Squawk Radio

Hello everyone at Squawk Radio, and thank you for such a warm welcome here! I am delighted to be the guest blogger this week in spite of my fat hen body (really, its starting to grow on me. I haven't looked that good in a two piece in a long long time).

They told me to blog about whateve. Yippee! Before I start, let me please put up a disclaimer. I know it looks really bad for a professional writer to have a lot of typos and grammatically incorrect sentences floating around, so let me apologize in advance :-).

Today I thought I would tackle what's been on my mind the last few days: Men. Here's the deal--my hunky husband and I are thinking of selling our house and moving. Our house is old and seems to be in a constant state of repair, and we thought, why are we doing this every weekend? Why don't we move to a new house and let someone else have this headache? So we called a realtor, who came to our house and said, "Oh, wow. Huh. Wow. I think you're going to need to change a few things before you put this on the market."

After all that work installing new kitchen and doors and offices and painting and landscaping and blah blah blah, it still needed work. She advised us to re-carpet the two rooms that aren't tiled, put up drapes where we had blinds, paint, paint, and paint, and then re-tile one bathroom. We did all that. We worked all through the month (when I should have been writing, hello! I had no idea selling a house was so much work!!). We gave old furniture away, made two trips to the dump and more to Goodwill. I thought we were done. I thought our house looked terrific.

But then last week, while I was away, I get a message on my cell: "I'm re-arranging the furniture. I think you'll like it." The call was from my husband. I immediately panicked. There had been a desk incident a couple of years ago, where he wanted to move it in front of a big picture window, and I said no--that turned into one of those huge knock-down, drag-out arguments about where a desk should go that quickly escalated into name-calling and accusations. We didn't speak for days. So I called him and demanded to know what he was doing.

"I was watching baseball and I didn't like where the couch was." Translation--it wasn't three feet in front of the boob tube with a built in snack fridge. "So I moved it. Then I moved a couple of chairs. And the little tables at the end of the couch. We didn't need one of them anyway. But you'll really like it!"

I tried to be chipper and not hyperventilate. I told myself there was nothing I could do from Ohio and to calm down. Furniture can be moved again when he goes to work. Nothing to get all upset about, right? Right!

The next day, I get another call on my cell. This time, I am in the middle of a booksigning at Walmarts. "I'm going to stain the master bathroom. I think it will look better."

"Wait, WHAT?" I screeched into the phone. The one woman who had actually picked up a book of mine instantly put it down and walked off.

He said, "Stain it. You know there was the piece of trim that needed to be stained? Well, I stained it, but then it made some of the rest of it look dull, so I'm going to stain it all."

I tried to keep a smile on my face while I worked through where in blazes this man came from, because heretofore, I couldn't get him to stain his shirt without harping on it for days. This is a man who has never had any interest in clothes or furnishings or dishes, and definitely no interest in the bathroom other than, where is his towel and his shaving cream. Suddenly he was rearranging furniture and staining the bathroom while I am away?

"What do you mean stain?" I asked carefully.

"You know. Put some of that dark stain on wood like we did with the trim around the door."

"Okay," I said, my heart pounding. "What do you mean, "stain the bathroom?"

"Like...put the dark color on all the wood."

I picture all the wood in my bathroom. "Please don't," I whimpered. "I'll be back in a couple of days. Hey, lets stain together!" I tried. "That's something we can do together! You know how we're always looking for stuff to do together?"

He snorted into the phone at that and said, "Listen, you'll like it, I promise. Everything will look really shiny. Okay, I gotta go. And don't you have some books to sign?"

Well, no, I didn't, but that's another story. So anyway, I spent the next two days trying to envision what my newly stained bathroom looked like. Shiny, apparently. I tried not to think of all the other home decorating tasks he might be tackling in my absence. I prayed that the heavens would give me back the guy who wears the same shirt over and over until I move it from being the first thing he sees in his closet. I swore never to get upset that he wasn't helping me do something around the house again and to thank my lucky stars he wasn't doing anything.

But I have to say...when I got home Monday, I was actually very pleasantly surprised. The room he had rearranged really did work better. The stain in the bathroom? Just trim, and it looked very nice. I never would have guessed he had it in him. He was very pleased that I was pleased. But you know how that goes. Now he's walking around, looking at my house and saying things like, "Do you really want that painting there? Don't you think it would look better over there?"

I am hoping it will wear off as soon as football season returns and we retreat to our usual and separate corners.

So what was up with that sudden rash of home decorating genuis? And what weird thing has your guy done recently?