I am sick of being “The Finder” in this house, and I am not convinced that other people even try to find something before they ask me. They know I’ll hop to it, or if I don’t, I’ll have to suffer through their ineffective, lame-ass excuses for searching before I go ahead and find it anyway.
Usually in plain sight.
This weekend Tom said he couldn’t find the mortgage statement. This is annoying for several reasons. First, I was the one who wrote the mortgage checks for 11 years. Then I forgot to mail one (or 2) measly payment/s, and Tom took over.
(Not that this approach is all bad, if you really want to get out of a job, but I didn’t mind the bill-paying so much. When we were engaged he asked if I’d iron a pair of his brand new pants. I quickly proceeded to burn a hole in them and haven’t ironed a thing of his since. That worked well. But back to the mortgage statement booklet thingy…)
I knew that I hadn’t done anything with it, so after looking in my bill and stamp basket, I said finding it was now up to Tom.
You should have seen his annoyingly wide bush-baby eyes as he gave me an incredulous look and said, “What do you mean you DON’T KNOW WHERE IT IS? Aren’t you even going to look?” I shrugged and went back to my magazine.
This guy was agitated.
“What are we going to do if you really lost it?!?” he continued, pacing around the kitchen in distress.
I ventured to guess that with all the advanced degrees in the house we could probably come up with a solution, but he wasn’t digging the calm, reasoned approach. Reluctantly, I put down my Diet Dr.Pepper and looked for a bit, making a point to say, “For the record. I think you took the payment booklet and put it somewhere.”
He did not like this either.
Later that night, Tom (who had been watching tv alone on the couch) asked me where the remote was, as if I had somehow snatched it from his grasp unnoticed. By this time I was good and cranky. I may have said, “If it was up your ass you’d know.” Not sure if I should have said that, or at least in that way. I think the proper grammar might have been, “If it WERE up your ass you’d know.”
Anyway, yesterday I saw our mortgage payment on the counter all sealed, stamped and ready to be mailed. Yep, it had been in his home office all along.
Tonight at 10 when I was dying to watch “The Amazing Race” on the DVR, our son came downstairs distraught because he couldn’t find the novel he needs for tomorrow. He assured me he already had looked for it. Tom stayed firmly planted on the couch with a shrug, saying, “I looked for it earlier.”
So, I hauled my bath-robed self up and down all 5 levels of our split level and even out to the car. As the third person on this quest, I figured the book must have been tucked somewhere pretty bizarre. I did a lot of huffing and puffing and not all of it was because I’m out of shape.
Finally I found the book. On my son's nightstand.
A quiet, “Sorry Mom,” and Jake padded back off to bed.
I turned to Tom in total exasperation. “Apple. Not far from the tree. Aargh!”
He said, “Oh please. What about all the quirks the kids have that come from you??”
Trust me, this is one pissing match he does not want to get into with me. At least not right now. Girl had a lot of soda today.
