Descending into total uselessness

I'm going on a vacation next weekend, or at least what qualifies for a vacation in our world these days, which in this case is a long weekend away from the house to a place that does not include relatives -- because if you're visiting relatives, you're not really on vacation.

We're heading over Memorial Day weekend for exotic Chicago, where we'll probably shave a few years off our lives eating pizza and navigating traffic and toll roads.

As a result, this week will be one long exercise in futility at work, because the amount of work I'll need to accomplish before I leave will steadily and dramatically increase, while my mental ability to actually perform that work -- my productivity -- will plunge like a lead balloon. This is stressful on an employee, particularly one like myself who is typically allergic to real work.

All week, the part my brain that controls my desire to stay employed will inform me of the tasks I need to complete, which will invariably be more than normal because at any workplace a person's workload only increases in the days before a vacation of any sort. It's ingrained in our DNA: the moment a person is given responsibility over others, it triggers the gene that makes them give more work to an employee about to leave on a trip. If I were a boss, I'd do the same thing. I'd probably be worse because I'd almost certainly be jealous of the person taking said trip.

An increased workload is bad enough, and my brain does a lot to get me to begin working on it. But the part of my brain unconcerned with future employment -- or most of my brain -- will tell myself repeatedly that a vacation is coming up. That voice will grow louder as the week goes on, drowning out the noise coming from the responsible part of my person, and my descent into worthlessness will accelerate as a result. By the end of the week I'll be as useful as a broken copier -- serving only to take up space and to frustrate my coworkers' efforts to get anything out of me.

I'll be the recipient of a few cuss words but if I'm lucky I'll manage to make it to Friday without being kicked or beaten with a baseball bat. Come to think of it, that's pretty much my expectation for every week.

My productivity before any extended absence from work is almost always out the window, though I am hardly alone in this. Some places might as well shut down the week before Christmas. And around here the introduction of warm, sunny weather around these parts will lead to many an empty workplace, leaving the rest of the staff to do everything but break out a keg.

But don't worry. My blogging productivity won't drop this week at all -- after all, a person has to actually be productive for their productivity to drop.



If you go over here, I promise you'll find much nicer posts than this one.

Bugs Bunny (and kids) must go away

Stupid fuzzy, adorable bunnies. I hate them.

On Saturday, The Wife and I decided to replace the small tree/bush/thing next to our entryway with another small tree. This was an easy decision, as the old tree was gangly and half-dead and looked like it belonged in the Land of Mordor rather than in my yard. We replaced it with a weeping crabapple, because our yard isn't messy enough.

My first step was to remove the old tree, which was more like a glorified shrub, an ugly glorified shrub at that. I undertook this task with a certain glee -- I hated that tree, so removing it was like being given the joy of firing a really horrific boss. I'd been dreaming of this moment for months. I dug and dug and dug. Then I pushed the shovel in another time, only to hear a loud squeaking, followed by many more squeaks, and followed by the evacuation of several small, furry animals from the very area I was shoveling.

My first thought was: They're RATS! Kill them all with the shovel!

My second thought was: Those aren't rats. They're baby bunnies! QUICK! Kill them all! No. Wait. Can't do that.

Dammit.

I indeed have a bunny problem, which is probably obvious as my ZIP code is in Minnesota, and we're overrun with the furry, promiscuous, overeating creatures. To have plants is to hate bunnies. They consume flowers just before they're going to bloom. Then they consume other plants just for the hell of it. And when they're done they dig holes in the yard. They're also sarcastic, cocky, overly confident and like playing jokes on poor balding hunters with speech impediments.

My life, I'm certain, would be much happier if my yard were free of them.

Unfortunately, they're also fuzzy and adorable and have an almost universally positive portrayal in the media. And the baby variety is especially cute, as I witnessed this weekend. So I am torn. I hate them, and want them out of my yard, but I just can't resist their cuteness.

All those mini-bunnies hopped away from their newly destroyed home as fast as their baby bunny feet could take them. Most found corners and buried themselves in leaves. One seemed to be running to the gas station. The others tried desperately to pick areas where I was about to step. When they found a hiding place they just sat there, still as can be, even after I began picking them up.

I could have tried fixing their bunny nest, but as the bush/tree was in pieces and partially dug up, keeping it in place would have destroyed my home's already limited curb appeal. Besides, bunnies suck. These stupid things have been munching on my plants for months. Their nest needed to go, preferably far away from my property. But awwwww! They're so CUTE!

I hated myself for getting rid of them, even if we did so as humanely as possible -- by placing them in a box and trucking them to a local wildlife rehab center where they'll be cared for until they can be released into the wild where they'll make other bunnies, eat carrots and make many other bunnies and probably be eaten.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm a total wimp.

Since then, I've also had to endure regular return visits by Mama Bunny, who has made herself more visible in these past two days as she's searched for her children -- or, perhaps, to admire that nice weeping crabapple.

Sorry, Mama. Your babies are in bunny foster care because you stupidly decided to nest right next to my front door, then you left your kids to fend for themselves. Despite your stupidity, they're gonna be OK. Now get the %$^!@ off of my lawn and quit eyeing my coreopsis.



(Wow. I can't believe I just wrote a piece about baby bunnies. What's wrong with me? I'll tell you what's wrong, but go here first.)

Fancy restaurant + child = insane parent

We're taking my mom out for Mother's Day tomorrow. Late, yes, but it's better than a punch in the face. Besides, everybody is at the restaurant on Mother's Day. But nobody is dining out on a Friday evening.

As part of my detailed planning for this monumental event, I asked her today where she wanted to go.

Her first suggestion was an Italian restaurant. Too fancy, I said. I have a 3-year-old. I can't take him to a fancy restaurant. I'd get the same reaction from my fellow diners that I'd get if I stood naked in front of a large group of complete strangers and flipped them off while cursing their grandparents. And that's based on the off-chance that The Boy would keep the decibel level at a minimum. "Probably not, Mom," I said.

Then she mentioned a Mexican restaurant.

"Which one?" The Wife asked later. I gave her a general description of what it was, and its location. We'd been there before, a couple of times. Still, she had no memory of the place. So I told her this: "It's the restaurant with the mariachi band where The Boy peed his pants."

"Oh, that restaurant," she says.

It had taken me a while to figure out which restaurant, too, when mom brought it up, and I needed the exact same event to figure it out.

So here's what our lives have come to: we know restaurants now not for the quality of the food or for their service or ambiance but the extent to which The Boy tolerated them. Indeed, it's actually a pretty good indicator of whether it's safe to attend an eating establishment. If we remember the food, or the service, or the ambiance, it's likely that he did well there. At least he did well enough for us to avoid any visits from the authorities. Thus, we had time to actually consume the meal and enjoy it.

If we don't remember the meal, but only remember that "this was the place where our pitchfork- and torch-wielding fellow diners forcibly removed us from the restaurant," then it's likely that the events overshadowed the food. That could mean that the food was so bland that we had no choice but to focus on our boy's antics. More likely, the antics were enough that they overshadowed the food. The food might be good, but our photos are likely near the hostess station with a big, red 'X' on our faces.

Contrary to popular belief -- and by popular belief I mean the loud-mouthed rantings of childless child-haters who nevertheless consider themselves to be parenting "experts" -- none of us who've had the good fortune to procreate actually enjoys disturbing an entire restaurant full of patrons. We only enjoy disturbing some of them, like the drunk who enjoys spewing four-letter words near my table, or the person at the next table who can't quit talking loudly about her decision to be a lesbian to piss of her parents, or the large group of people who've decided that working ear drums are for sissies. And bad tippers. I enjoy disturbing them, too.

So we usually try to avoid any place that could result in a call to the National Guard, and generally fancy restaurants are out. Indeed, unless the food is ordered at the counter or the waiter hands me either crayons or a big bowl of tortilla chips we are not likely to go. We'll have plenty of time later in life to enjoy table cloths and salad forks.

We'll also have money to afford those restaurants.

We ultimately decided that the Mexican restaurant would probably work in this case. The Boy loves that mariachi music, and as his previous visit there damaged only his pride, and not any costly equipment or artwork. So it's unlikely that our visit there will trigger any alarms.

But maybe I'll wear a disguise, just in case.



If you click on this link right now I'll stay a member of the club.

The sweet, sweet sweetness of cake batter

Because I was yanked away from my family -- and worse, by a cruel and merciless, customer-hating airline named Delta -- I was out of town on Mother's Day. That kept me from my annual tradition of making The Wife a cake.

So I did it this evening instead. This year I made her a Bundt cake, because I have mad Bundt-cake making skillz. Plus, The Wife likes my Bundt. She likes how my Bundt is firm yet moist. She likes putting her hands on my perfectly round yet firm and moist Bundt. Sometimes I have to slap her hand away because she can't keep it away from my Bundt. "It looks so tasty," she says, unable to avert her eyes away from my luscious Bundt.

The best part about making cake, Bundt or non-Bundt, is licking the bowl. In the old days, my mom would usually call one of us children to perform that chore, which was the only chore that resulted in a stampede of running feet in her direction. Mom would forget sometimes, however, and I would sadly discover the horrific sight of cake bowl in the sink, filled with water tinted the color of whatever the cake was -- brown for chocolate, yellow for, uh ... yellow.

Still, most of the time I got that bowl and would use all of my skills to get every drop of cake batter into my mouth. I'd use utensils, fingers and even my own tongue. I'd frequently end up with cake batter on my nose, in my hair, on my forehead, up and down my arms and down my shirt. I looked like I'd just lost a Nickelodeon contest, but it was totally worth it because, simply put, cake batter is the single awesomest thing on the planet.

In terms of awesomeness, there's cake batter and then there is everything else. How fantastic is cake batter? It's so fantastic that, even now, I risk deadly poison and my relationship with my own son just so I can have it.

After emptying the cake batter into my Bundt cake pan I sat there and looked at the leftover batter, too little to make any difference in the cake, but plenty there for a person to spend several minutes in batter-eating heaven. And then I looked at The Boy. Small. Only three years old. He'd love this stuff. He'd go nuts. He'd love me forever for the chance to consume this delicious treat. And he'd have the memory, like I do, of licking the bowl.

But ...

That cake batter has raw eggs. And he's only 3. What if he got salmonella? He's still young, and it could hurt him pretty badly. I would be a terrible, terrible parent if I let that happen. So, making my sacrifice, I protected him the best way I know how: by eating all of that cake batter by myself. Better me than him, I thought.

Yet let's be realistic. I had no intention of letting him eat that cake batter, regardless of the potential presence of any bacteria.

He didn't know any better. Besides, he doesn't even like cake. When my bundt cake was finished, I served him a small piece -- this was chocolate chip Bundt cake, extremely tasty stuff -- and he refused to touch it. Isn't that weird? What kind of kid doesn't like cake?

He probably wouldn't have even liked the cake batter.

That's what I'll keep telling myself, anyway.



I'm also going to tell myself that you're going to CLICK HERE RIGHT NOW!!

Watching the booze from the sidelines

I don't drink, despite a life filled with routines that threaten that status, including traffic, parenthood, airline travel, being a Minnesota Vikings fan, living in Minnesota during the winter and, of course, in-laws.

Not drinking has its disadvantages. I have no excuse on the on those unfortunately common occasions when I make an idiot of myself, drinking games are no fun with orange juice and I had to use the Internet and many of what were then known as "long-distance phone calls" to find someone stupid enough to marry me.

But this is outweighed by a slew of advantages: I don't have to sell a kidney to pay for a night at a restaurant, I rarely end an evening smelling like a chimney and I'm almost never in danger of spending a night cuddled next to a garbage can in an alley.

In addition, I get to watch otherwise reasonable, buttoned-up professionals spend an evening registering gradually higher marks on the idiot-o-meter.

Take Monday night. I was in a room with a bunch of lawyers (and, surprisingly enough, I was neither screaming nor crying.)

At the beginning of the night, as the wine began flowing and yours truly stuck to his Diet Coke (with a wedge of lime to make it look fancy), all was orderly and civil.

A pair of attentive wait staff kept supplying the room with a steady stream of alcohol, however, and as the night went on the conversation level went correspondingly downhill -- but not without first going up hill. Loosened up by a few drinks the attendees felt confident and free enough to begin going into detailed debates on John Adams' underrated role in the founding of our nation; the prospect of a black man winning the White House and the potential for a capitalist solution to our energy crisis.

Yet that quick spike in quality quickly gave way to lesser diatribes about the Canadian version of American Idol and Jamie Lynn Spears.

A few hours later and it was nearly impossible for me to tell what the conversation was amid all the very loud guffawing. Not long after that half of the room is singing the Flintstones theme while the other half is taking turns swinging from a chandelier.

Actually, I'm only making that last part up, because I left before then. As the Sober Guy I've developed a keen sense of the proper time to leave a party full of drunks -- that's the point when there is more laughing and yelling than there is actual conversation. So I make sure everybody can get home -- and in this case "home" was across the street, so I just gave them all directions -- and then make as easy an exit as I can.

The next morning I make sure to run into a few of these people to laugh at them. Or I annoy them by being the 40th person to say "How you feeling this morning? Heh, heh, heh!"

Still, this party was fairly tame, because nobody got any tattoos or ended up making out with a coworker in the corner or generated any large repair bills. So any laughing I did was kept to a minimum.

There certainly was nothing like this: A close friend of mine, who also doesn't drink, recently saw her boss violate various state and federal employment laws by sexually harassing a couple of her male employees. Again.

Come to think of it, maybe I am missing out by bugging out of these parties early. It certainly would give me some blog fodder.



There are probably a few drunks over at humor-blogs.com.

The Great Indoors

Hi there. It's the Wife. DD is on a business trip. He had a long day of aggravation at the hands of the airlines industry. As he is now super cranky, and wishes to spare you (yet another) rant on that topic, he asked me to fill in. So, here I am - along with the first thing I could think of. Hope it's OK...

It has been a long and hard Minnesota winter. We really wanted to do some outdoor stuff after being cooped up inside after I'm-afraid-to-count-how-many months. But as soon as it started getting marginally warmer (i.e. consistently above freezing, most days), it also started to rain. A lot. So, we've started improvising.

Last Friday night, we pitched our tent, unrolled our sleeping bags, and went camping - in our living room. The most striking thing was the realization that it was (in almost all ways) superior to outdoor camping.

Unlike outdoor camping:

• Our environment was comfortably climate controlled
• The ground under our tent was smooth and completely without rocks
  
• There were no bugs
• There were no bears
  
• A well-equipped kitchen and a fully operational bathroom were close at hand
• There was a comfy sofa for anyone who got tired of sleeping on the floor
• There was no threat of waking up soaked through from rain or heavy dew
• No bears
• No hunters
• No potentially unsafe campfires or accompanying smoke
• No drunken neighbors (well, at least not that we could see/hear)
• No mud or dirt being tracked all over
• No extensive packing of tons of gear into and on top or the Corolla
• No long road trip through rural Minnesota

Just easy, comfortable, no stress family time. And a glimpse at nature through our miniblinds in the morning (to the extent "nature" exists in our yard)

Now I just have to remember why exactly it is we go camping every year, outdoors. Maybe group amnesia factors in somehow...

Competitive gift giving

A big reason we moved to Minnesota two years ago was to avoid air travel. In Charleston, where we lived at least 1,500 miles away from anybody who shared either mine or my wife's DNA, that was largely unavoidable on an average year, no matter how much I begged and pleaded to stay home.

Sure, it's colder here in Minnesota and there are neither mountains nor oceans nearby, but at least I don't have to pay hundreds of dollars to be tired, cramped, stressed out and treated like garbage just to fulfill some family visiting obligations.

Yet, ironically, I ended up taking a job that -- you guessed it -- requires me to fly several times a year.

It's not so bad, really. I've built my shoulder muscles lugging around my bags. I've gained a new appreciation for leg room and I've seen hotel rooms in Phoenix, Miami and Virginia. And I get to go to D.C. in a presidential election year. HOT DOG! Gridlock!

But the person who really benefits from these trips is The Boy, because when I first started taking them I started a tradition of buying him something from wherever it was I went. For the most part these were small, modest toys -- because I didn't want to "spoil him" (as if connecting Dad's departure with gift-giving is any better). When I went to D.C. the first time I got him a toy Air Force One, complete with a totally unrealistic sound of a plane taking off. About the only thing it did well is annoy Dad.

Then, on a trip to Denver, I got him another plane, this one a stealth bomber. It made the same damn sound. I hadn't paid enough attention to it before I got it, and didn't realize it made the sound until I had already bought it and left the store. It's been a curse on my house ever since, going off at the slightest provocation, or just for the hell of it. That thing went off constantly in my luggage, in my car, in the toy box. I was hearing it in my sleep, at work, or any other time I'm sitting there, staring ahead blankly. And when that one wasn't going off Air Force One was, until the day that plane decided to simply keep going off without stopping in a major effort to send me to the loony bin.

I won that battle, however. I managed to remove its battery before the guys in the white coats showed up. But I admit that I was cackling and drooling in the process.

I quit giving The Boy planes, but I never deviated from my rule of simple, cheap gifts. And I expected my frugal wife to do the same when she went to Vegas.

Fat chance. She came home with something cool. A carpet surfboard. Sure it barely moves, but The Boy had been trying to surf on the carpet using various flat objects for weeks and obviously adored a device designed specifically for that purpose. So like any new toy he loves he played with it nonstop for two days before promptly forgetting its existence. Unlike the toys I got him, which were hot items for about five minutes before being discarded.

I could not let this stand.

I could not let The Wife get away with getting a better gift. That goes against every competitive instinct I have. So when I went to Newport News I searched the neighborhood for a toy store or something that would provide me with the gift that would shout to the family that, "DAD WINS!" Unfortunately, there was nothing within walking distance of my hotel other than an IHOP and an RV superstore marked by prominently displayed confederate flags. Pancakes aren't a good gift and I wouldn't be able to fit an RV in my suitcase.

The idea hit me on the evening of the last day of my trip, at a minor league baseball game in Norfolk. A team t-shirt, with The Boy's name on the back. Excellent! He loves his name! He'll totally forget all about that stupid carpet surfer and Dad will be No. 1 again!

And, in fact, the shirt went over well. Too well. He wore it with pride, and eagerly displayed it for all of his friends. Yet instead of "extra small," the size he wears, I got "small." So when he wore my winning gift, it looked like he was wearing a dress.

But at least his name was on it.