The Little Woman Part 2 17 years of marriage will always have its ups and downs for any couple. We have few conflicts and most small problems we have had, could easily have been dealt with, if Hopee came with a warning label. It should contain the following info. She is slightly dyslexic. Once she decides on a course of action, she will accept no advise from me, Einstein, or MIT School Of Engineering. You can applaud her if you like for her persistence, but I dont care what you think, she is stubborn. She has no concept of the right tool for the right job. Instructions are for idiots if it comes with a diagram or pictures. She can assemble almost anything from the pictures or diagrams. If she ever in her childhood mispronounced a word, she still mispronounces it today. She speaks Hopee which is a dialect of English. If you get to know her, I will translate for a small fee. I am now fluent in Hopee. Let me elaborate on these points. If you watch animal shows and you notice a large yellow striped cat. That is a Tager not a Tiger. After correcting her the first 100 times she said this, now when we see one, I say, look at the big Tager. If you ask her for help tearing down the Empire State Building she will say sure, let me get my tool belt. She fears absolutely nothing. Her belt will have three tools. A lightweight wood handled hammer, a medium flathead screwdriver, and an 18 inch spring steel pry bar useful for removing wood paneling and trim molding, but absolutely nothing else. She is a firm believer in the principle that if you cant fix it with a hammer then you have an electrical problem. She has the screwdriver for that. If you inquire as to why she has these specific tools her answer will be, I like small tools that fit my hand and the pry bar is blue. She will start by finding a seam. She will drive the screwdriver halfway into the seam and then try to pry off a section of the building. The screwdriver will bend, not the building. She is quite the optimist and will look up to see if a large new crack has developed up to the top of the building. No visible cracks, so the now stuck screwdriver will be removed using the claw hammer and pry bar. She will drive the pry bar into the already existing hole. She is a practical woman. Why waste a perfectly good hole. She will push on the pry bar and it will flex. Then she will go to the other side and push in the other direction. It will flex the other way. She will look up again for cracks developing. The building is still there, no new cracks, and the pry bar is stuck. She will drive the bent screwdriver just below the pry bar to enlarge the hole. Check again for cracks because she now has two wedges driven into the side of the building. No cracks and now both tools are stuck. After beating the hell out of both tools with the hammer, they remain stuck and then and only then will she consider a larger tool. If you attempt to interrupt her midway through this process you also will get the dreaded left hand of silence. Arm up and palm facing you, it is not a sign of peace or greeting. In Hopee this means shut up. If she says anything, it will be, this is not working dummy, cause I am not done yet. The next project, she will show up with the same three tools only now with a new screwdriver, probably with a blue handle. A medium flathead screwdriver works well on small flat head screws or bolts. It will not turn a large bolt an inch wide even with vice grips locked onto the handle. You will create a perfect S shaped tip on the screwdriver and the bolt wont move. If you have small animals, your name starts with an S and you want to brand them, I have a whole drawer full of small branding irons. Many are bent at 45 degree angles for those hard to reach critters. RPM is how fast something turns. Torque is how much force the turning tool will exert. High RPM and High Torque with a cutting head, will cut through steel. A Dremel is a small tool with high rpm and almost no torque. It is not made to cut steel and sadly, mine was blue. I had a boxed set with every tool attachment made. I came home one day and found her trying to cut a half inch solid steel bar. She stopped work and complained to me about this POS that stopped turning soon as she applied force. I said that is because you just burned out the motor. I explained that a Dremel would not cut solid steel and told her what it could be used for. She said she understood. I purchased another Dremel and about six months later, again found her cutting a piece of steel pipe with it. It was also ruined. I was more than a little annoyed and angrily asked why she was again cutting steel. She smugly held up the quarter inch walled steel pipe and said, this is not solid steel, see the big hole in the middle. I now have another Dremel which I have had for 10 years. Blue or not, she comes no closer to it than a poisonous snake. I many times find her in the middle of some new project. She is a frugal woman so she recycles old materials. If your house should collapse on you, call Hopee. She will pick up every bit of it and dump it in our back yard. The pile will remain for years. How much lumber do you need to make two bird houses? Lizards, mice, and then copperheads will infest the pile. She will one day comment on the increase in snakes found in our yard. Here is where experience counts. If I die, the lumber pile is still there, and you marry her. Do not under any circumstances mention a correlation between the snakes and the lumber pile. Just kill the snakes. You are far less likely to get hurt. If you as the new husband encounter her in the middle of a new project here is what you should do. Do Not offer to help. In Hopee dialect an offer to help is received by her much the same as if you said, Move out of my way, thats a Mans job. Sit down and with absolutely no expression on your face, concentrate on what she is doing. I call this looking concerned. If you paid attention to what was written above you may observe her do something humorous. Laugh all you want on the inside but maintain the stone face at all costs. Crack one little smile and even with her back turned she knows. She will spin around, left hand on hip, the right hand holding the blue screwdriver will point at you and she will say, WHAT? Translation from Hopee to English. Shut your mouth. (does not matter if it was already shut). You are not helping here (I know better) Find somewhere else to sit and if youve got nothing better to do, clean up that woodpile. You may now speak and you only need two words. Yes Dear. The dyslexia affects two areas of our lives. If I ask where something is and she replies top right shelf of the pantry. I go to the pantry and look at the top left shelf. If not there, like Columbus, I explore the entire left side until I discover something. Never, ever do I look at the top right, cause it aint there. She transposes numbers. I see well at distance and she sees well up close. Good combination. Maybe not. I ask her to read small numbers for me such as Model numbers. I have whiled away many hours trying to find info on nonexistent models. Life with Hopee is many things, but never boring. If I pass away and you are interested in becoming the next Mr. Hopee, the requirements are not that tough. You dont need to be a Rocket Scientist. You dont need a large vocabulary. Come to think of it, you dont even need to speak. One 3x5 card that is laminated on one side reading Yes Dear and No Dear on the back will suffice. No need to laminate the No Dear side. You wont be using that much.
Posted on: Mon, 26 May 2014 10:26:02 +0000
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