Paying for potty time

WE INTERRUPT THIS BLOG BREAK FOR SOME BREAKING NEWS FROM THE YOU-KNEW-IT-WAS-COMING DEPARTMENT:

According to this story by Reuters, the discount Irish airline Ryanair may start charging passengers for -- wait for it -- using the toilet.

So not only will you be paying for the right to be harassed, strip-searched and shoehorned into a large, claustrophobic tube, you'll be able to pay extra for the right to squeeze into a broom closet and spray human waste all over it because of a sudden, unexpected bout of turbulence.

Naturally, the moment that Ryanair decides to go forward with its pay-toilet system, other airlines will follow. They're like a flock of penguins who all refuse to be the first to jump into water infested by a killer seal. The moment the first person takes the plunge, and gets devoured, the rest go in after.

(Note to self: Don't write a blog post the day after watching "Blue Planet.")

WE NOW RETURN TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED BREAK, ALREADY IN PROGRESS.

Taking a break

I'm going to take a modest hiatus for a few days, as if my writing hasn't represented a creative hiatus for, oh, the past six months.

I have lots of good reasons:

• Fumes from The Sequel's diaper cream are making me loopy;
• The Sequel's cries, combined with random screeches from The Boy, are diving into my skull and consuming much of my relatively modest supply of useful brain cells;
• I'm currently reading The Watchmen because at work I'm surrounded by comic book geeks who've threatened to annoy me until I've finished it;
• I can't think straight because I'm full of free IHOP pancakes.

So instead I'm just going to spend the time cleaning things up on my blog and visiting a few sites that I've been neglecting recently. I'll return in a week or so.

The irresistible lure of free samples

On a list of food entitled "Things I Will Eat," chicken salad is nowhere near the top, or the middle for that matter. Yet as we wandered Costco this afternoon and came by a free sample of crackers topped with chicken salad, I snarfed one up like I had been wandering through the desert eating manna for 40 years -- never mind that I had just wolfed down some yogurt a few seconds beforehand.

But it was free.

I love free samples. Love 'em. They could be handing out granola mixed with lighter fluid and I'd not only grab it I'd have to force myself not to eat the tiny paper cup in which it came.

On weekends, if you're lucky and you go to the correct grocery store, you could get enough free samples to provide you with a substantial meal, so long as you're not too choosy. Why sure! I'll drink this brightly colored liquid you call "yogurt" that tastes instead like dishwashing detergent because it's free! FREE!

I discovered the lure of the free sample, served by the nice older woman, at a young age. And every weekend, I found myself at the local grocery store, wandering the aisles, dreaming of all the hamburgers I'd eat if I were a millionaire, and consuming any free sample I could get my little hands on.

At first I was afraid that they wouldn't give me any -- because I was by myself, and it was not like I was actually going to buy anything -- but most of the women probably took pity on me. It was rather pathetic, after all, for a kid my age to be spending his afternoons daydreaming in a grocery store instead of playing baseball with friends. After a while, I got to know some of them by name.

I ate anything they had -- microwave chicken nuggets, cereal, sausage. But the gold standard was always pizza, never mind that the pizza was little more than a slab of cardboard topped with cheap tomato sauce and melted plastic. I could have spent my day getting the snot kicked out of me by school bullies or having my mom ban "He-Man" from my television set, but if there was a free sample of pizza it was always a good day.

My mom didn't like my free-sample consumption. "Don't do that," she said, "people will think I don't feed you."

Um, Mom, have you looked at my chubby build lately? I look like a walking bowl of Jell-O. NOBODY is going to think that you don't feed me.

So amid all those money-saving tips y'all are reading about these days is one from Dorky Dad that will really do you some good: Replace at least two meals a week with free samples. Sure you may have to go to a few stores and yes, you WILL look like a dork. But remember: They're FREE.

Beware the long, kid-filled plane trip

I'm scared.

As much as I'd like to think of myself as a fearless human of the male gender who laughs at danger and gives fear a wet willy, the truth is that plenty of things scare the living bejeezus out of me. My wife scares me, especially when she gets "that look." I hate heights, especially bridges. I'm afraid of baked squash and of cheese graters, bad drivers, bad bosses and, of course, the ever-present danger of being kidnapped, strapped to a chair and forced to watch MTV for hours on end. (And not the good MTV back in the day when it actually played music, but today's MTV that's filled with reality programs involving catty, self-righteous young women.)

But what scares me the most is flying. Not flying by myself, for I've grown accustomed to having large chunks of my bank account drained so I can be treated poorly, subjected to unreasonable searches and long delays just for the right to spend a few hours in a claustrophobic tube.

(Wait, wouldn't I be the one who is claustrophobic there? Why would the tube be claustrophobic? Buh. You know what the heck I'm saying. I'm not correcting it. I'm not even going to erase this paragraph.)

I'm afraid of flying with my family. So I'm dreading the approach of next fall, when my brother-in-law gets hitched. In San Francisco. Which means we'll have to fly. All four of us.

Back in the day, before we decided to reproduce, such trips would exciting and easy. Just take a couple extra days off, give the cat some extra food, get a ride to the airport and get going. Enjoy a couple of days in some far-off place, blow some of the tons of extra money that's always laying around a childless, two-income household, stay up late taking long walks and hanging out in smoke- and alcohol-filled establishments, do everything possible to avoid a family argument, then go home filled with memories and overpriced souvenirs.

By contrast, traveling on an airplane with children is about as much fun as having abdominal surgery without painkiller or sleeping gas. There are lots of things to think of: How will we transport the child? Where shall he sleep? Will we pack enough diapers? Should he sit on a lap? And once we get there, everything must pass the "child friendly" test. Will the kid like it? Will his enjoyment result in some form of legal action from the establishment or fellow guests? And, mostly, will whatever it is we do result in some stupid, anonymous complaint on the Web from an overly angry adult who hates kids and thinks that parents with children should remain locked in a soundproof room until their children turn 21? But no matter how much planning is involved, you never think of everything, because those dang kids have minds of their own.

But now we have two kids, and so this fall we'll have double the traveling fun. One child is small and portable yet armed with the ability to make that entire plane flight miserable for every one of its inhabitants. The trip will take us a total of seven hours, meaning he'll probably spend six hours bawling loudly.

The other is older and self-sufficient, so he'll spend the entire time either climbing on his seat, climbing on daddy, running up and down the aisle or begging for attention, all while loudly singing a song he made up that has lyrics only he can understand -- over and over again, until Dad and everybody else within hearing distance (meaning everybody on the plane) is driven to seppuku.

As it happens, the risk of all this happening does keep us home far more often these days, or at least in locations close enough to get by car. But San Francisco is a bit too far, even for a cheap control freak such as myself who is willing to drive long distances to avoid the cost and pain of an airport.

Oh well. I guess I'll have to stockpile the tranquilizers between now and this fall -- for me and the kids.

Escaping from my messy desk

It's probably a bad sign when your spur-of-the-moment decision to clean and organize your desk results in shouts of joy throughout the office.

Alas, this happened to me today.

My desk is a reflection of my brain: unorganized and messy, but packed with information that is often useless and may take me some time to locate.

I've never had a clean desk, except for an inspired hour or two after I clean it. Then, no matter what I say I'm going to do -- I'll keep this pile of stuff here, and this pile of other important stuff over there -- it ultimately devolves into a massive pile of papers, magazines, books, more papers, vital retirement account information, not-so-vital updates on The Boy's week at day care, unused file folders, gum wrappers, pop cans, coffee cups and items that cannot be identified without being sent to a lab for analysis.

People have made efforts to convince me that I'm in need of a clean desk. My first boss asked me to clean my desk a couple of times before realizing that it was like begging for rain in a desert. (He was also the guy who presented me one morning with an alarm clock; aaah, good times.) Other bosses have looked at me, then looked at my desk, then let out an exasperated sigh as if to say, "There is absolutely no way I'm going to change this guy."

(I might add, by the way, that among all of the people I've worked with my desk has never even been in the top five of nastiness; at least I can usually see some small portions of my actual desk and I've yet to see any new life forms develop.)

I'd like to think that a messy desk is a sign of extreme busyness. It's like saying "Look, boss; I'm so busy I don't even have time to take this pile of papers and gently toss them in my recycling bin two feet away! Don't I deserve a raise???!?" Unfortunately, that never happens.

So I had time today, and was pointed in the direction of a shelving unit that I thought would finally, finally, end my messy-desk days once and for all. At least that's the way it is in my work-space fantasies. (What? You don't fantasize about your work spaces? Am I the only one?)

What will ultimately come true is that my clutter will simply move from my desk to my shelf. Then it will spread back to my desk and ultimately engulf the entire cube. I'll be discovered years from now, long forgotten and encased in a huge pile of papers.

More painful boy raising

Upon learning that I would be the father of a boy I had dreams of raising a young, peace-loving man who shuns violence and spends all his time reading books and playing music and engaging in reasoned discussions on a wide range of topics.

Those dreams have since been dashed by a 45-pound of highly energetic reality.

The Boy is all boy, which is perfectly fine, of course, yet is quite painful, both to us and all the "bad guys" that apparently infest our home.

We have no guns in the house, not even a water pistol, and yet our house is full of guns -- he makes them out of Legos, out of random sticks he finds in the street, from kitchen utensils that he swipes from our drawers when we're not looking and, if he could catch her, our cat. He uses them to "kill bad guys" that live in our house.

At Halloween he dressed as a pirate, but he had his pirate sword weeks beforehand because he kept using other things as swords -- including the knives from our knife drawer. Better a plastic weapon than a sharp one, we thought.

In between such events he continues to use every reasonably solid object in the house as a diving platform, including a tall, plastic hamper, which he will periodically turn upside-down, climb atop-of, and then leap from.

(I might note, by the way, that none of this comes from the influence of television, as the only TV he watches is either a Blues Clues DVD or some benign, G-rated cartoon, though now that I think of it he was present during several episodes of "24" while an infant.)

Today has been an especially violent day, filled with bad-guy destruction, tackling pirates, pillow-sword fights and songs about guys who try killing Santa Claus. And when he wasn't the one engaging in violent acts, he was talking others into doing the same.

To wit: We were in the car earlier today. I made a joke at The Wife's expense. The Wife responded by headbutting my shoulder (doesn't everybody's wife headbutt?) I exaggerated the pain of this event.

The Boy thought it was funny.

DO IT AGAIN, MAMA! DO IT AGAIN!

What?

DO IT AGAIN! I WANT YOU TO DO IT AGAIN! (Giggle)

She refused, opting instead to poke me after I said she was too chicken to headbutt me again.

Once again, I exaggerated the pain. Once again, The Boy had a good laugh.

DO IT AGAIN, MAMA!

Beware the crazy cat lady

The Wife and I are voracious readers of the daily newspaper. On most mornings we sit at the table, eating breakfast, and she fills my head with stories she's reading. These stories usually tell a horrific and depressing tale of some far-off place. I just nod and grunt, because in the morning I only have the energy to eat my breakfast, read the previous night's baseball scores and privately hope that Ed McMahon will come knocking on my door with a big check and a reason to stay home from work.

(Look, I'm a night person. Getting me to say something resembling "good morning" is like prying a pebble from a slab of concrete.)

But this morning she said something that got me out of my morning-induced coma.

They found 118 cats in a house in St. Anthony, she said.

One hundred and eighteen cats??!? In the same house? I have a single cat. And living with her is like living with an inconsiderate, do-nothing, mooching, smelly roommate. She constantly begs for food -- frequently waking me up well before my alarm clock -- scratches the furniture when we're not looking, jumps on the table to lick our dinner plates even when we are looking, spreads her hair throughout the house like she's some sort of allergen fairy, and has one of the highest stink-to-weight ratios in the animal kingdom. (Seriously, if a fox ever happened by her litterbox even he would demand a deodorizer; and I change that box every bleeping day.) Oh, and she snores so loudly it measures on the Richter Scale.

(Here is where I tell you that I'm the only complex being in this house who doesn't snore; sometimes, the chorus of snoring people and felines form a nice melody; other times they're only slightly less annoying than fingernails on a chalkboard. It usually depends on how much sleep you need that particular night. I won't tell you which one you'll hear when you have to get up at 4 a.m. to catch a plane flight.)

I once left the door open to the outside with my cat standing right there, and actively encouraged her to bolt, but my vehemently indoor feline wouldn't budge. Not that I blame her, for this is still Minnesota and until recently it's been near 14 billion below zero outside. No amount of fur on anything could protect a person from 14 billion below zero.

So the thought of 118 of these cats roaming around my house, begging for food, turning my couch into a heaping ball of fabric and coils and meowing at all hours of the night just gives me the heebie-jeebies. One cat has driven me nearly insane. Two cats would push me overboard. 118? Think spontaneous combustion.

Alas, The Wife wasn't done reading to me. It was the worst thing they'd found in St. Anthony since they found the guy living with 500 rabbits, she said.

Well, 500 rabbits is certainly understandable. He probably started with two a month earlier. Besides, I think I have about 500 rabbits in my yard, eating various plants, digging holes, driving me bananas.

The Wife moved onto another story. Not to be outdone, a lady in Texas was found with 22 dogs crammed into a station wagon, The Wife said. Apparently the car really, really stunk.

We don't have dogs, mostly because of an inter-family battle. I think dogs should be big and useful for something like hunting or biting annoying neighbors. The Wife likes tiny dogs that bark constantly, nip at your heels, are so inbred they can't stop shaking or peeing and, when confronted by a burglar, do a perfect impression of a soccer ball. Our inability to compromise on this has left us with cats. And fish.

So I have no frame of reference for 22 dogs in a station wagon, but I'd bet they were fighting to stick their heads out the window.

Pumping the sump pump

It's a well-known fact that household projects -- at least household projects on which I am working -- turn out far, far worse, more complicated, more time consuming, more tool utilizing and more curse inducing than I imagine when I set about the project. It does not matter how much I worry in advance. This is how it always is.

I could start out replacing a battery in my smoke alarm, would budget 5 minutes for this seemingly simple task, and would finish three days, twelve trips to Home Depot, one visit by paramedics and two visits to the marriage counselor later.

The Wife has become adept at avoiding the house, and the city in which we live, during those weekends I plan on tackling some household task. She learned to simply leave town after my mouth burned through several of her pairs of highly expensive, noise-canceling headphones.

House projects scare me. I'm especially afraid of plumbing, which in this house is little more than a jumbled set of PVC pipes laid out in haphazard fashion behind my walls, which is what happens when a drunk farmer builds your house. I'm afraid of plumbing because of what I might find inside those pipes, or behind those walls, and of the fact that if I remove one my entire house just might collapse in on itself like it was the end of Poltergeist.

So now you know why it's taken me more than two years to replace my sump pump.

For those of you who don't know, or those of you who do not have basements, a sump pump is a necessary ingredient when half of your house is below ground. Water, pulled by gravity, tends to flow downhill, and a basement, being at a lower altitude than the surface, can potentially fill with water if it rains enough, and while most of us would probably enjoy an indoor pool I am not one to swim alongside all the crap I keep in my basement. A sump pump pumps that water and puts it where it belongs -- outside.

(I might add that a basement can also fill with water if you accidentally leave the sprinkler on all night and that sprinkler gets stuck while pointed at your foundation. Not that I know this from experience or anything.)

Yet as the inspector inspected our house when we bought it, he found the pump sitting in a puddle of water. It was not pumping. For some reason I agreed to replace this myself. Maybe I was blinded by thoughts of an indoor pool.

Upon inspecting my sump pump further, I learned that it was little more than a pile of rust connected to a pipe.

I got all my tools, brought them to our rusted pump and proceeded to remove it, when I remembered that it was a household project involving plumbing, got really scared and ran away, screaming.

Who needs a sump pump, anyway?

Me, apparently, because every time it rained for longer than 10 minutes I kept worrying that my basement would flood and fill up with fish and that some random guys in waders holding poles would knock on our door asking if they could camp out in our living room. I would worry about this, declaring to myself that, as God is my witness, I will replace that pump. Then I'd look at my dry basement, would get distracted by my hidden stash of cream cheese frosting and forget about the whole thing.

But I finally decided to get the thing done this weekend. I bought the equipment, including a brand new hacksaw. Given how much this job scared me, I was fully prepared to spend a month locked in mortal combat with my rusted sump pump and the pipe that was attached to it by Hercules himself.

Based on how worried I was about the project, and the proportional increase in pain-in-the-buttness to actual time and money budget, I figured this project would take me eons. But I was determined to finish. That, and The Wife threatened to knock me out, shove me in a box and ship me to Antarctica if I didn't install the sump pump.

So I got started.

And fifteen minutes later, I was done.

No cussing. No swearing. No calls to paramedics. Not even a single return visit to Home Depot. It was done. It worked. I walked out of the storage area where our sump pump pit is, stunned and quiet and determined to get myself to a gas station so I can get a lottery ticket and take advantage of my stunning good fortune.

The boy gets the last laugh

The Boy eats everything we put in front of him -- meat, broccoli, salad, squash, fish, eggs, etc. -- usually with enthusiasm. Upon finishing his meal, he frequently lauds the cook by saying, "I must offer my most gracious thanks, dear mother and father, for this fabulous dinner that you have set before me. I now must go pick up all my toys so I can go to bed early."

At least that's how it exists in some parallel universe.

In reality, on most nights dinner is a battle of wills. The Boy has an exclusive, "I'll-eat-this-without-having-it-forced-down-my-throat" menu that includes only four things: Mac & cheese, burgers, pizza and noodles. As much as I'd love to live off burgers, the menu must be more broad than that, and it must include vegetables. The result is that, when we make an unapproved item, The Boy spends the dinner hour doing everything he can to avoid eating whatever it is we made that night.

We don't do anything particularly special in response to this, but we will spend the evening placing various obstacles and booby traps in front of the refrigerator and the cupboards to keep him from getting snacks. But at least he keeps asking.

Boy: Can I have a treat?

Me: No, you didn't eat your dinner. You go eat your dinner and you can have a nice treat.

Boy: (pause) I don't want a treat.

We had one of these very exchanges earlier this week. The Wife and I were eating leftovers, and The Boy decided that he didn't like them. After several hours of cajoling he still didn't eat and, though he was probably famished, was thrilled with the satisfaction of having controlled what he ate for dinner. Even if it was nothing.

He would also spend the next morning with an even greater satisfaction: Not wishing for death because he was so sick.

Whatever it is we ate that evening managed to severely disagree with both The Wife and I. The Boy, having avoided the meal, escaped unscathed. It is a sad irony and, frankly, really unfair. The Boy should be the one who's sick for not eating his dinner, DAMMIT!

The lesson here, kids, is that it's perfectly OK to avoid dinner, so long as you know that the evening's meal has been infested with a dangerous dose of bacteria.

Somebody please beam me up

I was perusing the pages of the New York Times the other day -- OK, I was perusing the online Web pages of the New York Times, for like most people I'm too cheap to buy the actual newspaper -- when I came across a story that got my antennae up. (I don't actually have antennae, but I'd like it if I did, if it would help me hear otherwise inaudible conversations that go on behind closed doors at my office or near the women's bathroom.)

The headline promoted "A leap for teleporting." Then the first paragraphs talked about how scientists had something of a Eureka! moment in their efforts to teleport atoms from one place to another.

My brain began doing jumping jacks. WOOHOO! Finally, someone figured out teleportation! I'll be the first in line! Even if I have to sell my house!

My euphoria would be short-lived, however, for in the third paragraph the author bursts my bubble, saying that "Even in the far future, 'Star Trek' transporters will probably remain a fantasy." Apparently, these transporters are simply another potential communication device.

DAMMIT. And YAWN.

A transporter like Star Trek would be, needless to say, totally cool, not simply because you'd get to disappear before somebody's eyes but because you wouldn't need to take an airplane, or drive your car, ever again. Sure, there's always the potential that the transporter will mix up your atoms and when you are done being beamed your arm is sticking out of your butt, but at least it'd be less humiliating than going through airport security. Seriously, do I really have to take off my shoes and show you my toiletries?

I love visiting other places. I love the adventure of visiting a city or a state or a country that I'd never been before. My problem is the actual process of traveling, which requires me to either spend several hours navigating a freeway full of obviously pathetic, careless and thoughtless drivers, or give half of my monthly salary to a company (which actively acknowledges that it hates its customers) who will hurl me through the air at hundreds of miles per hour in a claustrophobic tube alongside oversized fellow passengers who spend the entire trip screaming, swearing, kicking, farting or all of the above.

My frustration with travel had me considering taking a train, of all things, on a to-be-determined date to Maryland for my brother-in-law's wedding. A train provides you with all of the expense of air fare without the reasonably quick travel time. But at least The Wife would be able to breastfeed The Sequel while we're still in motion.

So amid my personal dreams of obtaining super powers or being abducted by aliens is a real dream of being able to get to where I'm going through the glory of teleportation. Give me my own teleporter and I'd go everywhere -- to Paris for lunch, to Rio for Carnival and to Tokyo just because I want to see people sleeping in tubes. Yes I'll periodically arrive without my left leg, but at least that'd be better than shoehorning myself into an airplane seat for 20 hours.

(And let's not discount the benefit that a transporter might have in family relations. Are your argumentative in-laws visiting? Transport yourself to Guam! Yes, if they had a transporter they'd want to visit more often, but you can simply escape to Peru before they show up. Dang, do I want a teleporter.)

Apparently, this dream won't be realized in my lifetime, because the only person on Earth with the will to actually develop a teleporter, ME, spent too much time sleeping in high-school physics to learn anything useful enough to actually be able to create one. My only hope is that one of my boys will soon -- and I mean soon -- begin realizing his Newton-like potential.

Now excuse me while I go to the library for books on quantum mechanics.