Eldercare From the Vet, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Meat & Bad TV Channels

Welcome to my latest publication of Domestic Chaos Theory…

Eldercare From the Vet. This was weird. I got a little red splotch on my leg. Then, for some reason, it spread all over my legs and torso and arms. The dermatologist took a biopsy. Determined it was psoriasis. To be honest, it wasn’t really itchy or anything. But it looked disgusting. Most people just assumed I was now a leper.

Had this happened to my wife, we would have spared no expense to get this fixed. Like, as soon as we received the diagnosis, we would have helicoptered in the world’s leading specialist to diagnose and treat her. Cost be damned.

However, this didn’t happen to my wife. It happened to me. And that pretty much changed the calculus on treatment options, all of which were a bit pricey. At first, she suggested the free clinic. However, sanity eventually prevailed. I’m now under the care of our local vet, who is looking to expand his business. I’m not even sure that’s legal. So far, so good. And I like all of his clients; I get a treat if I behave myself. Life is good.

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Meat. My wife is way into the organic thing. We now pay a premium for the privilege of buying unattractive vegetables. And don’t start me on organic milk. If I can’t afford a personal trainer, why should my cow have one? So, I balance things out by doing our food shopping at The Dollar Store. I love the brands there. My family, not so much. Even my youngest son is starting to push back on products like “As Seen on TV” Peanut Butter and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Meat.

Bad TV Channels. I’m an excellent sleeper. We go to bed around 11. Get up around 7. I’m grateful. So, I mention to my wife how nice it is to be able to get 8 solid hours of sleep. That comment does not land well. She claims that all normal people with normal problems wake up for two hours in the middle of the night. Every night. Just worrying. On top of that, apparently, she spends the entire 120 minutes just staring at the back of my head. (Worst TV channel ever!) Hmm. I make a mental note to put the baseball bat sitting by the bed back into the garage. Just playing it safe...

MY FAMILY’S POV

I’m a Dollar Store kind of guy. By contrast, my wife is a “you’ve never heard of this grocery store before because it is one of a kind and therefore obscenely expensive” kind of woman. It’s a little bit like living in parallel universes.

The funny part is that we both hide our snacks around the house from one another. Obviously. Because we literally have zero snacking self-control. My trick is that I take my fake Doritos I purchased at Aldi out of the bag and put them in a bowl in the cabinet. When my wife finds them, she forgets that they’re actually $1.99 Clancy’s Tortilla Chips from Aldi’s (not $6.99 Doritos from the checkout aisle). But when she bites into them, she obviously realizes her mistake. (Granted, Clancy’s is a poor name but also the chips are a bit off.)

Of course, she immediately is mad at me for hiding chips in such a way that she’d obviously want to eat them.

There’s a lot I could say about my psoriasis story as well. Sometimes my stories are really pretty much true. In that case, while I did have psoriasis, I just went with believable exaggeration. (The part about my wife calling in a specialist is not the exaggerating part, though.)

The picture of her staring with menace in her heart at the back of my head was a complete home run. Again, she did not read the story, but that picture says everything she thinks needs to be said about our marriage. Ha.

FINAL THOUGHTS

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