When we're out shopping together the spousal unit likes to have lunch at a fast food place. I try to steer him towards Burger King because I like their chili con carne. At the BK in the town where we were doing Christmas shopping today there was a huge poster of Homer Simpson touting some new burger combo.

In French.

Because this is Qu�bec.

It appears that there are times when I run purely on lower brain stem functions. Not thinking at all, I turned to the spousal unit and said, "I didn't know Homer Simpson spoke French."

I will never live that down. Seven hours later and he is still making jokes involving the words "Homer Simpson" and "bilingualism". He can be a cruel, cruel man.

I have probably mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: there are two things no married couple should ever do together--hang wallpaper and shop for gifts. Both are activities that could well end in bloodshed. Why I ever agreed to go Christmas shopping with him today eludes me. Again, I'm blaming it on the lower brain stem problem.

Christmas shopping for him is simple. You see, deep, deep in his heart he believes that He Who Dies With The Most Tools Wins. Thus, I just hand him a pitifully small wad of bills, tell him to knock himself out and he spends endless happy hours pouring over his tool catalogues until he finds The Perfect Tool.

It's not that I don't love him. It's not that I don't care enough about him to pick that perfect something. It's that I would not recognize that perfect something if it walked up and kicked me in the shins. The man already has 4,892 tools. Deciding what the 4,893rd tool should be is beyond me.

His tools are incredibly arcane. The spousal unit has something like four different sizes of pry bar for tearing things apart, for instance. Why someone needs FOUR different sizes of pry bar to accomplish this eludes me. You're ripping something apart. To me the words "Hulk Smash" say it all. Was not the concept "One Size Fits All" designed for this situation?

Apparently not.

But enough of my mystification over the world o' tools. Back to the horror of shopping.

Today's quest was stocking stuffers for the daughter and her sweetie. Off to the dollar store we went.

The spousal unit is the worst person to take into a dollar store because I suspect that at some point in his life he was genetically engineered and magpie DNA was inserted into his body. The man loves the shiny stuff. At Christmas time dollar stores are chockablock with shiny stuff. The situation has heartbreak written all over it.

Every time I turned my back on him, he tried to sneak glittery Christmas stuff into our shopping cart, especially tree ornaments. Tacky, glittery tree ornaments. It was like shopping with a three-year-old in the cookie aisle of the grocery store.

The deal is, we have something like two large cardboard boxes full of Christmas tree ornaments in our closet. This is more than enough because the spousal unit absolutely refuses to buy a commercially grown Christmas tree. His attitude can be summed up with the words "show me where in the Bible it says to kill a tree for Christ."

So every year we end up with these pitiful Charlie Brown type Christmas trees. They're usually the top of some poor evergreen tree from the woods around us, one that's blown over in some late fall storm. There are not many branches on which to put decorations when you have a tree such as this.

Really, we do not need any more decorations. But, as well we all know, the words "need" and "want" are two different things. Behold what it cost me to buy peace.

The worst part? He picked out the most unbelievably tacky, glittery, hologrammed Christmas present labels it has ever been my misfortune to behold. They are the sort of thing that would have made Liberace weep with joy. There are no words for the horror I feel every time I look at them.

We have one more day of shopping together to get out of the way and then the season is wrapped up. I know by the end of that day I will be running on my last nerve. But you know, much as I will want to kill him, I can't.

See, we were married a few days before Christmas and our 29th wedding anniversary is waddling into view.

If I croak him, no anniversary gifts.

Bah. Humbug.

--Marn

P.S.--If you sent me an e-mail offering to join the 500 Miles To Nowhere 2004 Posse and haven't heard back from me, could you please send the mail again? I forgot to check my bulk mail folder this morning before I deleted it, and I may have vapourized your letter by accident. Uh oh. Please forgive me.

Mileage on the Marnometer: 529.9 miles (854 kilometers)
met goal Nov. 7

Goal for 2003: 500 miles - 804.5 kilometers