Oh, how I love my husband, the Guv. I've loved him for over twenty years, through what was left of high school, college, various jobs, two kids, two guinea pigs, a dog, four homes, two apartments, one pizza oven, a not-quite-midlife crisis convertible, you get the drift. Our life has ebbed and flowed and changed in amazing ways, and it seems like life together just gets better and better...
... except for one thing: travel.
It's not that I don't like traveling with the Guv, because I do, especially if it's without kids and the agita that comes with driving a gazillion hours with both of them in a too-small convertible on a family road trip because the Guv refuses to drive my much-more-comfortable-for-road-tripping minivan.
But that's another post.
The thing about traveling with the Guv is how he tries to Save the Earth through using the bare minimum in hotel products. If I unwrap a soap in Hotel One, that soap is going to travel with us to Hotel Two, Hotel Three, and Hotel Umpteen until that soap is finished. And he removes other ones before I can unwrap them, because I have to finish Soap One from Hotel One before I am allowed to unwrap Soap Two from Hotel Two. Soap Two is "disappeared" before I even notice it's gone. I cannot have Soap Two, because it's cheating on Soap One, which, if I don't finish it that very trip, will Kill the Earth.
Follow?
[As an aside, you know how Jack Nicholson unwraps about 300 Neutrogena soaps in "As Good As It Gets," uses them once, and throws them away? Yeah, I'm thinking the Guv is not a Jack Nicholson fan.]
Says the Guv, "If hotel products aren't completely used, they are thrown out. And throwing out even a mere sliver of remaining soap is unconscionable, unthinkable, unimaginable, ad un-eco-freako" -- or something like that. And so, if you open the cabinet below our bathroom sinks, you will find approximately 5,942 unopened hotel soaps -- because The Guv also takes the wrapped ones, because he once heard that they even throw out unopened ones between visitors. I am no longer allowed to buy him his old favorite Lever, which I really loved to smell on his freshly-washed skin. He uses hotel soap, soap that will outlive, outplay, and outlast us all, because no human being could ever use that much soap. He says he'll use them for the gym... you know, the gym at his office that he uses maybe weekly after a super-early morning conference call, after which he comes home to shower... home, where he uses hotel soap, which means the saving-it-for-the-gym-thing isn't really working. He says he's saving money. He may be saving the earth and money, but, clearly, he is not saving my sanity, because the problem is that, with rare exception, I really don't like hotel soap. I don't like the way it smells, I don't like its waxiness -- not even the good stuff -- and I don't like its littleness. So, we're at an impasse: I'll buy my Lush body wash and Dove sensitive skin bar soap and use them both in one shower. (Ouch! says the Earth.)
So, anyway, this vacation, I had a plan. He recently brought home soap I actually like: EO. I took three cakes of it, one for each hotel switch. We could all use it and then leave it behind at the end, right? RIGHT?
No. EOS1 (that would be EO Soap One) followed us from Hotel One to Hotel Two then back to Hotel One for Stay Three. (I didn't follow that either, but the point is that the soap followed us.)
I can be zen about this. At least I used the soap I like. And the Guv dried it and rewrapped it so carefully between stays that it wasn't gooey and gnarly. And really, if he wants to take that on, I shouldn't object.
What I will do, though, is go through the cabinets under our sinks and donate at least half of what's stacking up down there. I'll have to open each soap to make sure that it's one that he hasn't used and saved for later, because that happens a lot. He says it's his way of Saving the Earth. I think he's trying to kill me.
P.S. I'll resuscitate with Starbucks hotel-pack coffee, because we have dozens of those, too, because we're saving the earth, and coffee farming, and my coffee budget, one foil-pack at a time.
P.P.S. Please don't think I'm being mean to the Guv. He vets all of my posts, and, noting my anxiety about the soap following me, he actually suggested this one. Isn't he a keeper?!
Recent Comments