Sunday column: Honey, do you have to do that?

Sure, he's cute, but he sure knows how to get on my nerves!

With nearly a year of married life under my belt, I can say I've learned a lot. I also know I have a lot left to learn about marriage, but I'll just take it one year at a time.
At the top of the list of lessons learned during Year One is compromise. It's something I still haven't mastered, but I'm getting there, slowly but surely.
I've also learned plenty about my husband in the course of the past year — things I didn't know before we tied the knot.
He's got a lot of, shall we say, quirks that have taken some adjustment on my part. But, I've also learned what a good sport he is, because he has no problem with letting me air my complaints about his idiosyncrasies right here in the newspaper.
So, here's some of the top things about my husband that bug me — in no particular order:

1. The man is physically unable to eat unless he is parked in front of a TV turned on to something — anything! Since we don't have cable, many times he's on the couch, plate balanced in his lap, happily munching away to the ever-enthralling Time Life infomercial or some other, equally stimulating, half-hour sales pitch for a useless product. I dare not suggest that we turn off the TV and have a nice quiet dinner, because he simply would not be able to digest his food.

2. Nick drinks a lot of milk; I knew this when I married him. I quickly got into the habit of buying two gallons of milk at a time, which may seem excessive for a household of only two people. But, it's not. The drinking of the milk isn't the problem. It's the empty milk gallons. For some reason, he cannot bring himself to put them in the trash can. They're always left sitting empty on the kitchen counter. With a trash can located a mere six inches away, I can't for the life of me understand why he doesn't throw them away. I guess it's just one of those mysteries that can't be explained.

3. I recently diagnosed my husband with an illness: The plague of the cell phone download. This is an expensive disease for those unfortunate enough to live with someone who suffers from it. It rears its ugly head once a month in the form of the cell phone bill, which is consistently double the size it should be. The explanation — multiple downloads of cell phone games, ring tones, multimedia text messages, you name it. It's a compulsion he does not seem to be able to control, and we're paying dearly for it.

4. When we got married, we received a nice big wicker laundry hamper as a wedding gift. It's too bad I'm the only one who uses it. Nick doesn't feel the need to use a hamper. Instead, he just uses the entire house. He drops his laundry wherever he happens to be — there's an assortment of both clean and dirty laundry littering the floors of our house at any given moment. And he wonders where the dog keeps finding his socks to chew on. Hmmm.

5. Every Friday night Nick says the same thing when I get off work, "Let's go to the movie store!" And every Friday night, I respond with a groan. The movie store ranks right up there with the cell phone company in terms of the drain on our bank account. We can never seem to return a movie or a video game on time, so we rack up late fees more than double the original cost of renting them in the first place. Plus, we can never agree on a movie when we go to the store to pick one, so I say why bother even going?

6. Nick usually likes to drive whenever we go somewhere together, which is fine with me. But even on the rare occasions when he isn't driving, he still wants to control the music we listen to. And, as I said about movies, we seldom agree on what to listen to. He calls the music I like "weird" and I call his stuff "annoying," but for some reason we usually end up listening to his choice. I really need to get an iPod.

7. Remember how much Nick loves to download extras for his cell phone? That in itself is irritating enough. But to compound it further, I can never get a hold of him on the dumb cell phone. You'd think, with all those fancy ringtones, he'd hear it ring and answer when I call. But, no. For every one call he picks up, I have placed an average of five that go unanswered. Thank goodness I haven't had an emergency and been unable to reach him. Then I'd really let him have it.

As easy as it is to complain about the things he does to bug me, I admit that I like having my husband around 99 percent of the time. He makes me laugh, and we have fun together. The past year hasn't always been easy, but we were able to get through everything together. I have a feeling that's how the years ahead will be, too.