Wives of America, lovely and gracious ladies, I entreat you to give your husbands a Christmas present this year that they will treasure more than a Rolex or SUV. Simply acknowledge that you understand the following statement and will treat them accordingly:

When you move it, you hide it.

I concede that, in all disputes about managing the household, you are right or might as well be. You're at the helm of the good ship Home and, if you decide that the spare light bulbs are handier if moved from the bottom-left kitchen drawer to the back of the second shelf of the bathroom closet, so be it.

But the poor slob you live with doesn't know you've done this. The next time a bulb burns out and he goes to the good old bottom-left drawer he has gone to for years, he's going to get a nasty shock -- they aren't there anymore! First, he will doubt his own memory (did I put them somewhere else? did I run out and forget to restock?), which is always unsettling. Next, he will begin searching adjacent spots, usually (in the northern hemisphere) in a counterclockwise spiral-bottom-right, next-to-bottom-left, etc. Then, as panic increases, he will make pointless random sorties. In some cases, he will proceed to stage 4, wherein he will systematically (and disruptively) search from one end of the house to the other. But it will never occur to him to look in the back of the second shelf of the bathroom closet.

Finally it will dawn on him: "she's moved them!"  By the time he comes to you, yelling "where did you put the light bulbs", he's already spoiling for an argument, or worse. There are at least eighteen cases on record of moved-item-provoked uxoricide (three of which were set aside as justifiable homicide) and doubtless many more that were prevented only by the husband's inability to find a weapon because his wife had moved it.

Ladies, however much you like to tidy up, you can prevent this discord and mayhem. The solution was developed by my daughter. She is very systematic and tends to reorganize the household every time she reads another issue of Simple. Because of her husband's complaints, she had the following printed up in pads:

They agreed that, any time an item is moved, one of them must post a notice on the refrigerator and the other must acknowledge it by writing OK.

Ladies, I recommend that you print up a pack of the above notices and present them to your husband at Christmas, with a promise that you'll use them. I think you'll find it worth the trouble.

Jennifer and I have agreed to donate this idea to the world, in the hope of promoting domestic tranquility. We expect no recompense. However, as I've said elsewhere, it's ideas like this that do more for world peace that the UN ever did. So if the Norwegian Nobel Committee happens to feel the same way, we are willing.