I know I’m not the only person in the world that doesn’t like certain things. Actually, it’s typical of both genders. Today, I decided to make “the list” of things I don’t like and why. It’s rare that things irritate me, so when it does happen, my husband says, “You made my day! My Carole is irritated!”
Since its summer as I write this article, I’ll start with air conditioning. It has to be in the 90s before I actually say I like AC.
My husband and I have always had different temperatures. Whenever I’d say, “I’m cold!” he’d say, “You can’t be!” I finally stopped complaining about the AC being on. I figured it was easier for me to put on a jacket, rather than have him sweat and complain.
Even in the car, I make sure I have a jacket and a small blanket to cover my legs. To his chagrin, he knows I especially enjoy when the sun beats in on my side of the car.
I don’t like the AC in grocery stores either, especially when I forget to wear a jacket in summer time. On top of the AC coming at you from above, you get a double northeastern as you walk by the freezers.
Speaking of cold, I don’t like to eat a cold apple from the refrigerator. The cold bites give me the chills. My husband places the whole bag of apples in the refrigerator. It seems we both forget to leave a few outside in a dish for me.
Another thing I don’t like about apples is if they are tart. My husband doesn’t like if I take one bite, and if I don’t like it, I throw it out. So we compromise, if I take a bite out of an apple and don’t like the taste, he’ll eat it so it’s not wasted. Works for me.
I think one of my worst irritations is when on vacation, I open a closet door in a motel, and I’m confronted with an iron and ironing board. Ever since permanent press, I’ve been living in paradise, and then on my vacation I have to be irritated. I don’t even take dressy clothes along. I dress down, not up. You’d think ironing boards and irons would be extinct by now in hotel rooms.
Nowadays, I hardly ever iron anything. And when I do, I have a miniature board with an iron on top, propped on a table in my laundry room.
I now have an aversion to hemming or any kind of sewing. When my husband has a hole in a sock, he’ll ask, “Will you darn it?” I tell him he can go out and buy new ones. The reason I’m tired of sewing is because I raised, in my first marriage, five girls (two from his first marriage). Every winter and spring found me either taking a hem out or putting a hem in skirts and dresses, at least 50 of them. This was all before permanent press.
I have an aversion to sitting on a rug to exercise or anything else. All I can think of is, all the places the bottom of a shoe has been, before it came to the rug.
Today, when I exercise, I go to the Y for senior classes or I take a walk in my neighborhood. I have great instructors at the Y, but there is one thing I complain about to my hubby when I come home, “We did a few dance steps in class today. I hate dance steps in an exercise class!” I do love to dance, but not as an exercise routine.
I might as well come clean about my next peeve. I don’t like outside work. I’ll admit I tried to get out as much farm work as I could growing up, but unknowingly I must have overworked ’cause I sure don’t like it now. My husband knows this about me. He does the outside work, and if he calls me to help, I go.
Some of my problem outside is my husband measures everything. He obeys every rule imaginable in the gardening books. I break them.
The first year we moved to this house, we bought and planted flowers. The animals ate every one of them. That ended that project. If it’s any consolation to my gardener readers, I work very well inside the house.
I don’t like snakes. I don’t know that they ever did anything to me personally, except jump up at me. When I was raising my children, I thought it would be nice to have large stones all over the bank, in back of the house and down to the creek. While gathering large stones from the creek, a snake sprung from under a stone and up in the air near me. It probably didn’t touch me, but it made me not like snakes.
I only had one other incident with a snake when I worked for my brother. My nephew, Gary, ran after me with a small snake dangling from his hand. As I ran, I yelled, “Please stop. I don’t like snakes!” He kept running and I finally stopped and yelled, “I’m going to faint!” He must have believed me and stopped chasing me.
Alas, that night I opened my jewelry box and there was the snake looking quite crazy. I slammed the lid shut, ran outside into the field , and dumped the jewelry (it wasn’t expensive anyway) and snake. I hope the jewelry and the snake lived happily ever after together.
“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” so the saying goes. Not with me. I think I’d much rather have a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken to eat all by myself.
When my husband and I were talking marriage, he brought up the subject of getting me a diamond ring. I told him I’d rather have a plain gold band (He later bought me an opal, my birthstone).
Through most of my life I had jewelry. Not the expensive kind, but still, I had some nice pieces. One day, heading into retirement, I said, “Carole, you really don’t care for jewelry, why do you wear them?” I decided, from then on, to be myself. I do love to see beautiful jewelry on others, but I just never liked it on myself. I did keep both a gold and silver necklace to wear with a sweater.
I like to see a nice tan on someone, but I don’t like lying in the hot sun. My sister, Mary Alice, loved tanning each summer. I tried it a few times and decided I’d rather be reading a book on the front porch. I don’t even care to walk on a sandy beach and have sand squiggle between my toes. But, I do love walking barefoot in a big yard or park.
You might not believe my last item on the list: I don’t like to type. Actually, I write my stories on scrap paper and once I’ve revised them, they get typed. I try to get each story typed right after I’m satisfied with it, or I have too many piled up.
One time, we had a virus on our computer and all my stories, at least 100, were gone. Now, it’s not that I didn’t know to back them up on a disk, but I just didn’t do it. But, I always Xeroxed a copy of each story and placed them in a folder, in a box, on the floor. I was grateful I did that much.
At that time, my daughter was laid off from work, so I paid her to type up my stories that year. It saved me a heck of a lot of aggravation. I now back up all my stories on a disk.
I probably watched more children’s TV programs when raising the children, but I really don’t care to watch TV that much. During the week, after dinner, I watch the news with my husband. Maybe it’s because I discipline myself to write that I don’t allow TV to interfere. On weekends, on our date night, I don’t mind if my hubby wants to watch sports. But, I do ask him to mute it so we can chat on our date night. Other times, we might watch a sitcom we both enjoy.
I did have more on “the list” of things I don’t like. Perhaps that will be another article. I’m sure my readers have plenty of things they don’t like and many good reasons why. At least we think they’re good reasons.
Carole Christman Koch grew up in Berks County and has been published in numerous publications. She has a passion for writing and has many stories from growing up on a farm to everyday stories.
