The Dumb Daddy Diaries

Dumb Daddy Hangs Hat

2010-02-03T09:17:00.004-05:00

My apologies. I deserve my three readers an explanation.

Every New Year, in lieu of resolutions, I sit down and formulate a list of personal and professional goals for the coming year. My absence here of late is due to this year’s list. Long story shortened: I dedicated two fun years to blogification. I enjoyed it and friends and family members were quite supportive. Yet it took a good deal of my time and added a good deal of stress. It also directed my writing energies away from a promising novel – which has been percolating in my brain since the birth of Dumb Daddy Diaries but which had not yet leapt to paper.

Many bloggers write for fun – as a hobby. I began the blog, however, as part of my professional development. Over two years it became clear, however, that I would have to do two things to make it financially successful – thus justifying the time commitment and the knot in my back. First, I’d have to spend a whole lot more time promoting the blog by reading and posting on others’ blogs, which is something I’d loathe. Second, I’d have to be far more willing to humiliate and alienate family members. Alas, I pity the losers too much – a fatal flaw.

I also wanted to see if setting Dumb Daddy aside would help both lessen stress and allow me to focus on my novel. It has. I’ve made great progress on both fronts.

So for 2010, I won’t be blogging. Instead I have a different set of professional goals that excite me. I’m going to focus on developing a business that actually may help feed my kids. In helping develop my wife’s private psychology practice in the last year, it became clear to me that small businesses and start-ups could benefit by having a single source that provides inexpensive material support for promoting businesses. Rather than spending significant time and money hiring separate professional writers (for such things as press releases), copy editors, graphic artists and Web builders for their advertising and communications, business owners, I came to believe, would leap at the chance to work with one talented individual who could provide all these services – without the big price tag of media firms with significant overhead.

So Ink and Image Media has been born, built upon a decade of experience in the publishing and media industries. I2 aims to help small and medium-sized businesses with lesser things, such as proofing and editing documents and small publications, and larger things, such as logo and Web site development. Whether your business needs a professional looking logo, a catchy and impressive print ad, small brochures, promotional writing or press releases, Web design and development or basic advertising or public relations advice, Ink and Image Media can help. In the weeks to come, I’ll roll out a dedicated Web site and contact information. In the meantime, I can be reached at (813) 431-1179.

I thank those kind readers who have been fans of Dumb Daddy for the past two years. (Who knows what the future holds?) For now, however, I would be grateful if you’d help spread the word about my latest professional endeavor.

Take care, readers, and stay in touch!

Christmas Mix 2009

2009-12-13T21:16:00.010-05:00

I’ve got more personal traditions surrounding Christmas than is healthy for a guy. In addition to my annual bath, I make an annual Christmas mix of 15 songs. I make no claim that it contains the best Christmas songs ever. I’ve been doing it for so long, I completely ran out of Burl Ives tunes in 2002.

Instead the mix has to follow some loosey-goosey rules. The songs have to catch my interest. They can do this by being good. They can also do this by being extraordinarily bad. I occasionally throw a few in there that the girls or Maria particularly like – and then regret it when they sounds like Miley Cyrus’ North Pole Dance. (I’m terribly sorry. That was completely out of line. There's no such song. I’m sure Miley’s a nice, wholesome girl that will eventually make a fine Trivial Pursuit question.) And I try to include a few completely new songs that no one has ever heard of – and no one will ever listen to again – but were pleasant to discover.

I have a few other rules. No country music is allowed (Look. I was forced to move to the South. That doesn't mean I have to swig moonshine, take my first cousin to prom or listen to their elevator music. And I certainly don't call the dude Santy Claus.) I also avoid hokey Christmas gag songs. My sister-in-law has been putting the full court press on me to include Dominic the Donkey. But I draw the line at holiday songs that make people homicidal. Particularly off limits are gag versions of The Twelve Days of Christmas. In fact, the original version of that song is so annoying, I finally included it this year for the first time. I’m hoping it will inspire Congress to write it into their banking reform legislation. I'm hoping all mortgage and investment bankers will have to be rounded up and sent to a two week retraining seminar that consists of a concrete cell and the Twelve Days of Christmas on a continual loop.

With all these rules, the result is a haphazard mishmash of embarrassing holiday hoopla that we play for two weeks straight. I offer it here with some lame excuses.

1. Ring Those Christmas Bells by Fred Waring & The Pennsylvanians.
This song has a whacko beginning but it was the best version of the tune I could find.

2. The Twelve Days Of Christmas by Ray Conniff.
See banking reform legislation above.

3. We Are Santa's Elves from the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Soundtrack. VCRs were invented when I was in high school, so this misfit only got to see this once a year when he was a kid. And I loved it. Did I mention that Herbie is my dentist?

4. Pat-A-Pan by David Archuleta.
The girls love this song but Maria commented today, “That song is exactly why he came in second place on American Idol.”

5. Winter Snow by Chris Tomlin.
I really like the gentleness of this song.

6. Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow by Michael Bublé. I did this for the sake of modernity. Dean Martin, holding a cigarette and a cocktail, does it better.

7. Soul Cake by Sting.
I like this new musical form of medieval torture and so does The Grump. I think it’s because it ends with lines from the nursery rhyme “Christmas is Coming,” which I sing to the girls at night when tucking them in during December: “If you haven't got a ha'penny, then God bless you!”

8. It's Not The Presents Under My Tree by Eva Cassidy.
I just like the bluesy feel of this tune.

9. Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town by Mariah Carey. Anything Mariah sings for Christmas works for me.

10. 2000 Miles by KT Tunstall. Another new one that caught my attention. I don’t get the 2000 miles reference, however, so if you can help, post a comment.

11. O Holy Night by Il Divo. Maria made me put this one on. It confirms that my decision to skip Il Divo’s June concert was the right one.

12. Go Tell It On the Mountain by Mahalia Jackson. I love gospel music. It almost makes me wish I were Protestant.

13. Rudolf The Red-Nosed Reindeer Mambo by Alvin Stoller. A Christmas mambo? Who could pass? Plus, Alvin’s commentary makes him seem psycho. So psycho he'll probably wind up at my mother's house for Christmas dinner - along with the homeless arsonist who's a regular at family gatherings.

14. Medley: Here We Come A-Caroling/O Tannenbaum/I Saw Three Ships by Arthur Fiedler. Really. Medleys are more Christmas than fruitcake. When I played tuba in the Crystal Band of Scranton, we were all about clip-on bow ties and Christmas medleys.

15. Jingle Bells (featuring The Muppets) by Andrea Bocelli. It’s bizarre enough to have a fake PBS opera singer with a heavy Italian accent sing Jingle Bells. Throw in the Muppets and you have a circus. If Il Divo did crap like this, I’da gone to their concert.

Happy listening! (Now click on comments and add your two favorites for consideration for future mixes.)

Dash Gets His Shots

2009-12-11T12:54:00.000-05:00

Ninety-four dollars. Coulda bought an iPod. Taken the family out to dinner twice. Or bought one-twentieth of a high-def television the size of Rhode Island.

What I get?

A distemper shot. The chance to walk around in public carrying a Ziploc baggie full of poop. (Why is it, despite being in the thickest, most freezer-proof Ziploc bag I could find, I still couldn’t bring myself to stick it in my shirt pocket like an after dinner mint?) And a diagnosis that my new puppy, which has only lived with us six days, has fleas like my family has addicts.

Why?

“No Frontline for one year!” my breeder lectured.

Because watching a puppy gnaw off its own ass is great family fun.

So Dash has been fumigated.

And I need a distemper shot.

I Just Need a Good Colon Cleansing

2009-12-10T14:54:00.001-05:00

I have an absolutely hellacious deadline this month. That and my hellacious holiday baking responsibilities cause me to fall silent each December. But I felt I needed to break my silence to bring you this latest breaking news: Stuccoville Colonics is set to open.

I have to admit: I had no clue what colonics was. And now that I know, I finally comprehend the old adage “Ignorance is bliss.”

Colonics are all the rage, my business manager tells me. Everyone in Hollywood does it. She's ready to sign up.

If the owner of Stuccoville Colonics had any sense, she’d show up at the Stuccoville HOA’s next resident forum and hand out gift cards.

“Open wide and say, ‘Aah!’”

If colonics defenders are to be believed, that Five Guys double bacon cheeseburger you ate last Friday got stuck in your last colonic bend. It’s putrefying and backing up the half dozen Twinkie chasers that followed. The good news? There’s no need to eat fiber or even any vegetables to get the plumbing moving again. Instead, you can just pay someone to stick a firehouse up your Southside and blast the lower five feet of your internal tubing with warm water. For a little extra dough, they’ll add some Crest for that cool, minty feeling.

I just have one question.

Who’s gonna tell all these fools they’re getting hosed?

Surprise! Dash Comes Home!

2009-12-06T08:17:00.003-05:00

The mind-blowing surprise of the family's Christmas-Hanukah celebration at the girls' godmothers' house?

To the amazement of The Papaya, Elf and The Grump, Dash, a 10-week-old Sheltie, joined the family last night. The girls took some convincing we were actually letting them take him home.

"Really? He's ours?" They kept saying. "Dad's not going to say, 'Just kidding?'"

(Even I'm not that cruel.)

And when it finally sunk in, Elf burst into tears of joy and Papaya kept bouncing like a jumping bean. The Grump, being the Grump, remained seated on the sofa, emphatically gesturing with her hands like an overwhelmed Larry King. "I can't believe it! I can't believe it!"

Dash was the gift Elf's godmother, Jackie, gave the girls -- the culmination of a surprise that has been in the works since August.

He's adorable, cuddly and smart. And best of all? He's already using the papers and going outside.

The girls, shocked and not believing Jackie's announcement that dog she's just placed in Elf's lap is actually theirs to take home, take some convincing.

Good Christian Hate Mail

2009-12-02T13:25:00.005-05:00

Today’s lesson in irony: Nothing pisses off people like humor. Yesterday the magazine I work for came out with its latest edition. My so-called humor column touched on religion and the important role family fights play in properly celebrating the holidays. I thought I made it clear that my theft of the “Keep Christ in Christmas” sign was a faith-filled, deeply respectful effort to mock my agnostic brother. But, no, it didn’t work. Yesterday I received an e-mail making it clear at least one Latina Catholic wants to reassemble the Inquisition and burn me at the stake for heresy.

Please. The line forms to the right.

“Your column this month was anything but funny,” she wrote (I’ve taken the liberty of cleaning up her multiple spelling and punctuation errors for clarity). “I believe the latest sport, or fun, is making fun of and ridiculing Catholics and their faith. I dare you to write a similar column making fun of either Islam or Judaism. That would probably get you flogged, not by your kind mother-in-law, but by the media or even the law.”

Because, as even Mel Gibson knows, a super-secret, anti-Catholic cabal of Jews and Muslims, closely working together in amicable fashion, control the world’s governments and media outlets. All that nonsense about Middle East conflict is just a front.

Sigh.

She wasn’t done administering her spiritual work of mercy. Announcing she was from South America, where Catholicism is “not only respected but nurtured and loved,” she concluded, “Please send me an e-mail or call me. I will be very glad to inform you more on the Church of which you have not a clue nor information.”

Because having a dozen related-by-marriage Latinas already pissed off at me and wanting to set me straight just isn’t enough for one man.

The poor lady apparently missed the irony at the heart of the column: that the most outwardly devout were the quickest to anger and judgment. This is why I generally avoid being deep; I’m usually the one that drowns.

Nevertheless I now feel compelled to assure everyone that the current state of my festering soul is not the result of profound ignorance. Indeed, it’s the finely honed product of twelve years of very expensive, private education – including 45 minutes daily of catechism and theology – in the nation’s best Catholic schools.

So happy holidays to you! (Oopsie!)

Christmas Prep

2009-11-30T13:39:00.005-05:00

Our traditional Christmas/Hanukah extravaganza at the girls’ godmothers’ house is this Saturday. As part of my holiday shopping for this event, I stopped at the Goodwill Superstore. You can officially put this one in the column of Stinky Skanky Things I Won’t Ever Do Again. The Goodwill Superstore Supersmelled like an old lady’s closet. An old lady who’s taken all of her personal hygiene items and locked them up tight into a five-year certificate of deposit bearing 2.97 percent interest and containing extreme penalties for raiding it early.

Super Duper Pooper Old Lady Smell. I kept expecting someone to come up to me and assault me with Bengay.

Of course, I can’t really tell you why I went to Goodwill. That would spoil Saturday’s grand, mind-blowing surprise (which woke me this morning at 2 a.m. with a minor anxiety attack). But I’m pretty sure that even after I blog next Monday about it, stopping at Goodwill this morning will still make absolutely no sense to anyone.

But that’s pretty much how all guys shop for Christmas. It’s why they invented the Internet – to keep losers like me from blocking the aisles, cluelessly scratching our butts, while we look fearfully around for the old hag carrying the Bengay.

Thanksgiving, however, was great fun. I even planned on adding a few more Thanksgiving leaves here over the weekend, but was having too much fun killing my brother-in-law and nephew on the Xbox to turn on a computer.

As we do each year the Sunday after Thanksgiving, we set aside yesterday for acquiring our Christmas tree. Annually it’s a big day. But this year, one word captures the day. Debacle.

Perhaps it was the fact that the tree kept falling on my head. Or the fact that we bought it too late in the day to put anything on it after I got back with a new tree stand. Or the fact that the girls were so sleep-deprived from the weekend that they kept bursting into tears when we told them we couldn't decorate it at 10 p.m. Or the fact that, in a moment of weakness during dinner, I let the girls decide that we’d change from white lights to colored lights for the tree. Or the fact that I went to Wal-Mart for the second time that day (the first foray produced extension cords and a power strip) and bought 900 lights for the tree. Or the fact that I still ran out three feet from the bottom.

So, this morning, I have a naked, crooked tree standing in the living room that is three-quarters covered in trailer park Christmas lights.

Call me a snob, but I’m opposed to colored lights on a tree. Most Americans don’t know this, but the color of lights you put on your Christmas tree determines whether you are middle or upper class. It’s one of those super secret class rules – like whether you wear flip flops to a White House State dinner.

You think Bill Gates has colored lights on his tree?

No.

But I do.

And I just did some Christmas shopping at Goodwill.

So what’s next in my bleak, middle class future?

I’m thinking a baseball cap that says “Gone Fishin!” and a black T-shirt that says in blurry letters: "If you can’t read this, you’re DUCKING FRUNK!"

Thanksgiving Leaf II

2009-11-24T09:40:00.005-05:00

This morning I give thanks for mental health and self-control. I’m going out on a limb here. People who lack mental health and self control are generally unaware of it. I could be a raving lunatic with a meth addiction who lives under a bridge with delusions of a stable middle class family life. But this morning, one of my persistent hallucinations (the one I call my wife) told me I needed to clean the bathrooms before my nephew and his girlfriend get here. And since hallucinations don’t generally encourage you to clean bathrooms, I’m going to guess that, today, I’m grounded in cold, harsh, toilet-brush wielding reality.

I mention gratitude for mental health and self control today for less humorous and more poignant reasons. On Sunday night I learned that a dear friend of mine was hospitalized for the third time for mental health issues. His personal struggle with illness strikes too close to home. We’re the same age, have the same educational backgrounds and have wonderful wives and children. Our childhoods were remarkably similar – private Jesuit prep schools up north, well-regarded universities, wildly dysfunctional Irish Catholic families and all the insanity that goes hand in hand with growing up with an alcoholic parent. He’s generous, funny, kind, gregarious and, otherwise, completely and utterly typical.

Yet somehow, through either the injustice of blind luck or some small blessing of which I am utterly unworthy, I have managed to find myself this gray November morning on a different, easier path. For reasons unclear, I find this truth more disturbing than reassuring. Whenever the phone rings with news of my friend’s latest struggles, a wave of melancholy laced with fear sweeps over me. Why not me? If this could so dramatically affect someone whose mental health I never questioned a decade ago, what keeps me a step removed from the abyss?

Whatever the causes, I am grateful for where I stand today. It is, in part, by choice. I have chosen to be a different man, a different husband, a different dad than my own remarkably self-destructive father. Yet, my friend has made similar choices. And so, it is also, in part, due to fate. Or luck. Or chance. (But not God’s hand, for that would be cruel injustice.)

Whatever it is called, I am thankful for it. And this morning I wish and pray that it touch all whom I love dearly.

Especially my friend and his family.

Thanksgiving Leaf I

2009-11-23T09:28:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite Thanksgiving traditions, strangely enough (given that I’m usually mocking such societal convention), involves giving thanks. Each Thanksgiving, Maria has the kids cut out autumn leaves from construction paper. As dinner begins at my in-laws’ home with the 30 billion individuals who manage to squeeze into the three tables we jam into the dining room (which spill into the foyer), we each take a leaf. Then we fight over the three dried-out markers we managed to find in the kitchen utility drawer in order to anonymously write those things for which we are most thankful. During dinner, my father-in-law (a.k.a. Abu) reads them off and we all try to guess who the particular leaf belongs to.

It’s my favorite tradition, in part, because I enjoy sneaking fake leaves into the basket. These forged leaves make specious announcements. My sisters-in-law give thanks for non-existent pregnancies and my brothers-in-law give thanks for coming to terms with their sexual orientations, which tend to make mashed potatoes squirt out of Abu’s nose.

But the whole tradition is also quite touching and so I’ll try to post some genuine leaves here this week.

Today I am grateful for Cody.

Cody is my neighbor’s white, frou-frou, yappy lap dog. This weekend, because my neighbors went to Disney, we took care of Cody.

In our house. Which, not counting my mother’s visit over the summer and the squirrel I had to get out of our attic last fall, is the first time we’ve knowingly let a crazed, allegedly domesticated animal co-habitate with us.

Cody had a bed that is far nicer than any I was permitted to use as a child. Yet he refused to use it, preferring instead to camouflage himself by lounging on our formal white sofa in the front living room. This made me profoundly nervous. While Cody was all white, the stuff that came out of his ass at various times over the weekend wasn’t. And, despite being frou-frou, Cody wiped less consistently than even The Grump.

I’ll admit it. I’m a bit high maintenance. I also maintain some pretty high expectations for my daughters. This, I suspect, makes me rather unbearable at times. Yet Cody’s presence here this weekend also gave me a glimpse of a side of my daughters I had recently been blind to. The Papaya, Elf and The Grump actually took care of Cody this weekend: walking him, feeding him and yes, picking up after him whenever his ass exploded. Most of the responsibility really was undertaken by Papaya, 10. And watching her with the dog made me realize what a smart and super responsible kid she is. Elf, 7, was profoundly sweet with Cody, reminding me what a generous and loving heart she has. And The Grump, 4, usually timid and fearful in new situations, had a blast, running through the house with Cody, reminding me of how much I treasure her joyously unmatched belly laugh.

Which is a rather roundabout way of saying that I’m really grateful for my three wonderful daughters and the opportunity, this past weekend, to see their hearts with new eyes.

Soccer Season Continues: Screech and The Return of Bam Bam

2009-11-10T10:14:00.012-05:00

My high risk foray into the field of athletics continues to go well. While everyone still pretends they’re not keeping score, The Super Shooters, which I am kick-ass-istant coaching, are completely undefeated. The team has only one tie, but it doesn’t really count. The weekend after that tie – right after we strategically brushed up on some defensive tactics like clothes-lining and tripping our opponents – we crushed the exact same team and sent their clipboard-carrying coaches home grumbling.

U-7 Coaching Rule: If you want all the other adults on the field to ridicule you, be sure to carry a clipboard and two different colored dry erase markers.

My assistant coaching responsibilities continue to challenge me to grow in unexpected ways. These duties, as I’ve mentioned before, largely entail running into the scary forest beside the field to retrieve balls that have been kicked in there. Recently, Skittles, who is usually a little slow on the uptake, realized this is how I spend the majority of my waking hours. So the little pendejo started purposefully kicking balls in there – as deep into the forest as he possibly could.

At least until I told him, in my official assistant coach voice, that I was going to kick his sorry ass into the scary forest if he kept booting the balls in there.

And while Bam Bam missed the first half of the season with his arm in a cast, he is now showing up to all practices and games, which has prompted me to consider breaking his other arm. Bam Bam plays soccer like I shoot pool with my pool-hustling father-in-law. Bam Bam and I just wail the little white ball hard, hoping something, somewhere will drop in our favor.

But pool has six pockets and soccer only has two goals, so it’s largely a losing strategy for Bam Bam, especially since he tends to wail the ball toward the wrong goal. This is where my assistant coaching responsibilities also come in handy. On the sidelines, I begin screaming like an old lady who's just had her purse snatched: “NO, BAM BAM! THE OTHER WAY! THE OTHER WAY!”

Bam Bam, of course, just keeps wailing cluelessly away, striving mightily to score for the other team.

Until we send Skittles in there to kick him into the forest.

But the eye opener on the field this past weekend wasn't Bam Bam. It was Screech, who played for the other team.

Screech got massively beaned in the stomach by a towering boot from our best player, Dash. It made me wince. It made me wince because, in warm ups just prior to the game, Dash beaned me in the back, which made my left kidney liquefy and pour out my ear.

Post-beaning, Screech went off like an air raid siren. He just stood there, mid-field, as this alarming, end-of-the-world, undgodly sound poured from his U-7 body. He didn’t move. The ref didn’t shrug or stop the game. Screech's own coach ignored it. Finally, some adult, fearing that actual planes might start bombing the park if he wasn’t silenced, escorted him from the field. It left most of us Super Shooter fans perplexed. In outrage we showered Screech with Attaboy applause as he left the field.

Five minutes later, Screech was back in.

Another Dash boot.

It took out Screech’s head.

The air raid alarm went off again. Again, the boy stood immobile mid-field. No one moved. The sound was ungodly. Like a Confederate rebel yell from an entire Virginia regiment. Or the collective sound an entire exploding planet makes when the Death Star visits.

Coach Anders turned around, his eyes wide, his mouth open, struggling to stifle an awkward laugh.

The Super Shooter compassion was gone. Spent like trailer trash lottery winnings. All of us finally understood why no one from the other team had raised a finger when the poor kid got beaned the first time.

He was a serial soccer screecher.

So we all just waited until the escort removed him from the field again.

To no applause.

So, as a highly trained assistant soccer coach, I offer two possible solutions.

Either sign Screech up for the pea knuckle league next spring.

Or toughen him up a little.

Perhaps New Mexico’s Women’s Soccer player Elizabeth Lambert can help. Just click here to view Gentle Elizabeth’s Rough and Tumble Anti Screech Solution Clinic.

Graduates get a hug and a certificate suitable for framing.

Just tell her Dumb Daddy sent you.

Wal-Mart High Fashion

2009-11-09T14:58:00.005-05:00

As a card-carrying member of the Bald Dudes of America, I know nothing about fashion. This is because the fashion industry never includes bald men as their models. (Really. Go look at yesterday’s flyers. You have a better chance of spotting Mama Cass in boxer briefs.) Because of this, the Bald Dudes of America have sworn to have nothing to do with fashion until we bring the fashion industry to its knees.

In the meantime, all I know about fashion can be captured in two Dumb Daddy Fashion Corollaries.

Fashion Corollary Number One: While I have no idea how you should dress, for a very clear idea of how you should NOT dress, visit a Super Wal-Mart on a Sunday afternoon. For a few handy examples, you can visit The People of Wal-Mart. I’m fairly sure all of these photos were taken at the Wal-Mart on Gunn Highway in Tampa, where I can buy my underwear, my ammo and my Cheerios all within 30 feet of each other (This, I’ve been told by my nephew’s girlfriend Alison, is illegal in sensible countries like Ireland and Azerbaijan).

Fashion Corollary Number Two: You can tell how fashionable a young woman is by the gargantuan size of her sunglasses. The bigger they are, the more fashionable the woman is. I know this because She Who Controls the Universe watches the Kardashians. And the Kardashians are both shameless and highly fashionable. And they have the strongest necks in the world. In fact, just one lens from most of their sunglasses could reverse global warming.

Which is why, while waiting for Maria to order a new box of contact lenses in the optometrist’s cage in the front of the Wal-Mart on Sunday afternoon, I seized the largest pair of sunglasses I could find from the women’s section. Busting a hernia while hoisting them to my face, I whirled about and shouted, “Look! I’m a Kardashian!”

You may think this is not very funny. But, I assure you, the optometrist lady laughed very hard. Maria, however, pretended not to know me.

But, I assure you, it was definitely not funny. I realized this the moment I took those pie plates off.

Then it hit me, nearly snuffing out my meaningless life: a suffocating wave of cheap women’s perfume.

Perfume which had been secretly coating those Kardashian glasses. Perfume which had once been super-douched onto the face of one of the Female People of Wal-mart. Perfume which was now super-douched by extension onto my face.

People of Wal-Mart Perfume was on me like that black alien goop that made Toby Maguire go disco in the last Spiderman movie.

On me. On my body. Specifically on my face. On the bridge of my nose, which I now wanted to saw off my bald head.

I reeked just like a woman in spandex with a tattoo teetering above her butt cleavage.

“What is that smell?” The Grump kept asking.

We went home and I dunked my head in isopropyl alcohol.

And so, on this very afternoon, I swear to you on my sweet grandmother’s grave: I shall never, ever be fashionable.

Even for cheap laughs.

Toy Hall of Fame

2009-11-06T08:54:00.002-05:00

Big news! The National Toy Hall of Fame announced yesterday that this year it was inducting the ball.

What? You didn’t know the Toy Hall of Fame existed?

Neither did I. It’s apparently in downtown Rochester right between the Furniture Hall of Fame and the Clothing Hall of Fame.

This is apparently what wealthy people do when the get together to brainstorm. They establish the Air Hall of Fame and then take 10 years to induct oxygen.

Since its opening in 1998, the Toy Hall of Fame has inducted Barbie, the Slinky, Mr. Potato Head, and the Atari Game System. (Click here to see all 44 of the Hall of Fame’s honored toys.) Last year they inducted the stick. They finally realized sticks are really just toy guns and swords when their front office secretary ran across a stick marked 20 percent off in Wal-Mart’s toy aisle.

The announcement that the ball was finally inducted -- long after the View Master, Etch-a-Sketch and Easy Bake Oven -- prompted me to wonder what the Toy Hall of Fame in Zimbabwe must look like.

So I googled “Zimbabwe Toy Hall of Fame.” Turns out it’s in some kid’s closet in Hwange. It consists of a rock, a stick, a pair of his mom’s panties…

And a ball.

I’ve traveled pretty extensively in the developing world, where the AA batteries for a Nintendo Game Boy (another 2009 inductee) cost a week’s salary. In one country I visited, the kids spent hours cutting reeds, stripping them of their leaves and taking turns bouncing them off a slab of concrete to see who could make them leap into the air and fly the farthest. Kind of like a third world version of shuffleboard (which, contrary to popular conception, is actually named after the people who play it in America).

And the kids played with balls. Balls were everywhere.

So do something really unexpected this holiday. Go into a toy store and buy a ball for your kid.

If they have them.

Hot Christmas Gift: The Homeless Doll

2009-11-04T08:19:00.006-05:00

It caught my attention yesterday.

But, first, a preface. We own American Girl dolls. Lots of them. We’ve even had brunch at the American Girl Store in Manhattan, where a dude named Carlos, wearing stripes, served me pudding with a daisy growing out of it.

I admit this with a double jogging stroller full of shame. The dolls cost $100 each. But it’s not my fault we own a zoo of them. Blame my mother-in-law. She gave The Papaya and Elf one each Christmas for the last six years.

Now, yesterday, I heard about American Girl’s latest doll, Gwen. Gwen has brown eyes and long, blonde hair. She comes with a tasteful white eyelet dress with embroidered accents, pink underwear and braided sandals.

But not a shopping cart.

Or a folded cardboard sign hand-printed in jagged, crazy letters: Will Work for Food.

Gwen, you see, is homeless. Her father abandoned the family. Her mother lost her job.

What does a homeless doll cost?

$95.

That’s like three full weeks standing at Stuccoville’s busiest intersection.

In the midst of an economic downturn that has thrown millions out of their jobs and homes, the doll is aimed at both pricking American girls’ social conscience and building awareness. The message? You too can wear a tasteful white eyelet dress with embroidered accents under the bridge of your choice.

And play the violin outside the subway for spare change.

All for $95.

None of which is being donated by American Girl to homeless children causes. (So, which pricks need pricking now?)

Just one question.

When you bring Gwen home, are you supposed to keep her outside?

Stick a Fork in It

2009-11-03T08:23:00.012-05:00

Okay, it's time to wrestle the fake spider webs off the bushes and shovel the putrifying pumpkin into the garbage. Halloween 2009 has been officially buried.

It was a great week. On Halloween morning the magazine staff -- as well as dozens of other Stuccovillians -- held a charitable 5K Race and Fun Run that raised about $16,000 for literacy programs at one of Tampa's poorest schools. A couple thousand (including spectators) showed up for the event, which was a great way to kick off the holiday season. The only minor downer the whole weekend? Why, it was the Stuccoville mama who confronted me on Friday in the produce aisle of Publix. She informed me she was refusing to participate in the run because it benefitted Just Elementary instead of Stuccoville Elementary, one of Tampa's wealthiest schools. I nodded politely, allowing the poor lunatic to embarrass herself. In hindsight, I regret not retorting: "Is it also your policy, dear, to participate in only those Thanksgiving food drives that allow your kids to go home with all the dehydrated mashed potatoes?"

Alas, Just Elementary is getting all the money, foolish woman! And, as your consolation prize, you are welcome to inhale my affluent left butt cheek through your collagen-enhanced lips!

Halloween wouldn't be Halloween without at least one frightening Stuccoville Mama in an SUV, would it?

The weekend, however, was still a great one, proving both merry and scary, as the following photos show:

The Papaya, 10, went as French Toast. Unfortunately, all of Stuccoville's brainy adults kept guessing she was an artist, which put the poor girl in a foul mood. "What artist walks around inside two pieces of bread?" she kept asking incredulously at the end of every driveway.

The Grump went as "Kimono Cutie," which really was just a 4-year-old's cleaned up version of "Gallavanting Geisha."

And Elf, 7, went as a purple witch.

All the kids on the cul-de-sac, gather for a pre-Trick or Treating photo shoot.

And, finally:

As I said, it was both merry and scary. Our neighbor, Tim, showed up at the block party with a yellow wig (all agreed he seemed much happier as a blonde). Of course, when a guy dresses as a woman, it is part of The Official Gentleman's Code of Conduct that all other guys must cop a cheap feel.

Which made Tim even happier.

You Should Have Seen Hotcakes

2009-10-30T14:22:00.002-04:00

Stuccoville Elementary had its Storybook Parade this morning. In addition to another opportunity for the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s office to write up multiple parking violations, the morning featured the school’s youngest students dressing as characters from storybooks. The kids in fourth and fifth grade, however, had to dress as words.

Hard to believe, The Papaya (pictured below, on the right, with classmate Amélie) chose a food.

Dumb Daddy thanks his neighbor, Nikki, for lending us her toast costume, enabling the Dumbster to focus on actual paying work instead of building a stinking cup for “cupcake.” He encourages Nikki to get working now on The Papaya’s Chicken Strips outfit for next year’s middle school parade.

And if we don’t get the chance to spend some quality time together before All Hallow’s Eve, I wish all my readers a big, fat, hairy BOO.

Cackles Becomes Homeless

2009-10-28T08:34:00.012-04:00

There is nothing so utterly practical and entirely hope-less as an artificial Christmas tree.

Unless you’re in Florida at Halloween. Here, because it’s still pushing 90 and the air remains armpit humid, a lot of people have given up on real pumpkins. Instead they display orange, spraypainted, hollow globs of Styrofoam that, yes, look like shiny, thoroughly fake pumpkins. Some you can buy already, perfectly carved and outfitted with a light.

Sigh.

If we’re so obsessed with ridding our homes of mess and simplifying life – wringing all the hassle-filled joy out of it – why, instead of children, don’t we all just buy mannequins?

We carved our pumpkin, which The Papaya named Cackles, on Saturday. We bought it the previous Sunday from the Scout patch. We put off carving it to preserve its longevity. Yet, when we got inside, we already found a big, black spot on its bottom. I carved it completely out, hoping to arrest the decline.

But today we had to give up on Cackles. Because Elf kept gagging while eating her Cinnamon Toast Crunch, he had to be pulled off the table. I put him outside, which means he won’t make it to Halloween.

In just four days, poor Cackles had become covered in black splotches, had some type of disturbing hairy stuff growing out of its nose and was emitting a nauseating stench.

Which is okay if you are a guy over 60, but is absolutely not okay if you’re a pumpkin.

The damn thing has become so scary, I don’t even want to stick my hand in it to light the candle.

So Cackles now sits on the sidewalk, where he will slowly melt, caving in, turning into a orangeish-grayish, fetid pumpkin puddle.

Because Florida does this to all living things, despite the plastic surgeons.

Meanwhile all the prefabricated pumpkins sit perkily on people’s porches.

Looking entirely fake and dead-less.

The anti-Halloween.

Photo: The Grump, 4, "helps" with the carving. She found the whole process totawy gwoss.

Taming the Wild Things (or Safety First, Part II)

2009-10-26T09:44:00.017-04:00

It was Wednesday. We were standing beneath the Tree of Knowledge. I had been out of the loop and was catching up on the latest Stuccoville scuttlebutt. The school had nearly exploded the day prior – artificial nails flying everywhere, saline implants springing leaks and athletic bras whipped off and torqued in homicidal rage around other women’s necks.

Yes, it’s Stuccoville Drive Smackdown, Part II. (Do click here for Part I.)

I had foolishly believed that matters couldn’t become more insane. I had forgotten an important truth taught me by my grandma: If you remember that humans share 97 percent of their DNA with wild animals, you won’t ever be disappointed with their behavior. (Unfortunately, grandma never got around to explaining why only one percent of us is kept in cages.)

But back to the Tree of Knowledge and all the fun, homicidal rage.

“On Monday and Tuesday, it got absolutely insane out there,” said one mom, shaking her head.

“One crazy mother just parked right in the middle of the road!” added another. “Completely blocking all the traffic! She just left her car there and announced she was going into the school to pick up her child. No one could get by and all hell broke loose."

“But it got even worse on Wednesday!” one added. Her voice fell to a whisper. “Someone called the sheriff!”

Cue the little boy dressed in the wild animal costume. He leaps onto a fallen tree. King Max shakes his metal scepter and screams, “Let the wild rumpus begin!”

There was roaring. There was howling. There were fully grown trees uprooted and tossed everywhere.

OK, it was only traffic cones.

“Who called the sheriff?” I said.

But the moms didn’t answer. Instead they looked around warily and their eyes widened in fear. Another mom, a Tree of Knowledge regular, stepped forward. Her voice boomed. “I CALLED THE SHERIFF!”

Her name is Judith.

If this were a J.K. Rowling novel, her name would be Tilly Trufflebuttom. But it is not. This tale is of far greater significance that a mere orphan saving the world from the Dark Lord. This is a paradoxical morality play about how the enforcement of posted laws leads to the abandonment of rules of basic decency and decorum.

But why Judith?

Until I saw Where the Wild Things Are with The Papaya and Elf this weekend, I had decided I would instead call this Stuccoville Mama Margaret Thatcher.

Largely because they exude the same gentleness.

But after watching the movie, I decided to call her Judith.

While Judith was only one female Wild Thing in the film, it is an apt name nonetheless. Wild Thing Judith is Madame Doom and Gloom. For Wild Thing Judith, there is nothing so bad that couldn’t get a whole lot worse. And, like our Stuccoville Judith, when presented with a glass that is half full, she will not insist it is half empty. Instead she will point out that the glass itself is nowhere near as nice as the set she purchased just last Tuesday, half-off, at Bed Bath and Beyond and she pities the fool who owns it.

A word, however, in Stuccoville Judith’s defense. Unlike the rest of us, who stand around whispering and shrugging politely in the face of foolishness and contrary opinions, Judith fiercefully stands up for what she believes. Like fire and brimstone conservatives who bellow their views in crowded rooms because, of course, everyone present agrees with their brilliance, Judith expresses her opinions fearlessly – with no concern for their impolitic nature. And to hell with those who disagree. In response, we smile politely, raise the white flag of verbal surrender and perhaps throw in a nervous cough.

I actually kind of respect Judith for that. And for the fact that she could crush me between her thumb and index finger.

“I CALLED THE SHERIFF!” Judith bellowed again. “I was tired of those crazy mothers. Someone had to do something. It was for the kids’ safety!”

An image flickered through my brain: that of Judith’s older daughter, pile-driving her scooter through clods of little children, screaming, “EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME!” Careening blindly around Stuccoville Drive’s corners.

Without a bicycle helmet on.

Yet while two sheriff’s deputies did show up on Wednesday, they most certainly did not show up because Judith called them.

They showed up because Stuccoville Elementary’s principal called them. The principal called them after a group of fearful helicopter hellions trouped into his office, all reporting the same thing: “There is a tall, blonde, crazy woman screaming at people and throwing traffic cones at minivans on Stuccoville Drive.”

A description that sounded suspiciously like Wild Thing Judith. (Wild Thing Judith denies the cone-heaving allegations although, in the interest of a good story, I advised her to go along with that version.)

Yet the principal, increasingly nervous about the matter, called the deputies to keep an eye on Wild Thing Judith and, in his words, “to keep traffic flowing smoothly.”

So what did Hillsborough County’s finest do on Wednesday to improve traffic flow? They completely shutdown the turnabout at the end of Stuccoville Drive, bringing all vehicles on the road to a complete, dead stop.

Called in to restore order, the sheriff's deputies produced unmitigated, migraine-producing chaos. They barked at the helicopter hellions. They wrote tickets outside their jurisdiction. They told the hellions – in no uncertain terms – that they absolutely could NOT park in a public parking lot which lacked posted, no parking signs. And, for added fun, they shut down the only place any car, desiring to comply with their orders, could turn the hell around.

And the helicopter hellion lemmings kept pouring forward, crushing the ones in front of them against the wall built by the deputies at the cliff's edge.

"We're saving you!" cried the heroic police.

The principal made a helpless robocall to all Stuccoville parents that night. It offered the Rodney King plea: “Since the cops are morons, please, can’t we all just get along?”

Really.

Is it too much to hope for some order amid the chaos? Isn’t there someone – perhaps a king – who can help?

Where the Wild Things Are offered a sobering lesson.

Wild Thing Carol: “If you’re not a king, what are you then?”

Little Boy Max: (long, thoughtful pause): “I’m a Max.”

Wild Thing Carol: “Well, that’s not very much. Is it?”

So today, because I couldn’t find a mother for all these Wild Things, I stole The Grump’s sidewalk chalk.

And drew Max's heart at the end of Stuccoville Drive.

Photo: The photo represents my hopeful attempt to tame the Wild Things at Stuccoville Elementary (The C, by the way, stands for Carol.). If it worked for Max, maybe it'll work for me. Now grab some sidewalk chalk and draw Max's heart somewhere else where the Wild Things need taming. Send me the photo at cbarret3@tampabay.rr.com and I'll post them here.

Unmanly Baked Goods

2009-10-22T19:35:00.003-04:00

She Who Controls the Universe handed me the list and sent me to the grocery store after dinner. “Get some Twinkies,” she added.

It threw me for a loop. We’re not a Twinkie family. That family lived in the Midwest sometime in the 60s and wore embarrassing clothes.

But another student in Elf’s class had a birthday celebration today. Turning 7, he handed out Twinkies. It was her first Twinkie. Elf stood up on her chair after dinner. “Listen, everyone!” she demanded. “I had my first Twinkie today and it was…” Elf paused and rolled her eyes ecstatically. It made me anxious.

“Delicious!” she concluded.

“Oh!” said Maria (similar orgasmic eye roll). “I ate Twinkies all the time when I was a kid.”

Okay, so that family didn’t live in the Midwest. It lived in Puerto Rico sometime in the 60s and wore embarrassing clothes.

So tonight Maria, who was also raised on Spam, thought she’d present the girls with an extra special, surprise treat: A cream-filled spongecake shaped just like a…

Twinkie.

“Get some Twinkies,” she whispered.

I didn’t expect my reaction. As I got to the supermarket checkout with my groceries, the cashier was a teenage girl and the bagger was a teenage guy. I put the rest of my groceries on the conveyer belt: organic lowfat milk, bananas, four bagels, organic yogurt, two loaves of whole wheat bread with extra fiber.

And Twinkies.

I suddenly felt extraordinarily self-conscious. What if they thought I was some loser bald guy, picking up my own 10-pack box of Twinkies? They’d think I was heading home, completely alone, to flop into a recliner, put some pathetic sitcom on the television and morosely stuff Twinkies into my mouth.

Could anything else in Publix have screamed "unmanly" louder? (No, they don't stock lace panties.) Hell, even tampons would have been better. At least it would suggest I had a woman I could ravish after my organic yogurt.

“I just want to go on the record here that I’m not a Twinkie buyer,” I announced to the cashier and bagger. “My wife is making me buy these.”

As I swiped my credit card, I caught the cashier throwing a silent look to her manly bagger.

“Loser,” it said.

“Loser Twinkie Buyer,” his look back said.

“Thank you very much,” I responded.

And I took my reusable shopping bags filled with my food and my f**** Twinkies and went the hell home.

Safety First

2009-10-20T11:49:00.010-04:00

I shift my bike into higher gear and I ride by them: a hovering Helicopter Hellion screaming at a sheriff’s deputy. The spectators are clearly divided. Those driving past glare at the crew-cutted nazi. Those walking or riding bikes give Deputy Truth, Justice and the American Way high fives.

The confrontation began percolating some nine years before. It’s a complex tale involving insane parents, a dysfunctional society, an engineer, a bureaucrat and a grouch.

Stuccoville Elementary is car constipated. HOA officials blame the school district’s abandonment of Stuccoville Elementary’s original traffic/bus plan. A school district bureaucrat blames the engineer, who didn’t install a necessary median cut or insure that all the buses could actually turn on the school’s internal roads.

So the bureaucrat’s solution?

Gate and padlock a road the district built to actually move traffic. “It’s for the safety of the kids,” she said – a secular, non-thinker’s, how-dare-you-challenge-my-authority shrug, akin to the churchly, “It’s a mystery.” One, after all, can’t question a mystery. Or the safety of kids, no matter how annoying they are.

Stuccoville Elementary needs about 100 more parking spaces. There is inadequate room for the SUVs and minivans of Homeroom Moms who fervently long to pass fulfilling days photocopying worksheets, compiling class memory books, clipping Box Tops and opening Jell-O cups in the cafeteria. The congestion is aggravated by the Helicopter Hellions. Convinced their children are abduction magnets, these Nervous Nellies won’t let their children out of their sight. (Attention, Helicopter Hellions: O’Henry’s The Ransom of Red Chief was required reading, but you slept through that class.) And because the district won’t bus kids within walking distance of school, the Helicopter Hellions must drive the buggers to school, park on all the sidewalks and carry their little geniuses to their desks, where they carefully put down the science projects they completed for their children the night before.

And at pick up, the Hellions won’t use the official pick-up car line at the school’s front. How can you even expect such a thing? It snakes a quarter mile down the road and they have far better uses of their time than the fools who make that line! Plus, the fifteen minute wait under the sun could render their precious abduction-magnet progeny into little puddles of sugar water.

The Helicopter Hellions must dismount.

But these umbilically-challenged lunatics aren’t entirely to blame. School district officials knew there was inadequate parking. Like school performance, it’s an easy enough, if socially impolitic thing, to predict. Any school’s performance and levels of parental participation – even a school’s percentage of Homeroon Moms and Helicopter Hellions – is a direct correlation of the wealth or poverty within its boundaries.

The solution?

Build more parking places at schools in rich neighborhoods.

Yet, in a dysfunctional, race-obsessed nation whose citizens all pretend they’re middle class, it’s an explosive idea. Race, after all, is also unfortunately yet significantly correlated to wealth and poverty. Build 100 more parking spaces at wealthier schools and a month won’t go by before a reporter asks why the district builds fewer parking spaces at schools who largely serve minority students. Then the American media race circus rolls into town and politicians dive for the exits.

It’s just better off and less expensive all around for school board members to pretend all schools have no parents who volunteer. And then give continuous media interviews insisting schools can’t succeed without high levels of parental involvement.

But the lack of parking was creating hives at Stuccoville Elementary in its early years. How, after all, would our gifted children access their gelatin?

Homeroom mothers made do, parking en masse down both lanes of a side street, Stuccoville Drive, which lies adjacent to the school.

Enter the grouch.

His name was Nathan. He was an elderly fellow, a retiree from New York, who served on Stuccoville’s HOA. Nathan proudly proclaimed that he didn’t cast his votes to support what he personally wanted. Fervently devoted to the democratic ideal, Nathan – Stuccoville's personal Pericles – instead voted to support what Stuccoville’s fine residents wanted.

Nathan lived in the neighborhood that bordered Stuccoville Drive. And all that Homeroom Mom and Helicopter Hellion parking along the road drove the poor man bananas. Those inconsiderate mothers parked on the grass. They broke sprinkler heads. They kept ambulances from racing quickly to his door.

So he quietly had the local community development district demand that the county ban parking there.

And standing.

On both sides of Stuccoville Drive.

Nathan wasn’t quite done spreading the love.

A year later, faced with a petition signed by 400 homeowners for the installation of a sidewalk down Stuccoville Drive to allow kids to safely walk to the school, Pericles voted to oppose the sidewalk.

So when Nathan died four years ago, I admit, I exhaled a gentle – if profoundly guilty – sigh of relief.

And the Stuccoville HOA created a Good Neighbor Award and named it after him.

But the Homeroom Moms and the Helicopter Hellions still parked in droves along Stuccoville Drive. They parked on the grass. They parked on the grass beneath Good Neighbor Nathan’s No Parking signs. They did K turns on Stuccoville Drive, regularly threatening to smush its pedestrians. They parked on the sidewalk Good Neighbor Nathan opposed. They regularly threw their car doors open, nearly blasting school children, riding their bicycles to and from Stuccoville Elementary, off Good Neighbor Nathan’s sidewalk.

So Stuccoville’s HOA and the school principal decided this year that it was high time for a Stuccoville Drive Smackdown.

Cue the crazy mom, shaking a ticket beneath Good Neighbor Nathan’s No Parking/No Standing sign, shouting at a smirking deputy, telling him what a jerk he was being.

But now the world is better. A few dozen tickets solved the problem. Right?

Of course not. This is Stuccoville.

The Homeroom Moms and Helicopter Hellions no longer park their cars on Stuccoville Drive to get out and pick up their abduction magnets. Instead, they have joined their mighty forces together and forged a merry-go-round of roving SUVs and minivans, circling the end of Stuccoville Drive, not parking, not standing, all 100 of them, looping endlessly up and down the narrow road, jabbering on their cell phones, waiting for their kids to walk down Stuccoville Drive to their looping cars, blowing their horns at the impassable traffic bottleneck, stomping on the brakes to avoid hitting the kids on bicycles, stomping on the brakes to avoid hitting their own kids, walking down the road – in the middle of the road – to their looping cars driven by their loopier mamas.

All because of insane parents, a dysfunctional society, an engineer, a bureaucrat and a grouch.

But really.

It’s for the safety of the kids.

Balloon Boy Deflates

2009-10-16T10:02:00.010-04:00

As an official blogifier, I must uphold the sacred blogificatory code of conduct to fan the flames of our latest national obsession.

So, I turn to the Balloon Boy Show this morning.

It has reaffirmed American parents’ faith in their children and their parenting.

Last night, during a highly important interview with Wolf Blitzer on Larry King Live, someone in Balloon Boy's family - or perhaps it was Wolf Blitzer - audibly farted (Don't believe me? Click here. The explosion occurs roughly 44 seconds into the clip.). While the daring attempt to keep the balloon aloft failed, it was, however, the most trenchant observation ever made on that show. Yet, like awkward public farts throughout this great land, it was simply ignored by all involved. "Pay no heed to that fart," demanded the awkward silence that followed. "It really didn't happen."

Which simply indicates what a lousy journalist Wolf Blitzer is. Didn't it demand follow up? Wasn't it in the national interest to pinpoint the farter? Wasn't it as newsworthy as the whole Balloon Boy story?

(Isn't it all really about hot air?)

I certainly hope Congress establishes some kind of Warren Commission to get to the bottom of this - or at least identify the right bottom. After all, we need something to keep us logging onto our favorite Internet news sites ten times a day.

And this morning, during a highly important interview on the Today Show, Balloon Boy tossed his confetti on national TV (Click here; it appears at roughly 6:05 in the clip.) Yes, he asked his mom for a cup – perhaps he meant the Super Big Gulp one right next to the cameraman. And then Balloon Boy barfed, forcing poor Al Roker to add a little spewing face right above Colorado to his national weather map.

Isn’t it time to stuff the entire family back into that box in the attic?

Coming Full Circle

2009-10-13T21:41:00.006-04:00

It being Rocktober, She Who Controls The Universe dragged me to another concert this past Saturday. You’d think after taking me to see Journey last year, she’d have learned her lesson.

But no. She’s still got it in her head to reform me.

It could have been worse. The woman likes Def Leppard, for gahd sake. Fortunately it was U2’s 360° tour.

It featured a big spaceship, the founder of Cirque du Soleil speaking from the International Space Station, dozens of masks of Aung San Suu Kyi and a videotape of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who apparently took one too many bong hits.

Oh, and 70,000 drunk people. Which was a record for Raymond James Stadium but not downtown Tampa.

It was a poignant moment for me. I had come full circle. So I’m pretty sure the tour was named in my honor.

Seventeen years ago, I attended my first U2 concert in Washington, DC: the Achtung Baby tour. I took a woman I was trying to impress. I can’t remember a thing about her, but I think her name was Brooke and she was beautiful and cool. She was the roommate of my housemate’s girlfriend. But, I knew as only geeks know, the only way she would go out with me was if I did something impressive. I had an extra ticket, so I took Brooke to see U2.

Brooke never spoke to me again.

Maybe it was because I just stood there the whole night. Maybe it was because I stayed sober and didn’t offer to buy her a beer - or 12. Or maybe it was because I had also brought along my sister Maura and brother Brendan, who also just stood there with Brooke and me all night, stone-cold sober, scratching beneath their chins and really enjoying themselves.

Who’s Gonna Ride Wild Horses?

Definitely not Brooke. She almost took the metro home.

Who could blame her? I should have read the Rock Concerts for Dummies book before that outing.

Seventeen years later, I’m much wiser. I got married before going to any more concerts. And my wife, who has victimized me with her fall concert series the past two years, is beautiful and cool, if a little neurotic about vacuuming. We went to U2 with our neighbors, Tim and Nikki, who were actually good company because they didn’t get sloppy drunk and try to force me to dance like Maria’s brother did at Journey.

And we all politely took turns sitting next to He Who Spilleth Over, a supremely large dude, who, wedging himself into his seat, pushed all of his impressive lardity high up between his nipples and his chin, where it flopped over into the adjacent seats. He Who Spilleth was an obsessive U2 fan. The Spillster had memorized all the song’s lyrics and screamed them at the top of his lungs, while either (1) holding his beer aloft with his left hand or (2) holding a chubby finger pointed straight up into the air in extreme excitement.

At one point, after a series of particularly high notes that Bono handled impressively but which almost made He Who Spilleth toppeleth, he turned to his girlfriend and screamed, “God! We suck!”

But The Spillster kept on singing. He was happy, so I let him be. And at the end, his girlfriend dragged him joyfully out of his seat. “Come on!” she demanded. “It’s time to cut the umbilical cord!”

I had a really great time.

So Brooke, if you’re out there, please do the right thing and return my $45. I want to take my mother to see Bruce Springsteen.

October's Business Sponsor

2009-10-12T11:49:00.005-04:00

Here at Dumb Daddy Diaries, we allow only the nation's most discriminating companies to advertise with us. (And by discriminating, we don't mean in the traditional southern sense of the word; we mean it in the traditional snobby northern sense of the word.)

This month, we welcome Doc Morton's Vegetable Elixir! Now, with Doc Morton's, even the pickiest eaters can get their nutritional needs met (Click on the image to view their ad). As Susan Castor, a Vermont mom and dedicated Dumb Daddy reader, testifies, "With Doc Morton's Vegetable Elixir, my kids won't have no brain damage no more! Doc Morton's even made my husband's and my foreplay into part of a well-balanced, nutritional diet. Thanks, Doc Morton's!"

Boo Your Neighbors

2009-10-09T10:56:00.012-04:00

It’s time to boo your neighbors.

At least the ones you like.

Deed restrictions forbid me from leaving the confines of Stuccoville, so I don’t know how widespread this custom is in less civilized corners of the barbarian realm. But it’s been quite the rage in Stuccoville for the last decade.

To properly boo one’s neighbors, you have to purchase a cheap plastic pumpkin, fill it with Halloween chokables from the Dollar Store and throw in some candy (if you use lollipops or carrot sticks, you’re a loser). You also must include a poem with Proper Booing Directions and a little 8½ by 11 poster that reads: “We’ve been Booed!” (They hang this in their front window to avoid multiple booings.) If you’re too lazy to create these on your own, you can click here and here.

Then you pick your victims. Sneak onto their porches after dark. Leave the pumpkin on the doormat. Unlike the bag full of poop, however, don’t light the pumpkin on fire so the homeowners panic and stomp it out; it might melt the chocolate. Then you ring the doorbell and run like hell.

The children of the victimized home find your treat-filled pumpkin and scream with excitement. The parents, however, moan. This is because the Neighbor Booing Tradition is firmly rooted in our great country’s deep-seated fear of breaking chain letters - no matter how annoying and ridiculous their demands. The instructional how-to-boo poem informs the victims they have two days to boo two other homes. And if they don’t?

The wrath of God.

Okay, it’s actually just an implied threat. If you don’t boo others in two days, your house will get haunted by the evil spirit of your great-great mother-in-law. Or the bank will finally get around to foreclosing on your dump and reselling it to some random trick or treater for a stale popcorn ball and a full-size Snickers bar. Or the booers will come back with that flaming bag of poop.

Despite this, a huge number of boo-ed people surreptitiously cheat. They take their pumpkin full of candy and fake Dracula teeth and don’t pass the sweetness and bloodletting on.

How do I know? Do the math.

If only one person begins all the booing on Oct. 1, by Halloween 32,768 homes will have been booed. Thus, it would take only 183 of Florida 18.3 million residents, beginning the nonsense on Oct. 1, to boo every single home in the state.

Yet I assure you there are thousands of mobile homes in Tampa Bay alone that lack a We’ve Been Booed sign.

Really.

Instead, they all have signs that read, “Stop mocking us!” or “My trash is actually multicolored, so I’m a little confused.” or “My home is a tornado magnet!”

But not: We’ve been booed.

So an awful lot of the booed have been cheating.

So call out the dogs. And grab your flaming bags of poop. Halloween is on, my friends.

Photo: The Papaya boos her neighbors. The bizarre look on her face suggests she snorted all the straws filled with colored sugar on the way over.

R.I.P. Facebook

2009-10-08T09:25:00.009-04:00

I killed Facebook. It made me do it. It became like a cocktail party of teetotaling nerds.

I played a role no doubt. A few months ago, right after I posted a profile update that called for the tech geeks of the world to develop digital napalm with which I could scorch every field in Farmville, someone told me I could block certain people and posts. It was perfect for me: a spineless way of unfriending people in a friendly way.

I badly needed this option. Just a few weeks before I had secretly unfriended a local politician. Despite having one bazillion Facebook friends, he caught me and sent me a new friend request. I could read between the lines. They screamed: “You unfriended me behind my back, you snake! Let’s see if you’re man enough now to ignore my friend request!”

I friended him again.

Now, with my new, handy-dandy blocking capabilities, I could disappear my Friends like some Argentine dictator. A ruthless Facebook genocide commenced.

I have just over 207 Facebook friends, which is approximately 205 more than I have in real life. Of the lot, 170 post absolutely no status updates. Ever. Of the remaining vocal 30, only 5 are guys. And within minutes, I had blocked every individual who spent the hours between 7-10 p.m. every night playing Mafia Wars and Farmville or and letting me know the latest cow milking badge they earned.

Three of the five guys were killed off next.

The local politician disappeared. Don’t get me wrong. He’s actually a really nice guy. It’s just that we inhabit different extremes of the political spectrum. And he kept Facebook imploring me to donate to his campaign, which was a little like Glenn Beck repeatedly begging Ted Kennedy for a naked backrub.

Blocked.

And one of my former students from Washington, DC. The one with five children from three different women. The one who kept posting photos of the latest being he had impregnated with his acidic, brainless seed.

Blocked.

And then there was the perpetually traveling retired dude. I think he got related to me by marrying someone with my first cousins’ mother's DNA. I also suspect one of his daughters made the mistake of buying the fellow an iPhone and now hates herself. Her dad began documenting his every breathing moment on Facebook, along with photos. “Just finished clipping my yellow toenails and am applying the fungicide!” he’d write. It was quickly going downhill. In another month, he’d be posting, “WARNING: Just took a Category 3 dump in an Arby’s near Potomac Mills in Virginia. Be sure to buy lunch at Wendy’s instead.”

But he was kind of related to me, so, at first, I felt too guilty to block him. Then came the last straw. “I’m tired of all those so-called Americans who go to public school for FREE and won’t stand to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Stand and say it or get the hell out of the country!” he wrote.

I momentarily considered my two Facebook friends who are Quakers. They seemed far nicer than Yellow Toenail Guy.

Blocked.

Truth be told, there were only three Facebook friends whose status updates I found regularly worthy of server space. One was a gay guy out in California (another former student) whose posts are so profoundly weird it’s like attending a freak show for free. Definitely a keeper. Another is my friend Roly in Virginia, who apparently is married to the same woman that I am. Sympathy vote. And then there’s a local reporter for the St. Peterburg Times whose profile postings are deliciously satirical, snarky and self-deprecating. She’s my only hope of claiming to know someone famous.

I looked over my remaining Facebook status updates. They consisted entirely of women. Women wishing their own children and nieces and nephews a happy birthday. Women posting how wonderful last night’s Glee episode was. Women wishing each other a happy Yom Kippur and a fulfilling fast.

Facebook is dead.

Thank God.

My Latest Athletic Feet

2009-10-07T08:56:00.002-04:00

My apologies for neglecting my blogification duties. The Mother Ship has swooped in from Scranton and the 15 minutes I commit daily to this space has been absorbed by her daily demand that I drive her to McDonald’s or Burger King for a medium diet coke with two lemons. (Burger King does not have lemons.) I am particularly fascinated by The Mother Ship’s diet, which illustrates that a human being can survive into their 70s solely on Publix Chocolate Trinity ice cream, apples slathered in peanut butter, an occasional bagel smeared with butter and a medium diet coke - with an occasional lemon to keep scurvy at bay.

But my big news this morning is this: I am now assistant coach of Elf’s U7 soccer team, the Super Shooters.

In keeping with October’s scarifying theme, this development is horrifying. Prior to these past two weeks, my greatest athletic accomplishment was back in the 1990s when I served as moderator of a bowling club at the Washington, DC high school where I taught. (To spare myself further shame, I shall not even admit to having been appointed another high school’s JV basketball coach. When that school administration discovered that - despite teaching social studies (the academic realm of all fools hired to coach) - I couldn’t dribble with my left hand, I was immediately elevated to Athletic Director to minimize the damage to their sports program.)

I shall probably be blogging about this at length this season, so I won’t go into all the gruesome details today. Just some highlights I've learned during my past two-weeks as assistant coach:

1. Only the head coach gets a whistle. Assistant coaches, being lower on the evolutionary coaching ladder, must grunt and wave their arms for attention.

2. At our first practice, Pepita, a little girl built like a Dora the Explorer fireplug, threatened to kill me with her judo hands.

3. Asher likes to fall dramatically after every kick. This is good because it takes everyone’s attention off the fact that the ball didn’t go into the goal again.

4. Skittles has the attention-span and listening skills of a Beagle puppy.

5. Asher and Skittles like to be partners for every drill so they can poke the crap out of each other when coach isn’t looking.

6. Bam Bam plays with a broken arm in a red cast. We’ve told Bam Bam’s father that Bam Bam can’t play because Bam Bam could brain someone with his red cast. Barney Rubble still brings him to practice anyway.

7. While no one keeps score in the league, we killed the other team 9-3 in our first game this past Saturday. Elf and I, however, missed it because The Mother Ship demanded I drive her to Naples over the weekend to visit my nephew and buy her a diet coke at McDonald’s down there.

8. Burger King does not have lemons.

D Day

2009-09-30T08:43:00.005-04:00

I went to pick up The Grump, 4, at Primp and Proper Praise Jesus PreSchool yesterday. Hanging on the bulletin board was a large sheet of lined, white paper with 13 lines that all began with “D is for…” Each of the children had been interrogated by Miss Daisy and their answers had been written into the spaces allotted for them.

“D is for dinosaurs,” said Cole.

“D is for Dalmatians,” said Savannah.

The Grump?

“D is for dragon dungeons.”

I smirked in doubt. While the alliteration was dynamically dramatic, I found it highly unlikely The Grump knew the word dungeon. She’s just not that into grunge yet.

But it was on the paper. Miss Daisy had written it. And so Grump must have said it. Miss Daisy wouldn’t lie right after morning prayer, right?

Later that afternoon, Maria opened my office door. “I’m absolutely mortified,” she said.

I looked at her.

“Today was D Day at Prim and Proper Praise Jesus PreSchool,” she said. “When Miss Daisy came to her and asked her what D was for, do you know what Grump said?”

“Dragon dungeons.”

Maria looked at me like I was crazy. She shook her head. “Grump said ‘Doofus.’ And then Grump asked me why all the other kids looked at her for saying it.”

I wracked my brain, searching for the culprit who had brought such great shame to the family name. “Who says doofus around here? The Papaya?”

“It’s the Disney channel,” Maria said.

But her face’s guilty look gave it away. Suddenly it clicked.

“You say it all the time!” I said. “Doofus is the word you use to describe all 3,000 men that are related to you!”

She tried to wave me off. “Tomorrow you need to apologize to Miss Daisy,” she said. “So she doesn’t think we’re a bunch of Appalachian hicks.” She paused. “You just can’t tell her I say it.”

Because it's a loving husband's responsibility to fall on all of his wife's verbal grenades.

And because it’s far more believable if Miss Daisy thinks I’m the Appalachian hick.

Maria left my office. I could hear her drilling The Grump. “If tomorrow is E Day, what are you going to say, Grump?”

“Elf,” she said.

"That's right."

We're keeping Grump home for F Day.

P.E. or Just Plain Poo P?

2009-09-29T08:31:00.007-04:00

I was sitting, deep breathing in my transcendental meditation chair, obsessed with a tickle on my earlobe (yes, Dave, you should try it), when my home phone, my cell phone and my business phone all rang consecutively. The same message was left on each.

“This is the secretary from Stuccoville Elementary calling. During her P.E. class your daughter Elf had a run-in with a large mud puddle. (muffled laughter) And the mud puddle won. Elf’ll need new pants, a shirt, socks and sneakers brought to the office. She’ll be waiting in the infirmary for you.”

Because sitting perfectly healthy, mud-spattered children next to Swine Flu Wheezing Rotavirus Hurling Blorgs is the logical thing to do. (What’s wrong with these people? Did they spend their childhoods failing basic moron screenings like Sesame Street’s One of These Things is Not Like the Other tests?)

I gathered up Elf’s clothes (bringing two pairs of everything to avoid tearful fashion miscues) and left the house. Then, halfway to school, I turned the minivan around to come back and get the camera.

Because the Blogods willed it.

I found Elf sitting on butcher block paper in the infirmary, ponytail and smile still intact. She looked like her arse had exploded in a nuclear fart. Then she spotted the camera.

“Daaad,” she moaned.

Most elementary kids would be mortified. They’d demand they not be made to return to school until after spring break.

But Elf’s a good sport. She even smiled for her fans.

And hug and a change of clothes later, she was on her way.

Go, Elf!

Grump’s Future

2009-09-24T08:05:00.003-04:00

The Papaya, 10, prattled on, nearly incoherent snippets of her school story spewing like machine gun fire across the table. She was all coked up on Great Value maple syrup.

Listening to fifth grade girls speak is like stuffing your brain into a gerbil wheel and spinning it so fast it careens off the cage. There’s a whole lot of likes instead of proper ums. A sentence is insufficiently dramatic without a good, absolute -ly word. And humans don’t say anything. That’s waaay too passive. They go instead.”

“And, like,” she says, “Michael goes, ‘I like Emily, but don’t tell anyone.’”

“Michael didn’t go anywhere,” I corrected. “He said.”

“Michael said,” she mocks me. “But Hannah, like, completely told everyone in the room.”

“And could we like a little less, please?”

“Ugh! Just let me speak!” she growls. “So Hannah tells everyone that Michael likes Emily. And you won’t believe it! Michael starts completely crying! He was so embarrassed he was, like, totally crying!”

The Grump, 4, couldn’t have cared less. She got off her chair, crawled up onto my lap and settled in.

“Michael was so angry!” The Papaya said. “And then, five minutes later, guess what? Emily starts, like, completely crying. It was totally insane!”

…insert…brain…hit…gerbil wheel…

“And so Mrs. Marzipan, our teacher, starts waving her arms in the air. ‘Hannah,’ she goes, “Enough with the drama already! You caused this. You’re the one who told everyone that Michael likes Emily!”

The Papaya is still spewing miasma across the table but The Grump reaches up and pulls my ear down. “I’m not going to college,” she whispers.

I look at her a moment. “Really?” I respond. “What are you going to do? Collect garbage for a living?”

“No,” she says. “Play with my toys.”

Catch and Release

2009-09-22T11:03:00.005-04:00

I have a working theory about men.

We’ve been honed through millions of years of natural selection to do some things very well. Like The Nasty. Like watching other men beat the crap out of each other. Like fishing and flatulence competitions. Like leaving socks on the floor.

A small number of us have our moments when we transcend our breeding. We hold steady jobs. We actually care for our kids. Some of us even notice when our wives get their haircuts.

But, for the most part, the patterns of suburbia and stable family life prove a bit of a mismatch. Nesting, after all, is a pregnant woman’s drive. Her loving husband prefers world conquest.

So, when a lot of guys hit 40, they hit a wall. They realize they’re not going to be a rock star. They’re a whole lot balder and fatter than George Clooney. They’re not pulling in a million dollars. Nor are they gonna conquer the world. And the Cubs sure as hell aren’t gonna win the World Series.

Cue existential crisis.

By suburban standards many have the perfect life: a nice, comfy house in Stuccoville, a steady, happy marriage, a responsible 401K, a yearly vacation and successful, happy kids.

Yet the guy will be mowing his yard someday. Or shaving and looking at himself in the mirror some morning. Or laying perfectly still in bed some night, reflecting on news that one of his high school acquaintances is actually living the perfect life.

Really. Facebook told him.

And despite all the wonderful gifts and joys present in his own life, the guy finds himself thinking:

So this as good as it gets?

Mid-life manly malaise. A significant number of men don’t survive it. They destroy their marriages. They crawl into a file cabinet at work. They take to getting drunk. Or they madly pursue some other obsession, seeking that fleeting flash of excitement and happiness that comes with buying expensive crap, getting high, or escaping their mundane, mind-numbing brand of Stuccoville to metaphorically fish, fart and leave their socks on the floor.

They prefer all of this insanity to discovering the peace of the in-between times. In the 90 percent of life that is neither miserable or happy. In the 90 percent of life that just…is…life.

So, in pursuit of the overlooked 90, I’ve recently taken to meditation. Nine minutes per day.

I’ve discovered my mind is a raving lunatic, throwing furniture about the room, refusing to sit politely in its chair.

Catch and release.

I continue to breathe until the next insane, chaotic, lunatic image floods my skull.

Catch and release.

It swims off. And I breathe again.

My anxious, Great Recession heart palpitations have receded. I’ve started to recognize, once again, that each moment has its own color, its own current, its own smell.

Though fleeting, those small moments – those moments when I manage to capture and savor the wonder of in-between – never ceases to surprise.

A shudder of happiness; a glimmer of peace.

In Stuccoville, of all places!

Catch and release.

Church of the Resurrection

2009-09-18T08:19:00.006-04:00

Two Sundays past we were in Lakeland with the in-laws. So our Sunday morning ritual changed to my mother-in-law’s Sunday morning ritual.

Which involves standing at the foot of the steps, twenty minutes before mass starts, and shouting at the top of her lungs at everyone: “Hurry! We’re going to be late. I’m leaving right now!”

And then doing this again once every minute for the next fifteen minutes. Five minutes before mass starts, everyone rushes madly to their cars for the 12-minute trip to the church, where we arrive exactly seven minutes late for mass. We rush into the narthex, only to discover the main entrance doors to the church closed and guarded by the elderly ushers. Rather than overpower them and burst through the main entrance, we undertake the walk of shame through the cry room and claim seats in the vaguely Catholic row of chairs that are mashed up against the back wall. They're put there for those who are late and those who plan a quick escape right after communion to get on their boats by 1 p.m.

Welcome to the Church of the Resurrection.

The church has stadium seating, so perched back there, way up in the nosebleed, procrastinator-and-pleasure-boating section, I can see everything that everyone shouldn’t be doing. Which is far more entertaining than watching a dude in the dress waving his arms and doing the whole Hocus Pocus thing. Or perhaps it’s the Hoc Est Enim Corpus Meum thing. I’m not too sure. I’m too busy watching all the sinners.

Sunday proved a very good show. But it was run-of-the-mill, pick-your-nose-and-wipe-it-under-the-pew stuff until the offertory.

Then the collection baskets were passed around. And a wrestling match broke out between a 5-year-old boy and his dad just four seats down from us.

Best of all? It was like movies before the invention of sound. This five-minute, pitched, Oedipal battle took place in absolute silence.

Why?

When the collection basket passed the little boy, the little bugger reached in and nicked a dollar bill. Stole it. Burgled the basket. Lifted it from Mother Church.

Robbed God blind.

At first, as the basket continued past his family, the father just looked completely startled. Then, realizing that he must show his fellow parishioners that he doesn’t tolerate thievery in the midst of the consecration, the dad held out his hand out. It was a silent demand that said: “You hand that dollar bill over this instant, young man!”

The boy squeezed the bill into a tiny fist and looked forward, the first time he paid attention to the priest the entire mass. (At least I think this was the case. I wasn’t really paying attention to the priest either.)

So the father seized the boy’s wrist. The boy writhed away but obediently remained in the pew.

Perplexed and unwilling to play witness to murder, the usher hurried off to the next row with the basket. The father grabbed the boy’s hand and began prying.

It was on, baby!

The boy pulled away, jamming the fist beneath his armpit.

The father whispered furiously in his ear.

The boy said nothing, just holding his clenched fist out away from his dad.

The father seized his son’s arms again. The wrestling match was now in full swing. And, as they struggled mightily, they were still absolutely, completely and totally silent.

Because we were in church after all. And you have to show respect in church.

The boy finally fell, crumpled into a ball, completely boneless. The arm with the clenched fist jutted into the aisle, miles from the panting dad.

So dad, giving up on any semblance of propriety, hoisted the boy up by his armpits. The boy went completely rigid. No kicking. No shouting. No whimpering. Just a defiant smile. The boy’s thieving hands were stretched far outward, high above them both. Still far from dad.

And the father carried his statue son high, up the aisle of the church and out its guarded doors.

Silent, frozen and crucified.

With the dollar bill still clenched in his fist.

I Shot the Deer!

2009-09-17T09:32:00.001-04:00

And there weren’t two. There were three. (At this rate, they’ll be 250 of them by Halloween.) They showed up in the backyard around dinner time, peeking in all the windows. They looked nervous and skittish, as if they were up to no good.

Despite growing up in Northeast Pennsylvania, where schools gave the first day of hunting season off and you could hear the echo of rifle fire as Bambi’s mother bit the dust, I simply shot these two with my digital camera. One was a six-point buck (his 30-pound scrotum cued me in to his gender and prompted The Papaya to consider a lifelong celibacy). They hung around long enough to watch the bizarrely behaving animals, hooting and hollering from inside their glass and stucco cage. And then, with a flick of their tails, they were gone.

Photo: Click on the photo to view a larger version.

Neighborly Advice

2009-09-16T09:38:00.005-04:00

So we don’t have a deer.

As I opened the window shades to the back of the house this morning, there were actually two deer, including a four-point buck. Of course, if I were a Florida cracker, I’da just busted out that dern window with the butt of my shotgun and started firin’ away. To get dinner on the fire early, ya know.

But I live in affluent, deed-restricted Stuccoville. So, instead, my neighbors have been firing advice at me.

“Sprinkle cayenne pepper on the bushes,” advised Petunia. She had emerged from behind The Great Green Wall to show me a large bug she had entombed in a Ziploc baggie. It looked like a mutant wasp, two inches across, and it was still struggling to sting something. “Have you ever seen a bug like this?” she asked, wildly concerned.

“No,” I responded. I’ve lived in Florida a dozen years and there’s always some new beast crawling out of the swamp. Bugs own the state. In fact, they run the state legislature.

“We have deer,” I added, competitively. “They’re pooping in my yard and eating my bushes. My sister-in-law, who lives in Westchester County, got lyme disease from a tick bite in her own backyard. So it might help a little if you could lay off the feed corn you throw in your backyard. The Internet says it’s like deer candy.”

“Oh, that’s for my ducks. I keep the ducks for my protection.”

I looked at her, eyebrow raised. I let the comment just hang in the air a while longer, waiting to see if any crazy bells would start ringing somewhere. “Are they armed?” I finally asked.

“No,” she said, although she seemed to like the idea. “I keep ’em so I know if we have bobcats. The bobcats will go for the ducks first, you see. That’s how I’ll know if we have a predator in there.” She gestured ominously to the swamp beside our homes. The water beyond the trees looked like a feather pillow had exploded over it.

I had no idea the cul-de-sac was bravely protected by a kamikaze duck army patrolling the Great Green Wall.

“Yeah,” I said, pretending this was the most logical thing in the world. “But the feed corn—”

“Oh, the deer don’t like it,” she insisted. “I sprinkle cayenne pepper in it so the deer and the raccoons don’t eat it.”

Because, after all, ducks love Mexican food but deer and raccoons prefer fine French dining.

I fled the conversational train wreck at the very next stop.

My other neighbor, Nikki, offered a suggestion when I stopped for our daily mailbox conversation. “You know what you have to do, don’t you?” Her voice trailed off, eyebrow raised, a smirk on her face. She looked like she was going to say, “You just gotta make wild passionate love to the deer. They just hate that.”

She’s from Virginia after all.

“You have to pee on your bushes,” she said.

“I’ll get right on that,” I responded.

Amazingly enough, the 30-pound document that details Stuccoville’s extensive deed restrictions fails to ban such behavior. I looked. There’s absolutely no mention of the following: “Members shall refrain from urinating on their bushes, trees, flowers, driveways, porches, home exteriors or any portion of the plots of contiguous or far-flung neighbors unless otherwise permitted in their neighborhood specific guidelines.”

Quite a blatant, careless oversight for the Deep South.

And I was worried about the deer.

The Hissy Fit: The National Sport of the USA

2009-09-14T09:26:00.003-04:00

Pardon me while I have a geriatric, when-I-was-a-kid, this-country-is-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket moment.

The following are the images American children have witnessed in recent months:

A professional athlete and role model for young girls smashing a tennis racket in anger and threatening to stuff a tennis ball down the throat of a rule-enforcement official.

Town hall meetings filled with people screaming at each other and interrupting, calling congressmen Hitler and Stalin and fist-fighting in community centers.

A hip hop artist, angry that his favorite artist didn’t win a video award, interrupting an acceptance speech to tell everyone someone else should have won.

A congressman shouting "You lie!" over an opponent’s speech in the U.S. Capitol and immediately raising $1 million toward his own reelection.

A local neighborhood mom, who everyday parks illegally to drop her child off at the elementary school, yelling at a sheriff’s deputy for finally writing her a ticket.

These weren’t children in the throes of the Terrible Twos. These were adults.

Have we become a country of self-focused boors whose national sport is the sanctimonious, insulting hissy fit? Our country’s rules of politeness, etiquette and safety now seem only to apply to the other idiots of the world.

This is the lesson we choose teach our own children every time we miss an opportunity to show simple courtesy or good manners; positive sportsmanship or patience. Every time we choose to embrace hostility and self-centered arrogance over gentleness and understanding. Every time we raise our voices or shake our fists in self-righteous anger.

Does this behavior really make us proud? Does it make our nation one bit stronger?

If not, the change must start at home and it begins with a simple lesson in humility:

The rules do apply to you. When you’re wrong, promptly admit it. In place of listing other people’s faults, rectify your own. Remember that an apology is just hot air if subsequent behavior doesn’t reflect its spirit. And recall your grandma’s old sayings. There’s a reason they’ve stuck around when the other, more recent proverb, “When you’re angry, be sure to make an obnoxious fool of yourself” hasn’t. What are some of them?

A gentle response turns away wrath, but harsh words stir up fury.
Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.
You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Politeness is the art of choosing from among your real thoughts; it is like warmth to wax.
The way to overcome the angry man is with gentleness and the evil man with goodness.

And the most important?

Sometimes it’s better to be viewed a fool than to open your mouth and confirm it.

So, today, instead of forwarding an Internet joke or the latest political rant from the right or the left, copy and paste this reflection into an e-mail and forward it to your friends and family members.

Despite our differences, let all Americans commit once again, to build a nation founded on politeness, courtesy and respect.

Getting Unscrewed, Part II

2009-09-11T10:32:00.001-04:00

If you haven’t read the first part of this story yet, go here first.

Just when I thought it was safe to go into the hardware store, my neighbor Tim calls back the other night. You might recall that on Saturday Tim was looking for assistance with, um, removing a light bulb. So when I saw his number on the caller I.D. calling me a second time, I figured he needed help raising and lowering those super fancy-shmancy, highly complicated windows in his house.

I was wrong.

“After you left, Nikki went to Lowe’s for the new halogen lamps for the light fixture.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Once she came back with them, I went to put them in. All three of them. How complicated could it be?” he asked rhetorically. “There were just two prongs on the end of them. Right? You just have to slide ’em in. Right?”

He paused.

“Right.” I said. “You just slide ’em in.”

“Well, I snapped one of the prongs off one,” he said. “Five bucks it cost me! So I go and read the package. And right after I’ve held all three of them in my greasy, sweaty hands, the directions tell me never to touch halogen bulbs with my fingers or it’ll ruin them.”

A vague recollection of such a guideline flickered in my brain. “Yeah,” I said. “I remember reading that somewhere.”

“Fifteen bucks!” he said. “Down the toilet!”

Another pause.

“You know what’s hanging from my ceiling now?”

“What?”

“Two friggin’ wires! I’ve had it! I pulled the stinking lights right out of the ceiling. Nikki just went back to Ikea to buy a new fixture.”

Same Question: How many Stuccoville men does it take to change a lightbulb?

Revised Answer: That’s waaay too complicated. We’re gonna change the light fixture instead.

Grump Lets Loose

2009-09-10T09:33:00.005-04:00

Trauma.

For most children, it’s a moment of pride and joy.

For Grump?

Unspeakable trauma.

And I probably contributed to it with my parental shorthand.

It all starts out well and good. With your first child, because time and patience are plentiful and you are hellbent on raising gifted progeny, you respond to even the simplest questions, such as “How does the sun shine?” with a 15-minute lecture on thermonuclear dynamics and a five-minute sidebar summarizing Einstein’s equation: the amount of energy produced is equal to the mass of an atom multiplied by the speed of light squared.

By the time the third head pops into the world, the laundry is piling up, dinner is late, a significant work deadline is in fifteen minutes and no one’s practiced the piano today. So giftedness sails out the window. Mere survival is now the goal. Like millions or parents before you, you reach for that old cop-out: parental shorthand. “The sun is lighting its farts,” you answer. “Now go practice the piano.”

Grump always pitches a fit when we have to brush her teeth. Were she The Papaya, I would have patiently discussed plaque and tartar buildup and the intricacies of tooth decay and periodontal disease. But she’s Number Three, so she got shorthand: “If you don’t brush your teeth, they’re all gonna fall out,” I’ve repeatedly said. “And won’t you look ridiculous then!”

I figured this was a safe bet.

Figured wrong.

This morning as I was brushing Grump’s teeth, I heard something fall to the bathroom counter and then the floor. She had been playing with beads, so I figured she had dropped one. When we were done and she rinsed, it looked like she had just eaten chocolate. “Did you sneak some chocolate?” I accused.

“No!” she said.

Then I stepped back onto the fallen bead with my sock. I raised my foot and removed it with my fingers. It perplexed me at first. Whitish-ivory. Misshapen. Kind of a tapered, sharpened end.

Holy Crap!

A tooth!

I looked at Grump wide-eyed. “You lost your first tooth!” I cried happily.

She looked at me, terror flooding her face and she burst into a 10-minute sob fest. An hour later, she left for Pre-K, both hands clamped across the bottom of her face.

Dumb Daddy’s Moral: Just stuff the unfolded laundry into their dressers and toast Pop-tarts for dinner.

Photo: This evening, approximately two hours after she finally began letting her sisters see the gap in her mouth, Grump finally let me take this photo.

Elf Turns 7

2009-09-09T09:42:00.017-04:00

Seven years ago on a Saturday evening, She Who Controls the Universe, The Papaya and I went to dinner at Olive Garden and sucked down shakes from Ed and Eddie’s ice cream (Alas, it's gone out of business now that Maria’s no longer pregnant every three years).

Five hours later, Maria crawled out of bed to make her third trip to the bathroom (it was a large shake and she was rather super-sized herself). She gave a few good ritualistic grunts followed by a cry of surprise. In a moment, she was standing at my side of the bed dripping human goo all over the bedroom carpet.

“I think my water broke!” she cried.

Of course, being the laid back, got-it-all together, supportive husband I was, I immediately tried to reassure her. “Then get off the carpet, for gahd’s sake!” I cried back.

The following morning, Elf emerged face up, umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. The doctor moved like lightning, unlooping the cord, giving Elf a good pull. She sucked out Elf’s nose and mouth, jostled her a bit and rubbed her down, forcing Elf to cry hard until she pinked up.

Truth be told, for three years, especially when Elf appeared to be ambidextrous, I worried about brain damage. But by her fourth birthday, when she began breaking toys to see how they worked, it was clear that she was the brightest bulb in the house.

Even during the first month she was home, I remarked to Maria. “Elf’s always smiling at me.”

“It’s instinctual,” Maria said. “It’s evolution’s way of keeping humans from throwing their poopy babies away.”

But Elf’s kept smiling. She’s the happiest child I’ve ever met.

What do I love about Elf?

1. She awakes each morning like a hiccup, never wanting to miss a moment of action.

2. Elf nearly never despairs.

3. Her eyes almost disappear when she laughs.

4. She’s a skilled physical comedian (Elf has a song and dance routine called Leftover Lady, in which she stuffs a sofa pillow up her shirt and pretends she’s her turkey-and-stuffing obsessed mother the week after Thanksgiving.). It keeps The Grump in belly laughs.

5. While the rest of the family runs like ducks, Elf runs like a deer.

6. If she’s asked if a glass is half full or half empty, Elf will say she really didn’t want any and you can drink it all.

7. Elf furiously defends her sisters.

8. Elf is a monster soccer player.

9. She’s invented her own victory dance, which she performs when life goes her way. It involves shuffling from side to side and then a little Irish jig, all while humming The Cotton Eyed Joe. It ends with her arms thrown wide and the exclamation, “Victory dance!” (We should all have public victory dances, preferably something disturbing like this.)

10. At night after her prayers, when I sing You Are My Sunshine to her, she sings it back to me.

11. Elf is the first to say she’s sorry and seek a generous compromise.

And she still smiles all the time. Happy Birthday, Elfster!

Photo: Elf gets her long awaited Nintendo DS from her grandmother and grandfather, who joined us for dinner last night. We made The Papaya wait until she was 9 before she got hers - just more evidence that parental standards completely evaporate by the second pregnancy.

A Good Unscrewing

2009-09-08T07:58:00.007-04:00

Q: How many Stuccoville men does it take to change a lightbulb?

The phone rang. It was my neighbor Tim, who lives in the Very Smurfy Home down the block. “Hey! You got a minute?” he said. “I’m having a tough time figuring out how to remove some lightbulbs over here.”

Tim moved in with his family two years ago. He’s very good with the manual labor. He mows his own lawn, kills his own weeds, pressure-washes his own fence. He’s even managed to reproduce. It’s the more intellectual stuff that stumps him.

Like changing furnace filters and light bulbs.

“You unscrew them,” I said.

“Ha! Ha!” he mocked me. “I tried that. These are different light bulbs.”

I walked over. A ladder was out beside his bookcase. Above it were hanging three long halogen lamps. He gestured upward, so I climbed. Each of the lamps had a sconce and, bizarrely enough, inside each sconce, each of the lamps was covered with a fine mesh enclosure. Apparently to keep at bay all the kids who lick sub-zero metal fence posts in the dead of winter.

DIY Home Project Rule Number One: If something that’s supposed to come off doesn’t come off for fools with advanced college degrees, it’s time to hire the unshaven dude with a mullet, pickup truck and GED.

Rather than go in from the bottom, there had to be another way. I held the sconce and gave a twist to the metal sleeve that held it to the wire. It began unscrewing. Soon the sconce came off, exposing the bulb.

I looked at the bulb. It seemed held on by two small screws. I gave it a twist.

Nothing.

“How the hell do you get the bulb out?” I said.

Nikki, Tim’s wife, rolled her eyes in the kitchen. She was watching the whole operation, arms folded, oozing wifely judgment all over the floor, making it hard to keep our manly footing.

“I think you just pull it out,” she said.

It couldn’t be right. The lightbulb didn’t look at all like it just pulled out.

I gave it a gentle tug.

It just pulled out.

Nikki held out her hand to claim the bulb and headed out to Lowe’s to buy a replacement. I climbed down the ladder.

“You know,” I threatened Tim. “I think I may write about this.”

His eyebrows rose. “You’re going to make clear it wasn’t a regular lightbulb, right?” he said. “You’re going to mention it was one of those complicated halogen ones?”

“No,” I said.

Q: How many Stuccoville men does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Two and a wife.

To be continued...

It’s Confirmed

2009-09-07T16:49:00.000-04:00

“There’s a big doggie in the back yard.” The Grump stood in my office Friday evening, looking out the window.

The Papaya and Elf, engrossed in Poptropica, ignored her.

“There’s a big doggie in the yard!” The Grump repeated. Unwilling to be dismissed any longer, she pulled hard on the shade cord. The window blinds exploded upward.

The Papaya and Elf screamed.

The deer, fearing for its life, vanished into the woods.

Scatology

2009-09-04T11:00:00.010-04:00

“What in gahd’s name is that?” I said aloud.

I normally don’t talk to myself out loud. Don’t get me wrong. I conduct lively, multilingual debates with various people inside my skull on an ongoing basis. Unlike my late, great aunt Petronella, I just keep the mute button pressed. That poor woman, after a long day caring for my five siblings and me, would conduct very loud arguments with herself while rattling the dinner dishes.

But the sight was worrisome. It demanded an audible response.

Only it was already quite clear to me what it was. More worrisome was whose end it came from.

It was, as the photo shows, scat. As in scatology. As in the study of - or preoccupation with - fecal excrement.

For the layperson: poop.

And this really is another excellent reason why daddy blogs are more interesting than mommy blogs. How many mommy blogs have ever posted a photo of poop? I’m thinking none. They’re just too damn busy discussing the latest Consumer Report’s issue on wipe warmers.

But, as I said, this particular poop had me worried. You’d think after having three creatures obsessed with farts and all things flushable, I’d have my B.S. in S. But I was perplexed by this enormous pile.

It clearly wasn’t from a dog, whose poop looks like Tootsie Rolls (but without those unhealthy hydrogenated oils). And it wasn’t a cat’s poop, which are like Tootsie Rolls with a light, appetizing batter of kitty litter. This pile was enormous in comparison and it was the second precarious pile I had come across in my yard in the last two weeks. It could only have been made by something big and disturbing. The possibilities flickered through my brain.

1. An 80-pound rabbit
2. An obese, poorly mannered garden gnome
3. Grizzly Adams

To be honest, I was also thinking black bear and coyote. Stuccoville is surrounded by conservation areas, which are what delusional, middle-class Floridians call their swamps. My house lies adjacent to one and it’s crawling with beasties. I’ve spotted raccoons, otters, alligators and snakes galore. Hell, a few months back, Maria went for a run and came back to find an enormous serpent coiled on our welcome mat.

Recently I read that a black bear was spotted in another Florida suburb. Coyotes are even loping across Stuccoville’s main drag, despite deed restrictions aimed at keeping residents lacking bleached teeth and breast augmentation at bay. That was my main worry. Given their acquired taste for pet cats and dogs, coyotes have become a significant problem in the area. Yet had I thought about it some more, I could have put two and two together (or perhaps it's chew and poo together). I would have realized coyotes are just wild dogs. So their poop would look just like dog poop rolled in digested cat.

You know. Furry Tootsie Rolls.

So I took a picture and called the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission. A nice lady answered.

“Hello,” I said. “There’s some beast pooping in my yard next to my lariope. While I think I’ve eliminated my mother-in-law from contention, I’d like to know if it’s some other animal that could eat my 4-year-old daughter. I was wondering if I could e-mail it to you for proper identification.”

“You want to e-mail me poop?” she said.

“Well, not the real thing. Just a picture.”

“I see,” she said.

As we were talking, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to make a complete fool of myself. I had completely forgotten the wonders of the Internet. As I was talking, I google-imaged “scat.”

And there it was. Staring me in the face.

“Never mind,” I said. “I know what it is.”

“I’m very happy for you,” she said.

Just last weekend, I was puzzled by all the Indian hawthorne bushes beneath the live oak in my front yard. They were missing all of the leaves from their fronts. It all suddenly clicked. It wasn’t Grizzly Adams taking a dump in my yard. And it wasn’t coyotes either.

It was odocoileus virginianus (with appropriate emphasis on the final two syllables).

Deer.

Fad-vertising

2009-09-02T08:42:00.004-04:00

If you read blogs regularly, you may be aware of the latest blogificatory hot topic: blogging with integrity. Apparently blog readers everywhere are being brainwashed by popular mommy bloggers who have been co-opted by the devils of corporate America. In exchange for a free weekend at Disneyworld, these festering souls blog about how Disney’s ride mortality rates are lower than a Baghdad street market’s. In exchange for a month’s supply of diapers, these sneaky mamas swear Pampers leak less than than their own grandmas.

The outrage! I had no idea that the mommy blogger I read some months back about her special, personal tour of the Campbell’s soup factory and the shelf she built above her night table filled with Tomato and Split Pea with Ham soup cans was an actual bribed product placement. Now, in shame-faced protest, I’ll have to rip out my own bedroom shelf of Vegetable Beef and Chicken Noodle.

Well, you can be sure Dumb Daddy will never brainwash you like that. Why? Because I have signed the Blog With Integrity Pledge. I, along with thousands of other bloggers who can’t get anyone to advertise on their sites let alone read them, have taken this very important pledge. It means you can safely read about our meaningless lives without us trying to get you to buy worthless crap.

And since I can’t get any advertisers to diabolically manipulate you, I’ve decided to create my own ads for valued companies that really should exist but don't. So who is this month’s cherished sponsor of The Dumb Daddy Diaries?

Party Poddies.

Be sure to click on the ads to read the manipulating fine print. And, by all means, you manipulated fools, buy your man a Party Poddy today!

Crapshoot

2009-09-01T09:30:00.014-04:00

On May 27 I posted a blog here that announced my intention to rework a middle grade/young adult fantasy novel that, back in late 2007-2008, had not won me an agent. I had set a goal to rework the thing by the end of summer. It largely involved completing a sex change operation on one of my main characters.

So Abby and her sassy ponytail became Jack with his lacrosse stick. Because even though only one of every five American men is functionally literate and all of those geeks are still banned from Oprah’s Book Club, we have to pretend to market to them.

For those blessed with having written their last page-long project back in college, winning an agent is like winning a chance at winning the lottery. Getting an agent doesn’t mean your book gets published. It just means that publishers will look at the book.

So what are the odds of even winning an agent?

A typical agent takes on a handful of new writers a year. Yet they receive upwards of 1,000 newly written novels each month. And many don’t even read any part of your novel in making their first cuts for their literary kickball team. They only read your query letter, which, by itself, has to convince them the first chapter deserves a glance while, coffee in hand, they take their morning dump. And you have to convince them without using really cool fonts, neon-colored stationary or cash bribes.

As one lengthy rejection letter stated, “I only add a handful of new writers to my client roster each year, so I search for a unique voice, finely-honed writing skills, stellar world building talent, characters that jump off the page and a story that pulls me in from the first word and doesn't let go.”

In other words, she’s looking for a good abduction into Jumanji - preferably narrated by a vampire Elmer Fudd who’s willing to show a little ass.

What’s my plot synopsis?

Reeling over the accidental death of their father, fourteen-year-old Kate, twelve-year-old Jack and ten-year-old Mary Maguire are forced to move from their Washington, D.C. home to their grandmother’s mysterious, rural Florida mansion. After the Maguires discover the home’s strange and magical connection to its Spanish colonial past, they are unwillingly transported into a medieval land on the cusp of civil war. Trapped in an ancient world and bravely aided by their new friend Simon, they undertake a heart-stopping journey of sorcery to find a way to return home.

As Elmer might uniquely say, “Wewuh, it’s not exactwy inspiahwing.”

Yet agents' diabolical form rejections just string sucky writers down a long, exit-less highway of misery. Personally, if I am locked in a disturbing level of American Idol-tryout denial about my writing talent, I’d rather receive the blunt response: “Really, buddy, the world will be a better place if you just hang up the keyboard and take up macramé.”

But the rejection form letters unnecessarily inspire glimmers of hope. “Of course, this selection process is entirely subjective and your project, like the Gettysburg Address, shows merit,” they all reassure us. “There’s probably some agent out there - perhaps living in a mud and wattle hut in Borneo - who will gladly represent your novel. So keep your chin up and keep the U.S. Postal Service operating in the black!”

So, on this fine morning kick-started by rejection, where am I going with this lame post lacking a unique voice, finely-honed writing skills, stellar world building talent and characters that jump off the page?

Right here: She Who Controls the Universe, who has had my completed and continuously reworked manuscript sitting on her nightstand unread for the past two years, did manage to read my latest rejection letter.

“It’s your title,” she concluded. “It sucks the nail off my big toe.”

What is it?

Magineria: The Riddles of Gigarist.

Admittedly, it’s not exactwy inspiahwing eithuh. But I think it’s better than my previous titles:

Magineria: Searching for the Heart of Gigarist and Magineria: The Heart of Gigarist and the Society of Ianua

Or my attempt at levity: I’m a Fantasy Character: Get Me Outta Here!

But the whole title discussion has proven a tad disheartening. Because She Who Controls the Universe has made it clear she absolutely hates the only thing she’s read of the novel. And when I respond, “Okay, so what do you propose I title it?” she responds, “I have no idea. I’m not a writer.”

But if an agent can reject a book without ever having read it, certainly anyone can title it with no advance knowledge of the plot.

Right?

So here’s my challenge to you this morning. Give my novel, sight unseen, a catchy, new, non-big-toe sucking title. And if I use it, I’ll thank you on the Acknowledgments page.

Assuming I can afford that extra piece of paper when I self-publish.

The AGP Teacher Responds

2009-08-31T10:08:00.011-04:00

Those who follow Dumb Daddy’s rantings know that he sincerely believes most dedicated and committed teachers omit one very important item from their massive, overflowing school supply lists each year:

A clue.

In recent years (see here, here and here) I have humbly inquired why The Papaya needs three boxes of pencils for her AGP math and science classes. I have even wildly speculated about the need for so many pencils. Perhaps the AGP teacher wants to build a wooden boy to keep her company during her planning periods. Or maybe for a global warming-inspired, second great floodish, survival ark large enough to hold two of each species - except amoebas, which, unlike Stuccoville’s fine residents, apparently can reproduce on their own without first visiting World of Beer.

Well, I have been set straight.

Mademoiselle Bunsenburner, the fifth grade Anxious Gifted People (AGP) teacher, has notified me that all sixty pencils are, in fact, needed for a highly important scientific experiment that was conducted on Friday, the first day the Anxious Gifted People gathered for class. The experiment?

What throwing angles, wrist torques and velocities maximize the number of pencils an Anxious Gifted Person can successfully embed in a ceiling tile?

She even sent me photos of the experiment in progress, with The Papaya decked out in a highly scientific and psychedelic tie-dye lab coat and muy sexy safety goggles.

I therefore offer AGP teachers everywhere my sincerest, most humble apologies.

And The Papaya has informed me that the results of the study have enabled them to produce the following scientific equation to determine the necessary pencil-hurling velocity (Pn):

The other variables, of course, being the number of personal computers in the room (Pc), with r standing for the number of runs scored in the kickball game at recess, k being the number of crushes the average fifth grade girl will have during the first semester (please use scientific notation) and kn being the number of glue sticks required to adhere the class nerd to the bulletin board multiplied by the number of wedgies all AGP students will deservedly receive on the playground this year.

Scientifically spanked, I’m glad I could clear all that up for you.

The Dangers of Housekeeping

2009-08-28T10:25:00.011-04:00

Did you know that in 2008 more than 15,000 Americans died in housekeeping accidents? Approximately 4,000 adults drowned in buckets of dirty water. Another 2,500 died from infections acquired from their toilets and showers. Five thousand were impaled by brooms and mops. Two thousand more perished when their cans of furniture polish spontaneously exploded. Just under 1,170 choked on their feather dusters and 1,250 more perished when their hair was accidentally sucked into their vacuum cleaners, causing circulation to their scalps to dry up, which quickly leads to unconsciousness and brain death.

I didn’t know ANY of this. In fact, during a 45-second Internet search, I couldn’t find any statistics whatsoever on the dangers posed by housekeeping – especially when a guy does it. So I just made them up.

But I’m pretty sure they’re true.

Because I was almost killed doing the laundry.

Really.

And it didn’t involve trying on my wife’s underwear.

Because She Who Controls the Universe believes that clothes dryers shorten the life expectancy of high quality clothes purchased at Wal-Mart and Target, I gotta hang dry everything that isn’t underwear, socks, towels and sheets. She Who Controls the Universe even hangs pajamas, but I courageously draw the line at some insane behavior. (I just sneak-throw them in the dryer when she’s not looking. Then, when Elf walks in the room with her pajama pants shrunken to her knees, I preemptively say things like, “Lordy! Elf is sprouting like a weed!”)

To hang all this stuff, we have a removable metal pole that spans the laundry room just above the washer and dryer. But yesterday, when I was wrestling a bra off it, I managed to jar it loose. But I was looking down at Grump’s progress at jumping into her shoes at the time and didn’t realize I had jarred it loose. But I did manage to look back up at the bar just as I gave the bra a tremendous tug. And the metal laundry pole came crashing down on the bridge of my nose.

It caused such intense, brain-crapping pain that I started pinging off the laundry room walls like Kung Fu Panda - or Jack Black pretending he’s been kicked in the family jewels (which, when you really think about it, is just Kung Fu Panda).

It hurt so stinking much I almost threw up.

The Grump, to her credit, didn’t burst into laughter and remind me what a loser I was. She just stood there, her mouth open, terrified, like the nearby mop might begin assaulting her.

For that, I was grateful. Had it been The Papaya, she would have been rolling on the living room floor. “Put that bra back up there, Pops!” she’d roar. “We gotta You-Tube that one.” Then she’d mutter with an eye roll, “And Mr. Wears His Socks Past His Ankles wonders why I don’t want him walking me into school anymore.”

And I'd have to kill her.

And pin it on the furniture polish.

Meanwhile, today, since She Who Controls the Universe is in Orlando testifying at a trial for one of her clients, I am left with the perilous responsibilities of dusting and vacuuming.

If you don’t hear from me in 72 hours, send a rescue party.

The Papaya and Elf Begin Anew

2009-08-25T09:42:00.009-04:00

There are apparently two ways a Stuccoville mama can properly acknowledge the first day of school. You can head off to the Boo Hoo Breakfast in the multipurpose room, sniff a little, feel a little lonely and console yourself by sticking 3-pound muffins into every available orifice.

Or you can high-five each other, shout "in your face!" at your grouchy, sleep-deprived, back-to-school child and then head on over to Kingsbridge Drive, where the mamas are going to start serving celebratory margaritas at 10 a.m.

Which is a whole lot later than that group usually starts pounding the pickle juice. But, hey! It’s not their fault! They were preoccupied with making all those bologna sandwiches for lunches this a.m.

Maria and I just rode our bikes home after dropping off Elf in her first grade classroom and The Papaya at her fifth grade classroom. As we pedaled home, Maria couldn’t decide if she was going to weep or throw up. I encouraged her to weep so the entire family doesn’t get quarantined for Swine Flu before the first progress reports go out.

And so a new year begins. New Justice T-shirts. New Converse and Sketchers. New highlighters, markers and notebooks.

And 180 new days of eye-popping gossip about the lice-infested, DUI-afflicted, tawdry-affair-and-custody-battle-hardened, foreclosure-dodging mamas and children of prim and proper Stuccoville Elementary - all served with a smile at afternoon pickup, just outside the walkers/bikers departure gate beneath the Tree of Knowledge.

See you there at 2:30 p.m.!

Photo caption: So this is what happens when I tell my children "Give me your best back-to-school smiles, girls!" I finally got an acceptable photo after I encouraged them just to scowl.

Grump’s First Day

2009-08-24T09:41:00.005-04:00

Her tiny, tanned face whitens. Brown eyes widen. Lips press together. A thin smile of tremulous fear. She avoids my eyes.

The Grump stands stiffly. A breath of wind could make her melt into tears.

I want to scoop her up and run away. Drive to the beach and hunt for shells together.

Grump is my fearful child. On Saturday night, with the whole family at an engagement party for my sister-in-law, Carmen, Grump spent the evening wrapped around one of her parent’s left legs. She avoided the swimming pool, its wave of rambunctious boys sending a shiver of terror through her. I had to pry Grump out of my buttocks to get a plate full of food.

On Sunday afternoon it was a gymnastics party for her friend Sarah. She stood in line, between two boys a foot taller, her whitening face and thin-lipped bravery crumbling into sucked breaths and tears. Gentle Elf spotted her and slid protectively between Grump and all that testosterone.

Do I swoop in for the rescue? Or simply stand in sight, letting her fear bubble up and dissipate, evaporating into a lesson that big boys don’t bite.

Mostly.

And now, this morning, Grump’s first day back to pre-K. A new teacher and classroom. A new collection of marigolds and mayhem. The bathed, well-behaved, sweet-smelling girls and those nasty, noisy, stinky-assed boys.

Preparing for the morning, The Grump put on her new outfit. Brushed her hair (except for the back). Velcroed her new Sketchers securely to her feet. Wrapped her backpack around her body and disappeared into the back of Maria’s car. From her booster seat, she leaned forward and gave me a tiny wave and brave smile.

And I almost – pathetically yet in a very masculine, stinky-assed way – started to cry.

A Parting Gift

2009-08-20T11:19:00.012-04:00

The doorbell rang.

It was Dave and Cocoa.

Cocoa, who was just visiting for several days, is a dog as big as a horse. Dave, my neighbor, takes care of Cocoa when one of his children needs a break from the food bills. The beast pulls him around the neighborhood. (“Oh,” Dave said when departing. “Cocoa dropped something in the corner of your yard. I have to take the dog home and barricade it inside before coming back for it.” I was afraid to look, unsure if he needed both hands to hold on to Cocoa or to actually pick up the Rhode Island-sized poopage. But that was later…)

Dave stood at my front door with a smirk. “What’s with the statue?”

I looked over his shoulder. There it was. Standing smack in the middle of my front yard. A white, fiberglass angel, waist high, holding a bird.

Dave was suspicious. He sees me as an apostate, but I’m not really anti-religion. I just believe religious expression is most safely kept between the believer and God. I also firmly believe in the separation of church and estate. If, like some showy Pharisee, you wear religion around your neck in flashing, neon lights or erect religious grottos in your front yard, that’s three strikes against your aesthetic sensibilities and one strike against your mental health.

Hit your knees in private, I say, and you might just get somewhere. Hit your knees in public, and you’re just running for office.

I immediately called my brother Brendan, who was moving to Atlanta the next morning. As a blood relative, he and his wife Monica are immediately in the top six suspects when something bizarre happens.

“Hey,” I said when he answered. “You forgot to pack the statue of your first girlfriend.”

He swore up and down he had no idea what I was talking about. Plus, it wasn’t likely. They had been preoccupied with last minute packing for the move.

I hung up. The statue was quickly attracting a crowd in deed-restricted Stuccoville, which only allows you to display grass and conformity in your yards. My neighbor Tom and his kids came over. We consulted regarding the possible perpetrator.

Dave had an alibi. He brought the statue to my attention and no decent practical joker does such a thing.

Tom was at Sunday religious services all morning. Plus if he were the guilty party, he would have been immediately fingered by his two young daughters.

“That leaves Johnny and Tim,” I said.

But Tim was in Miami for a trial.

“I saw a big truck in front of Johnny’s house this morning,” Dave observed.

So the image made a miraculous appearance in Johnny and Paige’s front yard.

An hour later, my cell phone rang. I let it go to voicemail, which I quickly retrieved. “Yeah, Chris,” Johnny said. “I’m just calling to see if you know anything about a statue in my front yard. Paige said she saw it in your front yard this morning.”

He seemed befuddled and worried, as if the statue was portend of a possible Al Qaeda strike on his home.

So I moved it to Tim’s front yard. His wife, Nikki, a former cop, called a half hour later. “Tim’s not here and a statue just appeared in my yard while I was taking a nap!” she said to me “It’s as big as me! Did you do this? What am I supposed to do with this?”

She sounded like an oak tree had just caved in the roof to her master bedroom.

I swore up and down I had nothing to do with it.

“Someone probably stole it and put it in my yard!” she said. “Now I have to call the cops and report it!”

The thought had never even occurred to me. Who would risk a special place in hell for stealing an angel and then planting it in an innocent person’s yard? Plus, my incriminating fingerprints were all over the angel now. If it was stolen and I was identified as the God-hating thief, my mug shot was gonna be all over Bill O’Reilly’s show.

“No!” I said to her. “If I were you, I’d just put it in Dave’s yard.”

After all, it was probably him in the first place.

The doorbell rang. My brother Brendan and his wife Monica had driven over to say their final goodbyes. Down the street Nikki was already talking to Maria, who was returning from a run. Nikki was madly gesturing, pointing at the troublesome statue as if it were a family of gnome vandals who kept stoning her home. Suddenly Johnny’s SUV came around the corner.

“Oh, crap!” I said to Brendan and Monica.

I could see Nikki accusing Johnny. I could see Johnny pointing at me.

I could see Nikki, hands on her hips, wagging a finger in my direction.

And then our neighbor Petunia – who creeps around the neighborhood with a flashlight in the middle of the night and lives behind a large fence backed by an even larger wall of bushes and trees – all to hide (one might be prompted to satirically speculate) that she (only perhaps, and definitely in a highly imaginative rather than in a litigiously problematical, factual kind of way) eats children in her yard – emerged from her gate. “That’s a beautiful statue,” she said. “If you don’t want it, I’ll take it.”

“No,” I cried. “I want to put it in my friend Rob’s yard.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” scolded Nikki.

And Petunia threw my statue over her shoulder and disappeared behind The Big Green Wall.

“Yeah,” said Brendan, calling safely from Atlanta the following day. “It was us.”

The Big Move

2009-08-17T09:56:00.005-04:00

I’m just feeling sad this morning. Nothing funny, nothing cynical to offer. Just sad.

In 2002, five years after Maria and I packed up our graduate student and high school teacher furniture into a big U-haul truck and my friend Roly and I drove it across five states to the big box of humidity and mullets called Florida, something occurred that I never would have predicted. My brother and his wife also moved to Tampa – the Florida State Fair and its fried Snickers bars proving too inexorable a draw to fight any longer.

Actually, Monica, Brendan’s wife, had a great job that moved her here.

This morning it moved them to Atlanta.

The upside? Unlike everyone else in Florida, they were recently able to sell their home for 32 cents profit - a month before a sinkhole opened across the street and began sucking their old neighbor's driveway into Hades.

The downside?

Just about everything else.

In the seven years they’ve been here, we’ve celebrated the birth of Elf and The Grump, as well as their two daughters, Lila and Julia, The Grump's closest friends. It’s been a rare week that Brendan, a stay-at-home dad, didn’t drop by and spend an afternoon or morning, heading off to the park or pool, having lunch, arguing politics (he was always wrong).

Christmas Eves were marked by dinner at their house. They threw an annual Easter Egg Hunt (before the sinkhole swallowed the bunny). Brendan and I would go to movies Maria and Monica despised. When family from up north would visit, I’d head over to their house. We’d play Hearts, laughing hysterically.

They are generous. They are kind. They are funny.

And now they are gone.

And so I’m feeling sad this morning.

NHC Forecasters Kicks off Florida Storm Season

2009-08-16T13:01:00.007-04:00

FOR CARIBBEAN SEA, THE GULF OF MEXICO AND FLORIDA PENINSULA...

THE NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER IS ISSUING ADVISORIES ON ALL SORTS OF TROPICAL CUMULO-NIMBUS CRAP AS AUGUST BUSTS LOOSE ITS HELL AND MAHEM RIGHT NEXT DOOR TO FLORIDA...THE GULF WATER IS NOW AS HOT AND WET AS A FAT LADY’S FART (REALLY! GO LOOK OUT YOUR WINDOW FOR GAHHDSAKES!)…AND IT’S ALL CREEPING ACROSS THE ATLANTIC… IN HIGHLY THREATENING FORM WITH ALL SORTS OF CRASHING BAROMETERS…BLAH,BLAH, UTC QUIKSCAT PASS, BLAH, BLAH, RADIOSONDE DATA, BLAH, BLAH, DEEP CONVECTION, BLAH, BLAH, ACID INDIGESTION, BLAH, BLAH, WIND SHEAR, BLAH, BLAH…TOWARD THE LEEWARD ISLANDS…LESSER ANTILLES…ACHILLES ARCHIPELAGOS…AND THE PATELA, FIBULA AND SCAPULA ISLANDS...

...TROPICAL STORM WARNINGS HAVE BEEN ISSUED FOR THE METATARSALS AND PHELANGES AND A HURRICANE HUNTER AIRCRAFT RECONNAISSANCE IS SCHEDULED TO INVESTIGATE THE ACTIVITY IMMEDIATELY AFTER HAPPY HOUR IN CUBA TONIGHT…

…INTERESTED PARTIES IN THE AFFECTED AREAS ARE STRONGLY ADVISED TO BEGIN PANIC HORDING, RUSHING OUT TO WAL-MART TO ACQUIRE WATER AND TOILET PAPER AND DELICIOUS, CANNED CHEF BOYARDEE PRODUCTS AND LOTS OF ICE THAT WILL MELT WHEN THE POWER DISAPPEARS FOR A WEEK…RESIDENTS OF COASTAL COMMUNITIES ARE STRONGLY ADVISED TO DON THEIR FLOATIES AND THROW THEIR BABIES HIGH UP INTO THE PALM TREES…BTW, WHEN YOU’RE OUT AT THE STORE THIS AFTERNOON, GRAB SOME EXTRA BEER AND A SHOTGUN TO FEND OF THE LOOTERS…

…ALL YOU YAHOOS IN KENTUCKY WHO THINK YOUR STATE’S BORING AS HELL CAN GO PLUCK YOUR BANJOS AND GIVE THANKS TO GOD ALMIGHTY YOU WERE BORN IN APPALACHIA, WHICH IS VERY BORING BUT WHERE THE ONLY NATURAL DISASTER YOU HAVE TO FEAR IS YOUR FIRST COUSIN…

ELSEWHERE...TROPICAL CYCLONE FORMATION IS NOT EXPECTED DURING THE NEXT 48 HOURS.

$$
FORECASTER BARRETT

How'd I do? For the real thing (and to see what Floridians obsess over in August and September), click here, pick your favorite storm name and click on the blue link Forecast Discussion in its box.

Hooja Get? Viola Swamp?

2009-08-15T13:55:00.010-04:00

Stuccoville’s cell phone towers and e-mail servers are crashing this afternoon.

There are cries of joy. Weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Stuccoville’s mail carriers are being brutally assaulted in the street. Mauled. Torn to pieces. Death Boarded.

Stuccoville Elementary’s class teacher assignments land today. Immediately, the Stuccoville Mama Train began tearing down the tracks, abandoning Starbucks and roaring through its pedicure stations to light up the phone boards, shoot out e-mails and hit Reply All with wanton abandon.

Elf, 6, landed with her close friend and cutie pie, the MiniBlond Bomber, in Mrs. G’s. As I write this, Elf’s bowling at a first grade birthday party, beaming from ear to ear. They can spend the year planning their wedding.

The Papaya?

She’s spent the afternoon on the phones. “Hooja get?” she says, not even bothering to identify herself. She listens quietly. Hangs up. Dials another friend. “Hooja get?” she says again.

She finally hung up and moved to Mopetown.

The Papaya, you see, had a falling out with Calliope last year. And Savannah said that Penelope said that Calliope said that The Papaya and Calliope have been condemned to pass the year together in Mrs. V’s classroom.

Way downtown, central city Mopetown.

Meanwhile the Stuccoville Mama Train keeps charging down the tracks, jamming e-mail inboxes and cell phones. “Oh, she’s a screamer!” says one.

“Ahhh! She’s very sweet and nice. Yes, she’s a bit obsessed with dioramas, but she’s gentle and makes the science fair optional, so we’ll give her a pass,” says another.

"Pisser!" says a third. "I wouldn't stand for it! I'd march right in there and demand Mrs. Hugabunch instead."

Which is exactly why the Stuccoville Elementary front office staff quietly slips them all in the mail on Friday afternoon.

Right before disappearing for a long, quiet weekend.

The Annual School Supply Rant

2009-08-12T21:56:00.003-04:00

Saturday we just bit the bullet and completed all of our back to school shopping: shoes, clothes and, yes, school supplies.

We divided up the three school supply lists and descended upon Target. We emerged $128 later and six Target bags later. Here is most of it:

Of course, Abraham Lincoln became a lawyer, was elected to the House of Representatives, was elected U.S. President, freed the slaves and saved the Union. His stinking school supplies?

Slate and a piece of chalk.

So the school supply lists have prompted some questions.

Fourteen glue sticks and three bottles of glue. What in God’s name are all you teachers doing with so much paste? Gluing rookie teachers to the gymnasium ceiling in ritual hazing events? Using it to keep the kids in their seats?

And crayons. Crayons and markers. Crayons and markers out the wazoo. How many rainbows can a single pre-K student color between 9:30 and 12:30 over 180 days? At this rate, Michael Moore is going to make a new documentary about how the world is dangerously running low on primary colors.

And pencils. What is with teachers’ obsession with pencils? I’m thinking eight pencils would suffice for 180 days. My three daughters now own 72. Is the Hillsborough Teachers Union using them to build a wooden retirement cruise ship?

Pop Quiz Math Problem: If you walk into a teacher's home in which 3 people live who eat 3 meals a day, how many spoons would you find into their silverware drawer?

Answer: 72.

Day 9-10: These Little Piggies Return to Tampa

2009-08-10T21:41:00.004-04:00

All good things must come to an end. Our last day at Grandma’s house in Scranton passed uneventfully. No health care town hall meetings on the front porch. No embarrassing T-shirt shops inadvertently wandered into. Instead we had a fun lunch at my sister Megan’s house while Ma Joad did laundry and packed for the trip home. The girls loved the time they spent with their cousins, Abby, Natalie, Isabella and Hannah, while I stayed in the living room and read about King Phillip’s War. In case you didn’t know, King Phillip’s War involved the Puritans and Pilgrims finally concluding that all their in-laws would be invited to future Thanksgivings but all the Indians had to be killed because they hogged the cranberry sauce.

Or something like that. The book had a lot of big words like Wampanoag and confusing dudes’ names like Cotton Mather, so I might have missed something.

I have to say, however, that throughout the story, I found myself rooting for the Indians. But we know how that all turned out. They were all cruelly rounded up and forced to move to Cleveland, where they play baseball.

And on our last night in Scrantoon, the girls experienced one of the highlights of their trip: pedicures and manicures by Aunt Kate, who works at the University of Scranton giving pedicures and manicures to the Jesuits.

Or something like that.

And the next morning, bright and early, we bid Kate and Nana farewell and began the 1,100 mile journey back to Tampa, spending the night in Florence, South Carolina, where only a single thing proved memorable.

Departing Florence, we stepped into the hotel elevator to carry our stuff to the car. In addition to the travel bag we had, we carried the pillows and comforters one of the girls used on the inflatable mattress we hauled around the country. On the elevator stood a hotel manager and an elderly couple. The old man looked up at us as we entered. His eyes flashed open and he cried, “Look! They’re stealing the bedclothes!”

I smiled and looked nervously at the manager.

Four hours and one gas stop later, we pulled into a very crowded McDonald’s in Georgia for lunch. We got in one of the half dozen long lines of people crying out numbers and begging to be supersized. I suddenly recognized the old man in a line to our right. He turned and caught me staring at him. “We met you in Florence this morning,” I said, utterly surprised. “What are the chances?”

His mouth dropped open. “Yes,” he cried, causing everyone to stare. “You were that family who stole the hotel bedclothes!”

Here are the chances: Some people win the lottery but Dumb Daddy gets accused of hotel larceny while ordering Happy Meals with extra honey mustard sauce.

It’s good to be back home.

Day 8: Day at the Museum

2009-08-08T20:16:00.007-04:00

Day 8 of The Great Recession Road Trip, a cultural detour was called for. Where in Scranton does one turn for a serious dose of culture?

St. Rocco’s annual church picnic?

Al O’Donnell’s funeral home?

The Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour?

A University of Scranton beer party?

The Nay Aug Park Zoo? Oopsie! Sore subject! All the animals died! And current Scranton public works union contracts have left the city too broke to maintain anything but a gerbil cage (without the gerbil wheel) and an ant farm (without the ants).

We finally gave up and drove to New York City, two hours away.

Which took us through the Garden State, which really knows how to trick out its rest stops:

Once in the Big Apple, I spent my first hour searching near the American Museum of Natural History for the rarest of the city’s historical artifacts: an actual parking spot for under $40. (I eventually found the museum’s parking lot beneath the museum, where someone kindly let me park on an exit ramp for a mere $47 for seven hours.)

Having grown up in Puerto Rico to a family who preferred Chuck Norris films and Menudo concerts to museums, Ma Joad was under the impression the Museum of Natural History was something one breezed through in just under two hours.

For those of you unfamiliar with the institution, the movie Night at the Museum is roughly based on the place. The real thing, however, is about 10 times bigger than the movie version, but its Sacagawea is not nearly as hot, at no point did the Theodore Roosevelt statue say “Na-noo! Na-noo!” and Ben Stiller wasn’t walking around the lobby engaging in the high art of bodily fluid humor.

Initially thinking the museum was only as big as the San Juan mayor’s personal collection of rum bottles, Ma Joad actually penciled a number of other highly cultural activities into our afternoon (I wisely remained silent, not wanting to be told to watch my tone). The most important of the side trips was a stop at the M&M Store in Times Square, which we visited two years ago and where The Papaya,10, has requested her ashes be strewn after her death. In fact, when it became clear that we would be arriving in Manhattan after 11 a.m., forcing the Cruise Director to shorten her itinerary, the following conversation took place.

Ma Joad: By the time we park, it’s going to be 11:30. Maybe we should just skip the museum and go to Times Square.

Pa Joad: I did not drive two hours to spend $60 on two pounds of personalized M&Ms.

Ma Joad: Watch your tone.

Fortunately, the moment she stepped into the museum’s entrance, she came to her senses. Overwhelmed by its beauty and grandeur and the big dinosaur bones, her eyes actually filled with tears.

And after we paid $125 for the tickets, mine did too.

“You didn’t tell me it was like this!” she cried.

Yes, all five floors of it. It was amazing and we could have spent another two days there.

But Grump, 4, would have been more impressed if the dopey dinosaurs, just standing around collecting dust, actually tore one of the hundreds of little summer campers tearing through the place to meaty shreds.

Alas, the museum closed at 5:45 p.m. and we departed to have dinner with my brother Brian, who works in Manhattan for the Department of Sanitation (perhaps you’ve heard of them by their informal name: Goldman Sachs). The rest of his family joined us for dinner, my sister-in-law Tania, nephew Owen (one of my three intrepid readers) and niece Anna. We had a great time with them and I was sad to kiss them goodbye.

But the New York City cultural highlight of the day?

Walking up Amsterdam Avenue to the Italian restaurant, Maria spotted a T-shirt in a window. It sat right next to a large poster of two naked women provocatively eating popsicles, a poster she apparently did not see. Printed on the T-shirt? Little Mr. Happy.

Being a half block ahead, I didn’t see her stop and drag Elf into the place. After all, she figured, a T-shirt reading “Little Miss Happy” or “Little Miss Sunshine” would be just perfect for Elf, 6.

The two entered the place and immediately began pawing through the T-shirt rack. Elf began to read them out loud.

“Little Miss Orgasm,” she said. “Mr. Masturbation.”

Ma Joad seized her hand, pulling her away from the T-shirt rack.

“No! Wait!” cried Elf. “What’s masturbation?”

Ma Joad dragged the child back out onto the sidewalk.

By that time, I had wandered back to find them. I spotted the poster on the window. “You took her in there?” I cried.

“Watch your tone,” she said.

I held Ma Joad’s hand firmly the rest of the night.

Day 7: Lake Wallenpaupack

2009-08-07T10:16:00.007-04:00

Day 7 of the Great Recession Road Trip found Ma and Pa Joad headed west of Scranton to Lake Wallenpaupack to visit the lakehouse of Pa Joad’s childhood friend, Jim Lawhon.

I love Pennsylvania town and geographic names. Many are a mile long, bestowed by Native Americans, who, without text messaging, leisurely took all day to say them. They even added clever, hard consonant sounds allowing them to spit on people: Susquehanna, Allegheny, Lackawanna, Wyomissing and Tomaqua.

Then there are the entirely functional names given by coal miners too tired to get creative: Carbondale, Mountain Top, Pottsville (a laid back place) and Hometown.

Yes, there is a Hometown, Pennsylvania, which allows all of its residents to joyfully engage in a confusing Abbot and Costello routine whenever they meet a stranger.

Stranger: So, tell me the name of your hometown.

Hometown Resident: Yes!

And then there are just the flat-out odd Pennsylvania names: Minooka and Shamokin (Why doesn’t the Shamokin city council, in an effort to stop the loss of its brightest youth to places that actually have jobs, undertake a “Don’t Quit Shamokin!” campaign?). And Archbald, famous for the Archbald Pothole, the world's largest outdoor collection of cheap beer cans, and Wilkes-Barre, which was apparently named after the child of a woman’s studies major.

Then there are those places named by the sexually repressed or naïve: Intercourse, which famously is located just down the road from Blue Ball, Pennsylvania. I’m also going to throw Scotrun, PA into this category. This is because every time I saw Scotrun’s exit sign as I was falling asleep on the way back from some trip to New York City in the middle of my sex-obsessed middle and high school years (okay, it actually still happens to me), I swear the sign actually says “Scrotum.”

But on Day 7 we were headed to Lake Wallenpaupack, created in 1927 by the Pennsylvania Power and Light Company, which bought out the town of Wilsonville and built a damn that put the town on the bottom of the lake. They gave the hydroelectric reservoir a Lenape Indian name meaning “the stream of swift and slow water.”

We went to Paupack to visit Jim Lawhon and his family. Jim lives in a lakehouse beside the one owned by his parents, Zim and Patricia. Colonel Zim, a veteran of World War II, turns 91 this month and, I’m fairly confident, could still kick my ass. Except that he’s one of the most gentle and polite men I’ve ever met. And his wife, Patricia, is a hoot. They raised 13 children in a Victorian home on North Washington Avenue in Scranton. They were fixtures of my grade school and high school years and made me, once again, feel like family.

Jim and his wife Meg, a west coast native, currently live in Switzerland with their way-too-cute kids, Sam, Matt and Katie. Joining us for dinner at the lake were two other great high school friends, Pam Sealey-Walker, who brought along her two beautiful daughters and is not a women’s studies graduate, and Bill Haggerty, whose dental practice is in Milford.

All of them met Maria, The Papaya, Elf and The Grump for the first time.

We had a great time during a wonderful evening and it made me want to live in the mountains again.

Even if I did have to survive Blue Ball and Intercourse to get there.

Day 6: All Things Nana

2009-08-03T16:27:00.012-04:00

Thus begins our Brief History of Nana Barbara’s Near Death Experience and Ranger’s Real Death Experience:

The great focus of this summer’s Great Recession Road Trip was a family visit to Nana’s house in Scranton, the first family visit there since the fall of 2007. My mom’s home is an ancient, creaky place with Victorian trappings. As you pass its heavily landscaped yard and porch and drag your luggage up its steps, you will encounter a heavy oak door with an ornately decorated brass plaque. It reads, in Gaellic, Cead Mille Failt -- proof that you are entering a home steeped in Irish heritage and guilt.

But mostly guilt.

As Irish as I am, I know no Gaellic. Outside the potato famine and the fact that Protestants and Catholics spent the better part of the 20th century throwing rocks at each other, I know no Irish history. As far as I know, the Irish phrase on my mother's front door could mean “Get the hell off my porch!”

Or, given its brevity, directions to the nearest neighborhood bar.

The front door’s doorknob, I am happy to report, is currently in operational condition. This was a relief because it has, in the past, popped off in my hand, forcing me to scale the back of the house and attempt to enter the home through an open, second floor window -- something I would not have wanted to try with three daughters and all of their luggage after an 1,100 mile drive.

Just inside the screen door and stapled to the interior oak door, right above its big mailslot, is a large Ziploc gallon-bag with the important message: “Mailman! Please put all mail inside this bag!”

Apparently this is because any mail that goes through the mailslot is immediately shredded by Nana’s dogs, Stella and Ranger, who defend their territory by eating IRA statements. And, of course, shoving mail inside a big plastic bag instead of the dogs’ heads is the civilized thing to do.

During our visit, however, the big oak door was never closed except at night. The mailman simply opened the screen door, ignored the sign and plastic bag, and dropped all the mail onto the foyer floor.

The main kitchen window also features another, completely ignored sign. “Important! Do not put anything on this radiator!” it says. This, I assume, is to allow people to look out the window. The sign, however, now blocks the view.

And you have to move all the stuff on the radiator to read it.

All of which leads me to the following conclusion: If you’ve got a really important sign for people to read in Scranton, write it in Gaellic on a brass plaque. You’ll get the exact same response AND you’ll look really cosmopolitan.

While my mother’s house has its own unique culture I will never completely grasp (Did you know that refrigerating butter is completely optional?), I do love visiting the place and its crazed collection of people. And it was particularly good to see my mom up and about, preparing dinner and loudly apologizing for everything when she wasn’t grumbling about her boarders (her children and grandchildren).

It was a real improvement.

You see, she almost died this summer.

The how and why seem unimportant at this point. Plus, they'll read far less dramatically and far more tediously than, “You see, she almost died this summer.”

Suffice it to say that a prescribed drug nearly destroyed her liver. She was feverish, in intense pain and could no longer walk without assistance. I traveled up for a week on Father’s Day to help out.

And nearly departed five days early when she began demanding that I brew coffee every night at 2 a.m.

And in the midst of her near death experience, one of her beloved dogs – a mongrel named Ranger – was put to sleep after battling cancer. They even hired gravediggers.

Because Ranger, unlike the butter, couldn't just be left out on the kitchen counter.

All in all, a rather bizarre, depressing run.

So, during our Great Recession Road Trip, seeing Nana walk around like her old self, enjoying life – with grass beginning to sprout on Ranger’s grave in the backyard – made me feel like a tiny miracle had somehow happened.

And on Wednesday we celebrated her 71st birthday. The family gathered together and ate white and red pizza from Old Forge. Aidan, 3, blew out the candles. And we feasted on cake and ice cream.

And then we all gathered on the front porch and had an argument about health care reform. Because my family is filled with passionate and talkative people. On the one hand, you have diehard conservatives who are intolerant of same sex couples who wish to marry. And on the other hand, you have diehard liberals who are completely intolerant of closed-minded conservatives.

Our intolerance, tempers and never-ending attempts to change each other all simply prove that we are far more similar than we'd prefer to admit.

Yet, being Irish, we all decide to ignore the 95 percent of issues and values on which we agree and instead choose to discuss the 5 percent that makes us want to throw rocks at each other.

But we were all on that porch: alive, walking and breathing. And, however briefly, living in the same house again, driving each other crazy.

And it was wonderful.

Photo: Nana poses at her birthday party (prior to the argument on health care reform) with ten of her fifteen grandchildren.

Day 4-5: Scrantoon, Tubing and the Good Humor IHM

2009-07-31T21:16:00.004-04:00

Day 4 of the Great Recession Road Trip found us on our way to the birthplace of Dumb Daddy. Scranton, Pennsylvania is the home of dozens of people who are close relatives of D Squared. And dozens more relatives who deny knowing him altogether.

I feel compelled to point out that, despite my worries that The Papaya, Elf and The Grump would go stir crazy on the trip, graffiti the inside of the minivan and throw random truckers the finger, they have actually been very good natured and flexible about the whole trip. I really do have three great daughters. How I’ve managed that is beyond me.

For the past six months, I’ve spoken to them excitedly about visiting the lake house belonging to my Aunt Kay and my late Uncle Paul. They are parents to six great children and have nearly two score grandchildren now, all but two of which frequently visit the house on Lake Ariel, a lake in Northeast Pennsylvania.

On Sunday, we traveled up there, spending the day with my cousin Matt, his wife Laurie, their five children, my other cousins Eileen and Kathy and their kids, my mom, two sisters and their children and my Aunt Marie and Sr. Adrian Barrett, of the Sisters Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM), who, had she not entered the convent some five decades ago, would be called my Aunt Dorothy. Instead she married Jesus, so we call her Aidy Baby, because this is how we show our profound respect to the deeply religious.

Aidy Baby is big into religious rituals and roles, her most important title being the Supreme Pontiff of Post-Dinner Lake Ariel Ice Cream Cone Scoopage. The kids love her. And she loves them back.

And did I mention she loves ice cream?

In fact, if Aidy Baby were pope, mass would conclude with a sundae party instead of Necco wafers, thus successfully re-converting all those heathen Protestants.

In addition to consuming a gallon of ice cream apiece, the girls had a blast tubing, jumping on the trampoline, riding bikes to the lake dam, jumping off the floating dock and running around like wild women after their second cousins. Or they might be first cousins, once removed; my understanding of relative terminology is pretty relative.

The Papaya, 10, loved the water, rarely leaving it. Elf, 6, usually the most laid back of the trio, went in once, decided she didn’t like the squishy bottom or the frigid temperatures and didn’t go back in; later, when I pressed her to swim to the dock, she burst into tears and said she was afraid of the alligators my nephew Andrew, 18, insisted lived in the lake. The Grump, 4, was, well, The Grump. She didn’t go into the water at all, instead demanding that she follow her cousins around the lake in a paddle boat that she forced adults to paddle. The highlight of her day? Catching a fish off the floating dock, which she was then too terrified to look at when Andrew tried to show it to her.

The night concluded with several launches of a rocket my cousin Matt got for his birthday and a great campfire with marshmallows.

The highlights for me? After my nephew Andrew spent the afternoon talking smack about how he was going to dump me off while tubing, he managed to take the first tumble while I hung on for dear life (my arms and boobs are still sore). And despite fishing regularly off my uncle’s dock when I was a child, that night I also managed to catch a fish – my first ever at the lake. In fact, it could be my first caught ever.

And my cousin Matt was kind enough to take it off the hook for me.

Day 2-3: Our Great Nation’s Capital and I Like Naked

2009-07-29T09:41:00.006-04:00

I met Ma Joad one early autumn evening in our great nation’s capital in 1993. I had lived there a few years, teaching at Gonzaga College High School. That September I wandered over to Georgetown to meet one of my old high school teachers, Fr. Ruff, for dinner. Following mass at Holy Trinity Church, he introduced me to one of his hottest students from St. Joseph’s University, who happened to walk over to say hello.

The rest, they say, is history. Or, at that point, future.

Continuing our Great Recession Cross Country Car Trip, Ma Joad and I, along with The Papaya, Elf and The Grump, set off from Charleston for our old haunting grounds of Washington, DC. After stopping at a local filling station to gas up and acquire three Moon Pies, a Southern delicacy the girls insisted we had to try, we began the long trek up Interstate 95. That poor highway is largely bereft of interesting stops, crushed as they are by the cultural and economic might of South of the Border, which aptly represents everything horrifying about American culture. (You never SAUSAGE a place!)

The girls also concluded that Moon Pies tasted like blandly flavored, chocolate-dipped flip-flops. So we threw them out the window at people driving Hummers.

And after South of the Border’s enormous, sombrero-shaped version of the Seattle Space Needle, we were badly in need of some good, uplifting Greco-Roman architecture. Fortunately DC fit the bill.

Nine hours and one argument later (featuring Ma Joad accused Pa Joad of getting them lost, Pa Joad throwing the Google Map directions into Ma Joad’s lap and Ma Joad calling Pa Joad a big baby) we pulled into the home of our close friends, Cindy, Roly, Isabella, Danny and Sammy, in Alexandria, VA, around 6 p.m. We stayed with them for two great days and ate all their food.

It was wonderful.

Alexandria is everything a snobby, navel gazing liberal like me aspires to be: well-educated, tasteful, quite historical and historically preserved, culturally astute, earth friendly, disciplined, organized and completely strip mall- and stucco-free.

And in need of serious lifelong psychotherapy.

Alexandria is also very public television. And preferably organic.

Two blocks from Roly’s and Cindy’s house we encountered Spill the Beans Organic Coffee Shop and Chat House. It featured organic coffee and organic conversation. A dry cleaner next door also claimed to be organic.

Cindy’s kitchen was very organic. There was organic lemonade and organic milk. Even her sugar-drenched breakfast cereals were very healthy little chocolate and vanilla-flavored organic bunnies.

Hell, when Alexandria farts, it’s organic. And then an art and jazz festival breaks out.

Meanwhile I live in Tampa, which, Cindy likes to point out, makes me a Tampon.

Alas, there are far too many highlights of our D.C. trip to detail here without it reading like the 2009 federal budget.

So here’s the Cliff Notes version: The Washington Monument was closed because it was struck by lightning, but we did see the World War II memorial, where Ma Joad insisted we take a photo of her standing beneath the Puerto Rico pillar, (no word yet on whether she’ll have it lasered onto a CD to hang from her rear view mirror), and the Lincoln Memorial. We walked past the White House on the way to the Old Ebbit Grill, the oldest saloon in the federal city where the important Washington folk take lunch. Our waitress was very polite but spent her breaks listening to Rosetta Stone tapes to improve her English. Hoping to get another photo of another president for posting here, I said to her, “Pardon me, but my friend Roly here is a former lover of Sonya Sotomayer. Other than him, is there anyone else important dining here today?”

She smiled politely, shook her head no and brought me the blackberry pie when I had clearly ordered the blueberry cobbler. And then, as lunch ended, Elf pointed to the ceiling, which was painted with dozens of carousing naked dudes pretending to be cherubic angels. “Why are all those naked people up there?” she whispered.

Ah ha! We had finally spotted the important people: Senator Ensign, Senator Craig and Governor Sanford.

“They’re Republicans,” I whispered back.

Afterwards, to replace our trip to the top of the Washington Monument, we went to the Old Post Office Pavilion and climbed to the top, where we could see all the impressive buildings where all the fully clothed, important, Washington folk who missed lunch with me work.

But our day wasn’t finished.

That evening, Roly took me, The Papaya and Elf – along with Isa and Danny – on his world famous nighttime tour of the monuments. We climbed the steps to the Capitol and visited the Jefferson Memorial. With Elf falling asleep on my shoulder, we buzzed by the Iwo Jima memorial in Arlington before heading home, exhausted, our day complete.

Our time with Roly and Cindy made Ma Joad and I wish we lived in DC again – they’re the absolute best friends two people could have in the world (and I’m not just saying that because Roly is one of my three readers.) Ma Joad even burst into tears leaving. And then burst into tears four hours later talking about how difficult it was to leave.

But what was my absolute favorite highlight of the trip?

As Elf and The Grump took their showers one night, young Sammy, 3, lurked outside the door giggling. Cindy called for him two times with no luck. Finally, she raised her voice. “Why are you doing that, Sammy Diaz?!”

Sammy cried out. “Because I like naked!”

Just like his mama.

Road Trip, Day 1: Charleston and Chester A. Arthur

2009-07-22T22:05:00.006-04:00

In 1870, the British ship Carolina, along with another small sloop, sailed into a harbor in what is now South Carolina. They dropped anchor about five miles north of where I sleep tonight. Three ships had originally left England on the journey. Two of them were lost, one replaced by the small sloop.

Of the hundreds of colonists that left England for the trip, only 149 made it to shore to establish Charles Town. The rest apparently died after a particularly harrowing trip through the local Taco Bell drive thru.

Okay, I may be a little fuzzy on some of the historical details. The bellman talked rather fastish and I wasn’t about to pay the extra $9.95 for the WiFi in the hotel room to check Wikipedia.

Anyway, I’m thinking those English colonists should have bought Japanese. Had they taken three Sienna minivans, they would have made it here no problem.

This evening, I write this entry from the South Carolina lowlands. I had thought, way back in 1997 when I moved to Florida, that I was definitely moving to the lowlands. Turns out I was wrong. They’ve been in South Carolina the whole time.

So I’m really not sure where the hell I moved to in 1997.

But tonight I am in the lowlands.

Prior to 2001, however, I taught U.S. History for a dozen years. I enjoyed it immensely. I taught a great deal about Charles Town and the Carolina colonies, yet had never visit the old city. Turns out, the place is as neat, historical and beautiful as all of those history books said it was.

For those of you slugs who can’t recall your American History course from high school, here’s the history of South Carolina in ten words: South Carolina’s most important exports were rice, indigo, secession and death.

It’s all coming back now, isn’t it?

This morning me and the rest of the Joad Family began our Great Recession Cross Country Car Trip, with our end goal being the great economic promise of Scranton, Pennsylvania. We departed Tampa around 8:30 a.m. Our first casualty occurred just south of Waldo (“Where is Waldo?” you ask. “North Florida,” I answer. He’s in the police car pulling over all of the out-of-town speeders.). Outside Waldo, a male cardinal, flying directly into Highway 301 without first looking both ways, mistook the minivan for a giant female cardinal and flew headfirst into my windshield. It shot upward in a wide arc before plopping into the field adjacent to the road.

“We killed it!” Ma Joad gasped.

Very Steinbeck.

During the drive, I tried to impress Ma Joad with my civil war history, but her eyes seemed to glaze over. Right at the Georgia and South Carolina border, I deepened my voice and quoted the great Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman. General Sherman’s March to the Sea had left Georgia smoldering. When he turned northward into South Carolina, which had started the ruckus by shelling Fort Sumter (just three miles from where I sleep tonight), he looked forward to some vengeful ass kickin’. And so he deepened his voice, and wrote a letter back to his wife, which said:

"The whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak violence upon South Carolina. I almost tremble for her fate."

Ma Joad yawned.

Mrs. Sherman probably did too.

The rest of the day was rather uneventful, with the exception of our discovery, just over the Georgia/South Carolina border, that more fruits than just apples can be made into cider. We pulled into a rather interesting country store off state road 17, which leads to Charleston. Its signs touted cherry cider, blackberry cider and peach cider, which prompted us to stop. But it wasn’t a genuine, real, authentic country store like Cracker Barrel. No, siree. It was updated and yuppified. Kind of like Roy Clark in khakis and a polo shirt. Carolina Cider Company, it was called. It sold cider, grits, hard candy and boiled peanuts. But there was no guy in overalls scratching himself on the porch. And a jug of cider cost 10 bucks. So we bought little bottles for $2 each, and, convinced we had gotten a true taste of native Carolina culture, hit the road again.

I just have one nit to pick with South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (who couldn’t take my call when I phoned; he’s busy hiking, his aide assured me). When the powers that be decide to remodel South Carolina, I’d like to suggest they shorten state road 17. It’s 20 miles too long.

Charleston, however, is absolutely cool. And beautiful. And colonial.

Except for the prices, which are outrageously modern.

Best of all, right in the middle of eating dinner, we met Chester A. Arthur, who was once U.S. president. He’s since changed his name to Jerry and he’s one of the owners of the South End Brewery, where we ate chicken fingers and brick oven pizzas – exactly what South Carolinian Edward Rutledge was probably eating when he signed the Declaration of Independence.

And because Jerry had the most amazing mustache I’ve seen since the Civil War, I asked if I could have my picture taken with him. And he politely obliged. And he threw in a 30 minute history lesson for free.

Then we spent the evening walking Charleston Harbor and Market Street. But after 30 minutes, we realized Elf was missing. So we went back to the restaurant looking for her.

And found her hiding in Jerry’s mustache.

So we called it a night.

Tomorrow, it’s on to this great nation’s capital.

I almost tremble at its fate.

Road Trip: Preparations

2009-07-21T13:20:00.002-04:00

You people are relentless. Over and over again, they’ve landed: “Hey! When are you going to start posting again?” they read.

Did you conspire this past week to all e-mail me at the same time? Are you aware you pay me nothing?

What do you people take me for?

Migrant farm labor with a keyboard?

Okay. Okay. So it worked. Over the next few days, I shall post Notes from a Treasured Family Road Trip. In order to keep the criminal element from Stuccoville from invading my home and trying on my underwear in my absence, (You know who you are, Pivnichny.) I have waited to post these until we’re safe and sound back in our southern suburban home, sitting on our porch swing, with a banjo in one hand and shotgun in the other.

Really. Just ask Flannery O’Connor. That’s how we all spend our leisure time down here.

Anyway, it’s been a very eventful summer, which should give me some good posts in the coming months. As a taste of foreshadowing, I shall drop these cliffhangers: one of my mother’s beloved dogs died (yes, they actually hired gravediggers); a family wedding was announced, taking my last sister-in-law off the meatmarket and kicking off months of celebratory tension and fighting over the planning; and my mother almost died, which would have taken her off the meatmarket and kicked off months of tension and fighting over the planning.

So stay tuned.

Meanwhile, I offer you Day 0 of the Great Recession Road Trip to Scranton, which entailed 2,200 miles of cross-country, quality time – through the great states of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina (Hello, Pedro!), North Carolina, Virginia, the District of Columbia, Maryland and Pennsylvania (oh, and a side trip to New York) with The Papaya, 10, Elf, 6 and The Grump, 4, and Ma Joad, 39.

Tighten your seatbelts:

We leave tomorrow. A trip to Scranton by way of Charleston and Washington, DC, where we will stay a couple of days. The girls are excited. Not only will we see the Washington Monument, but we will also go tubing at my cousin’s lake house, where The Papaya hopes to consume all existing S’mores within a 20-square-mile area.

Today? I’m running around making preparations.

Maria went off to work and left me with a list of them: Stop the papers. Vacuum (“Please remember the sofa cushions,” she insisted.). Laundry. Printing off car trip activities. Acquiring 40 hours of quality children’s DVDs.

I’m really not sure why I’m cleaning so much. It doesn’t make much sense to me. If we get crushed by an 18-wheeler or, worse, eaten by the kin of Strom Thurmond, I’ll have cleaned for nothing. Yet, from Maria’s perspective, if we get crushed by an 18-wheeler or eaten by the kin of Strom Thurmond, everyone who comes into our house afterward will see just what clean people we were – right before they throw dirt on top of us.

So I clean.

And I went to Publix for bananas. For one cannot undertake a proper road trip without bananas. And as I went through the checkout with Elf and The Grump, one of the day cashiers, a fellow named Stan, who has a 1960s IBM haircut and looks like he chainsmokes newspapers and old overalls, says to me. “Are you enjoying your day off with your grandchildren, sir?”

Elf just looked at me, eyebrows raised.

“Are you out of your mind?” I wanted to reply. But I didn’t, because I left my spine in the frozen foods aisle.

My brother Brendan will enjoy this immensely. He takes great joy in reminding me of the time I went to the movies with him and the ticket girl, snapping her gum, asked if I wanted a senior ticket.

Do I look old?

I’m bald. And gray. And I’m 43. Technically, if I grew up in the South and only had a GED, I could be a grandparent.

But I have all my teeth. I don’t have tattoos or a mullet. I don’t enter my daughters into the livestock contest at the Florida State Fair. And I was wearing Old Navy shorts, running sneakers and a beat-up button-down from Wal-Mart.

Except for the damn shirt, it didn’t exactly scream geriatrics.

“No,” I said to Stan. “They’re my children.”

He handed me my environmentally friendly reusable bag. “Enjoy your bananas, sir,” he said.

Tomorrow: Charleston.

Double Digits

2009-06-15T14:31:00.003-04:00

While swamped with work today, I want to pause and do a quick shout out to The Papaya. Ten years ago today, we had our eyes opened to the wild, wonderful world of parenting. The Papaya popped out onto the planet, shocking us with smells and bodily functions we thought only existed in strange and murky alien worlds.

Like that time, just a few weeks old, The Papaya decided she wasn’t quite done pooping, and as I peeled a dirty diaper off her, she coated my arm, the wall, the bedroom curtains, the changing table, several stuffed animals, my neighbor’s house, several nearby cars and buses – hell, the entire Florida peninsula stretching from I-4 down to Miami – in breast-feeding mustard caca.

Or that moment, at the conclusion of her baptism at Sacred Heart Church, at the very moment that 90-year-old Fr. Kinelly trembled and excitedly said to her, “We welcome you to the church, Papaya!” our precious, little, beautiful girl let roar a middle-aged, construction worker, beer fart that shook the first ten pews. (I went up to Fr. Kinelly afterward. “Sorry about the baby, well, you know,” I said. “Oh,” he replied. “I thought that was you!”)

But we kept her anyway. And we’re happy we did. She explodes a lot less these days.

Now, for the love of gahd, will someone please tell my in-laws to stop sending dozens of those greeting cards that shriek bad 70s and 80s music when you open them? We want cash, people! Not Kool & The Gang!

Dibs on the Crazy Parent

2009-06-12T08:29:00.008-04:00

This week The Papaya’s at volleyball camp. She’s had a ball. She’s absolutely loved it. The thing she’s most excited about?

The vending machine with Pop-Tarts.

She spent three days negotiating for four quarters. Fearing she would just rip the machine from the wall and shake it until the chocolate ones broke free, Maria caved and gave them to her yesterday.

The Papaya came home from camp with a vending machine story that she told at dinner.

“During lunch I got in line for the vending machine. This older girl got in line about three kids behind me. She noticed there was only one package of Pop-Tarts left, so she said, ‘Dibs on the Pop-Tarts!’”

The Papaya tends to be a bit of a fragile lily when it comes to conflict with people outside the home, so Maria grew nervous. “What did you do?”

“I bought the Pop-Tarts.”

Now here’s what I think happened: The girl confronted her. The Papaya ignored her, ran into a corner, and quickly swallowed the Pop-Tarts whole without unwrapping them.

The Papaya, however, swears it went down differently.

“When I bought them, the girl got upset.” The Papaya continued. “She said, ‘Hey, I had dibs on those Pop-Tarts!’”

She fell silent.

“So what did you do?” said Maria.

“I told that I had gotten in line before her.”

“That’s right,” I praised her, “Line location trumps dibs any day of the week.”

Maria’s presence at the table stopped me from finishing the thought: “But you should have told that girl that the only thing she has dibs on is a big box of stupid.”

I was a bit surprised at myself. During the story, I had felt the flare up of an insane parental reflex to defend The Papaya against the Dibs Uttering Pop-Tart Bully. I wanted to march down to the volleyball camp, shake my finger under the girl’s nose and growl, “How dare you try to intimidate my precious, gifted, first-born child! How would you like dibs on a good kick in the arse!”

What stopped me?

Mrs. Mickelson.

Mrs. Mickelson lived on the top of Kingsbury Road, a block away from St. Paul’s. Her son, Michael, was a sweet and polite kid. But he was the kind of kid whose clothes and haircut perpetually carried the scent of grade school chum. He immediately attracted the school’s sharks, who taunted him relentlessly in the block between the school and his house. Being the nice, polite kid I was, I didn’t join the sharks. But I certainly didn’t try to stop them either. They had their victim and I was content to hide anonymously in the reef.

Mrs. Mickelson knew about the sharks. And she had the same insane parental reflex to defend poor Michael.

One day as Michael was hotly pursued up Kingsbury Road by the shouting sharks, Mrs. Mickelson’s reflex flared. The window to a second floor bedroom of the Mickelson home flew open.

“Leave Michael alone, you faggots!” she screamed. “Homos! Go home to your mamas, you girls!” She screamed even louder. “You damn fags! Leave my Michael alone!”

The sharks scattered.

I looked, wide-eyed, at my friend Jim, who looked back at me, eyes wider.

A screw had come loose. Mrs. Mickelson, the wife of a respected local dermatologist who lived in the nicest home on Kingsbury Road, who drove a new white Cadillac and whose hair and dresses were always impeccable, had gone off the deep end.

She actually thought she was helping Michael by giving the sharks a taste of their own medicine.

And so, this morning, the Dibs Uttering Pop-Tart Bully gets a pass from Dumb Daddy.

Until I can find Mrs. Mickelson’s phone number.

Too Many Relatives

2009-06-11T09:17:00.005-04:00

It's official. I have too many relatives.

This morning I looked up on my bulletin board and spotted the family birthday list. It's a completely filled, single-spaced typewritten page that my brother maintains and e-mails to everyone every three months when there's an update. Even with the list, I'm forever misplacing birthdays.

I suddenly realized I hadn't looked at this month's birthdays yet, so I read the June section.

I get to the bottom: "June 18, Bridget," it says.

"Who the hell is Bridget?" I say aloud.

Mental click.

Oh, yeah.

My sister Maura's baby.

Shameless Self Promotion

2009-06-03T13:12:00.006-04:00

I usually try to avoid plugging myself and my two annual accomplishments here. It's just generally embarrassing. But I feel a burning urge to break my blogivacation today to report this very important fact: I am famous in Columbus, Ohio.

Columbus Parent asked me to write one of their features for June. And, today, the magnanimous, wonderful and beautiful editor of that brilliant parenting publication (Staci, I'm available for more work...) sent me an e-mail letting me know that I'm, um, gracing the homepage of their Web site. It will likely change by tomorrow because, after all, liposuction will only take my modeling career so far.

My mother will be so proud!

Click here to see it and read my salient insights on Father's Day. And if you're reading this too late to catch the homepage feature and it's changed, click here to find the article.

Summer Break

2009-05-27T13:13:00.003-04:00

Okay, I'll admit to feeling tortured about this.

I need a break. And rather than taking 45 minutes to an hour out of my day to write about my kids over the summer, I'd prefer to actually spend it with them.

And reading.

And writing some other things that I love to write.

And since I started this blog some 18 months ago, my other fiction writing has suffered and taken a back seat. And I just miss it.

In the past week or so, I've returned to a book I "finished" writing more than a year ago. I had started another novel in the interim, but knew that someday I would have to return to the first book to rework its first chapter. And working on that first chapter has made me excited about that project again.

And so, while I may pop in with an ocassional post over the summer, I will likely be scarce over the next eight weeks.

Rest assured, I'll still be writing -- but this time on something I'd hope you actually are willing to pay for. And when I'm done re-working it and the agents all pass on it once again, I'm going to make it available to readers myself.

I wish you a happy summer and close by sharing you the book's opening lines:

On the day she turned fourteen, Kate Maguire had learned one important lesson about life. A person takes about a half million breathes in a single month. And somewhere between the first and the 500,000th breath, your father can die, you can kiss your best friends goodbye and you can climb into the back of a small, cramped car with your most important treasures and begin a trip to another corner of the country.

And drop without a sound into a strange, unrecognizable world...

Lasts

2009-05-20T08:36:00.006-04:00

Yikes! It’s been a week.

My sincerest apologies to my three readers. I’m not shirking responsibilities; I’ve just been busy.

Proof?

This morning at breakfast, I was trying to clean the counter where The Grump had practiced her letters last night while Kris and Adam competed to be named The Great American Karaoke King. Maria had presented her with one of those dry-erase books that easily wipe clean for re-use. Yet I couldn’t figure out why I had to SCRUB the counter to get rid of all the extra Ps and Qs that had carelessly wound up there.

I finally looked at the marker.

“You gave her a permanent one,” I said.

Foolish me.

I had forgotten that people were up VERY late last night with the whole, highly important American Idol sing off. And as any marriage counselor will tell you, timing is everything.

“You don’t come out of your office for ten straight days and nights and when you do, it’s to criticize me.”

As I said, I was a little busy. Overwhelmed with both production for the magazine I publish and a whole group of lasts. Lasts that marked the end of fourth grade, the end of kindergarten and U-6 soccer, and the end of the 3-year-old, Monday, Wednesday, Friday Jesus Rocks program.

Amid all the editing, we had The Papaya’s spring concert. Elf’s last soccer game and her end-of-the-season soccer party. And The Grump’s pre-school show.

Which brings me to another woman I’ve managed to highly annoy in the last 24. As we were returning yesterday afternoon from acquiring provisions, The Grump was singing one of the show songs from her wonderful pre-school, The Most Righteous Garden of Our Sacred and Angry Savior.

Where hugs are free with a purchase of 20 rolls of holiday gift wrap.

She sang it like this:

Who is the king of the jungle? Ooh! Ooh! (sang like a monkey)
Who is the king of the sea? Baa! Baa! (sung like a drowning sheep)
Who is the king of the universe?
And who’s the king of me?
(SHOUT) J-U-S-U-S!
He’s the king of the universe!
And he’s the king of me!

"No, Grump," I interrupted. “It’s spelled J-E-S-U-S.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is.” I said, fairly sure that, at the age of 43, I still spell better than my 3-year-old.

Her voice rose. “No, it isn’t!”

“Well, then, Miss Know It All, what exactly are you spelling in that song?” I said.

Pause.

“I don’t know.”

“Ha!” I said. “It’s J-E-S-U-S!”

“No, it isn’t!”

Timing, as I said, is everything.

And if you see Jusus hanging around anywhere, please let The King of The Grump know he needs to work on her messy spelling and writing.

I’d Know That, Um, Face Anywhere

2009-05-13T20:22:00.006-04:00

So tonight at Elf’s soccer practice I have one of those bizarre, slightly mortifying moments that constitute my life.

I was standing on the soccer field at one of Stuccoville’s fine parks. Elf’s team, The Dribblers, was holding their last practice. Maria had designated me Money Collection Man. She had e-mailed the other team parents, suggesting they hand me large wads of cash so she could buy gift cards for Coach Anders and Coach Jim.

I was standing there talking to two other dads when another dad walks up. He’s wearing a baseball cap. Something about him makes me think I should know him, but I can’t exactly place the guy. “I’m told you’re collecting money for the coaches?” he says. He holds out a twenty with a friendly smile.

“Yes,” I say.

I look at him. I know all the other dads on the team and finally deduce he’s J-Man’s father. But there’s something vaguely familiar about him that I’m still struggling to place. He apparently read my confusion. “We’ve actually met,” he says, extending his hand. “I’m Seymour Bluttox.”

The lightbulb goes on.

My proctologist.

I should clarify. I shouldn’t call him “my proctologist.” I don’t have any medical specialist I see regularly that I can actually claim ownership of – like some people who proudly say, “Oh, yes, I have to see my chiropractor for an adjustment.”

Or, “My phrenologist gives me three months, tops.”

Or “My plastic surgeon is having a major league sale on ginormous bazongas this month.”

I should instead describe our relationship thus: Dr. Bluttox served as my proctologist.

Once.

Back when my mom was diagnosed with colon cancer and all of her children were ordered to undergo a thorough spelunking of their large intestines.

I’d like to say Dr. Bluttox did a wonderful and thorough job, but some other dude who talked like a pirate, who had a ponytail, who insisted that vodka constituted one of the clear liquids that could be safely consumed in the 24 hours prior to a colonoscopy, and who served as Dr. Bluttox’s anesthesiologist gave me a shot of something that knocked me cold. So as far as I know, they could have played canasta on my arse for the next 20 minutes.

But, afterwards, Dr. Bluttox told me everything was okay up there and I decided to take the kind man at his word.

So Dr. Bluttox is just standing there on the soccer field, twenty in one hand, and the other extended to shake my hand in greeting.

I catch myself just before turning to the other two dads standing beside me and saying. “Oh, this guy’s my proctologist.”

For gahd’s sake, I’m only 43. Only guys over 50 make such proclamations at cocktail parties.

So I just shake Dr. Bluttox’s hand. Then I decide to crack a joke to cover my embarrassment. And, like usual, I foolishly begin speaking before it’s properly formulated. “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t recognize you without your…”

I stopped again. It suddenly dawned on me that I had no idea what the proper name was for the IMAX camera/proctological snake he had introduced up my backside. So instead, I was going to finish the statement with the words “long thingee.”

As in, “I didn’t recognize you without your, um, long thingee.”

But this was a dude who had seen me naked. So I just suddenly stopped speaking and gave an embarrassed laugh. I thanked him for his twenty and he walked back to his chair.

The other two dads were looking at me strangely. For some unknown, foolish reason, I felt compelled to explain the bizarre interaction.

“He’s my proctologist,” I said. “I didn’t even recognize him.”

Awkward silence. This, for some additionally unknown foolish reason, compelled me to explain further.

“After all, he saw a lot more of me than I saw of him.”

Polite, awkward smiles all around.

And thus, another day in my bizarre life comes to a close.

Post Mother’s Day Reflection

2009-05-12T09:26:00.005-04:00

As a writer whose life is delineated by the strictures of the five paragraph essay method, I tend to filter my life into specific themes, even if they make absolutely no sense.

Like Mother’s Day, whose primary theme was priests and sex.

We had a wonderful Mother’s Day. After I kicked off our celebration of Maria by serving The World’s Best Mom a big omelet, we all went to mass. We go to a Franciscan parish downtown. While the priests all wear robes created by famed and cutting-edge fashion designer Pietro di Bernardone, the dude did live in the 13th century, when people let sheep sleep in their beds instead of cats. It being 700 years later, the good friars could use a fashion makeover (Friar George, if you’re reading this, the fashion columnist at my magazine insists that this spring is all about frills, embellishments and animal prints. Go for it, man!) Nevertheless, while these fine men may lack some semblance of sartorial splendor, the parish’s Franciscan priests actually seem far more connected and real to their parishioners than many of Tampa’s diocesan priests – most of whom now hail from countries where they still treat women like sheep and cats.

So, I went into the grand church expecting to hear one of the friars – all of whom are gifted homilists – speak movingly about Mother’s Day. But instead, the priest who heads up diocesan efforts to recruit other priests shows up and offers his Join Now and Unlike Those Other Guys We Won’t Send You to Iraq or Afghanistan speech. His speech extolling the importance of church vocations actually began with a joke that likened one guy’s wife to Satan’s sister.

Blatant misogynism ignored for the moment, Mr. Five Paragraph Essay Method was left scratching his head and asking: “And this relates to your main idea in what way?”

The dude, moreover, wasn’t particularly appealing. He also seemed completely oblivious to the irony (or is it just a simple paradox?) that he was trying to create more Fathers on Mother’s Day. “Join the priesthood,” he was saying, “And you can hang out with people like me!”

He'd have gotten far more takers if he offered S&H Green Stamps – or coupons for 50 percent off at Bed, Bath & Beyond.

And all this is going down while photos of Miami’s most famous and popular priest appeared on the front of a Spanish tabloid with his hands down some hottie’s bikini, a flagrant violation of the Holy See’s Cardinal Rule: If you’re doing the Deed, you can’t Lead the Creed.

In other words, if you want to be a Father, you can’t do anything that might make you one.

Feeling unsettled by mass (“Pray, sinners, that God sends you fools more people like me!”), I then drove the family to The Papaya’s godmother’s home, where, fortunately, we encountered normal, happy people.

Including the son-in-law of The Papaya’s godmother, who actually left the priesthood a few years back because he felt called to get his jiggy on.

Mike (as with all names here, completely made up) has been completely and wonderfully transformed by marriage and female companionship. He has always been a super guy, but now he just seems more content and relaxed. Two years ago, when he was newly engaged, I would never have joked about sex with him, for fear that he would have slapped me with a quote from The Book of Revelation and told me to sit up straight. On Sunday, as we swapped war stories about adjusting to married life with wonderful, hot, and high maintenance Puerto Rican women, he actually began joking about sex.

He dug into the arroz con pollo gleefully. “These parishioners used to come up to me and say, ‘Oh, Father, you’re not missing anything!” he said.

He shook his head. “They were out of their minds.”

The Ultimate Betrayal

2009-05-08T09:44:00.004-04:00

I’m excited.

This is a good thing because I find very few things exciting.

It’s a shame, really, how I’ve allowed the jadedness of middle age to squelch my youthful effervescent inner nerd. When I was 9, a new episode of The Six Million Dollar Man was exciting. Even 10 years ago, I might even be excited about the new Star Trek movie that opens today. (Don’t get me wrong. I was never excited enough to put on a Star Trek uniform and camp out overnight for tickets like an old housemate I had back in D.C. But, still, kind of excited in a slightly less frightening way.)

But I’m not particularly excited about the new Star Trek movie opening tonight.

I’m talking about the fact that we’re going on vacation.

Not just any vacation, mind you. A vacation that doesn’t involve extended family.

Please, don’t misunderstand me. I love my extended family – my mother, my five brothers and sisters; their spouses; their 12 children. And Maria’s extended family – her parents, her six brothers and sisters; their spouses, and their 10 children. All 43 members of my immediate extended family, not counting exes, dogs, beta fish or all current but as yet unmarried significant others. Proof of this is the fact that all of our vacations for the last 13 years have involved some extension of those 43 – all those trips to Pennsylvania and Puerto Rico. Even our annual Fourth of July trip to Florida’s beaches, where we dutifully drag our buckets and shovels behind Abu (Maria’s father) as he limps across the sand in a straw hat, black polyester socks and sneakers with the St. Pete Times tucked into his armpit.

All good times.

But here’s the thing about extended family. After about three days, you want to kill them. For one, they don’t understand the pathetic rhythms of your daily existence. In the morning, I just want to schlump around my clean, orderly kitchen, dealing out toast like Snoopy in that Thanksgiving special, drinking my coffee and silently reading the paper – with an occasional glance out the window to give thanks for sunshine and the way it plays with green. Maria and my children understand this and keep clear until I’m fully conscious.

But extended family?

Moments after I awake in Scranton, my sister stalks me into my mother’s chaotic kitchen, repeatedly touching my arm, insisting I listen to her. And listen some more. And listen some more. Until I want to crawl into the dishwashing machine, slam the door and press the pot scrubber button.

Emerging into my mother-in-law’s kitchen at 7:30 a.m. is like landing in a sports bar on a Saturday afternoon. Three televisions are on competing channels and the healthiest menu item is cheese fries. And then Maria, my mother-in-law and all of my sisters-in-law converge at the kitchen table and I become a guest on The View.

From my perspective, the safest way to vacation with family is to swap homes for the week. You can politely wave to them as your airplanes pass each other. And when you feel a longing for their company, you can go sit in the living room among the family photos.

But this week I’m excited.

On Tuesday, we did something for the very first time. We put a deposit down on a condo for a week at the beach.

Alone.

I even feel a little guilty about it: the ultimate betrayal.

So, don’t tell anyone.

And, no, you can’t come either.

Excuses, Excuses

2009-05-07T15:13:00.004-04:00

I’m not ignoring you. I don’t have writers’ block. I’ve not been lying on the beach. I’m not even procrastinating.

Really.

I just haven’t been home for the last two days.

Yesterday, a man wearing green pants and saddle shoes shanked his golf ball at the Stuccoville Golf Club and took out a transformer that provides electricity to all of Stuccoville’s cheap seats. And you cannot stay in a Stuccoville home that lacks electricity. It’s like putting a frog in the microwave and hitting the popcorn button.

Within two hours, it was above 85 degrees inside.

So I picked up The Papaya, Elf and The Grump from school and threw them in the community pool, where they remained until 6 p.m. Then there was soccer practice. And baths.

And lying, sunstroked, face down on the bed.

And this morning?

Bright and early, our stomachs teeming with butterflies, we traipsed downtown to the Tampa Convention Center for the Area Battle of the Books competition. The Papaya and Team Mariposa were amazing, placing second in the first battle of the morning and advancing to the Area Championship battle. The championship battle went down to the wire, with Stuccoville Elementary and Citrus Park trading first place positions in the first and second rounds. In the third round, Team Mariposa, trailing Citrus Park by a mere four points, rang in first to answer the very last question of the battle, a five point question.

Calliope, Penelope and The Papaya waited, the audience trembling on the edges of their seats, until the last possible moment before the judge rang the time bell…

And then they answered completely and totally wrong.

Sorry, kids. If you want happy endings, stick with books and avoid reality at all costs.

While disappointed, Team Mariposa could hold their heads high. They never quit when they were behind. And most important to me, they were good sports even in defeat.

There was no weeping. No gnashing of teeth. They congratulated the victors.

And then there was Italian gelato and happy smiles all around, courtesy of Penelope’s mom. Which, when you think about it, made losing absolutely worth it.

Now I’m glad it’s all over and we can return to normal, tranquil nerddom.

And I can get some work done.

Appreciating Teachers

2009-05-05T08:23:00.003-04:00

So it’s Teacher Appreciation Week.

The last few days as I’ve dropped The Papaya and Elf off at Stuccoville Elementary, I’ve watched its 900 students traipse to their classrooms beneath immense burdens: flowers, chocolates, gift bags barfing multicolored tissue paper, breakfasts, gifts of time, large household appliances, gift certificates, bank bailouts and cruises to Cozumel.

Moms and dads get a single day.

Great U.S. presidents share one day.

Jesus was allotted two.

And teachers get a week.

Call me Mr. Conspiracy, but I’m thinking a teacher came up with this one.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, my divorced grandmother used to tell me. So every day this week when I’m dropping Elf off in her classroom, I’ve been telling all her kindergarten pals that next week is Elf’s Dad Appreciation Week and they should duly inform their parents.

This morning Nicholas wasn’t buying it. He eyed me carefully. “I’m not sure I believe you.”

So I turned to Elf’s teacher. “Ms. Hugabunch,” I said. “Isn’t next week Elf’s Dad Appreciation Week?”

“Oh, yes,” she said.

“Well, okay,” said Nicholas.

“But I don’t want any flowers,” I told him.

They can also hold the chocolates.

Instead I’m hoping for some gift certificates to the movie theater.

Or two thousand Dairy Queen Blizzards.

And a vasectomy.

I’ll keep you posted.

Hurry Up and Wait

2009-04-29T13:23:00.004-04:00

Cool your jets.

Time is money.

Hold your horses.

Americans are terrible at waiting. To alleviate such nonsense, we’ve created fast food, the drive-thru, the supermarket express lane and right-turns-on-red.

Oh, and laptops.

The last two days I’ve had to practice my waiting skills. I volunteered to help my special-needs sister-in-law (she recently snapped her right leg at one of those fake indoor rock climbing places because Florida has no real outdoor ones). Carmen had to go to physical therapy on Tuesday. This afternoon we’re bonding at the mechanic’s shop so they can install new gas and brake pedals so she can drive with her left foot and be less special needs.

So I get to sit around and count my heartbeats and think about how terrible I am at sitting around.

Having lived in and visited the developing world extensively, I can assure you that people living there have waiting down to a science. They announce they have to go to town for something important. Then they walk out to the unpaved, dirt road, plop themselves down at its side, hold enormous leaves over their heads like a parasols and wait. They wait for any rusted-out truck that might happen to rattle past. Then they give it a polite wave and ask the driver if he’ll haul their butts into town for some pocket change.

“How long do you usually have to wait?” I would ask.

Shrug.

“Five minutes? Five hours?”

Shrug.

“So I take it there’s no published rusted-out truck schedule?”

Polite smile.

Americans in that God-forsaken place were the only ones wearing watches. That way we could time all the waiting.

Even in Maria’s Puerto Rico, which (except during the Olympics and beauty pageants) still lies within the United States, waiting skills are finally honed. You wait for weeks for telephone installation. Or for the electricity to come back on. Or for the governor to be indicted.

Except you generally don’t have to wait too long for that last one.

In Puerto Rico time is fluid. So a lot of Puerto Rican doctors don’t even set office appointments. If your thingamajig feels like it’s giving out, you just show up at your thingamajigologist’s office and drape yourself across a chair.

Assuming you got there early enough to get one.

And once there, you spend the rest of the week in your thingamajigologist’s waiting room, which is usually about the size of a telephone booth. It generally contains five individuals who have crying babies on their laps and 20 more who are shouting like Spanish machine guns into their cell phones.

And then a lady in leopard-print stretchy pants pulls an empanada out of her cleavage, takes a few bites and breathes on you. (Okay. Okay. That was a highly inaccurate, unfair and outrageous stereotype. It’s ususually the husband of the woman in leopard-print stretchy pants that grabs the empanada out of her cleavage.)

And you keep sitting there, wishing for death, until your thingamajigologist sees you and sends you somewhere else to wait for tests. But by that time, your thingamajig is usually feeling much better, so you just go back to your car, head home….

…and cool your thingamajig in traffic.

So you see why a proper Puerto Rican would never drop off their cars for something important like repairs or a new accelerator. Instead, you hang out in the garage and wait for hours while it’s repaired. Because waiting has value. And the more of your family members you can get waiting with you, the more meaningful that waiting becomes.

Because if you’re all not waiting for something important, your life is just passing you by.

Of course, being an American, I find this whole waiting thing highly suspicious.

Knowing this about their customers, American businesses stick TVs in waiting rooms in an attempt to make all that waiting seem less suspicious and more productive. Paradoxically, these TVs are always tuned to (1) a 24-hour news channel, (2) Judge Judy or (3) Jerry Springer. This, I suspect, is supposed to help me feel like I’m just lounging around my own living room, where, apparently, millions of Americans spend their precious hours of free time sucking down People magazine, keeping abreast of the latest natural disaster, political scandal and paternity test and waiting for new gas pedals to magically appear in their Hondas.

So to pass my last two days of waiting, I’ve had to listen endlessly to feverish 24-hour news broadcasters panting about Swine Flu.

I’ve even learned that many Americans and foreign governments have stopped eating and importing American and Mexican pork products because they believe you can contract swine flu from eating bacon. Of course, this is all perfectly logical because millions of people annually contract human flu by consuming other humans.

And when avian flu comes along?

Stay the hell away from the Chicken McNuggets.

But, hey, when you’re broadcasting 24-hours of news a day, you gotta broadcast something. And after five months of terrible news about the economy, it’s a relief to learn I might just die before I lose my job and home.

Yet as I sit here listening to the numbers of victims of swine flu, I can’t help but think that a helluva lot more people have been killed simply by waiting.

They’ve keeled over in doctors’ waiting room. Or on the side of a road with enormous leaves over their heads. Or in their mechanics’ shops.

I, for one, live in Florida. Florida, we all know, is God’s waiting room. And the morning paper is just teeming with obituaries.

So despite the TV’s attempts to get me worried about something else, I choose to remain highly suspicious and concerned about waiting.

And I’m getting very good at it.

The Drill Sergeant

2009-04-27T08:37:00.010-04:00

What’s the best way to get five 6-year-olds dashing down the field – all in the right direction – after a soccer ball?

1. Tell them it’s a scoop of ice cream gone rogue.
2. Announce that, after their little brothers’ shirts, it’s the second best place to wipe all their boogers.
3. Shout at them until the veins pop out of your neck.

Judging from Saturday’s soccer game, Option Number Three doesn’t work.

Since we’re in pop quiz mode, here’s another:

If your 6-year-old’s soccer coach, a rather beefy dude topping out at 6’3”, spent the better part of each game popping a blood vessel and shouting at the kids like a drill sergeant, you would:

1. Sit there politely and roll your eyes when he’s not looking.
2. Yell at his kid from the sidelines.
3. Surreptitiously give him the smallest piece of ice cream cake at the end-of-the-season party.

Elf’s team, The Dribblers, played a team coached by The Drill Sergeant on Saturday. It was rather uncomfortable. While he was likely unaware of the situation, The Drill Sergeant was the main topic of conversation on the sidelines. It wasn’t that he was mean, per se. He just suffered badly in contrast to all the other coaches competing for the Warm and Fuzzy Coach Award from the Stuccoville Soccer Association. The Drill Sergeant largely shouted his coaching directions throughout the game. While the shouting was annoyingly non-stop, he also had gotten to the point in his coaching career where he no longer felt the need to conceal his abject frustration:

“Antonio! The goal is in the OTHER direction!”

“Amanda! Why are you just standing there!? You’re on OFFENSE now!”

I politely inquired with parents on the other team. “Are you aware,” I gently asked them, “that your coach is behaving like a complete jerk?”

“Tell me about it,” they whispered back. “It’s gotten worse each week.”

Some tasks and the people asked to undertake them are just bad matches. Like the time I was asked to coach JV basketball.

This despite the fact that I couldn’t dribble with my left hand.

Or the time George W. Bush was asked to be president.

Or when Bill Clinton was asked to teach that abstinence class to high school girls.

For some odd reason, it doesn’t occur to some of these people to avert the impending train wreck by saying, “Maybe it might be wiser if I just stick to coaching JV bowling.”

But they don’t, the train flies off the track and they scratch their chins and say, “Oopsie. My bad.”

Sometimes these people, who really began with the hope of being helpful, need to be gently nudged back into reality.

So I made a helpful suggestion to the other team’s parents. “What if I try to organize a group effort to tackle the dude after the last whistle and give him a wedgie. You in?”

Polite laughter.

One of the grandfathers of the boys playing on The Drill Sergeant’s team even left the game early, saying he could no longer watch the situation.

Of course, all of the parents on Elf’s team were discussing how they wouldn’t put up with The Drill Sergeant. We all agreed that if our kids were on that team, we’d ask my wife to march up to the tall and scary dude and say, “Excuse me, sir, but please watch your tone.”

But the parents on the other team are bright, reasonable people who love their kids too.

My guess is that The Drill Sergeant is probably a nice guy. And it all probably started well. But now it’s just one bad curve away from a train wreck and an insurrection. People, unfortunately, put off uncomfortable action until the last straw. And by that time, they want to sharpen it and drive it right through the offender’s heart.

Yet I witnessed the matter and, like those parents, did nothing. Perhaps I should have spoken up -- should have marched over to him, said, “Listen up, buddy! No one yells at our kids but us! Got it!?”

And then run away.

Yet I didn’t.

But my offer of the gang wedgie is definitely still on the table.

Mad Momma’s News Recap, Edition 4

2009-04-25T09:50:00.008-04:00

Bookworm Nerdtopia

2009-04-23T12:40:00.011-04:00

A little riddle for you:

What has 18 books, 32 brainiacs, 8 buzzers and three rows of parents trying not to hurl? (If you didn’t buzz with your answer the moment I said 18, you’re way too late.)

It’s Stuccoville Elementary's Fourth Grade Battle of the Books.

Who participates?

Future computer programmers, encyclopedia editors, Jeopardy world champions and mutant X-Men named Cerebrum.

The preparations began in earnest before spring break. They culminated this week as five girls from Mrs. Mariposa’s class at Stuccoville Elementary swooped into my house after school. They carried two gigantic plastic jugs filled with one bazillion random lines from all 18 books. (Calliope, the team captain, also brought her cell phone (OMG!), on which she texted all afternoon.) One of the girls, The Trainer, pulled the strips of shredded books and read the one-sentence quotations they contained.

“The boy looked–”

“The City of Ember!” The Papaya, Calliope and Penelope (the other girl on the team) screamed at the exact same time.

“How do you do that?” I asked. “It was three words. Every single one of those books has boys in it.”

“It’s on page 32!” they shouted.

“Stop that!” I demanded, “Before they lock you up.”

The Papaya shoved me out her bedroom door. “Go fold the laundry,” she whispered.

The door clicked behind me. They screamed another book’s title the moment The Trainer uttered the first syllable.

It all seemed innocent enough.

Which made me very deeply suspicious.

So after they sucked down two bags of microwave popcorn and 12 pouches of fruit-flavored high fructose corn syrup, I occasionally eavesdropped outside The Papaya’s bedroom door.

My snoopiness paid off.

“So do you like Ishmael?” a voice quavered. “Have you two gone out yet?”

Pausing mid-text, Calliope answered in a kind of distracted, half-interested voice that conveyed college-level coolness. “Not yet,” she cooed. She made it sound like they were planning to skip all the preliminaries and get right to wedding in Vegas.

The room exploded in chirping and chatter, like an aviary after a triple espresso. I couldn’t make out any particular phrases, so I leaned in, my ear almost pressed against the door.

Suddenly, The Papaya’s voice rang out loud and clear. “What’s ‘make out’ mean?”

My heart stopped.

Whoa, Nellie! What began as an intense review of The Sloppy Copy Slipup was dangerously close to morphing into a Masters and Johnson expose. I threw open the door.

“Um,” I began.

Penelope didn’t wait. “Do you know who The Papaya likes?” she shouted at me. Her eyes were wide and excited.

“Me,” I said. “Dumb Daddy is the only man in The Papaya’s life.”

“JED!” Penelope screamed back.

So, there you have it. My gifted daughter likes a dude named Jed.

And Maria wonders why I was so hesitant to move to the Deep South back in the 90s.

“Perhaps we should leave the boys to high school and return to your intense review of The Penderwicks Go Shopping for Scented Candles,” I suggested. “Boys are only minor, pathetic characters in that story, right?” I nodded encouragingly at Calliope, who just rolled her eyes.

The Papaya shoved me out of the room again. “Maybe you shouldn’t snoop,” she hissed.

“The best parents always snoop. It’s in The Official Snooping Parents Handbook,” I said. "Maybe you should memorize that one."

But by that time, I was speaking to the door.

I could hear The Trainer begin to read another scrap of paper. “The sky–”

“The White Giraffe!” the three of them screamed.

Freaks.

And so we gathered in Stuccoville Elementary's multipurpose room this morning at 8:30 a.m. for the battle. Team Mariposa trouped in, decked out in their lime green shirts.

An interminable nail-biting 90 minutes later, the judges announced the victors.

“Representing Stuccoville Elementary at the District competition May 7th will be…Team Mariposa!”

Screams. Hoots. Hollers. High Fives. Trophies. And camera flashes.

As the hoopla died down, the kids in Mrs. Mariposa’s class gathered in the quad for a class photo. I spotted one of them talking to Calliope. He walked by me.

“So you’re Ishmael?”

He looked up, recognized me from The Great American Teach-In, and nodded.

“You were quite the topic of conversation at practice the other day.”

His face reddened slightly, but his eyebrows rose. “I was?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. "You and The Missing Manatee."

His face exploded in teeth. He high-fived his buddy next to him.

“Thanks!” he said.

I went over and hugged The Papaya. “Congratulations,” I whispered. “Now stop talking to boys.”

Smack Talk City, Part II

2009-04-22T10:42:00.005-04:00

The following blog is the second part of a lame two-part series, which starts here .

Moments before halftime, while Willy Wonka was in the midst of his taunting, trans-Atlantic call, Maria had leaped from her chair and rushed over, close to hyperventilating. “I know I shouldn’t feel this way,” she said, “But Elf’s not scoring! I want her to score! Instead she’s just staying back and not moving up to the goal!”

“It’s called defense,” I said. “The coach has her playing sweeper. Have you noticed she keeps stopping the other team from scoring? It’s kind of like un-scoring for the other team.”

“Ugh!” she said. “This game is killing me.” Maria scooted back to her chair. Since her fingernails had been gnawed down to the first knuckle, she began chewing on her toes.

Despite the pain in my stomach – despite the two-to-one deficit – there was a glimmer of hope. The bad guys’ Swedish superstar had yet to score. Elf’s team had kept Ansgar tied up in knots. Clearly, despite being merely American, Jim, Elf’s assistant coach, was doing a fantastic job. Ansgar’s team was spending most of its time playing defense. Elf’s team, The Dribblers, had congealed; I’d never seen them play so strongly.

A moment later, the halftime whistle blew and Elf ran over for water. Maria began whispering indispensible advice. I couldn’t hear her but her facial expressions made it all perfectly clear: “Have you considered kicking and biting?” and “Sometimes a strategic eye-gouging is the only thing that lies between an average athlete and a soccer superstar, young Padawan.”

The secret advice culminated in a forceful and audible shout, “You’re doing a great job, Elf!” Of course, what Maria actually wanted to yell was, “Don’t just stand there! Grind that little blonde boy into the field!” But we were all pretending not to keep score.

The whistle blew and Rob hung up the phone. We watched the action in silence a moment, as the ball ricocheted back and forth. Then, suddenly, a break.

Coach Jim’s daughter seized the ball from the bad guys, pivoted and kicked. It passed directly through the legs of one of the Ansgar's pirates, heading for the net.

Only it was in painfully slow motion. The ball was trickling as if it had been putted. It barely rolled. It sauntered. It paused, turned and waved to us all politely, and began trickling some more.

Parents on both sides screamed from the sidelines.

Would the bad guys stop it in time?

Of course, not! We're the good guys, remember?

The pain evaporated. The score was all tied up again.

I turned to Rob. “Hey, Coach,” I said. “You teach ’em that play at practice?”

“It’s called a Nutmeg,” said Rob. “Only they got it a little backwards.”

A few tense minutes later, Coach Jim’s daughter, who had clearly become Swedish over halftime, buried another one in the goal.

Three to two, good guys. The first time the entire game The Dribblers held the lead.

And then a whistle.

There was some confusion. Was it for another out-of-bounds kick?

The players gathered around their coaches and lined up to high-five each other.
It was Game Over, baby.

“Ansgar wasn’t himself,” Rob began, scratching his chin.

Michelle interrupted. “You gonna call Anders again?”

Rob pulled out his cell.

A better man than I, he actually hit send again.

For real.

Elf came bounding over. The Papaya congratulated her and Maria swept her into a hug. “Great job, Elf! You won!” cried The Papaya.

Maria held up her hand. “No one, won or lost,” she lectured. “No one was keeping score.”

Right.

Smack Talk City, Part I

2009-04-21T14:57:00.010-04:00

Stuccoville has a soccer league. The Stuccoville Soccer Association (SSA). It’s a wonderful soccer league where all kids get to play and learn the game. And no one keeps score.

Except every single one of the players, coaches and parents.

In fact, the only people not keeping score at the games are the players’ 2-year-old siblings. They’re too busy licking the slides on the adjacent playground to notice.

On Saturday, like all recent Saturdays, I rode my bike onto the field behind the Stuccoville Rec. Center. I looked around, wondering who this week’s enemies would be. While there are no winners and no losers on any of SSA’s teams, Elf’s team, you should know, was still undefeated, 2-0-1. And I simply wanted to see who their next victims would be.

Suddenly I spotted my friend Rob, whose son Will played on Elf’s team last season. I smiled my most threatening smile. He just waved me off. “We’re not talking today,” he said. Instead he immediately unfolded two chairs and plopped his mother into one.

Then he began pacing.

“We have Ansgar this year,” he bragged. He gestured to a little blonde boy on his team. “He’s from Sweden. He scored eight goals two games back, and then, to celebrate, beat up the other team’s snack mom.”

My stomach flipped. I had overheard some ominous whispers about Ansgar last weekend from another mom. “He’ll make you cry,” she assured me.

And now I was looking at him. I shuddered. Having a European player on your U-6 soccer team is as intimidating as a dude from Kentucky entering the Bangladesh National Chili Dog Eating Competition.

“We’re undefeated this season,” Rob bragged some more.

Worst of all, the only European on Elf’s team, Coach Anders, was actually back in Sweden on business. Jim, the assistant coach, while extraordinarily skilled, dedicated, competent and nice, had one debilitating weakness: he was merely American.

“Where’s Elf?” Rob looked over my shoulder.

I eyed him suspiciously. “Why?”

“I have an offer for her.”

I eyed him even more suspiciously.

Last season Rob singlehandedly turned Elf into a great soccer player. Rob, you see, works for Hershey Chocolate Company. (I’m not sure about his job title, but I’m fairly certain he uses his safety scissors to cut up the little strips of paper for all the Hershey kisses.) Last Halloween, when we stopped by his house, he gave the girls three full-sized candy bars apiece. He even handed me a ten-pound bag of two-foot Twizzlers because he was so impressed with my bald, bespectacled geek disguise. The Papaya was so convinced the dude was a living, breathing Willy Wonka, she started tasting the flowers in his front yard.

And last season, because Elf also viewed him as a kind of demigod, Rob played it to the team’s advantage. During a brutal neck-and-neck game in which no one was keeping score, he called Elf over. “For every goal you get,” he whispered. “I’ll give you two Reese’s cups.”

Maria even had to restrain me from immediately dashing onto the field, knocking all the 5-year-olds over, and kicking the soccer ball into the net.

It worked. In the second half of the game, Elf destroyed the other team.

But that was then.

On Saturday, the evil side of Willy Wonka was on full display.

“I’m going to offer Elf an entire case of chocolate if she just lies down on the field today,” he threatened.

The bastard.

With a whistle, the game began. In a moment, Ansgar was all over the field. In less than two minutes, Willy Wonka’s team blasted its first ball into the net.

“While none of us are really keeping score,” Willy Wonka gloated, “That makes it one to nothing.” He even taunted Michelle, Coach Anders' wife, who was sitting nearby watching her daughter play for the good guys. “Anders is lucky he isn’t here today,” he said. “He’d probably start to cry.”

We decided to ignore him.

Elf was gamely playing sweeper, charging forward, repelling the advances of Ansgar and his pirates. Her team kept pressing, threatening to score.

Kick!

A miss!

Kick!

Another miss!

A sharp pain blossomed in my stomach. The same thing happened last year when The Papaya’s team was neck-and-neck in a brutal fight to be crowned Stuccoville Elementary’s Third Grade Battle of the Books Champions. To keep from throwing up, I had to temporarily flee the school cafeteria.

Suddenly Elf’s teammate, T.J., broke loose with the ball.

Boom!

Score!

Maria screamed maniacally. "Take that!" she yelled at Rob.

Elf’s team was on the non-existent scoreboard.

Rob silently walked over and sat next to his mom.

I left him sit there in peace a moment before walking over and squatting between the two chairs. “When you first got here, you were walking back and forth back there talking smack. Now all of a sudden, you run over here and sit with your mamma.”

Rob’s mother turned and squinted at me. “I taught high school for 30 years,” she said. “You don’t intimidate me.”

I fled back to the safety of Maria's side.

The ball continued rolling back and forth, stuck in midfield. The minutes ticked by.

Suddenly a shout from the sidelines. Willy Wonka’s team was driving deep into our territory again. Rob leapt from his seat, abandoning Mama Wonka.

That pain reappeared in my stomach. I looked at the boy kicking it down he field and started wishing hard, like Dorothy in her ruby slippers: “Let him trip! Let him trip!”

But the little jerk didn't trip.

It was two to one again.

Rob turned around and walked back over. “Our coach was absent from practice this week,” he said. “You know who had to coach practice?”

I didn't get the chance to respond, “Some loser?”

Instead he just answered very quickly, pointing at himself. “Me,” he said. Then he nodded at Michelle again. “Anders is the most competitive person I know,” he said of Elf's coach. (Coach Anders and Michelle live across the street from the Wonkas.) He walked over to her. “What’s Anders number?” he said, taking his cell out.

“In Sweden?” she said.

Rob nodded. Michelle shrugged, coughed it up and he dialed. He waited a moment. “I just called to tell you your team is losing.” He began laughing diabolically.

The referee blew the half-time whistle and Elf ran to the sidelines for water.

To Be Continued…

Four Years Ago Today

2009-04-16T07:55:00.010-04:00

The call came in on a bright and wonderful Saturday morning as I stood in the toilet paper aisle of the Super Wal-Mart. My mother-in-law was set to arrive the next day. I was stocking up – double rolls.

Nine months pregnant and ready to explode, Maria had already called twice. “Add sponges to the list,” she ordered.

The second call was to straighten out her mother’s Honey Bunches of Oats breakfast cereal order. “Don’t get the one with almonds,” she said. “It makes her fart.”

I looked down at the box in the cart. The cereal was five aisles back. I walked quickly back to the toilet paper. Another twelve pack was in order.

The phone warbled a third time. “What?” I answered sarcastically, “Did your water break?”

“Yes!” she cried hysterically, “And it’s not supposed to happen this way!”

Any other person might have concluded that amniotic fluid was pouring from her ears. I knew, of course, that it simply referred to the fact that she had carefully planned the delivery for the following Tuesday, precisely at 10:30 a.m., right between vacuuming the family room and end-of-the-year party planning for Papaya’s kindergarten class show.

It even threw me for a loop. It’s not every day that someone points out to you that a sarcastic comment made in the middle of Wal-Mart’s toilet paper aisle is, in fact, a prescient insight. Plus I was also standing in a Super Wal-Mart with a large cart of groceries on a Saturday morning. The baby streaming down the birth canal would be in college by the time the cashier got through scanning all the coupons.

Holding the phone to one ear and steering the overloaded cart with the other, I raced to the dairy section, threw three gallons of milk haphazardly into the basket and dashed to the front of the store – the whole time trying to reassure Maria that it was, in fact, quite normal for labor to start any time it wants.

It was the cashier that pointed out that one of the overturned containers of milk had been leaking all the way from the back of the store, making me look like a gigantic, incontinent cow.

Simply relieved that I found a short checkout line, I madly threw the groceries on the conveyer belt as he took payment from a little man in front of me. “Do you want another gallon, sir?” the cashier asked me. His finger threatened to press his you-will-have-to-wait-there-45-minutes-while-we-interview-and-hire-a-new-store-manager call button.

“No!" I screamed. "My wife’s water has broken!”

Rather startled, the small man looked at his larger wife. I accidentally stepped into the milk trail and nearly slipped. Meanwhile Maria is weeping into the phone, telling me to make absolutely sure I didn’t get the one with almonds.

I had become Dick Van Dyke in a 1960s sitcom.

I arrived home to find water everywhere. Maria, convinced by some decade-old episode of ER that she was going to die in childbirth, was in tears and flapping her hands. Papaya, 5, was also dramatically howling – crumbs from her granola bar spewing out of her mouth all over the sofa (while she continuously stuffed the wailing hole). Elf, 2, the only family member with any capacity for rationale thought, was seated in front of the television screaming threats at Swiper the Fox.

Twelve hours of labor and three minutes of pushing later, we officially went over the edge and into the abyss: The Grump arrived healthy, happy and with a $500 deductible. We had crossed the threshold delineating sanity and order from insanity and cosmic chaos – all without the help of puberty. With a simple, red-faced, final push, we leaped from fiscal responsibility to making hard choices between paying for college or weddings. The doctor held up little, squalling Grump to let me cut the cord. “Congratulations,” she said, beaming to us. Then she turned to the nurses. “Meet the newest parents eligible for Extreme Home Makeover and Supernanny.”

And I wouldn’t change a thing.

Happy Birthday, Grump!

And Now, the Weather

2009-04-15T08:37:00.018-04:00

Monday’s fit of melancholy came to an abrupt end when a guy spit on me twice.

The double-barrel attack occurred under the Tree of Knowledge at the Stuccoville Elementary School pickup line. If you don’t know the exact site, it’s the large shade tree at the western exit for children who walk or bike to school. You stand under the Tree of Knowledge to learn which family has lice and which teacher has just been fired for her third DUI.

But generally not to get salivadized.

It all began innocently enough. We were telling funny stories with a third dad. Suddenly, the spitter, who is a clean-cut, friendly fellow, pronounced something a bit too excitedly and the first glob hit me in the face.

Oh, the inhumanity!

And before I could say something extraordinarily clever and original like, “I was hoping for the news and not the weather!” Or “Say it, don’t spray it!” Or, “At this time I’ll have to pass on your generous offer of Hepatitis B.” Before I could say anything or dig a foxhole, the spitter kept laughing and speaking sloppily and let another one fly.

And it landed on my right cheek just above my lip. And that particular mini-loogie was large enough to be picked up by Tampa International’s radar.

The spitter had to have seen it arc across the space between us…as well as the recoil of my head as it was slammed backward by the high caliber projectile.

What was I to do?

The appropriate social opportunity for a witty remark had been cut short by the second sneak attack.

And, despite having seen it, the spitter said absolutely nothing. Not, "Damn! Missed your eye!" Or, "Okay, now it's your turn!"

He was pretending it didn't happen.

I really wanted to wipe it off and say, “Well, that was the grossest thing to happen to me since my infant daughter barfed my wife’s curdled breast milk into my ear.”

But that kind of delayed insult when the another person is pretending a faux pas didn't actually occur is the sort of intimacy only close friends can share. And while he’s a friendly fellow, the spitter and I are, at best, acquaintances. And since the crowded Tree of Knowledge is located in a very polite and refined suburb, it would have been in very poor taste to charge him with involuntary manslobber so publicly. So I politely said nothing, also pretending the whole attack didn’t happen. This despite the fact that everyone else under the Tree of Knowledge had likely witnessed it and were all struggling not to retch into their children’s Dora and Spiderman backpacks.

And because I couldn’t say anything, I couldn’t exactly wipe the saliva off the side of my face on my shirt sleeve. Because then the spitter would know I felt the impact and was just politely overlooking the attack because both of us were social losers.

And that might embarrass him.

And make me feel foolish for not having quickly joked about it in the first place. And then giving him a revenge wedgie.

So I just had to leave the saliva there, bring our humorous conversation to a rapid conclusion, load up three girls onto their bikes, rush home and scrub my face.

For the rest of the afternoon.

It helped put the morose puberty nonsense into perspective.

So if I show up tomorrow under the Tree of Knowledge smiling beneath one of those big plate glass windows dentists now use to cover their faces, you’ll know why.

Death, Fertility and Other Fears

2009-04-13T10:38:00.013-04:00

I was hoping to kick off my post-spring break blogiflections with something witty. And yet this morning my mind keeps ricocheting between wonder at the explosion of green outside and the horror that four more local teenage boys managed to kill themselves in a car this weekend.

As The Papaya comes ever closer to a birthday marking the most difficult and threatening decade of any human life (10-19), I find myself increasingly viewing life like my mother-in-law, who possesses an uncanny ability to see dismemberment, death and illegitimate pregnancy around every corner.

(That's The Papaya in my blog profile picture when she was about 3. She's up to my shoulder now.)

I feel like someone who finds himself on the edge of an amazingly beautiful, sparkling lake, surrounded by majestic peaks with birds soaring into a crisp, blue sky -- compelled to cry out in wonder at the miracle of life -- only to have an underwater volcano burp a cloud of deadly gas that bursts through the lake surface, suffocating all the local villagers.

Yeah, God!

Yes, I’m an absolute joy to have around at life’s special, little moments. I’m like the soldier who had to stand behind every great Roman general as he returned in glory to Rome and whisper, “This is all well and good, but someday soon you too will be dead and worms will be crawling out of your ears.”

But here’s the essential deal. It’s spring, we just commemorated a wild mob’s nailing of a really nice guy to a cross and The Papaya is on the cusp of puberty. Maria announced one of the latest signs of development last week and I shocked myself with my reaction. A year ago I would have sworn I would be completely okay with this. Even joyful. Instead, this was Dumb Daddy’s thoughts. “Okay, rule number one: don’t tell me any of this. Rule number two: make it stop now.”

Really. If it’s okay with you, I’ll just take The Papaya to the beach and hunt for seashells for next 30 years. Just take my calls in the meantime, and I’ll see you when we get back.

My internal tumult this morning really is insane. I felt reasonably sure that I could protect my girls from most dangers when they were young. And now one of them is on the verge of stepping into a decade that heralds freedom, adulthood and the greatest evil known to man -- boys.

And I really want absolutely nothing to do with it.

Because boys, at least until their mid-30s, when their brains develop enough to allow them to accurately judge risk and danger (see fatal car wreck above), are just hairless, potentially violent orangutans.

And yet, isn’t it entirely apropos that on a week that we celebrate the cycle of life -- death and fertility -- along with a hope that it all really doesn’t end with our last gasp, I find myself obsessing about it all?

Not at all. While that’s all well, good and interesting in a detached intellectual kind of way, it just doesn’t make me feel any better.

This morning I just find myself wishing that life and my hope for The Papaya’s future would provoke wonder and joy instead of this hollow, achey anxiousness.

I guess I can't escape my fear that, regardless of whether she survives the next decade, at the end of it, I'll have lost her a little bit each day.

And that just leaves me a weepy, pathetic mess.

Signs of Spring Break

2009-04-07T13:26:00.005-04:00

You know it’s Spring Break when…

You’ve actually said “no” 75 times by 9:45 a.m.
Your children have lost all capacity to utter any words other than “I’m hungry” and “There’s nothing to do.”
You consider calling Octomom and offering her two or three more.
You mess up your kids’ beds just so you can send them to their rooms to make them again.
When your kids ask if they can throw rocks at each other, you respond, “As long as you wear your bike helmets.”
When your kids scream “Dad!” or “Mom!” for the 50th time, you call out feebly from behind the hurricane supplies in the closet, “I’m sorry. He/She left for Poughkeepsie hours ago.”
You organize a game of hide and seek, send the kids to their rooms to count, and sneak out of the house to hide in the supermarket’s liquor aisle.
The educator who recently was fired for duct-taping all of her first graders to their chairs is now leading balloting for Teacher of the Year.
You stop talking to parents who homeschool because they’re clearly insane.
You organize several playdates, drop them off at their friends’ homes and tell the mothers you’ll be back to pick them up at 10 p.m., give or take two or three days.

Now click on comments below to add your keen insights to this list.

Your Anger Makes Me Happy

2009-04-06T15:48:00.005-04:00

“Your anger makes me happy.”

The phrase is printed right below a cartoon drawing of a cute bunny on a refrigerator magnet at my brother Brendan’s home. A year or so ago, his daughter Lila, 4, picked it out to give to her mom, Monica, for a birthday gift. Lila, who couldn't read, simply liked the cute bunny. Brendan liked the phrase. So he enthusiastically bought it for Monica.

It’s an appropriate motto for my extended family.

In January, my nephew Andrew, 18, visited. Andrew and his mom live with my mother in Scranton. Filling out the rest of the three-story Victorian home is my other sister Maura, her husband and their two young uns.

While in Tampa, Drew told The Doorknob Story while we were playing Hearts. The Doorknob Story isn’t the exact same story, per se, but a series of related stories based upon the same theme: the front doorknob on my mother’s old Victorian home that makes you want to kill people.

My mother’s loose front doorknob is a regular phenomenon likely tied to the Mayan or Aztec calendar. The doorknob gets loose. For the next two months or so, it pops off in your hand and you have to thread it back into the door to make your escape. It stays this way because everyone is waiting for someone else to fix it. Then, somehow, it manages to get fixed by some guy whose married to one of our cousins and the door works for a year or two. Then the screw comes loose and falls out again. You go to leave the house. But, instead, you yank the doorknob and nearly fall backward when it flies out of the door.

So instead of getting outside, you find yourself stuck inside and staring down at your hand holding the doorknob and thinking, “G--d--n this f----- doorknob.”

That’s the doorknob story theme.

“So the front doorknob came loose,” Andrew began.

“It was loose when I visited in September of ’07,” Brendan interrupted.

“It’s been loose since my sophomore year in high school,” I added. “Looser than all the girls at Bishop Hannon.”

“Yes,” Andrew agreed. “But this time it actually went missing.”

You see, even The Doorknob Story has an occasionally interesting twist.

“It disappeared for, like, a whole week. Nana was pissed off the entire time, constantly asking everyone what they did with the doorknob.” Andrew paused. “So you’ll never guess where we found it.”

“In Nana’s purse,” I said.

Andrew’s face fell, disappointed I’d ruined a good story. “How’d you know that?”

“Where else would it be?” I said.

“Either there or the trunk of her car,” Brendan added.

“I think the next time I visit,” I said, “I’ll just take all the doorknobs off all the doors and put them in Nana’s purse.”

“You think anyone would notice?” Brendan said.

And with that, we played our last hand of Hearts and realized Monica had shot the moon.

Our anger made her happy.

Fast forward three months.

Andrew called me yesterday. “Yep,” he said, “They noticed.”

“Noticed what?” I said.

“I took all the doorknobs off the other night. And I dumped them all in Nana’s purse.”

“All the doorknobs in the house?” I said.

“Yep, every one of them.”

“What happened?”

“Well, Maura and Jeremy got home after 10 p.m. with the kids and had trouble getting into their rooms upstairs without the doorknobs. So Maura comes stomping back downstairs, throws open all the bedroom doors where we were all sleeping and demands to know where all the doorknobs are.”

He paused. “First she threw open my mother’s bedroom door and turned on the light. My mother didn’t know, so Maura yelled, ‘Unf----- believable!’ Then she went to Nana’s room. Nana didn’t know, so again she yelled, ‘Unf-----believable!’ Then she came to my room, and I completely denied knowing where they were. So she yells it again. And then she goes out into the middle of the second floor hallway and yells, “How is that three people could live in a house AND NOT KNOW WHERE THE DOORKNOBS ARE!?”

Andrew starts laughing.

“So what did you do?” I asked.

I just shouted back, “Hey! You live here, Maura, and don’t know where the doorknobs are either!”

You see?

Her anger made you happy too.

Mad Momma’s News Recap, Edition 3

2009-04-04T09:08:00.002-04:00

April Fool’s Double Whammy

2009-04-02T15:17:00.004-04:00

“You got me,” said one of the mothers at the school pickup line yesterday. “I swore last year when you got me that you’d never get me again. But you got me.”

She was referring to the April fool’s cover story gag on the HOA newsmagazine (rather frighteningly called the WOW) I publish. We threw our latest edition yesterday. A number of e-mails have since landed from individuals sheepishly admitting they’d been had.

The April Fool’s story informed everyone in Stuccoville’s HOA that they were losing all of their street trees and sidewalks to a road widening project. The project was to be financed by the federal stimulus package and was prompted by an 86-year-old resident who choked on a bratwurst during the last community-wide garage sale and couldn’t be rescued because of all the parked cars. (See yesterday’s post below to make sense of the nonsense).

At the end of the story, I actually included an editor’s note that warned everyone it was an April Fool’s gag.

Fortunately no one reads editor’s notes.

I received the following e-mail this morning:

I got fooled! I made some ugly calls on some answering machines. My blood pressure shot up and then [my husband] Sandy and I decided to donate out house to charity because there was no way we could sell it! I was so upset I kept saying over and over, “What have those fools done?” I called [my neighbor] Arlene and she said she was upset too until she realized it was April Fool’s Day. Then I had to laugh because I also got caught last year. You guys are just too good!

This e-mail landed just as I was writing this blog:

We just closed on our new house two weeks ago, and my husband almost choked (no bratwurst needed) when he read our first issue of WOW! You got him better than I ever could!

Thank you.

Another resident forwarded me an e-mail that his irate and fooled neighbor had sent out to her subdivision’s entire neighborhood e-mail list. (Do note the telltale signs of an e-mail the sender will truly regret later: capitalized words, multiple punctuation marks, the demand to “get real,” and the sarcastic comment making clear just how dumb everyone else in the world is):

How many of you knew about the above project [widening Stuccoville’s streets]? I was very surprised to see the article in the WOW today about this. I, for one, was not aware there was even a hearing on this.

How many of you want to imagine NO TREES and NO SIDEWALKS in our neighborhood????? For such a decision such as this to be made, one that will effect everyone’s life and property values, and no notice of hearing was given is unconscionable.

I DO NOT want my trees and my sidewalk removed. These are a major part of the very reason we purchased in [Stuccoville] in the first place.

And, we're worried about the widening of [another nearby road]??? Get real!!!!!!! Oh yeah.... the workers may be your next door neighbor, perhaps both husband and wife. I'm really looking forward to that help for those to get a ‘little extra money.’

I’m just wondering what prompted the poor woman to stop at a mere seven exclamation points after the demand to Get Real. Did her index finger Get Tired?

Anyway, my favorite part of yesterday was my call to Stuccoville’s property manager’s office. That office is occupied by three very polite and dedicated women in charge of slapping Stuccoville’s errant residents’ wrists for deed restriction violations.

If you’ve never lived in a homeowners association and do not know what a deed restriction is, here’s HOA life in brief. An HOA makes rules that ban all decorating and home maintenance practices popular throughout Appalachia. You know that bathtub your husband buried halfway in the front yard and then converted into a sacred grotto containing your favorite statue of the Virgin Mary? In an HOA, that shrine will get you fined $100 a day for ten days. And then the HOA board can lien your property and tear both the tub and the neighborhood’s only virgin out with a backhoe.

And then charge you for it.

Yes. I know. We’re all godless communists.

Anyway, in the April Fool’s story, I announced that Stuccoville’s residents (whose household incomes average greater than $75,000 annually) could drop by the property manager’s office to fill out applications for the road crews. (They were particularly interested in hearing from stay-at-home moms with backhoe driving experience.)

So yesterday afternoon around 2:30 p.m., I picked up my home phone, engaged the caller ID block and phoned the property management team while sitting in my home office. I changed my voice so it sounded like an extremely snooty, elderly female librarian. The lead property manager, who had not yet received the April magazine, answered the phone.

Me (in warbly, snooty, old-woman voice): Yes, I’m interested in acquiring a job application for the road crew.

Patty: Excuse me?

Me: I’m calling in reference to the WOW cover story. I’d like a job application for the road crew.

Patty: I’m terribly sorry. I’m really not familiar with that project.

Me: You’re not familiar with the community’s road widening project?

Patty: Well, um, no.

Me: Well, you certainly are out of the loop over there, aren’t you?

Patty (ignoring the jab): You say you saw this in WOW and we’re supposed to be taking applications?

Me: Yes. It’s the cover story, for goodness sake. It clearly said I could get a job application from your office. It’s even on the Web site.

Patty starts madly clicking on her computer.

Patty: Um, let me transfer you to my assistant, who may know more about this project.

Patty transfers me and Charlotte, the administrative assistant and perhaps the nicest person the planet, greets me politely.

Me: Yes, I’m interested in acquiring a job application for the road crew.

Charlotte: Ma’am, I’m terribly sorry, but that’s an April Fool’s joke.

Of course, since the fastest way to annoy someone who is absolutely correct is to insist they are completely out of their minds, I had no other choice...

Me (sounding exasperated): No, you clearly don’t understand. I’m talking about the road widening article. I’d simply like a job application please.

Charlotte: Yes, ma’am. That article is an April Fool’s joke.

Me: The WOW clearly states that HOA President Kweeros (his real name is Quiros) said I could get an application from your office.

Charlotte (her voice rising ever so slightly): Ma’am, that article is an April Fool’s joke.

Me: No. You’re not listening. I’m talking about the road widening article. I simply want a job application please.

Suddenly my home office phone for the magazine rings behind me. As I continue to torture Charlotte in my old lady voice by insisting she doesn’t know what she’s talking about and she insists, in return, that she does, Patty’s voice shouts out of the magazine’s answering machine.

Patty: Residents are now calling our office about your article on the cover of the magazine! (abruptly hangs up)

Charlotte: Ma’am, if you read to the end of that article, there is a note that says it’s an April Fool’s joke.

Me: You are rather ill-informed, dear. I simply want a job application. I demand to speak to your supervisor!

Charlotte (who by this point would be completely justified in killing me, decides to pass me off to Patty again, who is probably hiding under her desk waving Charlotte off): Please hold, ma’am.

Patty picks up with a sigh.

Patty (fruitlessly trying the preemptive, authoritative voice approach): Ma’am, what we’re trying to tell you is that that the article you keep talking about is an April Fool’s joke. Every year WOW --

Me (rudely interrupting): You clearly don’t understand. I’m not joking. I’m talking about the road widening article and I’d simply like a job application.

Patty (sounding as if she’s close to headbutting her computer monitor): Ma’am, that article is not real. It’s an April Fool’s joke. I can’t give you a job application for a road widening crew.

I suddenly go silent. Then I switch to my normal voice.

Real Me: Patty, if I tell you it’s me, are you going to call me on my office phone and yell at me again?

Patty: Er..eh..(confused, nervous laughter)…Chris? Is that you? (laughter in the background) How did you do that voice?

My gahd, I love April Fool's Day.

Your Shoe’s Untied

2009-04-01T16:13:00.008-04:00

It’s one of my favorite days of the year.

Each April 1st the magazine I publish runs a completely fabricated cover story. I’m the publisher of a newsmagazine for Stuccoville’s HOA, a rather affluent, conservative and quite large suburb of Tampa. Stuccoville boasts about 3,500 homes, hundreds more apartments and several commercial areas.

One year we announced that one of Stuccoville’s two community pools would be filled in and converted to a vegetable garden in order that the community could hold a farmer’s market and sell vegetables to keep the HOA fees low. Another April 1 story announced that the community’s beautiful flowerbeds in all the road medians would be converted to plastic, artificial flowers. Another announced that one of Stuccoville’s gated neighborhoods was banning children. Three years ago we announced the HOA had purchased an enormous waterslide from a bankrupt waterpark and was installing it on an alligator-infested retention pond on Stuccoville’s main thoroughfare.

Last year we announced that the HOA had accidentally let the trademark on Stuccoville’s name lapse and was being forced to change the community’s name. And that the HOA leaders had chosen Whackasoogie.

People’s heads exploded.

Every year, no matter how much attention we give residents’ funny and angry responses in the May edition, residents get fooled the following April.

So what’s this year’s gag? Because a resident choked to death on a bratwurst during the last traffic-clogged community-wide garage sale, the HOA has decided to use federal stimulus dollars to widen all the subdivisions’ roads. This afternoon and evening, people will be sitting down with the newsmagazine to read that the HOA will seize all of the land that their sidewalks and curbside trees are on to do the widening. Click here and check out the cover story on the homepage if you actually want to read it.

Best of all? In a community that voted overwhelmingly for John McCain in the last election, the use of the federal dollars will require that the federal stimulus program’s logo to be stamped in all of Stuccoville’s intersections. What’s it look like?

The upside? Stuccoville’s stay-at-home moms (particularly those with experience driving steamrollers and backhoes) can put in job applications for the road widening crews at the HOA’s property management offices.

I called Stuccoville’s property manager this afternoon, disguised my voice to sound like an old woman, and requested a job application. I’ll post the bizarre conversation that resulted here tomorrow.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go hide.

Lightning Man and Thunder Woman

2009-03-31T08:26:00.004-04:00

Maria and I would like to cordially invite everyone in the world to jump into our bed the next time a thunderstorm occurs in the middle of the night.

Okay, in re-reading that, it makes us sound like we’re swingers.

But, of course, that’s ridiculous. There’s just too much laundry to fold to actually do the nasty with each other let alone two other despicably hairy, sweaty losers.

On Sunday night a cold front came through the state. In Florida during springtime that means a line of terrifying thunderstorms. God or Mother Nature or my mother-in-law (whichever omnipotent, sadistic entity is in charge of such things) generally times major climatic events to inflict maximum damage on my sleep. I actually checked the radar before tucking myself in. “The whole house is going to explode at like 2 a.m.” I said to Maria.

“Of course, it is,” she said. “You go in with The Grump. That will create enough room on your side of the bed for The Papaya and Elf. And Mr. and Mrs. Morris if they also knock on the door terrified.”

Sure enough, in a few hours, an explosion overhead caused The Papaya to do the 15-yard dash in less than 1.5 seconds. “There’s lightning and thunder!” she panted, shoving me out of the way.

Big sigh.

She’s 9, for goodness sake. Will she be using this same, lame excuse when she’s in college just to jump in bed with the captain of the varsity chess team?

A moment more and Elf was there, crawling inside one of the pillow cases. During thunderstorms, I still have far too much compassion for Elf. This stems from the time I found her at 1 a.m. standing in the middle of the girls’ completely dark bathroom and shaking like a leaf (real, actual trembling!) and hugging all 15 of her stuffed mini-Care Bears – all while the sky exploded overhead.

There being no more room left in my bed, I went to check on Grump.

Unlike the other two munchkins, Grump’s as equally terrified of the dark as she is of storms. She dashes through dark rooms as if the ceiling fans are in wild pursuit of her tiny buttcheeks. So when lightning sparks, she just trembles in her bed, pulling the covers over her head.

I found a lump in her bed shaking.

“Do you want me to stay with you until it’s over?” I said.

She nodded, so I crawled in next to her and put my arm around her.

Poor Grump flinched and flailed everytime a particularly loud clap of thunder rattled the rafters.

And even one time when I actually managed to fall back asleep and made one long snort of a snore that even startled me back awake, she jumped and cowered against me.

“That wasn’t thunder, Grump,” I said. “Just me snoring.”

An hour later, it was done and we shuffled beds again.

Another night saved by Lightning Man and Thunder Woman.

Friends With the Ball

2009-03-26T09:16:00.009-04:00

Elf is friends with the ball.

At least according to her soccer, Coach Anders. Coach Anders is a friendly, enthusiastic guy from Scandinavia. He loves soccer and he’s great with all the kids on Elf’s U-6 team. I have yet to meet a dour, mean person from Scandinavia. Every person I’ve met from Scandinavia is happy, laid back and very nice. We put fluoride in our water; Scandinavia apparently uses Prozac.

We really should import more Scandinavians.

My point is that Coach Anders told Coach Jim who told Wife Maria that Coach Anders said that Daughter Elf is “friends with the ball.” Apparently, that is Scandinavian for “innately good at soccer.”

Okay, Scandinavian isn’t a real language. I offer my apologies to all Scandinavians for maligning their real tongue, which is Elvish.

My apologies again.

Unfortunately the major countries that make up Scandinavia -- Norway, The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and New Hampshire -- work a lot like the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin in my addled, limited brain. They kinda blend together into one ridiculous stereotype. In the case of Minnesota and Wisconsin, it’s a cheese-eating polka band rooting for Green Bay. In the case of Norway, The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and New Hampshire, it’s a friendly dude in wooden shoes holding his finger in a dike so his windmill and tulips don’t get flooded.

And my university major was International Studies, which goes a long way towards explaining U.S. foreign policy.

My actual point is that Elf’s first soccer game of the season was this past Saturday. Of course, it’s a friendly, educational league that emphasizes learning the game, so no one but the parents keep score (Elf’s team, The Dribblers, crushed The Bad Guys, 3-1).

And Elf had the first goal of the season for her team, which prompted Coach Anders to award her The Game Ball.

Elf and Coach Anders rock.

Gummy Ear Worm

2009-03-24T10:20:00.002-04:00

An accurate predictor of my stress level on any given day is the number of earworms that plague me.

Oh, and that terrible sense of dread that feels like all the chubby dudes gossiping in front of the local Piggly Wiggly’s Little Debbie display are sitting on my chest eating their Triple Fudge Brownies.

But enough about my fantasies!

And back to the less grotesque ear worms.

Ear worms are those tunes that get stuck on replay in your head until you give serious consideration to sawing ye ole noggin’ completely off. Like that horrible version of Music Box Dancer that the toothless guy in the ice cream truck bleats as he drives through Stuccoville.

Or any version of Turkey in the Straw.

Children’s tunes are particularly successful ear worms. Producers of kids’ shows understand that maximum success results from songs that can be effectively used in CIA black ops prisons to replace waterboarding.

And so, this morning, I curse the art teacher at Stuccoville Elementary School. She turned The Papaya on to a song called I’m a Gummy Bear. And in a misguided attempt to be World’s Best Dad, I actually downloaded it for the girls from iTunes. It's been playing all weekend.

And now that the girls are back in school, it’s still spinning in my head.

The only upside to the dopey thing? It actually contains the lyric “Three times you can bite me.”

Versions of it are available in English, French, Spanish and German.

Think you can withstand its insidious, homicidal insanity? I dare you. Click here and listen to it five times. And see if you can actually stop yourself from murdering the person innocently working in the next cubicle.

And then, after you’ve had a chance to wash up, click comments below and post the names of your worst ear worms.

Made in China, Part II

2009-03-23T15:08:00.010-04:00

“How come you never use the coffee mug I gave you for Christmas two years ago?” The Papaya asked some weeks ago.

She was talking about a commuter’s insulated cup, the kind with a lid that allows you to take it in the car so you can use the cell phone, put on your makeup, read the newspaper AND drink your morning coffee all during your daily commute.

“Well, sweetie,” I said. “Most people use those cups when they're commuting to work in the morning. And my commute only requires ten seconds of walking from the kitchen to my home office, so I just don’t have a chance to use it very much.”

“Oh,” she said, mollified.

But this morning, as I searched through the cupboard for something to take my coffee with me as I drove them all to school, I came across the old Christmas gift. I was still a little hesitant. Truth be told, I really don’t use it because The Papaya bought it at the school’s Holiday Gingerbread Shop, which is a collection of trinkets emblazoned with World’s Best Mom and World’s Best Dad, all sold for 32 cents.

And made in China.

Given that they were sold during all the recalls of toys, pet food and God-knows-what-else two years ago, I’ve avoided using it for fear it would melt my liver. But I also didn’t want to throw it away, for fear I’d upset The Papaya.

So there it was in the cupboard, staring me in the face, repeating The Papaya’s words. “How come you never use me? Don’t you love me?”

This morning, you see, we didn’t have our usual morning routine. Carmen, my sister-in-law, went rock climbing yesterday afternoon. (Actually, because we’re in Florida, where there are no real rocks, she went simulated rock climbing.) She adeptly made it to the top of the intermediate wall before falling and snapping her ankle in half.

With Carmen's surgery scheduled today at 7 a.m., Maria spent the night with her at the hospital. So this morning, I had to make the lunches, get the breakfasts, make the beds, get the girls dressed, herd them into the van, drop them off at school and rush down to the hospital and switch with Maria so she could actually come back here and sleep.

Hence my need to carry the coffee.

The morning went incredibly well. At least until I took my first sip of coffee halfway to the hospital. I kept sipping and sipping and not actually reaching any coffee. Confused, I looked at the mug. Instead of actually coming out of the opening in the coffee top, the entire time it had been leaking out around the edge and dripping down the mug and all over my shirt and pants. Like those gag dribble glasses popular with our grandparents' generation. Instead of sipping, I had actually succeeded in dumping half of the coffee mug down my front.

And because the cup insulated the coffee as well as it had poured it, the coffee had cooled to body temperature, making me completely unaware that I had just successfully dyed half my body in Folgers French Roast. Best of all? I had so thoroughly wet myself that my 2-year-old, $35, made-in-Singapore cell phone, sitting in my front pocket, gave up the ghost.

I tried to mop myself up with two McDonald’s napkins I found in the glove box.

I got to the hospital and went to Room 519, where I found Maria and Carmen. Maria gave me a kiss and eyed me. “Did things go all right this morning?” she asked nervously.

“Yes,” I said. “Why?”

“Because you look like you pooped yourself while getting dressed.”

The coffee mug landed in the garbage.

Mad Mama's News Recap, Edition 2

2009-03-21T10:19:00.005-04:00

Modern Americans don't have time for newspapers. They get all their news from the Internet. In an effort to make The Dumb Daddy Diaries your one-stop shop for all the information you need in life, we introduce this weekend a new, occasional, weekend guest feature: Mad Mama's Weekend News Recap. Here it is! Mad Mama: Unfair and Completely Unbalanced.

Dumpty’s Remains Confirmed

At an archeological dig at Enderby in Leicestershire, Nicholas Rushtinglee, a spokesperson for the British Museum, announced that it is likely that graduate students from Oxford University’s School of Archeology have found the remains of Humpty Dumpty.

At a news conference, Rushtinglee pointed excitedly at the remain of a bow tie stained with egg yolk. “And this isn’t all” he said. “There are pieces of a waistcoat embroidered with bunnies. It appears that Mr. Dumpty may have participated in the first Easter celebration.”

When asked for a possible explanation of why all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Dumpty together, Rushtinglee said it was likely that their supplies of flour and water paste had been stolen by the bakers of hot cross buns.

Rushtinglee hastened to add that this find puts to rest once and for all China’s spurious claim that Dumpty fell off the Great Wall. “Those shells they found along the wall clearly are pieces left over from egg drop soup,” he said dismissively.

Usefulness of Reading Scorned

U.S. Dept. of Education Secretary Arne Duncan has announced that the latest U.S. scores in reading proficiency have finally confirmed the educational research community’s suspicion “that trying to teach people to read is a waste of time.”

Pointing to the decline of newspapers and the increase in rentals from Netflix, Duncan stated, “But that’s okay. We really don’t need reading anymore.”

Duncan announced plans to modify the No Child Left Behind program by penalizing schools who fail to do away with the use of printed material by January 2010, when they have to have made the transition to Talking Books. “It is obvious to us that the days of reading are over and that print communication is, for all intents and purposes, obsolete,” said Arne. He declined when asked how books would be recorded for the audio materials.

Church Attracts Tourists

In Good Hope, Alabama, church sponsored billboards advertising “Great Sex: God’s Way” have attracted the attention of hundreds of Japanese businessmen who are flooding the town requesting directions to the entertainment. Daystar’s pastor Jerry Lawson stated he was happy with the increased attendance. “Collection plate offerings are up,” he said, “although the ushers doing the collection are a little tired of getting their asses pinched.”

eBay Bid Prices to Replace Dow Ticker

Announcing, “Well, we just wanted to see something go up occasionally,” Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Merdoch announced that instead of running stock market indices in the venerated business paper, the Journal would instead print running bids from the used lingerie section of e-Bay.

In other business news, Squawbox Investor Roundtable participants expressed concern on Friday over AIG’s decision to list itself on e-Bay, where it sold for $5 to a former AIG executive who recently received a $2.5 million bonus. “That’s an embarrassing bid, even for a company like AIG,” said the program moderator.

House Finance Committee Chair Barney Frank immediately announced plans to pass a sales tax on all sales of multinational corporations over the Internet to recoup the federal government’s bailout dollars.

Nanny Sues Inquirer

After supermarket tabloid The Inquirer accused Brad Pitt’s nanny of giving the star a backrub, the woman hotly denied the accusation, saying she was helping Pitt remove an oversized, custom-designed closet organizer from his back. “He uses it to carry the children and their pets,” Herra Lolo said, announcing she was suing for libel. “It’s the 24-pocket pantry kind you can get at Bed, Bath and Beyond.”

Lola complained about the press. “That damned potpourri follow us everywhere and they make up things. Missus Angelina didn’t slap me! She was waving at their parrot, Birdzilla. Birdzilla goes everywhere with them and the damn parrot didn’t want to get out of her pocket.”

O’Bama Supports Boots

Yesterday President O’Bama called a special press conference to again angrily denounce critics of his wife’s choice in clothing. “Enough,” he said sternly. “I will continue to support my wife choices by adopting her fashions,” he said, pointing to a pair of fur trimmed turquoise boots that he was wearing. “Who are the idiots who write those fashion columns? If Hoover were here, they’d be in hiding.”

During the press conference, Michelle O’bama was busy weeding the new White House vegetable garden in a Vera Wang evening gown trimmed with oregano and basil.

Bailout News

In a recent survey of 49 economists, both President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner have received failing grades for their efforts to revive the U.S. economy. The group criticized the O’bama team for delays in enacting financial reforms and in handing out cash to unemployed financial experts, particularly economists.

The latest criticism has not affected O’bama’s popularity ratings with the general public. Hansee Dowch, a recently furloughed Starbucks barista, brimmed with enthusiasm. “O’Bama’s great! I just got hired at the Treasury Department! They’re hiring hundreds of people just to keep up with printing new money. Now I get my own set of green and black Crayola markers to color all the twenties!”

March Madness

On Thursday night’s Tonight Show with Jay Leno, President O’bama, wearing fur-trimmed turquoise boots, announced a new aspect to his economic recovery plan. Calling it March Madness, O’bama stated his administration would begin paying performance bonuses to all those teams who failed to make the NCAA playoffs. "We have to find a way to keep the best minds in the game," O'bama said. "If we don't rescue these hurting basketball teams, you can just say goodbye to the banking industry."

National Day of Mourning For Aniston

The U.S. Congress has proclaimed April 1 a national day of mourning for movie star Jennifer Aniston, who recently broke up again with musician John Mayer, creating the nation's first surreal reality rerun series. “Breaking up is hard to do, and this woman bravely represents the country’s pursuit of happiness amidst the vicissitudes of daily life and the scorn of rejection,” said Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. “She is a true symbol of America throughout the world. Never before in the chronicles of culture has anyone done less and generated so much public interest and acclaim.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said House Republican leader John Boehner, “Paris Hilton has done a lot less and I like looking at her more.”

The Skinny on Scranton

In a surprising news release, the management of the Scranton Times–Tribune announced another cut in the size of their daily and weekend newspaper. Chief financial officer Henry Lynett stated, “We have decided on an eight-by-twelve format.”

Lynett explained that the paper, when folded to measure six by eight, would be both considerably easier to deliver and easier for the reader to hold.

The announcement follows news that the Times-Tribune was also cutting staff levels to trim costs. “We’ve had to lay off anyone working for the paper who is not directly related to the Lynetts,” said Lynett. “That leaves us with 550 employees. If things get worse, we may have to let the in-laws go.”

Mad Mama, Dumb Daddy’s mama, lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania with her two dogs, two daughters, three grandchildren and one son-in-law, none of whom will take out the garbage. Her friends call her Barbara Barrett.

Stick with the Rice

2009-03-20T14:45:00.007-04:00

In my suburban, stuccoed utopia, some of the neighborhood’s most popular features – outside of all the boob jobs – are its ponds. Stuccoville’s ponds, like those in suburban communities throughout Florida, are necessary to recharge the groundwater supply. They also keep Florida neighborhoods from turning back into swamps.

While utilitarian, they’re also quite popular. Stuccoville homebuyers pay lot premiums for homes located on the retention ponds. And then they promptly sign documents forbidding any use of them.

Stuccoville, after all, is deed restricted.

There’s no boating. No fishing. No touching. Basically you’re only allowed to gawk at them from a safe distance.

Kind of like the boob jobs.

Part of my magazine gig is to cover local community meetings where residents and leaders gather to complain. One of the more popular complaints? That outside people, who didn’t sign the documents, are fishing in the ponds. The outrage! And simply because I report on these meetings, a lot of people in the community are bizarrely convinced I actually know how things work. What foolishness!

Just this week another mother came up to me as I stood, scratching my chin beneath the Tree of Knowledge at the school pick-up line. “People are fishing in the pond behind my house,” she said. “What can I do?”

“Do you own a rifle?” I asked.

Why anyone would fish in those ponds – let alone keep and eat anything they caught there – is beyond me. While pretty, the ponds strain environmental contaminants from entering the watershed. All of the petroleum runoff from the streets lands there, as well as the tons of pesticides and fertilizers Floridians dump on their lawns to keep them alive (the state, after all, is one giant, infertile, God-forsaken sandbar). But that’s not all. Scores of Stuccoville homeowners walk their dogs, pick up Rover’s caca in plastic supermarket bags and then, when no one’s looking, heave it down all the storm sewers. With the first big rain comes, dozens of bags of dog crap float out into these retention ponds.

Yummy. Pass the wasabi.

About 18 months ago, the pond patrol was raising hell about one particular fellow who wasn’t just content to just cast a simple fishing line into the pond. The dude brought a net to work. In a matter of weeks he began emptying the ponds of all the fish that the local taxing district had stocked to keep the aquatic plants under control.

An all-points bulletin went for Gnarly White Pickup Man, an ubiquitous form of wildlife indigenous to Florida. Then one Saturday, driving home from a birthday party, I got in on the action. I quickly dialed the number of the field manager. “Doug,” I said. “Your pal Ernest Hemingway is fishing my pond.”

A few days later, I got the update. Doug walks over to me at a meeting. “I got him and gave him a trespass warning!” he proclaimed, all smiles. “I got there just as he was pulling away. Followed him up Sheldon and across Gunn Highway.”

I nodded for him to continue

“He pulled into a parking lot there, across from the Super Wal-Mart. Then I called the cops when he went into one of the places and we nabbed him. The guy's a fellon, out on parole. I had a good conversation with his parole officer." Doug almost walked away, but added one final juicy tidbit. "By they way, you’ll never guess what he was doing with all those fish.”

“What?”

“Selling them to that Chinese restaurant there.”

I haven’t eaten Chinese food since.

Check back tomorrow for my new occasional, weekend guest feature: Mad Mama's News Recap. Mad Mama brings you her unique take on the world's most significant current events. Don't miss it! Mad Mama: Unfair and Completely Unbalanced.

Note to Self

2009-03-19T08:37:00.002-04:00

Review highly complex Roy G. Biv concept with youngest gifted daughter.

St. Patrick’s Day

2009-03-18T08:34:00.010-04:00

As 100 percent County Mayo Irish, I feel like I let down my Irish heritage on March 17 each year. Yes, the girls kind of wear green. Yes, they go to school and swallow green cupcakes, munch green cookies and drink green punch. Their school is even visited annually by little Irish vandal they call Lucky Louie. An alleged leprechaun, Lucky Louie trashes all the classrooms when the kids are out at lunch. Elf, our kindergartener, was quite jazzed by his visit and chattered about it on the way home from school yesterday. “Lucky Louie even went into the bathroom in our classroom, Dad!” she told me.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“He peed in the toilet. The water was green.”

When I was younger and living in Scranton, St. Patrick’s Day was very serious stuff. You put on a tuxedo, bought a green carnation, went to the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick’s Dinner, and sat across from Mr. Ruddy, who would arrive at all of my uncle’s celebrations with the battle cry, “Paul! I got my drinking pants on!”

Down here in Tampa, with only half-Irish blood coursing through my daughters’ veins (the other half is hot-blooded Puerto Rican), we seem only partly committed to the day. Clearly my daughters don’t go over the top like all my friends and family up in Scranton, which hosts one of the most culturally significant St. Patty’s Day Parades in the world. While I wasn’t there this year, I fortunately found a video that will give all of us a little peek. Click here.

Be sure to examine the clip closely. The video was clearly posted by someone who was there. Proof? He was still so drunk he misspelled it St. Parick’s Day. Another important point: in the second scene of the clip, there is a food stand. I'm almost positive my brother-in-law, Neil Murphy (wearing sunglasses), is actually standing in front of it, buying a pierogi.

Be sure, as well, to examine the parade participants closely as the clip nears its end - with around 50 seconds remaining, right before the banjo player and the guy, dressed in a pink poodle skirt and that cute bob and carrying the mongo saxophone, passes. You wouldn’t want to miss the three-legged dog in the green sweater vest limping down Wyoming Avenue.

Go ahead and laugh. Unlike 50 percent of the humans who attended, the mangled beast could still walk by the time it was all over.

And here’s an odd, unrelated detail that I feel absolutely compelled to add: Scranton also has a Lucky Louie. Only he’s Italian.

The whole clip left me feeling quite nostalgic and missing my father, who, as I pointed out in last year’s post on St. Patrick’s Day, thought of himself as more Irish than the Irish Prime Minister’s Irish Setter.

The video clip of the Scranton parade has left me with just one little question. Do the real Irish in Ireland also have those handy, green plastic bullhorns that, in a pinch, can also serve as beer bongs?

Bumbling Burglary

2009-03-17T08:50:00.007-04:00

Should the economy decline further and the magazine I work for no longer find a need for my advanced punctuation skills (!) and my ability to distinguish the plural from the possessive, there is one job I will not be applying for.

Burgling.

Rather than try, I might as well just call up the Falkenberg Road Jail and make an early reservation for a cell with an ocean view.

Monday night, as I was crawling into bed at 10:30 p.m., Maria leapt back out of it. “Oh, no! We forgot Elf’s tooth!”

Elf had ripped another tooth from her jaw in the middle of dinner – because getting The Grump, 3, to eat her vegetables just isn’t drama enough for one meal.

“Wow!” Elf had announced in the middle of dinner, showing the bloody stump to all of us. “Just look at how gross this is!”

Afterwards, preparing for bed, Elf had dutifully laid the former body part out for Tooth Fairy Biohazardous Waste Removal. She was hoping to trade the thing for a hefty AIG bonus.

“Are you excited the Tooth Fairy is coming tonight?” I asked her as I tucked her in. She nodded, her eyebrow suspiciously cocked, as she studied my face. “Fool!” I could tell she was thinking. “Do you actually believe I am dumb as you were at 6?”

I kissed her on her forehead and she went to sleep.

With one eye open.

One thing is clear. Whoever thought of the whole Tooth Fairy ritual had kids who were already drinking heavily at night by the age of 5. Or the parents enjoyed the challenge of escaping from locked metal boxes thrown into icy rivers.

Elf has the ears of a bat. Plus, being smarter than all of us put together, she’s been lying in wait since she was 3 to prove the whole Santa-Easter Bunny-Tooth Fairy conspiracy another pathetic parental lie.

Despite having found a comfortable spot in my own bed for the night, Maria made clear she expected me to join her in the icy river. “Come on!” she whispered loudly.

I sighed and crawled back out of bed. Apparently neither of us is intellectually capable of tackling Tooth Fairy responsibilities alone.

By the time I got to Elf’s door, Maria was already inside. She was in there for five minutes before she popped out again. “I can’t find her tooth!” she said. “It was on her night table when I kissed her goodnight.”

“On her night table?” I said. “It’s supposed to be under her pillow.”

“You want to try to slide your hand under there without waking her?”

“Let me look.” I pushed passed her into the room, struggling to see everything on Elf’s table. It was completely covered in packrat packrattage. A Hannah Montana lamp. A ream of papers all folded into failed paper airplanes. A half dozen odd-looking, small containers, including a tiny, plastic treasure chest and a miniscule woven covered basket that looked like a mouse’s hatbox – all possible Elf tooth holders. I began shaking them all. Then I spotted the bloody thing on a napkin. It had slid between some half-completed coloring pages.

Elf sat up, groggy. “What are you doing?”

I froze.

Maria stepped in, tapping acting skills that would make Paris Hilton look like Oscar material. “Oh,” she said. “I just came in to lie down with you for a minute.”

Maria then proceeded to lie down on Elf’s head, waving her hand wildly behind her back, signaling for me to seize the tooth and flee.

I did so, managing to bang my toe against the bookcase in the hallway, which hurt so much that I wished for death.

Maria emerged a few minutes later. “Do you have the money?” she whispered.

“What?”

“You were supposed to get the money.”

“When was I supposed to get the money?”

I was quite sure of it. At no point where there any explicit instructions to “go get the money.”

“Do you have the money?” she says again, like I didn’t hear her the first time.

“I have four twenties in my wallet. That’s all.”

“We’re going to give her a twenty?”

I looked at her. Fifty percent of normal parents would have just stuck the damn twenty under the pillow and gone back to bed.

The key word being normal.

Maria didn’t wait for an answer. “Go take two dollars out of The Papaya’s piggy bank.”

My mouth dropped open. “You’re going to steal Tooth Fairy money from your other child? That’s money the Tooth Fairy probably brought her! Are you aware its Lent?”

Stealing, of course, being morally acceptable the other 325 days of the year.

In truth, I wasn’t so much bothered by the stealing as I was with getting caught doing it. The Papaya would probably throw us to the ground and beat us to a bloody pulp with her American Girl dolls.

“We’re recycling,” she said. “It’s good for the environment.” She disappeared into the other bedroom. After a moment she tiptoed out with The Papaya’s piggy bank, which is actually shaped like a cat.

She wrestled with the kitty, finally extracting two dollars bills from its belly. She ironed them with her hands. “Just put the money in Elf’s room in the middle of the night,” she ordered, as if I go for a midnight stroll every evening. “And put this thing back in The Papaya’s room.”

She kissed me goodnight and left me to return the safe after the big heist.

She Who Controls the Universe had waded out of the icy river, bidding her beloved husband farewell. So much for Bonnie and Clyde. Clyde was on his own.

I held my breath and crept into The Papaya’s room. I took the kitty bank over to her desk. I walked inches at a time, blinking to bring her desk into focus without my eyeglasses. In the pitch dark, I carefully slid it onto the top of her hutch.

Bang!

I knocked over a hideous mermaid from one of those paint-your-own-pottery-and-pay-us-30 bucks-for-drying-it places.

The Papaya sat up. “What are you doing?” she said.

“Dusting,” Clyde answered. “Go back to sleep.”

I busted out of the joint and limped back to bed, still nursing my throbbing toe.

“Did it go all right?” Bonnie asked Clyde as he crawled back into bed.

“Of course,” Clyde lied.

They still haven’t returned the $2.

Tune in tomorrow to hear Elf cry, "Hey! Don't pinch me! I AM wearing a little green! I just wiped a booger on my skort!"

Out of Sight

2009-03-16T08:33:00.010-04:00

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…

While living in Florida has its downsides (the tap water tastes like skanky underwear and there are disturbing numbers of strip malls and European dudes in Speedos at the beach), it does offer some unique pleasantries.

Take this picture, for instance. (Click on it for a slightly larger, clearer version.) I took it at about 7:46 p.m. last night, just as the sun dipped below the western horizon behind me.

Figured out what it is yet?

In the fall, winter and early spring (but not during the summer rainy season when the towering afternoon thunderboomers block the view), Tampa residents can actually see space shuttle launches that occur clear across the state. At night, they are particularly brilliant against the inky sky.

As the countdown nears its end, we turn on the local news coverage. The moment the sparks fly, igniting the shuttle rockets, Maria, the girls and I all scream at the top of our lungs, race to the front door (where we’ve carefully placed our flip flops and shoes, all facing in the right direction), throw them on quickly, and dash through the neighbor’s yard to the pond’s bank.

A moment passes before the orange plume of the shuttle rises slowly over the homes across the pond and into the sky. We watch it rise, higher and higher, until the rocket boosters, emptied of their fuel, peel off, reflecting the sun, little diamonds dropping away towards the Atlantic far below. (If you look closely in the upper left corner of the above photo, you can spot them just below the shuttle.)

Night launches offer a longer spectacle, lasting ten minutes or more. The shuttle rises in a high arc, slowly growing dimmer until it is but a pinprick of light. It then actually appears to dip and decline as it reaches its orbit and begins its slow dance across the sky, a tiny star on a steady trek across the firmament.

The spectacle never ceases to amaze the girls – or Maria and me.

And in a week or so, as the shuttle returns to earth, it punches back through the atmosphere, racing across the Gulf of Mexico toward Cape Canaveral. If you watch the clock and listen, you’ll hear it – a thunderous sonic boom that, if it lets loose close by, will set off your neighbors’ car alarms.

It almost makes the Speedos bearable.

Mad Mama’s Weekend News Recap, Edition 1

2009-03-14T07:53:00.006-04:00

Modern Americans don't have time for newspapers. They get all their news from the Internet. In an effort to make The Dumb Daddy Diaries your one-stop shop for all the information you need in life, we introduce this weekend a new, occasional, weekend guest feature: Mad Mama's Weekend News Recap. Here it is! Mad Mama: Unfair and Completely Unbalanced.

The Economy

In response to the chief economist of the California Association of Realtors, who has stopped using the term "soft landing" to describe the state's real estate market because she no longer feels comfortable with that “mild label,” the state of California is proposing a return to the Homestead Act of 1862. Following the original act’s provisions, U.S. applicants will gain freehold title to 160 acres of land anywhere in the state of California. The new law requires three steps: file an application, help the current owners of the property to move to a tent at the rear of their former home, and volunteer 20 hours a month at one of the hundreds of recently opened soup kitchens for Realtors.

Entertainment

On Monday night’s CNN special, Defining Abnormal Behavior, Las Vegas entertainers Siegfried and Roy announced their return to the stage with their tiger friend, Hellboy, which nodded coyly to the cameras as his famous friends discussed the animal’s change of heart and his born-again religious conversion.

“Right after he found Roy’s neck, he found Jesus,” said Siegfried.

Roy tried his best to nod, but instead just produced a strange creaking sound.

In related news, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, chief medical correspondent for CNN and a practicing neurosurgeon, explained his reasons for turning down a White House offer to become Surgeon General. “I don’t mean to disappoint you guys,” he is reported to have told the Obama administration vetters, “But I’ve paid all my taxes, so I don’t think I have a chance in hell of getting confirmed.” Instead, Gupta has joined the Siegfried and Roy team. Sources close to Gupta revealed that neurosurgeon leads the tigers in daily meditation to help calm their nerves. To prepare Siegfried and Roy for the show, Gupta announced he also removed all of their brain parts that deal with higher reasoning.

Government

In a daring show of support for First Lady Michelle O’Bama’s fashion statements, which feature a strong commitment to the second amendment’s right to bare arms, President Barack O’Bama declared his intention to have all the sleeves removed from his own dress shirts. He also announced will carry around a basketball, tucked under one of his bare arms, at all times. He refused to comment on reports that he plans to enforce the new dress code on all cabinet members and senior staff.

The NRA’s response to this development was, however, lukewarm. “Until President and Mrs. O’Bama also start wearing John Deere baseball caps, we will still question their true commitment to making guns available right next to the scratch-off lottery tickets at your local 7-Eleven,” said NRA spokesman Billy Ray Norris. “And by the way,” he quickly added, “Charleton Heston is still waiting for someone to pry that rifle from his cold, dead hands.”

On this week’s presidential radio broadcast, a sleeveless O’Bama grimly announced a response to criticism that he has tried to do too much in the first 45 days in office. O’Bama stated he would instead embrace a greater bipartisanship approach by spending the next 55 days upstairs in the family quarters doing absolutely nothing. Republican House Leader John Boehner, however, criticized the move as just another attempt to raise taxes on the middle class.

United States Health News

The New England Journal of Obesity has announced the use of a new guide for measuring the relationship between obesity and intelligence called the RSI, the Rear Seating Index. (I’ve tried to understand the scientific study to explain it here but apparently my buttocks are too small to do this successfully.) Bertha Wares, spokeswoman for both the Women’s Freedom Foundation and President of the Wendy’s Super Size Me Fan Club, decried the announcement, claiming the scientific study was nothing more than another attempt to justify scholarly groping.

International News

A source close to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife, Sarah, revealed that the prime minister met yesterday with the members of the special forces arm of Scotland Yard, The Laddies. Rumors are that the Browns, furious with the gift exchange that took place during a recent White House visit with the O'Bamas, will take military action to recover theirs.
The conflict began when O’Bama returned a bust of Winston Churchill, loaned to the Bush White House, where it had been displayed for 7 years. When this angered the British government, O’Bama just shrugged. “Look. I’m a Democrat. Like former President Clinton, I prefer only women’s busts.”

Brown attempted to iron out the differences by presenting O’Bama with a pen holder made of wood from the former anti-slaving ship, HMS Ganett, and a written autobiography of Winston Churchill. In return, O’Bama presented Brown with 25 DVDs of American movies and a copy of ABBA’s Greatest Hits.

Angry that the DVD collection failed to include all of Hugh Grant’s movies, Brown has reportedly ordered a covert strike against the White House to retrieve his gifts. "We can't very well complain about it to the president,” said Brown’s staff, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Such comments would be a serious breach of diplomatic protocol. So we’re just going in to liberate the crap when he goes to the bathroom.”

A peeved O’Bama, however, is reported to have responded. “Who the hell does Brown think he is? The Queen of England?”

White House insiders report that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempted to reassure O’Bama by telling him that on her recent trip to Japan, Korea, China and Indonesia, she received only hair twisties, a batik mouse pad and a Lego set of the Great Wall.

The Skinny from the Electric City

Preparations for the annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Scranton, Pennsylvania and the surrounding area have already begun. Local church leaders have strongly advised the St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee and participating sinners that the church leaders would be praying "that hellfire would descend upon their heathen shoulders for drunkenness, heretical beliefs and other forms of debauchery." John Keely, president of the parade committee, expressed surprise at the pastoral rebukes and defended his fellow participants by saying, “We march to heaven. And God help the Protestants who stand in our way.”

Keely, however, quickly denied he was calling the Roman Catholic bishop of Scranton a Protestant. “He might be Italian,” Keely said, “But he was born that way. And we try to embrace diversity.”

In addition to Scranton streets being painted with green stripes for the occasion, for the first time in parade history, three city ambulances are also being painted green. According to Sam Marone, manager of the local ambulance service, the gaily decorated vehicles will come in handy. “Local bars open early here by 6 or 7 a.m. We want catch the drunks as soon as they drop, get 'em sobered up quick, and back into the bars.”

Other Northeast Pennsylvania News

Russian astronauts were lauded by the White House on Friday for their heroic rescue of a Bradford County family spotted floating aimlessly past the International Space Station. The family, hiking in the woods near Wysox, was unexpectedly blasted into space by a Virginia company drilling for gas in the Marcellus shale area. The Browns, unfazed by their unusual experience, remarked, “What a trip …and we couldn’t have afforded it any other way!”

Mad Mama, Dumb Daddy’s mama, lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania with her two dogs, two daughters, three grandchildren and one son-in-law, none of whom will take out the garbage. Her friends call her Barbara Barrett.