Dad's Time to Shine: The Road Trip

I'm about to take a road trip, because it's summer and The Boy is off school and by law I'm required to regularly drag my family on these trips as a suburban parent. This is the main reason I got the minivan.

We're going to South Carolina, because at 95 and humid here in Minnesota it's just not quite hot enough. Or mosquitoey enough.

According to Google Maps, Myrtle Beach, SC -- yes, we're going to Myrtle Beach to get our annual dose of neon and drunk teenagers -- is a 1,300-mile drive from where we live, which in theory would take us 23 hours. In theory.

In reality, without kids that drive would be an hour or two shorter, because I'm a freakish dictator behind the wheel and demand very limited and well-planned out stops. I dehydrate myself and eat only at restaurants connected with gas stations. I also speed and break other traffic laws in the process. I could guarantee to beat the recommended time, which always made me feel like I accomplished something.

(My wife has thus far successfully resisted my efforts to get her to wear Depends for such trips, but I'll wear her down sooner or later; and if I don't, then old age will ...)

These days, I'll be lucky if I can get there at all. One kid, at 5, will have to go to the bathroom every five minutes. The other, barely into his toddler years, is guaranteed to act like a toddler, meaning he'll scream most of the time. We'll stop every half an hour to relieve the one and then a half hour later to pacify the other one. The result is that the one who does the most whining on the trip is -- you guessed it -- dad, as he ponders how much time he's losing with every miserable stop.

It'll also be my job to yell from the driver's seat whenever the kids act up. In fact, I even drew up a DAD ON A LONG ROAD TRIP BINGO card for my family to use to pass the time as we pass through the Eastern U.S. To be honest, I kind-of look forward to the blunt, loud statements because it makes me feel more dadish.

In recent days, we've spent more time developing ways to pacify the children during the trip than we have in planning and preparing for what we'll actually do once we get there. Your packing list probably includes underwear, shirts and toiletries. Mine includes tranquilizers, bribery cash and duct tape.

Oh, and various electronic pacification devices.

Indeed, the dads of previous generations had it much worse than we do. These days I can shove an iPod into The Boy's hands and give him the headphones. Or I can pop a few Pixar movies into the DVD player and then enjoy the sweet, sweet solitude of the open, traffic packed and construction-jammed freeways. Back in The Day, when I didn't have kids and knew everything, I scoffed at the idea of in-vehicle video players. Then I had kids, and realized this: What the heck else are they going to do back there but bug the heck out of me?

When I was a kid, all we had to do in the back seat was to poke and prod and fight and throw things and pick our noses and try to get passing semis to honk their horns. We tried singing songs but nobody could get past 90 on "99 Bottles of Beer." I was once asked to navigate but messed up so badly that instead of driving to South Dakota we ended up in South America. It's a virtual guarantee that a father invented the in-car video player. I have no proof yet, but I'm pretty sure that this generation of dads could be expected to live a few years longer than their predecessors on the simple basis of that invention alone.

Still, that won't make this trip easy. I'm expecting to lose my sanity somewhere in Tennessee. And I figure someone will hit BINGO before we even leave Wisconsin.

My Big, Wooden, Overpriced Swing Set

I spent the past 10 days putting together a wooden swing set for the kids, which automatically tells you one thing: I spent way too much money for what I got.

If the product involves birth, children, weddings or death, it's a guarantee that it'll be overpriced. There are no exceptions to this. And the wooden play set falls clearly into the "children" category. And considering that I got the biggest piece of junk I could find, and still forked over cash, I would say I paid too much.

I went on Craigslist, because that's pretty much my top shopping destination these days. We found something we considered "reasonable." I would not say "cheap," but given the fact that old, decrepit wooden Rainbow sets can fetch four-figure sums I would say it was fairly reasonable. In addition, it was big enough to be fun but still small enough to fit in the postage stamp I call my yard. Actually, my yard is quite big, but it's on a corner lot that is what I'd call "heavily forested," which makes swing set placement a bit of a challenge.

Having never bought a swing set before I had a few misconceptions when we went to see the set in person. I figured that I'd just get a couple of big, beefy friends to help me, we'd load it in the back of somebody's pickup, tie it down, then drive to my house. Over and done. Perhaps, worse come to worse, somebody would ride in back, holding onto it.

(True story: Back in my pickup truck owning days a friend of mine asked me to haul a mammoth chair and ottoman he had bought; the furniture store workers tied it down, but my friend insisted they keep the plastic on. But the plastic made the furniture slippery and it nearly fell off my truck 50 feet from the furniture store. His solution? He rode in back and held onto the furniture, sitting on the edge of the pickup truck bed as I drove 20 minutes down an Interstate highway. Ah, good times.)

That pickup truck story reminds me of one of my favorite all-time bumper stickers: "Yes, this is my pickup, no I won't help you move."

My absolute favorite bumper sticker? "667, neighbor of the beast."

Where was I? Oh yeah, my silly preconceived notions. The first factoid to trash my Haul It In One Piece plan was the fact that the owner's backyard was almost completely cut off from the civilized world, so we'd have to take it apart in pieces just to get it out of there.

The second dose of reality was the fact that it was about two stories tall, which would make it a bit of a snug fit under the three bridges between that place and my house. "You can probably take it apart in four or five pieces," the owner said.

It's here where I have to confess something: My carpentry skills are just a shade above "nonexistent." No, I'm not afraid of a drill and own two of them, but mostly their role in my house is to provide me with a power tool that looks like a gun. Admit it: If you're a guy, and you own a drill, you routinely point that thing like you're about to shoot someone. OK, maybe that's just me, but I think it proves that the fake, gun-toting tendencies most boys show at an early age don't die down, even when we grow up and have lots of guns of our own. You know that Charleton Heston pointed his drill like a gun, even though he probably had an actual gun in the other hand he could point.

So I feared taking it apart, and as we went on that fear would be well founded. Because the more we took it apart, the more we realized that we'd have to take more of it apart. So that "four or five pieces" soon became "20 or 25 pieces." And what was going to be a simple process would end up taking several hours.

But that's life. It's a rule that something will go wrong with just about any project, whether you're hanging a picture or putting together a play set. You'll need another tool and have to make a trip to Home Despot. Or the process will be more complex. Or the directions will be written in 50 languages, none of them English. But SOMETHING will go wrong. It always does. Always.

So we got the pieces of my boys' play set home and then the rain started falling, which meant that I had a yard full of wet wood and slides. It cleared up long enough for me to start putting it together, but then the rain fell again and then I left for New York for a few days, leaving in my wake the wet, hulking skeleton of a wooden play set.

But it cleared up long enough this past Sunday that I could really get going, so build I did. I drilled (didn't have enough screws, so had to get more) and placed boards (had to replace some, then measured wrong and had to redo several of them) and hammered (smashed my thumb) and dug. Yes, dug.

Apparently, the biggest problem that can go wrong with a swing set is that your yard looks more like a cliff. My yard slopes downward, and is full of tree branches and roots that result in a leaning swing set that looks like it belongs in a Tim Burton movie.

But I finished. Today I put the sand in the sand box, because we love having sand tossed all over our yard, marking the end of that 10-day journey. I'm glad to say that I didn't end up in the hospital once, but with the number of boards and equipment I had to replace I probably could have just built the thing from scratch myself. Yup. Paid too much.

Escape From New York

I like New York. I wouldn't say I love New York, because then I'd be endorsing those ubiquitous and annoying I-heart-NY t-shirts. But I definitely enjoy being in the city, t-shirt notwithstanding.

Still, I was pretty eager to go home yesterday afternoon when the conference I was attending there ended. It was mid-afternoon, and I had a few hours before my 7:15 p.m. flight. So I checked on that newfangled thing called "The Internet" to see if there were any earlier flights out of JFK.

There was, and it had lots of open seats. It was only leaving an hour earlier, but that's still another hour of my life. The problem with get-away days on trips is that it's difficult to do much when you have down time because you're spending that time fretting about your travel home -- or at least I do, because I'm paranoid and nervous. So I decided to bolt. I put it into high gear and headed to the airport.

(This did not stop me from changing out of my suit and into a pair of jeans; if I'm going to be sardined into a tin can I'm going to be comfortable, dangit.)

It was raining, but I had an umbrella, disproving the theory that bringing an umbrella on a trip guarantees that rain won't fall. It DID fall, making me thankful that I finally remembered to bring an umbrella rather than forget it on the kitchen counter, which is what I usually do. So I got out my umbrella, flipped my backpack over my shoulder, lifted the handle of my suitcase and began speeding down crowded New York sidewalks the mile-long walk to Penn Station.

This would be the nicest, most pleasant part of my trip home. After weaving in and out of walkers, speeding ahead of slow ones and playing chicken with other pedestrians' umbrellas, I managed to make it to the train station, got my ticket and boarded a train one minute before it left the station. Better yet, I got on the right train.

(As I said, I'm paranoid, and I was so convinced that I was going to end up taking the wrong train and find myself in rural Maine that I spent my week scouting my various transit options to ensure I knew what I was doing; I spend most of my time driving from place to place using maps that I usually can understand; I need to take an advanced course in hieroglyphics to decipher most public transit maps, be it New York or Minneapolis or Kalamazoo.)

I got to the airport fully two hours before the flight I wanted to take was to depart, only to find that said flight was full. All those open seats were filled in the time it took me to get to the airport.

I'd be stuck on my own plane, which wasn't to take off for three entire hours.

I do tend to spend a lot of time in airports when I travel because I hate the idea of missing planes and give myself way too much time to go through security. On top of that, I love paying too much to eat poorly prepared food served by disinterested wait staff. And I enjoy paying twice the price of a typical magazine that I use to hide my face while people-watching. Still, three hours in JFK was a lot. And it would be three full hours, too, because the plane didn't board until just before it was to take off.

But we boarded. It was a small plane -- so small that we couldn't bring our carry-on luggage and had to get there through a maze of makeshift hallways that were so long I thought that I'd nearly reached Minneapolis by the time I got to my plane.

We all boarded. Then we waited. And waited. And then the captain got on in his pleasant captain's voice that had clearly aced the "How To Speak Like A Pilot" course in Pilot School. Unfortunately, said pleasant pilot voice didn't have a pleasant announcement. And he seemed frustrated by JFK.

I didn't take exact notes of what he said, but here's how a normal person would have said it: "Well, ladies and gentlemen, the idiots at JFK allowed too many flights to be scheduled to fly out of here at the same dang time and as a result a little rainfall is creating a massive backup. Morons." He went on to say that our plane was eighth on the list to back away from the gate -- that's right. We were on a waiting list for the right to wait.

Forty-five minutes, he said, before we could do so. So we waited. And waited. I got several text messages from my increasingly technologically savvy five-year-old. And I read all the reading material I brought with me.

We began backing up. The pilot came on again. Here's what he said, translated into normal-person speak: "Don't get too excited. We ain't anywhere close to taking off. I'm so bored I'm just going to drive over to the tarmac to do some cookies in this baby. In any event, we'll be taxiing for a long, long time."

And then he said this, and this is an actual quote: "We have a PROPOSED taxi time of 45 minutes from now. But this is just what happens at JFK and the way things typically go, it'll be an hour or an hour and 15 minutes."

At least the guy was honest.

In the end, we were in the plane, getting cramps and bed sores, for two and a half hours before the second engine fired up and we took off. (That said, at least the flight attendants were pleasant and I had two seats to myself, which made the flight a bit easier because I didn't have to spend the three-hour flight being squeezed against the wall.)

We arrived in Minneapolis at 11:30 p.m. and I called my wife to let her know that I didn't die in a fiery plane crash and to find out when the next light rail train was to leave -- I had parked far from the airport and took the train to save money, because I'm stupid. The problem is that, at 11:30, the trains begin running on the hour. I was going to be there until 12:30. I waited. and I rode the train with a few other airline passengers, some rowdy teenagers and at the end, a drunk who apparently forgot to remove his pants during his previous trip to the bathroom.

I got to the parking garage to find that my car was there, in tact and not towed away or vandalized or stolen. WOOHOO!

By the time I got home it was 1:30 p.m., fully 12 hours after I left my conference. Had I driven from New York, I could have made it to Chicago in that time.

The Dreaded Kids Cut

I got tired of looking like my head got swallowed by a giant beaver and so I got my hair cut this evening.

I went to a new place, because I rarely go to the same location or the same stylist twice, lest someone get comfortable enough with my hair that she can actually do a good job. Or maybe I'm just worried that any stylist who cut my hair once would run away screaming the next time I walked in the door.

In any event, this time my stylist smelled like she had just bathed herself in Ben Gay. She was also at least 70 years old, had an obvious wig of long, brown hair and had a fresh tattoo of barbed wire around her right arm -- probably to fit in with her fellow stylists (most of the stylists I've used had some sort of skin art, though it's possible that most people have tats nowadays and I'm just way out of touch.)

Usually, when I get my hair cut, I find my family after making my way out of the mountain of hair engulfing the chair once the stylist is finished. This time, however, I kept worrying about The Boy, who is also cursed with my thick locks and was getting his hair cut at the exact same time.

(Not surprisingly, during our hair cuts a parade of people marched in to get cuts and were given wait times that were increasingly pessimistic; I can only guess that the two stylists on duty that evening had grown so weary of cutting our hair that they wanted nothing to do with follicles the rest of the evening.)

The Boy is nearly 6 now and is long past the Screaming Stage. That didn't keep me from wincing every time his stylist snipped his hair. I remember those days, when we had to strap him into the chair for his first hair cut, then use both parents plus members of the Denver Broncos defensive front line to hold him down as the stylist cut his hair. I still break out into hives anytime I allow myself to think of that day too long.

(Yup, there they go -- I've now broken out into hives, and a cold sweat and my teeth are chattering; dang this stupid, unhealthy blog post.)

The Sequel has not exited that stage. In fact, he's fully immersed into the Screaming Stage, as told by The Wife, who took him to get his hair cut separately this evening, mostly for scheduling reasons.

Apparently, to get a child's hair cut at a special kids hair cut place you can't work whatsoever, and you have to schedule an appointment months in advance, or decide to wait five hours to get squeezed in, all so your child can get a cheap toy and a sticker at the end of the ordeal and get his hair cut in a place decorated with kids' stuff. The Wife, God bless her, drew the short straw, so to speak, and was saddled with the screamer.

Her description of the evening, complete with dramatic pauses, went something like this.

ME: How did it go?

HER: Not good.

He screamed.

Loudly.

The entire time.

Police showed up.

In riot gear.

With bullhorns.

And K-9 units.

And boxes and boxes of earplugs.

(OK, I might have made some of that up. But I think you get the point.)

So I am thankful that I had the easy one this evening. And, by the end of it, when I realized that he hadn't screamed -- only "moved too much" as his stylist said -- I was thankful. And hopeful that The Sequel's screaming days won't last. But that won't stop me from wincing all the time.