Problem Solving

Prison.

My wife isn't the complaining type, not even a little bit. When people tell her that she's lucky to have the best husband in the world she tends to agree. She sings the praises of my cooking and my childcare and sometimes my cleaning. Not too much on the cleaning. If she were a glass half empty type of gal she could easily turn those compliments about me around and find things about me to shoot down. I looked at the cup on the floor this morning and contemplated this.
Like all houses we have bugs. Spiders are the creepiest, but at various times of year we have other visitors as well. Right now we have a series of seemingly identical black beetles that will make their way across the living room, from one side to the other, and disappear. I don't know what they're doing or where they're going but they seem to be harmless. My inclination would be to just let them be, but everyone else in the house seems to think that they should be put outside as part of our humane bug removal policy. It's a simple process really. Just place a cup over the bug, place a piece of paper under the cup, and carry the bug outside where it belongs. Generally this job falls to me but sometimes I'm busy and I don't make it all the way through the process. Yesterday my son saw a beetle and demanded that it be trapped. He's five now and I told him I thought it was high time he start trapping his own bugs, but he said it was a daddy job. I was getting everyone ready for school at the time and figured that if I took a second to trap him under a cup then I could just pitch him outside later. The heart of the problem was a bug crawling across the floor. Now there was not a bug crawling across the floor. A large part of me felt that the problem was solved.
Last night my wife came home and eyed the upside down cup in the middle of the floor and shrewdly asked about it. I hastily explained that there was a beetle under it and I'd get it later. Of course I did not get it later. In fact later, after the kids went to bed, we were watching TV and another beetle had the bright idea to crawl across the floor. I got up, and moved the cup, and now I had two beetles trapped. My wife suggested that I put them outside but it was cold and I didn't have a piece of paper at hand and I felt that since I had once again solved the problem immediately at hand I would be fine until the morning. This has turned out to be true. In fact, I haven't quite gotten around to putting them outside even yet. You see, the cup in the middle of the floor hasn't become a problem. When it's time to pick up the living room I imagine it will be, and then I'll solve it.
I do believe that I married well.