The refrigerator in my house is so old that that you still stuff blocks of ice in the bottom to cool it. Well, not that old, but pretty darn close. It does the trick — chills food — but we’ve been thinking it’s time to replace the old boy. And I’m realizing the hard way that a lot goes into buying a refrigerator these days. Refrigerators might be the most technically complex appliances in the house, and you have to first understand the hundreds of different configurations, options, sizes and styles before making a decision. So I thought I would share a few of my tips to help other refrigerator buyers navigate these chilly waters: • For starters, don’t be afraid of all the new technology — the bells with even fancier whistles. In fact, choose a fridge that has more buttons and digital displays than a space shuttle. That way, if anyone from NASA ever visits your house, they will be duly impressed. • Don’t worry about budgets or what you can afford. PSHAW! Because the minute your wife sees the one with the wine chiller and foot massager that is $1,000 more than you planned to spend, that’s all out the window anyway. • Show off in front of the salesman by asking lots of well-researched and knowledgeable questions. Here are a few examples: “So, does this one get, like, really cold?” “What kind of gas mileage does this baby get?” and “If this one is shinier than […]
The parent packing fail
Nine o’clock on a dark country road. Out in Keystone Heights. On the way to a CVS or Walgreens. Whatever we could find at that hour. Desperate. Forlorn. Feeling like the worst parents ever. EVER! “How could this happen?” my wife asked. “What kind of parents are we?” “It’s not our fault,” I comforted her. “It just turns out we’re not as smart as we thought.” We were on a retreat with Memorial Presbyterian Church. Out on a lake, amidst the wilderness and great expanse of mosquitoes and spiders and other critters who bite you in inconvenient places. We were unpacking when I heard my wife gasp. I felt the oxygen sucked out of the room. “I can’t believe this,” she told my daughter. “You don’t have any underwear!” A bear could have burst into the room carrying a flamethrower and it wouldn’t have had the same horrific drama, or intensity, or power. Parent fail. To make it worse, she also didn’t have any socks. And turns out, I didn’t have any socks, either. We had everything else. We had dishwashing detergent — in case we had to do dishes — and flashlights and rain gear and gardening gloves for a work project. Stuffed animals and I think even an encyclopedia set. But essential articles of clothing? NOOOO!!!! My daughter shrugged. “Oh well,” she said. “Can I go play now?” I pictured myself stitching together paper towels with dental floss to make primitive underwear and socks. “There go the Thompsons […]
Weightlifting for tough-mudding dummies
I think his exact words were, “Hey man, you’re about to rip your shoulder off!” Or maybe it was, “Hey man, that’s a good way to shred your pecs!” Or possibly, “Guy, if you have three brain cells in your head, you won’t do that!” I was “doing” what I don’t do: lifting weights. There are exactly three reasons I don’t. 1) I’m scrawny — like two string beans lashed together by a rubber band. 2) You can rip your shoulder off. 3) Big, huge guys who look like 12 sacks of potatoes strung together with mooring lines stand around and say things like, “Hey man, you’re about to rip your shoulder off!” “So what if I am, big potato sack dude?” I want to say. “Just go over there and dead lift a car or something.” He was right, though. I overloaded one side of the bar with too much weight. I pictured myself toppling over sideways while lifting it. Pinning myself to the floor. My shoulder running for the exit while I meekly called out, “Yo, potato sack dude … Little help over here!” November is no longer so far away. The Tough Mudder is coming. It’s part endurance race. Part obstacle course. Part insanity. There are big walls to get over. Ropes to climb. Things that require muscles and upper body strength. Things I don’t possess. All my life I’ve been a runner. My idea of weightlifting is grocery shopping. Even that’s a stretch. I ask old […]
The backup bomber strikes (Or I’m officially my dad)
I am officially my dad. Shame. Shame. As I backed the car out — in a light drizzle, in a parking lot with seemingly endless room, with plenty of light and with no glaring dangers to be seen — it happened. Crunch! Or did I feel it first? A little jolt to the vehicle. Ooops! And disbelief. Was I just struck by an iceberg? A meteor? A missile? Because I didn’t just back into something. No, I did NOT just hit another vehicle! Because I don’t do that. I don’t have those kinds of issues. The Backup Bomber! No, that’s not me. That’s my dad. Yet … well … there it was. The big dent in the back hatch of my vehicle. The over-sized, heavy-duty bumper on the 14-mile long pickup truck behind me still in mint condition. I could hear it laughing at me. “Not even scratched, and look at your car. Like you got hit by a train! HAHAHAHA!” The humiliation. The horror. And after all these years of making fun of my father. My dad used to have a knack for backing into anything, and especially those yellow parking poles that stick up out of parking lots for the sole purpose of sending poor suckers to auto collision centers. I have a theory that body shops actually install those poles to drum up business. And my dad could hit a yellow parking pole when there wasn’t even one for miles around. They had a knack for appearing […]
The email scourge
In the early 1960s, John Q. Email revolutionized the world. He sent an encoded message across a computer network to a user 3 feet away. It said, “Hey, want to hear a joke about my cat?” After 42 messages and 18 cat jokes, email had been invented and John Q. was dead, victim of a co-worker who screamed, “I just want to do some work!” The weapon of choice: a letter opener. Rest in peace, John Q. OK, so I made all that up. But it’s how I envision the scourge we know as email getting its start. And how I picture the demise of the doofus who did this to all of us. Who unleashed this uncontrollable tsunami upon the world. Who figured he was doing everyone “a big favor,” yet really just created a communication vehicle for scams, credit card offers and cryptic messages from co-workers that read, “So, what do you think?” I think you shouldn’t have sent me that email!!! This was the fictional scenario I invented one early morning as I sat at the computer hitting delete as quickly as I could on work and personal email. It was a desperate attempt to keep my inbox messages to no more than six. Part of a pledge I made to always see a sliver of empty space, rather than an endless stream of unanswered messages. This was my solution after hundreds of messages backed up in an electronic junk jam. I feared warnings like: “Your email […]
Tough mudding through training
It was some of the worst news I have ever received in an email. I slumped back in my seat, swallowed hard and contemplated crying. “You did this,” I scolded myself. “You have no one to blame but yourself.” How could I have been such a fool? “Howdy,” the email started out. I should have sensed right then it was bad. I should have Googled “cheap cave for sale Arkansas” and then gone into hiding like a hermit. I should have clicked “delete” straight away. But instead I read on: “Well, school is about to begin yet again and that means we only have 12 weeks from yesterday until TOUGH MUDDER.” AHHHHH! It was the dude at the college who “recruited” me for a team to take on a Tough Mudder — a masochistic series of physical obstacles spread across a muddy 10-mile course. One of those obstacles involves electrified wires dangling down. When you read up on a Tough Mudder, you notice startling similarities to Dante’s nine circles of the underworld. Unfortunately, you don’t notice these similarities until after you paid the non-refundable entry fee. I agreed to it months ago, and only because I was certain a giant comet was going to strike the Earth. I figured it would postpone the Tough Mudder for at least a couple weeks. That would give me time to come up with a proper excuse to get out of it: “Man, I’m on comet cleanup duty. Bummer!” Still no comet! (Stupid doomsday […]
Surviving August in Florida
It’s August. It’s hot. The most miserable month in Florida is upon us. People drag themselves about the streets like sloths, dripping in sweat. Our greetings grow more and more testy as the month goes on. “Your face offends me!” is often heard for no good reason. We all hate August. We all dread it. September can never come soon enough. August isn’t a month to “live.” It’s a month to “get through.” The best August is the one you see in the rear view mirror. “Fairwell! Nobody liked you!” But I submit that time is a precious commodity and that we should never wish it away. Not even a hot, horrid month like August. Because this is a month that defines us as Floridians. Without August, we’re just really tan people who like to wear flip-flops. But August is what makes us unique. Makes us tough. Makes us daredevils and warriors. We cut grass in this weather! We’re surviors! We’re Floridians! Hear our sweat roar! So I offer you poor, suffering Floridians a few reasons why we shouldn’t dread August, but instead embrace it and thank it for making us who we are: • Remind yourself that heat is good for the pores. In fact, heat will actually melt away your pores. Plus, people pay good money to have their hair curled. In our blistering heat and unbearable humidity, mother nature’s salon does it for free. I have curls on my head that could be used as springs on […]
Time for back to school
“Do those shoes fit anymore?” I asked my daughter as we headed out the door to walk the dog. I was shocked by what I saw. I thought she was wearing a doll’s shoes. I imagined little toes curled up inside like a roll of paper towels. That they might burst free at any moment. She looked at her feet. “Nope,” she answered. “They don’t.” “Then why are you still wearing them?” I asked. “That looks incredibly painful.” “Yep, it is,” she said. “I can’t feel my left pinky toe. And something just popped in my right foot. I think it was a bone. But I just LOVE these shoes. I can’t think to give them up.” She batted her eyelashes and smiled. “Let’s go!” she said before hobbling down the steps. Looked like a girl with two peg legs. Like many houses this time of year, it’s back to school shopping time at mine. Lists for school supplies have arrived, and every day I come home to find more bags stacked floor-to-ceiling with pencils and Crayons and notebooks and other third grade-related items. We could open an office supply store in my living room. If a hurricane comes, we don’t have a bottle of water or a can of tuna fish to survive. But if the school supply apocalypse arrives, we’d be set for months. Then there are the clothes. Back-to-school clothes. About this time of year we ignorant parents (I’m primarily referring to the male species here) always […]
Goodbye vacation state of mind
We can bottle, freeze-dry, package, can, concentrate and shrink-wrap anything. You name it, we can vacuum pack-it. We can seal it up nice and fresh. Ready to open at a later date. Enjoy! So with all of our technology, with all of our ingenuity and know-how — all of the means at our disposal! — why hasn’t anyone thought to bottle a vacation? I’m sure it’s doable. And incredibly lucrative for the successful inventor. I would buy it. I would pay almost any amount of money for it. Well, if that amount of money was $6.52. That’s about what I have left after a 10-day vacation to the mountains of North Carolina. I’m a week back from that wonderful, amazing, soul-refreshing, rock-climbing, stream-dashing, gem-finding, deer-spying, flying squirrel-flying (not sure where that last one came from) curvy road-riding vacation, and I am longing to be back there. Free from the reality and the pressure and the stress that is real life. How I would love to go into the refrigerator right now, grab a can of vacation and pop the top. Just stand there in the kitchen soaking up its wonderful effervescence. Returning to that vacation state of mind. “Ahhhh, mountain air, take me away!” Wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t you buy that? Right now millions of Americans are returning from vacations, struggling to re-acclimate themselves to the routines of regular life. Grocery shopping. Bed making. Bill paying. Waking up at a normal hour to go to work. Remembering that drinking […]
The arcade explosion
It’s what I imagine being inside an exploding firework is like. Blinding light. Deafening noise. All oxygen consumed. Furious, tornado-like winds. Finally, in a millisecond, you’re blown out of your senses into a thousand tiny pieces. That was the experience as I walked in the door. “Oh crap,” I said. KABLOOEY! I’m still not sure what the place is called. Or what the place is. A screaming arcade and kiddie playland mixed with a screaming sports bar and adult playland. An inside bowling alley with football games and pop videos displayed above each lane so you can watch Nicki Minaj while you roll into the gutter. Behind you bleeping, screeching, blurping, crunching, blasting, ca-chunking video games. Over there a band warming up. Over there a baby crying. Over there … wait a minute … what the heck is that? AND HOW DOES IT MAKE SO MUCH NOISE!?! And the lights. Fourth of July with a side of sunspots and a laser light show sprinkled on top for added seasoning. “I like this place,” my daughter told me, squinting. “Let’s go play.” My daughter used to hate these kinds of establishments. Too busy. Too noisy. Too overwhelming. But now she storms into them, bouncing from game to game, desperate to win enough tickets to buy something incredibly cheap in the reward shop. “Two hundred and fifty tickets for this!” I called out. “Do you realize the mark-up?” “Dad!” a voice chided me. Only, it wasn’t my daughter’s. It was a little […]