Advice From the Trenches
I always envy people who can talk to anyone at any time about anything . I am married to an extrovert who could strike up a conversation with a fence post. I like to attach myself to his side in a group of people so that I can join the conversation that he started...it works well for me.
I am always better with the written word than the oral conversation because it gives me a chance to rethink what I just "said" and I can edit it to say exactly what I meant to say. (Sometimes there is a serious disconnect between my brain and my mouth!) However, there are times when it is hard to figure out what to write also. I come up short of interesting topics to share. So I went on Pinterest (my go-to site for ideas) to investigate blogging topics. There are all kinds of topics that make interesting blogs, trouble is you need to be fairly knowledgeable about a topic to blog on it. I am discovering that I know a little bit about a lot of things, but not a great lot about anything. Jack of all trades, master of none!
I thought about a cooking blog, because I can cook, but unless people are in the market for good old Nebraska chow, which is pretty plain and simple, I don't have much to share. My mother taught me all she knew about cooking, and it has served us well, too well judging by the bathroom scales, but it's certainly nothing fancy. You begin planning a meal with the meat, figure out the potato dish and throw some kind of a veggie on with it. Viola! Instant meal! The one thing I learned to make from her was good cinnamon rolls. It's one of her favorites and she makes awesome cinnamon rolls, consequently it is also one of my favorite treats so I learned to make them well too. But I would probably run out of anything very interesting to share in short order.
There are blogs on style and beauty tips, but there again I lack anything to share. These are the blogs I need to be reading! There are blogs on interior decorating, but again nothing to share. I don't seem to have the knack of putting things on the wall and making them look good, or even picking out paint colors. (We have lived with some truly questionable color schemes because I couldn't afford to repaint immediately!) Fitness blogs are off the table since I don't know anything to share. And, while I know a lot about dieting, my authority on such matters might be brought into question by the lack of results I have achieved.
The one area I might be able to share helpful information is in the area of marriage. I am not an authority by any means, and I honestly don't know how anyone could be an authority since each marriage is as unique as the two people involved, but we have remained each other's best friend for 45 years now, so maybe I have gained some experience to share...at least from my perspective. Here are a few of the hard and fast rules from our relationship:
1. If you are married to me you need to remain in bed in the mornings until I am ready to be sociable. And that is at least two hours! I need quiet time to sit alone, read, play Word With Friends, pet the dogs and ponder life. Nothing starts a day off worse than having to talk to someone early in the morning...and Mike knows this. It works great for us because he hates getting up anyway, and having to face me before I am ready to be sociable helps justify his laying in bed.
2. Mike knows that when we go out to eat and liver and onions is on the menu, he'd better order it because he will never get it at home....unless he is willing to cook it himself. And then I will eat outside to avoid smelling it while I eat! I can't say that I am picky about most things, but I draw the line at liver and onions! Maybe someday I will be starving and it will look good to me, but not as long as we have anything else in the house to eat. He seems to feel the same way about microwave popcorn. If I pop microwave popcorn, he prefers that I eat it somewhere besides sitting next to him.
3. We each have our own places to be. Mike sits in the recliner rocker. I sit on the couch (or the matching chair now that we have given the couch away). He sleeps on the right side of the bed no matter where we sleep, and I sleep on the left. Things just don't seem right if we switch sides. When he had his shoulder surgery we switched sides of the bed so that his sore shoulder was away from me. Neither of us slept well during that time, and we were both happy when his shoulder healed and we could return to the right sides of the bed. And most of the time his place in the car is behind the wheel, and I ride shotgun. The exception to that is when he is tired and fighting sleep. All we accomplish by changing places is that he is no longer sleepy and is full of advice about my driving!
4. There is all kinds of marriage advice about effective communication and working out differences. And I suppose if you are someone else, that is helpful. For us we just puke out our frustrations and work on it from there. We have learned to curb profanity and name-calling since that always escalates the problems, but otherwise, we might yell and become angry and finally go to our own corners to ponder the situation. And then, just like a summer storm, the thunder and lightning are over and a peaceful calm rests over the household. We are both clear on what the other thought, and since we are both kind of rash in speaking to one another, we understand each other's anger and can forgive it. I'm sure most marriage counselors would want us to work on that, but it's worked for 45 years, and neither one of us plans to change. And we're OK with that! The only thing we have discovered that has changed is that the anger doesn't seem to have the vengeance it used to, mostly because we are too old and tired to expend that much energy on it. There is something to be said for old and tired!
So there you have, non-professional advice from someone who has been in the trenches. And honestly, this may only work for us. Please don't take advice from me and then blame me if it doesn't work for you. You are not Mike and Sandi.
And, in the meantime, I will try to figure out what I might know enough about to share on a blog!
I am always better with the written word than the oral conversation because it gives me a chance to rethink what I just "said" and I can edit it to say exactly what I meant to say. (Sometimes there is a serious disconnect between my brain and my mouth!) However, there are times when it is hard to figure out what to write also. I come up short of interesting topics to share. So I went on Pinterest (my go-to site for ideas) to investigate blogging topics. There are all kinds of topics that make interesting blogs, trouble is you need to be fairly knowledgeable about a topic to blog on it. I am discovering that I know a little bit about a lot of things, but not a great lot about anything. Jack of all trades, master of none!
I thought about a cooking blog, because I can cook, but unless people are in the market for good old Nebraska chow, which is pretty plain and simple, I don't have much to share. My mother taught me all she knew about cooking, and it has served us well, too well judging by the bathroom scales, but it's certainly nothing fancy. You begin planning a meal with the meat, figure out the potato dish and throw some kind of a veggie on with it. Viola! Instant meal! The one thing I learned to make from her was good cinnamon rolls. It's one of her favorites and she makes awesome cinnamon rolls, consequently it is also one of my favorite treats so I learned to make them well too. But I would probably run out of anything very interesting to share in short order.There are blogs on style and beauty tips, but there again I lack anything to share. These are the blogs I need to be reading! There are blogs on interior decorating, but again nothing to share. I don't seem to have the knack of putting things on the wall and making them look good, or even picking out paint colors. (We have lived with some truly questionable color schemes because I couldn't afford to repaint immediately!) Fitness blogs are off the table since I don't know anything to share. And, while I know a lot about dieting, my authority on such matters might be brought into question by the lack of results I have achieved.
1. If you are married to me you need to remain in bed in the mornings until I am ready to be sociable. And that is at least two hours! I need quiet time to sit alone, read, play Word With Friends, pet the dogs and ponder life. Nothing starts a day off worse than having to talk to someone early in the morning...and Mike knows this. It works great for us because he hates getting up anyway, and having to face me before I am ready to be sociable helps justify his laying in bed.
2. Mike knows that when we go out to eat and liver and onions is on the menu, he'd better order it because he will never get it at home....unless he is willing to cook it himself. And then I will eat outside to avoid smelling it while I eat! I can't say that I am picky about most things, but I draw the line at liver and onions! Maybe someday I will be starving and it will look good to me, but not as long as we have anything else in the house to eat. He seems to feel the same way about microwave popcorn. If I pop microwave popcorn, he prefers that I eat it somewhere besides sitting next to him.
3. We each have our own places to be. Mike sits in the recliner rocker. I sit on the couch (or the matching chair now that we have given the couch away). He sleeps on the right side of the bed no matter where we sleep, and I sleep on the left. Things just don't seem right if we switch sides. When he had his shoulder surgery we switched sides of the bed so that his sore shoulder was away from me. Neither of us slept well during that time, and we were both happy when his shoulder healed and we could return to the right sides of the bed. And most of the time his place in the car is behind the wheel, and I ride shotgun. The exception to that is when he is tired and fighting sleep. All we accomplish by changing places is that he is no longer sleepy and is full of advice about my driving!
4. There is all kinds of marriage advice about effective communication and working out differences. And I suppose if you are someone else, that is helpful. For us we just puke out our frustrations and work on it from there. We have learned to curb profanity and name-calling since that always escalates the problems, but otherwise, we might yell and become angry and finally go to our own corners to ponder the situation. And then, just like a summer storm, the thunder and lightning are over and a peaceful calm rests over the household. We are both clear on what the other thought, and since we are both kind of rash in speaking to one another, we understand each other's anger and can forgive it. I'm sure most marriage counselors would want us to work on that, but it's worked for 45 years, and neither one of us plans to change. And we're OK with that! The only thing we have discovered that has changed is that the anger doesn't seem to have the vengeance it used to, mostly because we are too old and tired to expend that much energy on it. There is something to be said for old and tired!
So there you have, non-professional advice from someone who has been in the trenches. And honestly, this may only work for us. Please don't take advice from me and then blame me if it doesn't work for you. You are not Mike and Sandi.
And, in the meantime, I will try to figure out what I might know enough about to share on a blog!
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