Yep, That About Sums It Up.

Sometimes a couple of pictures express way more than any number of rage- and booze-fueled blog posts could possibly hope to say.  This is one of those times.

Sorry for the quality of this one but I had to snap it quick.  In case you can't make it out, the warning on the truck on the left says "KEEP BACK 100 FEET.  NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR BROKEN WINDSHIELDS"  The one on the right says "KEEP BACK 200 FEET.  NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR BROKEN WINDSHIELDS".

Here is the next.  I took this outside a candy shop in Virginia Beach.  It speaks for itself.

I don't know about you, but I think these two pics together answer the question "What is wrong with this country?" nearly completely.

Wait... You Want To Rent How Many Donkeys?

You know how you are always supposed to tell your kid they can be whatever they want to be when they get older?  Yeah... That doesn’t always work. 

Six or seven months ago at the stoplight outside of one of the local Chuck E Cheese restaurants, our (then) three-year-old son declared that he no longer wanted to be an astronaut.  “Fair enough,” I said, “You can be whatever you want, buddy.  What do you want to be instead?”

“I think I want to be Jesus when I grow up,” he said.

The wife and I looked at each other   She shrugged, deferring to my greater “spinning a line of B.S. on a moment’s notice” ability.  Just super.

“Well,” I said after the light had turned green, “They already have one of those, big guy”.

“Well,” he immediately volleyed, “If there were two Jesuses, then maybe we could help more people.”  

Ahh, I see.  The boy thinks that the Cosmos is pretty much like a badly run Wal-Mart where the lines wouldn’t be so long if someone would just open up another damn register. Well, we’ve all been there in our darkest hours, I suppose... All in all, an admirable career choice.  Not really a lot of room for advancement, though, but admirable nonetheless... Hmm.  I haven’t said anything in a while. Next Sunday I should really ask the pastor what...

He continued excitedly “What if there were ninety Jesuses?  Then we could help whole bunches of people!”

I thought: Look, dude, Jesus’s aren’t like shopping mall Santas.  You don’t just slap a beard on some wino and call him the Savior of Mankind. There’s kind of a tough vetting process involved, and don’t even ask about the exit interview...

Ninety Jesuses, indeed.  No wonder there was no room at the inn.

Aside from Leonardo da Vinci needing roughly half a mile of canvas to depict it, the Last Supper would probably be less known for it’s austere messages and holy symbolism as it would be for the story of the eleven hundred or so dudes who crammed themselves into the Upper Room for dinner, violated the heck out of ancient Jerusalem’s very strict fire code and noise ordinances, and obviously didn’t get their security deposit back.

I mean, with ninety main participants, the Stations of the Cross would turn into a complete farce scored by Spike Jones or something - Station 9: The Jesus’s Fall for the One Hundred and Eighty First Through Two Hundred and Seventieth Times”.  

Ridiculous.

I could go on and on about lepers being accidentally vaporized from overdoses of healing magic and sightless beggars being alternately healed and re-blinded until everyone in the parade has had a turn, but I won’t.  Also, I will hold my tongue regarding a thought I just had about Roman soldiers singing a horrifically modified version of “Ninety Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall”...

All I could do in the end is agree with him and just be thankful that he didn’t say he wanted to be a bank robber or something.

Wait... 

Actually, how cool would it be to plan and pull off a high-stakes heist with your son?  Damn straight, it would be the most awesome thing ever...  Excuse me, I need to go talk to the Lego folks about an idea I have for an “Ocean’s Eleven” themed play set...

Man, You Say Red a Lot...

Aside from the day-to-day Mr. Fix-It stuff I have been doing since we moved into the new place the boy and I cranked out a few projects together.

The first is a Red Toolbox Classic Toolbox Woodworking Kit from Lowe's.  We actually put this together at the old place but for one reason or another it never got painted properly.  I didn't have any red paint so I figured I would just bop on down to the local True Value and get me a pint.  

No dice - no cans of pre-made red of any shade that was not spray paint.

I was annoyed but I wasn’t really surprised. Based on my experience there attempting to rent the Emperor's New Garden Tiller and failing to buy other “of course they will have it” type things I am now wondering if this ginormous place isn’t really a Mafia front or just a movie set or something.  Hmm... Next time I’m in there I’ll check and see if they have Red Apple Cigarettes...

I ended up going to Lowe’s and getting a sample size container of a dark, traditional red.  (Valspar Posh Red 1011-4, if you must know).  The result is there on the left.  It works just fine.

The second project we worked on was refurbishing an old cedar birdhouse.  This birdhouse was at the old place when we moved there long ago.  I rescued it from the tree it was attached to after that tree was felled by Hurricane Isabel.  The “before” pic is there on the left. 

The boy and I were going to hang it up as is but he asked where the food would go.  Good question.  Let’s make it into a bird feeder, instead.

I cut the parts for the dish and roof extension out of some spare cedar from my recent mailbox refurbishment project and cut the a perch from a poplar dowel I had for leftover from some other forgotten thing I probably half-did long ago.  I used a hole-saw on the door to make a nice neat circle and to enlarge the entryway a little.  The boy enjoyed using the drill, cordless screwdriver, and hammer to put the parts together.  

It was painted red and white and we hung it together where we could see it from his bedroom window.  The squirrels and the cardinals love it.  

The last project: finally painting some bookends Grandpa bought a long time ago.  Like the toolbox project it was started at the old place but the paints that came with it were mostly bad-in-the-box - only the metallic blue was usable.  Last week it got bumped up to the top of the queue and we painted it and bedazzled the living buh-jeebus out of it with glitter from his craft box.    It sits on his desk now and holds a few books of his choosing.  He is very proud of it.

Three fun projects, each with their own “lessons learned” - some for him and some for me.  First, I learned to stop counting on the local True Value to “stock things” and “provide services” and just make peace with the fact I will most likely be driving 15 miles to Lowe’s whenever I need something. The second, the boy’s lesson, is that not all red birds are robins, and not even all robins are red. The third we learned together - although mixing yellow and red poster paint does make a different color, doing so in a one-to-one ratio makes a pretty crummy orange.

Meet the New Hovel; Same as the Old Hovel (Conclusion)

(Continued from Part I)

One day before we moved in the wife called the PODS folks to make sure that our two trailers full of furniture and outdoor equipment were going to be delivered on time.  The movers we used are in high demand and work by the hour - we only had a small window of opportunity, see.  

Also, it’s the year 2012 and, since the world has gone all Atlas Shrugged and no one knows how to do anything correctly from beginning to end anymore, only the truly foolish think “Well, I’m sure everything will be just fine”.  It's always best to check.

The guy at the other end of the line said “Yes, ma’am, your trailer will be delivered Saturday at 9”.  Trailer?  Not trailers, plural?  Uh, oh...

After about half an hour of shouting the PODS delivery folks found the other trailer but said it was scheduled to be delivered a week later.  Also, they couldn’t tell us which one had our furniture and which one had our lawnmowers and other garage stuff in it. This would have been great to know before we were forced to play Sophie’s Choice with our stuff, thereby risking being huddled together at night on the Husqvarna instead of our beds for a week.

Eventually they agreed to deliver both our trailers on the promised day at the promised time... for an additional fifty dollars, of course, since we were “changing” the delivery date and time.  We said, “Fine”.  We will pay the fifty dollar Mafia-like shakedown fee to make sure our furniture “doesn’t suffer an unfortunate accident” or whatever your game is.

It’s times like this where one of my wife’s hidden talents really shines through.  She is normally calm and composed - the paragon of self-control in crisis situations, in fact.  She can juggle nineteen different things and still be around for friends in need.  She is a great cook, a great mom, and she’s even kind of cute.  

But, brother,  if you try and screw her out of a single copper ha’penny she will come down on you and your organization like the Fist of God and she will not stop until she has lain waste to everything as far as the eye can see, collateral damage be damned.  I usually try to not be around when she shifts into that mode... I... I think I once heard her get so angry she started using Klingon swear words and began peppering her fury-driven invectives with “Thee's" and “Thou's" like an Old Testament prophet...

By the end of the "conversation" they agreed to get all our stuff to us on time.  We didn’t have to pay the fee.  

The next day I got to say a phrase I don’t think anyone has ever said before: “The POD people are here - thank God!”  The movers did a great job.

A week after we moved in, all the furniture (well, all the furniture we owned at that time, anyway) was in and all the boxes were emptied.  The boy was playing with his Legos in the living room when the realtor (finally) came by to get the FOR SALE sign out of my garage.  Remember how I said the living-in-a-hotel-slash-house-hunting adventure was over for him?  Well, seeing her, he nearly lost his tiny, three-year-old mind.  He shook his head and in a clearly panicked voice he repeatedly told her “We... we live here now!  We live here now!”  We assured him she was just there to visit and he calmed down somewhat but he was visibly on edge until she left.  

Poor little dude.

The new house officially became “home” about a month ago when we hosted our first party.  We called it a soiree, but I am pretty sure the neighbors thought it was closer to a hootenanny, what with all the cars lined up and down the street and the overly loud and underly talented guitar-playing blasting from the room above the garage.  Eh, let’s split the difference and call it a shindig. We had a blast.

And, other than a lot to say about the weather here, that’s about all there is to the moving-to-a-new-place story.  We are happy to be here and we look forward to many years of enjoying our new home.

Meet the New Hovel; Same as the Old Hovel

As you know we lived in a one bedroom efficiency for six weeks while we were in-between places. You would think that would be all kinds of awful but actually it was just fine. It was sort of like living on the set of The Honeymooners, except instead of Ed and Trixie as neighbors, we had a revolving cast of rejects from Jersey Shore walking around bellowing their opinions of things at one in the morning. I think maybe Marriott should change their slogan from “Live Like You” to “Live Like You, You Drunken, Shirtless, Hallway-Wandering Weirdo”. 

The boy dealt with living in a hotel for that long like a champ, sometimes sleeping in the bed, sometimes sleeping on the floor (his choice).  We ate out a lot and took advantage of fun stuff in the area but by the end the adventure had obviously run its course, and you could sort of tell that he wasn't necessarily buying the whole "you will eventually get all your toys back" line his folks were feeding him anymore.

Months before we moved, we (well, mostly my wife) started the process of packing up all of the files and books and attic fodder we owned and we (well, mostly I) hauled it to The Least Secure Storage Facility in the Whole Wide World (more on that later).  Now, we consider ourselves very "flat surface" people - we don't see the need to cover every square inch of horizontal and vertical space with knick-knacks and bric-a-brac to the point where it looks like we are living inside a wedding cake decorated by unsupervised kindergarteners. That said, we still managed to fill 2,000 cubic feet of storage facility space with, like, forty-seven dollars worth of stuff in boxes. 

Ah, yes, the boxes. Friends of ours had finished moving recently and my awesome wife scored tons of free cardboard boxes from them.  She even did most of the packing because, not to put too fine a point on it, she is awesome.  I think, though, that the awesomeness is tainted with juuuust the smallest smidge of evil. 

Let me explain.

These boxes were used but clean and strong - not the flimsy, roach-infested treasures you can rescue from the back of your local liquor store.  Great, right? Well, not really.See, "used" here means "previously-labeled-and-sometimes-relabeled", so a box that might be Sharpie'd SERVING PLATTER - FRAGILE might actually contain ONE HUNDRED POUNDS OF BOOKS.  After the third time blowing most of my intestinal tract out my backside I learned my lesson.  I girded my loins appropriately, approached the next box like an Olympian dead-lifter, and nearly launched a box labeled BOOKS - actually containing FOUR WINE GLASSES - into the ceiling fans.

Serves me right, really.  I should have helped pack more...

(To Be Continued...)

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Wow!  Finally, after three months, I am back to writing.  What can I say?  It has been a busy, busy time for us.  Let’s recap for now and we can get into details later.

The boy turned four recently.  He is enjoying being back at school with his friends and especially enjoying not being at the cold, antiseptic daycare he was stuck at over the summer.  He is getting the hang of swimming, riding a two-wheeler, reading and writing, and using swear words in context.  He is on a soccer team and he has his first game this week.  

He ditched me in favor of hanging out at a girl’s house for the first time yesterday. As I held the football and watched him dash off across the lawn and through the trees with her, I have to admit I had never been so happy/sad/proud before in my life...

We traded a house of sticks for a house of bricks.  The new place needed a lot of things done to it - nothing too major - but we hired a contractor for a lot of the larger jobs, like tree removal and repairing load-bearing masonry.  The smaller things occupy my somehow-always-thirty-item-long to-do list.  I can’t decide if I should track down the guy who lived here before and a) buy the guy a freaking hammer and an extensive instruction manual for it or b) thank him for being such a neglectful, lazy bonehead that it makes my day-to-day actions appear absolutely heroic by comparison.  Definitely more on that later.  Remind me to tell you about the chainsaw and the Pyrex dishes sometime...

I built three workbenches, modified a birdhouse, built some bookends, completed over 100 to-do list items so far from “hang paintings” to “replace broken deck board” to “re-stain desk for son”. I built a chalkboard, built a towel rack, and engraved our name on the mailbox in compliance with HOA regulation 425b-12, Section vii Paragraph 4 entitled “Resistance is Futile”.

I grilled out about 10 times, went to Busch Gardens twice, went to the pool a couple of times,  and went to the beach once.  I bought a sweeeet new guitar (yes, I am Level 9, now), too.

Oh, and once a saw a blimp...

More later.

Holy Blank, Indeed!

... And the award for "Long-Lost Object Least Likely to Be Found During a House Move or, In Fact, Ever" goes too... this Yoda Lego Minifig Head!

This head, lost sometime in January, was found a couple of days ago while moving a box containing a Nativity scene to the holiday section of the attic in the new house.  In retrospect, though, I guess we shouldn't be even the littlest bit surprised...

Kweznuz

Look, Microsoft Kinect, Jimmydunes and I were simply shooting the breeze about real estate - you just happened to be in the room.  We never asked you to chime in with your quirky “Negative-I-Am-A-Meat-Popsicle” worldview.  I don’t know what you thought you heard, but something of a triumph on getting absolutely none of the conversation correct at all.  

Well done!

House Hunt Recap

During our search for a new home I have become more familiar than I care to be about the different neighborhoods in the area.  They all seem to have some highfalutin titles that make everywhere sound like the names were grabbed from particularly uninspired 2-word Mad Libs responses.  My wife seems to have mastered them, but they all just blur together for me. 

So, instead of trying to remember if the last house we saw was in Shady Pines, Sheetrock Hills, Rock Ridge, or Radiator Springs, we decided to give nicknames to the houses themselves.  Here are a few:

Squirrel House - This house was a sample model on the fourth fairway of a local golf course.  As attractive as it was picturing myself screaming “Hey, you old people, get out of my yard!” for eight hours a day, there was another problem.  As we were leaving I heard a scrabbling up near the roofline that was coming from at least two squirrels darting in and out of a slightly-larger-than-squirrel-sized hole in one of the gables.  Fun!  But wait... Near the hole... Is that bat guano?  Yup, looks like it... Next.

Showcase Showdown House - My wife calls this one “Ravine House” because of the alarming, toddler-enticing 45-degree drop-off in the backyard that led down to a swampy inlet (Hey, dad, my soccer ball went down the hill of poison ivy and into the water moccasin farm again... Can you go get it?). I called it “Rotten Tree House” because of the two near-death 60-foot poplar trees leaning in the most expensive direction possible.  Since the sellers were throwing in a pool table, three flat screen televisions,  a desk, a set of lawn furniture, and, believe it or not, a 2004 Volvo, we decided that “Showcase Showdown” was a much better name.  

If you think about it, these are not the actions of someone selling a house.  These are the actions of someone fleeing something.  Whether it is “the long arm of the law” or “Tony ‘Grievous Bodily Harm’ Masconi” remains to be seen, but not by us.

Swamp House - An otherwise perfect house with yet another 45-degree drop-off near a swamp, this one straight off the back porch.  Look, realtor people, stop calling it a “marsh”.  Here’s how you can tell the difference between a “marsh” and a “swamp”.  It’s a “marsh” if it is in a romantically desolate watercolor painting.  It is a “swamp” if you are actually in or near it. 

Olive Garden House - Horrifyingly realistic Mediterranean-themed tromp-l’oeil murals upstairs and down shot “OMG, Hire Painters, For The Love of All That Is Holy, Hire Painters Now” to the top of the “to do list” with a bullet.  This house would have been fine, but there were other... complications... aside from rotten window frames and an unexplained craving for breadsticks after we left the place.  Let’s just say there was some unpleasantness.  Let’s also say our lawyer advised us not to write anything more about it.  Period.

Power Line House - We didn’t even go in here.  The place had a really nice back yard and was about 200 feet from a huge set of high tension line towers.  No.  No.  No.

1313 Mockingbird Lane - We did go in here.  A bank-owned property.  We were put off by the ant-farm-like floor plan, the huge cracks all throughout the brickwork, the laughably high price tag, and the boxes of “Squatter-B-Gone” peppered throughout the place by whatever poor slob got stuck with the job of trying to make this structure even remotely sellable.  We would say the bank would be lucky to get half of what they are asking for it.

Colonel Expletive Deleted House - We wanted this house.  It was a fine house.  The guy living in it, though, was unwilling to move out before “the end of July... maybe later”.  See, he is waiting for his final military orders to come through.  He is getting a $50,000 moving allowance and doesn’t want to risk losing the money by leaving the place early.  Go ahead and read those last two sentences as many times as you need to to get them to make sense to you, cuz I am at a total loss.  Fifty grand?!?! Where the hell is he being stationed? Low Earth Orbit?  A palace under the sea?  A magnificently appointed Zeppelin permanently parked over the Grand Canyon?  

After we balked at the idea of living in this single bedroom efficiency for two months (probably more) and walked away, their realtor sent the second-most-condescending letter I have ever read to our realtor. It informed us that by walking away now we risk (get this) “losing the house of your dreams because you are not willing to wait a few extra weeks.  Sometimes the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, and we (the sellers) may still be here if things don't work out for us elsewhere”.   

I’m like, look, I don’t know what kind of crummy dreams you have, but a house possessing a room which, with a lot of work, could make for a cool TV room someday does not constitute a “dream house”.  It is an adequate house.  My “dream house” is 10,000 square feet, has an Olympic-sized swimming pool, dual matching glass and bronze elevators, an observatory, a helipad, and sits square in the middle of a hundred-acre vineyard.  In my dream I would fly the house you are trying to sell in on weekends to use as my servants’ temporary guest quarters.  You need better dreams.

Home Freaking Sweet Home - Hopefully we close on this one at the end of the month, but we have been down that path before (see Olive Garden House above), so we will see... Stay tuned.

Another Delightful Spring Shower

Last week, amongst the stacks of pre-move-out cardboard boxes and rows of rows of random and probably completely unnecessary items we have accumulated over the years, we hunkered down in the hallway and waited for the most recent tempest to pass.

See, for years our neighborhood had been the target of hyper-local unrelentingly violent weather.  A two-mile-wide corridor of blood red on the radar map had us at ground zero more often than not.  During a storm, the nearby high school would report half an inch of rain.  We would get half a foot.   The rare snows would be the same way - one or two inches four miles away, eleven inches at the house.  

Bizarre.

The downstairs hallway was probably the safest place to be at the old homestead in the event of a typical “shower”, or, as we liked to call them "Jeebus-H-Rice-Doesn’t-It-Ever-Just-Freaking-RAIN-Here?"  Of course, no place is 100% secure against an onslaught of the elements but I refused to have the newspaper headline "Run-of-the-Mill Cantaloupe-Sized Hail Slaughters Clearly Unprepared Family - Neighbors Not Surprised" become a reality.

Here’s a typical weather-related news blurb from the useless local weather morons:

A cold front is pushing through which will provide some much needed rain to the area.  Temperatures will drop from a high of 97 degrees to 60 degrees over the next couple of hours which should bring welcome relief from the heat, then climb back to the 90s just in time for yardwork tomorrow.  After the break, how a recent six percent hike on parking fees at the local zoo could affect your wallet this summer.  Stay tuned!

Here’s our typical reaction honed by years of experience:

Bring in the lawn chairs!  Shut the garage door!  Batten down the hatches!  Lash the Escort to the driveway!  Our wills are up to date, right, honey?  RIGHT?!?!  They’re calling for a 20% chance of light rain for parts of the viewing area!!!  Have the neighbors finished that ark yet?

I’m not being fair.  Actually, calling the weather folks “useless” does a complete disservice to things that are genuinely useless.  They would have to really improve significantly in order to be considered for the title “useless”, and, even then, only at a probationary level.

These guys actually think that “parts of the viewing area may get some rain tomorrow” is an actionable piece of data.  Should I mow the lawn now?  Can I wait?  Shouldn’t it matter that the viewing area is, like, the size of New England? If you are truly interested in bringing us up to the minute weather news from your Super Ninja 3000 Quadruple Doppler Radar Technotron or whatever, why do you put the info online in 5 minute increments, and then only when that info is already 15 minutes old?

I guess having the TV on does provide some info, though.  The meaningless lull of the bald guy or the tall guy (depending on what local news station you watch) is comforting as they prattle on and on about unconfirmed reports of dime-sized hail in tiny burgs seventy miles away. It is less soothing when the weather guy’s voice quavers and says “If my wife and family are watching, now would be a good time to take cover in the place we talked about before” (that actually happened about a year ago).

So, as the cul-de-sac out front disappeared in a grey mist of nearly horizontal rain (sigh... again) we calmly and with a tone of utterly transparent joy and exuberance say to our three-year-old "Ok, buddy let's go to the hallway!  You can play with the iPad if you want to!  Sound like fun?  Here you go... just BOY HOWDY WOW!  Did you hear that?  That lightning was super close, huh?! Hahaha!  I can see the smoke from the tree it hit out back!   Cool, huh?  Hey, why don't I go get your sleeping bag - it'll be just like camping out!  Awesome!  I'll go get it right after I change my underwear!  Can I get you a snack?"

I mentioned before that we are in the process of moving.  The house sold faster than we hoped and much, much faster than we expected. The last item in the list of things to do was the septic tank inspection - it passed, of course, but the real test was the eight (yes, eight) inches of rain that came almost immediately afterwards.  Again, it passed with flying colors.  Or at least it passed with a complete lack of floating colors.

The ditch was filled with quick-moving rainwater runoff from the forest behind the house so the boy and I made a tinfoil boat, peopled it with a multi-colored ping-pong ball "family", and set it on it's merry way.  In his head it is out to sea by now.  In reality, it probably got hung up on a fallen branch shortly after it turned the first corner where it will stay for the next 500 years when it will be discovered and its "purpose" grossly misinterpreted by archeologists.

Hmm... In retrospect maybe I should have spaced out the last two paragraphs a bit...

Other than the rain, the “local viewing area” sponsored a waterspout that turned into a tornado.  Depending on which news outlet you went to, it caused either “minor damage to the facade of a yacht club” or “completely leveled the city of Hampton, chuckling evilly and salting the fields in its mighty wake”.  Since I drive through that area every day, I am guessing it was more on the “exciting but inconvenient” side of that coin.

Well, regardless, I write this now from the comfort of a single-bedroom efficiency (more on that later), and I see they are calling for showers for “the area” over the next three days.  I wonder if I should contact our old neighbors and ask if I can lend a hand hauling gopher wood or converting board-feet to cubits or something...