I'm not a man-basher.  Really, I'm not.  If I do say something uncomplimentary about my husband or men in general, it's only because they deserved it.  I love my husband all the time, but sometimes I don't understand him. 

I don't understand why he can't eat Froot Loops in front of other people.  He tells me it's not a manly cereal, and he wouldn't be caught dead eating them, even though he likes them.  He eats things like granola and trail mix because they sound manly.  Well…and because he likes them, too.  But that's beside the point.

I don't understand a man's obsession with his barbeque grill, either.  In my eyes, a grill is a grill.  You use it to cook hot dogs and steaks and when it doesn't work anymore, you fix it.  My husband needs to be steered away from the outdoor section of a department store lest he drool on the biggest, baddest outdoor grill/barbeque station they have.  I don't know if these stores have drooling policies, but I'm pretty sure that it's an unspoken rule that if you drool on it you have to buy it.

My brother just bought a new grill.  It's a really nice one and, of course, he is obsessive about it.  He cleans and polishes it everyday.  He hates to cook on it because he doesn't want to get it dirty.   All of his neighbors have to close their blinds because the UV rays reflecting off his over-polished outdoor grill have the ability to fry their small children and pets.  In fact, NASA once issued a statement that their astronauts in the International Space Station could see a bright light beaming from the vicinity of my brother's backyard.  They said he might have to douse it because he might be sending hostile messages to alien planets. 

Our grill is about eight years old and is still functional after we recently bought a new burner for it.  After seeing my brother's new grill, however, my husband is now scoping out mega-grills as if there were a real possibility of owning one of them.  He's looking at those L-shaped, wrap-around models that have enough grilling space to cook hot dogs for the entire 82nd Airborne division.  In fact, everyone could eat at the same time.  We'd have to build a whole new deck to accommodate this monster-grill. 

People would come to visit and instead of seeing our beautiful backyard and all the flowers I planted with painstaking care, they'd say, "Uh…Nice grill."  Of course, if it's a guy that's visiting, we'd have to wipe the drool off of it.

The automatic switch for lighting our grill stopped working a short time ago.  So now my husband is using that for an excuse to buy a new grill.  This is a man who would wear a pair of shoes until they literally fall off his feet before he would buy another pair.    This is a man who, I am convinced, will try to pay my daughter to elope rather than pay for a big wedding one day.

The lighting switch on the grill stops functioning, though, and this man thinks it's time to pull out all the stops and buy a grill so expensive that the lighting switch would never have the audacity to break; a gas grill that comes with titanium parts, a twenty-year warranty, and a thirty-year mortgage. 

I looked at this madman and said, "How about I just go out and buy a box of matches?"

Dejected, he answered, "Oh alright," as he kicks an imaginary pebble,   "But make sure they are the blue tip ones…And make sure they are the really long ones…And don't get the cheap ones, because they never light on the first try."

I went out and bought my husband the biggest, longest, most expensive box of matches I could find.  Only the best for my man.

You can reach Laura at lsnyder@lauraonlife.com Or visit her Web site www.lauraonlife.com for more columns and info about her new book.