From the section on House Rules

Back when we lived in Portland, my wife and I learned of this amazing gourmet cookie called “Ugly White Chocolate Raspberry.” We could only get them in Seattle at the time, so when we visited friends up there or made an occasional shopping trip, we would always pick up a few boxes, bring them home, and keep them in the freezer.

Craving a cookie one afternoon, my wife opened the freezer and began to search. “Where are the cookies?” she asked.

“What cookies?” I responded, trying to sound innocent.

“The gourmet ones we bought in Seattle.”

“Oh, those cookies. They’re in the freezer, last I saw. Did you check?”

“Yes,” she said

“And…”

“The box is there. It’s empty.”

“And…”

“Honey,” her tone carried the exasperation of a point that I was missing, “we had two boxes of those cookies. There were eight cookies in each box. I ate two of them. What happened to the other fourteen?”

“Uh, not sure.”

“Do you have any ideas?”

“Yes,” I said. “Next time we go to Seattle, we should buy four boxes. They keep well in freezer.”

“Agreed, but why is there an empty box in the freezer.”

“Not sure.”

I guess I did eat the other fourteen cookies. My wife tried to make them last. With less self-control, I downed one maybe every other day or so, going through the boxes in less than a month. (Okay, in about two weeks.) My wife was disappointed to discover I’d eaten the cookies. However, it was finding the empty box in the freezer that bothered her more.

It’s happened before. She once had two cereal-box size boxes of her favorite Japanese treats (Pocky) in the pantry.

“You ate all of them,” she said.

“No. There’s a whole ‘nother box in there.”

“Why didn’t you throw away the empty box?”

“It’s empty? I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, right.”

I do know I’m not the only person who does this. At work one morning, I opened the freezer in the break room to store my meal until lunch. I saw a few boxes of Dove bars there and moved them around to make room. One of the boxes was empty. When I later mentioned the empty box to some of the women in my office, they all chimed in, “It must have been a guy.”

Then one of them grilled me. “My husband is the same way. Why do men do that?”

I thought about it briefly. “We’re embarrassed. The treats should last longer than they do. By leaving the empty box, we hope the women in our lives will not notice that the contents are gone. We figure we’ll throw the box away in a couple of weeks.”

“Bull$^!t,” one responded. “Men are just lazy.”

I tried to defend myself. However, I was done before I started. “So, Walt,” one said, “what’d you do with the box?”

“Huh?”

“There’s a garbage can next to the fridge. What’d you do with the box?”

I admitted I’d left it in the freezer.

At our current house in Georgia one morning, my younger son asked for a breakfast bar. I went to the pantry, grabbed the box, and discovered it was empty.

“We’re out,” I said. “How about some yogurt or cereal?”

Overhearing, my wife said, “We can’t be out. There’s a box in the pantry.”

“It’s empty,” I said.

“Who ate the last cereal bar?”

My older son confessed. “I did, Mommy.”

She looked at him sternly. “Next time. Throw away the box, please.”

I tried to stifle a laugh. My wife then smiled at me and said, “He’s definitely your son.”

Postscript: For those interested, the above-mentioned cookies are called “ugly,” as something in the baking process turns them green. They are still great and especially so just out of the freezer. A link to Cougar Mountain Baking Company can be found here. Pocky can likely be found in any large Asian foods grocery store nationwide.

From the section on House Rules

When we moved into our house in Georgia about 15 years ago, one of the first things to get on my wife’s nerves, other than me, was the dishwasher. It worked fine. The dishes were clean. The problem was the noise. It was LOUD.

“Turn the TV down!” my wife would call from upstairs. “I need to get some sleep. I have to get up early tomorrow.”

“If I turn it down, I can’t hear the dialogue over the dishwasher.”

This was such a problem that my wife re-did our remodeling budget, figuring out a way to add in a new dishwasher. She chose an energy-efficient one that could practically do more dishes than we had. Best of all, it was nearly silent.

Unfortunately, the “silence” created a new issue. The new dishwasher was barely audible, even to someone in the kitchen. If I was cleaning up after dinner, I could load it, turn it on, and my wife wouldn’t know it was running. This was a problem as she and I have different impressions of what constitutes a “full” dishwasher. Some mornings, she got up, saw dishes in the sink, and assumed the dishwasher was full. Then, she would open the dishwasher, seeing both clean dishes and excess space . . . enough room for the unwashed dishes in the sink.

“Honey, there’s plenty of space in this thing,” my wife would say. “It can handle more dishes than our old one. You need to pack it correctly.”

“Yes, honey.”

I would watch as she explained, nodding to show that I understood or at least feign that I did. She would then continue. “Make all the dishes face the same way and you can pack more in.”

“Uh huh.”

“Pack these items on top and these on the bottom.”

“Uh huh.”

“Stack the smaller utensils here and the larger utensils here.”

“Yes.”

“And always wash the pans by hand.”

“Okay.”

No matter how much I tried, the dishwasher wasn’t packed correctly by her standards.

Sometimes, I compensated by overpacking. I thought I did great job. I soon found out I was wrong.

“Honey, there’s too much stuff in here,” she would say. “Not everything’s getting clean.”

“Sorry.”

Frustrated herself, she began stopping the dishwasher if she realized I’d started it, inspecting it to assure herself it was loaded correctly. She even asked me to stop running it, saying that she wanted to check the dishes first. Still, when it got late, I loaded the dishwasher, assumed it was fine, and turned it on.

My impression has always been that most wives would be happy when their husbands clean up, but the way I did it never seemed right. I briefly tried leaving the dishes in the sink, a habit I used to have when we got married, but this didn’t go over very well.

So what happens now?

After many years of marriage, my wife has learned to live with it. I load as best as I can, and she spaces out her complaints to make them occasional. It is irritating to me that I just can’t get what she wants. It is irritating to her that I still play dumb on the issue. However, I do have a measuring stick to judge all of this by. Early in our marriage, I did all of the ironing as she claimed she didn’t know how to iron. She has kept this charade up just as long.

Let me know. Is not knowing how to pack a dishwasher a common problem?

As I mentioned previously, my first attempt at publishing was not historical fiction. My first attempt at getting published was a series of vignettes poking fun at my own marriage. I called it Honey, You’re Annoying Me: Coping with Irritating Man-erisms. I thought I’d found a niche with this book. I could make it cross-cultural, since my wife is Japanese and I’m American. So I studied the market and found the following types of marriage books: professional (spiritual), professional (non-spiritual), women preaching to the choir, men getting in touch with their feminine side, and famous people. Given that my effort wasn’t getting in touch with my feminine side, I was none of the above.

Then, one morning, in the midst of my daily, hour-long commute, I came to the realization that marriage was like Michelangelo’s statue of David. Michelangelo sculpted David from a fractured block of stone that no other sculptor wanted. In my epiphany, I visualized that when couples walk the aisle, men see themselves as a finished work of art. Women see their men as a block of stone where imperfections can be chipped away. I was proud of myself, proud of my epiphany, at least until a discovered about a year later that some psychiatrist from Holland had already developed this theory and called it The Michelangelo Effect. Oh well, at least the theory states that this is indicative of a happy marriage.

Still, my vignettes remained, and over the years, I learned that people agreed with many of them. Now it’s time to release them. I will be publishing them on this site. I’ll try to get them up weekly. The habits fall into several categories:

1) First comes “I Do.” Then Comes “You Don’t.”

2) House Rules

3) That was cute before we were married

4) DNA Conspiracy Theories

5) Free Throws from the Line of Scrimmage

6) Why Can’t Daddy Be In Charge

7) Cooking is a Contact Sport

8) If a Tree Falls in the Office…

9) The Practical Species

I hope people enjoy them. As my marriage has lasted over 25 years, I’d like to think of it as a happy marriage.

One last thing. Special thanks to my good friend, NY Times bestselling author Haywood Smith, for coining the term “man-erisms.”

Many years ago, my wife and I were facing what we thought would be the last Christmas we would have with our younger son believing in Santa Claus. (Our older son had known for about three years by that time. However, under penalty of lack of presents, he had kept his mouth shut.

We had an established pattern of activities for the big day. My younger son and I would begin Christmas Eve by following Santa on the Norad Santa website (www.noradsanta.org), tracking Santa through Asia. We played games on the site, went to early church services, went out for dinner (Chinese, since they’re open), and then I would read The Night Before Christmas to him. Then we would check the Norad Santa tracker one last time as proof of why he should go to bed. We’d give it about an hour and then my wife and I would set out the presents.

The trickiest part was that we’d always set one present next to his bed. In his excitement, my younger son was a light sleeper on Christmas Eve. Getting in and out of his room was a challenge.

Then came that fateful Christmas Eve we feared would be his last. We kept up pretenses as best, dodging questions as they arose. My wife and I got him off to bed and then waited an hour. I brought the gift upstairs.

Then he woke up and caught me.

He immediately headed back to his bedroom, tears streaming from his eyes. I followed him in and asked him what was wrong. He said he’d seen me and knew that Santa Claus didn’t exist. Like any parent, I couldn’t give up yet and tried to lie my way out of it. “I was just moving the gift,” I told him. “Santa was in a hurry and left it at the bottom of the stairs and I was helping Santa out,” I added.

He didn’t believe me. I told him I’d prove it to him. I knew my computer was still up, though I hadn’t looked at the Norad Tracker since my son had gone to bed an hour prior. I flipped to the website.

Per the Norad website, Santa was in “Atlanta, Georgia.”

I couldn’t believe it. The website updates around every five minutes or so with a new city, and I’d opened it up when it said Santa was in Atlanta. My son cheered up, convinced that Santa had just been there. He went back to bed, content as could be. After the next Christmas, his questions arose again and he eventually figured it out. But that was one more year of believing. One more year of dreaming.

One more year of childhood.

Clip art from the Norad Santa website

My first attempt at publishing was not historical fiction. My first book (still unpublished) was a series of vignettes poking fun at my own marriage. I called it Honey, You’re Annoying Me: Coping with Irritating Man-erisms. I thought I’d found a niche with this book. Beginning in January, I’ll put up for review here what I never could get published.

I hope you enjoy it.

A clarinet sits in my home office.

The room hasn’t always been my office. For many years, it was my older son’s bedroom. But my son went away to college in the fall of 2016 and I, after some trepidation about changing the place where he sleeps when he’s home, took it over. A bed remains there for when he’s visiting.

And now his clarinet is there, too.

My son began playing clarinet in sixth grade. The instrument seemed to fit him, melodic but not overly loud. Struggling with a learning disability, he spent most of his time studying, but he managed to fit the clarinet in with his other activities of Boy Scouts and rec baseball. He sometimes went to school early so he could do what his teacher called “pass-offs.” He performed in competitions in Tennessee and North Carolina, as well as a huge performance at the University of Georgia.

Then came high school. My son participated in both marching and concert band. Marching band was his favorite of the two. He gave up fall baseball to participate in the band. (He eventually gave up spring ball to make Eagle Scout.) In high school, his band participated in many competitions and won numerous honors. He marched in a post-Christmas parade in Italy, a New Year’s Day parade in London, and finished his high school with a Holiday Bowl appearance in California his senior year.

Then came college. He chose Mississippi State because they accepted him to study chemical engineering. He wanted to play in the band their as well. In spring of his senior year in high school, we drove to Starkville so he could try out. As ecstatic as he was about going to college, playing in the marching band was almost as important.

Now that my son is in the spring of is final semester at college, I see that it was.

My son gave up concert band in college, owing to the study requirements of his major, but marching band remained the outlet he loved. He performed at football games at Ole Miss, Kentucky, Arkansas, and LSU. He also did a non-conference game at the Superdome in New Orleans, three bowl games in Florida, and a final one in Nashville.

The game I’ll remember most was his last one in Starkville. It was the Egg Bowl vs. Ole Miss. He got his name announced with the seniors and his face on the jumbotron. For a brief moment, his smile lit up the stadium. He still had his trip to Nashville. When he brought his clarinet home after that weekend, it was done.

I hope he’ll pick it up again. Once he has a job and is settled in somewhere. I’m hoping he’ll join a community band and get back to playing. For now, he has wonderful memories.

As his dad, so do I.

My mom called me this week. She asked how everything and everyone is. Typical conversation for a mom and a grandmother.

Then, we got to the reason for her call. She wanted to know the current status of my sequel to my first book, The Samurai’s Heart.

I’ve had people ask me before about the status of my book. I’ve told them I am working on it. However, I must admit it reaches a new level of urgency for an author when the request is coming from his mom.

To my mom and to everyone else, I’m here to say that I have completed the rough draft of my sequel. The book is titled The Samurai’s Soul. I am now editing it. It is a little disjointed, but I am connecting the disparate points to make sure the story flows. From there, I will have it read, do my own edits again, and then have a professional editor review it. In the interim, I will also be getting a cover.

It should be fun. It should be soon.

For those of you waiting, thank you for your patience.

Thank you for checking out my new website. This section is Under Construction. Will be blogging soon.