OK, last week I started the, “Let’s NOT Allow Our Hubbies to Annoy Us, So We Can Have Better Marriages” experiment.  We’ll pick one pet peeve per week that we’re going to ignore, until we all have the perfect, flawless, annoyance free marriage, I imagine Angie and Brad have.

This week we’re talking TRASH DAY (feel free to insert your own grievance).

We’ve lived in our home for about 9 years or 936 trash days. I know, most people prefer to count in years. Though, I think the British count in trash days or do they use the metric system? I’m not sure which. Anyway, we’ve had the same trash days (Mon. and Thurs.) every week.

Yet somehow, my husband forgot to take out the trash both days last week.  Not just one day, which he’s usually good for, once every three weeks, I’m talking both!  Frankly, I can’t wrap my head around it.

Forgetting trash day isn’t like forgetting to pick up toothpaste.  One does not peek into the neighbor’s bathrooms to see if their tubes have run dry, nor do we all run out of Crest at the same time. HOWEVER, one does get a peek at the curbs of about 50 neighbors with large green plastic containers on the curb; and yep, our day is the same as everyone else’s.

Why doesn’t my husband notice the cans littering the street and turn back to set ours out when he’s mere feet from the house? I wonder. “There’s no conspiracy here honey, the neighbors aren’t putting out all their cans, simply to watch you turn around and put out ours, so they can snicker behind your back,  “Dumbass, fell for it again! Hee hee hee, now let’s all go schlep our trashcans back into our garages,” high-fives all around!

“The garbage collectors are also not fucking with you, by changing up the days they will collect our junk.  Nope, they have better things to do, like leaving the can in the direct path of my car, which often ends with me extracting it from the undercarriage and hoping it pops back into shape.” Those are the jokes they play, duh?

My husband’s standard response, “I forgot, and I didn’t notice all the other trashcans.” I get it, I’m no ogre, it was an honest mistake (made at a 1:6 ratio. Not that I’m counting), but he has like two weekly jobs around the house: trash and light bulbs.

Could you imagine if us moms just forgot 50% of our jobs any given week?  Like, “Oops I forgot to feed the kids this week and seeing other people eat, or even eating myself didn’t remind me. But for the record, I also drove carpool this week and I got them to and from school everyday. Yep, I didn’t even miss one!”

So, this week, I won’t mention the trash once. Even though I noticed, just this morning, that there was a ton of recycling stuff in the regular bin – where it should NOT be. I also won’t breathe a word about all the stuff in the small cans in our office and bathrooms, which clearly weren’t emptied. No, I’m taking this experiment seriously. Zipped, are my lips.

On a side note, last week’s experiment went really crappy! I mentioned that my hubs parked in the farthest spot one time and noticed that he was too close to a car another time.  I said, “Didn’t you read last week’s column about how much your parking annoys me!” To which he responded, “Yes, did YOU?”

Touché.

Is it just me or does your husband have trashcan blinders too?