I know, right?

So I pick it up, it doesn't have the tripod attached, and I haul it out into the living room. I know he's not going to volunteer to help me but will help me only if I make myself out to be a completely inept doofus who might break his expensive contraption that he hasn't used in the 7 years I've known him but is still precious to him.

This is not hard to do because I am a completely inept doofus who would probably break his expensive contraption without his assistance.

Me: So, where's the tripod?

Brad: In the garage by the... over by... uh... *rolls his eyes violently* ... I'll go get it.

Me, in an annoying perky voice: Cool, thanks!

He goes off to get the tripod and I wait patiently while he fiddles around, setting up the tripod, attaching the telescope to said tripod, turning this knob and that knob and the other lever and moving it and adjusting it and looking through the eyepiece and generally taking for-freaking-ever to finish setting this up.

But, you know, he's doing it all for me, so I sit quietly and wait.

Brad, with telescope pointing off into what he hopes is a northern direction: Okay, so the telescope should point to the north star and then this gizmo here will follow the rotation of the sky as the night goes on and you can set your camera up here and then this thing will do that thing and then you can follow it using this other doodad of some technical variety there.

I might be paraphrasing him a bit.

Me, looking in the direction he has the telescope pointed: Umm... honey? That's not the north star. Those are trees.

Brad: mumbles something incoherent about the north star and tracking it across the universe and stuff like that.

Me: Uh... what if I don't want to do that? What if I want to just look at the sky?

Brad, looking at me as if I'm an alien of some sort: You can do that. Just step up here and look through the viewfinder.

Me, stepping over to the telescope that he has set up to his height, which is about 6 inches taller than my height: Umm... this is a little too tall for me. I can't reach the viewfinder.

Brad: mumbles something about short people that the Society for Little People* would find very offensive.

Me, watching him lower the legs of the tripod, then grabbing the telescope as it starts to tip over: Be careful! That's going to fall over on top of you.

Brad: That's okay, my head's right underneath it.

Me: Well, your head is soft enough to cushion the fall.

After it's all set at the height proper for a shorter person, I look through the viewfinder and see.... nothing. At all.

You would think with a sky full of stars and planets and moons and stuff, I'd see something when I looked through the telescope. Hell, I can see it all with my bare eyes. But noooo, nothing through the telescope.

I tell Brad this.

He looks at me as if he thinks I might be lying. Then he steps up to the telescope and proceeds to spend another eternity fiddling with this knob and that switch, and I watch the birth of a star, watch it grow up, have baby stars of its own, and then go supernova in the time it takes him to figure out the telescope.

Brad, with the telescope pointing at the moon: Okay, come here! Hurry, come look!

Me: Hurry? That's the moon. I don't think it's going anywhere.

I look through the telescope at the moon, which is full and therefore very bright. It's very cool. I look at it a couple minutes and then I ask if I can look at other things.

He again tells me to point it in the direction of things I want to look at. So I do. And see nothing again.

Me: Here I thought looking through the telescope would be like looking through binoculars, only stronger, so I could see further away. There's a load of stuff out there I can see with my eyes but I can't see anything through this telescope!

And he goes into this lengthy explanation of why I can't actually see anything through this telescope besides the moon, even though looking at things in the night sky that are very far away are exactly the reason one uses a telescope in the first place. None of the explanations makes even the least bit of sense to me.

Disappointed, I sit down on our chaise swing and look up at the sky and see one falling star shoot by. A lifetime of interest in the planets and stars and I can't even see them through the telescope that I've waited 7 years for him to set up for me.


Let this be a lesson to you, kids. If you need fancy-pants contraptions to even look at things you're interested in, make sure that you know exactly how to use that contraption before you even try.

Or at least, have someone set it up who knows what they're doing. Unlike my husband.

*Totally made up society. Probably.