A Quest for Importance

So I’ve had this idea rolling around in my head for the last couple of weeks. But it was stuck in the pre-planning phase. It was kind of like when you have a really good dream and then wake up and promptly forget what the dream was about. You can remember that it was good, you just can’t remember why. You see when I started this blog, it was a creative outlet. It also helped with maintaining memories even to the point now where I read what I wrote a month ago and begin to remember things that had already escaped me…in a month. Sheesh I used to think I had a pretty decent memory! But there was another angle I wanted to approach as well, and that was to help other guys/dads out there that may be looking for some advice or guidance on something they were dealing with. I know that sounds a bit pretentious, but I didn’t really set out to help mankind, I set out to help some poor Joe surfing the net wondering if anyone else had gone or was going through what he was. Well, that was the plan anyway. Easier said than done I suppose, but back to this idea.

It all started one night as I was finishing fixing the door from our dining room to the garage. Someone had bent the metal flashing that goes around the frame of the door so it wouldn’t close right. Upon asking who broke the door, I was informed that my arch-nemesis did it…Nobody. Nobody is a jerk and I dislike him greatly. He sneaks around my house breaking things, stealing the last of the tasty treats in the cupboard and clogging our toilets with enough toilet paper to choke an elephant. He’s dead meat if I ever lay hands on him, but I digress.

I had just fixed the door and was marveling at my handy work when I felt the overwhelming need to show off for my wife. I actually interrupted her conversation with a friend she had over and with a great flourish closed and opened the door several times. She smiled sweetly and humored me by claiming I was “the” man and that my handy man skills were unmatched by any in the land. (She said it far less poetically, I believe her exact words were less superfluous and much more sarcastic, but meant with love!) I didn’t think much of it at the time, but later I was pondering what caused that need in me to be noticed by my wife. It was weird, I fix stuff all of the time (remember that jerk Nobody) so why the sudden need for attention?

You see some guys (not all, I hate overgeneralizations) but some guys need that “atta-boy” every now and again. It’s not necessarily that we think we are doing the most important and/or difficult job in the world (I bent a piece of metal back into shape so the door would close) it’s that we want our wives to think that we are doing something important and difficult. It’s a primal feeling, but a feeling none the less. We want to show off for our mate to reminder her of all the good things about us (so hopefully she’ll forget our gastrointestinal prowess or our ability to burp the ABC’s on command.)

I can tell when I’m running low on spouse power. I’ll do things (like show-off more) and beat my proverbial chest in an effort to draw the attention of my mate. My wife is my tether to my home. She keeps me aware of all of the important things she does all day with the kids and all of the goings on with each of them. When I hear all of that, I’m not going to lie, sometimes it’s easy to lose my perspective on where I fit in within our home. With everything running so well and with the kids happy, it can be easy for me to assume that I’m not as needed in our family. It’s during these times that I will seek my wife’s respect in order to fill the need to feel like I’m important to my wife. When that need is met it bleeds over into everything I do. I work harder at my job, I play better with others and I even do more around the house. I haven’t kept a chart or anything, I have just observed this as I go about my day.
So for any women out there reading this and asking yourself how you can make your man feel more important (and not just so he’ll do more laundry) let me tell you things that make me feel important to my wife and you can experiment with your hubby and see if he is similar. For one, there is nothing that shatters the cold grip of an exasperating day than when my wife looks me in the eye and tells me how proud she is that I’m doing what I’m doing and how much she appreciates what I do for the family. It’s almost like it rips me away from the fog of the day and reminds me that I’m not at work bashing my head against a wall for nothing. There are people depending on me and on my results at work and that makes me feel important. Another way my wife makes me feel important is by bragging about me to my kiddos. When my kids understand why I’m away all day and not able to be with them like mommy and when they understand that I have to leave every week day to ensure that we have food on the table and money to buy plungers, I feel important. One other way that my wife makes me feel respected is by listening to me when I share things about my day with her.

I want to interject something here for the benefit of any ladies reading this. Your guy may not be the most forthcoming when it comes to talking about what’s going on in his life. For some of us guys, coming home and sitting on the couch for a good gab-fest is right up there with a woman getting a Brazilian wax. It’s painful for some of us to sit still and talk about things. The good news is, if your guy is like this, there’s a good chance that he is an experiential communicator. Meaning he communicates while experiencing something. For example, if you have a difficult time communicating with your guy, go do something with him that he likes to do such as a sport or a hobby. Many times guys, myself included, feel more comfortable talking about what’s going on if they have something to do while talking. It makes us feel like we are accomplishing something and you might be surprised how much more your hubby gabs while hiking or fixing up the garage. Give it a shot, go do something with your hubby that may be you did when you were dating and see if there is more communication.

Alright, thus far I’ve given the ladies a lot of instruction, but guys we have things we need to do as well. For one, a woman can’t respect someone that doesn’t respect himself. You may hate your job, your boss, your school, but in the end if you don’t respect the fact that you are putting yourself out there for your family everyday, you will be a difficult person to make feel important. I realize I said that I seek my wife’s respect yes, but not all of the time. Not as the sole source of my strength. To be honest that’s too much of a burden to place on one person. I seek my wife to bolster my level of importance at times, but you’ve got to have a baseline of self importance to build from. Second, you have to be open and honest with your wife. Just a week or two ago I wasn’t sharing some potentially game changing information about work with my wife. I didn’t want to get her worried. This backfired horribly and in fact actually ended up not only worrying her, but confusing her as to why I was acting so weird/irritable. We have to be honest guys and share the good stuff with the bad stuff otherwise you are going to make things very difficult for your wife and yourself. One last thing guys, don’t hide your mistakes. I know it can be extremely difficult to tell your spouse about your moment of stupidity, but she will respect you more if you are unafraid to admit your mistakes and learn from them.

So what do you think blog-heads, any guys out there just looking for a little respect? Or any ladies out there with a good suggestion for making your guy feel important? Don’t be shy, leave a comment!

Check out this great MSN video: Seal screams like a man

Check out this great MSN video: Seal screams like a man

Darth Vader's Nephew Chad Vader...

I'm stuck doin' Cub Scout leader training this weekend so I didn't get to blog. I figured I'd give you this little vid to make up for it ;) Have a great week blog-heads!

The Best Defense….

...is a good offense and let me tell ya I’m already attacking this old house and it’s only Thursday. Remember the $37 heating element for the oven I ordered from Sears online? It was supposed to get here tomorrow, but it made it a day early and I was able to get it installed tonight. Score one for the…home team? Anyway, here is the new element…

And here is the new element compared to the old element…

The repair was EXTREMELY easy and only involved turning off the oven’s circuit breaker, unscrewing two screws and unhooking two wires shown here…

I knew this because, when I ordered the element, the Sears webpage had a blown-up picture of the oven. You know it’s one of those pictures that you get when you buy a Lego set and it shows things taken apart with dotted lines were they attach. Those little pictures are a God-send when you are trying to not only A) order the right part but also B) figure out if you are going to need any other parts. Next I hooked up the new element to the two wires, screwed the two screws in and flipped the breaker back on and bada-bing bada-boom…

I got a glowin hot heating element ready to bake! This project turned out just about as well as any project I’ve ever done. Not really because of my great skill or good looks (although there is plenty of that to go around) just simply because it was any easy fix once I did a little online research. My wife and I were freaking out about trying to find $5-600 in our budget for a new oven but ended up only being out around $50 (after tax and shipping.) God bless Google and Sears! Now all I need to do is go find some oven-cleaner sheesh!

So how about it blog-heads, any repairs going on in your neck of the woods this weekend?

Hi…You’re not alone.

When I first set out on this Blogging thing, I obviously was (and still am) pretty clueless about what’s out there in Blogsville. So, I did some research. Actually I did A LOT of research. Over the past month I’ve read somewhere in the area of like 400 blogs. Believe me when I say, I’ve seen some crazy stuff and some not so crazy stuff and everything in between. Of course there are blogs of cute kids, zealous moms and even meat turtles, but I don’t really remember much about those. What I do remember are the three or four blogs that I couldn’t stop reading. It wasn’t because they were super entertaining and shared a common thread with my blog. It wasn’t even because of witty pictures and funny stories. I was drawn to the very real and very honest conversation about the pain the authors were/are dealing with. One in particular was from a person battling mental problems and others were from people with serious health issues or issues of just plain old being alone. They (for the most part) didn’t have many followers (1-10) and what struck me the most was the followers they did have, seemed to be a close loved one or sometimes a spouse. Yet here they were, firing blindly into the vast web with the hope that someone, any random stranger would take five minutes out of their day and offer a brief hi…you’re not alone.
As I am adjusting to this new blog thing in my life, I find that I am obsessed with numbers of page visits and followers. I check my comments often and always make sure to re-comment on other blogs. But the thing that freaks me out the most… is the fact that I’m happy. I have a beautiful wife and three kids I’d die for, a job that puts food on the table and even a couple of dogs that can be pretty cool when they’re peeing outside of our home. God has blessed me incredibly. And yet I still obsess over stats and comments…..But what if I didn’t have my family? What if I didn’t have a relationship that is constantly growing and maturing with God? Heck, what if I didn’t even have my dogs?
How much more would I look for stats and comments then?
Blogspot has a button that’s located up on the top of the page. On my blog it’s right above the “Dutiful Dad” heading. It’s called “Next Blog>>”. If you hit that button, you will be taken to a completely random blog that has no affiliations with my blog. So how about it fellow bloggers, got five minutes? I dare you to hit the Next Blog button and see what comes up. Odds are you’ll get a fluffy page with someone’s kid dressed up as a bunny. But maybe, you’ll hit the 1% of blogs out there that I’m talking about. Maybe you’ll pull up a blog from a person whose whole entire day would be rocked by someone just saying, hi…You’re not alone.

Eye of the Tiger Baby!

Well the house definitely put up a fight, but the final score for the weekend…Me 3 House 1. As it turns out the people on the Hot Water Heater box where WRONG! I didn’t need two people to install nor move the heater. Instead I employed a bear hug and much grunting and before you know it….hot water. Ok well it didn’t go quite as well as that, but I have to say, it could’ve gone A LOT worse. As it turns out, the whole project (including slurpies, parts run and puke clean-up) took about 5 hours. Yes, I realize that there is a lot that needs explaining after that last sentence. So here goes…I started the hot water heater project at about noon on Saturday. This was about four hours later than I had planned due to a nasty case of HALOitis (not to be confused with halitosis) which I contracted the night before. (I’d just like to give a special shout out to Babymaker2000, Urillegitimatechild and j dub el u for a wonderful evening.)  HOLAitis is a nasty condition that, if left untreated, can cause irritability, sleepiness, the inability to track time annnnnnnnd holes in the wall shaped like X-box controllers. The only treatment for HALOitis is the constant nagging of one who isn’t affected (usually a female but not always…. Shout out to kdpm98.) Anyway, I finally make it out to the garage to identify what exactly I have to do and right away realize that I need to go to Lowes for parts I didn’t know I needed. This didn’t really bother me too much as going to Lowes for me is like going to Toys R Us for my kids. What did bother me was I wasn’t sure what exactly I needed parts-wise, and the only way I was going to know what I needed was to rip apart the heater. This sounds simple enough, but bear in mind, when you take out a water heater you have to shut off the water and the gas to the house. Not exactly something you want to start and then discover you can’t finish right away.

Once I had a complete list of what I needed, the kids and I jumped in the car and headed to Lowes. On the way, we stopped at 7-11 to grab their favorite treat…Wicked Apple Slurpies. The clerk at 7-11 always laughs at me when we do this because I only fill up their drinks half-way.  Someday, when things are called what they really are, I will be laughing at the clerk with my half filled glass of diabetes. Seriously, those things are ice and sugar with a little bit of dye to turn your poop pink. So, slurpies in hand we hit Lowes. Now I could pontificate about Lowes for days. Literally, it’s like a time warp for me when I walk in. Five minutes in Lowes for me is like one hour in the real world. However, I’ll limit my words for Lowes in this post to say that I got the parts I needed and checked out with relative ease. I love Lowes!

We got back home and I started in on the water heater. In the mean time Abigail was complaining of not feeling well so I had her lie down on the couch and watch Diego (a show best watched from several rooms away.) Suddenly I look up and there is Abigail holding her tummy. She says her tummy hurts and then proceeds to spray apple smelling vomit all over her shoes and the floor. Fortunately, I had just turned the gas and water back on and was able to clean things up.

One note to anyone who decides to update their hot water heater….make sure that you clean out any rubber gaskets and other pieces of stuff that can clog water lines. I actually only spent 3 hours on the water heater, the rest of the time was troubleshooting the kitchen faucet and why it wouldn’t put any hot water out. In the end I took off the hot water valve under the sink and that appeared to work.

 All in all I consider this weekend a victory. I still need to replace the heating element in the stove next weekend and the light bulb in the fridge this week at some point, but I replaced the water heater, secured the washer and dryer platform in the garage (seriously it sounded like the space shuttle launch every time the washer started the spin cycle) and I even managed to fix our bed. The middle rail was broken in the middle from a previous dragon attack (see “Goin' Potty with the Paper”.) Final score for the weekend? Me: 3 House: 1. I’ll take it.

Cub Master Powers ACTIVATE...

Alright, when we started this weekend, the house was winning 3-0. I have, however begun to turn the tables. To begin with, I have to tell you about a tradition at my house. The tradition goes like this….whenever my wife goes out of town overnight, such as is the case this weekend, the first meal made is chicken enchiladas with a white sauce. My wife is the ONE person I’ve ever met that doesn’t like my chicken enchiladas so when she’s gone, you can be assured I will be stuffing down enchiladas like a rabid monkey in a banana tree. (The second meal is baked Mac-n-Cheese with a tomato sauce. Another dish that only my wife has an aversion to.) What does this have to do with my oven being broken? Well as you can guess I was in danger of not getting my enchilada fix, when all at once, my Cub Master training kicked in and I had a brilliant idea. I quickly went to the garage and found our Dutch oven that we use for camping. I then made the most glorious chicken enchilada pie and put it in the Oven which I then put on our grill and kept the heat at around 375 degrees.

 Thirty minutes later I was shoving down enchilada pie down by the spoonful (spoons allow you to get more in a bite than a fork.)

As ingenious as the dutch oven idea was, it still doesn’t get that oven fixed. This is the heating element in the bottom of our stove. As you can see rogue brownie mix dripped onto the element and caused it to arc-weld itself and break....

To fix this, I turned to the internet. I’ve been able to prolong the life of some of our appliances by finding parts online and fixing them myself. In this case I was able to go to Sears’s parts website (via Google…what did we ever do before Google?) and found a replacement heating element which will arrive on my doorstep next Friday for me to install at my leisure. Now I know that you really can’t call that a win, but I have to think it at least drops the score to a more manageable 2-0 with the house in the lead. Next step is to replace that water heater. This was on the side….

I try not to let the man keep me down. I mean how do THEY know how many people it takes to install a water heater? It’s not like they’ve done tests or even installed one of these before…..

Weekend Hat-Trick

So this weekend starts with the house firmly in the lead with a hat-trick score of 3-0. The hot water heater is leaking and needs to be replaced, the oven heating element arc welded itself dead and the fridge has a busted light bulb. (Admittedly the light bulb isn’t major, but Madison declared the fridge broken and requested a new one with an ice-maker in the front….riiiiiggghhhtttt.) Any who, much to do this weekend. I’ll try to blog the repairs, in the mean time, a little taste of my new favorite cartoon to watch with the kids….Shaun the Sheep. G’night folks….