Tag: The War Between Men and Women

Don’t You Let Them Clarence, Don’t You Let Them!

photog Current Events , ,

Men and women are fundamentally different.  We interact with the world and each other in different ways.  We have different takes on almost everything.  Probably God will have to provide two different versions of heaven; one for men and one for women.  But the confusing aspect is how men and women (for example a husband and wife) will get to see each other in the afterlife.  Will we be separated for eternity?  That seems odd.  And yet neither group would think it was in heaven if heaven corresponded to what the opposite sex imagined for heaven.

For instance, for Camera Girl, heaven would be the place where I would constantly admit that she had been right about some piece of advice or other.  And for me heaven would be that place where she anticipated all of my requests ahead of time and sandwiches and coffee were endlessly available.  And she never questioned my infallible judgement.

It’s a seeming paradox.

But on reflection I remember that God is male so I have to assume that in the afterlife women will be given the grace to recognize that they’ve been wrong all along and now feel celestial joy in finally appreciating the truth and gratitude toward men for putting up with their illogical thinking all of these millennia.

There is an old movie with William Powell called “Life with Father.”  It takes place in 1880s New York City and Powell is Clarnece Day Senior, a prosperous stock broker and the patriarch of a family of four sons.  His wife Vinny is a cheerful, well-meaning woman whose lack of financial ability drives Clarence to distraction whenever he tries to keep control over the household budget.

Toward the end of the movie, Clarence is attempting to explain women to his son Clarence Junior who is eighteen.  He says, “Clarence understanding women is very difficult.  They think …  No, I’m wrong already.  They don’t think at all.  What they do is get stirred up!  And they get stirred up about almost anything.  But don’t you let them try to confuse you.  Don’t you let them.”

And Clarence Day Senior was entirely correct.  They get stirred up.  And when they do logic and normalcy go out the window.  Of course, in 1880 women were forty years away from getting the vote and the possibility of good governance and sanity were still a possibility.

I often think about who these male morons were who voluntarily voted for women to get the franchise.  Exactly how stupid must they have been?  I assume they were communists of one stripe or another.  But even communists couldn’t have wanted the chaos and confusion that female voting would surely bring.  But here we are.

Being an optimist, I still look forward to the day when an amendment to reverse women’s suffrage passes.  After all it goes hand in hand with the amendment for reversing prohibition.  That was after people saw how much damage it had done and the damage done by prohibition pales in comparison to what women voting has done.  Think of all the awful candidates, almost exclusively Democrats have been elected because women got stirred up.  Women voting was almost responsible for electing Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris to the presidency.  And surely even women can see how disastrous those administrations would have been.

But as optimistic as I am I fear it will take some really catastrophic result of woman voting to convince them to voluntarily give up the vote.  So, it is a somber optimism.  But that’s the way of the world.  We must be patient.

It Couldn’t Hurt

photog Current Events, Trump , , ,

The unthinkable has occurred.  Camera Girl has joined the resistance.  Somehow, she’s discovered the 4B Movement.  I don’t know how it happened.  I keep her inside a hermetic bubble, into which no outside influence is allowed.  Like a Svengali I mold her every thought and gaslight her entire notion of what’s going on in the world.  But somehow, it’s happened.  She has declared herself part of the 4B; No barbecue, burger, brisket or bologna.  And as a further sign of her radicalized state of mind she’s added another 4B’s; no breakfast, bagel. bialy or bacon.  Shades of Lysistrata!

A complete food strike.  It’s diabolical.  And there’s nothing I can do.  I don’t know how to buy or cook food.  I’m not even sure what I currently eat.  The dishes she makes for me are complex and confusing.  If left to my own devices I’ll probably wander through the supermarket buying the easily identifiable items like bananas and seltzer.  It looks pretty bleak for me.  I tried to placate her.  I told her I’d stop watching YouTube videos of Kamala voters screaming and crying.  I told her I’d let her watch NCIS and other girly soap operas.  But she just ignored me.  Her tactic is to eat her meals before I get up in the morning.  When I get up at 10:30 am I can still smell the coffee and bagels wafting around the dining room but all that’s left is an empty coffee mug and some everything-bagel crumbs on a plate in the sink.

I can’t figure out where she’s hiding the food.  I suspect it might be in the kitchen cabinets but because of the illogical way she arranges things I’ve never been able to find anything but trash bags and window cleaner in those places, so what’s the use.  In desperation I’ve been sneaking out to the edge of the swamp looking for the crumbs and crusts that Camera Girl leaves at the edge of the water for Moe the Crow.  I’ll give him this, he puts up a pretty stiff fight for his food.  But I’m just too strong for him.  I will have to get there a little earlier though.  The bread gets very soggy from the ground water almost immediately.

I’m thinking of getting some outside help.  I’m going to write a letter to President-elect Trump and see if he has any advice for me.  I mean he’s always fighting with “nasty women” and he’s managed pretty well for himself.  Well, he did get sued by that harpy who claims he raped her in Bloomingdales.  And he is on his third marriage.  And he did have that Million-Woman March against him back in 2017.  But probably all of those experiences have made him wiser about women and anyway I feel he owes me after I stuck up for him with Camera Girl and all the other women who over the years have argued with me about what a terrible man he is.  Surely that wisdom can do me some good in my present predicament.  The “art of the deal” must have a chapter on food strikes.

Well, if all else fails. I will fall back on what every man has as his birthright; the male brain.  As Shakespeare very beautifully expressed it in Hamlet, “What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason.”  That’s right, how noble in reason.  We are the thinking animal and we can think our way out of any crisis.  I will buy food myself and by trial and error I will figure out how to cook it.  I can write the equations for the heat transfer of an electrical resistance stove top.  I can figure out the amount of time it takes for a quart of water to reach its boiling point at a particular power setting.  I know how the proteins in animal muscle become denatured at high temperature.  Fire is the invention of some male ancestor of my species and I can master its application to any technology.  As Prometheus is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!

Maybe if I tell her how nice her hair looks lately, she’ll make me some coffee and a pumpernickel bagel.  It couldn’t hurt.

Eureka

photog Current Events, Humor, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner , , ,

After yesterday’s epic whine about the vicissitudes of home ownership I looked around for some kind of salve for my male ego.  And fate or something provided me with the opportunity to redeem myself.  A clogged bathtub drain.  For the last few weeks, the drain in our tub has been getting slower and slower.  Lately I’ve left the plunger near the tub and after every shower I played a game of trying to get it to break loose.  All I achieved was to dredge up a goodly amount of black flakes that were some kind of fossilized soap scum.  And all that achieved was to waste ten or fifteen minutes while I cleaned up the tub of this disgusting residue.

But today I had had enough.  I gathered my equipment:

  • Screwdrivers … check
  • Needle nose pliers … check
  • Accordion Toilet Plunger with Large Bellows for Extra Powerful Plunge, Black … check
  • Snake auger … check
  • Electric drill … check
  • Safety glasses … check
  • Disposable rubber gloves … check

All that was left was to let Camera Girl see that I was preparing for battle and even though I would be expending tens of thousands of dollars to have someone competent repair my home, at least I was capable of saving the cost of a plumber to get my bathtub back in good operating condition.

I solemnly explained to her how I would be removing the plunger from the trip-lever stopper to properly auger the drain line.  I don’t think it would be possible for me to overstate the intensity of contempt her look communicated to me.  Well, that’s the problem with women.  They don’t understand or appreciate technical genius.

So, I removed the drain filter and tried pulling out hair with the pliers.  Nada.  Then just for old time’s sake I put six inches of water in the tub and tried the “Accordion Toilet Plunger with Large Bellows for Extra Powerful Plunge, Black.”  I pushed down on the stupid thing once and the tub drained in seconds.  And of course, Camera Girl walked in just as it emptied and gave me the same look.  She picked up the plunger and asked, “How much did you pay for this?”  I said, “ten bucks.”  “And this?” (pointing at the auger).  “Sixty dollars.”  She shook her head and walked away.  Women don’t understand about contingency planning.  Very short-sighted.

Well, as pathetic as my victory was, it has transformed my attitude.  We’re definitely on the upswing.  And after she took a shower, she readily admitted that a working bathtub drain is not a commodity to look down your nose at.  And there’s no telling what I might do next.

Who knows, maybe I’ll tell my builder to stop all work, figure what I owe him so far and take over the job myself.  I mean how long could it take me to shovel ten thousand pounds of gravel?  And how hard can it be to jack up a building off its foundation?  And who needs a truck to pour concrete anyway?  What was it Archimedes said?  “Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I’ll move the Earth.”  Well, some of my ancestors came from Sicily.  Maybe I’m related to Archimedes (at least by marriage!).  Well, baby steps.  I think I’ll shock Camera Girl and brew my own pot of coffee.  How hard could it be?

Don’t Let Them See You Sweat

photog Current Events, Reclaiming the Family , ,

There are all kinds of men in this world.  They vary in temperament, intelligence, philosophy, habits, health and any number of other traits.  And likewise with women.  They come in infinite variety.  Most notably of late is their level of allegiance to the feminist project.  So, they run the gamut from strident man-hating lesbians and cat ladies all the way to the maternal heroine of the Victorian novel who lives to help her children and dotes on her husband.

But one thing I’ve noticed about all women.  When the bottom drops out of the world and the Huns are at the gate even the most misandric harpy that ever railed against the patriarchy runs around in circles screaming for the cavalry to arrive.  And just to be specific they expect the cavalry to be steeped in testosterone and bearing Y-chromosomes.

The best example of this that I can remember was directly after September 11th 2001.  Maureen Dowd was and is a journalist for the New York Times and she has spent decades banging the drum for feminist complaints about men.  Her contempt for men in general and conservatives in particular was limitless.  But then the Towers were knocked down in September and suddenly policemen, firemen and soldiers were the heroes she wanted to write about.  Suddenly she realized that the only thing standing between her and the primitive world that is held in check by modernity is a man with a gun.  Of course, eventually she calmed down and realized that men with guns tend not to be feminists.  And she returned to her default contempt.  But for as long as she was scared, she wanted to be comforted by the knowledge that the patriarchy was keeping her safe.

And that impulse to look to the man with a gun is programmed into her DNA.  She won’t admit it because it makes her seem like someone who can’t push aside sex-linked traits as if they were just “social constructs.”  And it’s more than just protection from the Hun.  Whatever the catastrophe, when the bottom drops out a woman looks to her man to make things whole again.  And that’s all women.  The good ones are grateful.  The dishonest ones pretend they could have done it on their own.  They may even pretend they did.

But when Armageddon arrives, and you’re busy trying to figure out how to save the day, it’s good to remember that the women folk often need some kind of sign from you that you can save the day.  And here the female psyche should be taken into consideration.  Because even if there’s nothing that you can think of to do the best strategy is to appear to be doing something constructive.  I am convinced that a fretful woman who sees her man engaged in physical activity with tools of whatever kind; mechanical, diagnostic or even just a wheelbarrow will take solace from the idea that he is taking the lead and solving the problem.  And it doesn’t hurt if he assigns her some role to play in the “brilliant plan” that he is already putting into motion.

Camera Girl, even Camera Girl is not immune from this behavior.  She that has shared my life for almost half a century; knows me right down to my toes.  And she knows just how lazy and lethargic I am by nature.  But when I can see that something serious has scared her, then I know it’s time for me to do my best Superman impression and let her know that I have a way to make everything whole again.  Of course, most times I don’t and maybe I’m kind of scared myself.  But admitting that is a big mistake.  Morale is a very important part of life and if you let the family morale crack, things get even tougher.

So that’s my insight.  I recently saw an example of this that reminded me of this dynamic.  I thought it might be useful information for others.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 07MAR2024 – International Women’s Day

photog Chemist, Current Events, Guest Contributors , ,

Friday is International Women’s Day.

My company has asked us all to:
1) Be Inclusive.
2) Wear Purple. (Apparently the color of IWD. It is said to signify justice, dignity and honor.)
3) Write appreciation cards to our female coworkers.
4) Post “Heart hands pictures”

Now, I am all for recognizing people who do good work, but why limit it to women?
In fact, point three seems to be in direct conflict with point one above.

As for point 4, I am not a teenaged girl.

Update

(Editorial Comment)

Chemist, thank you bringing this important cultural occasion to our attention.  But some of these suggestions are problematic.  Purple is a problem for me.  Since I’m never sure if something is purple or blue I just call it “other blue.”  So maybe they can allow me to wear blue?  Of course sometimes something that looks red to me turns out to be purple which is why I sometimes call it “other red”  Would it be alright if I could also wear red?

I don’t think I should write appreciation cards to women.  I don’t think Camera Girl would like that very much.  Also I’m afraid if I got too specific about what I appreciate about them it could be taken the wrong way.  In fact I’m pretty sure there wouldn’t be a right way to take it.

As far as being inclusive can I include men in the International Women’s Day?  I’d like to appreciate Charlton Heston and Dwight D Eisenhower.  I don’t think either of them get enough appreciation for their understated efforts.  Heston’s work in Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green is somewhat underrated.  And Eisenhower did get things going on the whole interstate highway thing which I really appreciate when I cross state lines.  So can I include these two men?

Ah, heart hands!  You really shouldn’t miss out on that.  That really looks like fun.

So let’s all try to embrace International Women’s Day.  Although be careful embracing women.  I know Camera Girl frowns on me embracing many women either international or domestic.  She’s made this very clear.

Men and Women – The Fish Pond Rorschach Test

photog Current Events, OCF, Reclaiming the Family , ,

I have known Camera Girl for about forty-eight years.  We met on a beach while each of us was skipping out on our respective high schools.  Physical attraction was the initial force that brought us together but over the years, we have interacted to the point where, we know each other as well as a man and a woman possibly can.  And yet our motivations, methods and objectives are, if anything, even closer to being diametrically opposed now than they were at the beginning.

I like to think that I base my plans on a somewhat analytical approach to accomplishing my objectives.  So, let’s say Camera Girl tells me that she wants a fish pond.  Before committing to such a project, I would first look at the pros and cons of such a goal.  I would ask my client what are the objectives?  How many fish and what type are desired?  What’s the budget for construction and maintenance?

Then I would look at the various options for constructing the pond.  Should it be a liner or a solid shell?  Should I build it or hire a contractor?  Where should it be set up with respect to the sun?  What safety considerations need to be weighed?  When does it need to be completed by?  What additional items (like a bench or some plants) are also required?  What modifications will need to be made to the property (power line, water line) to accommodate the pond?  And finally, how will the pond be impacted on by the surrounding wildlife?

Camera Girl, on the other hand, cleans out an old muck bucket that she has lying round the yard, buys a dozen “shiners” at PetSmart and tells me she wants me to buy a “solar” fountain on Amazon.com for $12.98.

I find this very disconcerting.  I explain to her that the “shiners” will probably die in the bucket over the course of the summer, the fountain is a piece of crappy plastic that will probably stop working after a few weeks and she’ll have to replace fish and water every few weeks.

This perturbs her not the least.  Our granddaughter will be coming over tomorrow and they like looking at the fish in the bucket for a few minutes every day.  And none of my arguments address this goal.

For she knows that if I were to undertake this epic project by the method that I favor, it would involve weeks of planning and months of installation.  Just digging the hole would take a week or two.  So, from her point of view my method has no upside.  A pond that was finished in September is worse than no pond at all.  The weeks when our granddaughter would be without the fish to interact with would be an epic failure.  Because by September she’ll be entering kindergarten and no longer around to enjoy the mega-pond that I would create.

So, shaking my head and grumbling under my breath I look up this magnificent “fountain” and find a plethora of companies selling this same crappy plastic fountain and select the one that will deliver it for a total of $7.53.  This is my consolation.  I paid five bucks less for a piece of junk that probably won’t last through June.

But when all is said and done.  She has logic on her side.  That muck bucket pond is almost an optimized solution to the mission.  A little girl will sprinkle some fish food into it and watch the fish come up to get it.  And even if the fountain stops working and even if the racoons and the herons eat all of the fish on a weekly basis it will have served its purpose.

But my pond would be much better.

14APR2022 – OCF Update-Camera Girl Finally Frees the Slaves

photog Current Events, photog's Corner , , ,
Winter, Sony A7 III, Voigtlander 10mm f\5.6 lens, 22APR2021 – Photo of the Day

Today was a day of toil.  About a week ago Camera Girl was  in her garden, supposedly turning the soil with a pitchfork.  I say supposedly because after ten or fifteen minutes of effort the pitchfork was still stuck in the ground and the ground was having the best of the argument.

Finally she gave up and complained bitterly of her fate.  Being the gentlemanly parfait knight that I am, I mocked her.  I said, “Sure women are always saying how they can do anything a man can but apparently that doesn’t apply to pitchforks.”  She sot me a look that seemed to imply something about the quality of that night’s dinner.  So I displayed magnanimity.  I said, “You poor weak creature, I will turn the soil for you, only not today.

Well, apparently “not today” was today.  So I went out to the west field and starting singing road gang spirituals.  And to be honest, between the matted weed roots and the stupid liner that someone put in the soil was incredibly tough and heavy to turn.  But three hours of working like a hired field hand got it done.  About half way through it occurred to me that I could have rented a rototiller.  But by the end I was so satisfied with myself that it was worth it.  I showed up afterward in the kitchen drenched in sweat and covered with dirt but extremely pleased with myself.

I preened in front of Camera Girl and lectured on the difference between man’s work and woman’s work.  I mentioned that I left some clean up of weeds and liner next to the garden.  And that she should get that squared away as soon as possible.  She mumbled something under her breath but I pretended not to hear her.  Then I headed up for a well deserved shower.

Remarkably shortly after i finished working the skies opened up and it poured to beat the band.  Probably some of the seedling I put in this week may be washed away.  But some of them will make it and I ‘ve got more for next week too.  As long as we don’t have a repeat of last spring when it rained for forty days and forty nights, things will be fine in the garden.

This year we intend to grow a lot of butternut squash because Camera girl makes a great chicken soup with it.  And we’ll grow lots of zucchini and eggplant.  This year we’ll put in some thorn-less raspberries and I might move my blueberry bushes to make it easier to protect them from the birds.  Most years they get more than I do.  And I have to remember to put out the egg cases that the praying mantis laid over the winter.   I sure don’t want them hatching in the house.

So it was a work day but I’ll be sure to find something to be outraged about in the news when I check it out.  Enjoy your Thursday night.

Reclaiming the Family – Part 9 – Starting a Dialog Between Men and Women

photog Current Events, Reclaiming the Family , , ,

I poke an enormous amount of fun at Camera Girl.  I accuse her of all kinds of sins against logic.  But she is an excellent wife, mother and grandmother.  Echoing Proverbs 31:10, “Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.”  Now, I would have gone with star sapphires but that’s a personal choice.  A good wife and mother is the foundation of proper human existence.

But that foundation is crumbling.  Modern life has sought to trivialize the important of a woman raising a family.  Instead, feminism has substituted the working woman as the paradigm that young women should strive to emulate.  If motherhood is discussed it’s always in the vein of how it can be minimized.  It should be pushed off into middle age and its impact mitigated through daycare from birth and television and social media as babysitters.  The result is plummeting birth rates and latchkey children who grow up addicted to their phones.  And worse, now the substitute mothers in our children’s classrooms are brainwashing, mutilating and sterilizing our children to put an end to human life altogether.  It’s hard to imagine anything worse than where we are.

So, how do we get out of this trap?  I can only think that it will require an overt organizing of men and women to build a new foundation for relations between the sexes.  Nothing short of this will solve the problem.  In fact, if something like this doesn’t emerge, I’ll take that as a sign that our civilization is doomed.  We’ll have to wait for someone outside of Western Civilization to take the lead in preserving the human race.

I can’t claim that I’ve worked out all the details of what such an organization would be like.  I’m not even sure how it would begin its work.  I notice that of late there have been a few more women right-wing commentators advocating for traditional female roles.  The name that comes to mind at the moment is Peachy Keenan over at the American Mind, the on-line site of the Claremont Institute.  Maybe it would be possible for a panel of female pundits to engage the female audience on the Right.  And just as important it’s necessary to engage the other side of the equation.  A cross section of men on the Right need to get involved in the discussion.

Initially I don’t envision any quick solutions to these problems.  Society is pushing everything in the wrong direction as hard as it can.  Just getting young men and women in the same room talking about what is wrong with the current set-up would be a distinct improvement.  In fact, I think the opportunity for the young on the Right to mingle socially is part of the solution.  We need to re-socialize people.  They need to get off their phones and meet each other face to face.

As I said, unless this gets addressed in an organized fashion, we’re through.  For that reason, this needs to be pushed at the highest level.  The Republican Party should be addressing this at the national level.  It should be a plank of their platform.  The churches, any of them that aren’t already just arms of the trans-alliance for mutilating children, should be the focuses for this at the local level.  Every parish of the Catholic Church should have a committee of mothers who spend their time thinking of ways to encourage their sons and daughters to have children and raise them themselves.

I’ll say this a third time.  If we don’t get ourselves out of this feminist destruction of the family our civilization will be done.  And it should be.  A society that destroys the family has eliminated the main source of human happiness on this planet deserves to disappear.

Geometry and the War Between the Sexes

photog Current Events, photog's Corner ,

On Mondays Camera Girl is in charge of Princess Sack of Potatoes.  Which makes me her errand boy for anything that needs doing.  So today she wanted me to get the memory card from the game camera so she could show her protégé what kind of animals had eaten the food she stole from me.  Now, sure, the scraps she gives the wild beasts living in the forest are probably not premium protein anymore.  Bits of chicken fat and skin and whatever doesn’t end up on the menu for me probably shouldn’t arouse my sense of outrage.  But in these days of skyrocketing food prices, I’m acutely aware of threats to my survival.

But I digress.  I brought the memory card in and popped it in the card reader slot on my laptop and reviewed the numerous files.  But what we discovered was that Camera Girl had miscalculated the line of sight of the camera.  She threw her largesse too close to the camera’s location and thus the viewpoint was mostly above the location of the food.  Therefore, mostly what we saw were the animals before and after they were feeding and typically at the edge of the photo and moving away from the camera.

I respectfully brought this situation to Camera Girl’s attention.  But she said she did what I told her to do.  I carefully and calmly reminded her that I showed her the line where the camera would see the action but assumed she wouldn’t put the food right below the camera because it was elevated from the ground.  She told me what she thought about my assumption using a popular breakdown of the spelling of ass-u-me.

I thought this distinctly unfair.  But what I decided was to provide her with a clear target.  I said, “Do you see the pole banged into the ground?”  She said yes.  I continued, “Do you see the rainwater drain that ends near the pole?”  Again, she said yes.  I finished, “The line segment formed by the pole on one end and the end of the drain pipe as the other endpoint is the acceptable area to put the food.  Do you follow me?”  She said no.  I slowly and calmly said, “Huh?”  She said, “That’s not clear.  How will I know if it’s on that line?”

I remained calm.  I could see I was dealing with a non-Euclidean geometer and she was trying to involve me in a topological debate.  Therefore, I changed tack.  “Imagine the two points I said were the endpoints.  Instead think of them as two opposite points on the circumference of a circle.  In your mind envision a circle with those two points on the circumference.  Anyplace inside that circle will be an acceptable target for your animal slop.”  She shook her head and walked away.

So why did I write about this?  Well, I think it represents a microcosm of the male/female dichotomy.  Men use logical simplifications to model the world.  We like reasoning our way through problems.  Women want simple concrete rules to follow.  They don’t want to discuss theory.  At least that is the way women used to be.  Nowadays I’m not sure what they are.  Maybe they’ve become like men.

But even if they’ve adopted some of the practices of men I doubt if they’ve changed their nature.  There is a difference in the way the brains of men and women work.  We go about things in different ways.  And from my point of view, I think there is an advantage to this dichotomy.  These two ways of looking at things provide checks on each other.  Too much theory can lead to error based on differences between the map and the territory.  But at the same time without the imaginative leap and the simplification that modelling can provide many problems would never be solved.

I started to expound on this dichotomy to Camera Girl.  She told me the garbage pails needed to go out on the road today and walked away.  And so it goes.

Renewing Camera Girl’s Contract

photog Humor , ,

I have often commented to Camera Girl that since people nowadays live enormously longer on average than people in the pre-modern era that the institution of marriage with its whole “’til death do us part” clause is behind the times and needs to be updated with more nuanced language.  However, I never say this when she’s holding a sharp knife.  She’s excitable.

But it’s fair to say that a fifty-year reevaluation event seems warranted.  We’ve got another five years before that milestone but I felt it was a good idea to start some preliminary exercises to determine if an emergency early intervention would be needed.

Today I went on an inspection to see how she was doing.  This morning when I came down for breakfast, I carefully examined the meal for signs of insufficiency or insincerity.  The scrambled eggs and pumpernickel bagel seemed up to snuff.  Check.  The breakfast conversation was satisfactory.  Check.  But the after-breakfast banter seemed to die away.  I was sitting in the living room working diligently on very important web site related work.  But there was none of the expected wifely encouraging, congratulatory pep talk that somehow, I think should have been there.  Maybe just a random “Let’s go photog!” thrown in every few minutes.  That seems reasonable.  Within a half hour my rage built up to the point where I actually got up and went into the kitchen to investigate this outrage.

Well, she probably heard me coming because she managed to throw up a smoke screen of cooking food.  As evidence she had a red sauce with meatballs on the stove and a pan of sausages in the oven and an Italian cheese cake under construction on the counter.  Well, okay.  Check, check, check.  She seemed to be busy.  Seemed!

I went back to the living room thinking furiously on what I had seen.  Well, the kids and grandkids were coming tomorrow for dinner.  I guess maybe cooking was a prerequisite for the meal.  Maybe it would be a little unreasonable for her to do all the cooking after I went to bed so as not to interfere with the very important wifely responsibilities of cheering on the king in his daily battles.  Could it be possible she was in the right?  Was it possible I was being selfish?  Me?  “I’m the Bad Guy?  How did that happen?”

Faced with this confusing thought, I retreated to first principles.  What would Ralph Kramden do?  Ah, that’s better.  Obviously, this pretend-hard-working act was a plot to undermine my sense of self-righteousness.  As such it qualified as disloyalty, the ultimate wifely sin.  Hah!  I knew it.  I’m the good guy.  I win again!

Well, once that had been worked out to my full satisfaction, I felt better and could afford to be magnanimous.  I went into the kitchen and patted her on the arm and praised her for the wonderful work she was doing.  This seemed to confuse her a little but she kept working and almost seemed to ignore my presence.  Well, sure.  Not everyone has my ability to multi-task.  I smiled tolerantly and made a silent benediction over her efforts.  A wise man once wrote that, “uneasy is the head that wears a crown.”  And so true it is.  I’m constantly employed providing guidance and useful advice on any number of things around here.  My inexhaustible supply of knowledge is always improving her efforts.  Noblesse oblige as the say.

I guess the outcome is I’ll let things lay for the next five years.  Sure, she tries to undermine my authority but she’s a hard-working member of the team and I like to reward effort.  Plus she’s related to my children and family is family.  Well done Camera Girl, well done.