12 posts tagged “men”

Potential father's day present

I just noticed that the ad claims the fabric absorbs "hot" perspiration. Does that mean that it won't absorb "cold" perpiration? At least it yields to every movement....

On the way to school this morning I was stopped at a red light. From one footpath a man waited for the Walk sign and from the other side of the road a dog waited. As soon as the green walk sign blinked, the man crossed from one side and the dog crossed from the other and then both went merrily on their way in opposite directions. Not sure what it says about humans or dogs, but I suspect the dog would come out on the superior side!

test driving our new car

I am exhausted.

We spent the day shopping for a new car. I have been living this day in man zone. What is it about the sight of a new car that brings out that glint in a man's eye only seen previously when he is seeking to discard his virginity?

Currently we have a large 6 cylinder "family" sedan, which I drive 95% of the time, and then only shopping, or once upon a time when I worked. We want/need to downsize. Well, we had talked about it for some time and thought we would take the car on our 7,000 klm trek to South Australia/Victoria, which we did in September. It was fun. Now, however, we don't need a large car, need to reduce costs, and of course would like to cut back on our carbon footprint etc. I also wanted a smaller car to park in those ever decreasing shopping mall car park spaces.

So off we went. I thought we were "just browsing, thanks" but apparently we actually had an appointment with a dealer rep for 10am. Mr FD told me at 9.20, and we live a good half hour from the car dealership. I was ready in 7 minutes. AND LOOKING GOOD, thank you very much! He was not ready. It was a chanc for me to remind him what a perfect wife I am. Then he got us lost on the way over, so we arrived about 25 minutes late....we left the dealership at 3pm. We drove several differents cars, even the ones that I said "in your dreams, buddy!" We negotiated, we pretended we were tough, we caved. I hit Mr FD several times, as he kept wanting to upscale and I had to keep reminding him that it was actually MY car as he has a large company car. No, I didn't need the sports pack. Or blue tooth - I don't believe in talking on the phone while driving - driving is driving, it kills. Yes, we used to have a sun/moon roof that only our son ever opened when he borrowed our car - a bald Mr FD does not need a SUN roof. I can turn my own lights on thank you...I can even turn my own wipers on. I have had all that with our present car and I am over it. A car is a money loser. The minute you drive it out of the car yard it starts to devalue. It is a tool not a status symbol to me. Like all men Mr FD thinks that the size of your car equals the size of your penis....we settled for a mid sized car. No comment. 

I will be sad to hand over the old car. We have had it just 3 years and it is a lovely car. Great to drive. Times have changed and our life has changed, so time to move on. Funny how a car starts to feel like a member of the family though. It isn't - it is tin and plastic and metal and cloth and oil. But it is still like leaving behind a trusted friend.

New car smell though! About next Friday.

Nearly one out of two women would rather give up sex for two weeks than go without the Internet, according to a survey released Monday.

Far fewer men would choose to go without sex, according to the survey of 2,119 adults carried out by the online research firm Harris Interactive and sponsored by Intel Corp., the world's biggest computer chip maker.

Forty-six percent of the women polled said they would rather go without sex for two weeks than give up access to the Internet for the same period of time, according to the survey, "Internet Reliance in Today's Economy."

Only 30 percent of men said they would rather forgo intimate relations than cyber ones.

Ninety-five percent of those surveyed said it is "very important, important or somewhat important" to be able to access the Internet.

Sixty-five percent of those surveyed rated Internet access above other discretionary spending items such as cable television subscriptions (39 percent), dining out (20 percent), shopping for clothes (18 percent) or a health club membership (10 percent).

Sixty-one percent of the women surveyed said they would rather give up watching television for two weeks than give up access to the Internet for one week.

Harris Interactive and Intel said the survey was conducted November 18-20. They did not provide a margin of error for the results.

I COMMENT NOT....

If you remember back a couple of days you may remember that I wrote that Mr FD had reversed his usual habit of loosing things on his trips away and this time had left his phone at the airport before he even left? Well, he reverted back to his usual habit in the end. Sad isn't it?

He left his credit card at a pub on the Atherton Tableland (North Queensland) where he stopped for lunch. He was almost back to Cairns when he remembered and so had to turn around and go back for it. At least he remembered. I have spent  a lot of time cancelling credit cards over the years. I have also tracked down mobile phones in taxis in distant cities. We wont go into the effort that went into getting him home from Holland when his passport, briefcase and laptop were stolen in Amsterdam. I had this vision that his plane would finally land in Brisbane and a door would open, and Mr FD thrown out onto the tarmac. He would be naked except for a little tag hung around his neck, saying Please Return to Australia.

Of course on the home front he cannot be trusted to switch the stove off, and is under severe instructions not to walk away from the coffee machine when he is making his coffee. We have already had one explosion and we are onto our second machine! I long ago bought an iron that switches off after 15 minutes of non movement. In the very first years of marriage he was banned from putting bottles of beer and the like in the freezer to chill quickly as I got tired of cleaning beer and glass fragments from the frozen peas.

We have lost count of the books he has donated to airlines, the bottles of after shave left in motel bathrooms and the underpants left under motel beds.

I put most of this down to the fact that men cannot multitask. Sorry, but it is true, I have living proof. They really can only master one thing at a time. They may do that one thing really well, but ask for a second task to go alongside and chaos ensures. For Mr FD the other task is speaking. He talks. He talks all day. He talks at night, even in his sleep as told previously. He talks over other people. He is perpetually in conversation, often with himself as I have tuned out long ago, but he rarely notices. So if he is speaking, he forgets to pay attention to all the other stuff - like credit cards, phones, luggage, coffee machines. And so the loss ensures.Or the explosion.

Luckily he has a great sense of direction and somehow manages to always find his way home. It probably helps that our house is in a totally different style to every other house in the street!  

I just noticed that the Thinking Women's group has 480 members.

On the other hand the Thinking Men's group has 5 members...

 No need to explain ....

I saw a man riding on one of those fold up bikes on the way to work this morning. It was orange. The bike, not the man. He was skin coloured, with dark clothing, if you must know. The bike was a little bigger than one of the bikes that you used to see monkeys riding in circuses. I guess it couldn’t be too big and then it wouldn’t be easy to fold and carry up to your office.  I guess it would have folded up to the size of an umbrella, if the umbrella had two wheels. I imagined it sitting next to his desk and when his secretary came in, if he had one, he would say take a seat, let me move my orange fold up bike out of the way. I did think, isn’t that a great idea. He is getting exercise, and saving the planet and has the convenience of taking his little bike with him wherever he goes. If he is way down the hall from the elevator then he can just flip out the bike and ride to the elevator if he is so inclined. Smart bit of engineering. The thing was, he looked ridiculous. Can’t dress it up any better than that. A big man on a little orange bike is a humorous sight. Can’t get around it. Sorry. Funny.

Feeling rather postal today. Someone mentioned something about Mars being in my star sign or something. Maybe that is it. I kind of think that I don’t need any anger driven planet to motivate me to the level of postal today, but there you go. I am a good advertisement for why no one should carry a gun in their handbag today. Dumbo IT has already slumped to my expectations and it is only 9.30am. I am trying to remember that I only have 3 days left before I start vacation. Hold the thought.

Day didn’t start well. I sat down at the table with my breakfast and my life saving cup of tea. At the same time I flipped open a magazine. Well, my left hand flipped open the magazine, but my right hand spilled my tea. I don’t know about you, but our dining table is usually a mine field of clutter. Daughter 1 can be counted on to have at least 3 handbags of varying size and colour on it at any given time. Winter time she has a couple of pretend scarves too. Last weekend’s newspaper, a few magazines. A couple of coathangers. My camera. Some junk mail. And a sachet of face cream out of the last cosmetic catalogue. So down went the tea. I tried to create a clear flow area before running for a cleaning cloth , but that really didn’t help. Neither did the cloth that I got – not absorbent enough. Then the stupid woven bamboo place mats wouldn’t flex enough to allow me to wipe under without removing everything and that caused the ceramic Flora the table hen ornament in the center of the table to topple over and spin like a top. Yes, a great start for the day.

I also took the garbage and recycling bins out to the footpath. The side gate that we normally exit through from the back garden is broken. Mr FD was mowing the lawn and innocent victim that he is, forgot to peg back the gate. It was very windy and I suspect the wood dry and the gate flew back and forth and splinted the post and broke out the hinge. It is now wedged into place with a large terracotta paver left over from the landscaping we did when we paid someone to create the arbor. So I had to take the bins right around the back of the house and use the other side gate. I am a hero. The gate is going to have to stay like that for a number of weeks now until we return from holidays. Unusable. Or until February when Mr FD will finally succumb to my rising nagging and do something about it. Hire someone to fix it.  The bins will stay in the front yard now because I will not take them back around to their usual resting place. Why do things like this always happen just before you are going away? Major things break. We have a security door that is becoming difficult to unlock too. I know it will fail while we are away. No a huge problem as we do have other doors, but it is the laundry door out of which we run the grey water pipe for our garden and so Daughter 1 will have to run it out the other door and through the dining room if so. Not that they will have as much laundry. See the things that I have to be anxious about? How will they cope, at 29 and 23 years of age, without my superior knowledge and guidance?

I had a dream. Daughter 2 was castigating me for clipping my toe nails in the living room. Not only that but she was most annoyed that I left the toe clippings all over the floor. The toe clippings appeared to be about 1/3 inch long. She made me collect them and suddenly I was pushing a library trolley with my toe clippings in archive boxes on the top shelf. I felt like I was in a library basement, but I was walking towards these large refrigerators, like a hospital basement morgue. I did work in a university library at a teaching hospital once, eons ago, and sometimes I would be asked to take a vital book to Prof so and so. I would scuttle off imagining that the good Prof was in the middle of brain surgery and needed to know some vital bit of information, such as whether to stitch to the left or the right,  which was contained in the book that I was racing to him. Most times I just gave the book to his very bored and desiccated secretary. The back corridors of the hospital were a rabbit warren of decay and shadow and that is how I felt as I trundled along with my toe clippings. Of course I don’t remember what happened after that. Were my toe clipping required for a toe clipping transplant. We will never know, sorry.

I must pretend to do some work. I can’t be sacked before I am made redundant!

Anti-flirt club

Alice anit-flirt

:

Forgive me, for I have sinned. I committed sins against humanity today. Well actually my sins appear to have been committed against mankind.

I obeyed the speed limit and all the road rules today, and for this I ask forgiveness.

My outrageous behaviour caused grown men to revert to childish temper tantrums. They were caused to feel the need to attach the front of their car to the back of my car, to attempt to pass me on the outside bikeway lane, to dart from lane to lane trying to overtake me and pass me in my thoughtless adherence to road safety.

I also caused their hands to honk horns and their fingers to twitch above their light switches as they fought the desire to flash me as I did 80 klms an hour in the 80 klm zone.

Please forgive me for slowing down to 40 klms in the school safety zone when I saw the 40klms per hour sign and for not dashing through the red light on the other side of the school.

I ask indulgence for continuing on my wanton manner all the way to my Basement of Discontent (office) and thus causing so many men to tap their foot continuously on their brake pedals.

I especially ask for forgiveness for taking perverse enjoyment in their discomfort and wishing that their stroke or heart attack did doth strike them sooner rather than later.

Heck, no, I am not sorry at all - and I may just do the same thing tomorrow!