I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE my wonderful husband! Every day I can’t believe I am lucky enough to be married to him. That being said, sometimes being married to someone with a computer engineering degree has its challenges. Luckily, I have a wonderful friend who has been married to an engineer for many more years than I and is always willing to lend an ear and sympathize with my “special” challenges.
First, you must know that the engineering brain tends to find the most complicated ways of doing the simplest task. For example, the little clip on our oldest son’s window broke the other day. I asked my husband to please fix it. Our son likes to play up against that window and I was concerned the window would come open and he would fall from the second story. “Don’t worry”, I told him. Just replace it with one on the downstairs window. Saturday morning, I was getting ready to clean the house when I heard the most marvelous words from my husband.
“Honey, I am going to fix the window.”
Hurray! I didn’t have to nag or anything! I was feeling pretty good as I started to clean the upstairs. I was about 30 minutes into cleaning when I heard my husband yelling for help from the first floor.
Let me pause for a minute. Remember how I said I was feeling pretty good. You know the feeling. When you are being productive on a breezy summer day and you actually feel things are getting accomplished. I love that feeling.
Okay…. Unpause. I ran downstairs to see what was going on. Picture the scene…. My husband is standing with one hand around the top pane of our window holding the top pane of glass which he has pushed out of the window frame. The other hand is on the tape measure as he is trying to do some rough measurements on the window.
I stared for a minute and then the conversation went like this.
“What on earth are you doing?!!!”
I am replacing the upstairs window with one from the downstairs! Hold this window while I go and measure the one upstairs to see if it is going to fit.”
“ Why don’t you just switch the little clips on the top. They unscrew, you know.”
(LONG PAUSE)
“Oh, that would be easier.”
SPEECHLESS! For the first time in my life I was rendered Speechless!
That is just one of the many examples of the challenges of loving an engineer.
Besides finding the most difficult way to fix the simplest problems, there is another challenge to the engineering brain. Engineers have to research EVERYTHING! This can range from the best way to get rid of ants to ordering pizzas. Honestly, we were ordering pizzas after Logan’s birthday party this past weekend and it took Aaron a good thirty minutes to place the order. First, he had to research the size of the pizzas verses the cost difference. Then, there was the number of slices per each size pizzas, The ratio of toppings, and the ….wait for it…….Cost per square inch. He must have researched three different companies before coming to a decision on the order. I think you get the picture.
I tell you all this to tell you about the party. Logan informed me this year he wanted a science birthday party. What?!!! How do you even begin to do that? Thank goodness for the internet. I googled it and before long had a plan. It actually turned out really well. We played a game making towers out of toothpicks and marshmallows. We made slime. We mined for rocks. We made a geyser using coke and menthos. I even made a volcano cake that really smoked thanks to the dry ice my wonderful husband went to five or six stores trying to find. I asked Aaron to handle the geyser experiment. It was the last thing we did before cake. The kids really loved it. I went inside to start the dry ice smoking in the center of the cake.
Looking back, this could be where things went wrong. You see, my engineer noticed I did not need to use all the dry ice. He took a piece of the ice and put it in a one liter coke bottle. After the lid was placed on it, the pressure built up until it exploded. Then he took it a step forward. I was over getting bottles for our neighbors too-cute-for-words grandson I had volunteered to watch that night when I heard a bomb goes off. It was a loud blast like you hear in WWII movies. Well, I went flying into the backyard only to discover my hubby decided to make a dry ice bomb with a two liter bottle . He blew up a table!!! It wasn’t even OUR table!!! It was one we BORROWED from Donna Huntley! Needless to say, we purchased her a brand new table to replace the destroyed one. Which brings me to my final point…….Sometimes life with an engineer can be a little costly! I love you, Aaron!
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