I would like to publicly thank Wifey for not only allowing me to publicize our vacation, but also for her copious note-taking, without which I'd have forgotten half the funny stuff that happened to us. Trust me, the blog was much richer because of her assistance.
Now, can we please forget about the whole keys-in-the-shoe thing?
Showing posts with label western adventure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label western adventure. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
These Keys Were Made for Walking
Two years ago when we made our pilgrimage to the US, Wifey put her cell phone "in a safe place" so that if robbers broke in and did a non-rigorous search they wouldn't steal it. This had the humorous side effect of rendering it unfindable when we came back a month later. We searched for it for two weeks until I wearied of the constant complaints and did what comes naturally: bought her a new one.
Listen, I enjoy letting my loved ones beat themselves up over forgetting where things are as much as the next guy, but there's only so much I can stand.
You know the rest of the story: two days later she found her old phone, which she much preferred, hidden beneath her clean socks. By some miracle of laundry we'd keep the pile full and thus kept her from getting to the bottom of it. So she went back to the old phone and I got a new phone and that was it.
Last year when we came back from the US, Wifey couldn't find a handful of things that she always carries in Europe: a US-European conversion card, some IDs, the bank card, and other miscellaneous stuff. We searched and we searched, but nothing turned up. A week later we found it, underneath a pair of jeans on the floor that we hadn't bothered to look under.
As we prepared to leave this year, we were laughing about the travails of finding things the last few years, and she made a bold statement: "this year I'm just leaving everything out. If somebody breaks in and steals stuff, more power to 'em." And this is what she did with everything.
Except for her keys, which I pleaded with her to "put in a safe place where we'll be sure to find them." We both remember this. What we don't remember is where that place actually is. Oh, sure, we easily found the car keys left on the table, and the other car key hung on the kitchen peg board, but the house keys were simply gone.
To say that it drove Wifey slightly made is an understatement. It drove her a lot mad. She proceeded to tear the house apart, day and night, searching for her lost keys.
I was glad to leave home to go to work, quite frankly. But each day I came home and there were no keys, but I did have a frazzled wife. Not much of a trade-off, I can tell you.
Finally this grew to such a fever pitch that it consumed my entire family: myself, the girl, and Wifey were all searching for the keys. The boy couldn't care less, and spent his time playing Paper Mario on the Wii.
Wifey and I ended up in our room, determined to either find the keys or burn the house down and start afresh.
"For some reason I'm drawn to right here!" she stood in front of her closet. "Do you know why?"
"All I remember is you telling me to help you remember where you put your keys," I said. "And then you put them in a place where we'd be sure to see them when we returned."
"I wanted to just leave them on the nightstand, but you wouldn't let me." She sighed. "Do you remember this magical place where we would automatically find them?"
"I bet you put them in your shoe," I said. "Did you check in your shoe?"
"What kind of a moron puts them in their shoe?" she asked me. "I'm not a mental patient. Of course I didn't check in my shoes."
So I pulled out her shoes and, sure enough, they weren't in there. But as I picked them up, suddenly a memory, clear as lightning, fired through every synapse in my brain:
Me, putting her keys inside my work dress shoes, which I wear to work every single day. The logic was this: I'll have to put on my dress shoes to go to work, and then I'll find the keys, and so it's not a problem.
Only, if you remember, I bought new dress shoes. And they were so comfy that I have been wearing them since my return.
Without thinking things through, I picked up my old dress shoes and heard the familiar clinking of keys.
"What was that?" Wifey was on me like a hungry bear on a fat hiker. "I heard keys."
"I think it came from downstairs. You better check it out."
"Are my keys in your shoes?" she asked me.
"It's an audible illusion," I said.
"Show me the shoes," she held out her hand.
"There's nothing to see here," I assured her. "Move along."
"Let me check."
I tried to palm the keys as I handed her the shoes, but only ended up scuffing her fingers and dangling the keys out in front of me.
"I have been tearing my hair out and kicking myself the last three days wondering what happened to those damn keys! What are they doing in your shoes?"
"I found them!" I said. "What's my reward? Are you aroused by my searching genius?"
"I won't kill you," she said. "I have to decide whether or not to Bobbitt you."
I'm starting to think burning the house down might have been the cleaner solution.
[Quick temporal note: I've been home a week. The vacation blog lagged real time by 2 days, which grew to a week over the course of writing it for various reasons. But we're all synchronized as of right now.]
Listen, I enjoy letting my loved ones beat themselves up over forgetting where things are as much as the next guy, but there's only so much I can stand.
You know the rest of the story: two days later she found her old phone, which she much preferred, hidden beneath her clean socks. By some miracle of laundry we'd keep the pile full and thus kept her from getting to the bottom of it. So she went back to the old phone and I got a new phone and that was it.
Last year when we came back from the US, Wifey couldn't find a handful of things that she always carries in Europe: a US-European conversion card, some IDs, the bank card, and other miscellaneous stuff. We searched and we searched, but nothing turned up. A week later we found it, underneath a pair of jeans on the floor that we hadn't bothered to look under.
As we prepared to leave this year, we were laughing about the travails of finding things the last few years, and she made a bold statement: "this year I'm just leaving everything out. If somebody breaks in and steals stuff, more power to 'em." And this is what she did with everything.
Except for her keys, which I pleaded with her to "put in a safe place where we'll be sure to find them." We both remember this. What we don't remember is where that place actually is. Oh, sure, we easily found the car keys left on the table, and the other car key hung on the kitchen peg board, but the house keys were simply gone.
To say that it drove Wifey slightly made is an understatement. It drove her a lot mad. She proceeded to tear the house apart, day and night, searching for her lost keys.
I was glad to leave home to go to work, quite frankly. But each day I came home and there were no keys, but I did have a frazzled wife. Not much of a trade-off, I can tell you.
Finally this grew to such a fever pitch that it consumed my entire family: myself, the girl, and Wifey were all searching for the keys. The boy couldn't care less, and spent his time playing Paper Mario on the Wii.
Wifey and I ended up in our room, determined to either find the keys or burn the house down and start afresh.
"For some reason I'm drawn to right here!" she stood in front of her closet. "Do you know why?"
"All I remember is you telling me to help you remember where you put your keys," I said. "And then you put them in a place where we'd be sure to see them when we returned."
"I wanted to just leave them on the nightstand, but you wouldn't let me." She sighed. "Do you remember this magical place where we would automatically find them?"
"I bet you put them in your shoe," I said. "Did you check in your shoe?"
"What kind of a moron puts them in their shoe?" she asked me. "I'm not a mental patient. Of course I didn't check in my shoes."
So I pulled out her shoes and, sure enough, they weren't in there. But as I picked them up, suddenly a memory, clear as lightning, fired through every synapse in my brain:
Me, putting her keys inside my work dress shoes, which I wear to work every single day. The logic was this: I'll have to put on my dress shoes to go to work, and then I'll find the keys, and so it's not a problem.
Only, if you remember, I bought new dress shoes. And they were so comfy that I have been wearing them since my return.
Without thinking things through, I picked up my old dress shoes and heard the familiar clinking of keys.
"What was that?" Wifey was on me like a hungry bear on a fat hiker. "I heard keys."
"I think it came from downstairs. You better check it out."
"Are my keys in your shoes?" she asked me.
"It's an audible illusion," I said.
"Show me the shoes," she held out her hand.
"There's nothing to see here," I assured her. "Move along."
"Let me check."
I tried to palm the keys as I handed her the shoes, but only ended up scuffing her fingers and dangling the keys out in front of me.
"I have been tearing my hair out and kicking myself the last three days wondering what happened to those damn keys! What are they doing in your shoes?"
"I found them!" I said. "What's my reward? Are you aroused by my searching genius?"
"I won't kill you," she said. "I have to decide whether or not to Bobbitt you."
I'm starting to think burning the house down might have been the cleaner solution.
[Quick temporal note: I've been home a week. The vacation blog lagged real time by 2 days, which grew to a week over the course of writing it for various reasons. But we're all synchronized as of right now.]
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Like a Boomerang
All good things must come to an end, and so too my vacation. So it was with heavy heart I awoke on my last day of vacation. True, with the time change the day will be something like thirty consecutive hours of waiting, flying, and security probings, so it's more like two days than one, but you get my meaning.
We ate a light breakfast and packed the bags. In order to do this, I had to bring all the luggage inside to weigh it on the bathroom scale at Aunt Awesome's house. Because with airlines looking to cut costs, I didn't want to show up with an overweight suitcase and have to pay the exorbitant fine to get it on the plane.
Here's what we finally ended up with: two hard-sided suitcases weighing 45 pounds each, two big red suitcases that came in right at 50 pounds, the purple vomit case weighing 49 pounds, a medium red suitcase at 30 pounds, and a smallish duffel bag that was more strained than the seat of Michael Moore's pants that weighed only 25 pounds.
And how did it feel to lift each of the seven suitcases up and down repeatedly despite having a burgeoning hernia? Not so great, thanks. But in order to look tough to Wifey I had to gut it out.
She was particularly not interested in any suffering on my part because she'd re-sunburned her back and arms yesterday at the pool, and since it had been my fooling around that led to my injury.
Once the suitcases were weighed and stowed back into the car, we bid a fond goodbye to Aunt Awesome, who insisted that next time we needed to come stay longer so we can visit their cabin in Northern Georgia.
"Why, you need to cash in the insurance money on it?" I asked as the fallen tree outside trembled in the wind and the roof quivered underneath.
Then we were off! We had a 5:15 flight scheduled, and it was 1:20. Plenty of time, right?
We punched in Atlanta-Hartsfield to the GPS, a Tom-Tom, which has flawlessly led us across the US. After all, you can't go wrong with Tom-Tom! It's Wifey's, and she chose the English Female's voice for it, so we call her Tommy. She's like a family member now.
She decided to take us through the most convoluted string of streets to get to the interstate, which is okay: Tommy knows best. At 1:35 we stopped along the way to grab a quick bite at McDonald's.
Because I am absolutely insanely anal about airport time, I suggested getting food to go. Wifey hates to eat on the run, so she said this in response to me:
"I think we've got enough time, but if you think that would be better, then that's okay."
Here's what that means once you've passed it through your husband decoder ring: "If you make me eat in the car and then we end up sitting in the airport twiddling our thumbs for thirty minutes waiting for the plane, I will hold it against you for a minimum of three months and remind you of it in perpetuity."
I decided to stop and eat in Mickey D's. Thirty minutes later, we were back on the road.
Atlanta traffic is unpredictable, but thanks to HOV lanes and my blatant disregard for posted speed limits, we made good time to the airport and arrived at the Hertz return area around 3:05.
T-2:10 and counting. No problem. Sure, they tell you to be three hours early, but that's a conspiracy between the gift shops and the TSA to force you to buy airport porn after you've gotten in a fight with your wife because the kids drove you both crazy by bouncing off the walls for two hours because there's absolutely nothing for them to do.
When I turned in the keys to the nice lady at the car return, the first thing she did was point out that I didn't have a license plate. I showed her the small piece of paper taped to the tinted window that served as a temporary plate for the van, and she was happy.
Then she read my mileage. 5,548 miles, on a car that I picked up with 6 miles.
"Oh my gosh!" she said. "You put a lot of miles on this car!"
"Well, I have had it for a month, and I did pick it up in Salt Lake City," I said.
"That's true," she admitted, but still gave me the stinkeye.
Fine, I won't tell her about the key fob that I dunked in water. That'll learn her.
Once the car was paid for (and it cost less than I expected: yay!), we had to make it to the airport shuttle, which is located at the other end of the giant concrete desert that is the car return.
Why do car rental companies do this? You return the car at point A, then you have to walk across the entire lot to Point B, where the bus is. Then, just to make things extra-super-difficult, they put all the luggage carts at Point B. Now, really, does that make any sense? Who's gonna walk from A to B to A to B? Fools, that's who.
Is it really so hard to stick the luggage carts at A? Well, it is if you're a car rental place. Forget all the other slogans; I'll rent from any car rental company that advertises "Our busses aren't in BFE!"
So I quickly arranged the bags in perfect order, strapping them together into a massive behemoth that weighed somewhere around 400 pounds and required sixty newtons of force simply to get underway.
Wifey looked at Mount Samsonite dubiously. "I'm not pushing that," she said.
"I will," I said. "And I'll carry those other two bags and wear all the backpacks so your sunburn doesn't hurt."
Apparently, her sarcasm detector had been damaged in the pool, because she only shrugged and said, "Okay. You're a sweetheart."
So we took the luggage over in shifts, me dragging the giant pile once, then carrying the two big hard-sided suitcases over. But in order to help my children darted back and forth and filled me with dread that they'd get run over in the parking lot by lazy Hertz attendants who weren't paying a bit of attention to where they were going.
However, soon we were safely on the bus and whisked quickly over to the airport terminal. Time? 3:20.
T-1:55. No problem.
I don't know if every US airport has these, but Delta in Atlanta has a system where you sign in for all flights via Kiosks. At these machines you scan a piece of ID (credit card or passport) and it finds your reservation. Then it prints out your boarding passes, and you go turn your luggage over to an attendant who sticks the bag tags on it (which print out automatically) and sends it on its way.
I've used it without trouble the past 2 or 3 years, and I have to say that I'm a fan. And they have about 100 of these things, so one is always open. It is, for airlines, surprisingly efficient.
So I scanned my passport and it told me I didn't have any reservations that day. No problem; I whipped out my E-Ticket and punched in the digits and soon had my reservation. Whew.
After entering all sorts of information, I had to scan the passports for the entire family. First, me. No problem. Then, Wifey. No problem. Then, the girl.
"Passport is about to expire. Please see attendant. Check-in terminated."
Problem. It was 3:25.
So I quickly managed to locate the line that said "Kiosk Help." There were only two people in line in front of me, and there were three people being helped, so odds were good we'd have this little problem sorted out in no time.
See, it turns out that I knew all about this problem. The kids' passports expire in September. So before I left Europe, I called the consulate and asked them if that would be a problem to re-enter the country, because some countries say if your passport is within six months of expiring you can't enter.
"No, not in the EU," the helpful lady told me. "You can come and go right up until it expires."
I jumped in line and began to wait.
And wait.
And wait.
And wait.
At 3:40, there were still two people in front of me in line, but now there were lots and lots of people behind me. The three people who were still being helped fell into three categories:
1) The man who wanted to ship a large, suspiciously-packaged box marked "FRAGILE" on a flight he wasn't on.
2) A couple that didn't have the proper documentation.
3) The man for whom there was no reservation, but who insisted he had a reservation based on (and I kid you not) a series of illegible numbers scrawled on a napkin. Better, he was dressed in a suit that Sonny Crockett would have found a little garish.
Finally, the couple left and the head of the line (another couple, as it turns out) took their place. Then, right after, the guy with the suspicious package left. I was next!
It was then that Wifey approached me. "We've got a problem," she said.
"No kidding!"
"No, it's the boy. He has to pee."
Nearest bathroom? The other side of the airport. The question? What to do with the luggage mountain?
"Just leave the girl in charge," I said. "I can kind of see her all the way over there on the other side of the kiosk forest." She looked at me a moment, as if to ask me something, and I silenced her with this comment: " I will not leave this line for anything short of a fire in the terminal."
So off she went, the boy in tow. And, amazingly, the couple was finished quickly and I quickly reached an attendant. It was 3:45.
As a side note, the man with the napkin refused to leave, despite the fact that his nonexistence in their system meant the airline could do nothing for him. And Delta, in their wisdom, did not open another Kiosk Help Lane despite the 30 or so people waiting in line.
I'm guessing there were some missed flights in there somewhere.
"Hi," I said cheerily to the lady at the desk. "I am an American but I live in Europe and I am flying back there on the 5:15, but my children's passports expire in September so the kiosk won't check me in. I called the consulate before I left in July, and they assured me that this wasn't a problem and I could go back home."
"Oh, yeah, don't worry," said the agent next to her working with the family that didn't have passports for everybody. "You're going home."
Unfortunately, my agent was much more suspicious. She picked up a piece of paper and proceeded to read it for five minutes. We did not say a single word to one another. I have no idea what was on the paper. Instructions? A love note? Garfield Cartoons?
Couldn't tell you. Eventually Wifey came back. "What's the problem?"
This snapped the agent out of her trance. "Do you have any proof you live over there?"
"What difference does that make?" Wifey asked.
Now, listen, I know this much about airport security: even the appearance of giving anybody any lip whatsoever will get you not only thrown off the flight but banned from ever going in the airline again and put on the terrorist watch list and cavity searched by gate agents with cold, meaty hands.
So I shushed Wifey. "Here's my identity card and driver's license," I said, holding them out.
The agent did not so much as look down, concentrating on her piece of paper. "I gotta go check with somebody,"
Then she wandered off.
And did not come back for 15 minutes. It was a little after 4:00.
Wifey was getting angrier and angrier, probably because somebody had snored all night and she hadn't gotten any sleep. I blame the tree.
"Why don't you go keep an eye on the kids?" I asked.
"I want to know how this turns out!" she said.
"I'll tell you everything," I promised. "Don't sweat it."
So she went back to the children. Eventually, the agent came back.
"How are you gonna renew these passports from over there?" she challenged me.
"I'll just go to the consulate in the embassy and have them renewed, like I did with my passport two years ago when it got mangled."
"Oh," she said. "Do you have any bags to check?"
Now, since I am over here and safe from airline repercussions, I would like to officially say: what the fuck? I mean, seriously, that's it? I wasted a good thirty minutes of my life because you're so damned stupid you don't know that the US government has overseas offices that can help me with this kind of thing?
Geez, when you fell out of the stupid tree you hit every branch on the way down, didn't you?
So I came back with this clever retort: "I have seven bags. Let me go get them!"
I put the first bag up on the scale: 51 pounds.
"It costs 80 dollars for an overweight bag," she said.
"I just want to pay it," I said. "And get on the plane."
"Okay," she said.
I put the second bag up on the scale: 54 pounds.
I frowned. Third bag: 30 pounds. Duffel bag trying to pop free: 25 pounds. Hard-sided suitcases: 48 and 49 pounds.
Big red bag? 57 POUNDS!
"What the hell did you do when you weighed these?" Wifey asked me.
We decided to stop for ice cream, and we each got our favorite flavor: the girl go Reese's Pieces and Oreo, Wifey got a chocolate shake, and I got Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough.
The boy? Plain vanilla, in a cup, with a plain spoon. It's the only ice cream he likes. He only ate two bites of it, too, then declared himself done. Sometimes I worry about him.
As chance would have it, I ran into a co-worker who had spent his vacation in Canada in the dining area. We chatted a moment, which was a good reminder to me of why I keep him at Acquaintance instead of upgrading him to Friend.
"Who's that?" Wifey said when I sat down.
"Nobody you want to know," I said.
At 4:45 we headed over to the boarding area. When we got there, it was empty and they were just making the final boarding call for the flight.
"Wow, you guys boarded early!" I said.
The flight attendant became incensed. "We always board this flight an hour early!"
Now, listen, I've taken this particular flight six times. It has never boarded early, and usually boards late. So I didn't buy her BS. But, knowing that if you sass a flight attendant it's worse than if you sass a desk attendant, I let it slide. "Okay," I said. "But we're here on time."
"5:15 is the time in the air," she insisted. "We will close those doors at 5:00!"
"Okay!" I said, rushing into the tunnel with my hand clamped over everyone in my family's mouths.
For the record: the doors closed at 5:30, and the plane took off at 5:50. And that's all I'll say about that, since the TSA may be reading my blog even as we speak.
On the airplane it was pretty standard, although this time we didn’t have any personal movie devices, so Wifey’s super power didn’t come into play. The plane wasn’t full, so we ended up with an extra seat. Wifey sat alone on the far side, with the kids and I sitting in the middle three seats.
This turned out to be a good thing, because the jerkoffs in the seat in front of Wifey decided that they needed to recline the seat as far back as possible. When jerkoff #2 shoved his seat back, he crashed into Wifey’s knees.
“OW!” she said, and turned around and looked at her.
He then proceeded to shove his seat back not once, not twice, not thrice, but five times, crashing into her over and over and over again.
Wifey was now at what I like to call the “cover your crotch and get out of town” phase, where she is about to snap. I kind of wished there was more than a whole aisle between me and her.
Mt. Wifey finally died down, and I was thinking all was well and good. Jerkoff #2 drifted off to sleep, and an hour passed with no issue.
Then she struck, like a rusty bed spring erupting from beneath to rupture your nut sack without warning. What she did (and I admired the evil cleverness of this) was to reach down and grab her backpack, then lift it up. We were, at the time, going through a bit of turbulence.
And she proceeded to hit the seat in front of her so hard with the backpack that Jerkoff #2 fell into the aisle, whereupon his hand was crushed beneath a passing trash cart.
“AAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!” he yelled, waking everyone in the plane.
“Oh my God!” she leapt up out of her seat and helped him to his feet. “I am so sorry, sir, I accidentally hit your seat. Are you all right?”
“You….you…” he glared at her a moment.
“You really should have had your seat belt fastened,” she said. “Airplanes are dangerous places, especially if you sleep.” Then (and I am not making this up) she rubbed her hands together and let out a Mwu-ha-ha chuckle that would have sent chills down the spine of Vincent Price.
Jerkoff #2 spent the rest of the flight wide-eyed awake in terror flinching every time the plane so much as jostled.
Wifey slept like a baby.
The rest of the flight passed quickly and without event, which was probably because everyone within a ten-row radius was terrified of the crazy lady in 39B. I played it off like I didn’t know her.
We found nothing but luck back home, not only getting all our luggage quickly but also finding that the cab that awaited us was a van and that traffic was light, and the house still intact when we arrived.
And you can't ask for more than that, can you?
I'm already thinking about where I want to go next year…
[Author's Note: Thanks to everybody for reading this, and I hope you enjoyed it. I appreciate all the comments, good and bad. And don't worry: I'll keep blogging as per usual, and I'm sure something worth reading about will happen!]
We ate a light breakfast and packed the bags. In order to do this, I had to bring all the luggage inside to weigh it on the bathroom scale at Aunt Awesome's house. Because with airlines looking to cut costs, I didn't want to show up with an overweight suitcase and have to pay the exorbitant fine to get it on the plane.
Here's what we finally ended up with: two hard-sided suitcases weighing 45 pounds each, two big red suitcases that came in right at 50 pounds, the purple vomit case weighing 49 pounds, a medium red suitcase at 30 pounds, and a smallish duffel bag that was more strained than the seat of Michael Moore's pants that weighed only 25 pounds.
And how did it feel to lift each of the seven suitcases up and down repeatedly despite having a burgeoning hernia? Not so great, thanks. But in order to look tough to Wifey I had to gut it out.
She was particularly not interested in any suffering on my part because she'd re-sunburned her back and arms yesterday at the pool, and since it had been my fooling around that led to my injury.
Once the suitcases were weighed and stowed back into the car, we bid a fond goodbye to Aunt Awesome, who insisted that next time we needed to come stay longer so we can visit their cabin in Northern Georgia.
"Why, you need to cash in the insurance money on it?" I asked as the fallen tree outside trembled in the wind and the roof quivered underneath.
Then we were off! We had a 5:15 flight scheduled, and it was 1:20. Plenty of time, right?
We punched in Atlanta-Hartsfield to the GPS, a Tom-Tom, which has flawlessly led us across the US. After all, you can't go wrong with Tom-Tom! It's Wifey's, and she chose the English Female's voice for it, so we call her Tommy. She's like a family member now.
She decided to take us through the most convoluted string of streets to get to the interstate, which is okay: Tommy knows best. At 1:35 we stopped along the way to grab a quick bite at McDonald's.
Because I am absolutely insanely anal about airport time, I suggested getting food to go. Wifey hates to eat on the run, so she said this in response to me:
"I think we've got enough time, but if you think that would be better, then that's okay."
Here's what that means once you've passed it through your husband decoder ring: "If you make me eat in the car and then we end up sitting in the airport twiddling our thumbs for thirty minutes waiting for the plane, I will hold it against you for a minimum of three months and remind you of it in perpetuity."
I decided to stop and eat in Mickey D's. Thirty minutes later, we were back on the road.
Atlanta traffic is unpredictable, but thanks to HOV lanes and my blatant disregard for posted speed limits, we made good time to the airport and arrived at the Hertz return area around 3:05.
T-2:10 and counting. No problem. Sure, they tell you to be three hours early, but that's a conspiracy between the gift shops and the TSA to force you to buy airport porn after you've gotten in a fight with your wife because the kids drove you both crazy by bouncing off the walls for two hours because there's absolutely nothing for them to do.
When I turned in the keys to the nice lady at the car return, the first thing she did was point out that I didn't have a license plate. I showed her the small piece of paper taped to the tinted window that served as a temporary plate for the van, and she was happy.
Then she read my mileage. 5,548 miles, on a car that I picked up with 6 miles.
"Oh my gosh!" she said. "You put a lot of miles on this car!"
"Well, I have had it for a month, and I did pick it up in Salt Lake City," I said.
"That's true," she admitted, but still gave me the stinkeye.
Fine, I won't tell her about the key fob that I dunked in water. That'll learn her.
Once the car was paid for (and it cost less than I expected: yay!), we had to make it to the airport shuttle, which is located at the other end of the giant concrete desert that is the car return.
Why do car rental companies do this? You return the car at point A, then you have to walk across the entire lot to Point B, where the bus is. Then, just to make things extra-super-difficult, they put all the luggage carts at Point B. Now, really, does that make any sense? Who's gonna walk from A to B to A to B? Fools, that's who.
Is it really so hard to stick the luggage carts at A? Well, it is if you're a car rental place. Forget all the other slogans; I'll rent from any car rental company that advertises "Our busses aren't in BFE!"
So I quickly arranged the bags in perfect order, strapping them together into a massive behemoth that weighed somewhere around 400 pounds and required sixty newtons of force simply to get underway.
Wifey looked at Mount Samsonite dubiously. "I'm not pushing that," she said.
"I will," I said. "And I'll carry those other two bags and wear all the backpacks so your sunburn doesn't hurt."
Apparently, her sarcasm detector had been damaged in the pool, because she only shrugged and said, "Okay. You're a sweetheart."
So we took the luggage over in shifts, me dragging the giant pile once, then carrying the two big hard-sided suitcases over. But in order to help my children darted back and forth and filled me with dread that they'd get run over in the parking lot by lazy Hertz attendants who weren't paying a bit of attention to where they were going.
However, soon we were safely on the bus and whisked quickly over to the airport terminal. Time? 3:20.
T-1:55. No problem.
I don't know if every US airport has these, but Delta in Atlanta has a system where you sign in for all flights via Kiosks. At these machines you scan a piece of ID (credit card or passport) and it finds your reservation. Then it prints out your boarding passes, and you go turn your luggage over to an attendant who sticks the bag tags on it (which print out automatically) and sends it on its way.
I've used it without trouble the past 2 or 3 years, and I have to say that I'm a fan. And they have about 100 of these things, so one is always open. It is, for airlines, surprisingly efficient.
So I scanned my passport and it told me I didn't have any reservations that day. No problem; I whipped out my E-Ticket and punched in the digits and soon had my reservation. Whew.
After entering all sorts of information, I had to scan the passports for the entire family. First, me. No problem. Then, Wifey. No problem. Then, the girl.
"Passport is about to expire. Please see attendant. Check-in terminated."
Problem. It was 3:25.
So I quickly managed to locate the line that said "Kiosk Help." There were only two people in line in front of me, and there were three people being helped, so odds were good we'd have this little problem sorted out in no time.
See, it turns out that I knew all about this problem. The kids' passports expire in September. So before I left Europe, I called the consulate and asked them if that would be a problem to re-enter the country, because some countries say if your passport is within six months of expiring you can't enter.
"No, not in the EU," the helpful lady told me. "You can come and go right up until it expires."
I jumped in line and began to wait.
And wait.
And wait.
And wait.
At 3:40, there were still two people in front of me in line, but now there were lots and lots of people behind me. The three people who were still being helped fell into three categories:
1) The man who wanted to ship a large, suspiciously-packaged box marked "FRAGILE" on a flight he wasn't on.
2) A couple that didn't have the proper documentation.
3) The man for whom there was no reservation, but who insisted he had a reservation based on (and I kid you not) a series of illegible numbers scrawled on a napkin. Better, he was dressed in a suit that Sonny Crockett would have found a little garish.
Finally, the couple left and the head of the line (another couple, as it turns out) took their place. Then, right after, the guy with the suspicious package left. I was next!
It was then that Wifey approached me. "We've got a problem," she said.
"No kidding!"
"No, it's the boy. He has to pee."
Nearest bathroom? The other side of the airport. The question? What to do with the luggage mountain?
"Just leave the girl in charge," I said. "I can kind of see her all the way over there on the other side of the kiosk forest." She looked at me a moment, as if to ask me something, and I silenced her with this comment: " I will not leave this line for anything short of a fire in the terminal."
So off she went, the boy in tow. And, amazingly, the couple was finished quickly and I quickly reached an attendant. It was 3:45.
As a side note, the man with the napkin refused to leave, despite the fact that his nonexistence in their system meant the airline could do nothing for him. And Delta, in their wisdom, did not open another Kiosk Help Lane despite the 30 or so people waiting in line.
I'm guessing there were some missed flights in there somewhere.
"Hi," I said cheerily to the lady at the desk. "I am an American but I live in Europe and I am flying back there on the 5:15, but my children's passports expire in September so the kiosk won't check me in. I called the consulate before I left in July, and they assured me that this wasn't a problem and I could go back home."
"Oh, yeah, don't worry," said the agent next to her working with the family that didn't have passports for everybody. "You're going home."
Unfortunately, my agent was much more suspicious. She picked up a piece of paper and proceeded to read it for five minutes. We did not say a single word to one another. I have no idea what was on the paper. Instructions? A love note? Garfield Cartoons?
Couldn't tell you. Eventually Wifey came back. "What's the problem?"
This snapped the agent out of her trance. "Do you have any proof you live over there?"
"What difference does that make?" Wifey asked.
Now, listen, I know this much about airport security: even the appearance of giving anybody any lip whatsoever will get you not only thrown off the flight but banned from ever going in the airline again and put on the terrorist watch list and cavity searched by gate agents with cold, meaty hands.
So I shushed Wifey. "Here's my identity card and driver's license," I said, holding them out.
The agent did not so much as look down, concentrating on her piece of paper. "I gotta go check with somebody,"
Then she wandered off.
And did not come back for 15 minutes. It was a little after 4:00.
Wifey was getting angrier and angrier, probably because somebody had snored all night and she hadn't gotten any sleep. I blame the tree.
"Why don't you go keep an eye on the kids?" I asked.
"I want to know how this turns out!" she said.
"I'll tell you everything," I promised. "Don't sweat it."
So she went back to the children. Eventually, the agent came back.
"How are you gonna renew these passports from over there?" she challenged me.
"I'll just go to the consulate in the embassy and have them renewed, like I did with my passport two years ago when it got mangled."
"Oh," she said. "Do you have any bags to check?"
Now, since I am over here and safe from airline repercussions, I would like to officially say: what the fuck? I mean, seriously, that's it? I wasted a good thirty minutes of my life because you're so damned stupid you don't know that the US government has overseas offices that can help me with this kind of thing?
Geez, when you fell out of the stupid tree you hit every branch on the way down, didn't you?
So I came back with this clever retort: "I have seven bags. Let me go get them!"
I put the first bag up on the scale: 51 pounds.
"It costs 80 dollars for an overweight bag," she said.
"I just want to pay it," I said. "And get on the plane."
"Okay," she said.
I put the second bag up on the scale: 54 pounds.
I frowned. Third bag: 30 pounds. Duffel bag trying to pop free: 25 pounds. Hard-sided suitcases: 48 and 49 pounds.
Big red bag? 57 POUNDS!
"What the hell did you do when you weighed these?" Wifey asked me.
We decided to stop for ice cream, and we each got our favorite flavor: the girl go Reese's Pieces and Oreo, Wifey got a chocolate shake, and I got Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough.
The boy? Plain vanilla, in a cup, with a plain spoon. It's the only ice cream he likes. He only ate two bites of it, too, then declared himself done. Sometimes I worry about him.
As chance would have it, I ran into a co-worker who had spent his vacation in Canada in the dining area. We chatted a moment, which was a good reminder to me of why I keep him at Acquaintance instead of upgrading him to Friend.
"Who's that?" Wifey said when I sat down.
"Nobody you want to know," I said.
At 4:45 we headed over to the boarding area. When we got there, it was empty and they were just making the final boarding call for the flight.
"Wow, you guys boarded early!" I said.
The flight attendant became incensed. "We always board this flight an hour early!"
Now, listen, I've taken this particular flight six times. It has never boarded early, and usually boards late. So I didn't buy her BS. But, knowing that if you sass a flight attendant it's worse than if you sass a desk attendant, I let it slide. "Okay," I said. "But we're here on time."
"5:15 is the time in the air," she insisted. "We will close those doors at 5:00!"
"Okay!" I said, rushing into the tunnel with my hand clamped over everyone in my family's mouths.
For the record: the doors closed at 5:30, and the plane took off at 5:50. And that's all I'll say about that, since the TSA may be reading my blog even as we speak.
On the airplane it was pretty standard, although this time we didn’t have any personal movie devices, so Wifey’s super power didn’t come into play. The plane wasn’t full, so we ended up with an extra seat. Wifey sat alone on the far side, with the kids and I sitting in the middle three seats.
This turned out to be a good thing, because the jerkoffs in the seat in front of Wifey decided that they needed to recline the seat as far back as possible. When jerkoff #2 shoved his seat back, he crashed into Wifey’s knees.
“OW!” she said, and turned around and looked at her.
He then proceeded to shove his seat back not once, not twice, not thrice, but five times, crashing into her over and over and over again.
Wifey was now at what I like to call the “cover your crotch and get out of town” phase, where she is about to snap. I kind of wished there was more than a whole aisle between me and her.
Mt. Wifey finally died down, and I was thinking all was well and good. Jerkoff #2 drifted off to sleep, and an hour passed with no issue.
Then she struck, like a rusty bed spring erupting from beneath to rupture your nut sack without warning. What she did (and I admired the evil cleverness of this) was to reach down and grab her backpack, then lift it up. We were, at the time, going through a bit of turbulence.
And she proceeded to hit the seat in front of her so hard with the backpack that Jerkoff #2 fell into the aisle, whereupon his hand was crushed beneath a passing trash cart.
“AAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!” he yelled, waking everyone in the plane.
“Oh my God!” she leapt up out of her seat and helped him to his feet. “I am so sorry, sir, I accidentally hit your seat. Are you all right?”
“You….you…” he glared at her a moment.
“You really should have had your seat belt fastened,” she said. “Airplanes are dangerous places, especially if you sleep.” Then (and I am not making this up) she rubbed her hands together and let out a Mwu-ha-ha chuckle that would have sent chills down the spine of Vincent Price.
Jerkoff #2 spent the rest of the flight wide-eyed awake in terror flinching every time the plane so much as jostled.
Wifey slept like a baby.
The rest of the flight passed quickly and without event, which was probably because everyone within a ten-row radius was terrified of the crazy lady in 39B. I played it off like I didn’t know her.
We found nothing but luck back home, not only getting all our luggage quickly but also finding that the cab that awaited us was a van and that traffic was light, and the house still intact when we arrived.
And you can't ask for more than that, can you?
I'm already thinking about where I want to go next year…
[Author's Note: Thanks to everybody for reading this, and I hope you enjoyed it. I appreciate all the comments, good and bad. And don't worry: I'll keep blogging as per usual, and I'm sure something worth reading about will happen!]
Monday, August 11, 2008
A Penultimate Injury
Miracle of miracles, we awoke the next morning, all still alive despite having a tree hanging over us all night. In the clear light of day, it was obvious that the damage was much more impressive than previously thought, particularly judging by the number of golfers who stopped by to marvel at the tree.
I asked if Aunt Awesome wanted me to go chase them away with witty commentary or a Potato Gun, but she declined. I was somewhat disappointed, but had to acquiesce since I was a guest.
Over the course of the morning the cousins came by, along with their children. I hadn't seen any of them in years and years, so they all looked older and fatter than I remembered. I suppose I'm older and fatter, too, but I think it makes me look distinguished.
Finally Mini (the youngest cousin) drug herself in, bleary-eyed from a long night of partying. She recounted a tale of woe that was as boring as it was nonsensical, and had something to do with obtaining a low-priced keg that would fit their beer bong. Or maybe that was the other way 'round, I'm not sure.
After brunch (which was mighty delicious) we headed over to the Condo Association's pool. It was here that I was reminded, once again, that the rich live differently than you and I do.
Specifically, they live better.
I lived in a condo once, and our "pool" was a six-by-six rectangle that held fetid water and an unknown number of mosquito larvae and tadpoles. You could swim in it, but only if you wanted to have leeches in close contact with your privates under murky water.
And the Jacuzzi? Let's just say the bedspread at a porno shoot is only slightly more hygienic than that cesspool of human filth.
So I was somewhat skeptical that fun could be found at the Condo Association pool. In fact, I was looking forward to a fast retreat to a McDonald's Playland and drinking a milkshake. Because this belly fat didn't put itself there, you know. I had to help it.
When we entered, through the secured gate, I was awestruck at what Aunt Awesome had described as "our little community pool."
First of all, there were two pools. One only about 18" deep for the children, with a giant mushroom fountain at one end and a playing area at the other end. Spaced around it were hundreds of lounge chairs, and a covered area at the end for barbecues. The other pool was an adult pool, between 3 and 5 feet deep, large enough that you could swim half-laps from one side to the other.
And off to the side of the Adult Pool was the five-foot basin for the water slide, complete with one and a half loops, which you accessed by walking up the stairs in a tower that was about 25 feet high.
It was better than the crappy water park that got auctioned off in White's City, and I said so to Wifey.
"Can't be," she said with a twinkle in her eyes. "You won't get to see anybody flaunting their privates here like you did in White's City."
"The day is young," I said. "There's hope yet!"
The pool was well-staffed and apparently all hiring decisions were made by a man, because the lifeguards were all good-looking 20-year-old women in tight speedos who lounged provocatively under umbrellas.
We quickly applied sunscreen, then my children spent all of 20 seconds deciding what to do first: "The water slide!"
So we went and did several turns on the water slide. It was as fast as it was impressive, and I soon learned to respect the velocity one could gather coming down it.
The adults gathered in the water slide basin, where we were ostensibly watching the children come down the slide. In reality we were gabbing and waving as they made the near-continuous loop to and from the slide.
Occasionally one of the cousins would take a slide, and once she'd sobered up Mimi took several. However, soon they approached me after a particularly impressive slide.
"How do you go so fast?" they asked me. "You're shooting down that a lot faster than we are!"
Never one to miss a chance to be pedantic, I dropped into Confucius mode. "Grasshopper, in order to be a rocket on the slide, you must be like the slug underfoot: without friction."
"What the hell?" asked one. "Can you say that in English?"
"You can't let your suit touch the slide," I said. "You put your shoulders and your calves down and arch your back to keep your butt off the slide. You'll go faster."
And, sure enough, I was right. Soon they were rocketing down really, really fast. Eventually Denny was making huge splashes, too. I would say it's because he's fatter than me, but the reality is that he's not, he was just going down only on his back, legs up in the air, and then shooting out the tube like a cannonball.
I was insanely jealous, so I had to try the same thing. Big mistake on my part.
Listen, I'll be the first one to admit that I'm not in the greatest shape of my life. Unless you count "soft" as a shape, which most people don't. If I had to pick which Herculoid I most resemble, I'd pick the little yellow shape-changing paisley thing.
Even so, I should be able to go down the water slide without injuring myself. But the reality is that I can't. I started down on my back, but got turned around and was going head-first halfway down. But going head-first is against the rules, and I didn't want the hottie lifeguard to yell at me. As I tried to spin my body to correct this, I felt a wrenching in my stomach.
Specifically, it felt like I'd been stabbed by a Zulu spear three inches over from my belly button. I ceased sliding and began rolling, and when my corpse finally tumbled off the end of the slide my splash was pathetic. The others didn't hesitate to let me know that.
At least, they let me know once I'd dragged my sorry ass over to them.
"What's wrong?" Wifey asked. "You don't look so good."
"I'm fine!" I gasped.
"Dude, your splash was totally lame," Donny said. "I can fart and kick up more water than that."
"Yeah," said Mimi. "Even I can splash more than that, and I'm a girl!"
"Oh….yeah….I'll….show….you!" I gasped as I struggled out of the water. The invisible Zulus were stabbing me again, this time with flaming spears.
"Why don't you rest a moment?" Wifey said. "You can go in a minute."
"No!" I said. "I'll splash or die trying!"
And so I struggled up the stairs, with the boy passing me 3 times as I tried to climb my way to the top. Then, as I caught my breath, I let him go four more times just for good measure.
Then, I was ready. Mimi had just arrived behind me, sent by Wifey to see if I had died.
"What's the matter, old man, did you chicken out?" she asked me.
Up until then, I had begun to think that further sliding was not in the future. But not now that I had to impress a 23-year-old cousin-in-law that I barely know who thinks I'm an idiot anyways, even if it meant getting a compound hernia that landed me in the hospital.
Because I may be a dork, but I have my pride.
So I launched myself down the slide again, with the reckless abandon reserved for the young and drunken. Bear in mind that I was neither.
I realized I was having a more serious problem than a simple hernia halfway down. In addition to Zulu spears stabbing at my stomach, and being reversed again, the integrity of my swimming trunks was becoming questionable as I began to feel the slide hurtling by beneath my bare butt.
I tried to reposition myself and grab the trunks, lest I lose them on the slide proper, but that sent my body spiraling all akimbo. Given the somewhat feeble state of my stomach muscles, I was unable to really get my body under control, and at this point found my consciousness a mere rider on the sack of meat that my soon-to-be-waterlogged corpse had become.
Splashdown! Witnesses told me that the splash was impressive, mostly because I came flying out of the tube on my back, arms beneath me, legs in the air, and head first. I don't know about that, but I do know that when I hit the water two things happened to me:
1) I inhaled six gallons of water
2) My swim trunks ended up around my knees
The lifeguard began blowing her whistle and telling me that headers were not allowed and that I needed to get out of the landing zone. The others cheered my splashing. Wifey looked on with some concern.
I wrestled with my trunks and the feeling that a good 25% of my innards were trying to escape via a hole they were gnawing in my abdomen and made no progress on either the trunks or getting out of the way.
Let me tell you, there's no particularly good way to pull your swim trunks up in 4' of water when they're down at your knees without readily broadcasting this information to the world, and there's no way to swim away from the slide without losing the rest of your trunks and hoping that public nudity laws are more lax in an Atlanta condo pool than in the rest of the United States.
So I was flailing when the flux of water down the slide suddenly vanished, like the tide rolling out is a harbinger of a tsunami. I looked up in horror and…
BAM! Mimi landed on me.
This is not a situation that you want to be in: trunks around ankles, possibly herniated, and your wife's 23-year-old cousin sitting on your head with you underwater. There simply is no graceful way to extricate yourself from this situation without coming off as a little bit of a pervert or a whole lot of a dumbass.
So I did what any quick-thinking person would do: I blamed her.
"HEY!" I yelled. "You pulled my shorts down!"
"Oh my God!" she said. "I'm so sorry!"
"What's wrong with you?" I asked as I struggled to pull them up. "Weirdo! Pervert! Sicko!"
"Geez, sis, that's low," said Donny. "Pullin' a guy's shorts down just because he upstaged your splash."
And just like that, crisis was averted. We proceeded to make fun of her and I studiously avoided sliding again for fear of a repeat problem. I still felt like I'd been hit in the stomach by a Buick, but I figured that would go away in a few months. Pain is temporary, right?
Unfortunately that night was not months away, and I lay in so much agony that I couldn't give Wifey a proper "last night in the states," for which she was not terrifically appreciative.
Damn water slide.
Tomorrow: The Return
I asked if Aunt Awesome wanted me to go chase them away with witty commentary or a Potato Gun, but she declined. I was somewhat disappointed, but had to acquiesce since I was a guest.
Over the course of the morning the cousins came by, along with their children. I hadn't seen any of them in years and years, so they all looked older and fatter than I remembered. I suppose I'm older and fatter, too, but I think it makes me look distinguished.
Finally Mini (the youngest cousin) drug herself in, bleary-eyed from a long night of partying. She recounted a tale of woe that was as boring as it was nonsensical, and had something to do with obtaining a low-priced keg that would fit their beer bong. Or maybe that was the other way 'round, I'm not sure.
After brunch (which was mighty delicious) we headed over to the Condo Association's pool. It was here that I was reminded, once again, that the rich live differently than you and I do.
Specifically, they live better.
I lived in a condo once, and our "pool" was a six-by-six rectangle that held fetid water and an unknown number of mosquito larvae and tadpoles. You could swim in it, but only if you wanted to have leeches in close contact with your privates under murky water.
And the Jacuzzi? Let's just say the bedspread at a porno shoot is only slightly more hygienic than that cesspool of human filth.
So I was somewhat skeptical that fun could be found at the Condo Association pool. In fact, I was looking forward to a fast retreat to a McDonald's Playland and drinking a milkshake. Because this belly fat didn't put itself there, you know. I had to help it.
When we entered, through the secured gate, I was awestruck at what Aunt Awesome had described as "our little community pool."
First of all, there were two pools. One only about 18" deep for the children, with a giant mushroom fountain at one end and a playing area at the other end. Spaced around it were hundreds of lounge chairs, and a covered area at the end for barbecues. The other pool was an adult pool, between 3 and 5 feet deep, large enough that you could swim half-laps from one side to the other.
And off to the side of the Adult Pool was the five-foot basin for the water slide, complete with one and a half loops, which you accessed by walking up the stairs in a tower that was about 25 feet high.
It was better than the crappy water park that got auctioned off in White's City, and I said so to Wifey.
"Can't be," she said with a twinkle in her eyes. "You won't get to see anybody flaunting their privates here like you did in White's City."
"The day is young," I said. "There's hope yet!"
The pool was well-staffed and apparently all hiring decisions were made by a man, because the lifeguards were all good-looking 20-year-old women in tight speedos who lounged provocatively under umbrellas.
We quickly applied sunscreen, then my children spent all of 20 seconds deciding what to do first: "The water slide!"
So we went and did several turns on the water slide. It was as fast as it was impressive, and I soon learned to respect the velocity one could gather coming down it.
The adults gathered in the water slide basin, where we were ostensibly watching the children come down the slide. In reality we were gabbing and waving as they made the near-continuous loop to and from the slide.
Occasionally one of the cousins would take a slide, and once she'd sobered up Mimi took several. However, soon they approached me after a particularly impressive slide.
"How do you go so fast?" they asked me. "You're shooting down that a lot faster than we are!"
Never one to miss a chance to be pedantic, I dropped into Confucius mode. "Grasshopper, in order to be a rocket on the slide, you must be like the slug underfoot: without friction."
"What the hell?" asked one. "Can you say that in English?"
"You can't let your suit touch the slide," I said. "You put your shoulders and your calves down and arch your back to keep your butt off the slide. You'll go faster."
And, sure enough, I was right. Soon they were rocketing down really, really fast. Eventually Denny was making huge splashes, too. I would say it's because he's fatter than me, but the reality is that he's not, he was just going down only on his back, legs up in the air, and then shooting out the tube like a cannonball.
I was insanely jealous, so I had to try the same thing. Big mistake on my part.
Listen, I'll be the first one to admit that I'm not in the greatest shape of my life. Unless you count "soft" as a shape, which most people don't. If I had to pick which Herculoid I most resemble, I'd pick the little yellow shape-changing paisley thing.
Even so, I should be able to go down the water slide without injuring myself. But the reality is that I can't. I started down on my back, but got turned around and was going head-first halfway down. But going head-first is against the rules, and I didn't want the hottie lifeguard to yell at me. As I tried to spin my body to correct this, I felt a wrenching in my stomach.
Specifically, it felt like I'd been stabbed by a Zulu spear three inches over from my belly button. I ceased sliding and began rolling, and when my corpse finally tumbled off the end of the slide my splash was pathetic. The others didn't hesitate to let me know that.
At least, they let me know once I'd dragged my sorry ass over to them.
"What's wrong?" Wifey asked. "You don't look so good."
"I'm fine!" I gasped.
"Dude, your splash was totally lame," Donny said. "I can fart and kick up more water than that."
"Yeah," said Mimi. "Even I can splash more than that, and I'm a girl!"
"Oh….yeah….I'll….show….you!" I gasped as I struggled out of the water. The invisible Zulus were stabbing me again, this time with flaming spears.
"Why don't you rest a moment?" Wifey said. "You can go in a minute."
"No!" I said. "I'll splash or die trying!"
And so I struggled up the stairs, with the boy passing me 3 times as I tried to climb my way to the top. Then, as I caught my breath, I let him go four more times just for good measure.
Then, I was ready. Mimi had just arrived behind me, sent by Wifey to see if I had died.
"What's the matter, old man, did you chicken out?" she asked me.
Up until then, I had begun to think that further sliding was not in the future. But not now that I had to impress a 23-year-old cousin-in-law that I barely know who thinks I'm an idiot anyways, even if it meant getting a compound hernia that landed me in the hospital.
Because I may be a dork, but I have my pride.
So I launched myself down the slide again, with the reckless abandon reserved for the young and drunken. Bear in mind that I was neither.
I realized I was having a more serious problem than a simple hernia halfway down. In addition to Zulu spears stabbing at my stomach, and being reversed again, the integrity of my swimming trunks was becoming questionable as I began to feel the slide hurtling by beneath my bare butt.
I tried to reposition myself and grab the trunks, lest I lose them on the slide proper, but that sent my body spiraling all akimbo. Given the somewhat feeble state of my stomach muscles, I was unable to really get my body under control, and at this point found my consciousness a mere rider on the sack of meat that my soon-to-be-waterlogged corpse had become.
Splashdown! Witnesses told me that the splash was impressive, mostly because I came flying out of the tube on my back, arms beneath me, legs in the air, and head first. I don't know about that, but I do know that when I hit the water two things happened to me:
1) I inhaled six gallons of water
2) My swim trunks ended up around my knees
The lifeguard began blowing her whistle and telling me that headers were not allowed and that I needed to get out of the landing zone. The others cheered my splashing. Wifey looked on with some concern.
I wrestled with my trunks and the feeling that a good 25% of my innards were trying to escape via a hole they were gnawing in my abdomen and made no progress on either the trunks or getting out of the way.
Let me tell you, there's no particularly good way to pull your swim trunks up in 4' of water when they're down at your knees without readily broadcasting this information to the world, and there's no way to swim away from the slide without losing the rest of your trunks and hoping that public nudity laws are more lax in an Atlanta condo pool than in the rest of the United States.
So I was flailing when the flux of water down the slide suddenly vanished, like the tide rolling out is a harbinger of a tsunami. I looked up in horror and…
BAM! Mimi landed on me.
This is not a situation that you want to be in: trunks around ankles, possibly herniated, and your wife's 23-year-old cousin sitting on your head with you underwater. There simply is no graceful way to extricate yourself from this situation without coming off as a little bit of a pervert or a whole lot of a dumbass.
So I did what any quick-thinking person would do: I blamed her.
"HEY!" I yelled. "You pulled my shorts down!"
"Oh my God!" she said. "I'm so sorry!"
"What's wrong with you?" I asked as I struggled to pull them up. "Weirdo! Pervert! Sicko!"
"Geez, sis, that's low," said Donny. "Pullin' a guy's shorts down just because he upstaged your splash."
And just like that, crisis was averted. We proceeded to make fun of her and I studiously avoided sliding again for fear of a repeat problem. I still felt like I'd been hit in the stomach by a Buick, but I figured that would go away in a few months. Pain is temporary, right?
Unfortunately that night was not months away, and I lay in so much agony that I couldn't give Wifey a proper "last night in the states," for which she was not terrifically appreciative.
Damn water slide.
Tomorrow: The Return
Friday, August 8, 2008
What, More Shopping?
As punishment for my transgressions yesterday, today's plan was to visit vacation hell. That's right: we were going shopping again! Oh joy, rapture, just what I needed: several hundred dollars more crap to jam into already-stuffed suitcases.
Can you tell how excited I was?
We went to a store named Kohl's, no relation to the former German leader Helmut. It's kind of like Wal-Mart meets JC Penny's, only without the computer games or anything else interesting and with prices that will make you wince.
But don't worry, it's tax-free shopping day, I was assured.
"You know what? If we don't buy shit, then the oppressive tax system never comes into play in the first place!"
I was told by all involved to shut up and drive.
Up first at Kohl's: school clothing for the boy. We'd looked for all of about five minutes when his shopping stamina gave out, and he started vetoing every single choice he was presented.
"You have to take something!" said Wifey, exasperated.
"That," he said pointing to a pair of Batman pajamas with a cape on them. "I want that."
After some negotiation, we got him two pairs of pants, some shirts, and the pajamas he wanted. Plus, I bought him a shirt with a tank on it so he could look menacing at his school in the fall. Because I'm pretty sure in Europe there are no shirts with tanks on them.
Then we started looking for the girl. Typically she's not a very excitable shopper, but on this occasion she was quite gung-ho. I guessed it was to humor her aunt, but at any rate, it quickly became a girlie expedition to Darkest Rackica in search of the greatest outfits ever assembled.
The boy and I were bored silly.
"Can we go yet?" the boy asked me.
"Yeah, let's bug out of here," I said.
So I told Wifey that we were going to go look for a suitcase, and off we went. I didn't know if the damn place even had them, but I resolved to look everywhere but in the girl's department to find them.
What we actually stumbled across was lava lamps. Lots and lots of lava lamps.
Did you know that if you shake a lava lamp, I mean really shake it hard, all the little bits of lava break up into a billion pieces and it looks like a snowglobe of hell? We had a lot of fun doing that, until the boy thwacked a nearby teenage girl in the exposed midriff.
"OW!" she yelled. "That burns!"
He looked up at her and his eyes suddenly filled with anguished tears. "I'm sooo sowwy," he said to her. "I didn't see you dere, wady. Pwease fuhgive me." I have no idea where the speech impediment came from. "You can hit me wif it if you want."
"Oh, no, that's okay," she said. "Would you like to burn me again with it, little dear?"
By the time he was done with her she looked like a rooster that'd been plucked. I swear, I don't know how he manages such things. If it'd been me I'd be writing this blog from prison.
Figuring we'd done all the damage in lava lamps that we could, we swung back by girl's clothes. They had 5,472 outfits and were trying them on in every conceivable combination, so I figured we still had time to kill.
So we went looking for luggage. I actually found it, every shape and size and color you can imagine, and all only about 50% more than what it would cost at Wal-Mart. I don't care if they do abuse the working man, next year I'm making them my Official Vacation Sponsor.
I selected a fancy-looking bag from Ricardo's of Beverly Hills. Now, it had some cool features, like an interior separator to make two compartments, garment bag adaptor, and a matching tote bag, but none of those was why I chose it.
I chose it because it was the God-awfullest color of purple I've ever seen, and the interior looked like Bozo the Clown ate his makeup case and then vomited up the contents.
Listen, when you're standing next to the belts after an 8 hour flight and the kids are going crazy and your Wife is about to bite your head off because she couldn't eat the creamed crap they served, the last thing you want to do is try to figure out which of the 64 million blue-black bags on the conveyor belongs to you.
So all my luggage is either red (a rare color) or, now, purple (a very rare color) with bright pink fluorescent ribbons on them. I'd have bought the lime-green puke luggage if it'd been big enough, but it wasn't.
Because judging from the pile that the girl was trying on, and what didn't fit in the suitcases we had, we needed every inch of luggage space I could muster.
I returned to the girls with my find and they were suitably impressed. Then, they asked for my opinion on the clothing they'd chosen out for the girl.
I was in kind of a quandary: everyone wanted my opinion, which really should have no value, yet I had no opinion, was bored, and couldn't really care less whether she wore a paper bag to school or not.
Worse, Wifey wasn't giving me the subtle hints of whether I should say yes or no in this high-pressure decision. I was expected to actually decide something! So I just randomly vetoed some and accepted others, and for some reason everyone accepted that opinion like it was valid.
The fools.
Finally we paid the tab, which ended up being some hundreds of dollars. For every 50 bucks we spent, we received $10 "Kohl's Cash" that could be spent between August 11 and 17. Only, we'll be back in Europe then, so we ended up giving $60 to Sis-in-law.
So I quickly understood why it was we had to go shopping at Kohl's today. Dammit, I will have my vengeance. Next time I fly her over here to visit us, I'm requesting a seat in the lavatory.
Then we went and had lunch with Luggage at Pizza Inn. He's a cop, and had to work, so he came to meet us. It was very good, and afterwards we got to pet his police dog and marvel at his cruiser. The kids were thrilled
(Side note: why aren't there more Pizza Inns? Was there a plague there or something? I like that place. Good pizza, great tattoo machine, and sluttily-dressed waitresses that flounce around for no apparent reason. What more can you ask for?)
Then it was off to our last vacation stop: beautiful Atlanta, to visit Aunt Awesome, Wifey's favorite relative. Aunt Awesome is retired now, but up until recently she owned a successful business that she recently sold. I have met Aunt Awesome several times and I have to say she's my favorite of Wifey's relatives (with the possible exception of Sis-in-Law, who is always good for a laugh).
Aunt Awesome has four kids, each of them sharing the first letter of their name with their father. So we'll call them Danny, Donny, Denny, and Mini. While Danny lives with Aunt Awesome, the others all have homes and families of their own.
So we pull up and the kids eagerly ring the doorbell, their favorite part of any visit. I swear I don't know why I buy them toys: a box and a doorbell would make them happy forever. They almost went to fist city over who got to press the doorbell.
"Hey, welcome, y'all!" says Aunt Awesome. "Come see the tree that just fell on our house!"
Yes, that's right: moments before we arrived a tree fell on Aunt Awesome's house. Can I officially say that my vacation is designed to bring woe on all whom I visit? Especially since I stopped up three toilets that I never told anybody about.
The house sits on a golf course, and one of the big old trees behind it has crashed into it, knocked off a big section of gutter and cracking the roof in the bathroom that Aunt Awesome had just painted.
After I had surveyed the damage (which is just as effective as having one of those Europussie leaders review his outdated army) we sat down to dinner and caught up. Then, because it was late, I sent the children to bed.
When I came in to check on them, I overheard the girl saying sadly to her brother:
"Good-bye."
"Good-bye;" he said solemnly.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
He started to tell me. "She told me that tonight-"
"Shhh!" she said.
"What did she tell you?" I asked.
"Tonight the tree is going to crash through the house and crush the bed and kill us both," he said happily. "So it's good-bye tonight because we'll never see each other alive again."
"It is not!" I said. "If the tree crashed through the roof it'd actually land right on our bed and kill mommy and I, and maybe take Aunt Awesome and Uncle Mustache with us. But you guys should be okay."
Sadly, that seemed to comfort them.
Then it was time for bed, but I couldn't sleep, because all I could think about was ten tons of arboreal doom waiting to crush me flatter than a pancake while I slept.
Tomorrow: One Last Time at the Swimmin' Hole
Can you tell how excited I was?
We went to a store named Kohl's, no relation to the former German leader Helmut. It's kind of like Wal-Mart meets JC Penny's, only without the computer games or anything else interesting and with prices that will make you wince.
But don't worry, it's tax-free shopping day, I was assured.
"You know what? If we don't buy shit, then the oppressive tax system never comes into play in the first place!"
I was told by all involved to shut up and drive.
Up first at Kohl's: school clothing for the boy. We'd looked for all of about five minutes when his shopping stamina gave out, and he started vetoing every single choice he was presented.
"You have to take something!" said Wifey, exasperated.
"That," he said pointing to a pair of Batman pajamas with a cape on them. "I want that."
After some negotiation, we got him two pairs of pants, some shirts, and the pajamas he wanted. Plus, I bought him a shirt with a tank on it so he could look menacing at his school in the fall. Because I'm pretty sure in Europe there are no shirts with tanks on them.
Then we started looking for the girl. Typically she's not a very excitable shopper, but on this occasion she was quite gung-ho. I guessed it was to humor her aunt, but at any rate, it quickly became a girlie expedition to Darkest Rackica in search of the greatest outfits ever assembled.
The boy and I were bored silly.
"Can we go yet?" the boy asked me.
"Yeah, let's bug out of here," I said.
So I told Wifey that we were going to go look for a suitcase, and off we went. I didn't know if the damn place even had them, but I resolved to look everywhere but in the girl's department to find them.
What we actually stumbled across was lava lamps. Lots and lots of lava lamps.
Did you know that if you shake a lava lamp, I mean really shake it hard, all the little bits of lava break up into a billion pieces and it looks like a snowglobe of hell? We had a lot of fun doing that, until the boy thwacked a nearby teenage girl in the exposed midriff.
"OW!" she yelled. "That burns!"
He looked up at her and his eyes suddenly filled with anguished tears. "I'm sooo sowwy," he said to her. "I didn't see you dere, wady. Pwease fuhgive me." I have no idea where the speech impediment came from. "You can hit me wif it if you want."
"Oh, no, that's okay," she said. "Would you like to burn me again with it, little dear?"
By the time he was done with her she looked like a rooster that'd been plucked. I swear, I don't know how he manages such things. If it'd been me I'd be writing this blog from prison.
Figuring we'd done all the damage in lava lamps that we could, we swung back by girl's clothes. They had 5,472 outfits and were trying them on in every conceivable combination, so I figured we still had time to kill.
So we went looking for luggage. I actually found it, every shape and size and color you can imagine, and all only about 50% more than what it would cost at Wal-Mart. I don't care if they do abuse the working man, next year I'm making them my Official Vacation Sponsor.
I selected a fancy-looking bag from Ricardo's of Beverly Hills. Now, it had some cool features, like an interior separator to make two compartments, garment bag adaptor, and a matching tote bag, but none of those was why I chose it.
I chose it because it was the God-awfullest color of purple I've ever seen, and the interior looked like Bozo the Clown ate his makeup case and then vomited up the contents.
Listen, when you're standing next to the belts after an 8 hour flight and the kids are going crazy and your Wife is about to bite your head off because she couldn't eat the creamed crap they served, the last thing you want to do is try to figure out which of the 64 million blue-black bags on the conveyor belongs to you.
So all my luggage is either red (a rare color) or, now, purple (a very rare color) with bright pink fluorescent ribbons on them. I'd have bought the lime-green puke luggage if it'd been big enough, but it wasn't.
Because judging from the pile that the girl was trying on, and what didn't fit in the suitcases we had, we needed every inch of luggage space I could muster.
I returned to the girls with my find and they were suitably impressed. Then, they asked for my opinion on the clothing they'd chosen out for the girl.
I was in kind of a quandary: everyone wanted my opinion, which really should have no value, yet I had no opinion, was bored, and couldn't really care less whether she wore a paper bag to school or not.
Worse, Wifey wasn't giving me the subtle hints of whether I should say yes or no in this high-pressure decision. I was expected to actually decide something! So I just randomly vetoed some and accepted others, and for some reason everyone accepted that opinion like it was valid.
The fools.
Finally we paid the tab, which ended up being some hundreds of dollars. For every 50 bucks we spent, we received $10 "Kohl's Cash" that could be spent between August 11 and 17. Only, we'll be back in Europe then, so we ended up giving $60 to Sis-in-law.
So I quickly understood why it was we had to go shopping at Kohl's today. Dammit, I will have my vengeance. Next time I fly her over here to visit us, I'm requesting a seat in the lavatory.
Then we went and had lunch with Luggage at Pizza Inn. He's a cop, and had to work, so he came to meet us. It was very good, and afterwards we got to pet his police dog and marvel at his cruiser. The kids were thrilled
(Side note: why aren't there more Pizza Inns? Was there a plague there or something? I like that place. Good pizza, great tattoo machine, and sluttily-dressed waitresses that flounce around for no apparent reason. What more can you ask for?)
Then it was off to our last vacation stop: beautiful Atlanta, to visit Aunt Awesome, Wifey's favorite relative. Aunt Awesome is retired now, but up until recently she owned a successful business that she recently sold. I have met Aunt Awesome several times and I have to say she's my favorite of Wifey's relatives (with the possible exception of Sis-in-Law, who is always good for a laugh).
Aunt Awesome has four kids, each of them sharing the first letter of their name with their father. So we'll call them Danny, Donny, Denny, and Mini. While Danny lives with Aunt Awesome, the others all have homes and families of their own.
So we pull up and the kids eagerly ring the doorbell, their favorite part of any visit. I swear I don't know why I buy them toys: a box and a doorbell would make them happy forever. They almost went to fist city over who got to press the doorbell.
"Hey, welcome, y'all!" says Aunt Awesome. "Come see the tree that just fell on our house!"
Yes, that's right: moments before we arrived a tree fell on Aunt Awesome's house. Can I officially say that my vacation is designed to bring woe on all whom I visit? Especially since I stopped up three toilets that I never told anybody about.
The house sits on a golf course, and one of the big old trees behind it has crashed into it, knocked off a big section of gutter and cracking the roof in the bathroom that Aunt Awesome had just painted.
After I had surveyed the damage (which is just as effective as having one of those Europussie leaders review his outdated army) we sat down to dinner and caught up. Then, because it was late, I sent the children to bed.
When I came in to check on them, I overheard the girl saying sadly to her brother:
"Good-bye."
"Good-bye;" he said solemnly.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
He started to tell me. "She told me that tonight-"
"Shhh!" she said.
"What did she tell you?" I asked.
"Tonight the tree is going to crash through the house and crush the bed and kill us both," he said happily. "So it's good-bye tonight because we'll never see each other alive again."
"It is not!" I said. "If the tree crashed through the roof it'd actually land right on our bed and kill mommy and I, and maybe take Aunt Awesome and Uncle Mustache with us. But you guys should be okay."
Sadly, that seemed to comfort them.
Then it was time for bed, but I couldn't sleep, because all I could think about was ten tons of arboreal doom waiting to crush me flatter than a pancake while I slept.
Tomorrow: One Last Time at the Swimmin' Hole
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Batting 1.000
Today Wifey was going to go have her hair cut for the first time in two years. No, she's not a cultist; she lets her hair grow out long enough so she can cut it and donate it to Locks of Love, who use the hair to make wigs for children with cancer. She's been doing this for years.
It's a way to help reimburse society for all the horror that I inflict upon it. She's a saint, that woman.
Also going with Wifey was the girl, who intended to have her hair cut as well, although she hadn't decided if she wanted a trim or to cut it short. She also has long hair, but so far in life has resisted every effort to have it cut.
And of course Sis-in-Law was going as well, as it was her salon they would be visiting.
The boy and I were going to go "do something" with her boyfriend, Luggage.
As we busied ourselves to get ready, I questioned her one final time. "Are you sure you want to get your hair cut?" I asked. This is code for "I like your hair long and don't think you should cut it."
"Yeah," she said. "I like it short. It's much cooler in the summer."
"Okay," I said. "But I'm not sure that Locks of Love can use it, since there's so much gray in it. You might want to tuck in a twenty to cover the cost of dying it."
Note to self: this is neither safe nor conducive to intimacy.
For lunch, we jetted over to Ruby Tuesday's, because this was located adjacent to the hair salon. Plus, I love Ruby Tuesday's, even though they've changed the menu too much from their heyday and they're becoming metrosexual squishy, which I hate.
If I wanted an Applebee's clone, I'd eat there. And yet I don't. Differentiation, please!
All was proceeding nicely until the food came. A young woman about 20 or 21 years old, who was not our server, dropped off the food. I was sitting on the end, with the children next to me. Across from me were Wifey, Sis-in-Law, and Luggage.
After putting down the plate the waitress, for no apparent reason, grabbed her breasts and proceeded to grope herself in slow motion right at the end of the table, stretching up on her tiptoes and letting out a long sigh.
I was waiting for the 70's-era "bwount-chicka-chick-bwooon" music to start and gaping.
Then she turned and left with big greasy handprints on her shirt over her boobs. I looked incredulously at the others.
"Did you guys see that?" I asked. "Oh my God!"
"See what?" Wifey asked.
"I didn't see anything," said Luggage.
"Where?" asked Sis-in-Law.
"Who?" asked the girl.
"Can I have some of your drink?" asked the boy.
Now really, what could I say? Try to explain that I'd seen Pornowaitress on the prowl? I'd sound like a raving lunatic. And it's not like I could explain it in front of the children anyways.
"I guess it was my imagination," I said.
Then I resolved to tell no one what I had seen, lest I be accused of imaging perverted stuff. Of course, they all three read the blog, so I suppose now they know what I was talking about.
After lunch, we dropped the girls off at the salon and headed over to a place Luggage knew about, a toystore who's name I forget. It was awesome, with a huge train set and every kind of toy known to man.
Inside, as we wandered throughout every aisle, I stumbled across something that I thought had been lost to the ages: one of those windup kangaroos that flips itself over.
I immediately seized it, because Wifey had one of those things thirteen years ago and loved it. She used to show it to everybody who came into the office. Then it was broken in a moving accident when some idiot packed it in a box with a bowling pin with a sumo wrestler on it and it got smashed to pieces.
You can guess who that was.
So I took the kangaroo and a similar windup toy (a car that flips itself over, one of my favorites from childhood) and purchased them for the whopping price of 6.35. Best toy store ever, I tell you.
If you're ever in Huntsville, it's about five minutes away from the Ruby Tuesday's located near a hair salon, and it has a train set inside. Be sure to stop by.
Then it was back to the salon to pick up the girls. "Now remember," I told the boy. "Tell them they look nice and beautiful, no matter what, even if they look like a platypus farted on their heads."
He laughed. Five-year-olds are an easy mark.
Waiting outside were Sis-in-Law, who had not had anything done, the girl, who looked exactly the same, and Wifey circa 2002. I swear, cutting her hair made her look about five years younger.
"Wow!" I said. "You guys look great! You're beautiful!"
"Man, what a job!" said Luggage. "Awesome!"
"You look beautiful," the boy said to his sister. "Mommy?"
"Yes, hon?" she asked.
"I think you look wonderful!"
"Thank you, honey!" she said.
"Why did daddy say a platypus pee'd on you when we pulled into the parking lot?"
"I bought you something!" I held up the bag between Wifey and me in hopes of defusing what could become ugly quickly.
"What's that?"
"Here's a kangaroo just like the one you loved that got smashed in that inexplicable accident!" I said. "Isn't it great?"
She looked at it, then at me. "So?"
"So, uh, you love it, right?"
"Wasn't that your kangaroo?"
Hmm. You know, upon further reflection, she may be right about that. So it doesn't look like the kangaroo alone is going to make up for a string of gaffes on my part, since it pretty much ends up being for me.
"What else did you get?" she asked.
"Who wants to go to the space museum?" I asked.
"WE DO!" the kids yelled.
So off we headed, to the NASA space and rocket center in Huntsville. True fact: if you go to the center, and you have more than 5 people, just buy a membership. That's what I did, only I put it in Sis-in-law's name, because she might use it again.
I'm a four-star brother in law, aren't I?
Inside the center, you can see the Saturn V rocket that went to the moon (aka the flying phallus), the space shuttle (aka the winged phallus), and the rocket garden (aka the phallic flowers). Oh, and you can see a model of Skylab (aka the flaming vagina that almost destroyed Australia).
I may be misremembering the nicknames for those things, though.
Seriously, it is awfully cool. And you will learn some neat facts, and they have the actual lunar rover that was used when they faked the moon landings! Plus, a terrifically lame ride simulating a Martian Roller Coaster (I wish I was making the last part up).
The most interesting thing was discovering that Luggage is a rocket nerd. He sported a woody and a pocket protector the whole time we were in there, and was spitting out space facts like you wouldn't believe. Personally, I was shocked, because I thought his IQ was only slightly higher than Forrest Gump. Of course, Gump did know a lot about shrimp…
(I'm kidding. Well, about the IQ part. He did turn into a rocket nerd, which I was not expecting.)
At one point Luggage and I went into the G-Force simulator with the girl, while Sis-in-law, Wifey, and the boy stayed outside.
"Are you sure you don't want to come?" I said. "It might trigger your G-spot."
"Well no one else has for the past fifteen years."
In retrospect, I guess I walked into that one.
Inside they spun us around really fast, until the girl started yelling about how she was going to die. At one point the slabs you're laying on lift up about six inches, which we were ready for. What we were not ready for was when the machine slows down and the slabs fall back to the ground.
Unless you only weigh 50 pounds, in which case they don't drop down quite as fast. "Daddy!" yelled the girl, alarmed. "I'm not falling!"
"That's because they open the top and shoot out little girls," I said.
"WAAAAAH!" she began to cry at 2 G.
Not my proudest moment as a father.
After that we were pretty much ready to go. We cooled off back at Sis-in-law's, walked the dogs, and dithered about where to eat.
Being a decisive alpha male, I made the decision. Indecisiveness is, after all, for the weak. "Honey, where do you want to go?" I said to Wifey. "We'll go where you say."
"Red Robin," she said.
Being a good husband, father, and brother-in-law, I dropped them off and parked the van eight nautical miles away. When I finally arrived, I found my family sitting awkwardly on the porch watching a little girl turn red and scream at the top of her lungs, totally inconsolable.
"What's going on?" I asked.
"Her brother got a balloon, and-"
"SAY NO MORE! I can solve this problem!" I leapt into action, eager to show that I am also a top-notch stranger.
If you've ever been to Red Robin, you know that the entryway is festooned with six million balloons so that kids can take one. I sprinted inside, grabbed one of every color, and came charging back out like a firefighter trying to rescue a flaming baby cat.
"Here, little girl, it's a rainbow of balloons!" I thrust the balloons into her face and awaited the inevitable chorus of thank-yous from the girl, her mother, and society in general. Who knows? I might make Parade Magazine for this, or even Reader's Digest American Heroes section.
"GET THOSE AWAY FROM ME!" yelled the girl.
"What are you trying to do, you idiot?" yelled the mother. "She's balloonopobic and allergic to latex!"
At that the girl started to cough and her pupils dilate. "Help! Police! Maniac!" somebody yelled.
Thankfully, the pager sounded at just that very moment. "Force, party of six, Richard Force, party of six."
"Gotta go!" I let go of the balloons and sent them heavenward.
"Daddy!" cried the girl. "You lost our balloons!"
"I wanted that one!" the boy sobbed. "But now it's gone!"
"Um, uh," I looked at the growing angry crowd on the porch. "I had to send them to heaven so that your dead relatives could play with them," I said.
For some reason, this made the children cry even more.
"Nice going, dipshit," Wifey said as she breezed by me.
Inside, we were treated to Red Robin's specialty, a menu so complicated you need to be a rocket scientist to decipher it and figure out what you want. Thankfully, Luggage was up to the task and took care of it.
When we'd finished, Sis-in-law pointed out one of our neighbors, a very large man with a tattoo on his arm that said "Big Log." It looked like it'd been either put on in a basement or a prison.
"What do you think it means?" she asked.
"He's a baseball fan," said Wifey. "It means he plays baseball."
"He likes to go camping and sit on a big log," said the girl.
"I miss my balloon," said the boy. "I love that balloon."
I exchanged glances with Luggage, then leaned in close to the women. "I think it means he has extra-large equipment."
"No," said Sis-in-law.
"Why don't you ask him?" said Wifey with a twinkle in her eye.
"No way in hell," I said. "What if he got that in prison and the girl's right that he likes to make people sit on his big log?"
"Yeah," said Luggage, who is a cop. "In prison you'd definitely be somebody's bitch."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence."
With that we got up and left, with me giving strict instructions to the children not to touch or bother Big Log Man in any way, shape, or form. Better safe than sorry, I say.
After we'd tucked the kids into bed, we played a rousing game of Battle of the Sexes. If you've never played, don't. It's an awful game and Luggage and I got our asses handed to us.
Only, it turns out that if you're amazingly lucky you can win despite any skill. So Luggage and I won on luck alone, despite the fact that everyone present knew that we'd been outplayed the entire game.
Then it was off to bed.
So to recap: I'd called Wifey old, bought a gift for myself, taught the boy to insult her haircut, terrorized a stranger in front of Red Robin, and then won at a game despite my own incompetence.
Yes, I did end up sleeping on the couch. How did you ever guess?
Tomorrow: More suitcases?
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Not the Riveter
We had two goals for today: pack all of our belongings in the bags which we originally came over with, and not die in a fiery crash. Fortunately we managed to achieve one of them.
See, we’ve been doing this for the past four years, and each year we end up with more luggage than we started with. See, in addition to the clothing we bring, we always buy all our back-to-school, electronics, food supplies, and gewgaws that you either can’t get or pay too much for in Europe.
The first year, this meant we had to buy two 28” suitcases to fly back in addition to the 3 that we’d brought. The second year, we inherited two hard-sided circa 1970 suitcases in addition to the 5 that we had. The third year, we bought four suitcases (three with a duffel bag) and used three in addition to the 5 we had brought (two had worn out).
So this year, I had a master plan: we packed a small suitcase inside a large suitcase, an empty duffel bag, and another suitcase was full of souvenirs for our American friends. So we had 4 suitcases on the way there, but on the way back, we had two entire suitcases and a duffel bag spare space.
Even avaricious Euro-wannabes like ourselves should be content with that, right?
So we started packing. In order to facilitate this, Grandma and Grandpa took the kids away to Toys R Us, in order to get some last-minute bribing out of the way.
Apparently not. Someone (and I blame Wifey) waaaaay overbought, and we ended up with enough loose crap that it became clear we needed another small suitcase. Not a big one, mind you; just a small one.
I began to suspect this during minute 1 of our packing. “We need another suitcase,” I said. “Want me to run and get it?”
“No,” Wifey said. “I’ll make it all fit.”
“In that case, you wanna get naked and do it on the pool table?” When she looked at me like I was insane, I added “The kids will be gone for another couple of hours at least.”
She rolled her eyes at me and continued packing. Personally, I think that’s the sign of a mental imbalance. I mean, here is perfectly good sex (well, sex at least) begging, and she goes on working on packing.
Isn’t that a warning sign of OCD or something? I bet if you look it up it is.
So after about three hours packing, during which time I continued to whine and complain about how hot it was as an excuse to shed clothing, she had roughly packed the bags. In her rational mind, she’d accepted that we needed to buy another suitcase. But in her animal mind, which I think Freud called the Stubbornego or some such, she still thought we could fit it all into the suitcases we had.
Meanwhile, I was wandering around naked trying to entice her. “Hey, sexy, want a back rub after all that hard work?” I asked.
“No thanks,” she stuffed a pillow into the middle of one of the hard sided suitcases, and it hung open about four inches. “Hey, fatass, come sit on this and see if you can force it closed.”
“It’s too dangerous in my condition.”
“What condition?” She finally looked at me.
“Naked,” I said. “I might catch my junk in there.”
“Ridiculous,” she said. “That lip is more than two inches high, so your manhood is well clear of the opening.”
“But can’t you think of other things you’d like to do with my endowment?” I asked. “It’s almost as big as Harvard’s.”
“Just close the damn case with your fat ass, which is almost as big as Shoney’s Big Boy.”
More than a little disgruntled, I sat on the case and closed it. Let me tell you, that conversation didn’t do much for my self-esteem, nor was it conducive to intimacy.
Oh, hell, who am I kidding. I was still pretty much ready to go.
Once we got all the bags packed, the children came home, thus depriving me of any erotic alone time with Wifey. Not that anything would have happened, but I like to keep the dream alive.
The girl had managed to convince Grandma and Grandpa to buy her about 500 Pokemon cards, in several collectible tins that would not only take up space in the suitcase but were guaranteed to hang around the house underfoot for years to come.
The boy had gotten himself a Ben 10 Omnimatrix watch, a Backagon collapsible dragon (whatever the hell that was), and several collectible tins of Yu-Gi-Oh cards. If you don’t remember hearing about those during the vacation, it’s because you hadn’t. I have no idea why he bought them, other than to have collectible tins that were even larger than the girl’s Pokemon tins.
It was clear that we needed a medium-sized suitcase now.
“Oh joy,” I said to my parents. “I’m so glad that you bought them so much.”
“Well, since they can’t take their Furbies, we thought we’d make it up to them somehow.”
So, with an additional twenty pounds of cards, tins, and shattered hopes for a little naughty alone time, we set off, heading for the home of Sis-In-Law.
The drive was largely uneventful, other than discovering that the direct route went from Tennessee to Georgia to Tennessee to Alabama. Yes, the southern border of Tennessee is largely flat, but for some reason the road curves up and down. I blame the Hatfields and the McCoys.
Finally we reached her house, which is located at the end of a well-hidden street next to a garage door company with a banner-sized sign that says “SIGN OVERPASS PETITION HERE.”
I didn’t sign the petition, but it’s possible that Eustus P. Hogg III did.
Sis-in-law was quite happy to see us, and the six of us went out to dinner (my family, sis-in-law, and her boyfriend, who we will henceforth refer to as Luggage; he knows why). We chose Rosie’s in Huntsville, which is a Mexican restaurant. It was named Rosie’s in honor of the owner’s mother, whose name was Maria.
No, I don’t know why either. Nor do I know why the wall features a twelve-foot painting of a buxom Mexican woman with her cleavage spilling out of her low-cut white blouse. I mean, I liked it, but it’s not particularly the way I’d choose to decorate the wall of a restaurant named after my mother.
But Rosie’s not my mom, so I ogled like there was no tomorrow. Because if we don’t ogle, the communists have already won.
We had a good dinner; in fact, I would say that the dinner was excellent. Particularly noteworthy was the waitress who immediately fell in love with my son and brought him anything his heart desired, from extra drinks to extra straws to walking him to the restroom when he had to go potty.
She even brought him a handmade napkin blanket when he complained that the restaurant was too cold, and had a busboy climb up on a rickety ladder to close the overhead vent.
Yes, I do worry that he will have lady trouble in junior high. I worry a lot.
Once dinner was over, the girl whipped out the comment card and began filling it out in crayon. She heaped fulsome praise on Rosie’s and the waitress. The boy, who had abused her hospitality all night, was ready to go as soon as he’d finished eating. Once he’d had his way with her, he was done.
Sometimes my worries keep me up all night.
After that we left. Once we’d reached home, Wifey turned to me and asked “where did you put the hip pack?”
My response: “You mean the hip pack that you’ve been carrying the entire vacation that has your ID and your medicine and the cash that you don’t let me touch? I think I put it in your hands three weeks ago and haven’t touched it since.”
You know what else I won’t be touching for three weeks?
“I saw it!” sis-in-law said, averting violence.
“Where?” asked Wifey.
“On the bench at Rosie’s as we left.”
“Then why the didn’t you ing grab the ing thing, you ?” Wifey said.
For a minute, silence hung uncomfortably in the air.
“I’ll go get it,” I said. “Right now.”
“I’ll drive,” said Luggage. “Let’s roll!”
And we were out of there. I don’t know what happened later, but by the time I got back two hours later everything had calmed down.
Since Wifey made it abundantly clear that my slip-up earlier had cost me, I stayed up blogging on Sis-in-law’s prehistoric dialup connection and AOL account. I realized two things: ADSL has spoiled me, and AOL sucks ass.
Then, I watched a little bit of “Witches of Breastwick III.” You know, it’s not nearly as good as parts 1 and 2. I think because Jack Nicholson isn’t in it.
But that Cher sure has some big tits. I didn’t realize she did nude scenes. And at her age! That’s impressive.
Tomorrow: POW! To the Moon!
See, we’ve been doing this for the past four years, and each year we end up with more luggage than we started with. See, in addition to the clothing we bring, we always buy all our back-to-school, electronics, food supplies, and gewgaws that you either can’t get or pay too much for in Europe.
The first year, this meant we had to buy two 28” suitcases to fly back in addition to the 3 that we’d brought. The second year, we inherited two hard-sided circa 1970 suitcases in addition to the 5 that we had. The third year, we bought four suitcases (three with a duffel bag) and used three in addition to the 5 we had brought (two had worn out).
So this year, I had a master plan: we packed a small suitcase inside a large suitcase, an empty duffel bag, and another suitcase was full of souvenirs for our American friends. So we had 4 suitcases on the way there, but on the way back, we had two entire suitcases and a duffel bag spare space.
Even avaricious Euro-wannabes like ourselves should be content with that, right?
So we started packing. In order to facilitate this, Grandma and Grandpa took the kids away to Toys R Us, in order to get some last-minute bribing out of the way.
Apparently not. Someone (and I blame Wifey) waaaaay overbought, and we ended up with enough loose crap that it became clear we needed another small suitcase. Not a big one, mind you; just a small one.
I began to suspect this during minute 1 of our packing. “We need another suitcase,” I said. “Want me to run and get it?”
“No,” Wifey said. “I’ll make it all fit.”
“In that case, you wanna get naked and do it on the pool table?” When she looked at me like I was insane, I added “The kids will be gone for another couple of hours at least.”
She rolled her eyes at me and continued packing. Personally, I think that’s the sign of a mental imbalance. I mean, here is perfectly good sex (well, sex at least) begging, and she goes on working on packing.
Isn’t that a warning sign of OCD or something? I bet if you look it up it is.
So after about three hours packing, during which time I continued to whine and complain about how hot it was as an excuse to shed clothing, she had roughly packed the bags. In her rational mind, she’d accepted that we needed to buy another suitcase. But in her animal mind, which I think Freud called the Stubbornego or some such, she still thought we could fit it all into the suitcases we had.
Meanwhile, I was wandering around naked trying to entice her. “Hey, sexy, want a back rub after all that hard work?” I asked.
“No thanks,” she stuffed a pillow into the middle of one of the hard sided suitcases, and it hung open about four inches. “Hey, fatass, come sit on this and see if you can force it closed.”
“It’s too dangerous in my condition.”
“What condition?” She finally looked at me.
“Naked,” I said. “I might catch my junk in there.”
“Ridiculous,” she said. “That lip is more than two inches high, so your manhood is well clear of the opening.”
“But can’t you think of other things you’d like to do with my endowment?” I asked. “It’s almost as big as Harvard’s.”
“Just close the damn case with your fat ass, which is almost as big as Shoney’s Big Boy.”
More than a little disgruntled, I sat on the case and closed it. Let me tell you, that conversation didn’t do much for my self-esteem, nor was it conducive to intimacy.
Oh, hell, who am I kidding. I was still pretty much ready to go.
Once we got all the bags packed, the children came home, thus depriving me of any erotic alone time with Wifey. Not that anything would have happened, but I like to keep the dream alive.
The girl had managed to convince Grandma and Grandpa to buy her about 500 Pokemon cards, in several collectible tins that would not only take up space in the suitcase but were guaranteed to hang around the house underfoot for years to come.
The boy had gotten himself a Ben 10 Omnimatrix watch, a Backagon collapsible dragon (whatever the hell that was), and several collectible tins of Yu-Gi-Oh cards. If you don’t remember hearing about those during the vacation, it’s because you hadn’t. I have no idea why he bought them, other than to have collectible tins that were even larger than the girl’s Pokemon tins.
It was clear that we needed a medium-sized suitcase now.
“Oh joy,” I said to my parents. “I’m so glad that you bought them so much.”
“Well, since they can’t take their Furbies, we thought we’d make it up to them somehow.”
So, with an additional twenty pounds of cards, tins, and shattered hopes for a little naughty alone time, we set off, heading for the home of Sis-In-Law.
The drive was largely uneventful, other than discovering that the direct route went from Tennessee to Georgia to Tennessee to Alabama. Yes, the southern border of Tennessee is largely flat, but for some reason the road curves up and down. I blame the Hatfields and the McCoys.
Finally we reached her house, which is located at the end of a well-hidden street next to a garage door company with a banner-sized sign that says “SIGN OVERPASS PETITION HERE.”
I didn’t sign the petition, but it’s possible that Eustus P. Hogg III did.
Sis-in-law was quite happy to see us, and the six of us went out to dinner (my family, sis-in-law, and her boyfriend, who we will henceforth refer to as Luggage; he knows why). We chose Rosie’s in Huntsville, which is a Mexican restaurant. It was named Rosie’s in honor of the owner’s mother, whose name was Maria.
No, I don’t know why either. Nor do I know why the wall features a twelve-foot painting of a buxom Mexican woman with her cleavage spilling out of her low-cut white blouse. I mean, I liked it, but it’s not particularly the way I’d choose to decorate the wall of a restaurant named after my mother.
But Rosie’s not my mom, so I ogled like there was no tomorrow. Because if we don’t ogle, the communists have already won.
We had a good dinner; in fact, I would say that the dinner was excellent. Particularly noteworthy was the waitress who immediately fell in love with my son and brought him anything his heart desired, from extra drinks to extra straws to walking him to the restroom when he had to go potty.
She even brought him a handmade napkin blanket when he complained that the restaurant was too cold, and had a busboy climb up on a rickety ladder to close the overhead vent.
Yes, I do worry that he will have lady trouble in junior high. I worry a lot.
Once dinner was over, the girl whipped out the comment card and began filling it out in crayon. She heaped fulsome praise on Rosie’s and the waitress. The boy, who had abused her hospitality all night, was ready to go as soon as he’d finished eating. Once he’d had his way with her, he was done.
Sometimes my worries keep me up all night.
After that we left. Once we’d reached home, Wifey turned to me and asked “where did you put the hip pack?”
My response: “You mean the hip pack that you’ve been carrying the entire vacation that has your ID and your medicine and the cash that you don’t let me touch? I think I put it in your hands three weeks ago and haven’t touched it since.”
You know what else I won’t be touching for three weeks?
“I saw it!” sis-in-law said, averting violence.
“Where?” asked Wifey.
“On the bench at Rosie’s as we left.”
“Then why the
For a minute, silence hung uncomfortably in the air.
“I’ll go get it,” I said. “Right now.”
“I’ll drive,” said Luggage. “Let’s roll!”
And we were out of there. I don’t know what happened later, but by the time I got back two hours later everything had calmed down.
Since Wifey made it abundantly clear that my slip-up earlier had cost me, I stayed up blogging on Sis-in-law’s prehistoric dialup connection and AOL account. I realized two things: ADSL has spoiled me, and AOL sucks ass.
Then, I watched a little bit of “Witches of Breastwick III.” You know, it’s not nearly as good as parts 1 and 2. I think because Jack Nicholson isn’t in it.
But that Cher sure has some big tits. I didn’t realize she did nude scenes. And at her age! That’s impressive.
Tomorrow: POW! To the Moon!
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
They're Crawling All Over Me!
Our appetite had been whetted for fishing when we went out on the boat with Uncle B, so it was only natural that during the last day with grandma and grandpa we went out fishing on their boat.
And why shouldn’t we? Any success of the first trip was totally made up, so it was only natural that if we didn’t do anything but kill expensive Canadian worms this time we could similarly make up gargantuan successes, like the two-foot catfish that we caught last time.
Don’t remember that one? Well, it was there, and you weren’t.
Grandma and Grandpa have a pontoon boat, a very nice affair that they keep down at an expensive marina that is watched over by a lecherous drunk. He lives on one of the spare boats down there, and for a case of beer a month he’ll scare away interlopers and, if needs be, provide jars of pee so you don’t perish at sea.
Not that the second service is usually called for, but experienced mariners are ready for anything that might come up. The sea is a bitch, after all.
We packed the same lunch that Christopher Columbus and his men packed for their excursion to find India: peanut butter sandwiches, a bag of potato chips, and chocolate chip cookies for dessert. Except Columbus and his men called it scurvy, smallpox, and a side of cannibalism.
So armed with our cookies, bait, and pee jar, we set off.
One of the main selling points of the pontoon boat was that it had a potty. The children know this, and for months had been yearning to pee on the boat. So when we forced them to try before we set off from the mainland, they refused, despite the fact that the boy was doing the potty dance.
Being good parents, we forced them to go anyways. Through sheer determination, they did nothing, despite the fact that his eyeballs were starting to yellow from pent-up urine.
At long last we cast off the bow line, stowed the mizzenmast, and did lots of other nautical things like ramming another parked boat and knocking its propeller to Davy Jones’ locker. So I slipped Drunky $20 and told him to tell the boat owner that teenagers did it.
Ah, teenagers: is there anything you can’t blame them for?
My father is ex-Navy, so he steered us out of port and into the waterway. We had the lake largely to ourselves, because it was a hot and humid afternoon. So he cranked the pontoon up as fast as it would go and we took off.
Maximum pontoon boat speed? Slightly more than a duck, but no so much as you’d notice.
Sure enough, as soon as we were underway a fistfight broke out over who got to use the potty first. After much debate, we decided the boy, since he was about ten seconds from peeing himself. While he was in there, his snack disappeared, possibly pushed into the lake on accident on purpose.
But since I have no proof, I couldn’t punish anybody. It was perhaps the only time in my life I wanted to have David Caruso around. On second thought, scratch that: if I want bad overacting I’ll just guilt Wifey into having sex with me and watch the performance she puts on.
After everyone had experienced the joy of potty, grandpa turned to my five-year-old son and said “You wanna drive?”
Have you ever known a five-year-old who didn’t want to drive a piece of machinery? He accepted in a heartbeat. So soon we had Captain Davey Crockett at the wheel, his eyes blazing with wild fury.
Cap. Davey’s first goal was to ram a buoy. Grandpa wouldn’t let him, so Cap. Davey’s second goal was to run over a duck. They proved elusive, though, as the pontoon’s loud motor let them know we were coming.
That, and the girl yelling “Run, little ducks, he’s crazy!”
Unfortunately, though, Commodore Grandpa taught Captain Davey how to use the horn. So every time we drove by a buoy, he would honk the horn, then glare at it as we went by. Several times this had us veering off course, into brushes, brambles, and once a dock, as he gave the buoy the evil eye instead of watching the waterway.
After the fun of learning to drive the boat, we stopped for lunch in a secluded cove. In order to move back the brush, I grabbed ahold of the overhanging tree and made quick work of the branches.
And in the process released 9,682 different types of biting mini-bugs onto my head, and a population of Sumatran Giant Menace Spiders that fell onto my bare feet.
Standing at the front of the boat, with my children, my spouse, and my parents all watching me as I was suddenly covered with bugs that crawled into places that I don’t even like to wash, I went through the five stages of having a creepy-crawly bug on you in front of people that you know and love:
Stage 1: Be a tough guy about it.
You know, bugs get the creepy-crawlies when they see Chuck Norris. But I’m not Chuck Norris. So when I got bugs on me I was in and out of this phase pretty quickly.
“You’re covered in bugs!” yelled the girl. “Gross!”
“No big deal,” I said, shaking them out of my hair into the water. “They’re just bugs.”
Stage 2: Panic.
Then I felt one wriggling between my butt cheeks, and another biting me in the webbing of my toe, and what must have been a tick sizing up my jugular vein to spill my lifeblood on the deck and infect me with Lyme Disease, Agent Orange, and all sorts of other fruit-related complexes that you only want other people to get, preferably those that you don’t like so much.
So I panicked.
“Oh my God get them off me!” I yelled, flailing about and slapping at my back. “There are a million billion bugs on me and they’re going to give me filthy diseases in my privates! And I need those to properly enjoy internet porn!”
Yeah, I said this in front of my parents and my children. It’s not like this is an after-school special; this is real life.
Stage 3: Crying.
Quickly Wifey sprang into action and began dousing me with bug spray. “Hold still, you baby!” she shouted. “I’ll get them off of you!”
“The bug spray is making them angry!” I yelled. “Stop it!”
Then something with sixty thousand legs crawled up my shorts. I felt every single one of those prickly things biting into my skin, probably laced with some kind of dirty monkey feces that was going to give me lupus or erectile dysfunction.
I started sobbing like a baby. I later blamed it on the bug spray, but since I was wearing sunglasses and Wifey was spraying my legs, nobody bought it.
Stage 4: Leap into the water and hope that either they or you drown.
Finally I just dove off the boat. Listen, they’d fallen out of the bug tree, so I was figuring that they didn’t like water. I jumped in happily, confident that I could easily get back in and that my lifejacket would protect me from harm.
As I hurtled over the deck, I saw my lifejacket, sitting on the bench where I’d taken it off to stay cool in the ungodly heat of the day as we ate lunch. Then the slimy lake water closed in over my head.
You know how whenever you watch a movie the lake is totally clear and you can see to the bottom of it, which is rocky? Well, this wasn’t one of those kind of lakes. It’s ten feet of slimy green water laying on top of six feet of fish poop and dead worms.
And when your bare feet hit that mixture, it’s grosser than having a million bugs in your shorts.
I surfaced and made my way to the boat, a growing circle of bugs swimming away from me for shore. I drowned as many of them as I could as I went, because the little buggers deserved it.
Stage 5: Total loss of respect before your family and peers.
This isn’t so much of a stage as a result, but it’s true nonetheless. Grandma even took a picture of me for posterity.
I’d dried out pretty quick, and then after lunch we headed to a fishing spot that grandpa assured us would be our best chance to find something to catch. Along the way, I used the binoculars to check out lakeside houses and see if any young adults were frolicking nakedly with the windowshades open, because I was pretty sure the Internet would be off-limits to me for a while.
Turns out that not only was everyone clothed, but they were not particularly attractive, either. Oh, how I missed Carlsbad Caverns.
Once we’d arrived at the fishing spot, we passed quite a while throwing worms into the water, then watching as the sun cooked broiled our brains inside our skulls. This is why fishermen are inveterate liars and continue the habit: the heat has pretty much cooked out any intelligence that they might have had. Although anybody who thinks that fish eat worms is pretty much not thinking clearly to start with.
As we sat, a squall appeared on the horizon. It was one of those storms that you get in the south, fifteen minutes of hard rain that comes from nowhere and then returns there quickly.
Only to my children, this was like the loss of the Titanic. We were doomed, and no amount of praying was going to save us.
“We’re going down!” the girl yelled. “We’re all going to drown!”
“Help!” the boy yelled to another boat. “We’re sinking!”
Judging from the problems the two half-drunk rednecks were having bailing the water out of their boat, they were in no position to assist us anyways. Nor could they hear him, holler and honk though he might try.
The boat was tossed mightily, eventually running into a rock on the bank. Now I became worried: hole in a pontoon and we will be swimming.
So once again into the breach I rushed. Armed with the pole, I bravely headed out into the raging storm, getting soaked to the bone, and I pushed us off of the rocks, fighting against the heaving waves and the howling wind.
Wet, cold, unhappy work, but I was ultimately successful: the boat, and all aboard, survived the tempest, with me riding out the storm at the front fending us off of rocks, trees, and the occasional duck seeking shelter.
Finally the storm passed and we took stock of everything: nobody injured, the boat okay, and the only real loss a bag of goldfish chips that had been filled with water when we forgot it on decks.
Everyone thanked me for my job and gave me great praise for my hard work and perseverance during the troubles.
“The best thanks you can give me is to never mention the bug thing again,” I said.
“Forget that,” said grandpa. “I’m telling that story at the next family reunion.”
You know what? I’m a strong swimmer. I should have let the damn boat sink.
Tomorrow: Sis-in-law’s or Bust
And why shouldn’t we? Any success of the first trip was totally made up, so it was only natural that if we didn’t do anything but kill expensive Canadian worms this time we could similarly make up gargantuan successes, like the two-foot catfish that we caught last time.
Don’t remember that one? Well, it was there, and you weren’t.
Grandma and Grandpa have a pontoon boat, a very nice affair that they keep down at an expensive marina that is watched over by a lecherous drunk. He lives on one of the spare boats down there, and for a case of beer a month he’ll scare away interlopers and, if needs be, provide jars of pee so you don’t perish at sea.
Not that the second service is usually called for, but experienced mariners are ready for anything that might come up. The sea is a bitch, after all.
We packed the same lunch that Christopher Columbus and his men packed for their excursion to find India: peanut butter sandwiches, a bag of potato chips, and chocolate chip cookies for dessert. Except Columbus and his men called it scurvy, smallpox, and a side of cannibalism.
So armed with our cookies, bait, and pee jar, we set off.
One of the main selling points of the pontoon boat was that it had a potty. The children know this, and for months had been yearning to pee on the boat. So when we forced them to try before we set off from the mainland, they refused, despite the fact that the boy was doing the potty dance.
Being good parents, we forced them to go anyways. Through sheer determination, they did nothing, despite the fact that his eyeballs were starting to yellow from pent-up urine.
At long last we cast off the bow line, stowed the mizzenmast, and did lots of other nautical things like ramming another parked boat and knocking its propeller to Davy Jones’ locker. So I slipped Drunky $20 and told him to tell the boat owner that teenagers did it.
Ah, teenagers: is there anything you can’t blame them for?
My father is ex-Navy, so he steered us out of port and into the waterway. We had the lake largely to ourselves, because it was a hot and humid afternoon. So he cranked the pontoon up as fast as it would go and we took off.
Maximum pontoon boat speed? Slightly more than a duck, but no so much as you’d notice.
Sure enough, as soon as we were underway a fistfight broke out over who got to use the potty first. After much debate, we decided the boy, since he was about ten seconds from peeing himself. While he was in there, his snack disappeared, possibly pushed into the lake on accident on purpose.
But since I have no proof, I couldn’t punish anybody. It was perhaps the only time in my life I wanted to have David Caruso around. On second thought, scratch that: if I want bad overacting I’ll just guilt Wifey into having sex with me and watch the performance she puts on.
After everyone had experienced the joy of potty, grandpa turned to my five-year-old son and said “You wanna drive?”
Have you ever known a five-year-old who didn’t want to drive a piece of machinery? He accepted in a heartbeat. So soon we had Captain Davey Crockett at the wheel, his eyes blazing with wild fury.
Cap. Davey’s first goal was to ram a buoy. Grandpa wouldn’t let him, so Cap. Davey’s second goal was to run over a duck. They proved elusive, though, as the pontoon’s loud motor let them know we were coming.
That, and the girl yelling “Run, little ducks, he’s crazy!”
Unfortunately, though, Commodore Grandpa taught Captain Davey how to use the horn. So every time we drove by a buoy, he would honk the horn, then glare at it as we went by. Several times this had us veering off course, into brushes, brambles, and once a dock, as he gave the buoy the evil eye instead of watching the waterway.
After the fun of learning to drive the boat, we stopped for lunch in a secluded cove. In order to move back the brush, I grabbed ahold of the overhanging tree and made quick work of the branches.
And in the process released 9,682 different types of biting mini-bugs onto my head, and a population of Sumatran Giant Menace Spiders that fell onto my bare feet.
Standing at the front of the boat, with my children, my spouse, and my parents all watching me as I was suddenly covered with bugs that crawled into places that I don’t even like to wash, I went through the five stages of having a creepy-crawly bug on you in front of people that you know and love:
Stage 1: Be a tough guy about it.
You know, bugs get the creepy-crawlies when they see Chuck Norris. But I’m not Chuck Norris. So when I got bugs on me I was in and out of this phase pretty quickly.
“You’re covered in bugs!” yelled the girl. “Gross!”
“No big deal,” I said, shaking them out of my hair into the water. “They’re just bugs.”
Stage 2: Panic.
Then I felt one wriggling between my butt cheeks, and another biting me in the webbing of my toe, and what must have been a tick sizing up my jugular vein to spill my lifeblood on the deck and infect me with Lyme Disease, Agent Orange, and all sorts of other fruit-related complexes that you only want other people to get, preferably those that you don’t like so much.
So I panicked.
“Oh my God get them off me!” I yelled, flailing about and slapping at my back. “There are a million billion bugs on me and they’re going to give me filthy diseases in my privates! And I need those to properly enjoy internet porn!”
Yeah, I said this in front of my parents and my children. It’s not like this is an after-school special; this is real life.
Stage 3: Crying.
Quickly Wifey sprang into action and began dousing me with bug spray. “Hold still, you baby!” she shouted. “I’ll get them off of you!”
“The bug spray is making them angry!” I yelled. “Stop it!”
Then something with sixty thousand legs crawled up my shorts. I felt every single one of those prickly things biting into my skin, probably laced with some kind of dirty monkey feces that was going to give me lupus or erectile dysfunction.
I started sobbing like a baby. I later blamed it on the bug spray, but since I was wearing sunglasses and Wifey was spraying my legs, nobody bought it.
Stage 4: Leap into the water and hope that either they or you drown.
Finally I just dove off the boat. Listen, they’d fallen out of the bug tree, so I was figuring that they didn’t like water. I jumped in happily, confident that I could easily get back in and that my lifejacket would protect me from harm.
As I hurtled over the deck, I saw my lifejacket, sitting on the bench where I’d taken it off to stay cool in the ungodly heat of the day as we ate lunch. Then the slimy lake water closed in over my head.
You know how whenever you watch a movie the lake is totally clear and you can see to the bottom of it, which is rocky? Well, this wasn’t one of those kind of lakes. It’s ten feet of slimy green water laying on top of six feet of fish poop and dead worms.
And when your bare feet hit that mixture, it’s grosser than having a million bugs in your shorts.
I surfaced and made my way to the boat, a growing circle of bugs swimming away from me for shore. I drowned as many of them as I could as I went, because the little buggers deserved it.
Stage 5: Total loss of respect before your family and peers.
This isn’t so much of a stage as a result, but it’s true nonetheless. Grandma even took a picture of me for posterity.
I’d dried out pretty quick, and then after lunch we headed to a fishing spot that grandpa assured us would be our best chance to find something to catch. Along the way, I used the binoculars to check out lakeside houses and see if any young adults were frolicking nakedly with the windowshades open, because I was pretty sure the Internet would be off-limits to me for a while.
Turns out that not only was everyone clothed, but they were not particularly attractive, either. Oh, how I missed Carlsbad Caverns.
Once we’d arrived at the fishing spot, we passed quite a while throwing worms into the water, then watching as the sun cooked broiled our brains inside our skulls. This is why fishermen are inveterate liars and continue the habit: the heat has pretty much cooked out any intelligence that they might have had. Although anybody who thinks that fish eat worms is pretty much not thinking clearly to start with.
As we sat, a squall appeared on the horizon. It was one of those storms that you get in the south, fifteen minutes of hard rain that comes from nowhere and then returns there quickly.
Only to my children, this was like the loss of the Titanic. We were doomed, and no amount of praying was going to save us.
“We’re going down!” the girl yelled. “We’re all going to drown!”
“Help!” the boy yelled to another boat. “We’re sinking!”
Judging from the problems the two half-drunk rednecks were having bailing the water out of their boat, they were in no position to assist us anyways. Nor could they hear him, holler and honk though he might try.
The boat was tossed mightily, eventually running into a rock on the bank. Now I became worried: hole in a pontoon and we will be swimming.
So once again into the breach I rushed. Armed with the pole, I bravely headed out into the raging storm, getting soaked to the bone, and I pushed us off of the rocks, fighting against the heaving waves and the howling wind.
Wet, cold, unhappy work, but I was ultimately successful: the boat, and all aboard, survived the tempest, with me riding out the storm at the front fending us off of rocks, trees, and the occasional duck seeking shelter.
Finally the storm passed and we took stock of everything: nobody injured, the boat okay, and the only real loss a bag of goldfish chips that had been filled with water when we forgot it on decks.
Everyone thanked me for my job and gave me great praise for my hard work and perseverance during the troubles.
“The best thanks you can give me is to never mention the bug thing again,” I said.
“Forget that,” said grandpa. “I’m telling that story at the next family reunion.”
You know what? I’m a strong swimmer. I should have let the damn boat sink.
Tomorrow: Sis-in-law’s or Bust
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Losing My Marbles
You will notice that until now in our vacation odyssey, we have visited only my family. The reason for this is that Wifey’s family is a group of hillbillies who live on a mountainside that can only be reached via a guide, lest you be shot for trespassing in some hill family feud.
Okay, not really. But they do all live in the same place, and the last time I visited them, I ended up having to bury a dead raccoon.
This time, Sis-in-law hid in her redoubt in Huntsville (we’ll be visiting her later this vacation) so Wifey and I were forced to go it alone. I had a very simple plan: go, fake intestinal distress, and flee at the earliest opportunity.
I had prepared the ultimate tool for this: KFC takeout. If you slip the guy at the counter a twenty, he’ll give you gizzards and blood in a zip-loc, and you can deploy it at the optimum time for maximum mess.
So off we were, to visit Granny, Aunt P, and whatever of the cousins showed up. For the record, I like Aunt P and the cousins. Granny, though, can sometimes be hard to love, especially when she tells you that you’re fatter than last time she saw you.
First problem: only Granny was there when we arrived. Okay, no big deal. It’s 1:00 and we’re supposed to have lunch, and Wifey had specifically designed our trip there to assure that we arrived after everyone else.
And yet here we were, alone with Granny.
We had just sat down and begun hearing Granny airing her grievances when the children produced the marble jar. Once I saw it, I knew that the visit would soon go from bad to worse. I had never actually seen the marble jar, I had only heard about it.
Heard the tales of woe, that is.
The marble jar is circa 1750. You have seen its like raved over by effeminate collectible experts on Antiques Roadshow. Your great-great-great-grandparents, upon seeing this jar, would have pronounced it “unimaginably old” and hesitated to touch such a sacred object.
The marbles themselves, cat’s eyes and, uh, whatever other kind of marbles there are, were a gift from Martha Washington to George when they met, just before he chopped down the cherry tree with a silver dollar flung across the Delaware River. Or something like that.
At any rate, this was a valuable object and the generator of no small amount of thrashings for Wifey and her siblings when they were small and used to visit Granny. For as long as Wifey has been alive, Granny’s house has had one inflexible rule: you may not, under any circumstances, touch the marble jar.
Even looking at it will earn you a scolding.
And now, my children were holding it aloft, marbles clinking, shaking it like an epileptic shaman trying to drive off evil spirits, shrieking “Can we play with these!”
I had the gizzards half-deployed when Granny responded.
“Of course, sweethearts! Just try not to lose any!”
Wifey’s hand tightened in mine until, finally, I had to beg her to loose my fingers ere I lost a digit.
“You’re hurting me!” I whispered.
“I have never been allowed to touch those marbles!” she hissed. “Damn them! You have to spank them right now!”
“Why?” I asked as they began to play.
“Just to keep it fair. It’s obvious Granny’s lost her touch.”
“I have a better idea!” I said. “How about if I show you guys how to shoot marbles?”
“Great!” Shouted the kids.
“Let’s clear some space!” Granny said. She then instructed Wifey to move so we could have plenty of room to play.
I quickly showed the children everything I knew about marbles, including that if you step on an antique marble it will crush to powder. Granny just laughed it off. Wifey shot me a look of death which chilled me to the core of my very existence.
Nobody else showed up. Time began to slow as we entered the Granny zone, where complaints about health and dead relatives begin to loop around back to the beginning.
Finally, the others arrived. It was 2:30. I instructed the children to put up the marbles. “So,” I leaned in close to Wifey. “You want to spank me later for playing with the marbles?”
“All my life, I have wanted to play with those marbles!” she hissed at me. “But that horrid old woman has told me I was not even allowed to sully them with my touch! You and those vile children of yours come along, and you crush one, and no one cares!”
“I’m guessing this isn’t conducive to intimacy,” I said.
“What intimacy? You’re celibate.”
That sounded bad.
We ate, and with every bite I yearned to deploy the gizzards. Yet somehow I resisted temptation. Amazingly, this did not please Wifey, who was still disgruntled that I had played with the marbles.
After lunch, we visited the raccoon grave. It’s nice, with a flower that grows on it that looks like a naked woman when it blooms. At least, according to Granny, who apparently has a warped sense of humor.
As soon after lunch as we could reasonably justify, we headed off. Everyone had had a wonderful afternoon, with the exception of Wifey, who was still smarting over the whole marble thing.
On the way home, she counted her mosquito bites: there were 20, all picked up from visiting Granny on the porch while I stayed inside and played marbles with the children.
"Do we have any itch cream?" she asked me.
"No," I said. "I never get bit by mosquitos. That's what I keep you around for. They always like biting you better."
She was somewhat displeased with this, so we stopped by Wal-Mart (official vacation sponsor) to get some ointment. And, in a sudden surge of genius, I bought her a bag of marbles as well. But I didn’t tell her; I decided to keep it a secret and present it to her later.
For dinner, we were going out with old friends of ours, Wifey’s best friend from high school and her husband, a very nice gentleman who weighs all of one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet holding a brick. He’s been the exact same size the past fifteen years.
It is not in the least bit fair.
When we arrived home, Grandpa and Grandma were still trying to take down the Slip and Slide and the kiddy pool from when we were playing the other day. So I decided to pitch in and help dump out the pool. And, as Murphy’s Law demands, I dumped the entire pool into my left shoe.
My only left shoe. Well, my only left shoe that is not a pair of dress shoes.
I squished inside. “We gotta get ready,” Wifey said.
“I have a problem,” I said. “Look at my shoe.”
“Just put on your spare shoes,” she said. “And let’s go.”
“I didn’t bring any,” I said. “I’ll have to wear my black shoes.”
“You’ll look like a dork in black shoes and shorts,” she said.
“I guess I’ll wear slacks,” I said.
“Then I’ll look like a dork in shorts,” she said. “Thanks a lot.”
“Why don’t you wear the open-toed heels, fancy skirt, black sweater, and fishnet garter stockings we got?” I said.
Here eyes narrowed dangerously. “You dumped that pool in your shoe on purpose!” she said. “You want me to wear all that!”
“You can wear what you want,” I said. “I just thought you’d feel sexy in all that. And when you feel sexy…”
It hung there between us, the sexual tension so thick you could cut it with a knife.
“Okay,” she finally said. “But don’t get your hopes up.”
For the record: my hopes were not the only thing that was up. So was my blood pressure.
We had a great night, catching up talking about the good old days. We’re all fatter and he’s not. I hate him.
When we had dessert, I ordered a flake of chocolate cake. Wifey ordered a bag of smell from an ice cream sundae. Her friend just licked the menu. He at a piece of cake the size of New Hampshire covered in strawberry glaze and vanilla ice cream while drinking a bottle of chocolate sauce with a side order of sugared grease.
Yet if he turns sideways you can’t see him, because he only exists in two dimensions.
So, just to make things fair, I sprayed him with the zip-loc bag of gizzards.
SOB deserved it. Oh, sure, Wifey made a scene, but I’m pretty sure she was agreed with me.
Then we came home. And, in a touching moment that I thought belonged at the penultimate scene of a teary movie, I presented her with the marbles. “I love you,” I said. “I always will. You can play with my balls any day.”
“Stay here,” she whispered. “Until I call for you.”
So I did what any normal person would do: I stripped naked and hopped up on the pool table. Hey, it pays to be ready.
Finally, the door to our bedroom opened. There she stood, a vision of erotic beauty, clad in fishnets, high heels, cowboy hat, and lacy black brassiere. I was beside myself in lust. I came running down the hallway, drooling like a moron.
“Honey?” she asked. “You know what I want to play with the marbles?”
“Hmm?” I said, my mouth busy doing other things.
“I want to play whack-a-cock.”
And then she hit me with a sock filled with marbles in my ‘nads.
“Now we’re even. Good night!”
Tomorrow: My Day Aboard the Minnow
Okay, not really. But they do all live in the same place, and the last time I visited them, I ended up having to bury a dead raccoon.
This time, Sis-in-law hid in her redoubt in Huntsville (we’ll be visiting her later this vacation) so Wifey and I were forced to go it alone. I had a very simple plan: go, fake intestinal distress, and flee at the earliest opportunity.
I had prepared the ultimate tool for this: KFC takeout. If you slip the guy at the counter a twenty, he’ll give you gizzards and blood in a zip-loc, and you can deploy it at the optimum time for maximum mess.
So off we were, to visit Granny, Aunt P, and whatever of the cousins showed up. For the record, I like Aunt P and the cousins. Granny, though, can sometimes be hard to love, especially when she tells you that you’re fatter than last time she saw you.
First problem: only Granny was there when we arrived. Okay, no big deal. It’s 1:00 and we’re supposed to have lunch, and Wifey had specifically designed our trip there to assure that we arrived after everyone else.
And yet here we were, alone with Granny.
We had just sat down and begun hearing Granny airing her grievances when the children produced the marble jar. Once I saw it, I knew that the visit would soon go from bad to worse. I had never actually seen the marble jar, I had only heard about it.
Heard the tales of woe, that is.
The marble jar is circa 1750. You have seen its like raved over by effeminate collectible experts on Antiques Roadshow. Your great-great-great-grandparents, upon seeing this jar, would have pronounced it “unimaginably old” and hesitated to touch such a sacred object.
The marbles themselves, cat’s eyes and, uh, whatever other kind of marbles there are, were a gift from Martha Washington to George when they met, just before he chopped down the cherry tree with a silver dollar flung across the Delaware River. Or something like that.
At any rate, this was a valuable object and the generator of no small amount of thrashings for Wifey and her siblings when they were small and used to visit Granny. For as long as Wifey has been alive, Granny’s house has had one inflexible rule: you may not, under any circumstances, touch the marble jar.
Even looking at it will earn you a scolding.
And now, my children were holding it aloft, marbles clinking, shaking it like an epileptic shaman trying to drive off evil spirits, shrieking “Can we play with these!”
I had the gizzards half-deployed when Granny responded.
“Of course, sweethearts! Just try not to lose any!”
Wifey’s hand tightened in mine until, finally, I had to beg her to loose my fingers ere I lost a digit.
“You’re hurting me!” I whispered.
“I have never been allowed to touch those marbles!” she hissed. “Damn them! You have to spank them right now!”
“Why?” I asked as they began to play.
“Just to keep it fair. It’s obvious Granny’s lost her touch.”
“I have a better idea!” I said. “How about if I show you guys how to shoot marbles?”
“Great!” Shouted the kids.
“Let’s clear some space!” Granny said. She then instructed Wifey to move so we could have plenty of room to play.
I quickly showed the children everything I knew about marbles, including that if you step on an antique marble it will crush to powder. Granny just laughed it off. Wifey shot me a look of death which chilled me to the core of my very existence.
Nobody else showed up. Time began to slow as we entered the Granny zone, where complaints about health and dead relatives begin to loop around back to the beginning.
Finally, the others arrived. It was 2:30. I instructed the children to put up the marbles. “So,” I leaned in close to Wifey. “You want to spank me later for playing with the marbles?”
“All my life, I have wanted to play with those marbles!” she hissed at me. “But that horrid old woman has told me I was not even allowed to sully them with my touch! You and those vile children of yours come along, and you crush one, and no one cares!”
“I’m guessing this isn’t conducive to intimacy,” I said.
“What intimacy? You’re celibate.”
That sounded bad.
We ate, and with every bite I yearned to deploy the gizzards. Yet somehow I resisted temptation. Amazingly, this did not please Wifey, who was still disgruntled that I had played with the marbles.
After lunch, we visited the raccoon grave. It’s nice, with a flower that grows on it that looks like a naked woman when it blooms. At least, according to Granny, who apparently has a warped sense of humor.
As soon after lunch as we could reasonably justify, we headed off. Everyone had had a wonderful afternoon, with the exception of Wifey, who was still smarting over the whole marble thing.
On the way home, she counted her mosquito bites: there were 20, all picked up from visiting Granny on the porch while I stayed inside and played marbles with the children.
"Do we have any itch cream?" she asked me.
"No," I said. "I never get bit by mosquitos. That's what I keep you around for. They always like biting you better."
She was somewhat displeased with this, so we stopped by Wal-Mart (official vacation sponsor) to get some ointment. And, in a sudden surge of genius, I bought her a bag of marbles as well. But I didn’t tell her; I decided to keep it a secret and present it to her later.
For dinner, we were going out with old friends of ours, Wifey’s best friend from high school and her husband, a very nice gentleman who weighs all of one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet holding a brick. He’s been the exact same size the past fifteen years.
It is not in the least bit fair.
When we arrived home, Grandpa and Grandma were still trying to take down the Slip and Slide and the kiddy pool from when we were playing the other day. So I decided to pitch in and help dump out the pool. And, as Murphy’s Law demands, I dumped the entire pool into my left shoe.
My only left shoe. Well, my only left shoe that is not a pair of dress shoes.
I squished inside. “We gotta get ready,” Wifey said.
“I have a problem,” I said. “Look at my shoe.”
“Just put on your spare shoes,” she said. “And let’s go.”
“I didn’t bring any,” I said. “I’ll have to wear my black shoes.”
“You’ll look like a dork in black shoes and shorts,” she said.
“I guess I’ll wear slacks,” I said.
“Then I’ll look like a dork in shorts,” she said. “Thanks a lot.”
“Why don’t you wear the open-toed heels, fancy skirt, black sweater, and fishnet garter stockings we got?” I said.
Here eyes narrowed dangerously. “You dumped that pool in your shoe on purpose!” she said. “You want me to wear all that!”
“You can wear what you want,” I said. “I just thought you’d feel sexy in all that. And when you feel sexy…”
It hung there between us, the sexual tension so thick you could cut it with a knife.
“Okay,” she finally said. “But don’t get your hopes up.”
For the record: my hopes were not the only thing that was up. So was my blood pressure.
We had a great night, catching up talking about the good old days. We’re all fatter and he’s not. I hate him.
When we had dessert, I ordered a flake of chocolate cake. Wifey ordered a bag of smell from an ice cream sundae. Her friend just licked the menu. He at a piece of cake the size of New Hampshire covered in strawberry glaze and vanilla ice cream while drinking a bottle of chocolate sauce with a side order of sugared grease.
Yet if he turns sideways you can’t see him, because he only exists in two dimensions.
So, just to make things fair, I sprayed him with the zip-loc bag of gizzards.
SOB deserved it. Oh, sure, Wifey made a scene, but I’m pretty sure she was agreed with me.
Then we came home. And, in a touching moment that I thought belonged at the penultimate scene of a teary movie, I presented her with the marbles. “I love you,” I said. “I always will. You can play with my balls any day.”
“Stay here,” she whispered. “Until I call for you.”
So I did what any normal person would do: I stripped naked and hopped up on the pool table. Hey, it pays to be ready.
Finally, the door to our bedroom opened. There she stood, a vision of erotic beauty, clad in fishnets, high heels, cowboy hat, and lacy black brassiere. I was beside myself in lust. I came running down the hallway, drooling like a moron.
“Honey?” she asked. “You know what I want to play with the marbles?”
“Hmm?” I said, my mouth busy doing other things.
“I want to play whack-a-cock.”
And then she hit me with a sock filled with marbles in my ‘nads.
“Now we’re even. Good night!”
Tomorrow: My Day Aboard the Minnow
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Slip Sliding Away
Several weeks ago I made Wifey an offer that she couldn’t refuse: in order to minimize the amount of packing we had to do, I’d buy both her and I nice clothes so that we could go to church with my parents in something other than shorts.
Then I’d forgotten all about making the promise. Turns out she hadn’t, though, and this morning she decided to call me on my offer to go shopping “somewhere nice” so we could find some fancy clothing. So, it was off to the stores, just the two of us.
We went to a store called Goody’s, which if you don’t know is a store common in the South where you can find nice clothing that isn’t terribly expensive. Wifey is very choosy, but she managed to come up with several items that she liked enough to try on.
This is a big deal, since Wifey typically finds one item, tries it on, and hates it. But this time she had about eight different things she wanted to try on. We located the dressing rooms easily enough, despite the fact that there were neither customers nor sales associates to help us navigate the tangled store. It was like Omega Man.
“The sign says only five items,” she said. “Can you hold some while I go try these on?”
“I ain’t holding nothing,” I said. “Just take ‘em in. What are they gonna do, throw you out of the store?”
“I guess,” she said reluctantly. Wife always wants to follow the rules. I, however, am a scofflaw.
After looking around, I realized that this was simply too good an opportunity to pass up: an empty store, lackadaisical help, and Wifey willing to try stuff on. I picked out the trashiest dress I could lay my hands on and tossed it over the dressing room door.
“Here,” I said. “I saw this and thought you might like it.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Do it as a favor to me,” I said.
She sighed. So many things start out that way, after all. But like a good wife she tried it on and, if I do say so myself, looked quite fetching in it. At least, I wanted to go fetch her, but the dressing room door locked. So I had to content myself with peeking in through the two-inch gap around the door.
Thank goodness for poor maintenance, I kept telling myself.
“You gonna get nekkid in there, or what?” I asked her.
“I’m not going to get naked,” she said. “Go away.”
“What if I stick a dollar in through the door slat?” I said, pushing in a bill. “Could I at least get a little nipple?”
“Go away or I’ll call security!” she said. For the record, though, she still took the money.
“In Goody’s, no one can hear you scream,” I said. “You wanna join the dressing-room club?”
At that point a hangar hit me in the eyeball. I swear, that woman doesn’t ever want to join any clubs. I’m beginning to think she’s a violent loner.
Eventually she chose out some clothing she liked, a red paisley skirt and black top that made her look vaguely like a 19th-century school marm. I picked out a fishnet stocking/black garter belt combo to go with it that she promised never to wear, but we’ll see. I can be very persuasive when I beg.
For myself, I went with the classic black shirt/gray slacks combination. No need to mess with a classic, right? Plus, it has the added bonus of making sure that every single flake of dandruff that falls off my head is advertised to everyone within eyesight.
And that’s gotta count for something.
Then it was on to shoe shopping, or as I like to call it, hell. There is no single thing I like less in the world than shoe shopping. Here’s why:
When a man buys shoes, he goes to the spot in the store where they have that kind of shoe, he picks some out, he tries them on, and he buys them. That’s the end of it. So I did this: go to black dress shoes, do not wander around in sandals and boots, do not spend $200.
Women in a shoe store are like Jeffrey in those Family Circus cartoons where he goes all over creation to go from point A to point B. Wifey wandered all over, looking at every conceivable style and type of shoe that they possibly offered.
“You’ve never worn four-inch stiletto red heels in all your life,” I said when I caught up to her. “Unless you worked as a prostitute for a while that I never knew about.”
“I was just looking at these,” she said. “I’m searching for a comfortable pair of black dress shoes.”
“You’re not going to find them in the slattern section!” I said.
She grumbled something about how unhelpful I was and wandered off.
Because shoes were buy one, get one half price, she ended up buying two styles of black shoe: regular and open-toed. I picked the open-toed shoes out over her protests, as she’s never worn that style of shoe in her life. But I thought it went well with the fishnets.
Finally we were finished: one pair of clothes for each of us. Total time: three hours. Ay, carumba. So we went to Ruby Tuesday’s for lunch, one of the few restaurants where we hadn’t yet eaten.
The waiter was a nice guy and did a good job, other than right at the beginning where he brought me a coke instead of an ice tea. When I pointed it out to him he furiously apologized.
“I’m so sorry about that,” he said. “I know better, too. You guys always order the same thing.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that we’d never been there before. Of course, it’s possible that Ruby Tuesday’s waiters have a group mind, and he was recalling collective memories from all our other visits to other Ruby Tuesdays in other states back when we still lived in the US.
But somehow I doubt it.
That afternoon, we had a mini family reunion. My cousin, his girlfriend, and each of their daughters were coming over to play with my children, along with my aunt (his mother). In order to help wear out the children, grandma and grandpa set up the Slip N Slide in the front yard.
It was quite a complicated affair, a three-lane behemoth that ran about ten feet and ended in a small pool at the bottom. In flagrant violation of the instructions, we set it up to run downhill so that the children could gain maximum speed and increase their injury potential.
Once we had that set up, we were ready to go.
First one up: the boy. He ran, jumped onto the slide, and immediately smacked his head against the ground. Springing up, he declared it the devil’s toy and refused to step foot on it again for the rest of the afternoon.
Smart kid.
Next up was the younger of the two cousins. She ran at it, jumped on her stomach, flew to the end, flew off the end, and skidded five feet on the ground. She declared it the coolest thing ever.
Then came my daughter. She hesitantly stepped on it, crab-walked down the length, and said it was okay.
Finally, the older of the cousins. She sat down and scooted down the length of the slide like a dog trying to wipe it’s ass on the carpet. She said it was too difficult
I had had enough. “Out of the way!” I bellowed. “I’ll show you how to play with this toy!”
I ran at it and dove stomach-first, intending to slide to the end and show them that it takes speed to do this properly.
What I actually showed them was that the ground is hard, and when you weigh more than forty pounds it hurts like hell to slam yourself into it. I felt the impact all the way to my armpits, and by the time I got to the bottom I worried that I had permanently injured myself.
The children were amused. “Again, again!” they cried. The boy even insisted on riding me down, like some sort of perverse water park ride designed to punish unruly prisoners.
Every time I went down the slide I could actually feel my bones fracturing and muscles tearing. I eventually had to take breaks to chug a gallon of milk to stave off osteoporosis. When I finally convinced them to release me from sliding, every part of my body ached, including several places I was unaware that I had.
In total, I slid about four times. Finally in too much pain to continue, I crawled to the shower and put myself under the hot water.
“Sore?” Wifey asked when she came in to check on me an hour later.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “How are the kids?”
“They’re still sliding,” she said. “They’re not old men.”
“I’m not old either!” I said.
“You’re the one soaking his feet in Epsom salts, not them.”
When I’d finished, I hitched my pants up to my armpits, went outside and sprayed them all down with the hose. Damn kids were on the lawn, after all.
After dinner we caught up with my cousin and his family, having a good time.
The evening went on and on. I was sore, and very tired. But everyone was having too much fun to leave and let me go to bed. And I’m too young to have to crawl off to bed just because every muscle in my body aches like I’ve been run over by a steamroller.
So I did the next-best thing: I sent the kids to bed. Oh, sure, they protested because it was 7:15 and well before their bedtime, but I had to have some reason to chase everyone off and go moan myself to sleep.
After all, I’m not getting any younger.
Damn slip and slides should come with a warning: DO NOT USE IF YOU ARE OVER 10 AND HAVE ANY SENSE OF SELF-PRESERVATION!
Tomorrow: Catching Up is Hard to Do
Then I’d forgotten all about making the promise. Turns out she hadn’t, though, and this morning she decided to call me on my offer to go shopping “somewhere nice” so we could find some fancy clothing. So, it was off to the stores, just the two of us.
We went to a store called Goody’s, which if you don’t know is a store common in the South where you can find nice clothing that isn’t terribly expensive. Wifey is very choosy, but she managed to come up with several items that she liked enough to try on.
This is a big deal, since Wifey typically finds one item, tries it on, and hates it. But this time she had about eight different things she wanted to try on. We located the dressing rooms easily enough, despite the fact that there were neither customers nor sales associates to help us navigate the tangled store. It was like Omega Man.
“The sign says only five items,” she said. “Can you hold some while I go try these on?”
“I ain’t holding nothing,” I said. “Just take ‘em in. What are they gonna do, throw you out of the store?”
“I guess,” she said reluctantly. Wife always wants to follow the rules. I, however, am a scofflaw.
After looking around, I realized that this was simply too good an opportunity to pass up: an empty store, lackadaisical help, and Wifey willing to try stuff on. I picked out the trashiest dress I could lay my hands on and tossed it over the dressing room door.
“Here,” I said. “I saw this and thought you might like it.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Do it as a favor to me,” I said.
She sighed. So many things start out that way, after all. But like a good wife she tried it on and, if I do say so myself, looked quite fetching in it. At least, I wanted to go fetch her, but the dressing room door locked. So I had to content myself with peeking in through the two-inch gap around the door.
Thank goodness for poor maintenance, I kept telling myself.
“You gonna get nekkid in there, or what?” I asked her.
“I’m not going to get naked,” she said. “Go away.”
“What if I stick a dollar in through the door slat?” I said, pushing in a bill. “Could I at least get a little nipple?”
“Go away or I’ll call security!” she said. For the record, though, she still took the money.
“In Goody’s, no one can hear you scream,” I said. “You wanna join the dressing-room club?”
At that point a hangar hit me in the eyeball. I swear, that woman doesn’t ever want to join any clubs. I’m beginning to think she’s a violent loner.
Eventually she chose out some clothing she liked, a red paisley skirt and black top that made her look vaguely like a 19th-century school marm. I picked out a fishnet stocking/black garter belt combo to go with it that she promised never to wear, but we’ll see. I can be very persuasive when I beg.
For myself, I went with the classic black shirt/gray slacks combination. No need to mess with a classic, right? Plus, it has the added bonus of making sure that every single flake of dandruff that falls off my head is advertised to everyone within eyesight.
And that’s gotta count for something.
Then it was on to shoe shopping, or as I like to call it, hell. There is no single thing I like less in the world than shoe shopping. Here’s why:
When a man buys shoes, he goes to the spot in the store where they have that kind of shoe, he picks some out, he tries them on, and he buys them. That’s the end of it. So I did this: go to black dress shoes, do not wander around in sandals and boots, do not spend $200.
Women in a shoe store are like Jeffrey in those Family Circus cartoons where he goes all over creation to go from point A to point B. Wifey wandered all over, looking at every conceivable style and type of shoe that they possibly offered.
“You’ve never worn four-inch stiletto red heels in all your life,” I said when I caught up to her. “Unless you worked as a prostitute for a while that I never knew about.”
“I was just looking at these,” she said. “I’m searching for a comfortable pair of black dress shoes.”
“You’re not going to find them in the slattern section!” I said.
She grumbled something about how unhelpful I was and wandered off.
Because shoes were buy one, get one half price, she ended up buying two styles of black shoe: regular and open-toed. I picked the open-toed shoes out over her protests, as she’s never worn that style of shoe in her life. But I thought it went well with the fishnets.
Finally we were finished: one pair of clothes for each of us. Total time: three hours. Ay, carumba. So we went to Ruby Tuesday’s for lunch, one of the few restaurants where we hadn’t yet eaten.
The waiter was a nice guy and did a good job, other than right at the beginning where he brought me a coke instead of an ice tea. When I pointed it out to him he furiously apologized.
“I’m so sorry about that,” he said. “I know better, too. You guys always order the same thing.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that we’d never been there before. Of course, it’s possible that Ruby Tuesday’s waiters have a group mind, and he was recalling collective memories from all our other visits to other Ruby Tuesdays in other states back when we still lived in the US.
But somehow I doubt it.
That afternoon, we had a mini family reunion. My cousin, his girlfriend, and each of their daughters were coming over to play with my children, along with my aunt (his mother). In order to help wear out the children, grandma and grandpa set up the Slip N Slide in the front yard.
It was quite a complicated affair, a three-lane behemoth that ran about ten feet and ended in a small pool at the bottom. In flagrant violation of the instructions, we set it up to run downhill so that the children could gain maximum speed and increase their injury potential.
Once we had that set up, we were ready to go.
First one up: the boy. He ran, jumped onto the slide, and immediately smacked his head against the ground. Springing up, he declared it the devil’s toy and refused to step foot on it again for the rest of the afternoon.
Smart kid.
Next up was the younger of the two cousins. She ran at it, jumped on her stomach, flew to the end, flew off the end, and skidded five feet on the ground. She declared it the coolest thing ever.
Then came my daughter. She hesitantly stepped on it, crab-walked down the length, and said it was okay.
Finally, the older of the cousins. She sat down and scooted down the length of the slide like a dog trying to wipe it’s ass on the carpet. She said it was too difficult
I had had enough. “Out of the way!” I bellowed. “I’ll show you how to play with this toy!”
I ran at it and dove stomach-first, intending to slide to the end and show them that it takes speed to do this properly.
What I actually showed them was that the ground is hard, and when you weigh more than forty pounds it hurts like hell to slam yourself into it. I felt the impact all the way to my armpits, and by the time I got to the bottom I worried that I had permanently injured myself.
The children were amused. “Again, again!” they cried. The boy even insisted on riding me down, like some sort of perverse water park ride designed to punish unruly prisoners.
Every time I went down the slide I could actually feel my bones fracturing and muscles tearing. I eventually had to take breaks to chug a gallon of milk to stave off osteoporosis. When I finally convinced them to release me from sliding, every part of my body ached, including several places I was unaware that I had.
In total, I slid about four times. Finally in too much pain to continue, I crawled to the shower and put myself under the hot water.
“Sore?” Wifey asked when she came in to check on me an hour later.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “How are the kids?”
“They’re still sliding,” she said. “They’re not old men.”
“I’m not old either!” I said.
“You’re the one soaking his feet in Epsom salts, not them.”
When I’d finished, I hitched my pants up to my armpits, went outside and sprayed them all down with the hose. Damn kids were on the lawn, after all.
After dinner we caught up with my cousin and his family, having a good time.
The evening went on and on. I was sore, and very tired. But everyone was having too much fun to leave and let me go to bed. And I’m too young to have to crawl off to bed just because every muscle in my body aches like I’ve been run over by a steamroller.
So I did the next-best thing: I sent the kids to bed. Oh, sure, they protested because it was 7:15 and well before their bedtime, but I had to have some reason to chase everyone off and go moan myself to sleep.
After all, I’m not getting any younger.
Damn slip and slides should come with a warning: DO NOT USE IF YOU ARE OVER 10 AND HAVE ANY SENSE OF SELF-PRESERVATION!
Tomorrow: Catching Up is Hard to Do
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Death to Furby
When I came upstairs, I heard the familiar morning sounds: cartoons on the television, children and grandparents chattering about everything that’s happened over the vacation, the microwave cooking breakfast. But there was one unfamiliar voice, and nobody seemed to be paying attention to it.
It sounded like a deranged miniature poodle had learned to talk, but then gotten extremely drunk. “Mama,” it said. “I’m sick. Need medicine. BEEELCH! Feel better.”
When I came into the kitchen, I saw to my horror that each child was seated next to a Furby.
“Look what Grandma gave us, daddy!” said the boy.
“You can teach them to talk!” said the girl.
“Waa! Waa!” said the Furby. “I’m hungry!”
“Oh joy, rapture.” I said over their wailing. “I missed having an inconsolable whiny creature around the house.”
All that psychic energy invested in a vasectomy, down the drain because of four double A batteries and an overgenerous grandmother.
“Where did you get these?” I asked.
“I found them down at the secondhand store,” grandma said. “Aren’t they great?”
“They’re awesome!” said the boy.
I just shook my head.
“You know what’s the best part?” Before I could answer, he told me. “Mine doesn’t have an off button!”
In my opinion, whoever designs a noisy toy with no off button should be beaten with a sack of nickels. I think this should be federally mandated. Any candidate who advocates this would immediately earn my vote, regardless of their positions on any other subject.
Once we’d eaten and cleaned up, we headed over to my brother’s house to visit him and his family. He had a day off from his busy schedule as a bikini inspector, and his kids are near the age of my kids, so we’d planned to get together and “do something” so the kids could be reacquainted.
We had no fixed plan because that sort of thing just dampens family fun. We were going to play it by ear.
Four years ago when my parents retired, they moved from Washington state back to Tennessee to the town where I grew up. They bought a house with an in-law suite, then told my brother and I that it was so that either of us could come visit at any time and stay with them for as long as we wanted.
His house is a forty-minute drive away, as it is in the next town over. So essentially, it is my duty to come visit the grandparents and stay with my children.
At any rate, we grabbed what we needed (swimsuits, a toy for each child, and sunglasses) and headed over to his house. It’s a nice house, located downtown in a real, live, city. Oh, sure, you sometimes get to see prostitutes walking the streets near their neighborhood, but that gives the area local flavor.
Only it’s not the kind of local flavor that you want to lick without a tongue condom.
The children had a wonderful time playing. I showed my brother the priceless artifacts I’d bought at auction, and he pretended to be impressed, which is really all I could ask for. It’s hard to get too excited over rusted chunks of metal.
In the afternoon we went over to a park in the city that features incredibly overheated playground equipment and a small water park. When I say water park, what I mean is spraying fountains and some water cannons that the children can shoot at one another.
Thankfully, the cannons cut off if you point them at the benches where the grownups sit. I wish the guy that had worked on them had designed the Furbies.
While there, I heard a woman with tattoos down her arms and a nose ring complain that her in-laws don’t give her respect and treat her like she’s a bad mother. Actual quote:
Sympathetic friend: “Where’s your son?”
Tattoo Annie: “I’m not sure where he’s got off to. He was here a minute ago. BILLY! BILLY!” Shrugs. “I’m sure he’ll show up.”
I signed up for her online parenting courses right on the spot. I’m wondering what the thousand dollar lab fee was for, though.
Did you know that if you point a camera at a child, you can manipulate them into standing on the water jets and getting them to shoot up the leg of their swim shorts while pretending to take their picture?
Did you also know that their mothers think this is cruel? So you need to only do this to your own children. It’s hilarious family fun, though.
Well, it was fun for me, anyway.
After that, my brother offered to take all the children away with him to their church’s VBS program. Since this offered a chance for Wifey and I to be alone for the first time in weeks, we not only took him up on it but pre-emptively ditched my sister in law so that we could be alone.
I would say she deserves it, but she really doesn’t. But we ditched her anyways, with extreme prejudice and with no guilt whatsoever. Then we had the difficult problem of deciding what restaurant to go to. I wanted to go to The Melting Pot, but we didn’t really have time.
But I wanted to mention in writing that I love the Melting Pot. Everyone should go there, even though you have to take out a second mortgage to afford it.
So we settled on Outback Steak House. Say what you will about OSH, but since it’s got those blooming onions with spicy crack on them, Wifey loves it. She’ll eat just about anything if it involves onion.
(Get your minds out of the gutter. I’ve never tried that. Well, once, but it felt like somebody was feeding my dick into a meat grinder when some got on my pee slit and I spent four hours in the emergency room because “dick discomfort” isn’t considered “critical.”
Damn female nurses and their gunshot wound fetishes.)
As we drove towards Outback, I started to give her the old razzle-dazzle to see if I could get her pilot light started. It never hurts to try, right?
“So,” I said to her. “Seen any good westerns lately?”
She looked at me, pursed her lips, and prepared to say something terribly sexy. Only I don’t know what it was, because just then a Furby farted in the back seat.
“Scuse me!” it said. “Hahahaha.”
“Did he bring that damned Furby?” she asked.
“Sure sounds like it,” I said.
“I’m sick,” it said. “Whaa! Feed me!”
It kept this up for the entire drive to the restaurant. This is not conducive to intimacy, but it is conducive to thoughts of suicide.
Or homicide.
Or, even better, Furbicide.
We sat down inside and the waiter asked us our drink orders.
“I’ll take a Sam Adams,” I said. I needed something to dull the ache in my head from listening to Furby chatter for fifteen minutes. Plus, I’d never had a Sam Adams, so I thought I’d try one.
“Can I see your ID?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “If your X-Ray vision will run twenty miles.”
“You don’t have ID?” he and Wifey asked at the exact same time.
“Nope!” I said.
“Then you can’t have a beer,” he said.
Damn ‘ID Everyone’ laws. I’ll pass for 18 the day that Pamela Anderson passes for a good actress. We ate a good meal (and drank soda pop like wholesome American teens) and then headed back over to my brother’s place.
The whole way there the Furby farted, burped, and cried. It was like having a deranged five year-old in the back seat. The damn thing didn’t go ten seconds without saying something.
When the children returned, thrilled with their evening out, we headed back to grandma and grandpa’s house. It’s about forty minutes.
The whole way the Furby farted, burped, and cried for food, medicine, and mama. The boy tried to gently sooth it, spoke softly to it, threatened it, and generally did everything a good parent should do to calm an unruly child.
“Let me try,” said Wifey. He handed it up to her. “SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!” she shouted while shaking it like a Polaroid picture.
“Just hand it to me,” I said rolling down the window. “I’ll fix it up real good!”
“No, let me try,” she said.
She then spent the next ten minutes cradling it next to her breast and trying to calm it, but it ignored her and continued to whine and moan. We couldn’t take the batteries out because we didn’t have a screwdriver.
We couldn’t toss it out of the window because of vague ethical considerations, but I eventually convinced the boy to give it a shot.
By the time we got back, the family had two new rules:
1) Furbies are so special that they need to stay at grandma’s house
2) Furbies may never ride in the car ever again under any circumstance
We got in and put the children to bed, then turned in ourselves.
The first thing I did was start farting, burping, and whining to get Wifey to comfort me by clutching me to her breast, too.
Didn’t work, though. She just made me sleep on the couch.
Tomorrow: Discovering New Methods of Pain
It sounded like a deranged miniature poodle had learned to talk, but then gotten extremely drunk. “Mama,” it said. “I’m sick. Need medicine. BEEELCH! Feel better.”
When I came into the kitchen, I saw to my horror that each child was seated next to a Furby.
“Look what Grandma gave us, daddy!” said the boy.
“You can teach them to talk!” said the girl.
“Waa! Waa!” said the Furby. “I’m hungry!”
“Oh joy, rapture.” I said over their wailing. “I missed having an inconsolable whiny creature around the house.”
All that psychic energy invested in a vasectomy, down the drain because of four double A batteries and an overgenerous grandmother.
“Where did you get these?” I asked.
“I found them down at the secondhand store,” grandma said. “Aren’t they great?”
“They’re awesome!” said the boy.
I just shook my head.
“You know what’s the best part?” Before I could answer, he told me. “Mine doesn’t have an off button!”
In my opinion, whoever designs a noisy toy with no off button should be beaten with a sack of nickels. I think this should be federally mandated. Any candidate who advocates this would immediately earn my vote, regardless of their positions on any other subject.
Once we’d eaten and cleaned up, we headed over to my brother’s house to visit him and his family. He had a day off from his busy schedule as a bikini inspector, and his kids are near the age of my kids, so we’d planned to get together and “do something” so the kids could be reacquainted.
We had no fixed plan because that sort of thing just dampens family fun. We were going to play it by ear.
Four years ago when my parents retired, they moved from Washington state back to Tennessee to the town where I grew up. They bought a house with an in-law suite, then told my brother and I that it was so that either of us could come visit at any time and stay with them for as long as we wanted.
His house is a forty-minute drive away, as it is in the next town over. So essentially, it is my duty to come visit the grandparents and stay with my children.
At any rate, we grabbed what we needed (swimsuits, a toy for each child, and sunglasses) and headed over to his house. It’s a nice house, located downtown in a real, live, city. Oh, sure, you sometimes get to see prostitutes walking the streets near their neighborhood, but that gives the area local flavor.
Only it’s not the kind of local flavor that you want to lick without a tongue condom.
The children had a wonderful time playing. I showed my brother the priceless artifacts I’d bought at auction, and he pretended to be impressed, which is really all I could ask for. It’s hard to get too excited over rusted chunks of metal.
In the afternoon we went over to a park in the city that features incredibly overheated playground equipment and a small water park. When I say water park, what I mean is spraying fountains and some water cannons that the children can shoot at one another.
Thankfully, the cannons cut off if you point them at the benches where the grownups sit. I wish the guy that had worked on them had designed the Furbies.
While there, I heard a woman with tattoos down her arms and a nose ring complain that her in-laws don’t give her respect and treat her like she’s a bad mother. Actual quote:
Sympathetic friend: “Where’s your son?”
Tattoo Annie: “I’m not sure where he’s got off to. He was here a minute ago. BILLY! BILLY!” Shrugs. “I’m sure he’ll show up.”
I signed up for her online parenting courses right on the spot. I’m wondering what the thousand dollar lab fee was for, though.
Did you know that if you point a camera at a child, you can manipulate them into standing on the water jets and getting them to shoot up the leg of their swim shorts while pretending to take their picture?
Did you also know that their mothers think this is cruel? So you need to only do this to your own children. It’s hilarious family fun, though.
Well, it was fun for me, anyway.
After that, my brother offered to take all the children away with him to their church’s VBS program. Since this offered a chance for Wifey and I to be alone for the first time in weeks, we not only took him up on it but pre-emptively ditched my sister in law so that we could be alone.
I would say she deserves it, but she really doesn’t. But we ditched her anyways, with extreme prejudice and with no guilt whatsoever. Then we had the difficult problem of deciding what restaurant to go to. I wanted to go to The Melting Pot, but we didn’t really have time.
But I wanted to mention in writing that I love the Melting Pot. Everyone should go there, even though you have to take out a second mortgage to afford it.
So we settled on Outback Steak House. Say what you will about OSH, but since it’s got those blooming onions with spicy crack on them, Wifey loves it. She’ll eat just about anything if it involves onion.
(Get your minds out of the gutter. I’ve never tried that. Well, once, but it felt like somebody was feeding my dick into a meat grinder when some got on my pee slit and I spent four hours in the emergency room because “dick discomfort” isn’t considered “critical.”
Damn female nurses and their gunshot wound fetishes.)
As we drove towards Outback, I started to give her the old razzle-dazzle to see if I could get her pilot light started. It never hurts to try, right?
“So,” I said to her. “Seen any good westerns lately?”
She looked at me, pursed her lips, and prepared to say something terribly sexy. Only I don’t know what it was, because just then a Furby farted in the back seat.
“Scuse me!” it said. “Hahahaha.”
“Did he bring that damned Furby?” she asked.
“Sure sounds like it,” I said.
“I’m sick,” it said. “Whaa! Feed me!”
It kept this up for the entire drive to the restaurant. This is not conducive to intimacy, but it is conducive to thoughts of suicide.
Or homicide.
Or, even better, Furbicide.
We sat down inside and the waiter asked us our drink orders.
“I’ll take a Sam Adams,” I said. I needed something to dull the ache in my head from listening to Furby chatter for fifteen minutes. Plus, I’d never had a Sam Adams, so I thought I’d try one.
“Can I see your ID?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “If your X-Ray vision will run twenty miles.”
“You don’t have ID?” he and Wifey asked at the exact same time.
“Nope!” I said.
“Then you can’t have a beer,” he said.
Damn ‘ID Everyone’ laws. I’ll pass for 18 the day that Pamela Anderson passes for a good actress. We ate a good meal (and drank soda pop like wholesome American teens) and then headed back over to my brother’s place.
The whole way there the Furby farted, burped, and cried. It was like having a deranged five year-old in the back seat. The damn thing didn’t go ten seconds without saying something.
When the children returned, thrilled with their evening out, we headed back to grandma and grandpa’s house. It’s about forty minutes.
The whole way the Furby farted, burped, and cried for food, medicine, and mama. The boy tried to gently sooth it, spoke softly to it, threatened it, and generally did everything a good parent should do to calm an unruly child.
“Let me try,” said Wifey. He handed it up to her. “SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!” she shouted while shaking it like a Polaroid picture.
“Just hand it to me,” I said rolling down the window. “I’ll fix it up real good!”
“No, let me try,” she said.
She then spent the next ten minutes cradling it next to her breast and trying to calm it, but it ignored her and continued to whine and moan. We couldn’t take the batteries out because we didn’t have a screwdriver.
We couldn’t toss it out of the window because of vague ethical considerations, but I eventually convinced the boy to give it a shot.
By the time we got back, the family had two new rules:
1) Furbies are so special that they need to stay at grandma’s house
2) Furbies may never ride in the car ever again under any circumstance
We got in and put the children to bed, then turned in ourselves.
The first thing I did was start farting, burping, and whining to get Wifey to comfort me by clutching me to her breast, too.
Didn’t work, though. She just made me sleep on the couch.
Tomorrow: Discovering New Methods of Pain
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