Life with Michael is never dull. It's a roller-coaster ride. It wouldn't be so bad, but after all of this time, I still haven't found the "off" switch.

Things That My Husband Has Done To (Deliberately) Annoy Me:

  1. He has continued to misspell my name since 1985. It's "Deena" (pronounced Dee-nuh). He knows it is not "Deanna", but he claims he may spell it any way he chooses and says, "Your parents just didn't know how to spell it right." Which brings me to the next number:
  2. He always thinks he is right, even when he is wrong. At one time, he was actually being so stubborn that he bet me dinner that Portland International Airport couldn't possibly have more than seven flights going in and out of it a day (I honestly thought he was kidding at first. I really did.). Once I figured out he was seriously convinced of his assumption, I called the airport. PDX had, at the time, over seven HUNDRED daily flights. Dinner was excellent, thank you very much.

  3. One day while I was busily sorting through paperwork at the dining room table, the phone rang.  I casually said to my husband, "Would you grab that for me please?"  He did so, picking up the receiver and stating plainly to whomever was on the other end, "You've been grabbed!"  After a slight pause, he replied that I was home and handed the cordless phone to me.  Giggling out of shock from his comment, I tried unsuccessfully to regain my composure.  It was at that point that I realized that the person on the other end of the line was a woman whom I barely know.  She was replying to an invitation to her daughter for my daughter's upcoming birthday party.  She is also the wife of a minister.

  4. He continually tells me things I already know. He knows I already know a lot. He shouldn't have to tell me ANYTHING.

  5. He walks around the house with his coffee cup (full of coffee). I don't know why he does this. It's not like he has a destination in mind where he plans to go and sit and sip his beverage. Oh no. He just wanders aimlessly with the cup in hand and five thousand dollars worth of carpeting cringing beneath his every step. This brings me to number six:

  6. Not only does he know it bothers me when he carries his coffee cup all over the house (which is made worse by the fact that he has hand tremors which can sometimes equal the magnitude of a 7.8 quake), but when he stops somewhere, he will set his cup in the nearest windowsill and forget about it. I find coffee cups spread throughout the windowsills of the house. When I retrieve them, I find that they have left little round circles in the wood stain of the sills because he doesn't bother to carry around coasters while he carries around his coffee cup(s).

  7. He will answer my questions with another question. I might say, "What are you thinking?" and he will say, "Where do you want to go on our next trip?" I know that wasn't what he was thinking, and it throws the ball back into my side of the court, which I don't like. Of course, I would probably like it less if he answered truthfully about whatever he was thinking...but still, this does qualify as annoying.

  8. Once, while on a family vacation, the wind kept blowing out the pilot light in the travel trailer in which we were staying.  At one point, my dad was trying to relight it and I was holding the flashlights for him.  He said, "The wasps seem to be attracted to the propane."  About that time we heard a buzzing sound.  He said, "I think there is one in there now."  After more tries at lighting the pilot light and more buzzing noises, the wasp plopped out into plain sight.  Dad flicked it with his lighter and it flew into my hair.  My hair is thin and long.  It was also covered in mosquito repellent and dust, which made it feel similar to sticky artificial turf.  I was batting at the thing, which was quite angry at this point, and my dad was growling at me because I wasn't holding the flashlights still for him.  I ended up kind of throwing the flashlights at Dad and calling for Michael to come help me.  Michael's idea of helping was to tell me that he couldn't see the wasp and that it must be gone.  I told him that it wasn't gone because I could hear it buzzing near my ear.  He still kept insisting it was no longer in my hair.  I kept insisting that it was.  I'm really not one to panic over any sort of insect, but the fact that wasps can sting repeatedly and this one was quite unhappy at the moment had me a bit stressed.  I finally demanded that someone bring me a hairbrush as quickly as possible.  I cannot say for sure, but I think some expletives were involved.  After what seemed like an eternity, I was presented with two brushes from two different directions and managed to brush the wasp out onto my leg.  Fortunately, I spotted it there and flicked it to the ground where I mercilessly stepped on the wasp which Michael had insisted did not exist in the first place.  "I don't see a wasp.  It's gone, Deena!"  Yeah, right...

  9. He's chopped meat on my wooden vegetable cutting board in what I can only view as an attempt to bring disease and death to the entire family.

  10. He drives. Yes, he drives. I'm not talking about him driving too fast or without his seat belt (which both go without saying, actually) or that type of thing. I am just talking about the fact, in general, that he drives. I've contemplated how much worse it would be if he didn't drive and sat around the house all day, but it's still a close call. Which brings me to the next point:

  11. He ONLY likes to drive old cars. I don't mean "slightly used" vehicles. We're not talking about justifying not buying a new car because of immediate depreciation when it's driven off the lot. Nope. I mean that he will not consider buying anything made later than 1970. He currently drives a 1965 Ford Mustang with such sloppy steering that one cannot sneeze without veering off the road. Not to mention that the high point of veering off the road is that one might actually be able to stop by colliding with a tree, which is much more likely than ever getting the thing to stop using (gasp!) the brake pedal!

  12. He goes into the bathroom (specifically the one downstairs) and doesn't come out for hours. This is because he has rigged up the computer server in our house in the downstairs laundry room. There wasn't enough room for an additional chair, so he proceeded to place it strategically in front of the toilet (this reminds me of another point to which I will get next). He now calls the toilet "The UNIX Commander 2000". Now he can sit on the throne and play with his Linux configurations or conquer the universe with Nethack, all while I stand outside of the laundry room with my arms full of dirty clothes, knocking for him to please let me in (repeatedly).

  13. He names everything. See above example. A coffee pot is not just a coffee pot. It will become the "Caffeine Canister of Doom". Enough said.

  14. He knows I like the pillows arranged in a particular way on our bed. He, for whatever reason, cannot memorize the simple pattern and follow it. Instead, he will try to stack the pillows as high as possible against the wall. He says someday he will hit the ceiling with them, but thus far he has only made it to within about two-and-a-half feet of his goal. I don't think this is funny, but he seems to consider it an ongoing joke.

  15. He pets the cats backwards. I hate that. I can't stand to watch it. I don't know why the cats don't all run away from him in horror (come to think of it, some of them do) when he walks in the door.

  16. If I have just cleaned a glass tabletop of fingerprints, he will decide it's time to empty his pockets of change and will proceed to dump the coins onto whichever tabletop I have just cleaned. This, of course, attracts all of the children in the house, who seem to be instinctively drawn to the sound of money. What happens to a glass topped coffee table when three children and one full grown adult male surround it is not a pretty sight. I know any housewife who reads this will cringe at the mere thought.

  17. He doesn't go away. You see, he's one of those engineers with "flexible hours". He admits that he tends to take the "flexible hours" idea a little farther than it was intended, but that's his "way", or so he claims. When we were married, we made a deal. He was to be out of the house by ten and home by seven. I think it took him about three-and-a-half years to make it out the door before ten, and that was for a meeting. He says, "Morning is when you open your eyes." Many times I have told him, "I cannot miss you until you are gone." and "You cannot come home until after you leave." but he still doesn't seem to understand...

  18. He took the kids out into the backyard one fall the day after heavy rains had soaked our little section of this universe. He proceeded to put them into their soccer cleats and play soccer with them for almost two hours. What had once been a lovely, green plot of grass in our backyard became a slimy, gooey, mud hole. This was late October. I threw twenty-five dollars worth of grass seed down and the birds just ate it for winter food. The following spring I had only a weed garden where once that lawn flourished.

  19. He once dressed my favorite stuffed bear in my lingerie. I don't even want to know...

  20. This same bear, he placed on the bed with a pair of my nylons over its head, a small pot between its legs, and a note which read: "Put all of the honey into the pot and nobody gets hurt."

  21. Again, the bear (Getting the stuffed bear torture idea?)...was missing. Where did I find the bear? In the freezer! He later commented that he should have soaked the bear in water before putting it in the freezer... *sigh*

  22. He eats a LOT. I'm not talking the amount the average male consumes. Michael stuns people with the amount of food he eats. Once he was in a restaurant and ordered three main courses. The waitress went back to tell the people working in the kitchen about him. It so happened that a friend of one of my friends from high school worked there too. I found out about this incident the long way around, by the way.

  23. He doesn't gain any weight even though he consumes two-and-a-half times his body weight in food everyday. This is very disturbing to me as a female. I just look at the food he eats and my waistline expands. I swear, he must have worms or something...

  24. He never knows the date. Once he happened to know the year (this was around March, if I recall correctly). It was in the year 2000. He was quoted saying this, "I only know the year because they made such a big deal about it at the very beginning."

  25. He never has a clue as to the time. He doesn't wear a watch. He just doesn't care. The word "late" doesn't mean anything to him. It's just something that uptight people dreamt up to make their lives more miserable.

  26. Once he offered to paint my toenails and put electric blue "Cobra racing stripes" down the middle of each one.

  27. One day, Michael and I were making our bed.  I noticed he wasn't being too terribly careful about the process and asked, "Did you just tuck in the dust ruffle?"  He replied, "Yes, I did, as a good Mech Warrior should!" (Note: A dust ruffle is not supposed to be tucked in!)

  28. Michael speaks Czech. I think it is a very romantic sounding language, and at times I will ask him to speak to me in Czech. It's very sexy. I asked him to do so on one particular occasion. He said, "Ty mas cerveny nos." This is where I made my mistake. I swooned and THEN I asked him what he had said. The translation turns out to be: You have a red nose.

  29. I wanted to get a third cat.  He said that I could get another one only if he got to name it.  His first suggestion was "Harbinger of Death Cat".  I still had veto rights, thank goodness.  His second idea was "The Headless Kitty".  Now you see why the name "Dodo Dumpybug" didn't sound all that bad when it rolled around.

  30. He plays the same computer game for extended periods of time.  I am not talking about playing for six hours at one sitting (though that will definitely have to come up soon under another number), but I mean that he will glob onto one game and play it for years.  Never mind that the graphics are so outdated that he has to reset the monitor to 256 colors everytime that he plays.  Nevermind that he BEAT the game in the first six hour session in which he played it five years ago.  I once asked him why he plays the same games over and over.  He said that he might (note the use of the word MIGHT) find another, even better way in which to win the game.  Puh-lease...

  31. Two words - Taco Bell.  If you insist that I go on, might I just hint at the bodily function aftermath to be experienced after a human being consumes a ten-pack of soft tacos and a large order of Mexi-Nuggets on the side.  Please do not make me elaborate.  My nostrils are burning at the thought.

  32. Dressing our young daughter.  He is not allowed to do this anymore.  One has never seen the likes of such fashion horrors.  Here's an example:  Red, white and blue polka-dotted shirt with large yellow buttons.  Black tights.  Green and red Santa Claus socks with "Ho ho ho" written in white.  In June.  Black Nike sandals.  Hair that appears to have never been touched by a hairbrush.  Thank goodness the older two children dress themselves.

  33. I am a woman.  He is a man.  I am always cold.  He is always hot.  I have told him that when he doesn't feel like he needs the comforter or the blanket or the sheet anymore, he is more than welcome to pass them to my side of the bed.  Does he do this?  No.  He takes the whole kit and kaboodle and throws them off his side of the bed, where I cannot reach them.  If I suddenly stop adding to this page, it means I have either died of hypothermia or, less dramatically, my digits have just had to be amputated from the prolonged effects of frost bite.

  34. Michael used to throw our youngest daughter in the air.  This bothered me a lot.  It bothered me even more when he didn't catch her once and she fell on her head.  Fortunately, this only happened once.  If he ever tried it again, I told him that was going to drop him on his head, repeatedly.  Yep, I was.

  35. Michael used to build fires in the fireplace.  This might be viewed by some as romantic and sweet.  However, with Michael it was just plain dangerous.  Once he closed the glass enclosure and it blew up because he'd built too big of a fire.  Fortunately there was nobody in the room at the time of the explosion.  Another time, he was charged his entire cleaning deposit plus several hundred dollars because he had built a fire so big that it had caused smoke damage to the whole (vaulted ceiling) wall of his apartment.  Upon returning one night to our current home, I found the entire house filled with smoke.  He'd had to remove the battery from the smoke detector to stop it from going off.  The children reported to me, "This isn't bad, Mom!  You should have seen it earlier before he started all of the fans and opened all of the windows!"  This episode caused a permanent domelike shape of smoke remnants to be displayed along the outside of our upstairs fireplace.  It actually melted portions of the brass plated fireplace enclosure.  It also ensured that Michael permanently lost fire-building privileges.

  36. All women like to be complimented on certain types of changes - new make-up, a new hairstyle, etc.  One day, as Michael was heading off to work, he looked at me, as if he were noticing something.  Then he said, proudly, "You cut your hair this morning!"  Confused, I said, "No, I didn't."  Then it hit me.  I said, "You saw the scissors in the main bathroom, and some hair in that sink, didn't you?  I cut Justeena's bangs this morning."  Moral:  If you want to impress a woman with your powers of observation, at least make sure there is something to observe in the first place.

  37. Michael once changed the oil in my lawnmower.  He happily boasted, "You can mow the lawn again, now.  It's all ready."  I then found out he had left the lawnmower up on saw horses in the garage, and I had to figure out how to get it down by myself while he was at work (this isn't the really annoying part, by the way).  Once I got it down and around back, I tried to start it.  In vain.  For a long time.  Finally, exhausted, I called him at work.  I said, "Is there something I need to know about how to start the mower now that you have finally changed the oil?"  He said, "Um.  Oh yeah.  I bet I didn't plug in the spark plug in the front..."

  38. When the two oldest children were very young, Michael was bouncing up and down with them in the dining room while I was trying to prepare dinner.  It was shaking the entire house.  I finally said, "You are going to go through the floor if you don't stop that, Michael."  This, apparently, caused him to decide to move into the bonus room, which had a concrete pad for a floor.  It didn't, however, have a vaulted ceiling.  The last thing I heard was, "Hey kids!  Can you do this?" before I heard the crunch of the sheetrock as his head shot through it, leaving a head-sized hole in the ceiling.

  39. Sometimes Michael sings.  He shouldn't.  He really just plain doesn't know how.  The fact that he cannot find the right notes is made even worse by the fact that he doesn't remember the lyrics to ANY song.  The closest I have ever heard him come to making it through an entire song is when he was singing "Happy Birthday To You".

  40. Michael doesn't worry about what other people think.  Once, while doing a line dance called the Electric Slide, he ripped his jeans.  He proceeded to tell everyone in the entire establishment, repeatedly, that he had ripped his pants.  Other members of our group would try to speak to one another throughout the evening, but were unable to do so because Michael kept shouting, "I ripped my pants!"

  41. He nicknamed my truck the "Fruck" (which is short for the f'ing truck).  Try explaining to strangers why your four-year-old refers to your vehicle as "Fruck".  I got him back though.  His Mustang spends so much time in our garage that I call it the "Freck" (short for the f'ing wreck).  Now we have Freck and Fruck...

  42. Everything is "super".  All names somehow acquire the prefix "Super".  For example, I became his "Super-wife", his "Super-hon", his "Super-hottie" and his "Super-Dean-Dean".  My Suburban became the "Super-Fruck".  His underwear became his "Super..."...oh, nevermind.

  43. Michael once paid a waiter twenty dollars to "sing and light things on fire", but he complained when I wanted to spend a few dollars to buy tent stakes for a hundred and fifty dollar tent which I had purchased (which, for some unexplained reason, didn't come with stakes).  It wasn't the original tent purchase that bothered him, mind you.  It was the extra few bucks to make the tent functional which he opposed.

  44. Michael once wanted to swap out the engine in his '65 Mustang.  I said, "We need to buy another car for you in the meantime."  He said, "No, we don't."  I said, "How are we going to get by for a month or two without another car?"  He said, "It will take four days."  I said, "Sure."  He said, "No, I promise.  Four days."  Four weeks and two days later, his Mustang finally started up again.

  45. Michael doesn't drink beer.  However, I seem to have a gift for winning door prizes whenever we go out for dinner and dancing.  Generally, these "prizes" are T-shirts displaying the beer of choice for that particular evening for the establishment we were visiting.  Michael likes to wear these T-shirts to work, to special meetings with Xerox CEOs, to meet the United States President...

  46. Michael once awakened screaming due to a cramp in his leg.  I wanted to try to help him and said, "Which leg?"  He yelled, "MY leg!  I said,  "Honey, let me help you.  Which leg?"  He, again, just screamed, "MY leg!"

  47. Michael watches the History channel a lot.  I will walk into the room and say, "Would you mind turning off the World War Two channel and coming to help me?"  He will say, "I can't!  I want to see how the war ends!"

  48. He assigned me all kinds of email aliases without bothering to clear them with me first.  I can receive mail addressed to everything from the politically incorrect (not to mention technically incorrect) "drunken-midget" to "xena-goddess-of-fire".  Thanks, Dear.

  49. We attended a posh gathering at a local country club.  It was an awards ceremony for those employees of Xerox who had received patents and trade secret recognition over the course of several years.  On the invitation, ties were suggested and it was explicitly stated that no denim was to be worn.  My husband donned his black Lee jeans, defending his choice by saying, "At least they're not blue."  As we approached the area where the dinner and ceremony were to take place, he pulled out his tie and hooked it through his belt loop on the left-hand side of his jeans.  He said, "They suggested that I wear a tie, but they didn't say that it had to be around my neck."  When his name was called to receive his award, his tie flew out behind him like a tail as he approached the stage.  Apparently news of this rebellious move made it through the company quickly.  The next day a woman who wasn't even at the banquet commented, saying, "I heard you were bad..."

  50. One day I asked Michael to help me make the bed.  Unprovoked, he belted out at the top of his lungs, "I shall help you!  For I am Bed Man!"  I ignored him, choosing only to roll my eyes.  He then proceeded to tell me throughout the bed making procedure that I just had "pillow envy".
I will be updating this page often, as I have time.
I have come nowhere near completing it.
It's a "perpetually growing" type page, for which
I am sure I am going to have to buy a
bigger hard drive (this one is only 60 GB, you know...)

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© Copyright - 2001 Deena D. Stevens.  All rights reserved.
Don't copy this stuff (though I'm not sure why anyone would want to), blah..lawyers..blah, blah..etc.