Men Shop And Hide Too
three2seven.com

What is it about guys and toys? Take my husband. He doesn't believe in owning a single anything, whether it's for triathlon, his band, skateboarding or whatever. Two days later I check the mail and find a package slip from the post office. It turned out to be the deck part of the skateboard. He obviously found something he liked. It was some "Dogtown" thing that my husband described as the gods of skateboarding. Next day I check mail and find package slip. It's the wheels. Day after that it's the trucks - the part that the wheels go on. Isn't this a little much? Can't he buy a skateboard in one whole piece? It turns out there are hard wheels, soft wheels and different sizes so he needed to make sure he had the "performance" he wanted.

Next weekend we venture into a skate shop to add new wheels to our son's board. I can see my husband eyeing another Dogtown board. I was like, "Don't even think about it!" Apparently it was wider so it had different "uses" to the other one he purchased. Well, this board he was looking at suspiciously arrived to our house the next day. I know I buy clothes and shove them in the closet so fast that they become old the same day I buy them, but come on: this is in front of me!

Then later that week he comes home to tell me he has pitched a story to one of the magazines to run a piece on men skateboarding in their 40s... how convenient! He used this leverage to get three more boards interestingly shipped to his office instead of home. Unfortunately for him the boxes were so big I needed to pick him up from work with the evidence. That night he assumed the role of skateboard mechanic. Four hours later he had a row of five perfectly assembled skateboards. The product demonstration began with him saying, "This one is good for bowls and... this one is used for downhill cruising (as if!)... this is an old school board..."

Two weeks into it he managed to hurt his knee skating the bowls. Three weeks later he tried to resume. Four weeks later he played lawn bowls for a work function - done on a flat patch of grass - and rolled his knee. He now needs a knee reconstruction. Is this a good time to ask for that Tiffany's ring - or was that back when the fifth skateboard arrived??