Do You Have a Mental Illness?

I really don't want this blog to turn into one of those "wives - they say the darndest things" blogs. I'm always very aware of that, because we're all just one step away from becoming the next Me, CherkyB. However, the occasional well-placed The Mrs. quote does little to no harm.

The first words The Mrs. said to me today, on this her first non-counted birthday, comprise the title of this post. My first though was the same as yours: "Duh!" But this isn't a new installment of Duh or No Duh, a sadly neglected recurring segment here. Thus, I get to expound a bit on this.

The Mrs. had apparently just come from the closet, where she inspected her t-shirts and determined that none of them were on my fancy wooden hangers. She therefore felt I had gone out of my way just to be mean to her, and that this could only be explained by mental illness.

I led her back to the closet and pointed to two T-shirts of hers on fancy wooden hangers. She said, "Oh. I didn't look there. That's strange, cuz those are two of my crappiest T-shirts." Upon further examination, she determined they were also two t-shirts that had really big neck openings (which is stylish on a woman's shirt and retarded on a man's), so they wouldn't stay on a regular hanger. Then she wondered aloud what happened to her really big plastic hangers that she "normally" hangs those shirts on.

I don't think we're ready to fully rule out mental illness, though.

On the way home from work, I stopped at the store to pick up a Carvel ice cream cake. They had cakes that had "Happy Birthday" written on them with plenty of room below to personalize. But no one was in the bakery department at the time. So I bought a little tube of matching icing and wrote The Mrs.'s name and a little heart on the cake. I came home and placed in on the counter for her to discover.

When she discovered it, she said, "Oh. I already baked myself a cake. But I was lamenting how we didn't have any ice cream, and now we do, so we can have both."

That was pleasant.

Then, during dinner, she nonchalantly drops the, "Soooo... did your parents call you and tell you to buy a cake?"

Huh?

"Well, when they called me to sing happy birthday (off key in 4ths, whatever that means), I was baking a cake. I told them I always have to bake my own cake, and they thought that was terrible, so I figured they probably called you to tell you to get one."

But you were already making one. What good would it do to tell me to get one if they knew you already had one? That doesn't make any sense. Except maybe to a person with a mental illness.

We discussed how I buy her an ice cream cake every year on her birthday, and she said, "No. I buy you an ice cream cake every year on your birthday." I could probably search the blog archives for last year for our respective birthdays, but I'm not going to. Let sleeping dogs lie, as they say.

The great thing, though, was that we had candles from The Mrs.'s cake from last year. They were those number candles. Since she didn't get any older this year, I got to use the same numbers. That saved a couple bucks.