My wife, Marianne, went on a week-long cruise with her sisters. They are coming back tonight.

I miss my wife, of course, but I have to admit I am a little sad that my bachelor days are ending. For eight days I’ve been able to walk around the house in my underwear, eat what I want, watch what I want on television and put my sock feet up on the coffee table.

Paradise.

What I really like when the wife is away is not having to wash dishes. I seriously hate to wash dishes. It’s not my fault. I was born with a genetic aversion to soap and porcelain.

What I do when she is away is stack the dirty dishes in the sink or put them on the counter and get clean ones from the cabinet. Back in my bachelor years, my roommate, Jay, and I used this method and it worked out fine. Mind you, we weren’t complete slobs. We always set aside a day in late November to do the dishes. Regrettably, we always had some sort of conflict that day.

“Next November,” we agreed.

Eventually there wasn’t a square inch of sink or countertop in the kitchen that didn’t have a pot, pan or plate containing food residue on it. The kitchen reeked.

Jay and I were willing to put up with the funk, but, at the off chance one of us ever managed to convince a girl to visit our place, they might be put off by the smell – and by “put off” I mean gag and run out of the place. It was a problem of such great concern to us that at one point I suggested we may actually have to break down and wash the dishes.

“Get a hold of yourself man,” Jay screeched, taking me by my shoulders and shaking. “Don’t go talking crazy! I’ll think of something.”

He did.

I came home one day from work and the funk was gone. Not only that, but it was replaced by the intoxicating aroma of cooking food. I was intrigued and slightly alarmed.

“What are you cooking?” I asked Jay.

“The dishes,” he said.

It came to him that baked on funk doesn’t stink, so he placed the dirty dishes in the oven and baked them. After some experimenting, he determined that baking them at 350 degrees for about thirty minutes did the trick.

Little did I know I was rooming with a genius.

We did on occasion lure a girl into our apartment, but they usually dashed out of the place with one hand over their mouth after they stepped foot inside our bathroom. Of course, it couldn’t be helped. Turns out, there is no logistical way to bake a toilet. I was just glad whatever it was growing in the toilet didn’t reach out and grab them before they could get through the bathroom door.

Baking dishes won’t work for me now. Much as I hate it, the only mature, rational thing to do is suck it up, pull myself up by the bootstraps and get to the business of throwing away all the dishes. The tricky part is I’ll have to fake a crime scene and convince Marianne I was the victim of a dish burglar.

If you never hear from me again, you’ll know it didn’t work.