evil genius | The Sadder But Wiser Girl

There seems to be two of them in my house. It makes life interesting.

Living with an Evil Genius means that life is more interesting in our house. Well, ok I take that back, it can be boring at times. Like when football is on and he’s on the computer trying to figure out how to put a waterslide in his office. Or doing research on how he can convert the old satellite dish into some sort of super antenna so he can get all kinds of TV stations out in the garage. (It’s the research stage-that’s not so interesting compared to the outcome). Or when he’s playing the Sims 3 on his computer-he doesn’t understand why I don’t get into those games. Come on, I spend so much of my time trying to get the REAL people in my life to do what I want. WHY on earth would I get on my computer to tell fake people what I want them to do? This one is a little better than most, and he’s interested because he can create Evil Sims. Though I will say if nothing else, though, his latest obsession with a game has produced some very interesting things being uttered in our house:

“Gee, I wish I could find someone who’d have kids with me.”

“I’m so glad she died, she wouldn’t play chess with me.”

“I’m dating a crazy chick. I proposed to her like twelve times and she still wouldn’t say ‘yes’.

“Is this guy dead yet?” (He had a character that lived to be almost 120. That was weird).

“I have triplets!”

Add to that the little brainstorms that go in his head that just come tumbling out. The latest one went sort of like this:

Evil Genius: “You know what I should get out?”

Me (Very afraid): “What?”

Evil Genius: “My domino rally set. The kids would love it.”

What followed was two hours of footage of dominoes toppling playing on his laptop, with two sets of eyes right behind him. I should have taken a picture of it-Princess Imagination’s eyes were bugging out of her head and The Professor couldn’t stop jumping up and down and dancing to the music that accompanied it. What he loved best was the sound of the dominoes falling. I have to agree with this, it reminds me of a rainstick.

We have the domino rally set up in our game room. It kept the kids interested for a little while. Most of the evening the previous night, and about 10 minutes today. My only complaint about this is that it takes them FOREVER to clean it up.

I have to pat myself on the back a little bit for having a little bit of genius in myself. When we were at the library a few weeks back I spied The Lego Idea Book on the shelf. We checked it out and brought it home. My kids are lego nuts-so this was a hit. The next week The Professor put his first book on hold, The Lego Batman Visual Dictionary. He was quite pleased when he was able to pick it up. However, he has barely put it down. AND this particular one wasn’t quite as cool as the other one, because I really feel it more is just an advertisement for batman legos.

However I must be ok with this, because the next week I went back and spied the Star Wars Lego Visual Dictionary on the shelf by the bathroom and picked that up, as well as another one. My son has barely put them down, and now we hear many lego random facts all day long, such as what goes in what set and what versions are from what year. He is the only child I know who can look at a picture of a lego set and know what year it’s from. He informed me that the lego ewok set that I found in the basement is the 2002 edition, and that his clone trooper mask is the phase 1 mask. I probably have heard well over a thousand facts about legos in that little monotone voice of his. The little stinker keeps reading over my shoulder as I write and has been correcting my facts on here…

The Professor showing me some of the cool stuff in the “Lego Star Wars Visual Dictionary”.

While all of this is fine and dandy, I wish the geniuses would put their heads together and solve some of my first world problems I have going on here:

How to find and extract dead rodents from our heating system and/or walls. I looked, there’s nothing dead in the furnace itself, but it stinks like nobody’s business somewhere around our upstairs. I really have to put a scent in our Scentsy burner that compliments the rotting dead rodent smell. Yummy.

Why no matter how close to hamper these males in my house are, their socks can’t seem to make it in there. I find their socks everywhere in the house-inside the couch, on the floor next to the shower, next to the bed, shoved under the chair, in the gameroom…

Explore how we can fix the annoying things in the kitchen, like the trim that won’t stay on the pantry shelves no matter how many nails you put in it, and the sink with the dead garbage disposal that won’t drain right, or ways to raise the table up so I don’t suffer from back problems every time I have to bend way over to chop something up on it. Incidentally, I found a temporary fix to the drain problem-I bought a sink plunger at Walmart.

Yeah, we got problems right here in River City. But like most Evil Geniuses, they consider these small potatoes compared to figuring out solutions to bigger issues like how to turn our stairway into a giant slide or how to install a zipline in the backyard… Ah yes, like I said, having him around certainly keeps things interesting.

Invasion warning: Be prepared, I understand that he would like to write a rebuttal to this post after I publish it.

I am married to an engineer. A mechanical engineer. He wasn’t actually an engineer when I met him, he was only aspiring at that point. It took him many years to get to where he is now. He just started actually BEING an engineer this year. He designs stuff. I’m not really entirely sure what he actually does at work. He draws pictures. He gets free pop and popcorn. He gets a free gym membership (have I mentioned I’m jealous of the gym membership?)

Not THAT kind of engineer…

Sometimes he builds stuff. Sometimes he even finishes what he starts. Sometimes. Occasionally. Often when he starts something it morphs into something much, much bigger.

My husband’s stuff is more useful than what this guy comes up with…

The deck: We have a pretty nice fenced in backyard. There is a concrete patio area out there. For some reason, he felt we needed a deck. Is that a guy thing? I had no strong deck feelings either way. What started out as a very small deck turned into a quite large deck complete with rails and lights and a transformers looking gate. The deck is still standing, the gate didn’t make it. Don’t get me wrong, I have enjoyed the deck!

Then there was the Barbie house. My daughter had just turned three. She was obsessed with my old Barbies. At one point while watching her enjoy the Barbies he got a wild hair, as he calls it. It started out small, and then grew and grew and grew. You see, engineers have to build things to scale. So he built a three story Barbie house based on the dimensions of a real house.

It’s big. You can fit humans in it. It’s deep. I often walk in to find my daughter’s behind sticking out of it. At least she’s using it now. There for a long time she would simply take everything OUT of the Barbie house. Barbies sat at their table eating food on her bed. Not sure if that is something that little girls dream of (WOW a house that is nothing but a bed…). Or all of the Barbies would be out on the floor, possibly meeting their fate of being stepped on by Mom in the middle of the night.

The Barbie house remains unfinished. It has fared better than many projects in our house. I have done a lot of work on it-I “wallpapered” rooms (scrapbook paper and modge podge), painted rooms, made mattresses and blankets, not to mention spent hours perusing rummage sales and online auction sites looking for furniture. The outside that was supposed to be finished with trim remains undone, the roof has yet to be assembled, I finally gave in and painted the outside. I guess I can’t complain considering the lumber that is now my sons bed sat in the living room for months waiting to be put together…

At one point recently he told me he wanted to scrap the whole house and build a new one. ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH! I have a couple of things working in my favor here-the fact that he works a zillion hours a week and the fact that he has to be properly motivated.

The very latest project just recently was completed-that would be my son’s bed. It finally got painted after years of being left undone a couple of weekend ago. It’s quite nice. Now if only my son would actually stay in his room when he’s not being punished! Now my husband wants to build our daughter a canopy bed. She doesn’t even know what a canopy bed is but she thinks that if dad wants to build it therefore it must be cool. She has no idea what she could be getting herself into. I do…if it’s started it may get completed around the time she starts 1st grade.

I’m not complaining. I’m sure other people have husbands who do the same thing. Not necessarily build giant human sized Barbie houses but start projects and don’t finish them. I guess I am guilty too-the kitchen was partially painted for quite some time and that was my project. My husband’s parents house has had the same unfinished doorways as long as we have been together-currently they are still working on an enclosed porch that finally got a door that wasn’t made of plastic sheeting. Much like my husband’s projects, this too was one that started small and got much bigger. And I wonder where he gets it.

I always have to interject that I married “the interesting guy”. He would rather be known as an “evil genius”.