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My husband is what you would call an all-or-nothing kind of guy. There are other words for it, but we'll just go with that for now. He doesn't share my lick-and-a-promise method of doing certain things, for instance, vacuuming. He will actually move things out of the way. It's the darnest thing.

When we are working with a time frame, I try my hardest to steer him away from anything that causes his eyes to glaze over in anticipation of diving in and losing track of time. Too often he will somehow manage to spot something that will easily suck up an hour and make my hair go grayer by the minute.

Take, for a small example, when he wanted to clean out the kitchen sink so it was available to rinse off some freshly picked garden vegetables. A few dishes had to be taken care of and I was in the middle of something else (anything else, thank you), so he volunteered to take over the sink situation.

A little while later I happened to pass through the kitchen as he held the sponge under the soap dispenser and loaded it up like he was on a mission to scrub every dirty dish on our street. He lifted the first item in the sink - a plastic sandwich container. Soon the container's shape was indiscernible. Mountains of lather bubbled up and surrounded it, swallowing the container and dripping chunks of foam onto other objects awaiting their massage. I mean, cleaning.

I noticed Spouse's eyes had a dazed look as he stared out the window into the back yard deep in some kind of sudsy thought. I felt like he was enjoying this just a little too much but hey, I wasn't going to volunteer to take over. We're talking housework here. It was a half hour before the six things in the sink were all washed and placed in the strainer.

By then it was dusk and the vegetables were still in the garden. Guess who was not going to be washing off garden items at 8 p.m.? That would be me.

Today, though, our kitchen looks like a farmer's market with eggplant, zucchini, parsley and peppers splayed across the counter and table. That's because his all-or-nothing thought process means all the vegetables he had finally gotten around to stripping from the garden and placing in our basement refrigerator are now in the process of being cleaned, cut up, and cooked. I just wish he knew how to do this one item at a time instead of all at once so my kitchen wouldn't look like I'm making a giant vat of ratatouille.

Our normal haphazard fall routine is to strip the garden and then have too much to handle and too little space to handle it. We procrastinate prepping anything for immediate or future use, ignore the globs forming in the corner of the fridge, and lose half of what he grew. Fortunately, I've been perusing the cooking channel website, and I've gotten some great ideas for using this year's veggies. I have scrumptious plans for the eggplant thanks to Giada, and Debi Mazar's zucchini frittata sounds like a winner. We also have plenty of peppers to make poppers this weekend when the Love Couple is visiting. I'm feeling accomplished this fall. Now if I could just figure out what to do with that overabundance of parsley that continues to grow like this is July instead of November.

Being married to an all-or-nothing guy means when he isn't in a SpongeBob trance he becomes fully immersed in projects, whether it's stripping gardens or soaping up every dish he can get his hands on. My job is to try and keep up, and hope I have room for whatever his current obsession is.

Ratatouille, anyone?

- Janine Talbot

Janine Talbot has been writing since before her eighth grade teacher accused her of plagiarizing a poem she wrote. She has published locally in guest editorials, and her lyrics received honorable mention in American Songwriter Magazine's Lyric Contest. At 50-something and experiencing the empty nest (i.e., a spare bedroom with a desk), she is diving into the blogging world, sharing her stresses about her long-distance daughters, a spouse who lives for SpongeBob marathons, a blind golden retriever and a cat she swears screams "Now" at feeding time. She blogs here.