I’ve been on this minor campaign to make Pete more proactive about the procurement of common household items.

In Madison, we used to make a once-weekly store run that covered all of our grocery and household shopping needs (oh, Woodman’s, how I miss thee!), but now we carry stuff home manually from local grocery and drug stores as needed.  Something in Pete’s brain hasn’t quite adapted to this, however, and so I’ve been trying to break him of the passive-voice habit of dealing with household wants.  You know, announcing abstractly to the air, “the Lysol is almost empty,” and wandering out of the room again.  I’ll be informed, indirectly and at random moments, of the low Lysol levels a couple more times during the next week, until he eventually waves the empty bottle at me and asks where the replacement is.

“Did you write it on the list?”  I’ll reply, and this will spawn a dialogue that incorporates yet another iteration of the following topics: how difficult it is to write things on the grocery list, how precisely and mysteriously I organize said grocery list, the difficulty of using the ATM at our bank three blocks away, the number of drug stores and dépanneurs immediately surrounding our apartment, and the ethics of using our low-limit secured credit card for a bottle of Lysol.  After watching him eat dry bowls of cereal for breakfast for four consecutive mornings earlier in the year, I consider the fact that he will now voluntarily procure cartons of milk without involving me to be a definite victory.

Still, relapses happen.  Pete wandered into the kitchen before bed tonight, where I was making a bowl of cereal.  “We are out of floss,” he announced, tossing the empty spool into the trash can next to the counter.

“Did you write it on the list?”

“No.”

“You could pick some floss up yourself.”

“Where,” he replied huffily, “am I supposed to get that?”

Not that we ever keep score in our relationship, but… for the record, I won.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 12:32 am and is filed under bits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.