Marital Blowouts

I put this column on the blog ages ago but it was never run by the newspapers. I have since re-worked it and now present it for your profound enjoyment.

The Look.

Husbands know it. It is the fiercest weapon in a spouse’s arsenal. It tells the male that no matter what reasonable explanation he may have for what has just happened, he should just keep quiet – it’s a lost cause.

This is the story of how I got one.

It all started when, under the auspices of the governments Keep Your Husband Occupied at All Times program, I was winding up the garden hose. The cranking action of the hose reel took me back to the long ago days at school when we had to hand crank a Gestetner machine to make copies.

Every kid wanted to be the one to go get the newly run-off handouts from the office. We would sniff them deliriously as we weaved back down the hall, higher than kites, wearing a smile that only sniffing felt pens would later eclipse. Ahhhhhhh.

Do we have any Doritos? Wow – have you ever really noticed the lines on your hand before?

Ahem. Yes. Back to the story.

In addition to winding up hoses and raking leaves, those with irrigation systems need to drain all the water out of the tubes so they (the tubes) don’t go all sclerotic and have sprinkler versions of strokes or heart attacks over the winter.

What you do for this sprinkler angioplasty is pay someone to hook up a large hose to an air blower thing. The various zones of your sprinkler system use this air to blow their noses, while you stand around giving piles of money to the air hose guy while he politely listens to your grand plans for the garden.

When I had this done recently, a valuable lesson was learned.

Apparently there is a shut-off valve inside most houses, this valve being connected somehow to the irrigation system. Being a shut-off valve, it should be, uh, shut off.

I didn’t know that.

Further, when you hook up a large air blower thing to a hose connection and force a million gallons of air into it, a certain pressure is created, which must be relieved somehow.

Perhaps via the valve I left open in the basement.

My first clues to all this intriguing information were the jets of dust I saw shooting from what I thought were closed windows.

The other funny thing was the house seemed to be bulging.

“That’s odd,” I said.

“Did you close the inverse non-aligned dingle-whopper valve inside your house sir?” asked the blowout guy.

“Of course I did” I said automatically, unable to admit, like any male, that there wasn’t a single aspect of my home with which I was not intimately familiar.

“The what?”

He turned off the blower thing, the house slowly stopped hissing and shrank to normal size, and my wife and children emerged, coughing, from the house. Now that they could open the door, that is.

Some people believe that leaves change colour in the fall as a result of some natural phenomenon.

I believe it is a result of husband trees doing something that wife trees do not find particularly amusing, and receiving withering, frosty stares as a result.