Over dinner this evening:

Me: “I do not have any scheduled meetings in the morning. If you are free, we can go out for lunch.”
Sharmila: “No. The pest control guy will come at 10 am.”
Me: “Okay”

And the dinner proceeded.

After about half an hour (when Nikita declared she did not need any more help from me for her homework)…

Me: “Okay, then I am going to go upstairs and retire.”
She: “Are you going to sleep now?”
Me: “No. It is 9PM. I will probably catch up on some reading”
She: “Or you can help me clean up the kitchen”.
[She said this pointing to the one ketchup bottle that was still left after I had cleaned out all the dishes. I will leave the topic of irony here since more is to come]
Me: “I already did it” [as I put the solitary bottle left back in its place]

…and to add some twist to that I continued…
Me: “Now I am going to go upstairs and reflect on twenty three years of our marriage. By the way do you know how many years we have been married?”

Now, if you follow my blogposts regularly, you probably know by now that she absolutely cannot remember our birthdays, our anniversaries and all those good stuff. She will remember your face and name if she met you twenty years back, but she can’t figure out how many years we have been married! I got my twentieth anniversary gift on our nineteenth anniversary!

She knew I was just picking on her. So, she retorted – “I don’t know and I don’t want to know..”. I know she said that but in her mind, she was trying to start the subtraction process. You know how I knew that?

Because, about eight seconds later, she turned around and screamed “IT IS OUR ANNIVERSARY TOMORROW”!

And I stood there scratching my head wanting to ask her – “So, what was your first hint?” 🙂

The best part of twenty three years of marriage? Exactly this kind of moments of comic relief!!

Somehow she thinks I cannot boil a couple of eggs without very detailed instructions. Okay, I will give it to you that once I did try to boil eggs without putting water first. But still…

“Pls. switch it on”??? What was she thinking? I was going to just stare at the eggs and hope they merrily boil away?

Man, “I don’t get no respect” around this house 🙂

The good news is that she acknowledges that she is forgetful … and therefore writes down lists.
The bad news is that she is too forgetful to even remember to take the list with her.
When I called her up, she reassured me that she remembered the four items. So far so good. The tactical mistake on her part was to try and prove it by trying to rattle off the items from memory…
Like I was saying …. 🙂

Came home after the run and sat down for breakfast next to Nikita who was finishing up. Since she is the queen of procrastination, I tried to get her a jump start on her weekend work…

Me: How much homework do you have this weekend?
She: A lot
Me: Have you made a schedule?
She: No
Me: Why are you sitting here? Should you not get started on your work?
She: I don’t feel like it
Me: (sarcastically) Well, at least schedule in one hour tomorrow evening for crying since you will have unfinished homework.
She: (even more sarcastically) I would give you a nasty look right now but you already have one!

I went back to my breakfast, having been squarely beaten in my game of sarcasm!!

This can mean only one thing!

She is leaving for India!!

Apparently, there is enough food in the fridge for me to have parties at our home every evening till she comes back! There is even a helpful reminder that we should feed the dogs!!

I love it how it starts with a detailed Do-It-Yourself instructions on how to make rice and just to leave nothing to chances on either side of the alimentary canal, she has left instructions on what to do if we get into septic tank trouble!! This is some serious sh** 🙂