A Night at the Ballet

As the great philosopher Moe Scyzlack one said, "we're all pigs, Homer. The difference is that every once in a while you pick yourself up out of the muck, clean yourself off, and show your wife that you love her."

With all due respect, Moe is an idiot.

Six months ago, Wifey informed me that one of my husbandly duties was that I was responsible for taking her out once a month without the children so that we could spend "couple time" together.

This was in the context of a discussion about my many failings as a husband. And by discussion, I mean that she spoke in a louder-than-normal tone of voice and I nodded vigorously.

Hey, I haven't been married for fifteen years on accident.

I did pretty good at it for a while. In August we went to see a movie that I loved and she hated (Cloverfield). Then in September we went to a one-night-only tractor pull, and the next month I got so drunk at Oktoberfest that I vomited down the shirt of one of the busty waitresses. Good times.

For some reason, Wifey didn't seem too upset that we didn't go out for the next three months, and I figured that meant I was off the hook.

With Valentine's Day coming up, though, Wifey decided that it would be a glorious idea to reaffirm our love and commitment. When I told her I hated Valentine's Day and that I didn't want to go anywhere, she offered to send me up Swan Lake with a Nutcracker I'd never forget.

Seeing her interest in ballet, I decided to see if there was a show in the area on Valentine's Day. And lo and behold, I found us boss tickets to Romeo and Juliet the Ballet, by Prokofiev, danced by the Moscow City Ballet.

Like I care, but she's into this kind of thing, so I figured it'd at least get her in a good humor, which is what 90% of marriage is all about.

When we went to dinner, I could see that she was really excited. She had a twinkle in her eye and a lift in her step that I hadn't seen in years. I began to get excited, thinking about the post-ballet entertainment that I had planned, and which by the Valentine's Code is required of any woman who attends an event where her spouse or significant other is forced by social protocol to wear a tie.

Hey, my tie may have read "I'm With Stupid" with an arrow pointing up, and have had a naked woman concealed on the underside, but it still counts, even if it was a clip-on.

We entered the ballet at promptly 7:50, in order to be well seated before the 8:00 curtain up. This was the first time I'd been to the ballet, and I learned three things:

1) It didn't start until 8:15

2) It takes at least 15 minutes for a ballet character to die, which is a problem in a show where half the characters are going to be murdered or commit suicide.

3) In the ballet, no one can hear you scream.

We were halfway through the thirty-minute "dance of love", where Romeo and Juliet roll around, kiss, dance on tip-toe, then repeat ad infinitum, when Wifey leans over to me and says "I have a secret."

"What? You have a secret bottle of poison stashed somewhere?" I ask.

She shakes her head. "I'll tell you later."

Then she kisses me on the cheek.

So I'm running through all the possible secrets she could have: she bought me a present, she's got polio, I have only minutes to live, she's willing to walk out at intermission, something. But I come up with nothing.

Finally, mercifully, intermission comes. Then, all too soon, it's over, and I march back into the Bataan Death Dance.

The second act starts with some sword fights, which of course culminate in Tybalt killing Mercutio, which sets off ten minutes of women in black shrouds dancing around and Mercutio staggering this way and that, never actually dying but not able to live out the rest of the ballet (although they do drag his corpse back and forth a few more times).

Just as Mercutio falls, Wifey leans over to me and whispers in my ear "I'm not wearing panties." Then she gives my earlobe a little nibble.

I now considered three courses of action:

Course #1: Do nothing.
Course #2: Jump on her like a trampoline.
Course #3: Verify whether or not this information was true before embarking upon Course #2.

You have to understand that in the entire course of our lives together, the only time Wifey has ever left the house without panties is, well, very much never. In fact, short of showering, I think she wears panties all the time. Oh, maybe not underneath the full-length circa 1860's flannel nightgown that she wears to bed. But I'd never know, since it's like +5 Plate Mail in terms of protection.

Besides, Course #1 seemed like an insult. If she's being honest, I figured she wanted me to show interest. And I was interested. Very interested.

Even in Europe, though, I'm pretty sure going at it like wild gibbons per Course #2 would get you arrested. Well, not in Amsterdam, but anywhere else it's dicey.

So I opted for Course #3.

Since I don't want this to turn into a Dear Penthouse letter, I'll just give you the broad brush stroke of what happened: I reached over under the coat on her lap and, a few opened buttons later, verified that I had received an accurate account of the state of her undergarments.

Course #2 was looking better and better all the time. In fact, I suggested it, but she rebuffed me to continue watching Juliet flail about as she tried to decide whether or not to drink the sleeping potion (total time required: 45 minutes and 22 seconds of toe-standing indecision).

In due time the ballet was finished. I think Romeo won, but I'm not quite sure, since I didn’t pay that good attention to it; I was distracted by other things. People started clapping, dancers started bowing, and I started drooling.

I jumped up from my seat, her coat in my hands so that I could help her into it like a true gentleman. My watch snagged ever so momentarily on something, but I ignored it, and I saw a shower of small white confetti bits fly out over the audience from behind us.

"Nice touch," I thought.

Wifey looked up at me in horror. I looked down at her in lust. The old lady in the row in front of us, who had turned to see what hit her in the back of her head, screamed and fainted.

There was Wifey, in all her commando glory, dress now torn open to her waist, looking for all the world like she wanted to murder me where I stood. And here I was, slobbering and shaking her coat at her and urging her to get up so we could go discuss politics and backgammon in the parking lot.

Yes, the full reality of what had happened had not yet sunk in. To be honest, I was doing most of my thinking in the southern hemisphere, where such concerns as morals and decency rarely see the light of day.

Fortunately, people swarmed to help the collapsed old lady. The house lights were brought up. I dashed into the aisle, urging Wifey to come with me, always capering a few steps in front of her and shaking her coat at her like some kind of crazed medicine man as I tried to get to the car, and paradise, as quickly as possible.

Behind me came Wifey, cursing and trying to hold her dress together and catch up to me. And behind her a group of people shouting for everyone to get out of the way, that the old lady needed to be taken out into the air, thus attracting the most attention possible to her as she tried to climb the stairs and not give everyone seated along the aisle a money shot that they'd not soon forget.

Judging from my angle, she failed miserably, and I think I saw one or two camera flashes as she came along behind me.

I was out the door quickly, an angry Wifey right behind me, now screaming curses into the night. "WOULD YOU STOP AND GIVE ME MY COAT, YOU MORON?"

I began to suspect that the night would soon take a somewhat less-than-pleasurable turn.

She didn't speak a word to me as we headed back to the parking lot, trying as she was to hold her dress closed, pull her coat down, and walk all at the same time. My Spidey-Sense was tingling, telling me that to speak was to die, so I kept my mouth shut.

The warm breezes of the Southern Hemisphere were extinguished, snuffed out by the sudden resurgence of the ice cap from Wifey.

When we reached the parking lot, it was closed with a big white gate. So we stood, and we waited. And waited. And waited. Slowly, other patrons began filing out and stood in line behind us, pointing and whispering, with the two of us standing at the center of a small circle now surrounded by gleeful onlookers, at least one of whom was kneeling and pointing a camera phone at Wifey.

"Did you have a good time?" I asked.

"Let's see," she said. "My favorite dress is ruined, I was exposed to half a theater, and I'm standing out here freezing my hoochie off waiting for the gate to open. Do you suppose I had a good time?"

"You've probably lost a little of your ardor, then," I said.

She glared at me.

"How about when we get home, I'll see if I can help you relight that pilot?"

She glared at me with death in her eyes. I knew all hope was lost, so I tried my trump card:

"Since I went through all this trouble to set up our night out, just to be fair you should still plan on having intense verbal negotiations with my silent partner when we get home."

Whereupon, to my great chagrin, she showed me the Nutcracker.

Have I mentioned how much I hate the ballet?

Pleb the Builder!

One of the chief disagreements that Wifey and I have had regarding our charming European home is the lighting in the living space on the ground floor. This common area houses both our living and our dining room, and in the past we have illuminated it via several Ikea pole lamps.

I like Ikea pole lams. They’re cheap, which is nice. They’re portable, which is also nice. And when your spouse turns them off, if she does it slowly you can imagine that you’re at an upscale gentleman’s club and she’s about to give you a private dance, particularly if you choose that moment to jam a fiver in her panties and grope her.

Or maybe that’s just me. Okay, I don’t use the fiver, but I do grope. It’s one of the best non-verbal ways to say “I love you”, right?

Wifey, however, does not like the pole lamps. In fact, she finds the bottom level of our house much like a dungeon: dark, cold, and filled with people that she really doesn’t care for.

Some time ago, I accidentally installed a new wall lamp in one corner of the room. This unit has been operating now for a month without either burning the house down or going on the fritz, so Wifey decided to give me a little more challenge: she bought a chandelier.

I came home from work one evening to discover the thing in a box on the table, and her proudly telling me that she’d gotten it on sale: only sixty euros. That’s a hundred bucks in non-Monopoly money, which is actually pretty good for lamps here.

Needless to say, I was terribly excited with the thought of climbing atop a ladder, drilling holes in the ceiling, and hanging a forty-pound mass of metal and glass directly overhead. So I did what any husband does when faced with a similar situation: I procrastinated.

Weeks passed, and although eating around the box with the chandelier posed some problems, it eventually got to where we viewed it as one of the family. It was a lot less trouble than the kids, I can tell you that.

All that changed Friday . Wifey went out with friends, and I had to cut out of work early to pick up our children. Plus the two children of her friend. Plus the daughter of a woman that we don’t particularly care for but whom Wifey shuttles around sometimes. Other than the times that she gets so annoying you want to toss her in a creek in a burlap sack, this kid’s not so bad. So I hear; I spend all my time with her looking for burlap sacks.

Well, we got home, and the children went upstairs to play. I was a little disgruntled with Wifey, so I decided that the best way to take it out on her was to finally hang this stupid chandelier.

No, I hadn’t been drinking, but I do suspect mental illness played a strongly contributing role here.

I got the mounting bracket up, then hung the thing up, then realized it was time to go again, in order to get all the children ferried to their varying activities. “I’ll be back,” I said to the unwired chandelier waiting for me.

Jokingly, I told the children I was going to leave it hanging a few hours to see if it fell down.

Several hours later, we returned, to find not only Wifey but also the chandelier, right where they should be. Wifey was somewhat less than impressed, as the chandelier didn’t yet work, but did appropriately ooh and aah that I’d gotten it hung.

She did not ooh and aah when I said “if you think it’s hung well, come check me out.”

Come Saturday morning, I jumped on the task with both feet: Operation Light-the-damn-dining-room had begun! I spent some time swearing, splicing wires, and getting everything just so. My shoulders aching, I prepared to make the final tie-in of wires to chandelier.

“Do you want me to do anything?” Wifey asked.

Since children were present, I couldn’t say what I was thinking, so instead I opted for “just sit there and look pretty. I’ve got it all under control.”

Just as I said this, the house leapt six feet into the air. Either that, or the chandelier fell six feet as I knocked it off its hanger. The net effect was the same: with a loud crash, glass went everywhere, Wifey’s table, which she loves, was brutally scratched, and I had just payed a sixty-euro dumbass handyman tax to stimulate the local economy.

Wifey’s chandelier, whom I had eaten dinner next to every night for the past three weeks, was utterly destroyed.

Have you ever done something stupid, and just after, wished that you’d be injured so that you’d get some sympathy instead of blame? I felt just like that. In fact, I leapt off the ladder, hoping to break my leg or shove a shard of glass through my foot, but instead I ended up just smashing more glass flat.

If you thought the house was cold before, it was nothing compared to how cold it was gonna be, trust me.

“Never mind,” I said. “We’ll just pop out and get another lamp, right?”

“Wha?” Wifey had lost all capacity for rational speech. “Guh?”

“Great! Let’s go!”

So off we went. Turns out, though, the lamps were on sale for a limited time only, and now cost 120 euros. Well, not so bad: almost 200 euros for a lamp. Still less than I expected to pay. Right? Right?

“Hey,” I joked. “You wanna get two for when I smash this one also?”

This joke did not pan out as I had hoped.
Upon return to the house, I did what I should have done in the first place: I punished the children and sent them to their rooms. Helps me focus. Then, with a degree of skill that would make any home-improvement Bob from Vila to Thebuilder jealous, I wired up and hung my very own lamp.

And lo and behold, there was light. Lots of light. The bottom floor is now no longer dark. It’s still cold and full of objectionable people, but I’ll be darned if I’m moving out or paying exorbitant heating rates.

I have, however, moved all those Ikea stripper-pole lamps up to the bedroom, where they belong.

How I Lost My Jacket

One of the most endearing things about Wifey is that she takes great pains to ensure that everyone in the family is always outfitted in clothing which is in good condition and adequate for the weather, yet never purchases anything new for herself without outside intervention.

I once lost the entire contents of my underwear drawer, many of which were collectible, because she decided that when the fabric of your tightie whities becomes transparent, that means that it's time for them to go. I had been wearing some of those pairs since I was in high school. Meanwhile, she wears T-shirts whose designs have literally been washed off over the years.

Two months ago, when temperatures started to regularly drop below 80° in the morning, she pulled out her light jacket. It's a gray hoodie zip-front sweatshirt jacket, and she's been wearing it for the last seventeen years, ever since somebody left it at my parent's house after a Christmas party and she rescued it from being trashed by promising to give it a good home.

So last weekend we were preparing to go out, and she said to me "some of my friends said that it's time for me to get a new jacket. What do you think?"

"There's nothing wrong with that jacket." I said. In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with any of her clothing. I'm not Mr. Blackwell, god rest his bitchy soul, so I generally don't venture any opinion on any textiles whatsoever.

"That's what I think," she said.

See, I should have stopped there. Probably would have gotten laid. But instead, I decided to freelance.

"I've always liked that jacket," I went on. "It's sort of a retro-hobo look that has equal facility at keeping away both panhandlers and religious fanatics. Even winos in the throes of alcohol withdrawal would think twice about trying to bum change off of somebody whose jacket cuffs have load-bearing grunge on them."

After that, not only was I not getting laid, but she'd likely revoke my groping privileges for the foreseeable future. Undeterred, and not noticing the look on her face, I continued to riff on the jacket.

"Forget those knife-proof jackets popular with UK school children, that jacket just oozes security," I said. "Whose gonna mug somebody who can't afford anything better than that piece of crap? Not to mention the very real risk of serious infection from the layer upon layer of grimy stains and…"

It finally dawned on me that my mouth continued to run off of the teleprompter in my head. I guess this is what Joe Biden feels like.

A silence hung between us, as if to say if you think you're seeing her naked any time soon you'd best have pictures, only you never took any, and if you suggested it now they'd never find your body.

"You're not finding this humorous, are you?"

"Thank you for your opinion," she said. And that was that.

Well, this morning, lo and behold the temperature has reached "chilly" for me (less than 50), and so I decided that I needed to get my light jacket out. Unlike Wifey, my light jacket is new, and has the benefit of being waterproof with a hide-away hood and an internal pocket for important documents, like the stupid European ID that is too large for a conventional wallet.

Only, my jacket wasn't there. I was rooting through the closet when I heard Wifey in the other room.

"How do you like my new jacket? I didn't even know we had it. I found it in the closet yesterday, and since you hate my hobo jacket, and nobody was using this one, I decided that this is my new light jacket. All my friends just love it."

I found her standing in my jacket. Now, you have to understand two things about Wifey:

1) She's on brain medication, so there's every possibility that she does not, in fact, remember that this is my jacket.

2) I'm more than a little bit afraid of her.

What could I do? I could protest, of course, but that would certainly mean extending the nudity ban that has chilled our bedroom relations. So I did what I should have done in the first place.

"That jacket looks great on you," I said. "Really chic and sexy."

She gave me a hug and walked out to take the kids to school, with a mysterious smile on her face.
Damn her! Fortunately, though, I have a backup jacket from Carlsbad Caverns.

Stupid hobo jacket. I'd burn it, only I'm afraid that I'd catch bubonic plague from the fumes. Or worse, erectile dysfunction.

Home Improvement, Plebian Style

Like most women, Wifey doesn’t understand home repair.

Men know that every home project has three phases: the first phase, where you grossly overestimate what it is you are capable of doing, the second phase, where you spend vast amounts of money purchasing items which are directly or indirectly related to the task at hand, like getting a new cordless drill for a painting job on the logic that something might need to be re-hung, and the third phase, where you bleed and swear at the job in question until your wife is afraid to ask you to do any further work on it for fear of your health and/or sanity.

That’s home improvement, in a nutshell.

Women always think that home repair should be like This Old House, where people whisper expletive-free phrases, the fat guy with the beard never bleeds, and the antique table ends up in better shape than when you started.

I’ve got news for you: around my house, if a table needs some finishing work done on it, we call it kindling.

This weekend, though, we took on a fairly routine home task: we bought Ikea furniture. I like Ikea furniture, because it has directions with no words inside and the pressed wood smells like a Swedish forest. Fortunately, it doesn’t smell like the Swedes who assembled it, who often remind you of the hind end of a moose just after a meal of baked beans and chili.

The girl needed a new armoire. Since houses in Europe have the delightfully quant custom of being totally closet-free, we all have our hanging items in armoires, and the girl had outgrown hers. But it was nothing that Ikea couldn’t handle. We dutifully measured the space available: 105 centimeters.

Yes, I do everything in metric. If you don’t like that, go furlong yourself.

At Ikea, though, Wifey fell in love with an armoire that was 135 centimeters long. Being a good husband, what did I say?

“If you like it, get it. We’ll figure out how to make it fit.”

Now entering Phase 1. Since we were in Ikea, we also decided to get glass curio cabinets and a new baker’s rack to replace our current baker’s rack, which is in perfectly good condition but only weighs about fifteen pounds and can be easily folded down.

The new rack weighs eighty-four pounds and is slightly smaller than a Yugo. But it does smell of Swedish pines, which is a major upside.

Phase 2 was now accomplished.

We lugged all this out to the car, and Wifey did what she always does when it’s time to lift up something heavy: she batted her eyes at me and thrust out her chest and said “how can I help?”

With testosterone coursing through my veins and machismo now flooding my brain, I was not about to let Wifey help me fill the car up with cheap, imported pressed wood furniture, so I wrestled it into the car myself. In the process I herniated myself in several places, but I forgot to swear.

On the way home I made several jokes about stopping suddenly and having the boxes come hurtling forward to decapitate her. For some reason, she found this less than humorous.

Having learned my lesson, I kept my eyes north of the border and insisted that she help me lug the boxes upstairs. She tried me the time-honored woman’s trick of explaining that if we broke the boxes open we could carry everything upstairs easily in several trips.

Like I’m gonna fall for that. You know who makes the trips? Me, because she’ll end up unbuttoning the collar on her shirt or something and using cleavage to make me stupid. I insisted that we carry everything up, in boxes, because otherwise “we might scratch the wood.”

Yeah, right. Like that’d ever happen. Pressed wood’s indestructible, isn’t it?

After wrestling with them for the better part of half an hour, we got the boxes upstairs. We hadn’t sweat that much together since our wedding night, and only then because we discovered that the Chinese condoms I’d bought were expired.

Then we each took up our positions, ordained by the cosmos to be Wifey reading the directions, and me dutifully ignoring them to put it together “the way that seems right.”

We have put together most of our furniture this way, and in fact it works quite well. In all the time we’ve done this, we’ve never broken a piece.

What’s new, though, is that the children now “help” us. Mostly, they do this by running off with pieces and tools, or sticking dowel rods so far into their holes that they are lost forever.

And I’m strictly forbidden from swearing at the children, for reasons not entirely clear to me. Sometimes they deserve it, you know?

Two hours later, as something resembling an armoire began to take shape, I smashed my thumb with a hammer. I emitted a string of vile curses, because everybody knows that swearing at a smashed thumb makes you feel better.

“Are you bleeding?” asked Wifey.

“No, doesn’t count.” I said. Then I turned and, because I was preoccupied by the smashed thumb, I tore the top cross bar in half just by brushing it with my leg.

Stupid pressed wood. There goes our perfect record! Why don’t they just build the shitty thing out of balsa next time? At least then it’d be light.

Wifey gasped, the girl cried, and the boy just shook his head at me as if to say “I thought you were a man!”

I emitted another string of curses. “Get the tape,” I said.

“What? You’re going to tape it?”

“You have some other magical pixie dust way to stick the damn thing back together?” I asked.

Note to self: this is not conducive to intimacy.

When I’d finished taping it together, Wifey said “We’ll just stick a bow on it or something.”

“I’ll tell you where I’d like to stick it,” I muttered.

“What?” she asked me. “What did you say?”

“I love you sooooo much,” I responded.

Then we finally got it together. It only took us three hours and a minor squabble. Not bad, I say.

Next up: the all-glass curio case.

This was a bit trickier, if only because glass is often sharp, breaks easily, and is heavier than all get out. Midway through the job, I managed to slash myself and started bleeding. Not on the glass; it was actually on a Canada Dry can that I decided to crush with my bare hands before tossing it into the garbage.

Phase 3 was now complete.

As I was trying to get the darn thing together, Wifey was cautioning me all the while “don’t get blood on the glass! Don’t get blood on the glass!”

Finally it was ready to put into place, and the hang the door on it. “Just hold it there a second,” Wifey said. “I wanna clean it off before you put it in the corner.”

She left to go get the glass cleaner, the boy going along with her, and I took a moment to rest and revel in a job well done.

That, and I farted. Listen, at this point, it was one of the few bodily functions I still felt chippy enough to go through with. I could barely walk, I’d herniated everything, all my digits were throbbing from being hit with a hammer, and I’d cut myself on a drink can.

It’s amazing I was still upright.

Well, Wifey comes back, and she launches into this sniffing dry-heave, where she bobs her head, wrinkles up her nose, looks around the room, shakes it off, then starts it all over again. Every third one, she looks suspiciously at me.

“It smells like rancid moose toots in here,” Wifey said. “What happened?”

“Fine!” I finally admit. “I did it! I farted! I cut the cheese! That rancid smell is me! Me! There! Are you happy?”

“Daddy!” the boy said. “That’s awful! And in MY ROOM!”

“Good lord!” she said. “I thought there was a sewer leak or something.”

“Is this the thanks I get for putting together all this furniture all day?” I said.

“Well, you’re hardly finished with it, are you?”

Sigh. I should have bought that cordless belt sander.

Wherein Wifey Lets Me Down

Today Wifey received this call straight out of the blue:

"Hello," said the kind woman on the other end. "My name is Barbara, and I'd like to invite you to an elite, high-level fundraiser for Barack Obama."

What do you suppose Wifey said?

You'd expect that, given that her husband is an anonymous blogger with at least three readers, she'd leap at the chance to attend an elite, high-level overseas fundraiser for Barack Obama that was stooping to cold-calling any Americans they could find the number for.

It's the very definition of a target-rich environment for a master satirist such as myself!

But she just said "No, thank you."

And she hung up the phone!

Just thirty minutes at that affair would've written my blog for a week. A couple of hours would have kept me blogging up through the election! And can you imagine the fun I'd have had making an ass of myself?

Plus, I never get invited to any kind of elite, high-level events. Oh, sure, I got thrown out of an elite gentleman's club one time, but that was hardly my fault. I still maintain that it was her boob groping me, not the other way around, but the bouncer saw things differently. So did I, after he broke my glasses.

So I'll have to make do without whatever wisdom gets dispensed at these events. I must really have arrived, though, because four years ago nobody asked me to any kind of fundraisers for John Kerry.

But in 2008, Europe is apparently a swing state. Or a failed state. I can't ever remember the difference.

Being a good husband, though, I'm not going to hold a grudge or demand remunerations from my wife. She was, after all, trying to spare us the horrors of having a campaign flush with cash hit us up for money just after a Wall Street crash put another five years onto my career. For this, I will thank her.

But she better not complain about being groped again, I can tell you that. Because this time the bouncer's not there to save her.

First National Bank of Love

It's not on accident that I have been married for fifteen years. For most of those years I was married on purpose. And fifteen years is a long time, especially once you consider that the average celebrity is only married long enough to cheat at their reception.

Friends sometimes ask me what it takes to stay married for so long. Or at least, they would if I had friends. But I don't have friends, which is one of the secrets of staying married for a long, long time.

I'm kidding. If you're a man, then the real secret to staying married for a long time is realizing that your marriage is like a bank. It works like this:

When you get start dating someone, you open a "Love Account" with them. From then on, everything that you do is either a deposit or a withdrawal from this account.

Surprise her with flowers? Deposit. Run over her dog in the driveway? Withdrawal.

Take her to a chick flick? Deposit. Get caught opening an account in another branch? Big withdrawal, both from this account and possibly from the blood bank.

And so on and so forth.

If at some point you bounce a check (by, say, sleeping with her best friend and her sister in the same night) then the relationship is over, and your account is closed without further penalty, except perhaps her making disparaging comments about your male adequacy to everyone that you know.

This problem can be easily solved through relocation.

On the other hand, if you build up a large enough account at a particular branch, you can purchase a Diamond-Backed CD. Every CD is unique because they have various rates of return, depending on the branch, and their lifespan is not fixed. But some points are common to all Diamond-Backed CD.

Your branch will, on some routine basis, credit your account. Rates and periods vary by branch, but you can generally figure out the rate and frequency of return before purchasing your CD if you pay close enough attention.

With this periodic payment, you can begin to make routine withdrawals without worrying about zeroing out your balance, such as adopting the habit of sitting around in the living room every Sunday afternoon in your underwear watching Baywatch and scratching yourself with the remote.

Remember, though, the principle of deposits and withdrawals still holds. Only now if you bounce a check it's a big deal, and will end up costing you massive bank fees and penalties (generally half of what you have, plus a monthly fee until you die).

It's also worth noting that the exchange rate from when you first opened the account has changed. Things that were valuable before are worth less after purchase, and what was worthless before may now be highly valuable. The exchange rates will not be posted, nor can you find them online.

For instance, let's look at flowers. When you first open your account, buying flowers is a big deposit, like when you used to find five bucks in college and knew that tonight you'd eat something other than uncooked Ramen noodles.

Once you've bought a Diamond-Backed CD, buying flowers represents a much smaller deposit. It moves the account up some, true, but it's not going to buy you much more than an evening in a bar with your friends. If you want to go to a strip club, or if your friends are women, you'll have to either make a bigger deposit or accept that your balance will drop.

Luckily, new revenue opportunities do arrive when you purchase the Diamond-Backed CD. You can make a deposit by, for example, scrubbing the toilets or changing the baby. You will also receive a substantial insurance payment if you receive a spider-related injury. Before, these opportunities didn't exist.

Unfortunately, most branches do not offer a routine statement of account beyond giving you general signs of your fiscal well-being, such as slapping you every time you touch them when your balance has almost dropped to zero. Investors are advised to carefully monitor their branch for signs that their account is critically low before making any serious withdrawals, such as buying a sportscar with their children's college funds.

What most men do not realize, though, is that the Diamond-Backed CD also offer rewards for maintaining a high balance (some branch offices do not offer this, which is why many men choose to sell their Diamond-Backed CD at a loss of half their net assets in order to open a CD at a more appealing branch). These rewards far surpass a mere 1% cash back on travel to the continental 48 states on weekdays in the winter.

Your branch may give you such exciting gifts as a free pass on forgetting things, control over the TV remote, private modeling of lingerie, and a wide variety of sexual diversions delivered to the privacy of your own home (or office) in a completely legal and cost-free fashion.

How's that for fringe benefits?

I Turned Over My Testicles, Too

The other night I was playing a video game with my children. We were all having a lot of fun: it’s a cute little game where you have a little farm and you run around doing stuff like growing vegetables and whatnot. Well, you can also go fishing.

Since I’m all about fun, I went fishing. I spent the equivalent of twenty days in the game fishing. All my crops died. All my animals wandered off. My barn burned down. I lost everything except my shanty, which is how I understand that all farms turn out anyways.

What did I have to show for it? One fish, that I caught on my very first try. Every other attempt I caught nothing. Zilch. Squat.

So along comes Wifey, who plays a lot of video games, if you count the self-checkout aisle in the grocery store. Without that, not so much. She did play Galaga back in the day, but after that she stopped.

The phone rings, and I handed her the controls. “Here,” I said. “You can go not catch fish if you want.”

You know the rest of the story: she caught sixteen fish in ten minutes. It’s like they’re mesmerized by her tits or something and they just can’t help but jump up on the bank with her. Sure, I feel the same way, but damn! At least let me have a shred of pride here, all right?

So I came back from the phone and took the controls away from her, wrestling them out of her hands. “Now that the game has fixed itself, I’m sure I can catch fish!” I declared.

“No you can’t,” said the girl. “It’s mommy’s speciality.”

“Yeah, dad, you suck,” said the boy. “You’re too much of a dork to catch fish.”

An hour later, I hadn’t caught anything. Hell, she’d even caught a pair of boots. Me? Nothing.

I would like to officially note that this cheeses me off.

So I took the children outside to jump on the trampoline, leaving her to angle alone. Hey, it’s not like she doesn’t make me do lots of stuff by myself, too.

We were bouncing, having a grand old time. I was watching the kids do flips and drops and stuff, and I had the worst idea ever for an out-of-shape over-thirty guy on a trampoline with his kids.

“Hey, watch this!” I said. “I’m gonna drop on my butt, then spring back up on my feet!”

“Do it!” said the girl.

“Yeah, do it!” said the boy. “Can I sleep on your side of the bed with mommy after you kill yourself?”

“Oh, ye of little faith!” I said. “Watch me!”

“Make sure you keep your hands behind you,” said the boy.

Listen, I’m not going to trust little Oedipus on anything, so I just scoffed at him. “I don’t need your help!”

I got up a good bounce, about four feet in the air, and then I pulled my legs up and prepared to triumphantly spring back onto my feet.

Only, I got twisted a little: after my butt hit the trampoline, I began to rotate backwards, and soon I was headed back towards the ground head-first. So I did what any normal person would do: I yelled a swear word and panicked.

I landed head first, wrenching my neck, and I got my feet tangled up in the net. I ended up hanging there for a few seconds as the children paddled my butt and yelled “bad daddy!” because we’re not supposed to touch the net when we bounce.

Finally, I extricated myself and crawled inside.

“I think I’m crippled!” I said. “Help me!”

“Just a minute,” said Wifey. “I’m pulling in my sixty-eighth fish!”

If I wasn't so afraid of her, I'd call her a dirty name right now.

Guido, Bow Before Me!

Wifey and I went bowling over the weekend. It's been some time since we did this; in fact, if memory serves, we went bowling a little over a year ago on our last US vacation. Oh, sure, we've been playing Wii sports since then, but that's hardly the same.

Or is it?

To start off, I was captivated by the single greatest bowling innovation I have ever seen: the shoe conveyor. They have about thirty trays, each of them holding 4 or 5 pairs of shoes, and as you watch the trays are continually rotating from bottom to top. When your size passes by, you simply take them off the tray and go your way.

It was awesome. I took four pairs just to fully enjoy it.

Once we were ready we headed to our lane, #5. To our left was a group of four 20ish students, and on the right a 40ish couple that liked to bowl a couple of frames between fondling one another at the scorer's table. You might say that first she stroked his balls, then she threw hers.

The students were an altogether different matter. One was a Guido (flipped-up collar and sweatband included), one a sweaty drunkard, one a full-on glasses-wearing math major, and the last a fugitive librarian catching a few moments away from the books. The librarian was the only female, and the males were desperately competing for her attentions by showing off their bowling prowess.

Little did they know that a heaping helping of American Emasculation was cruising towards them, like Jaws surfacing beneath a skinny dipping hippie.

Wifey and I selected our balls and I went first. I waited for Guido to finish his first throw, and then I took my shot.

WHAMMO! A strike for Plebian. Not a wobbly strike, either: pins flew everywhere, like a Tomahawk missile had hit the back of the lane.

The Guido simply stared at me, open-mouthed. And it was then that I perchanced to look upon their scores: seven frames gone by, and not a one of them over 60. Amongst their group, if you bowled 105 and didn't win it was because somebody had the game of their life and maybe got to 110.

Now, I don't like to brag, but I can bowl well. Oh, not wonderfully or anything, but anything less than 125 means I had a horrible game. When I'm in practice I get 160 to 175. My personal best is 195. This is mainly because I can do two things consistently: throw the ball straight and throw the ball hard.

I calmly walked back to our table, and Wifey said "You suck, you know that?"

Then it was her turn. Wifey is a competent bowler, usually able to do around 90 to 110 if she's in practice. Her first shot wasn't nearly as impressive as mine, mostly because she got distracted by the guy to our right doing a tonsil-and-panties check on his wife right at the end of their lane.

I figure he was congratulating her on her robust showing the previous frame, where she knocked over four of the ten pins. Don't laugh; she didn't even break 50 in the three games she bowled while we were there. She seemed to average about 30.

I jumped up, hurled the ball down the lane, and got another strike. And, once again, it looked like an explosion at the end of the alley.

The quartet to our left were awestruck. Not only had I gotten two strikes, I had gotten them in a row! The librarian dared to speak to me, and asked me if it was my first time.

"Not quite," I said. "I grew up bowling."

My next two shots? Both strikes. Yes, I opened the game with four strikes in a row. Wifey also put in a strike and a spare, so she had nothing to be embarrassed about. But I was on fire.

By the fifth shot, all motion ceased when I was preparing to bowl. While everyone else waited with baited breath, Wifey yelled out encouragement to me:

"You suck!" she said. "Choke! Choke! Choke!"

I hurled the ball, and immediately winced. Bad throw. "Shit!" my yell echoed throughout the silent alley.

WHAMMO! A fifth strike. Wifey laughed and gave me a big kiss, much to the disappointment of the women in the adjacent lanes. The dude to our right gave me the stinkeye, as his 62 now seemed almost as impressive as John Bobbit on a porno set. Sure, it has some shock value, but next to the real thing it's just pales.

In hushed tones, the math major noted that even my bad throws were better than their best. To his friends, he wondered from whence this awful specter came to ruin their chances to score with the frumpy librarian, who was now enraptured by my bowling acumen.

The answer is yes, I did blow your night on purpose. Vive l'America!

On throw six, my arm started aching. Hey, not only am I out of practice, I'm not as young as I used to be. I still wish I could tag out when I'm putting on my socks some mornings. So my aim fell off, and although the end of my game was not an embarrassment, it wasn't up to my standards.

Final score? 197. This is not that impressive on a US lane, but in these surroundings that made me PBA-eligible. Consider this: take the two highest scores from Guido and chums, sum them, and you'll still have enough to fit in the woman to the right's average score.

So the bystanders were impressed, and more than a little bit awestruck.

Wifey and I bowled a second game, and I actually didn't do very well (129, mostly because my arm was killing me by then). But my two-game sum was highly remarked-upon by our neighbors, and when we left, they were sorry to see us go.

Wifey, it must be said, would have been competitive within Guido's group, despite the fact that she had what was (for her) an awful game and didn't break 100.

"So," I said to her as we left. "Did seeing that display of bowling prowess give you a new appreciation for just how awesome I really am?"

"Not really," she said. "I've seen you with your pants off."

Ouch.

After that we went to play mini-golf in an indoor, black-lit course. All I'll say about that is this: mini-golf is an evil game and everyone who is any good at it is a she-devil, particularly those who won't even flash their husbands on a vacant course because "I think they have cameras in here and I don't wanna get thrown out."

Pffft. It's Europe! As long as you don't get body fluids on the course I'm pretty sure anything goes, doesn't it?

Shout-Out

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?

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.]

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!]

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

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

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?