A Procrastination Lesson Not Learned

I'm a lifelong procrastinator. As a teenager a friend gave me a "procrastinator's license," and my mom called me a procrastinator so much I think she forgot my actual name. And I have continued that procrastination habit well into my adulthood.

So it was no surprise, then, when earlier this week I sat at my desk at work and realized that I had to take The Boy to Cub Scouts that evening, and that this was Rocket Derby Night, and that we hadn't done even the tiniest bit of work on his rocket in the month we'd had it. Dangit.

For those who don't know, the rocket derby is much like the soapbox derby, only using rockets that are propelled along strings with a propeller and two or three big rubber bands. I say "propelled" loosely, because the most likely result is that a rocket goes a couple of feet, assuming it doesn't plunge to the earth altogether. That's what happened to The Boy and I last year. We had worked on the rocket for days. Yet yours truly failed to do something rather important last year: effectively glue the piece the connects the rocket to the string. The device plummeted to the ground and broke upon start, breaking The Boy's heart with it.

So when I sat at my desk and realized that I hadn't built his rocket and I had precisely 9 hours to get it done, 7 of which would be spent in the rocket-construction-unfriendly environment that is my workplace, I was a wee bit disappointed in myself.

I thus embarked on a daylong mental rocket-planning expedition. I went home briefly for lunch and I glued the two pieces together that formed the block from which we could carve the rocket. That evening, The Wife and I met with The Boy's teacher for his parent-teacher conference, and then The Boy and I rushed home to begin carving. We then began turning that block of wood into a projectile.

Incidentally, the wood is made of balsa, which is wood so soft you could carve it with a spoon. I used a potato peeler, because as a household cook who specializes in mashed potatoes, I am one with the peeler. Yet I got a tad aggressive with the peeler and took a chunk of the nose off the rocket off and, along with it, all of its aerodynamics. But we pressed on. The Boy helped some, but as we were rushing I decided to do the carving and sanding for, you know, expediency.

This was the moment that my phone rang. It was my wife. She was at day care.

"My car won't start," she said.

DANGIT!

So we set aside the rocket and headed out the door. The Boy looked at me with big, blue eyes. "But Dad," he said, "are we going to do the rocket?"

I melted. Yes, Boy, I said. I'll do anything within my power to get that rocket done. But first, we must rescue your mother.

We drove to day care, tried to jump her car once, failed, went to a mechanic, got some car-jumping advice, returned, and got the car started. The Wife followed me successfully home, and then we restarted the rocket-building process. Only we had less than an hour.

We glued the pieces correctly, especially the part that connects the rocket to the string, and then I had The Boy get the paints so he could paint the rocket and make it look like he did the whole thing himself. And then I heard this, "Dad, this paint don't work."

The paints we had bought last year for the rocket were bone dry.

Alas, I added a little water, and The Boy began painting the rocket to look like a red crayon. Actually, it was a pink crayon, given that he had time for only one coat. It looked remarkably nice, given how rushed we were. And sure, I would spend the evening getting pink on my hands as I installed the propeller, but it was done and I was relieved.

That was when The Wife went to her car to go get a new battery, only to get the same clicking sound she got earlier in the evening. So a jumping I went.

Suffice it to say, by the time we got there, 10 minutes late, our expectations were low. Frankly, I just wanted the rocket to go a few feet. I just wanted to do better than last year.

The younger kids went first, and then The Boy and I began winding up our propeller. We wound it 100 times, just like they told us, and then The Boy calmly held his projectile and waited his turn. When they grabbed his rocket and put it on the string, he looked at me with both his fingers crossed and his eyes crossed. The scout leader running the derby yelled "Three! Two! One!" and then pulled down the device holding all of the propellers.

And The Boy's rocket fell straight to the ground.

I was devastated. The Boy speechless. Two years in a row!

But just as we thought it was a lost cause, just as I was frantically thinking of a way to explain my failure to my young son and just as I began thinking of ways to make it up to him, the scout leader picked up our rocket, and the one piece that fell off in the crash, one of the fins. Surprisingly, our haphazard rocket survived the fall. "Glue this back on," he said, "and try it again. It was wound up too tight and just flew off."

Another chance! We went looking for glue, and then a savior offered some of the "super" variety. We glued the fin on, I held it for a few seconds, and then we went back to the starting area to get our second shot.

We wound it up, this time stopping well short of that 100 mark. The leader grabbed our pink projectile and placed it in the blocks. "Three! Two! One!"

Boom.

Our rocket went a few feet. And then some. It flew off the blocks much faster than the other rockets in our heat, and went much further. When it finally came to a rest it was just a few feet short of the end, a very rare feat for even the best rockets, let alone our last-minute bottle of Pepto Bismol. Success!

The moral of this story is, of course, that procrastination pays. Just wait and wait and at the last minute a combination of adrenaline and willpower will get the job done. My Mom is probably reading this and is crying quietly in her hands.

I patted The Boy on the back after our race. We had given our high-fives, and I handed him his rocket. His first question was this, "What prize do we get?" Alas, Boy, no prize—the rocket derby is far less competitive than is the soapbox event. All we get is our pride in a job well done under extreme circumstances.

He didn't seem satisfied with his reward.

Discovering The Modern Version Of The Playboy Stash

The Wife and I don't watch a lot of television, mostly because we put the TV in the basement, where it's cold and buggy. It's also far away, and we're too cheap to buy a second set. So instead, we watch our fish tank, which has fewer commercials and is usually more entertaining than 93 percent of the selections on at any given time, anyway. We also stare mindlessly at our computers.

The Boy quickly took to our evening family ritual of staring at the computers. He did this climbing up onto our laps and then pounding on the keyboards whenever we were on the computers. The only way to assuage his computer needs was to give in, so we started with friendly little kid sites with lessons on the ABCs and vowels and how to spell words. We'd periodically let him watch Blue's Clues on the web or would peruse the PBS Kids site for him.

Eventually, time and The Boy's learning capabilities provided him with the ability to surf these websites himself. For the most part, our Household Internet Policy was liberal, which was something we could do because The Boy could not spell. He simply learned how to use bookmarks where we'd saved various sites for him. Life was easy.

But then he learned to spell. And he discovered YouTube, but mostly he used it to watch videos of skateboarding lessons or of funny home videos or music videos of bubble gum pop that was fine, even if the music made my ears ache and my musical sense scream.

Still, we kept our eye on what he was watching. And then The Boy came home from school one afternoon with this tale: a friend of his had been surfing the web, and then for giggles typed in a web address starting with the word, "butt."

It's a pretty funny thought, when you think about it. Few things on Earth are as funny to a 7-year-old as "butt," and so a website devoted to butts would have to be filled with flatulence, making it a veritable second-grader goldmine, would it not?

No, it wouldn't. The site was not quite the flatulence festival he expected. Instead, The Boy's classmate discovered the modern version of Dad's closet-kept Playboys.

"He said that he saw a girl licking a man's wiener," The Boy said.

Dangit.

I had long hoped that this day would never come. Oh, in the back of my mind I knew that it would. But I had always hoped that my eldest would never require such "parental guidance" and would simply avoid all bad things for the rest of his natural life so I could go on whistling and staring mindlessly at the fish tank all evening. Alas, that was not to be. His innocence is now gone. His friend had pulled back the curtain, revealing in playground talk that there exists this entire world of nudity and wiener licking, a world his parents had not told him about.

Fortunately, he found it totally disgusting.

"Put a password on that site, Dad," he said. "I don't to accidentally go to the site."

I'm proud of the kid, of course. He was honest, and he was suggesting ways to block his own access to those sites, lest temptation get the best of him. We ultimately did one better, and installed Net Nanny software that we should have probably installed about two years ago, which means that his old man now can't use half of the websites he normally peruses -- such as sportsillustrated.com.

Had he been more like his old man, he would have pocketed that information and then looked at the site when his parents weren't looking. But in my day, we had old-fashioned paper magazines, and we usually found them stashed in someone's father's closet or got them from a friend. Someone always had a source who had Playboys stashed in an attic, or Penthouses hidden under a bed.

We looked at them long before we had any idea why we were looking at them, because we knew that we weren't supposed to look at women with no clothes on. We were doing something forbidden, dangerous. It was exciting, far better than eating paste or playing Duck Duck Greyduck.

So imagine our joy the day that a friend of mine hit the jackpot. We frequently went dumpster diving, looking for toys, preferably, or any neat thing we could find that some idiot tossed away like it was garbage. On one particularly lucrative expedition we came across a large box. It was filled with skin mags of all types. We had reading material for years. We spent hours looking at them. We treated them like gold, and let only our closest friends know of their existence.

To be honest, I have no idea what happened to those magazines. Maybe we lost them, or perhaps my annoying little sister threw them away. Or maybe mom found them and burned them and then lamented to random people about her son's lost innocence. Of course, when I found those mags I was much closer to middle school, and middle schoolers aren't innocent.

Misleading My Spouse For Her Amusement

More than a year ago, my wife held what is commonly known as a "surprise birthday party" to celebrate the day that marked my having survived four decades without being shot for saying something stupid.  As I do every birthday, we went to get hamburgers. When we got there numerous friends and family members were waiting for me, and handed me a funny hat and a blinking button that said "40" on it.

I had no idea it was coming, even though my wife was exceedingly grouchy for some reason about our inability to get out the door in a timely fashion -- most of the time, it is I who is the grumpy one in such instances. Nevertheless, on that day I vowed my revenge, giving me 17 full months of planning a surprise birthday for her.

That day came last week. Well, technically, The Wife's 40th came this week, but her birthday landed on a Tuesday, and nobody celebrates birthdays on Tuesdays. So instead, I'd hold it on a Friday.

I had only one problem: Seventeen months may be plenty of planning time, but it's an awfully long time to hold a secret, which the last time I checked was the top requirement for a successful surprise birthday.No secret means no surprise, and no surprise means a boring old "birthday party," which I can have any old time, even on a Tuesday.

And I ... can't ... keep ... secrets.

Seriously: I'm a reporter by trade. And reporters are glorified gossips. My job on a day to day basis is to find information and tell people about it. I can't exactly turn this tendency off when I get home. And the result has made me notoriously bad at keeping secrets, and bad at not blurting out what I get her each Christmas.

My only saving grace is The Wife's strong desire not to know what I'm getting her for Christmas. She loves surprises. And so when I would taunt her about the gift I bought her in the days leading up to the holiday, rather than beg me like a starving puppy dog to let her in on the secret--which is what I'd do--she just blows me off and doesn't act like she wants to know at all.

Still, this was a different sort of surprise, one that involved considerable planning and the lure of various people, including far-flung family members, into the Twin Cities. So several months ago I convinced them to fly in or drive in from various locations. I then plotted the party in my head -- they'd be at our house when The Wife got home from work, and then we'd have a party a little later. And then I proceeded to bite my tongue for several months.

This was hard. Among the visitors would be The Wife's brother, who lives on the West Coast, and her pregnant sister, who calls Michigan home. How hard? The Wife once planned to unload some baby stuff onto her sister by sending it to her, and I all but had to shove my head into a vat of pudding to keep from saying, "HEY, just wait until they come here for your birthday rather than waste money on mailing it?!"

But, for some, inexplicable reason, I managed to keep this idea a secret. I avoided mentioning it during obvious conversation points. She never got a hint that I was emailing and facebooking various people behind her back. It was a lot of work. It was like a dog climbing a tree and meowing -- it all went against the very nature of my being. And so you can imagine my anger at myself the day last week that I almost blew it all.

It was Wednesday. The entire plan was set. Everybody was to come into town on Thursday night. They'd hang out on Friday. I'd take that day off to prepare for the party, and they'd be here by the time The Wife walked in the door after work. Later on, members of my family and several close friends would join us. And we received video greetings from numerous friends who live in far-flung locations.

That Wednesday, at the end of a long workday, I decided to write myself an email reminder about the menu I was going to serve at the party, and the food I needed to buy. I then clicked "send." But as I sent it, I noticed something wrong.

It wasn't going to my email. It was going to my wife's work email!

My immediate reaction was to begin cursing, and when I was done I cursed some more and then cursed again before frantically thinking of an excuse why I sent my wife an email labeled "party menu" with a lengthy list of food one would only cook at a party. Among the menu items were deviled eggs and pigs in a blanket, which nobody eats unless they're in a large group where nobody notices you actually eating them. The Wife also hates deviled eggs, meaning it would be plainly obvious that a party was afoot.

Dammit. My choices were to break into her office, hack into her email account and delete the email, or simply deny having ever written any email. "I don't know what you're talking about. I never wrote an email listing pulled pork and deviled eggs on a party menu. You must be thinking of your other husband."

But then I realized that, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, my wife, among others, can access her email at home. And then I consulted with some people who advised me on ways to mislead my wife. So, on the way home, I cooked up a frantic story, saying that I had accidentally sent an email to her that I had meant to send to my boss, and that nobody outside the company is even supposed to look at the message. For some reason, The Wife bought the excuse. She let me into her email account. I deleted the message, and then my heart sunk back into its chest. Crisis averted.

The rest of the shindig went well. The Wife never suspected that I was taking the day off on Friday, never noticed smoke pouring out of my smoker for the pulled pork that morning, never noticed the sudden surge of pie crusts in the refrigerator (The Wife prefers pie over cake on her birthday, so I made several pies; I'd personally recommend this recipe here, and I'd strongly recommend this one, but only because all of my guests gobbled it up, leaving none for yours truly.) Nor did she hear me dropping several pots and plans at 3 a.m. during my midnight pulled pork preparations.

When The Wife walked in the door and saw her siblings and their spouses staring at her, smiling, she jumped about 10 feet and then went into "I can't believe you did this mode" for the next several hours. But she might have been the most surprised to discover that I cleaned the entire house all by myself, proving that birthday miracles do happen.

I Hate Sagging Pants And Maroon 5

I like music videos. As a child of the 80s, videos were a huge part of growing up. But I'm also old enough to remember the dark days of the 70s, when there were no music videos. Probably because everybody had bad hair and ugly sideburns.

So when my eldest recently discovered the wonders of the music video, I didn't protest, though these days he watches them on YouTube, which in hindsight is a better format than MTV. Lots of people complain that videos have disappeared from Music Television, only to be replaced by half-clothed, obnoxious young adults doing stupid things, but the fact is that we still had to sit through a stupid Paula Abdul video with Keanu Reeves before we could see something from U2 or The Cure. Dammit! Why didn't we have that viewer control when we were kids?

There are a couple of problems with my video-watching eldest. One is that not all music is the same, and thus I actually have to provide that parental supervision all those authorities keep talking about. Another is that he listens to a lot of bubble gum pop music, which makes me want to cry and stab my ears with a butter knife. But the biggest issue is that The Boy is now 7 going on 17. Suddenly, and without warning, my boy has become concerned with his clothing choices. Given a rare $40 gift card recently, he opted to voluntarily spend part of it on a pair of skinny jeans. (This led to an odd moment where I almost literally had to hold my tongue, because I kept wanting to shout to him, "ARE YOU KIDDING?! Buy something COOL! Your parents will buy you those pants! You don't need to get them! And then I realized that my son was buying himself pants, thus saving me $20. And I kept my mouth shut.)

In the old days -- three months ago -- he would only wear shirts with some licensed character on it or with the name of a local sporting team. Now he's wearing patterned shirts. And I don't dare mention cutting his hair, which has grown long and unruly. He likes it that way.

This is a little difficult for us to get used to, given that past clothing choices haven't exactly inspired confidence in his fashion sense, often because they paired neon green with maroon. But we've let him choose the clothes and the hair style thus far, with one key exception: his pants.

The Boy recently indicated that he wanted to wear his pants down low, preferably with his underwear showing. I had a problem with this, mostly because I do not want to look at that butt any more than I already have. I've wiped that butt. I've potty trained that butt. I've seen things literally shoot out of it. I'm completely done with it. Plus, low-hanging pants just looks plain stupid. So I informed him, that, "as long as you're living in my house, Boy, you'll keep your pants up." I can't remember, but I think that when I walked away I might have muttered something along the lines of, "Dang kids these days ..."

And then it hit me: I'm a crusty old guy. Commonly known as a curmudgeon.

Actually, this fact hit me a long time ago, probably when someone told me that I'm a curmudgeon. And it's difficult to argue with. I tend to complain a lot and dismiss people who disagree with a wave of the hand and a "BAH!" I'm known at work for rants about the word "solutions" in company literature, such as "we deliver business-aligned solutions to support corporate and technology functions." (No, no no, no no!!! Your stupid software company does NOT sell "solutions," you sell a product or a service, so QUIT USING THAT WORD TO DESCRIBE YOURSELF! What I need is a solution to poorly written company announcements). I'm also known in my family for my hatred of Maroon 5 (I just wish that guy would lose his voice; it makes my eardrums scream and want to commit suicide) and the Miracle of Life center at the Minnesota State Fair, home of animals who are about to, are are in the process of giving birth, or they've done so recently (dang place is way too crowded, you can't see any animals, too many strollers, including mine, and poor animals have to poop out babies in front of a crowd).

But being the parent of a wannabe teenager has brought my curmudgeonness to an entirely different level. This evening, for instance, I found myself chasing after my eldest, pulling his pants up, grumbling the entire time.

The real problem is that the guy doing the griping about his son's pant waist level is also the same guy who once took a pair of new, white jeans, dyed them with black splotches, and then cut several holes in them, leading my girlfriend to say, "nice holes!" I wore these in public. Several times. Sometimes with a tshirt emblazoned with several versions of the f-bomb. Honestly, I can't say anything along the lines of, "In my day, we kept our pants UP!" to my son with a straight face. Sure, we kept our pants up, but they had holes that required that I wear a clean pair of boxer shorts under them.

Of course, now I know better, and really I'm just trying to keep my kid from making the same mistake I did, thus preventing him from looking like an idiot. Then again, perhaps instead of pulling his pants up in public and complaining about his underpants, I should actually encourage him to wear his pants like that. Then he'll think the look is dorky and he'll abandon it. Reverse psychology. 

So I guess I'll keep letting him watch the YouTube. Unless he starts listening to Maroon 5. Then I'm throwing the computer under a bus.

How I Became An Egghead

One of the dangers of spending any time in the South is the taste you acquire for its food, namely pig, slowly cooked over several hours in a smoky black barrel somewhere in the vicinity of a trailer park. The barrel itself looks as if it belongs with a blacksmith. Tending to it is usually some fat guy in a dirty tank top who last used deodorant during the first Bush presidency and looks as if he just spent some quality time underneath an oil-gushing Ford.

Such places do exist in Minnesota, but they're not as common. And so, upon my return to the state of my birth five years ago, I took up smoking.

Food. Not tobacco. (I did smoke tobacco, briefly during and after college, which made all sorts of sense, given that before and after college I had no money, so naturally I threw what I had away on useless cancer sticks; apparently, if my college offered, "Common Sense 101," I missed it; or maybe I did have it, it was scheduled at 8 a.m. and I slept through it, just like mythology.)

I had already been the household grillmaster and had wrested from The Wife the title of Household Cook, when I saw a friend smoke all sorts of meat on his smoker. So I invested in a cheap, electric version purchased on Craigslist. It was small, black and barrel shaped and smelled like wood. It worked fine for a while. Better yet, it was easy. And there's nothing I like more than easy. Especially easy food. The less effort required to get grub gets into my digestive system, the better.

The only problem I had with the smoker, other than the fact that it looked like a poorly-made rocket done in by a shrinking ray and painted black, was that it was useless when it got cold. And the last time I checked, my address said I lived in Minnesota. And it tends to get cold here for several months out of the year. Unfortunately, my love for the cooked pig doesn't end when the temperature drops. So off I started looking for a new smoker.

The Wife is afraid of three things: clowns, more clowns, and me uttering the phrase, "I need a new grill." Because she knows the potential for financial and/or physical harm that such a purchase can bring upon a household. And there are three things I'm afraid of: fricking rabbits, my kids uttering the phrase, "Dad, can we get a (FILL IN THE BLANK)," and my wife's reaction when I say, "I need a new grill." That's why I didn't tell her that I needed a new smoker for about a year.

And it's also why I didn't tell here exactly what kind of smoker I wanted.

See, when you begin researching smokers, eventually you come across the Big Green Egg. For those of you who don't know, the Big Green Egg is big, green and egg-shaped. The Egg smokes, but according to its enthusiastic users it does everything else, too: cooks steaks, makes pizza, bakes bread, makes cookies, laughs at your jokes about your mother-in-law, finishes your beer, babysits your children, and rescues cats from trees. It also cooks year-round, meaning I'll be able to stand on my deck smoking a pork butt in the middle of a mid-January snowstorm wearing bunny slippers. Woohoo!

(No, I don't wear bunny slippers; I would wear them, however, if they were made from actual bunnies ... that came from my yard.)

Egg owners are called Eggheads. And their boasts about the grill are legendary. Go to any smoking forum, and bring up, "What smoker should I get," and Eggheads will pop out of the woodwork like seagulls to a piece of bread or old people to a garage sale. All of them will say, "Get an Egg! It cooks everything! It lights up fast and uses less charcoal! It's like God made a grill and bestowed it unto His people! You will never leave the house again because you'll be too busy cooking! The food it cooks is orgasmic! GET IT! GET IT NOW!!!"

I NEEDED this egg. The moment I found out about it, I realized that I would stop at nothing to get my hands on one. Only, there was one problem: It's not exactly cheap. The Egg is an expensive grill that you keep shoveling money into once you get it. So not only do you have to spend hundreds of dollars on the grill itself, you have to buy all of these "eggcessories" so you can cook with it properly. You have to get something to enable you to cook indirectly. Then you have to buy something to stir the ashes. And then another device to lift the grate. And of course you have to build a nice table for it, lest all other Egg users laugh and call you sissy boy. By the time you're done your children are selling apples downtown so you can make your next mortgage payment. And you're selling stuff you've made on the Egg.

But such was my desire that I got it, anyway (Just a few more bushels of apples sold and we'll have that mortgage, boys!). Which brought me to one other problem: the egg weighs about as much as a Honda Civic with a family of four still inside. It's heavy. And as it's made of ceramic, meaning that one mistake and your egg will go Humpty Dumpty all over the ground. So I employed my 16-year-old nephew, who has recently become huge. He lifted the egg like it was an actual egg, and we got it home in one piece.

(Seriously, how did that happen? Here's a kid I used to spin around the parking lot over and over and over again and now he could probably do that to me; come to think of it, that kinda sounds like fun ...)

It's here that I'd like to say that I made a bunch of food and it was all awesome and that's the end. And so I will. But I'm glad to say that I haven't purchased all of the eggcessories they offer: I drew the line at the Big Green Egg corn holders.

Escaping Yard Work The Hard And Painful Way

Someone in the 1970s looked at homes around the country and declared, "You know what this yard needs? MORE ROCKS!" The result was a decorative landscaping rock trend that today is the bane of my existence. Someone somewhere leveled a mountain, broke it up into a million billion rocks, smoothed them out, and then spread them all around my house. I hate every single one of them, especially those that venture out into my lawn shortly before mowing time.

One particularly notable patch of rocks is in my back yard, where the drunk farmer who built my house decided to put an unsightly, raised area of decorative rocks. Did he plant anything in this patch? No. It's just rocks. Well, rocks and weeds now. And my central air unit, which is old. Probably older than the house, really. I think someone discarded it here back in 1977 and the house-building farmer decided to use it. A friend of mine once, upon walking in my yard and seeing the air conditioner, said, "What the heck is THAT thing?"

The job of that rock patch for the last few years, besides serving as a weed haven, is to be the object of my constant declarations of, "I'm going to do something about that." Of course, the job of transplanting decorative rocks from one part of my house to another, or to the driveway where some poor Craigslist shopper will take them, isn't exactly fun, and so I've usually found other things to do, such as anything. (Seriously, didn't Alabama chain gangs shovel rocks as punishment? Why would I want to do that?) Five years after we moved in, that patch is still there.

But this afternoon, in a fit of responsibility, I took my wheelbarrow and a shovel and got to work, shoveling rocks. I had asked The Boy if he wanted to help and earn some extra money, and apparently, after remembering the Alabama chain gang reference, decided that playing his skateboarding game would be more fun.

So I went back there and started shoveling. I periodically had a visitor in the form of my toddler, but asked The Wife to remove him, because toddlers and rocks really don't go well together -- or perhaps they go too well. Besides, some of those rocks would be flying from my shovel, and hitting my toddler with rocks is not how I want to end the weekend.

I started humming old blues songs, shoveling away, when I felt something on my ankle. Something painful. I looked down.

Wasp!

Apparently, wasps don't like it when you dig up their home. I shoved it out of the way, then felt something else painful. I took my shoe and sock off. I felt another sting of pain. More wasps! So I did what all the backyard survival books tell me to do, I began yelling and running while doing the Adult Wasp Dance. I yelled and danced my way into the front yard, hoping that someone would see me and come to my assistance. They didn't, meaning my neighbors (and family members) probably didn't think I was doing anything abnormal, at least for me.

I had about a million wasps coating my ankles and legs. OK, I had fewer than that. A dozen. OK, a half-dozen. I went into the house, having left a trail of shoes and socks and sunglasses and pride in my wake. I ran straight to the shower, figuring that the 5 million wasps I was certain were still on me looking to do some a-stingin' would run away and die at the first drop of lukewarm shower water.

I have been stung by a bee precisely once in my life. I was 3. And it hurt. But that didn't cause my fear of bees and wasps. That fear was already well ingrained, because I'm human, and it's a human instinct to act crazily the moment we see anything with a stinger on its butt. Now that I've been stung again, that fear has been magnified. I've been seeing and hearing bees everywhere since removing myself from the shower. I haven't gone outside since then, either, so my shoes and socks are still on the lawn.

And, indeed, the first dose of removed footwear is still near the yellow jacket nest, driving them crazy. We looked out the window and saw my shoe. It was under a relentless attack by a nest's worth of wasps. An hour later, the swarm was still there, though they were clearly tired, as a few were taking breaks. Nearby were my shovel, my wheelbarrow and a metal rake I was using for the job. And there they will stay until I can get myself a hazard suit. Or maybe a suit of armor.

The good news is that my eldest opted against earning money and my wife removed my youngest, or else they'd be the ones with stings, and it's one thing for a wasp to sting me, but them things had better not sting my kids. Or I'll go all gasoline-and-propane torch on them.

I guess this was just nature's way of telling me to sit around the house more often.

Sex, Trunks and Boiling Hot Dogs

We recently went to see a movie at something called a "Drive-In." For those of you who were born after 1985, a drive-in is a giant parking lot with a massive, poorly maintained white screen at one end. The theater then shows a movie on that screen that you can watch from the comfort of your vehicle, which is fine if you drive a Cadillac Escalade, less fine if you drive a 1978 Dodge Aspen with a bench seat. You listen to the sound through your scratchy FM radio, all the while praying that, by the time the triple feature is over at 3 a.m. you still have battery life to start your car and head home.

They were popular in the 1950s and 60s when everybody was so thrilled about the automobile that they wanted to spend as much time as humanly possible in one. They declined over time as people who owned the drive-ins realized that they'd make a lot more money by subdividing the land and selling it to developers. And they wouldn't have to employ people to stop people from having sex in their cars.

A funny thing has happened more recently: people realized that they preferred spending time outdoors in the summer while the weather was still decent, and thus outdoor movies have become in vogue again. So now we can watch movies in parks or in parking lots, if you know where to look, and the few drive-ins that remain have become more popular. So now you can say you're spending time outdoors, when in reality you're still sitting on your butt eating too much food.

One more bonus, at least for us parents: they're cheap. You generally don't have to take out a second mortgage on your house to take your family to a drive-in--provided, of course, there is a decent, kid-friendly movie available rather than something titled "Naked Ax Murderers 3." Actually, it's usually my luck that whenever I think of a drive-in movie, "Naked Ax Murderers 3" is the opening movie, followed by something like Bambi. Uh, can't you reverse those so I can get my nudity and violence after my kids have fallen asleep (or been given a heavy dose of Benedryl?).

We have two whole drive-ins in the general vicinity of my house, meaning that I can get to them without having to stop and use the restroom (by the way, as we age, that distance shrinks, I've found). They are the two I remember most from when I went to drive-ins during my youth. And, from the looks of it, they haven't updated either of them since. Or cleaned the bathrooms. Here's a sign that the public bathroom is in a nasty state: people wait in a long line to use the portapotty that they have as an apparent backup.

One more thing they didn't change: the between-movie advertisements for the snack bar, in which they showed film of popcorn being popped and pop being poured into a cup and hot dogs being boiled in water. It was the same thing they showed back in the 1970s, and as I recall, boiling hot dogs weren't appetizing back then. They sure as hell aren't appetizing now.

But at least they fenced off what was used for a playground, which in my day were usually made of metal. If at least one kid didn't get sent to the hospital from a severe cut, laceration or impalement, we just weren't playing hard enough. What? No injuries? SLACKERS! Anyway, most of the kids at the movie we attended played on a grassy knoll on one side of the theater. And they had a blast, proving that most playgrounds are almost totally worthless. Kids will always fill the playground void with whatever is available -- hill, steps, cars, other people, etc.

I saw E.T. in a drive-in theater, and the second feature that day was Airplane, the best single movie ever made, making it the most valuable drive-in visit in history. I also saw a Bruce Lee film at a drive-in theater. And this was the theater where I noticed that a van parked in the row in front of our vehicle was bouncing up and down vigorously during the film. The bouncing stopped after it was surrounded by a group of employees carrying flashlights. It would take me a while before I figured out why the van was bouncing.

In later years, I went on a double date at a drive-in, and the movies were so good all four of us fell asleep. We were woken up at 3 a.m. by some Grinch with a flashlight, probably the same one stopping the action in that van years before. My high school girlfriend and I went on a date with the same couple a few weeks later, only that time we tried hiding two of us in the trunk. You know, to avoid paying the extra ticket costs.

Being chivalrous folk, we men decided to hide. The girls were to let us out after finding a spot in back. So we hid, and got hot. My fellow male date and I baked in that trunk as the girls drove and paid for their tickets. We could not hear them well, so we just heard "mumble mumble mumble mumble." They drove around a while. "Mumble mumble mumble." And then they drove some more. "Mumble mumble mumble." Then they sped up! HEY! What's going on!

Next thing we knew they opened the trunk, we got out at the same parking lot where we got into the trunk. This was the 1980s, and they'd been replacing the old speakers with the newfangled FM broadcast of the audio. The problem: the car we were driving was a beater with only an AM radio, and all of the speakers were up in front. Nice of them girls not to keep us in the trunk the entire movie.

I'm glad to say we didn't resort to that during our recent visit, when we saw a 90-minute Disney toy advertisement called "Cars 2" and then something called "The Green Lantern" (I think it was a movie, though it sure didn't seem like it), making it the exact opposite of that awesome E.T.-Airplane double feature in that both movies sucked badly.

But the kids enjoyed it. They fell asleep in the back of the van after the first movie, and then The Wife and I got to "enjoy" the second, less kid-friendly second movie on our own. And then she fell asleep and it was just me watching a badly made superhero flick. Just like at home.