Saturday, May 31, 2008

Orphan Rats


It will be at least nine months until my wife and I have a kid... unless she knows something I don't. Actually, I've always thought her sisters would know she was pregnant before I would. Not just because I'm oblivious to mood swings, but because any news about Target coupons, holiday plans, and babies must be circulated through their phone guild before it reaches the public ear.

With baby plans up in the air, my wife still has the desire to love and nurture something cuter than me. In that light, we went shopping for a fish last week.

Keeping up with my cheap reputation, I made us go to the thrift store for a fish bowl. We actually found a real nice one, without any problems a little Windex couldn't correct. With a habitat secured, we started hitting up all the stores that featured critters: Petco, Animal Ark, and Hot Topic.

Once we walked into the first pet shop I was immediately flushed with memories of my childhood. Whenever I had a few bucks in my pocket I'd hop on my bike and ride down to the local pet shop to buy anything I could sneak back into the house. Over the course of my youth I think I purchased 6 hermit crabs, 2 lizards, 2 turtles, 3 frogs, 1 mouse, and 400 crickets from that store. I was lucky if any of them lived to half their normal life expectancy.

While wandering the isles we were approached by an employee. She asked if we were interested in adopting. My wife's eyes lit up, only to be dimmed when the employee stated, "we have two rats that need to go to a good home, and you guys look like a nice couple."

I couldn't help but think, "wouldn't rats prefer a bad home?"

No way in hell did I want two rats, but I also didn't want to tell the puppy-eyed employee "no." Looking for an easy out from the situation, I mumbled something about not being able to pass a criminal background check. Unaffected, she walked us back to the manager's office.

"They're both adult males," she said as she picked up a cage, "this one here is a hairless variety."

"Oh geez, is it supposed to look like that?" I asked.

"Yeah, hairlessness is a recessive trait, so he's very special. Isn't he beautiful?"

My wife and I took her question as rhetorical and remained silent, except for the sound that arose when I cleared my throat. "Do they pee all over when you take them out?"

"Not really--sometimes they trickle a little bit" she replied. "But that's just to mark their territory," she stated, as if she was their attorney.

"What about their, um, droppings?"

"You don't need to worry about those. Sometimes you'll find them in the corner of the room after you've let them run around, but they're really dry so they pick up easily." She then reached in the cage and picked up one of the pieces of crap. "See?"

After looking at a hairless rat and seeing a girl pick up its droppings, I was ready to come out and tell her we were not going to be the adopting parents for her rodents. At that point, nearly all of the employees in the store had gathered around us, thinking we were going to be the ones to finally take the rats home.

After telling them our intentions, the employee and her co-workers looked at us like we were the scum of the earth. "How could you be so cold?" said the look on their faces. We decided to skip the fish and we headed home. Now on our shelf at home sits an empty fish bowl. Maybe I'll just fill it with water and see if some form of life originates.

Friday, May 23, 2008

Stimulus Check


I got a paycheck without doing any work. That hasn't happened since I quit the fast-food job I had in college. Twelve-hundred bucks from Lady Liberty, just for residing between the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean (and for not living in Canada or Latin America).

They're calling it a stimulus check. Of course, the money once belonged to me. All the government did was hold it hostage for a while, then give it back. Uncle Sam: "I'll give back the $1200 I took from you if you file your taxes."

They're like hard-core regifters with these stimulus checks. We are the gifter when we pay taxes to the government. They then regift the taxes--not to someone else--but right back to us, the gifter and regiftee.

Actually, the money was probably going to go towards the cost of running the government, just like all taxes. Though that would probably mean the stimulus check was cut via a loan from the social security program. If so, I should probably should just put it towards my retirement fund because that's where it came from.

Since the U.S. is in a quasi-recession, my gut tells me to save the stimulus check for hard times. Yet economists are telling me to blow it on random junk so I can help pull America out of a recession. Which should I satisfy, my gut or the economists?

In my college Economics class I would eat gummy bears while I took notes. Maybe I should buy $1200 worth of gummy bears with my stimulus check to keep my gut and the economists happy.

Or maybe this is a time to be a true patriot. Perhaps I should return my stimulus check to the government. I could send it back with a post-it note that says, "I'd like this to go towards new hand towels at the White House." Maybe I could even request to have my initials embroidered on them.

I'd go down in history! One hundred years from now, kids would be reading in their textbooks about the man who gave his stimulus check back to the government.

"Ask not what money your country can give you--ask what money you can give your country," is a phrase I would coin.

Maybe those future textbooks would have a picture of me striding across the White House lawn, holding an American flag in one hand and a $1200 gift certificate to Bed, Bath & Beyond in the other.


Saturday, May 17, 2008

Interior Design


I recently watched a show on Home and Gardens TV where a "genius" interior designer walked into a couple's house for a home makeover. After belittling the homeowners and criticizing everything on their walls, the designer reworked their living room so it looked like Ikea on crack.

I grew up around a lot of farm land, miles and miles from any Ikea store. For housewives married to farmers, a common thread in home decorating involves choosing their favorite farm animal, then plastering their homes with it. Our next-door neighbor had a rooster motif. The house next to their's chose pigs.

I guess the country folk figure that since they make their living from these animals, they might as well have the courtesy to dedicate a wall, or two, or three, to them. Now that I live thick in the suburbs, I've noticed the same courtesy isn't duplicated in the houses around me. Last week I walked into the home of a guy who works as a software engineer. For whatever strange reason, the wife didn't decorate their kitchen with computer-related items. I thought a strip of wallpaper featuring keyboards would have looked good above the cabinets.

One of the latest home-design fads is painting verticle pin-stripes on your walls. Considering myself an able striper, I bought a couple rolls of painter's tape and went to town on the wall in our laundry room. "June Day Yellow" was my background color, and "Deep Sea Blue" was my accent stripe--12 inches on center. I envisioned a morning-breaks type of sensation for all who walked into the room.

After I finished, and after the buzz from the paint fumes faded, I stood back to admire my work. It looked like I was staring at the sun through blue prison bars.

My wife walked in and almost threw up. Out of the goodness of her heart she tried to fabricate some form of a compliment, but I quickly butted in with a promise to erase the prison bars. Luckily it only takes about 13 coats of yellow paint to cover a dark-blue stripe.

Despite my home-improvement failures, I really came through as a hero last weekend. As I was driving along a country road, I noticed a large stash of reeds growing by a farmer's field. Earlier, my wife had expressed interest in a large vase with reeds in it, to put in the living room. Unfortunately, a few decorating reeds in a furniture store cost about as much as their new couches.

We went out and picked the reeds I found. They were transported home, chopped down to size, and stuffed in a big vase we got for only ten bucks. Maybe an HGTV designer would have ripped it to part, but it looked good to me.

And maybe it would have looked even better if I had a job in the reed industry.

Friday, May 9, 2008

MPG

I drive a lot for work. My commute is a good 22 miles, and then I travel around to different sites during my workday. So with gas prices soaring, my car's MPG is a big deal (I know the topic of gas prices is becoming cliche, but please bear with me).

In fact, I calculate my latest gas mileage number every time I fill up. As a kid, I remember my grandpa doing that. He kept a little notebook above the sun visor of his 1970 Chevy and would jot down his mileage when he filled up. I never understood why; I guess I just though it was something all grandparents did. My grandpa loved statistics and figures. He was always rattling off numbers like the inches of rain we got last year, the distance between the rows of corn in his garden, and how many minutes are needed for an effective nap.

Yet here I am in my mid-20s, tracking my gas mileage like it's going out of style. If my MPG is down a little, I start to think up all sorts of reasons for the drop in efficiency. Did I hit an unusually large amount of bugs on the freeway? Did I put a new box of mints in my car? Is there a leaf stuck under my windshield wiper, causing drag?

Yes, these days I'm doing everything I can to keep my car's MPG optimal. The psi in my tires is right on the money, and I'm seeing all sorts of "birds" by driving 5 MPH under the speed limit. I've also stripped my car of any unnecessary weight (e.g., jumper cables, insurance and registration forms, my spare tire).

A few days ago I was reading an article about ways to improve your car's efficiency. One suggestion was to replace the air filter. The article guaranteed it was a do-it-your-selfer, so I stopped by Checker on my way home from work. I walked in the store and started scanning the isles for air filters.

"Can I help you find anything?" the clerk asked. "Yeah, I need to replace the air filter on my '97 Accord." He then proceeded to embarrass me with all sorts of ridiculous questions:

"Is your Accord a DX, LX, or EX?"

"I don't know, it's um, white."

"Is it a 2.2 liter, or a 2.7 liter?"

"Um, probably somewhere in between."

He walked down one of the isles, grabbed something off the shelf, and told me it was what I needed. For all I knew, it could have been a twenty-dollar air freshener.

Installing my new air filter turned out to be the quickest fix I've ever made on my car. I only had to go back in the house once for another otter pop, plus another three times for the correct size of socket wrench. Luckily, there's only three flights of stairs separating my parking space from our third-story condo.

Where I'm from, a man is measured by his ability to look at a bolt and gauge it's size. "Yeah, that's a five-eights incher," I initially thought. But after three trips up and down the stairs, I was loosening the bolt with a three-eights inch socket.

Sometimes just two-eights of an inch separates you from home-town manhood and better gas mileage.

Friday, May 2, 2008

4X4

Many of you know I'm serving hard time as a scout leader. As part of my sentence, I'm required to sleep outside from time to time. We (13-year old boys and some other leaders) have been calling it "camping."

Last weekend, camping meant driving away from society until we found a place where we could burn stuff without other people caring. Our journey took us to the base of some mountains, where we proceeded to baja-race up an antelope migration trail.

Eventually the trail took us to a nightmare of a slope. The other two leaders, in their 4X4 trucks, scooted right up it without a problem. I was in my little Honda CRV, which my wife and I bought last summer. I had only taken it off road once before, when I had to park on some grass.

I made it half-way up the slope on my first try, then my tires spun out and I had to back it down. There were three scouts in my car; the two older boys in the back were calling me a wuss, and the 12-year old in the passenger seat was in a state of shock.

"Let me out, I want out" the 12-year old screamed. "We'll die if we go up that again!"

"Listen soldier, you're gonna man your position," I said, while locking the doors. "You're not getting out until we ascend this hill."

He looked around for an item of comfort, and found nothing. He eventually grabbed the tire-pressure gauge that was laying on the dash, and clung onto it as if it had some life-saving quality.

We proceeded to climb the slope a second time. My engine started making weird noises, the windshield filled up with blue sky, and dust surrounded us. As I reached the point of failure from the first attempt, I looked to my right. The 12-year old was glassy-eyed and tears were streaming down his face. The tire-pressure gauge was still locked in between his hands. The boys in the back were yelling something about the car rolling over.

I looked up to the top of the hill, and saw the other two leaders standing proudly next to their big trucks. They began to yell things like, "just drop to a lower gear and get your RPMs revved up," and "ya gotta crank 'er to the right, or you'll tweak your driveshaft!" Even though I know nothing of auto mechanics, I wanted to counter with something intelligent. I leaned out my window and shouted, "yeah, I'll just pop the clutch a couple times to boost the alternator's intake." They both stopped yelling and looked at each other.

The soldier in the passenger seat held his ground and we made it to the top. The boys in the back got out immediately and jumped into the other leaders' trucks. "I think my manifold distributor is shorting out, so it will best if I have less weight anyway," I said.

The 12-year old was mad; his face was as red as my check engine light. "Dang it, you should have let me out," he exclaimed. I apologized and told him he could join the other boys in the trucks. He consented and quickly hopped out of my car, still clinging to my tire-pressure gauge.