It's too hot for my wife to work.

I know I am going to regret it in two months or so, but I have to admit I stood up and applauded when the weather lady mentioned 'an approaching cold front' last night.

The problem with these conditions is that they make it close on impossible to get anything done. I just can't expect Mrs Ed to work in this heat, it’s boiling her brain.

I shouldn't be surprised:- The poor girl isn't getting any younger, and I think these over-thirty temperatures only make matters worse. But she gets so very cranky.

I'm not one to make excuses for bad behaviour - being the well-mannered, do-gooder that I am I seldom have to - but I'm finding that more and more often I'm having to explain Mrs Ed’s actions, sometimes to the point of acute embarrassment.

Take the other day when a couple of friends were round to watch the rugby. She was already all asweat and, for some reason, making that angry hissing noise through her teeth. Actually by that stage I was already having doubts about her sanity. Her behaviour earlier in the day had fuelled fears that she had succumbed to some sort of sun stroke.

It was a Saturday, so she had only had to work half day, though as usual she failed to see this as any sort of plus. (I have explained to her that as I only get out of bed at 10, and she's home by 1.30, it hardly feels like she's gone. I even waiver a bacon and egg breakfast - though by the time she has got back and cooked lunch I must say I am ravenous).

Anyway, this particular day I had eventually surfaced at 11ish, having granted myself a sleep-in on account of Mrs Ed waking me up at the crack of dawn with various noisy mutterings and moanings whilst she got ready for work. But instead of thinking of words to reprimand her for these selfish early-morning outbursts, I decided that I would rather be pro-active and do something to help her out of her ‘over-working’ predicament. Newly-weds please learn from this wisdom- I haven't been married this long without learning that you have to work at a marriage to make it a success - it's a give and take relationship.

So, remembering how she had been ranting and raving about all the things that needed doing around the house and that there wasn't enough hours in the day, and that if SOMEBODY got off his lazy BACKSIDE and DID SOMETHING (her emphasis, not mine - can you understand that I'm worried about her sanity?) her life might be just a little bit easier, I decided that perhaps I should knuckle down and get involved.

And that's exactly what I did. It wasn't easy, and the heat almost took its toll, but luckily there were a few bottles of 'Amber Nectar' chilling in the fridge, which helped. By the time Mrs Ed got home (shame;- the poor woman had that many armloads of shopping that she had to open the door with her teeth) I was lying exhausted on the couch, but at least I could show her the fruits of my labour.
“What's this?” she spluttered, untying the rolled up piece of bond paper (stained with my sweat I might add) that I had left on the kitchen table, delicately tied up with a bit of elastic I had pulled out from an old pair of boxer shorts (who says us men don't have any romantic flair?
“That,” I grinned proudly, “is the end of your stress. I've been working on it most of the morning.”

I patted the couch so that she could sit next to me whilst I explained. Somehow I knew that it was going to be one of those special moments that marriages are all too rarely blessed with.
“What I've done is created a spread-sheet of all the things you have to do, and allocated a time for each one,” I smiled, waiting for the penny to drop and hoping that she didn't want to hug me too tightly (she'd been in and out the car and, with the air conditioner not working, well let's just say she wasn't as er … 'As fresh' as I would have liked).

But she was still frowning in that way that makes her left and right eyebrows network with one another. I continued unabashed - perhaps in the heat she hadn't quite grasped the enormity of what I'd done for her.
“As you can see, even with the short water break I have allowed you after each task, AND the hour I've given you off to make supper, there actually ARE enough hours in the day, and if you stick to this schedule you'll be finished in time to watch the Desperate Housewives rerun after the late news! ”

She was looking down at the paper so intently I couldn't see her eyes. Hence I wasn't sure if the drops of liquid that fell onto the printed sheet were tears of joy or simply sweat from her ever-furrowing brow. No problem - I had done it on the lap-top so I could easily run off another copy.

But still no words of gratitude were forthcoming, so I decided to offer her the pièce de résistance. I could hardly contain my excitement.
“The best part is that if you shout to me as you finish each job, I can enter the exact time into the computer, and it will automatically work out how many hours you have left to work, and whether you are saving time or losing it. So we can work out next Saturday's timetable even more accurately. Isn't that fantastic?”

Perhaps she was overwhelmed by the technological implications, because she said nothing, choosing to stomp upstairs instead.
I called after her “I don't mind doing that you know…. entering the information… I really don't mind…” but she had already slammed the bedroom door. Can you fathom it?

Eventually she ventured out and set to her tasks like the stalwart that she is. Indeed when my mates came round later that day and I quickly checked her progress before we settled down to discuss that night's rugby, I was particularly impressed by what I saw. I sauntered over to the kitchen door, choosing not to go outside because it was really just too hot, and Mrs Ed would be able to hear me from where she was washing the car anyway.
“Well done my love,” I called out, “That's very impressive. You've not only caught up the half hour you wasted clearing the kitchen drain, but you are another twenty five minutes ahead of schedule!” She paused to rinse her sponge in the bucket of soapy water, staring at me rather blankly as I carried on excitedly.
“According to my time table you only have to start on the lawn at half five, and Bob says that if you wash his car in the meantime, he'll go out and buy another six pack of beer! Isn't that great?”

She says she slipped, but I'm not so sure that a mere 'slip' could propel a bucket of grimy brown water four metres through the air with such accuracy. My eyes are still stinging, and I don't know if I'll ever get the white back to ‘bright’ on my Stormers' support shirt.

“Eish pal,” reflected Bob when I staggered back into the house “That's one angry Vrou. Perhaps you were right, you DO need to send her in to see one of those mind doctors…”
“You know what?” I said, wondering if I would be able to ever watch rugby again as I desperately tried to rub the oily bits of grit out of my eyes.
“I'd be mad if I didn't!”

The nest is empty... again...

.
Do you HAVE to do that?” Mrs Ed asked.
I raised my eyebrows resignedly, what was it this time?
“What is it this time?” I said, coincidentally echoing my thoughts.

You see it's February…. Sigh, and Mrs Ed and I are back to that dark and scary time where our home is far too empty and far too quiet. That time when the kids and all 475 000 of their friends are no longer 'in da house'.

Yes, The REE (Resident Expert on Everything) is back in Cape Town, blessing the Mother City with his infinite wisdom, and Fear Factor (still learning to drive) has sauntered off to stay with a friend in Jo'burg for the first few weeks of her 'Gap Year'.
“I think I'll work there for a while, and come back when I've earned enough money to buy a car…. And a ticket overseas,” she said.

Because, as everyone knows, Gauteng businesses are queuing up to employ matriculants from the Garden Route with no experience in anything except cell phone messaging and facebook updating. (I agreed to let her go in the vain hope that she will get used to using public transport and thus shelve the idea of getting her driver’s license until she is 75 and I am pushing up daisies.)

So the house is empty, the peanut butter jar is full, and Mrs Ed and I get to hear one another's noisy little habits .... ad nauseam.

“It's that eyebrow twitch you do when you're watching TV,” she says, “It rustles so much every time you do it, and it drives me MAD! Look, you're doing it again.”

I look at my eyebrow. Well I try. It's not very easy, really, without a mirror, though there is one individual brow-hair that, I'm rather proud to say, I can actually see if I pull it out straight. That's the one, coincidentally enough, that Mrs Ed calls my 'wayward eyebrow' because she reckons it has a life of its own, wandering around my forehead with no sense of direction or indeed destination. She hates it.

“Can't I just cut that one hair, PLEASE?” she often says. Of course I say no. What do us men have left if we can't even hang on to our own eyebrows? I say. Can we afford to relinquish such precious things to our women-folk? First they wanted to wear trousers, then the vote, now Absolute Eyebrow Control?

I swear sometimes I fall asleep on the couch (after an exhausting morning on the hammock) and wake up to find Mrs Ed hovering over me with the hedge trimmers.

But even that was in the good old days when the kids were at home and we got to look at one another. Now it seems we just listen to each other's noises,.... and complain.
“I am surprised you can hear my eyebrows at all over that racket your tongue makes against your teeth when you're reading,” I say, “Even the neighbours are complaining, and they're on holiday in Addo!”

I think wistfully back to December and January, when we used to sneak off to the bottom of the garden to eat our breakfast in peace and quiet, because 27 adolescents had somehow spent the night (I think they slept standing up) and were busy crunching and schlurping and guzzling and sucking their way through our grocery cupboards. “I can't hear myself think,” Mrs Ed used to say.

Now it's so much worse. Now I can hear her think.

“Will you STOP it with those toes of yours!” She screeches, shattering my thoughts and, I'm sure, the last remaining wine glasses;- a shame because these same glasses must have just been congratulating one another on their survival of the kids' latest homecoming. You see because some where it is (apparently) written that no-one under 23 is allowed to go through the motion of washing a glass of any sort, once the normal run-of-the-mill tumblers (and I use that word with great accuracy) have er... tumbled, wine glasses are fair game- despite their delicate nature and the fact that they have perhaps been handed down to you by a great aunt.

But now I long to hear the pleasant tinkle of a wine glass exploding on the floor. Because it would at least be a sign that someone else other than Mr and Mrs Ed are resident.

I switch the TV off. It had been on silent anyway - I was watching the 7de Laan omnibus and reading the English subtitles because I imagined that Fear Factor - our family's soap addict - might just be doing the same.

Now I can give my undivided attention to the study of my foot digits - just to ascertain why they are, according to Mrs Ed, breaking the municipal Sunday afternoon noise restriction levels.

I wiggle them one at a time:- backward and forward and left and right, and marvel at how silent they actually are. Indeed it even crosses my mind that I should perhaps embark on a career in cat burglary, so silent are my extreme appendages. I do a whole group-wiggle thing and I still can't hear anything. Remarkable I tell you!

Mind you, if there had been the minutest click I might not have picked it up with Mrs Ed noisily turning pages of her book like she does. I have complained in the past, but she says I'm being ridiculous. She says she can't be making any noise because she's reading it on a Kindle, but from where I’m sitting, every little click of the 'next page' button is enough to wake the dead.

In sheer desperation I get up to go and check the peanut butter jar. (Who knows- perhaps The REE has driven up from Cape Town for a surf without telling us). Alas, it's still full. The cornflake box sighs the sigh of the redundant victim (now the cereal killer is no longer resident), and the coffee cups I washed earlier in the day are still far too darn clean.

Mrs Ed frowns loudly, puts her kindle down and gets up to stretch. Her bones creak at a volume that makes me glance nervously at the main beam supporting the roof above our heads.
“Shall we go and visit my sister?” she suggests, scratching her tummy deafeningly.
“That depends,” I say, but there's already a palpable excitement in the room, “Are her kids home?”
“Yes, I think so,” she smiles, and the crackling of her make up doesn't even annoy me one little bit.
“Yes!” I say, grabbing for the car keys, “Yes let's!”
But she doesn't hear me, because she is already sprinting to the car, shouting (quite understandably) at the top of her lungs
“We'd be mad if we didn't!”

"I guess I'll put this milk back in the fridge, shall I?”

As I said it I instinctively ducked - and rightly so, because I narrowly escaped being knocked unconscious by a well-aimed, well-oiled gumboot which sailed through the air, missing my skull by mere millimetres and thankfully shattering a particularly ugly purple clay seal one of our offspring had made for Mrs Ed's birthday some 16 years ago.

I will admit, there was a hint of sarcasm in my voice, but once you have 'PTMBITFed' (Yes, it looks like a swear word, but it stands for 'Put The Milk Back In The Fridge') 17 times in a day, you will understand where I'm coming from.

Please tell me you do? Because my family doesn't.

What's this fixation with milk? Well, I may have mentioned this before, but I hate waste.
“But you have so much of it,” my son, The REE will laugh, prodding my ample mid-riff , but he knows what I mean. Or at least he should do by now - after all, he's grown up with me groaning about it 276 times…. A day.

So you understand that hating waste means that the discovery of vrot (it's so much more descriptive than 'sour') milk curdles my stomach.

Let's start with some facts shall we? The first is that we now have four adults in our family. Can I have an amen on that? My daughter, aka 'Fear Factor' (she's learning to drive) is 18, and my son 'The REE' (Resident Expert on Everything) is a few days short of being 21. Hang on…. (pause for applause) Yes, dear reader thank you, you're too kind. Oh a standing ovation? Thank you so much! It is true - With your support (I know you've been cheering me on) I have managed to get him to the 'Age of Majority' without leaving him on the doorstep of a wealthy home, exchanging him for something more useful on Bid or Buy or indeed losing him in a poker match. Mind you, as I mentioned there are a few days to go……….. . (Incidentally, he too doesn't have his driver's license, but that is only because the police gentlemen responsible for such testing don't understand his exceptional level of expertise behind the wheel)

So, to recap - one home, four adults….. So why, in this household where (did I mention?) four adults reside, does only one of us have the ability to PTMBITF? An interesting psychological phenomenon…..

Second fact - Both Fear Factor AND The REE passed matric. No, please hold back on the applause this time, BECAUSE DESPITE THIS, they still cannot PTMBITF. What do they teach in biology, or home economics, or maths or science or ANYTHING these days? Even a basic understanding of History would surely empower them with the knowledge that, for centuries now, milk left outside the fridge for a length of time has, historically, gone vrot. Shouldn't that be amongst the basics? Along with twotimestwoisfour, couldn't they memorise putthedarnmilkbackinthefridge…?

Third fact - Let's look at adult number 3. Mrs Ed is quite an intelligent person. Don't let outside appearances fool you- behind that moustache lies a cunningly clever brain. How else would she be so efficient at calculating and recalculating ways to poke holes in my sanity? If I think of the accuracy in the intricate illustrations of torture chambers (of her own design) I have found lying around on bits of paper, I know I am not living with a fool of any sort.

But yet she too cannot PTMBITF. She can send a blackberry message whilst watching a murder-mystery on TV whilst reading a magazine whilst talking to her sister on the landline whilst signalling to me to get my darn feet off the couch…. But when it comes to PTMBITF after pouring some into her tea. Nope. 'Amposseeebleauh!' as the French would say (and who says I'm not tweetaalig?).

Am I being unreasonable? Is this a storm in a (black) teacup? I think not. I think that it is EXCEPTIONALLY important for my family members to at least make some effort to PTMBITF, if only to prove that they do indeed have an acceptable level of common sense.

But they just don't get it. To them it's like the old riddle of how to get the fox and the lettuce and the rabbit over the stream without anything eating anything… They just cannot grasp the complicated triangle of milk, fridge and vrotness.

Picture the scene:- The REE staggers out his bedroom at two in the afternoon because he wants cornflakes. Yes this is true. Apart from 'surf's up', the call of the cornflake is the one and only outside influence which will cause him to hit pause on the game he's playing or movie he is watching. He had a girlfriend for a while which we thought might change things, but apparently she had a big argument with the back of his head and stormed out - or at least he thinks he saw her storming out in his peripheral vision. So, back to the scene you are picturing. The REE ventures into the kitchen, dumps a calamity of Kelloggs into his bowl, retrieves a reasonably new two litre bottle of full cream from the fridge (where I put it) from which he pours on a generous lashing of the lovely stuff, and then, of course he sets the still half full bottle down on the table.

Six hours later he comes back out his room, and repeats the whole process…. Except this time the milk isn't in the fridge. It's nice and cosy and warm on the kitchen table where it can catch a nice bit of afternoon sun. He tilts the bottle but, lo and behold! Instead of the expected rush of gloriously cool liquid, a roundish glob of off-white plops out and sits amongst the top flakes, like the ugly cousin of Michelin Man.
“ARRRRGGGHHHHNNNMMMPHTEWY” The REE moans, before hollering at the top of his voice….. “MO-O-O-O-OM! THE MILK'S SOUR!”

Now this is the intriguing bit. What follows is a lengthy 'conspiracy' conversation between The REE and Mrs Ed (with Fear Factor adding in her thre'pence every now and then), on how the manufacturers of milk must surely be adding something to it to make it go sour so quickly, so that they can increase sales. The REE goes into extensive detail regarding the hormones they are feeding the cows and the toxic fertiliser they willy-nilly spray on the grass.
“Maybe it's the vapour trails behind the planes?” Fear Factor suggests.

The conversation concludes with a lot of sighing and tut tutting and 'things-aren't-like-they-used-to-be'- ing (apparently in Mrs Ed's youth, you could keep a bucket of Blossom's udder's finest next to an active volcano in mid summer and it would still stay fresh for at least a week. “But the ice age is over!” I reasoned only to feel the wrath of her right boot).

I of course stand next to the fridge listening to this increasingly vrot conversation whilst miming the apparently exceptionally-difficult-to-grasp action of opening the fridge, putting the milk in, and closing it… but it's as if I am not there at all.

So, I find myself permanently on PTMBITF duty. It is my role in life to stand watch and ensure that my family doesn't have to suffer the mental stress and physical exhaustion associated with PTMBITF, I have pledged that so long as I have a breath in my body I will bear that burden for them. And you would think that Mrs Ed at least would be grateful for this honourous sacrifice, but no. She barely even acknowledges it.

In fact it seems that all she can do is harp on and on and on about something far less significant in comparison:- Me throwing my dirty clothes on the bathroom floor, next to the laundry basket, instead of into it. She says she can't understand why I can't grasp something so simple, despite the fact that I claim to be educated. On and on and on she goes, like an African Grey with tourets.

All I can say is that I'm glad I'm not the sort to be so anal about something so trivial - Especially when there are for more IMPORTANT things in life that need my full attention, like PTMBITF.