Lost In Wisconsin

The Wife and I are cheap, and that means we don't have any sort of GPS-enabled unit. We won't buy one, fearing that if we do it would just get stolen (and yours truly would undoubtedly leave it in the car one too many times; it would just be easier for me to simply hand my cash to a criminal somewhere, because at least my car window wouldn't be smashed to bits). And we don't want to make extra monthly payments to put one on my phone because Verizon gets enough of my money.

So when we travel, we use the old fashioned way: we type our destination on Google Maps, then trust that our friends in Mountain View, or at least their algorithms, have picked the best possible route.

We used to use actual maps. But we discovered that keeping maps in our vehicles is impossible. Somehow, they all mysteriously escape their automotive holding cells and wander off, never to be seen again. Except, that is, for our map of South Carolina, which has never wandered off. Of course, we never need that map anymore. Maybe it just wants to rekindle old times.

At one point we had an atlas, and we used it a lot, and then it, too, got the wandering blues and we never heard from it again.

But who needs maps when you have Google?

I do, apparently.

I had to go to Wisconsin this week on "business." As Wisconsin, according to Google, is right next to Minnesota, I figured that I would drive -- anything less than 10 hours is drivable in my book; anything more and I take a plane, though now that I have multiple children who each require their own expensive plane seat, we've been breaking that rule a few times of late. That and I'd rather carve a jack o' lantern into my sternum than take children through airport security, but that's another post.

I had to go to Appleton, a modest-sized city south of Green Bay. I don't mind Green Bay, but I'd prefer not to go there during a year when the Vikings are 2-4 and we keep hearing stories about Brett Favre's genitalia.

In advance of said trip, I did all the requisite planning: I packed clothes, brought a jacket, took work-related information and a camera, made a hotel reservation and told everybody where I was going. I also scouted area amenities and looked to see whether my hotel had a fitness center and free breakfast. And I looked to see what was on TV the night I was going to get there because, to be honest, I usually just sit in my room and flip channels for several hours whenever I stay in a hotel (I have neither a TV in my bedroom, nor cable, so such mindless flipping is a thrill).

I also had a minor panic attack when my iPod froze -- I cannot, CANNOT, drive by myself without an iPod, because I can't think of anything worse than having to wade through small town radio. Your choices: country, gospel, a grainy classic rock station and 59 talk radio stations. If you're lucky, that is. Mostly your seek function just keeps going and going and going until you finally give up and start singing "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" to yourself.

And I checked my route on The Google. I looked it over. I consulted the map. I highlighted all the major route changes. I looked at the weather. Then I got going. (Thankfully, I was driving during the tail end of Windpolcalypse, so my wife's little Corolla that I was driving was not blown completely off the freeway).

Not surprisingly, the drive was boring -- really boring. There were few towns along the way, and the only excitement came when my door nearly blew off when I went to get gas. That, and my periodic consultation of Google's directions, which required me to risk my safety. But I followed them closely. And I kept heading west.

But, at some point, I realized that the freeway number didn't jive with what Google maps was telling me. And then I realized I was getting perilously close to Green Bay. I was supposed to turn toward the south.

I missed a turn. And I missed a turn because reading Google's directions requires a person to understand transportation jargon, which I don't. I usually look for the word "exit" when I have to change highways. These directions said "merge into," which I took to mean that the highway would merge into my existing route. It didn't.

Indeed, Google maps has done this to us before, getting routes wrong, providing poor directions, not making me read more clearly or force me to buy a GPS. In any event, I was lost in Nowhere, Wisconsin. And so, after I stopped cursing, I found a gas station and looked for a map, and bought about 50 of them, including a big atlas. And I read the map, and it told me to head due south from my location -- problem was, that route was closed, requiring a 30-minute detour.

But eventually, my good-old paper map got me to my destination. And, on the way home, I didn't even bother with The Google. And I'm glad to say that I didn't get lost in the process.

Now if somebody could just improve the restaurant selection along these freeways, I'd be thrilled.

Halloween Is Here, Merry Christmas

Halloween is less than two weeks away, which means that my son has had his Christmas list made up in complete detail for at least a month.

Some of you might scoff. Only a month? Oh, but he's been planning and scheming his list for several months before that.

In fact, his holiday reminders officially begin on July 16. That's the day after his birthday. And for several months before that day he's actually divided the full list of What He Wants between his birthday and the mid-winter celebration. He also knows, however, that What He Wants changes roughly once a week between July and the end of the year, so all he does is fill my ears with his various Christmas Request plans.

(That said, a skateboard has topped this year's list for some time; a skateboard? Really? Will someone give me a gift card to the local emergency room and a bottle of Lipitor for Christmas along with it?)

But now his Christmas wishing is in full swing. A few weeks ago, he made up a lengthy list, about the size of a typical sheet of paper, single spaced, with a massive host of items, including such desires as an iPod Touch and a Nintendo DS and a weight set so he can "get big muscles." (That latter request is clear evidence that The Boy sees his future in his old man's body shape and has determined at an early age to avoid that fate; kid ain't stupid.)

In any event, the list was big and expensive and, if all the items were to be purchased for Christmas, then "Santa Claus" would have to sell the house and some jewelry and probably some illegal drugs on the side.

And then The Boy delivered this whopper: "I'm making my list short this year," he said, "because I didn't get everything on my list last year."

You're going to be disappointed again, kiddo.

Still, it's important to let The Boy have his fun. The best part about this time of year is that you get permission to ogle pages and pages of toy catalogs, drooling over the various items in them, hoping that one day you'll get them.

And the ad ogling doesn't stop when you depart your childhood. Now that I'm an adult, I ogle the tools and the electronics. And when I'm done I look for more tools and electronics. And then I start searching other Sunday ads in the hope of finding a stray electronic or two. Drooling over ads has been a favorite pastime since, well, since I was The Boy's age.

The best part these days is that I have some control over whether I actually get any of those tools and electronics. If I want a new tool, I just determine that it's "necessary" for some household project. "But honey, I NEED a laser temperature gun for my deck project to make sure the, uh, wood is the correct temperature to take my special screws."

If I want a new device, I buy one myself. If it's expensive, I just figure out an excuse to get one. For instance, whenever I need a new television, I just turn on the Vikings game. Inevitably they'll do something really stupid, which will cause me to throw a brick through the TV. (That said, The Wife is catching onto this strategy, because she's hidden my brick stash, which forces me to resort to my emergency, hidden supply of cinder blocks; do you know how hard it is to throw a cinder block through a TV?)

Kids have no control over such things, though they think they do thanks to that brilliant Santa Claus myth that keeps them behaving for a few months of the year and allows them to compile lists that they think they'll get. (Yes, in a fit of desperation, I have used the "Santa is WATCHING!" warning to get The Boy to behave; worked like a charm, but I must use that power wisely.)

In the end, whatever the kids get is interesting for about five minutes and in one piece for about 10, assuming it hasn't been tossed onto a roof or thrown into traffic or stolen by a band of gypsies roaming the countryside. But at least they got to make a list.

Dorky Dad And The Emergency Shirt

The Wife had today off so she could celebrate Columbus Day the way it should be celebrated: by getting scurvy and thinking that the Caribbean is actually India.

I spent part of my Columbus Day wandering the ladies' section of the WalMart with a shirtless toddler.

I had to work today. So The Wife and I planned to have lunch together. She brought The Sequel, who apparently did not agree with our choice of fast-food restaurant, because he proceeded to empty the contents of his stomach onto his mom. Rather than do this at home, or in the van, he kindly waited until we got to the lobby of the restaurant, where the deed could be done in front of a large group of hungry diners.

Getting barfed upon is a parental hazard, one nobody warns you about. (Note to people considering children: Ignore all this barf talk. It never happens. Don't fear. Go ahead and have your children. Come ... join us ... be one of us ... parenting is fun and rewarding ... walk to the light ...)

Yet if there were a Barf Olympics The Sequel would have easily won a gold medal. After standing in the lobby in a temporary trance as her brain tried to digest the fact that she was just the target of vomit, I urged her kindly to head to the bathroom, which came out, "WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU STANDING THERE FOR? GO TO THE BATHROOM!"

Two hours later, she emerged with a shirtless toddler. But she still wore her shirt, which was coated in a thick layer of stomach contents.

"You. Walmart. Shirt. Now!"

So, with a sick, shirtless toddler in tow, I raced to the nearby WalMart to get a shirt. This was going to be horrible. For one thing, I feared being booted out of the WalMart for having a shirtless toddler. Then I realized that a large portion of the retailer's customer base ends up on a website called peopleofwalmart.com, and I immediately discarded my fear as silly. (A store in which the butt crack count is usually in the mid-teens at any moment during the day certainly isn't going to boot a top-deprived toddler.) Indeed, I probably should have taken off my own shirt, so we matched.

My big problem on this day was this: I hate buying shirts for my wife. For some reason, there are few things I fear more than buying my wife a shirt she won't wear, never mind that she can just return the dang thing. Yet any time I find myself faced with having to buy her a shirt my brain shuts down, leaving me wandering the aisles in a zombie-like state, usually for hours, until I'm escorted to the electronics section by a sympathetic security guard who recognizes my brain's need to reboot.

But this time was an emergency. My wife was trapped in a restaurant bathroom covered in barf. My brain needed to stay alert.

I approached the section with trepidation. I saw a shirt I liked, but because it was Wal-Mart it was on the wrong rack and it was XXXL or something. UGH! Then I kept looking. I saw another shirt I liked but it said "slimming" and I thought my wife would be offended. I saw another version of the other shirt I liked and it, too, was on the wrong rack and was XXXL. DANGIT! And then my brain began to weaken. The alarm bells upstairs sounded a warning. A female voice then announced, "60 seconds to cerebral shutdown." I picked up my pace. I accidentally wandered into the big woman's section. OH NO! "30 seconds to cerebral shutdown," the voice said. At this stage I would have been satisfied with anything. But I still couldn't pull the trigger. A Halloween shirt? No way. Vikings jersey? Ha! My wife pays no attention to sports. "10 seconds to cerebral shutdown. Nine. Eight ..." OH NO! GRAB SOMETHING, QUICK! "Five. Four. Three ..." I then found a table of t-shirts for $5, which were on clearance for $3. Should I get purple? "Two. One ..." BLUE!

I escaped the section just as my brain began disengaging from vital functions. Fortuitously, it remembered that The Wife's last instruction to me was to get saltines so The Sequel could eat something that day.

I paid for my wares, rushed back to the restaurant and guarded the van while The Wife changed into a barf-free WalMart shirt.

We passed on lunch that day. The Wife and The Sequel went home. I went back to work and ate a sandwich on my desk, which was happily free of discarded digestive fluids.

Dorky Dad And The Sasquatch

Christmas is coming. I can tell because Target already has some Christmas decorations on display. They're hiding behind the Halloween stuff, ready to burst out come November 1. And lately, Target has been putting displays of its more fancy toys behind Plexiglas. They're usually big and obnoxious and can be controlled by a big and obnoxious button that's about kid height.

These toys are usually ridiculously expensive and would likely last little more than four hours before being reduced to a heaping pile of plastic and electronics by an annoyed parent.

Still, it is impossible not to play with these as you are making a pass through the toy section, a pass that is obligatory for all parents with children (I enjoy visiting Target without kids just for the pleasantness of being able to walk through without dealing with the toy section's immense gravitational pull on my six-year-old; seriously, it pulls him in, and we can't get him out).

Tonight, on one of these trips, we passed what was perhaps the single most obnoxious toy I have ever seen, a dancing Mickey Mouse that does the moonwalk and disco and sings things like "Go Mick-ee! Go Mick-ee! It's your birth-day! It's your birth-day!" (Note to my older sisters who may be reading this: Don't you DARE get that toy for my toddler; if you do, there may be nothing I can do to prevent it from being accidentally tossed into oncoming traffic; besides, it's expensive, and you guys do a great job annoying me for free.)

And then we walked past "Bigfoot," a sasquatch toy with an ape-like body, including giant arms, and a human-like face with big bushy eyebrows and giant teeth protruding from the bottom of his mouth.

Press the button and he grunts a lot and yells and pounds his fists, bonks his head and speaks unintelligibly. Here he is:


The Sequel looked at him and heard him grunt and yell and said, "DADDY!"

The Wife, just to confirm, asked The Sequel who that toy was. Again, he said, "DADDY."

Dang kid. I'm delaying your allowance by two years for that crack.

The Awesomeness Of The Gift Bag

Today was my wife's birthday. This is, in my humble and unbiased opinion, an underrated event in the calendar year. By marrying me, she removed me from the market, sparing slightly over half the world population from the frightening prospect, however remote, that I might woo them. She also puts up with a lot of grief, mostly from an unending stream of sarcasm and odd rants. I think this day is undercelebrated.

Of course, you couldn't tell by my gift-buying habits. Buying a gift for my wife is only slightly easier than wrestling a bear. As I've said before on this blog, we have significant differences over what constitutes an actual gift. I think gifts should be fun and exciting. She thinks they should be dull and painful (which explains her request list this year: hubcaps for her car, a scrub brush and the first book in the Twilight series).

Worse, The Wife's birthday arrived before I had a chance to give her gift any thought. One day, I was baking in a humid, 90-degree day working on my deck footings. The next thing I knew, it was cold, leaves were falling, and my toddler began turning the word "pumpkin" into something inappropriate. The appearance of pumpkins serves as a prelude to my wife's birthday, signaling to me that I need to buy The Wife's gift NOW.

So I started late. And the only opportunity I got to get her a gift required me to tote the children along with me.

Shopping with children is a painful ordeal. One of my kids is 6. He wants everything, and he wants to be anywhere but where we were at any one moment. The other is nearly 2, and he wants to put everything he sees in his mouth. Or he wants to break it. Or he wants to break it and put the deadly shards into his mouth, sending us to a hospital and the kids, most likely, to social services.

Add to this my inability to think of what to get The Wife for her birthday and my stress level was at 11.

I don't like being unable to decide what to get on a shopping trip. My goal of every trip, regardless of what I am buying, is to go in, find what I need, and get out, as fast as possible, preferably without being forcibly removed. Not knowing exactly what I want requires me to browse. The tardiness of my shopping made the online option unavailable. And on top of this I had the kids with me.

It took me the better part of the evening, and we went to several stores. I was rushing and indecisive. The kids were begging -- one to get all sorts of stuff, the other to be doing anything but what we were doing at that moment. But we got my wife a gift -- an iPod -- and then I relented and decided to get her a Twilight book. "To hell with it," I thought, but I held my nose as I bought the book, which earned me a weird look from the cashier at the bookstore.

We also got her a card, which is a requirement. The Wife could care less what gift I got her, so long as I got a good card. (I got her a card showing a guy sitting at a bar with a bad case of Plumbers' Crack; the top of his butt was tattooed with the phrase, "If you can read this, my pants are too low." The guy was telling a friend, "My kids got me a tattoo for my birthday." Maybe I shouldn't have bought it; might give my kids some ideas.)

This story should be finished, except that I got home just before The Wife did. I hid the gift and the cards where she wouldn't see them, near my tools, and promptly forgot they were there. So the gifts were unwrapped and the cards were unsigned when I got home from work with The Sequel this afternoon.

Now, I'm not a big gift wrapper. Even if I did have time to wrap them, all I would have done was to throw them into one of the 50,000 gift bags we've accumulated over the years. Sure, the decorations might be frilly and pink or they might be blue and say "It's a boy!" But at least she won't be able to see the actual gift. And I'd be able to say they're wrapped without actually having to work wrapping them.

A guy clearly came up with the idea of a gift bag. Or perhaps a woman came up with the idea when she was frustrated with getting gifts from her husband wrapped in the bag in which the gift was purchased (along with the receipt).

Wrapping a gift takes time. And time is one thing I don't have -- I've got to use those precious minutes to watch sports or check my fantasy football scores or teach The Boy how to make fart noises with his armpits. Why would I spend that time to carefully wrap a gift that will only be ripped off in 5 seconds upon opening?

(That said, my wife carefully removes all wrapping paper in the same way she removes our child's diaper, never mind that just like that diaper this wrapping paper goes in the trash; this is in direct contrast to me, who considers wrapping paper a nasty obstacle that must be removed immediately.)

But on this day, the gift bag would be a necessity, because The Wife told me via cell phone that she was about 30 seconds behind me -- giving me 29 seconds to find the bag, write a nice note in her card, have The Sequel scribble on his card and then toss them all in the bag with some tissue paper. And when The Boy got out of his mom's car, along with his mom, I had him run into the house. I tossed him the card and a pen and told him to run into the other room and "write something on that card." I didn't care what he wrote, just as long as it was something. Like a pro, he finished in record time, helping put the final touches on my gift just as The Wife was distracted and opening the mail. She was happy with the cards and the gift. Another successful birthday.

So thank you, Mr. Gift Bag Inventor. You saved my life today. Or at least you saved my wife from having to "open" her gift by opening the bag it came in.