me feel less attractive."
"I'm sorry Frank, I meant it as a joke. C'mere, gimme a hug. I love you, man."
I have never, and I mean ever, been a part of such a conversation and I have been a guy for as long as I can remember.
Because men rarely talk to each other about emotions and feelings and all that gooey stuff, we are not very good at talking to our spouses about those same topics.
Women talk freely about their feelings and emotions and how their emotions make them feel.
Practice makes perfect, and when it comes to talking about inner-most feelings, men are sadly out of practice, while women could make it an Olympic event.
My wife could easily make the national team on sharing feelings, while I would be relegated to the water boy.
So here is where I will impart my meagre wisdom upon the world whether they want it or not.
When it comes to talking about feelings and emotions, ladies, I implore you to talk slowly, use simple terms and most importantly of all never assume we know how you feel, because we don't - ever.
It is not that men are dumb (I know, there's lots of room for argument there), or we don't care (still more room), it's just we can't pick up subtle hints the lady in our life thinks is a blaring clue as to what is wrong.
If there is a problem, subtle hints work about as well as trying to knock out an elephant with a feather.
But if you say it in simple, straight-forward terms, the chances are much better our man brains will be able to connect with that little, tiny, minuscule part of our gray matter that controls emotions.
Yes, men (most men anyway) do have an area where they can look at and examine their emotions. It is typically buried under a pile of brain clutter consisting of information about motorcycles, hockey, movies and why beer and nachos are possibly the greatest food combination ever devised by the human race.
But once you get through all that stuff, the emotional brain does exist. Subtle hints have little chance of penetrating the man brain and getting past all the other stuff we men find interesting and important.
Not that our significant other's feelings are not important, they are, honest, really, I mean that, but over the centuries men have had to concern themselves with matters other than our emotions such as hunting for food, defending their land from attacking hoards and watching the play offs.
I doubt there is a man alive, now or through out the history of time, who has not had the line, 'Well you should know how I feel' dropped on them.
We don't know. It's that simple.
After more than two decades of marriage, I can tell when something is bothering my wife, but she has also learned after 27 years subtle hints don't work and the direct approach is most often used, thus allowing me to detect how she is feeling.
See how it works? My wife tells me how she is feeling and I recognize how she is feeling and then we have a big, happy talk about how she is feeling, I apologize for whatever it was that made her feel that way and life can get on as normal.

Copyright 2015, Darren Handschuh

An owner's manual? Never heard of it.

“I'm not sure you should get that one,” my wife said while we were looking at previously enjoyed (see second hand) treadmills at a local store that always seems to have such items.
I am not sure where they get them from, but every time I go in, there are at least three used treadmills sitting in the fitness section.
All have been 'gently' used – likely as a clothes rack or an item in the basement that conveniently takes up space.
They are in really good shape and I have purchased items from this store in the past with good results so I saw no reason why I should not replace my dead treadmill with one of these barely used ones.
Yes, I actually use my treadmill for more than a decoration or a handy dust-collecting devise.
The last one I had was a nice one, but as I was jogging along one day there was a puff of smoke and the jogging belt stopped moving.
I am not a treadmill expert, but even I know a puff of smoke is a bad thing.
It was an older treadmill, but a high-quality one so I called an expert treadmill repair guy, told him about the puff of smoke and he gave me his expert diagnosis: something broke.
Wow, thanks for the insight, Slick. 
He did manage to narrow it down to a most likely cause and said he would call me back with a repair estimate.
When he called back, he told how much the offending part would be and went into a rather lengthy explanation of how the piece of electronics burned out in the first place.
He went on about the walking board, the belt and a few other things, but by then my ADD brain had wondered off and I came back only when he said the cost to fix it - $800.
Yikers, that was double what I paid for it in the first place. I already had almost four years worth of exercise out of it, and for a second-hand treadmill I thought that was pretty good, so I decided to see if I could find another one for less than it would cost to repair this one.
That led the conversation I had with my wife in the store with the used fitness gear.
She didn't think I should buy it because it did not come with an instruction manual.
A what? Oh, right, that's one of those little books men never read on how to operate a piece of equipment.
This was not a nuclear-powered submarine or a high-tech piece of medical equipment – it was a treadmill.
You push the on button, run until you are tired, push the off button and then pat yourself on the back for exercising when you would much rather have been sitting in front of the TV with a beverage.
Ironically, I did not purchase that particular treadmill. Not because it did not have an instruction manual, but because the one next to it was a better deal.
The little woman was happy because this one came with an instruction manual which I am sure is chock full of all sorts of helpful information. And if I ever get around to reading it, I bet I will be correct.
Being a man I decided to live dangerously and try operating the machinery without consulting the manual.
Let's see – on button, check. Off button, check. The little safety thing that attaches to you and turns the machine off that no one uses, check. Increase/decrease speed button – got it. Increase/decrease incline controls – yup.
I think I got this beast figured out. I have been using the 'new' treadmill for a while now without any serious harm or danger to myself or those around me.
Maybe the next piece of equipment I buy I will actually read the operators manual – but I think we all know the answer to that.

copywrite 2014 Darren Handschuh

How do I feel? I feel like not talking.

I have never been really good at expressing myself.
Talking about 'feelings' was just something I never did growing up. It was a family tradition to keep your emotions bottled up because my parents, especially my dad, never talked about his feelings and emotions.
If he did not want to talk about something, he didn't. It was a simple as that.
Then I married my wife and was introduced to the very different side of the coin. While my family never talks about anything, her family never stops talking.
They talk about their feelings, emotions, thoughts and whatever else they can come up with – for hours on end.
They talk and talk and talk. And then they talk some more.
This was incredibly foreign to me. And the way my family dealt with things was equally foreign to my wife who would be baffled and often frustrated at the lack of communication of my kin.
But it was not just my parents, it has been going on for generations.
My grandpa came to Canada directly from Germany about two years before the Second World War started.
He could see what Hitler was doing in the country and as he was studying to become a Lutheran minister, he could not sit by and watch what the Nazi party was doing to the church, so he set out for the new country.
My grandma came from Romania and was a hard woman raised in a hard land. Neither were really in tune with their emotions and neither were really the touchy feely types so they passed that down to my father who passed it down to me.
I then ran smack into a wall of chatter when I met my wife and soon learned her family lineage took a much different and much more vocal approach to dealing with the issues of life.
They are not shy about diving into emotional oceans of any type and can't seem to let a matter rest until it has been talked to death.
This has taken many years to get used to as the Missus expected me to participate in the emotional love ins and express my deepest feelings.
Um, no. I don't want to – was always the wrong answer.
At first I was supposed to just 'share' and tell her how I was feeling, and how this made me feel and how that made me feel.
She expected all these sentiments and heart-felt thoughts to flow like water down a river.
She soon learned there was a drought in the Land of Handschuh and it took a lot of years before the rain began fall and the water started to flow.
She was determined to make me one of them – you know, the talkers.
To some degree she has succeeded. I am much more open to discussing things now that I used to be, but I am still a long way from the eloquent vocalization of her kin.
Oh well, we have only been married for 25 years. You can't rush these things.

copyright 2014, Darren Handschuh