Woohoo! I Got A New Weed Whacker!

My weed whacker decided that it would no longer tolerate life and quit working this summer, leaving me without an important tool in my lawn care arsenal. So I spent days researching weed whackers. I debated with myself over the benefits of 2-cycle versus 4-cycle engines, and looked into cordless, battery powered models.

I read articles. I looked at deals. I visited stores. I found one I liked, a 4-cycle, straight shaft beauty with a fixed-line trimmer head with an electronic starting mechanism. I went to the store: All gone. When will it be in? "Some time next month." Next month? I can't wait until next month! Any other stores? I GOTTA HAVE MY WHACKER! "None near here."

So I ordered online. (I like ordering online because you can find what you want and you can often get good prices, but ordering off the web combines two of my least favorite things: shipping costs and delayed gratification. I want it NOOOOW!)

For three days I routinely monitored the UPS delivery site, which The Wife dubbed my "Whacker Tracker." I tracked my whacker as it left the store and was shipped from Kansas to Minneapolis and then delivered to my door. On arrival day I rushed home and looked at my doorstep like Ralphie checking the mailbox for his secret decoder pen. I opened the box, put the whacker together and then displayed it in the house like it was the old man's leg lamp. (I did, however, nicely let my wife gently touch the whacker.)

I couldn't wait until I could use that thing to weed whack the yard -- not necessarily because I like weed whacking, which I do, but because I wanted to parade my costly new yard power tool around the yard for my neighbors.

Yup. I'm a dorky, suburban dad.

I've long known this, no matter how much I've tried denying my place in the world. I live in a suburb. I own a minivan. I've built a wooden play set for my kid. I've put the kid in cub scouts. I go to baseball games where I shout out instructions mostly to my kid, talk to other parents, and then converse for hours on my boy's batting stance and the double play he engineered before the rain delay in the second inning. At some point I'll have to consider putting him on a hockey team or, preferably, a soccer team. I like hockey more than soccer, but I like soccer's relatively low cost (a pair of shoes, some shin guards, European accent training with an acting coach, and a ball) compared with hockey's (8 billion pads, skates, new skates, a stick, a helmet, ice time, dentures and a mullet haircut).

Now I'm glorifying a yard tool. Of course, this yard tool DOES make my life easier, and as a male anything that makes my life easier is worthy being the subject of a few joyful shouts. I still wax poetic from time to time about my awesome lawn mower, which replaced what might have been the world's worst mower -- it was ugly, 70s-era orange and the self-propel function no longer worked, meaning pushing it was like mowing the lawn with a football tackling dummy. As I usually mowed in the afternoon on hot South Carolina summers, this was a bad thing, though it helped me drop 20 pounds.

And I might note that maintaining a good, well-manicured lawn is important for a home's "curb appeal," which is important for my home's "resale value" which would be good if the housing market wasn't currently "in the toilet." Mostly, a well-manicured lawn makes outsiders think that the inside of the house is also well-manicured and neat, rather than like a toy-strewn kid jungle.

Besides, weed whacking is indeed an awesome task. Sure, I usually damage my hearing and my legs and sometimes other body parts and I once weed whacked my finger. But whacking enables me to take out all of my weekly frustrations on a group of nasty plants that just won't seem to behave the way I think they should. I also get to whack the mole hills and the rabbit holes while the excessive noise keeps nosy neighbors and kids away. Why not get excited about a weed whacker?

But I'm not nearly as bad as my previous neighbor. He had a riding lawn mower, and he loved that thing more than his family. He washed it carefully after each use (using my hose, I might note, when I wasn't home), then dried it and probably waxed it and talked to it gently as he walked it to his garage like he was putting a baby to sleep. He then moved into a condo, but I'm pretty sure he got an extra bedroom to keep it in.

(I don't know if the product pictured is truly real, but you can find it here.)

Watching The Boy Grow Up

Six years ago this night, I was speeding along a deserted Charleston road. My wife was crawling all over the passenger seat. And I was hoping, praying, that some cop would see me flying down the highway. He'd stop me, discover that my wife was having a baby, and then would escort me the remaining mile to the hospital, clearing all that 2 a.m. traffic for me.

That never happened, but at least I got to speed to the hospital while telling my in-labor wife to "hold on, we're getting there!" (Which, in my opinion, is the next best thing to the cop-escort fantasy every man has about the birth of his child ...) I valiantly got my wife quickly to the hospital, where we sat and waited for another 14 hours before The Boy showed up.

He was a long, pink, wrinkled string bean. I shivered when he emerged and the nurses took him away. "I MADE that!" That moment, there was nothing on Earth I cared for more than that child.

I've watched him grow since that day -- not out, of course; he's still so thin that you're tempted to hold him whenever a stiff wind shows up. He went through all of his baby phases, then went into that cute toddler phase that The Sequel is in now where he drives you bonkers one minute, then melts your heart the next. He slowly learned the world around him, the alphabet, the colors, the numbers; how to relate to other kids. He loved the Wiggles, then Blues Clues, then Thomas, then Transformers.

He's had his typical kid moments. He learned to ride a bike at 4, took a bad fall the day he learned and scraped both knees, and got back on the next day. Other moments were more pleasant -- he once asked "Who's Mr. Sippy" as we drove across the Mississippi River. Still others were a bit more of a "challenge," like the time he asked why our girl cat didn't have a penis and whether it got cut off.

Today, I find myself living with this pleasant kid who loves to joke around and can hit a baseball and who can throw a better spiral than I can, who loves Star Wars and Captain Underpants books and writing nice letters to friends and family and making buildings out of construction paper. He is fearless on the playground but still worries about what things lurk in the basement.

All of this reminds me of the day, while The Wife was still pregnant, when my now former boss was telling me about parenting. As we sat in a smoky room in a hotel lounge just outside Myrtle Beach, he gave me a little speech about his own son, who was 16 at the time. "When he was born," my boss said, "I thought, 'this phase is the absolute best. It won't get any better than this.' Then when he was a toddler, I thought, 'This phase is the absolute best. It won't get any better than this.' Then when he got to school I thought the same thing. And then last night we were having a deep conversation and I looked at him and thought, "This kid has turned out to be one great person."

That speech, so far, has turned out to be the truth. Watching The Boy grow up has been a blast, and so far he's turned out to be a great kid. So Happy 6th Birthday, Boy. I wouldn't give you back for anything in the world. Not even a swimming pool filled with cream cheese frosting and big screen TVs.

Blindly Feeling My Way Across the U.S.

I'm writing this at the very end of a 10-day vacation, the longest I've had since, well, ever. I was going to write a full, detailed account of our experience, down to restaurant menu choices and bathroom break tales, but instead I'll give you the Cliff's Notes: We drove a lot. When we were done we drove some more. Then we kept driving until we found a beach. Along the way we ate a lot of fast-food and uttered the phrase "BAH! We're on vacation!" a lot. We got sunburn and sand in our underpants. When we were done we drove more. We took a break for some fireworks before heading home via driving.

Because I'm a control freak, I drove the entire time, refusing to once let my wife behind the wheel. I say she should do a better job of switching lanes while passing slower vehicles in the right-hand lane and that she could drive a bit faster most of the time. For some reason, she thinks that I'm a terrible backseat driver. We ultimately decided it'd be better for our marriage if I just drove.

Because I was behind the wheel for so so long, I had plenty of time to think, mostly about other drivers and the idiotic things they were doing to make my life miserable, or the transportation department guys, or just traveling in general. And, unfortunately for you, I'm about to share them now ...

* My minivan has a nice feature enabling me to control the volume of the radio from the steering wheel, which leaves my other hand free to find some of the 2 billion toys my kids keep dropping or throwing everywhere.

* Looking for toys blindly is dangerous, by the way, given some of the other things my kids drop back there.

* I don't want anything for Christmas, except a law calling for jail time for people who drive too slow in the fast lane.

* I would also prefer more state departments of transportation to follow the North Carolina strategy for warning drivers of upcoming construction. We got warnings of construction on I-40 heading into Tennessee for 40 miles, many of which effectively said something along the lines of, "You're DOOMED if you take this route! Find another path! Do so, now, before it's too late!" The other suggested route was about an hour longer, so being the stubborn sort, I pressed ahead. All we got for those warnings was a few miles in which a mountain freeway was reduced from two lanes in both directions to one, and most people slowed down only minimally, creating almost no delay. But thanks for the warning, NC, I appreciate that. INDIANA, on the other hand (or was it MICHIGAN? I can't recall) gave me no such warning on I-94 northeast of Chicago to a construction project that reduced traffic from three lanes in both directions to one, which delayed my already-ridiculously-late trip at least an hour.

* I am fully on the "zipper merge" bandwagon. When construction or some random lane reduction on a highway requires a merge, I now use the fastest lane and merge only when failure to do so would result in me hitting orange traffic cones or concrete barriers. Three months ago, I would have considered myself an ass and would probably have had several choice words for myself from the soundproof protection of my auto. Then I was told by engineers that it actually would be better if everybody did what the jerks do. So now I'm a jerk driver, but it's for the greater good.

* By the way, if anybody happens to know what the heck was going on in Kalamazoo, Michigan on Saturday, June 26, let me know. We got there at 2:30 a.m. local time and couldn't find a hotel room for the night to save my life. They were ALL booked solid. The only info we got was some "sporting event." Sporting event? We ended up crowding in a king-sized bed at a Red Roof inn, something my suddenly wide awake toddler found hilarious.

* My last blog post featured a "Dad on a Long Road Trip BINGO" card. I'm afraid to say that my wife got BINGO before we even left Minnesota.

* Late Monday night, as we approached Minnesota, my wife began going on about how much she liked her second-biggest toe. It was then that I realized we were cooped up in that van waaaay too long.

* Contrary to popular belief, I did not require my wife to wear an adult diaper, but half my kids had to wear a diaper, and sometimes I wished 100 percent did.

* People who go on long road trips (longer than 10 hours) with a toddler have a 98 percent chance of that toddler contracting some sort of odd affliction that causes massive fussiness for a large chunk of the trip. Unfortunately, we were not a part of the lucky 2 percent on this trip.

* Some people might be able to get through a 10-day road trip in a van with two children and not have them buried in toys and clothes and books and food by then end of it, but we are not among them. Thankfully, The Boy had his snorkel handy.