Yesterday I Tweeted that LovelyWife was a little weird quirky. Poppy told me you’re supposed to use quirky instead of weird when I talk about LovelyWife. Makes sense.

Anyhoo, I said LovelyWife was quirky because she can spend hours watching previews. Some of you Tweeted back that it was perfectly normal, and I explained that I didn’t mean previews at the movies (those are a must) or a television show were they’d show previews of upcoming movies for half an hour: I meant previews from the PPV channel. Previews from movies that came out years ago. Previews from movies we have already seen in the theater months or years ago. Previews from movies we own on DVD.

No in order to redeem myself a little, let me tell you about a few things that make me quirky weird.

1) I floss before and after brushing my teeth. I have massive spaces between my teeth, and that first floss is necessary to dislodge bits of food stuck in those spaces. If I only floss afterwards, I feel that the spaces between my teeth are still dirty – if there was food in there, no toothpaste ever went there, right?

2) When I forget to wear my wedding ring, I feel naked and I tend to hide my hands so people will not notice that I don’t have it on. This happened less then 10 times in the past 14 years, and on many of those occasions I backtracked home to put it on before getting back to my regular scheduled activities. BTW: This is a complete departure from LovelyWife’s habit of wearing hers. In fact, I often say that when I celebrate my 15th wedding anniversary by booking an Alaska cruise, I’ll have to bring the bedside lamp because my wife’s wedding ring spends half of it’s time on there. This is part of the secret why LovelyWife and I are sticking together so long; We’ve only been married 7.5 years! Which brings me to my next thing…

3) I’ve been married to a lamp for 7.5 years now.

4) I like reading instruction manuals. I have read every single instruction manual that came with anything I bought – cover to cover. If the manual is in English and French, I read both languages. I have a few manuals that are in English, French and Spanish. In those cases, also “read” the Spanish part even if I can’t really read Spanish. It doesn’t matter how simple the product is: I RTFM. As a corollary, a lot of the manuals I read multiple times. Very few novels have I read multiple times.

5) I will only park in certain specific parking spaces. I always park the car to protect the right side. I’m obsessed with preventing any dings on the car, and I figured that protecting the right side prevents me from circling the car every time I get in (since I always see the left side getting in the car). To further illustrate, here’s my grocery store parking lot:

I will only park in the orange spots. And you can totally see my car there. Clicking makes it bigger.

So there you have it. Five more things that make me… Well, if you love me you’ll say quirky. If not you’ll say weird. I’ll let you decide.