Dr K lets me live in her house and all I have to do in return is feed her. So that's what I do. I buy most of the food and make sure she has a lively hot dinner pretty much on demand. Oh, and I keep her off my bac... er... I mean entertained, by supplying a subscription to satellite TV, a magazine or two and a steady stream of video games, days out and live entertainment*.
Somehow I consistently manage to get out of doing the lion's share of the household chores. I pretty much get away with cooking dinner every night and not a lot else. Dr K tells me that she likes it that way and that she actually enjoys doing the vast mountain of washing up that I generate every evening.
I suspect there's another reason for her idleness enablement: I don't do it right.
It's not really that I don't do it right. It's more that I don't do it in the way that she wants. There's something wrong with my washing up technique, for instance. It's not, as she suggests, because the plates are still dirty at the end of it. They're not. No more than when anyone else washes up, anyway.
There was an example of this today.
Dr K was lounging in the sunny garden with one of the previously mentioned magazines, when the washing machine finished it's cycle. She got up to begin the task of transferring the waning from the machine to the line, but I stopped her.
"No, my precious darling," I said. "You stay there. I'll deal with it."
She looked dubious, but consented.
As I was hanging the washing out, however, her true nature began to shine through:
"Don't bother pairing the socks," she instructed as I paired the socks. "I'll just empty them out onto the bed last and then they'll all get mixed up again."
"I can't help but pair the socks, my beautiful angel," said I. "I am a compulsive sock pairer by my very nature and it would offend my sense of the aesthetic to put these socks on the line in a higgledy piggledy fashion."
"I would rather," she insisted, "that you concentrate more on stretching your gargantuan pants along the line. I heartily dislike your usual method of using just one peg for your undergarments as it leads to a longer drying time and thusly, damp gussets. Use more pegs."
"Very well, my fragrant petal," I muttered to myself. "Even after four long winters of co-habitation, you have not yet learned how to issue instruction to the most passive of aggressors."
And then I did this:
She was less amused than I might have hoped.
Passive aggressive nonsense aside, Dr K is lovely. She puts up with my messiness and my larking around and my ridiculous songs about her hair and her legs and her jubblies and she even quietly ignores me when I attempt to dry hump her as she washes up.
(*by live entertainment, I don't mean that I put on a cabaret act in the living room every night, awesome though that might be. I actually mean that I drag her to theatres and comedy gigs and stuff.)
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