The Hank Smoot Files

O' Christmas Brick

2010-12-10T16:11:00.001-05:00

I used to consider myself to be a pretty Christmassy kind of person. Not pretty in the sense of wearing pink tights and having freckles and ponytails, but in the sense that I really got into the Christmas spirit and had warm fuzzies about the holiday.

Sadly, it seems like each year those feelings fade a little further and further, especially now that Little Smoot has joined the squadron of non-believers. It was a lot more fun when we could sneak around and pretend that a fat guy was going to come down the chimney and load us up with gifts. We had fun with that for years, even though we don't even have a chimney.

I just got done, moments ago, hauling our damn tree up the steps and into the livingroom. If you have a keen sense, you may already detect that I am not having fun with it so far.

This is a pre-lit tree, which is a very convenient feature since all you really need to do is haul it up the stairs and plug it in. At least that's what's supposed to happen. In reality, you drag the damn thing up the stairs and find out that three of the seven strands of lights do not function at all, causing Holiday Rage Syndrome (HRS).

I contacted Mrs. Smoot to give her a heads-up on this situation, and she suggested that our options are to put the tree up and just not light it (which would look dumb), add more lights to the existing burned out ones (which would look dumb), go spend a fortune on a new tree (which would cost a fortune), or wait until after Christmas and get a new tree at a discount (which kinda still leaves us without a lit tree THIS Christmas).

I want to suggest another idea... I'm thinking we should just move to a country that has an easier form of symbolizing the holiday. Perhaps there is a country out there that, instead of having a Christmas Tree, uses a Christmas Brick. Just bring the brick up to the livingroom and view it in awe, reminding us of that special night 2000 years ago when Jesus was born in a manger, which may have been... near a brick. Whatever.

This Bites

2010-12-09T12:36:00.004-05:00

I'm wondering if there's any way of making a kid believe in the Tooth Fairy again after the child has become a non-believer.

The Tooth Fairy used to be very helpful to me when Little Smoot had loose teeth. I don't know whether she gets sentimentally attached to various teeth ("I once used this tooth for a particularly memorable bite of macaroni and cheese...") or what, but it seems like it takes forever for her loose teeth to fall out.

I'm sure it doesn't help that she knows that it makes me sick to see her teeth dangling around in her mouth. She loves to show me that stuff, and I wince in agony every time she does it. So right now she has a tooth that can probably hang a full inch below her gum line when she opens her mouth. She complains about it constantly, and I obviously can't wait until the thing finally falls out.

Not too long ago I was able to convince her of all kinds of stupid things, thanks to the Tooth Fairy. I'd tell her, "You know, I heard that the Tooth Fairy is most generous on Thursdays because that's her deadline for getting teeth to the factory in China." Or whatever.

Surely at age 12 she's running out of baby teeth. I'm sure running out of techniques to encourage her to get rid of them.

Cat Burglar?

2010-12-08T08:09:00.000-05:00

I'm growing very suspicious of our cat. Don't get me wrong, Murray is generally a very good cat and everything, but I am getting increasingly concerned about him.

Every day for the past couple weeks, he has attempted to thwart me from reading my newspapers. The instant I sit down to read the papers, he'll literally jump up onto my lap and obscure my view, oftentimes sticking his butt right into my face.

So I can't help but wonder what it is he is trying to keep me from reading. Is he worried that I'll see his name in the police blotter? Murray is strictly an indoor cat, but there are periods of time where I have no idea where he is, and it's entirely possible that he has managed to sneak outside to commit some sort of crime wave.

One of the daily newspapers I read is the Beaver County Times, and they have a feature every week called "Mugshot Monday," where they show pictures of everyone who has wound up in jail from the previous week. I always get a kick out of reading that feature, if for no other reason to feel good about myself and my remarkable ability to stay out of jail so far.

Anyway, I have this nagging feeling that Murray is going to be featured on this page one of these days, and he is trying to keep me from seeing it. Thankfully he hasn't realized that I can read the newspaper on the computer, because I really don't want him sticking his butt in my face while he curls up on the laptop.

Making the World a Better Place

2010-12-07T14:36:00.000-05:00

Ok, so it has been a few days (?) since my last posting here, but I'm sure you would understand that I have been busy making the world a better place. Day in, and day out, that is precisely what I have been working on all this time.

You see, back in Junior High -- where all of the world's best ideas are hatched -- some friends and I came up with a truly remarkable idea. It's an idea that will one day shape the whole idea of productivity for generations to come. Clearly, something of this magnitude is worthy of the time and effort, and if a blog entry or 50 go by the wayside, well, that's the price we have to pay for this kind of progress.

The idea I'm talking about, of course, is the Lunch in a Straw initiative. In Junior High, we came up with a few brilliant ideas. One of those ideas was to flick Jello (or whatever that substance was... it was probably called "schmello" or something) onto the walls of the cafeteria to see what would happen. As you're probably aware, after several months this substance formed a remarkable bond on the wall, and it's undoubtedly still there today.

As a result of that research, NASA is currently using cafeteria-grade Jello to seal cracks in space shuttle fuel tanks. Obviously, our work paid off for the betterment of mankind.

Well, now we want to introduce our popular Lunch in a Straw concept. During those formative days, we used to experiment by taking our drinking straw and poking it into our various school entrees. The end result was a straw that had inch-long segments of various food substances, or whatever that stuff was on our trays. Think about it -- an entire meal, compacted into the convenient size of a straw!

We believe that this concept will revolutionize the food industry, and productivity will soar like an eagle on speed. Let's say the average worker has a 9-hour day, and one of those hours is wasted on lunch. Not any longer, it isn't! The worker can simply whip out his Lunch in a Straw, and with one long suck he can ingest a series of foods, even an entire turkey dinner with all the trimmings!

Turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, pumpkin pie, coffee... one suck, and it's done! That one-hour lunch has now been reduced to about 15-seconds, and 10 of those seconds would likely be devoted to unwrapping the straw and playing with the straw paper.

Of course NASA is also interested in this technology for their programs, since the space savings is tremendous. That's assuming they're ever able to get another person back into space once they retire the shuttles next year.

Anyway, I apologize for this lapse in blog postings, but I think you can now understand and appreciate my absence.

Farting with the Stars

2010-09-14T08:03:00.033-04:00

Yesterday I talked about the problems associated with farting in public restrooms. My feeling has always been that it's best to be discrete in an effort to keep innocent bystanders from thinking you're weird. I failed to mention in that blog entry that farts also tend to echo quite loudly in public restrooms, only making things worse.

There are other situations, of course, where it's a lot of fun to put on a show of flatulence. For example, I always enjoy firing off a few rounds when Little Smoot is around. Sure, she often pretends that she thinks I'm disgusting, but I know deep down she's impressed. Farting loudly in front of your kids is right there in the Good Father Manual. Look it up.

This past weekend I decided that farting in some public situations can be enormously fun, especially if there are celebrities around. I was lurking on the sidelines of the Steelers game on Sunday, and for the second time this year Taylor Lautner was a guest of the team.

For those of you living underneath really large rocks, Taylor Lautner is most famous for his role as a werewolf in the Twilight movies, and girls swoon to the point of fainting just by merely thinking about him. There was a girl in the stands on Sunday who was violently weeping because she was within 50 feet of him. Seriously.

As you can see in the picture, which has not been Photoshopped in any way, shape or form, everyone enjoys a good fart in a football stadium. As a semi-interesting side note, the girl with Taylor Lautner is Lily Collins, the daughter of singer Phil Collins. And it is not merely by coincidence that Phil Collins had a hit song called "In the Air Tonight."

Farting in Public

2010-09-13T13:07:00.000-04:00

Like many people, the Smoots enjoy visiting our local Japanese Steak House from time to time. It's a lot of fun to watch these guys prepare your food right in front of you, and it's even more entertaining given that you never know if your hair may accidentally be lit on fire, or perhaps you'll suffer a puncture wound to the heart as the chef tosses knives around.

The only bad thing about the Japanese Steak House is that approximately 20 minutes after I eat at one, I have the obligatory "bad episode." If I'm in the car at the moment this strikes, it can be a very uncomfortable thing. This is why I found myself at a nearby Barnes & Noble the other night, about 20 minutes after enjoying dinner at the Japanese Steak House.

If you read my blog regularly (as if I have been posting to it "regularly") you know that it's pretty hard to embarrass me. I have been on stage in front of hundreds of people wearing only underwear on several occasions, for example. But for whatever reason, I do find it embarrassing if I fart loudly enough for other people to hear me in a public bathroom.

I always make a serious effort to keep things quiet when I'm in a restroom stall if there are other people around. I'll go through pretty extreme and uncomfortable processes to ensure that no one else hears what I'm up to, even though if you're going to make loud farting noises, this is actually the appropriate place to do so.

Well, I am sad to admit that my experience at Barnes & Noble was anything but silent, and I wish I could apologize to the poor guy who was in the next stall. It wasn't pretty.

Worse yet, I had tried to wait it out so that he would be long gone before I left because I didn't want him to see me, thus connecting my face to the noises he heard. But fate got in the way of that plan, too, as I found myself washing my hands next to him. I have a feeling that he planned it that way because he was morbidly curious to see what I looked like.

Anyway, I'm going to try to be more discrete in the future, as best as possible. I can tell you that I still have no real problem with farting in public in general; tomorrow's installment of the blog will be "Farting with the Stars."

Stupid Bandz

2010-09-07T15:59:00.000-04:00

In my never-ending quest to come up with a way to earn a jillion dollars with zero effort, I am thinking about inventing "Stupid Bandz."

For those of you who have no reason to ever interact with other members of the human race, you may not be familiar with "Silly Bandz." These are colorful rubber bands that are shaped like various things. I realize that some of you have probably already stopped reading this, dropped what you were doing, and have already run, screaming out of the house because you think this is the most amazing thing you've ever heard, and you have to run out and by a few hundred.

This is what has apparently happened with many people around the country, especially if those people are my daughter's age. And really, really especially if those people ARE my daughter.

Silly Bandz became really popular a year or so ago, and they've driven many a teacher insane because the kids are paying much, much more attention to who has what Silly Bandz instead of whatever drivel the teachers have to offer. Of course if they were really smart, the teachers would incorporate these products into their lessons as teaching tools ("143 Silly Bandz times the square root of 84 Silly Bandz is X minus the hypotenuse of another Silly Bandz...")

The odd thing is that it's not just kids who are into these things. I've seen a shocking number of adults wandering around with these things on their wrists, making me wonder how many important business meetings have been interrupted by suit-wearing individuals who have to stop everything so they can make trades.

Anyway, once Silly Bandz were introduced, a whole bunch of knock-offs hit the market, too, like "Fun Bandz," and "Crazy Bandz."

I would like to introduce "Stupid Bandz" as the next generation of the craze. Mine will be just regular, brown rubber bands, the type we all have hundreds of sitting in drawers right next to us. Except mine will be nicely packaged, and at a hugely inflated cost. There will be ones shaped like pebbles. Maybe clouds. Dinner plates. The moon. Anything that's already a circle could potentially be a new Stupid Bandz product as far as I'm concerned.

Or just send me a bunch of money in a bag. That would be fine, too.

Things a 42-Year-Old Shouldn't Be Doing - Part III

2010-08-19T11:11:00.000-04:00

There's something very alluring about a Slip-N-Slide. It could be the slipping. Or perhaps it's the sliding. I don't know. Whatever the case, I was unable to control myself when the organizers of our church picnic unfurled one last weekend.

We had been playing volleyball in some pretty warm temperatures, and I saw a couple folks erecting the Slip-N-Slide at the top of a perfect hill. Several other kids were already in line, and I knew I'd have to sprint up there to avoid standing in an even longer line.

I was very tempted to push my way to the front of the line because I'm a jerk, but then I remembered that this was a church picnic and God warns us against doing things like this ("Thou shalt not pushest thine way to the fronteth of the line for thou Slippest-and-Slideith").

So I waiteth my turn like everyone else, and debated how I should approach my ride. Should I catch some air and jump down the hill, or should I just lie down and give myself a gentle push like an elderly person on a Slip-N-Slide should do in an attempt to avoid total organ failure?

Well, naturally I went with the "catch some air" approach, which really does launch a person pretty far, especially if that person has a few extra pounds in the gut region. I decided that the Slip-N-Slide people should really consider making the plastic just a tad bit longer -- say 100 yards or so -- to accommodate people of my age and size.

I found that the standard Slip-N-Slide was woefully short, considering I continued slipping and sliding a long, long time after the plastic had run out. This meant that I was whooshing through a grassy area, arms flailing, for quite a while before I came to rest practically out of sight of the picnic.

I should also note that my chest looked like some sort of weird Christmas display, glowing with red (from brush burns) and green (from grass stains). But I am happy to say that I learned my lesson from that experience, and only repeated it three more times before calling it quits.

Things a 42-Year-Old Shouldn't Be Doing - Part II

2010-08-18T08:02:00.004-04:00

Continuing my "what I did this summer" series of immature things, I must say that I had a blast at the Noah's Ark water park in Wisconsin last week!

Back in 1985, when cavemen still wandered the Earth, my uncle took my brother and me to this same park. I have fond memories of that trip, and the great time we had splishing and splashing through the various rides.

Well, a lot has changed in the last 25 years. The biggest ride at Noah's Ark back then was called "The Plunge." It was a pretty simple ride -- you lie on a mat and go down a fairly tall slide. It's a bit of a wussy ride nowadays, by comparison.

This year they opened a new ride called the Scorpion's Tail (pictured above on the left; The Plunge is beside it on the right), and I must say it was the most awesomeist, butt kickingest ride ever. I had seen it on the Travel Channel before we took our trip, and I knew that I had to do this baby.

You climb up a seemingly endless number of stairs (which is why my calf muscles are still aching), and you come to a transparent capsule thing. You climb into the capsule (after being weighed by the staff, purely so they can mock you, I assume), and before you know it, a creepy woman's voice is giving you a 3-2-1 countdown.

Once the countdown is over, the bottom drops out of the capsule and WHOOOSH! Away you go, falling 10 stories at 40 mph down the tube, and through a freakin' LOOP! They should make a video of the faces of people as they get to the end of the countdown -- it's a riot to watch them! Of course I faked a yawn each of the times Little Smoot and I rode it.

I will reluctantly admit that at the end of our first day, I was praising the good Lord for whoever invented the concept of the "lazy river" raft ride, which involved no line, and absolutely no physical exertion.

Coming Soon: Part III -- The Slip-N-Slide

Things a 42-Year-Old Shouldn't Be Doing - Part I

2010-08-16T23:28:00.004-04:00

I hope you have been enjoying your summer as much as I have. I am happy to say that I have spent a disturbingly significant amount of time doing things that aren't appropriate for my age. Actually, most things I've done this summer are more appropriate for the 9-13 year old demographic, if not younger.

Today's installment of "things a 42-year-old shouldn't be doing" is: Capture the Flag.

If you're not familiar with this game, let me give a brief description (the term "brief description" will seem funnier a little later). You divide into teams -- the more players the better, and you set up a field of play that can be pretty much any size. Each team hides a flag on their side, and when the game starts, you try to find the opposing team's flags and bring them onto their own side of the field. When you cross into your enemy's territory, they can tag you and haul your butt off to a jail area until someone from your team tags you to free you.

Ok, enough about the rules. I should also mention that it's best to play this game in the full darkness of night, which I did a couple weeks ago with some of my closest friends from high school. The full darkness thing was also beneficial for those of us who used the opportunity to participate in other "co-ed activities," back when we played this game in high school.

Our friend Todd has the world's most awesome field for Capture the Flag, the very same field we had a blast using back in our high school days when these things were much more appropriate. As an aside, I feel that I should mention that Mrs. Smoot and another female friend in our age bracket opted out of our games this time around. Booooo. Hissssss.

Anyway, friends who did play came prepared for battle. They brought their darkest clothes along, which helped them skulk through the field undetected. I didn't have nearly as much foresight; I was wearing tan pants and a bright shirt which made me as invisible as a flashing neon sign. I did, however, remember to bring my health insurance card along.

So as we began playing, I kept getting caught because everyone could detect my neon flashing shorts, and this got to be a bit frustrating. About an hour into playing the game, it dawned on me that I was wearing really dark-colored underwear, so I made a strategic move. I ditched my shorts, and put them in a spot that made it look like they could be the flag. My shorts were now a very convincing decoy.

Sure, I was now running around in only my underwear in the middle of the night, but this actually worked fantastically well for a bit. It's a terrible shame I don't have pictures of this, and I can only imagine your disappointment.

Anyway, the opposing team fell for my ploy perfectly, grabbing my shorts instead of the flag, as I sneaked into their territory. If I had pulled that sort of prank the last time we played this game (20+ years ago) people would have thought I was insane. Nowadays it's hardly breaking news that I'm running around on a field nearly naked. It would have been more surprising if such a thing hadn't happened.

Coming Soon: Part II -- Water Parks

Insert Automated Title Here

2010-07-22T07:58:00.007-04:00

I think the automated checkout lady at our grocery store hates me. Then again, I think she might hate everyone.

It seems like automated checkout lines are getting more popular. I see them at most grocery stores, Wal-Marts, etc. When they first set them up in our grocery store, the automated voice lady seemed pleasant enough, and it was a nice change of pace from using the human-operated lines. Our local humans are often unpleasant or generally miserable people, so I don't mind scanning items myself.

But a few months ago they changed the voice behind the automated lane, and I think she sounds a bit cranky. She has this pompous-sounding inflection in her voice, like she's so smart just because she's invisible and everything.

Not only that, it seems like she makes a point of loudly announcing every item as I'm buying it, which can be a bit annoying. ("Please re-scan your box of EXTRA SMALL CONDOMS... Please put your box of EXTRA SMALL CONDOMS onto the conveyor belt... Please put your box of EXTRA SMALL CONDOMS into a bag...")

My GPS doesn't talk, thank goodness, but I have always found those voices to be a little unpleasant, too, for the most part. I think it would be great to be the voice behind those units. I'd make a point of getting really annoyed with people who miss turns and so forth ("Hey MORON! You missed the turn. Now I have to RECALCULATE the route. Are you HAPPY NOW?")

I'd have a lot of fun as the GPS voice. I'd also probably try to intentionally steer people into oncoming traffic or lakes, too. And I'd program it to say things like, "You let that old guy pass you? Perhaps you should stop and buy a box of EXTRA SMALL CONDOMS!"

Come Sail Away!

2010-07-21T11:03:00.001-04:00

I had the opportunity to go sailing last weekend, but I still don't understand the whole thing.

I have cousins who have a sailboat up at Lake Chautauqua in New York, and I had the opportunity to join them for a ride last weekend. My brother also went along, and he shares my vast knowledge of how to operate a sailboat (not a shred of knowledge, in any form whatsoever).

I love being out on the water, and we even owned a powerboat for well over a decade. But sailing is a whole different experience. For one thing, it clearly defies several laws of physics. The wind pretty much just blows in one direction, yet sailors manage to trick it into allowing them to travel in whatever direction they want.

One would think that you could put up the sail and the wind would take you whichever way it was blowing, and then you'd have to call a buddy to come pick you up in a truck at whatever shore you drifted to. That's pretty much how it goes with hot air balloons, right?

I have no idea how they accomplish it, but my cousins were able to do some wacky maneuvers to get the boat to go where they wanted. Sometimes this involved having my brother and me yank on various ropes. And my cousins knew all of the technical terms for all of these things; they were always mizzening their ballasts through their daggerboards on the port side, or some such thing.

I'm not sure if we were even accomplishing anything by pulling the ropes, or whether our cousins just wanted to make us feel like we were contributing. Maybe they were having us pull the ropes so we'd stop being inquisitive about stuff ("Hey! What does THIS thing do?!"). Whatever the case, here it is, four days later, and my right arm still hurts from pulling on one of the ropes.

While out on a boat I generally like to relax and take in the scenery, but you don't get to do a whole lot of that while sailing. Mostly I spent my time worrying about whether this gigantic mast was going to swing over and knock me out of the boat, which turned out to be a pretty valid concern.

At one point, one of the Andys (everyone on the boat except for me and my brother was named Andy) decided to turn around, which meant swinging the giant mast thing around. And when they swing that thing around, you have to duck under it and move to the other side of the boat.

Or you can do like I did. You can sit there and contemplate a route to the other side, and at the very last nanosecond duck under the mast and get stuck in a very awkward yet hilarious position while all of the Andys and my brother howl with laughter.

We did somehow make it back to the dock in one piece, and I honestly did enjoy and appreciate the experience. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go take a dinghy.

Socks of Doom

2010-07-13T20:06:00.000-04:00

I had a harrowing experience with a pair of socks the other day. It was so bad that I felt it was worthy of a blog entry. That, and I haven't had anything better to blog about for a couple weeks, apparently.

So I went on a weekend excursion which involved a lot of Geocaching. If you're not familiar with Geocaching, it's basically a sport in which we use billions of dollars of government-owned equipment to help us find tupperware containers in the woods, some of which contain valuable toys from McDonald's. It can also involve a great deal of hiking.

I spent most of the day on Friday finding caches up around St. Marys, PA, and I wasn't going to let the fact that it was pouring down rain stop me from finding my tupperware. At the end of the day, I was rather extremely moist, and in retrospect I should have simply abandoned my clothing -- especially my drenched socks -- in the woods, or set fire to all of it, or something. As a side note, as I was hiking through the woods, on two separate occasions I found pairs of underwear in the middle of nowhere. I'm not sure what goes on in those woods.

Anyway, instead of burning those clothes, I stuck them in a secret compartment in the back of my Prius. There's a little "cubbyhole" kind of thing in the hatch, convenient for keeping bug spray, windshield cleaner, illegal aliens, WD-40, etc. This is where I tossed the Socks of Doom for the weekend.

I came home on Monday night after spending a couple days in the eastern part of Pennsylvania, and it was pretty warm for most of that time. When it came time to extract the socks from the car, I was concerned that they might stink a little since I could already smell them a bit while I was driving. But nothing prepared me for the amazing stench I was about to endure.

Remember the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Nazi dudes were standing there around the ark, and with great anticipation they opened it up and these demons came bursting out, all honked off? And the faces of the Nazis melted right off as the demons roared into the sky? I think my socks were actually a little worse than the demons. I managed to hold my breath as I held them away from my body as I literally ran them to the basement to toss them into the washing machine. And now they're clean again.

Beyond that, there really isn't a real point or moral to the story. But then again, I rarely have a point, do I?

Extreme Mediocrity

2010-07-01T21:09:00.000-04:00

I don't mean to brag here, but once upon a time I was extremely mediocre at playing tennis. Nowadays it kinda stinks because I can rarely find anyone to play with. So I am making it my mission to train Little Smoot to be my new competition.

At the pace we're going, she'll be getting really good right around the same time that I will be dead, but that's not going to deter me. Actually, she has made some decent progress in these past few days, so I am rather encouraged. She does have the world's worst teacher, after all.

I tried to teach Mrs. Smoot how to play tennis a number of years ago, and it ended up being one of those famous instances where we almost drove straight to the divorce lawyer afterward. I am not a patient teacher when it comes to anything, let alone tennis. I just expect that people should be able to pick up a racket and automatically know how to hit a ball over a net. But that just doesn't seem to be the case.

Mrs. Smoot will also be more than happy to tell you about the time I attempted to teach her how to drive a manual transmission car, but that's an entirely different near-divorce attorney story. And the heck of that story is that we were already in the car, and I'm sure she would have driven us straight to the attorney's office if she had any idea how to get the car out of first gear.

Anyway, I finally got a chance to play tennis this morning against my brother. The two of us used to spend our entire summers on the court (the tennis court, not divorce court). We'd ride our bikes all the way into town, play tennis for a few hours, and then go grab a bite to eat at a place that served food so greasy that it would easily counteract all of the exercise we had gotten.

I am happy to say that I was still able to play in a seriously mediocre fashion, judging from our matches this morning. Unfortunately, my brother was able to play a level or two above mediocre, and he handed my butt to me on a platter. Things went quickly downhill after I dove for a ball and did a very impressive face plant right into the net.

During this beautiful play I did manage to get the ball over the net, and with my nose still pressed on the ground I was still able to ask my brother whether I had scored. Of course it turns out he was able to return the ball into my side of the court, in bounds, even while laughing himself silly.

At least I can still beat Little Smoot. For now.

It's in One of the Conditions

2010-06-30T18:46:00.001-04:00

I have been known to do some odd things in my sleep. When I was little I fell asleep on the toilet one time, which is really kinda convenient if you think about it.

I have also awakened myself with the loudness of my own snoring. Come to think of it, there was one time when my brother threw a pillow at me while we were staying at a hotel, and then he yelled at me for snoring. As serious as could be, I answered him by saying, "How could I be snoring if I'm sitting here talking to you?" It made sense at the time.

But I would like to point out that I'm not the only one who has weird nocturnal issues. One time, shortly after we got married, I was trying to find a pair of scissors in our apartment late at night, and I went in to wake Mrs. Smoot to ask her where where I could find them. She appeared to be perfectly awake when I asked her about the scissors, but she responded by saying, "They're in there."

"Uh, where?" I responded. "They're in there!" she replied again. "WHERE?!" I asked impatiently, apparently because I really needed to cut something. "They're in one of the conditions." Finally, I knew where to find the scissors. They were in one of the conditions. I gave up on cutting anything that night.

But my favorite sleepy Mrs. Smoot story was the night when she sat bolt upright all of a sudden in the middle of the night. She calmly looked around for a moment and then said, "H-o-l-y $%#&!" And then her head fell back to the pillow and she was sound asleep again. Of course I was up for quite a while wondering exactly what had just happened.

Mrs. Smoot will be glad to tell you that I am much more annoying and bizarre late at night, and I've done much weirder things while being asleep. To her I offer these words: Get your own blog! It's in one of the conditions.

The Mucus Permeates the Cavern

2010-06-27T20:34:00.001-04:00

We were at church last Sunday morning, and a few minutes before the service started, one of our church leaders approached me in the narthex and quietly said, "If you see Grant, please tell him 'the monkey is up front.'"

Naturally when I heard this, I was pretty excited. Judging from the tone of his voice, facial expressions, etc., I could tell that this was a very top secret communique, and that I should treat this message very seriously. I excitedly and immediately began to search for Grant, who is a member of our youth group.

Sure enough, I found Grant in the back of the church, and I pulled him aside so I could deliver the message. As quietly and carefully as I had received the message, I passed it along to Grant in the same way: "The monkey is up front," I told him. Grant nodded, and began to walk way.

I didn't want to pester him, or risk breaching national security or anything, but of course I really wanted to know the meaning of all of this. So I just came right out and asked him whether this was some sort of secret code phrase, like the type of thing they may have used back in the old days to warn troops that an enemy force was approaching, or how they might communicate the timing of an attack or something.

Stone faced, Grant looked and me and said, "No, it's literal." Turns out there was indeed a literal monkey (in the form of a puppet), and it was in the front of the church. Grant was in charge of shoving his arm up the monkey's personal region and providing it with a voice during the service as a means of promoting our Vacation Bible School week to the kids.

Nonetheless, my enthusiasm for the whole spy communication thing was piqued, and I knew Little Smoot would join me in turning it into something really annoying for anyone around us. So for the rest of the day, including a long drive to take her to summer camp, we were saying stupid things to each other like, "The crow flies at dawn." And, "The cashew rests upon the mantle." And, "The sloth has crawled upon the carpet." Oh, and let's not forget Little Smoot's favorite one: "The stain is in the underwear." Of course we both giggle ourselves silly each time we come up with one of these things.

While she was at camp, we were able to send her e-mail messages that would be printed out and delivered to her at the dining hall. In one of my messages, I concluded by telling her, "The platypus barks in the shadows." And that was the first thing she said to me when I picked her up from camp yesterday. I like to think that the camp staff reads these things before giving them to the kids, and they were really wondering what was going on. Little do they know that I was being literal about the platypus.

Weechers and Bocks

2010-06-23T17:15:00.000-04:00

When Little Smoot was a little girl, around age 3, she came up with this song that she would sing when it was raining. I have no idea where she got the idea for these lyrics, but her song went like this:

"The rain came down... the Weechers had a Bock!"

The tune was pretty catchy -- and short and to the point -- and we really did enjoy listening to her sing it from time to time, but it left us with just a few burning questions. For one, who are the Weechers? And what the hell is a Bock? And why do the Weechers only have Bocks when it's raining? Can the sun destroy a Bock? Do the Weechers enjoy the Bocks, or are they bad things?

It goes without saying that I have spent many sleepless nights worrying about the state of affairs with the Weechers, and whether or not they had enough Bocks. Could there be a Bock shortage? I have no idea.

She wouldn't tell us much of anything when we quizzed her about these things. We'd ask her all the time what these things were, and she'd just giggle and refuse to tell us what it meant. It's like it was some sort of deep secret, and the magnitude of revealing these things could destroy the common fabric of toddlers everywhere. It was clearly serious stuff.

So I asked her about this again recently. I figure now that she's 11, surely we have earned her trust to the point where she could tell us the meaning of this song so we can finally get a solid night of sleep around here. When I asked her about it, she remembered the song just fine, and sang it just like she did seven or eight years ago.

But she claims she has no recollection whatsoever of what a Weecher or a Bock might be. And I doubt that she would even know who to ask about such a thing.

So I am reaching out to my vast reading audience (both of you) to see if you could please do a little research amongst your three-year-old friends to see if they could shed some light on this subject. If they won't talk, I am going to have to condone torture in this particular instance.

Summer "Camp"

2010-06-22T22:54:00.000-04:00

So we dropped Little Smoot off at summer "camp" this weekend. I have to keep putting "camp" in quotes, because her version of "camp" this summer is a drastically different-looking experience than what she has done in past years. And it's a whole HECK of a lot different than when I was a camper, back in the Paleolithic era.

We dropped Little Smoot off on Sunday, expecting that she would be staying in the same sort of cabins where she spent her time the last few years at the same place. But this time she was assigned to a building that hardly seems like a "camping" experience to me. In the future, if we visit a fancy Hilton Hotel, she is going to feel let down, compared to her "camping" arrangement this week.

She has a room that she'll share with one other camper and two counselors. It's modern, nicely furnished and carpeted, has its own private bathroom and shower, and it even has air conditioning for heaven's sake. Air conditioning!

Let me tell you about the accommodations I had at camp when I was little. Note that I didn't use quotes around the word camp this time. We had these musty, cinderblock cabins which were mostly held together by dust and spider webs. In fact, we often took showers with spiders that were the size of soccer balls.

Our rooms were lit by a few light bulbs that hung down from the rafters, and most of the time only a couple of them actually illuminated when they were turned on. (Being young adolescent boys, we were always illuminated and turned on, but that's another story entirely.) And if you were creative, you could actually trap a fellow camper in his sleeping bag and tie him up to the rafters, not that any of us ever did such a thing, of course.

Camp food was another issue entirely. It was always consistently horrible, and we used to drink "bug juice" with it, which I do believe was made from actual bugs. Not Little Smoot's camp, though! I have had the opportunity to be a counselor at her camp for a couple summers, and the food at this camp is not only edible, it's actually GOOD! They have a fancy little salad bar and everything.

Last summer when I was a counselor there, we stayed in a typical cabin. It was much fancier than what I had grown accustomed to while growing up, but it was still something I would call camping, without the quotes. We immediately discovered that something had apparently died in our bathroom, either somewhere in the ceiling, or in the floorboards, and it smelled putrid for the entire week. But that is camping!

Frankly, when I go back as a counselor next month I am hoping that we'll get the typical old-style cabins that I'm used to... if only because I really think of that as being a big part of the whole summer camp experience. I have a feeling that when Little Smoot gets home this weekend, we're going to have to put little mints on her pillow for a week or so, just to ease her back into life at home. Yeesh.

Maker of Labels

2010-06-17T17:31:00.000-04:00

I like labeling things. Always have.

I can remember having one of those old label makers when I was a kid. Remember the ones where you had to twirl that round thing around to each individual letter, and then squeeze the trigger with all of your might to emboss the letter into the tape? And then when you screw up a single letter you have to start all over again? I can attribute my amazing wrist strength to all of the exercise I used to get with that thing.

Nowadays things are much more convenient when it comes to making labels. I have had a "Brother P-touch" label maker for several years, and it's just awesome. It has a regular keyboard, so I can just type what I want, and *poof*, out comes a very professional-looking label.

Since it's so easy now, I label everything. If you look closely in our house, you'll find that there are labels all over the place. Any time we buy a new appliance or electronic gadget (which I tend to do almost weekly) I always label the date on it, along with where we bought it. This way, I can see how long our stuff lasts without having to guess when we bought it.

I have even labeled some of our new, allegedly energy efficient lights to see how long they last. They claim that they're supposed to be good for many years, but my labels will reveal the truth! Take that, light manufacturers!

I also labeled the cat the other day. He didn't seem too enthusiastic about it, but for an hour or so he ran around the house with a label on his tail that said, "CAT." That way, I knew exactly what type of pet I was looking at, as he ran around in circles in an attempt to remove the label.

I thought I'd share all of this with you in case you ever wanted a reliable way to see how long your various appliances last, or if you want to keep track of what types of pets you have.

A Cat-spiracy

2010-06-14T08:02:00.028-04:00

What is it with cats? I like cats, I really do. I'm not one of these manly people who won't admit to liking cats because they're more "feminine" sorts of animals. I like them just fine. But they really seem to have it in for me.

When I was little we had a cat named Pumpkin. I don't know what I ever did to honk this cat off, but it was always retaliating against me for some reason. We had a bean bag chair at my parents' house, and I always enjoyed using it as I watched TV. And this was one of those vinyl types of beanbag chairs, one that would not simply absorb liquids, if you catch my drift.

It seemed like once a week or so, the damn cat would drink as much water as a feline can handle from its bowl, and she'd take a giant whiz on that beanbag chair. I know this wasn't a coincidence. I am absolutely positive that Pumpkin knew precisely when I was heading home from school, and that Three's Company was going to be on soon, and that's where I was going to plop myself.

I can remember one time I watched an entire show before I realized that I had cat whiz covering my body from my armpit down to my knee. Damn cat.

Nowadays we have a cat, too. Murray, or "Furry Murray" as we like to call him, is really a great cat. He is Little Smoot's best buddy. Little Smoot will go upstairs to go to bed, and if Murray is downstairs, he'll look at the stairs for a second, then he'll leap into action to follow her up to bed. In the mornings he'll sit there in the bathroom while she gets ready for school.

And he's out to get me.

The other day he decided to barf all over the floor -- a floor he knows I walk on -- just before I was getting Little Smoot off to school. I am certain that he calculated this, knowing that I had to get the kid off to school, and I didn't have time at that moment to clean this mess up. And he knew that by the time I got home from dropping her off, I would have forgotten all about it.

And I know that he knew that I was going to be walking around in my bare feet for a bit, and that he had positioned his work in just the right spot so that I'd step directly in it. And he was right. I don't know what it sounds like when cats laugh, but I am positive that I heard him chuckling at the same instant I stepped in that treat. Thanks, Bud.

And the Father of the Year Award Goes to...

2010-06-11T20:28:00.001-04:00

I like to think of myself as being a pretty good dad. Really I do. But it seems like there are a lot of times when I'm trying extra hard to be a good dad, and that's when I wind up doing the most damage.

Of course we can go back to the summer of 2005 when I took Little Smoot on a super-fun camping trip and she wound up getting run over by a pickup truck, breaking three bones in her foot. Let's just not go there... but suffice it to say, there's a fine example of trying to be a good dad but ultimately winding up at a hospital.

The other night Little Smoot had softball practice, and she asked me if I'd stay late and do a little more practicing with her. So my "let's be a great dad" instinct kicked in, and we stuck around and tossed the ball around a bit. She practiced some batting, and I got it in my head that I should do some batting, too. You never know when the team might have too few players, and they'll call upon my services to pose as an 11-year-old girl on the team.

Little Smoot headed into the outfield, and I amused myself with my manly ability to smack the ball consistently to the outfield fence with just about every hit. And Little Smoot would field the ball and throw it back in to me.

Well, you can probably guess where this story is going. It was just starting to get a little dark, and I was heaving the ball into the outfield in a manly fashion, and one of the balls hit a little rut in the field and took an odd bounce... directly into the path of Little Smoot's nose.

I sprinted into the field as soon as I saw it bonk her in the face, and she looked like a human version of Old Faithful, only instead of spouting water and steam into the air, she was a blood geyser. I bounced into First Aid mode, trying to figure out how to simultaneously get her to stop bleeding, and figure out how to keep her from ruining the shirt she was wearing since we bought it in Maui and it was one of her new favorites.

It was interesting to try to get her to walk from the outfield all the way to my car with her head tilted backwards and with blood literally dripping from her arms. Nice job, Dad!

Father's Day is just a couple weeks away. I'm just hoping that I won't get a lump of coal on this special occasion.

Let the Anxiety Begin

2010-06-08T10:29:00.000-04:00

I have a dentist appointment on Thursday. The folks at my dentist office are actually very nice people, but I still cringe every time I think of them.

Of course I'll attempt to trick them into thinking that I'm an avid flossing fanatic; I'll floss a few times a day between now and then in order to make them think that I've been doing this religiously the last six months. But they'll see right through that, and she'll whack away at my teeth with that pointy little spear thing of hers.

Mrs. Smoot often wonders what would happen to me if I ever faced an actual, serious medical situation. I'd probably explode in flames out of pure fear, that's what would happen. When we watch TV shows that feature blood and stuff, I always ask Mrs. Smoot to add things to the list of stuff I don't want to have done to me.

For example, we love to watch House, but I really get antsy about the stuff that happens under the care of their doctors. Like the season finale where House had to amputate a woman's leg while she was pinned in a building. I have had bad dreams about that one for a month or so now.

There was an article in the newspaper a few weeks ago about this great new surgery that allowed doctors to remove brain tumors by going in behind the eye socket. They were ecstatic about how non-invasive the surgery was, because they could go back there, suck the tumor out, and never have to go through the scalp to get to it. Cosmetically, it's supposed to be just wonderful, and the healing time is supposed to improve dramatically.

Sounds great, until you realize that they have to pop your eyeball out of your freakin' head, and drill a hole back there, and then say a little prayer that you'll actually be able to regain your vision when they stick your eye back in place. No thank you.

I know a guy who had to have some sort of horrible, horrible surgery where they had to pop his eyeball out WHILE HE WAS AWAKE. Just imagine that your vision is being controlled by someone who is pointing your eyeball in different directions for you, and you can't do a thing about it. And maybe while they're working, they leave your eyeball dangling there and you have no choice but to stare at your own nostril while they do whatever it is they're doing.

And now I have to be even more worried, now that I know that I am apparently the only person who operates my knife and fork with the wrong hands. Clearly I am lucky to have gone this long without major spleen damage.

All Forked Up

2010-06-07T09:57:00.002-04:00

Please help me settle a dispute with Mrs. Smoot. Hey, that rhymes!

Anyway...

We seem to have a serious difference in opinions about how to use a fork and knife, and as a result, we're probably screwing up Little Smoot's meat carving abilities for life.

First, I should point out that I write left handed, but I do everything else right handed, which instantly makes me a freak of nature to begin with. I don't dispute that. I know I'm screwy that way. Nonetheless, I think Mrs. Smoot's method of cutting and eating food is wrong, counterproductive, and potentially fatal.

Under normal circumstances, I always use my right hand to work my fork. My method of cutting meat and eating it is pretty simple. I use my right hand to operate my fork, and my left hand to operate a knife. So if I cut a piece of steak, I use my left hand to slice it, and my right hand is still in charge of elevating the food from the plate up to my mouth.

Mrs. Smoot does something entirely different. Like me, she normally uses her right hand to manipulate her fork. But when it comes time to cut meat, she actually switches her fork to her left hand so she can use her right hand to control her knife. This seems crazy to me. It seems to me that even a professionally trained juggler would risk stabbing him or herself in the heart while maneuvering utensils all over the place like that.

Yet this is what Mrs. Smoot is trying to teach Little Smoot to do.

When we die, most of us hope that our obituaries will say that we finished our lives doing something heroic, like saving a young child from drowning in a river, or tossing someone out of the way of a runaway train or whatever. You don't want it to say "Mrs. Smoot, 40, of Smootville, died in an unnecessary accident involving her spleen and a very sharp knife."

So here's what I am asking you to do. Go have something for lunch today that involves a knife. A slice of ham, for example. Midway through your meal, look down at your hands and see what utensils they're holding, and report back to me. If you find your knife in your right hand, report back to me quickly before you stab yourself in your heart and/or spleen.

The Fashion Family

2010-06-04T08:58:00.002-04:00

It's not just me.

Most people who know me will fondly remember the Easter Sunday when I went to church, greeted numerous people, and then realized that I was inexplicably wearing two ties. As odd as that was, I am happy to say that I am not the only member of the Smoot clan to have issues with fashion anomalies.

Last night was Little Smoot's band concert, which featured students from three elementary schools, the high school jazz ensemble, and an auditorium that had no air conditioning.

Moments before we were about to head out the door, Mrs. Smoot looked down and realized that she was wearing two different shoes. This wasn't a case where she had two extremely similar shoes that were technically different, like having a black shoe and a really dark blue shoe. She has done that before, and even after hearing her say "these shoes don't match," I couldn't tell the difference.

No, these shoes were quite extremely different, almost like wearing a boot on one foot, and a flip-flop on the other. So she fixed that problem before we left.

And then Little Smoot came down the stairs, all dressed up for her big night of trumpet playing. But Mrs. Smoot happened to notice that Little Smoot was unknowingly wearing her dress backwards. Yes, backwards.

Of course neither Mrs. Smoot nor Little Smoot managed to actually go into public with their own wardrobe malfunctions in place, but perhaps that will happen soon. I just thought it was rather ironic that I was the only person in the house who managed to dress correctly for once. At least as far as I am aware...

Thank You for Thanking Me!

2010-06-03T17:03:00.003-04:00

I think I may have started something that could spiral into a never-ending chain reaction. I'm a little concerned.

See, when we went to Hawaii, one of the highlights of our trip was an awesome luau on Maui. We had reserved the luau several months in advance, and we were seated right up front and center as a result of booking so early. We had the pleasure of sitting with a very nice couple from Wisconsin for the dinner and show.

While we were there, I had taken a photo of this couple, and they asked if I would mind sending them a copy, and I told them I would. I'm sure they never in a million years expected me to actually send them a print, but I was born with this stupid conscience that would have kept me up at night had I decided to simply blow this off.

So a week or so after we got back from our trip, I mailed them a 5x7 print and a nice note letting them know how much we enjoyed visiting with them that night.

Here it is, a couple weeks later, and I got this mysterious package in today's mail. Inside was a nice note from them, along with a block of Wisconsin cheese and some locally-made sausage! Very cool. I enjoy snacks like that, especially when they come directly from an area that's famous for particular kinds of food like that. I'd probably be in my glory if someone sent me a fresh potato directly from Idaho, or a fresh bowl of chowder from Boston... or a fry from France.

Now I feel compelled to drop them another note to thank them for their kind gesture. But what if that prompts them to send me another note, thanking me for thanking them? Obviously I'd have to send them yet another note, thanking them for thanking me for thanking them, and so it would go on and on. I just don't envision any possible scenario that involves a peaceful ending.

When I posted this dilemma on Facebook, one of my friends suggested that this is just the kind of gesture that can progress to the point where we exchange cards on holidays forever, and eventually we'll vacation together and ultimately we'll all move into the same retirement village. I would not be at all surprised.

Artificial Sweetener

2010-06-01T09:33:00.001-04:00

I'm not particularly good at sugarcoating things. I have always had a tendency to say pretty much whatever is on my mind, and more often than not the content of my mind doesn't go through a sugarcoating filter in my brain first. Nope, things go straight from raw thoughts to verbal communication with me, and that's probably not a good thing.

Since my sugarcoating filter seems to be largely missing, I make an honest effort nowadays to keep my mouth shut in certain situations, even if I think of something that I believe would be rather hilarious, but hurtful to someone else. Of course there are also plenty of times when I've let loose with the hilarious comment, only to regret it later.

Anyway, I got to thinking about this whole sugarcoating thing this weekend while visiting an acquaintance I hadn't seen for nearly two decades. He is actually an old friend of Mrs. Smoot's, and we learned (thanks to Facebook, naturally) that we were going to be in the same area this past weekend, so we got together for a delicious, gourmet lunch at Wal-Mart.

As soon as Mrs. Smoot's friend saw me, before even saying hello, his eyes got wide and he said, "GRAY HAIR!" And then he laughed in my general direction. Ok, so he's not always good at sugarcoating either. But as we were about to leave, he said, "Good to see that you're looking... healthy." I had to think about that one for a bit.

Was he being serious in stating that I looked "healthy" in some way? I mean, I wasn't using a Hoveround, nor am I visibly missing any major appendages or anything. I didn't have boogers dripping from my nose, and I wasn't hacking on my food... so I guess by all accounts, I appeared to be "healthy."

But I have a feeling, especially given that his first comment was about the gray hair thing, that the "healthy" comment was really an attempt at sugarcoating. I kinda think he meant "healthy" in the sense of "You look like you have been eating well. Really well. Like way too much, lard butt!"

For the record, though, I do feel healthy. Now where are those leftover chips from Memorial Day?

New Addition to the Family

2010-05-27T08:20:00.000-04:00

Yes, the Smoots have added a new family member. Its name is "Droid." No, it's not a new child, or a dog... it's my new phone. And it's not just any phone. No, it's the coolest new toy I have had in a long, long time, and I am including my extendable fork in that statement.

This phone does everything. It has a built-in GPS with voice navigation. It has a decent web browser. If I'm on a trip I can hook it up to my laptop and use it to connect to the Internet. It has a surprisingly decent camera. There are a bajillion "apps" that I can download, like one that will identify a song you're hearing, and where you can buy it.

If it's raining outside, a little animated windshield wiper will flash across the screen. I can play Tetris on it. You can point it at the night sky, and it will identify what stars/planets you're seeing. I can talk to it, and it will translate my sentences into a myriad of other languages.

With the new "Fartalyzer" app, I can record the sound of myself farting, and not only will it tell me what musical key the fart was in, but it will also let me know, based on the characteristics of the recording, whether I should immediately change underwear. It's that good.

So anyway, if I continue to have giant gaps in between blog entries, you can be sure that the phone is to blame. I'm probably spending all day playing with it instead of blogging. Of course if I find an app that allows me to post blog entries by merely thinking of stuff, there will be a LOT more new posts here.

Honked Off

2010-05-26T08:10:00.013-04:00

It's not a good idea to go up against me when it comes to acting immature. You'll lose.

Little Smoot's softball season is in full swing, and her team played a rather obnoxious opponent a couple weeks ago. The team members themselves weren't terribly obnoxious, but the parents certainly were.

We played at their park, and many of the parents parked their cars on a hillside overlooking the field. And other parents had various forms of mobile horns with them. Any time any of their girls did anything, and I mean anything, positive -- like not falling over -- the parents would start honking like a flock of defective geese. Unfortunately, the best we could do in retribution was to yell "HONK!" when our girls did something right.

So last night this team played on our turf, and we were prepared. One of our parents went out and bought a whole bunch of those annoying, plastic hand clapping things that light up, so each of us had one of those. I'm not sure it mattered, but they were pink.

I figured I would take things to a new, higher level of obnoxiousness, so I brought Little Smoot's trumpet along. It turned out to be an awesome tool against the folks from Monaca.

I suggested to our gang that we let the other parents make the first move. For one thing, we didn't want to look like we were the ones starting this little war. And for another thing, we were a little concerned about whether their town may have had two teams of girls, and we would end up just looking like rude morons honking at the wrong team.

Thankfully, it was the right team, and a couple of their horn honkers were there for the festivities. During the first half inning we let them do their honking, which, while annoying, was absolutely nothing in comparison to the noise I was able to generate with the trumpet. I also made note of the fact that the main honker for the other team was an 80+ year-old guy, and if I annoyed him with the trumpet, I didn't have to worry too much about him beating the crap out of me after the game.

I haven't really touched the trumpet since high school, except for a one-time gig at church. (Oddly enough, they never asked me to play again.) So I wasn't necessarily playing things well. But I was playing things loudly. Quite loudly. I suspect that I interrupted the play of games at adjoining fields. If only I could have captured the expression on that guy's face the first time I whipped out the trumpet. It was a Kodak moment, to say the least.

Our league has a rule that says that if a game is more than an hour and 40 minutes long, a new inning cannot begin and the game is over. A coach from the other team, knowing that we were closing in on that mark and that our team was gaining some momentum, went up to her pitcher and began a lengthy conversation to kill some time so we wouldn't have an opportunity to catch up. After watching this charade for a bit, I played the theme from Jeopardy!, which got a rousing reaction from our girls and parents.

Her ploy did work, however, and the game ended a few moments later. There were two winners in that game: the other team won the game, and I easily won the contest as Most Obnoxious Parent. Woo hoo! The other team's primary honker actually came over and delivered a concession speech. Thankfully he thought it was hilarious that I brought the trumpet, and we all had a good laugh.

Tonight I'm going to try to figure out how to get an operational fog horn into the game.

Lost

2010-05-25T09:19:00.000-04:00

I think I am nearly recovered from Sunday night's 18-hour Lost finale on ABC. And I'm pretty sure that the name of the series relates more to the people who are trying to follow the show than it describes the actors who are stranded on the island.

For those of you who haven't been watching Lost, here's a basic recap of all six seasons. A bunch of people crash in a jet that was en route from Australia to Los Angeles. They crash landeded on a mysterious beach (which we actually visited on our Hawaii trip, pictured on the right!) which features a smoke monster and a lot of magnetism or something.

Jack is one of the plane survivors, and he is a doctor. But it turns out he is now dead. The end.

A whole bunch of other weird stuff happened in between, but we have a long way to go before we figure it all out. Mrs. Smoot and I didn't watch the show from the beginning. We started buying the season DVDs a few months back, and we're only up to Season 3. So watching the finale was even more confusing to us than it was for the people who had seen the whole thing.

This has become a ritual for us at night. For the last few years we have picked a TV series, bought all of the DVDs, and watched them all on a nightly basis. Prior to Lost, we watched every episode of every season of House, and then Fringe. And at the risk of losing a bunch of "Cool Points" I will not even mention the series we watched from start to finish before that (Dawson's Creek...).

I'm not sure what we'll do when we run out of episodes of Lost, frankly. Is Three's Company out on DVD...?

Shifting the Time Space Continuum

2010-05-11T11:46:00.001-04:00

I have always considered myself to be a pretty adaptable person. In particular, I have never had much trouble with time changes. In fact, I often find it amusing when the TV news people give suggestions about how to cope with the big 1-hour time shift in the Spring and Fall. Are people that regimented that they can't deal with Daylight Savings Time? I dunno.

But here I am, almost a week after getting back from Hawaii, and I don't seem to be adjusted to the time change yet. Hawaii is six hours behind us, which is a pretty big difference. There were times on the trip when I was tempted to call someone back home as a prank at 9:00 p.m., which would have been 3:00 a.m. for them. But I figured whoever I'd call would surely get revenge by calling me at 9:00 a.m. their time. Or maybe it's the other way around. Whatever.

Our last week of the cruise involved crossing the Pacific Ocean on our way to Vancouver (where Olympics-related memorabilia is half off, by the way!). Every other day we would set our clocks back an hour as we crossed a few time zones, so by the time we got to Canada, we were only three hours different than our home time zone.

And I remain three hours off as we speak. It seems that every night at midnight I'm still wide awake because my brain thinks it's only 9:00. And mornings really stink. I've been waking up to get Little Smoot off to school, and I'll sit down to have breakfast only to wake up several hours later wondering why I have oatmeal all through my hair.

There have been a couple days where I have simply gone right back to bed after getting Little Smoot to school, and I'll wake up at noon or some such thing. Today I'm forcing myself to stay awake in hopes that I'll be able to fall asleep at a normal hour tonight.

Of course this might cause problems later tonight because I am the emcee for a banquet at our church. Hopefully they weren't expecting me to stay awake and alert for the whole thing.

Honest, I'm Not Ben's Keeper

2010-05-10T12:57:00.006-04:00

One of the things that I really enjoy on cruises is the opportunity to meet people from all over the world. Any time you run into other people, whether it's in the hot tub or at dinner, the first mandatory question is, "So, uh, where are you from?"

People on cruises ask this question first for a couple reasons. The main reason is that it's an obvious ice-breaker. It would probably be weird to come right out and ask them what the deal is with a giant mole coming out of their neck, or something, right out of the gate. Emily Post suggests that one should wait at least a few minutes before making that inquiry.

It is genuinely interesting to find out where people are from. I often make my own mental game of trying to guess a person's home state/country before asking. I can usually come pretty close based on a person's accent and personal hygiene practices, or lack thereof ("Hi! Judging from the smell, I'm betting you're from Indonesia!").

I found it interesting on this trip that every time I introduced myself as being from Pittsburgh, every single person had the same reaction. They'd pause for just a moment, let out a small sigh, and then say, "So. What are you going to do about Ben Roethlisberger?"

Since when am I personally in charge of Ben Roethlisberger, and why do I have to do something about him? I'm quite sure that I have very little to do with his fate. Maybe this picture of me and Ben was circulated around the web much more than I would have ever anticipated, and people assume that because we occasionally dress up in nice clothes together, I obviously have a say in his punishment for being an idiot.

Maybe people make the easy mistake of identifying me as Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner? We do look quite a bit alike.

Anyway, let it be known that I really don't have a hotline number that I can use to call the Rooney family and demand specific punishments for our quarterback. Maybe that could be my next life goal, however, now that I have completed the peeing-in-all-50-states thing.

As a side note, the photo at the top of this page was taken on the Big Island of Hawaii at a business. This place had over a dozen Steelers banners hanging all over the place, making it known that the Steelers Nation definitely extended well into the Pacific! It was amazing how few Cleveland Browns banners we saw along the way...

Where Does One Go From Here?

2010-05-07T13:10:00.001-04:00

I have finally accomplished my life goal, which brings me to the obvious question: What now?

It is disturbing to think that I have achieved the one thing that I have always wanted to do -- peeing in every state -- and here I am at age 42 with no specific goal or direction ahead of me.

I have written about my urination goal before, and of course I was able to get it crossed off the list while we were visiting Hawaii. The actual location of this milestone is depicted in the picture on the right, with my apologies to those who think that peeing outdoors is disgusting. I can't help but ask those people where they think their pee eventually ends up, or if they really believe that it's always going to be carefully stored right there below the toilet.

Anyway, I wish I could have somehow managed to go a few extra days without peeing on our trip, because it would have been the most awesomeist thing ever if I could have polished off my 50th state by peeing in the "World's Most Scenic Urinal." Seriously.

Feel free to Google it if you don't believe me, but the World's Most Scenic Urinal is located on the Big Island of Hawaii, in the community of Kealakekua, and it lives up to its reputation! It's located in the Kona Hotel, which is a pretty run-down place. I'm guessing that they established this urinal as a way of encouraging people to stop peeing randomly in the lobby or parking lot, because those places are certainly gross enough that you wouldn't necessarily feel bad about peeing there.

For me, this pit stop was like visiting Mecca. I approached it slowly, as though it was a religious shrine, and I savored every moment of the view as I took care of business. I was able to see the Kona coastline and community, and even a great view of our ship in the distance.

In addition to the men's urinal, there was a toilet for women with an equally scenic view out the window. But unless you had an unusually flexible neck, you wouldn't be able to enjoy the view while takin' care of business since it was aimed toward the door.

So anyhow, I'm wondering what I should possibly do next as a new life goal. Several people have suggested that I take care of peeing in all US territories, which I suppose is something worth trying for. There was some talk about the possibility of Puerto Rico becoming a US state, which would make it a mandatory pee visit for me, but I don't know if that's going to happen.

I guess I'm open to suggestions, which I would kinda prefer didn't relate to peeing in various places. Feel free to sound off with your ideas. Mrs. Smoot would certainly agree that I need some new direction in life!

Cruising Epidemic

2010-05-06T15:22:00.000-04:00

We're baaaaack! We had a super, fantastic time on our Hawaii cruise these past couple weeks, and we arrived back in Smootville a little after midnight last night.

There are all sorts of things I hope to blog about regarding our trip since we saw many spectacular things along the way. I am compelled, however, to start by discussing a terribly disturbing trend we noticed on the cruise.

First off, I must point out that we were easily the youngest people on the ship, by a long shot. The next closest person to us in age was, I'm guessing, somewhere in their 90s. So there were definitely some generational differences between us and the Hoveround crowd.

But imagine this scenario: You get up in the morning, and you and your spouse get dressed in separate rooms of the house. You meet at the door as you're about to leave to go somewhere together, and you realize -- EEEEP! -- we are wearing identical matching outfits!

Clearly, normal human beings would look at each other for a split second, share a hearty laugh, and then SPRINT back to their rooms to change into something that didn't match, right? But this is not what happened on our ship.

No, it seemed that a startling number of people actually planned this sort of thing, with extreme flare at that, and they were parading themselves around the ship in a way that seemed to strongly suggest that they were doing this with no sense of irony or humor at all. The first time I noticed this phenomenon I said to Mrs. Smoot, "Do you see that? You know what that is? It's a blog entry waiting to happen!"

These are people who obviously woke up in the morning and one of them said to the other, "Honey, how about we go with the obnoxious flower outfit today," or, "Dear, I think we should both dress up as cafe awnings." Or, "Sweetheart, give me 10 minutes and I'll fashion these drapes into outfits." And for some vastly inexplicable reason, they both thought it was the right thing to do.

I apologize for the terribly out-of-focus cell phone picture I posted, but I knew that you wouldn't believe it unless you saw it for yourselves. I have several other pictures of other similar couples, but I thought it was priceless that I was able to get two of these couples to POSE in this manner. Don't even ask what I used as an excuse for taking their picture. Suffice it to say that it's probably blurry because I was giggling while taking it.

Anyway, I would strongly suggest that we watch this disturbing trend (at a distance, preferably), and report future instances to Homeland Security if necessary.

Yes, Yes, I'm Still Alive

2010-04-20T13:07:00.001-04:00

Ok, I thought I'd check in so that people didn't think I have fallen off a large cliff or something. It strikes me a bit funny that there have been people who have not only noticed that I haven't updated the blog in a while, but some of those people actually seem to be visibly shaken by this. Alrighty.

See, the problem is that nothing weird has been happening in my life. Nothing remotely interesting has been happening, for that matter.

I spent most of last week painting portions of our house. Going into this project I remember thinking that this would certainly spawn numerous blog entries for several reasons. For one, I'm just not a handy person, and I've never painted anything in my life. Surely, at the very least, I'd spill a couple gallons of paint down the staircase, creating a flowing green paint waterfall, and I could blog about it. But, remarkably, that didn't happen.

I figured if I didn't create an Exxon Valdez-style paint catastrophe, surely I'd fall off my homemade scaffolding that I had to construct to get up to the highest point of our stairwell (I did make sure that Mrs. Smoot never saw that contraption in all of its glory). But, defying all odds, I did not fall and maim myself either.

In the end, the paint stuck to the wall, and everything turned out just fine. That just doesn't make for very compelling blog writing if you ask me.

I did get a new phone the other day, and I have to say that it is the most amazing gadget I've played with for a long, long time. If I leave it on the kitchen counter, it does the dishes. So maybe I'll blog about that sometime.

I am happy to say that the Smoots are leaving for Hawaii in two days, so one would surely think that something blog-worthy will happen while we're gone these next couple weeks. The lady who organized our trip arrived in Hawaii last night, after having her connecting flight canceled in Phoenix. See, she already has ripe blog material!

Stupid Brain.

2010-03-30T13:27:00.000-04:00

So I woke up this morning and looked at the clock. Yikes! Ten til, already? That's terrible news! Little Smoot should already be at school... we're late!

I hopped out of bed and ran over to wake Little Smoot this morning, while wondering why my alarm failed to go off. She bounced out of bed like a trooper, and managed to be ready to head out the door within literally three minutes.

I grabbed my keys and started for the door, and I glanced up at the clock again. And just as I was turning the door knob, it occurred to me: It's nearly 8:00, not 9:00, you dork.

My wonderful brain has failed me once more. For whatever reason (NyQuil, probably), my brain decided that we were late for school, and it didn't realize that I was off by an entire hour. So I apologized to Little Smoot, and we took our good ole time finishing our preparations for school. I do seriously hope that she ultimately did wear pants this morning.

I can remember one time when I was in high school that my brain tricked me like this before. My brain got me up literally in the middle of the night and decided it was time for school. My dad came staggering out to the kitchen to inquire as to why I was eating Raisin Bran at 2:00 a.m.

Stupid brain. I'm guessing this was my brain's way of playing an April Fools Joke on me... a couple days early.

Brookville Bruce?

2010-03-29T14:20:00.002-04:00

Being a native of Punxsutawney, PA, it's only natural that I often catch grief from people because our community happens to be the home of a specially-abled groundhog with weather forecasting abilities.

Of course those of us from Punxsutawney see nothing unusual about this; we've been celebrating Punxsutawney Phil's amazing abilities for well over a century now.

Not only that, but we have seen numerous pretenders crop up over the years. There are groundhogs in Atlanta, GA, Dunkirk, NY, Quarryville, PA, and many others who have tried to latch onto Phil's popularity by claiming that their own groundhogs have these special powers.

Naturally, they do not. Phil is the only groundhog with time-tested, accurate weather forecasting abilities.

Even closer to home we have had trouble with people trying to come up with their own ripoff animal prognosticators. In the very nearby community of Big Run, for example, there's a guy who claims that his backyard frogs can predict the start of spring. They have a banquet and everything (the townspeople have a banquet, not the frogs. At least as far as I'm aware).

And now, just within the past couple days, we seem to have another potential fly in the ointment. Not a literal fly, although I'm sure someone will come up with a weather forecasting fly soon enough.

Some idiot from Brookville (about 20 miles north of Punxsutawney) was caught trying to revive a road kill possum last Thursday. There can only be a couple logical explanations for such a thing. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article suggests that alcohol may be to blame. Well, duh... if you're going to try to give mouth-to-mouth to a possum, one would think that alcohol may be a necessity, indeed.

I would suggest that the suspect, Donald Wolfe, had reason to believe that this was a weather forecasting possum, and he just wanted to get in on the action. I mean, let's face it... Brookville doesn't have a whole lot going for it, so why not recruit a weather forecasting possum to boost its popularity. They could call it "Brookville Bruce," and have a special event for it every year so it could announce its forecast to the world.

It's only a matter of time before DuBois, Indiana and yes, even Sligo, try to hone in on the action.

How To Bake a Cake

2010-03-26T15:57:00.000-04:00

Since Mrs. Smoot had her birthday earlier this week (notice that I didn't bother to point out that it was #40!), I took it upon myself to make my first-ever attempt at baking a cake to mark the occasion. I thought I would pass along some instructions in case any of you in the vast viewing audience wish to attempt this feat in the future.

First, you need to go to the store and buy some stuff. I made a list at the house so I would know what I needed to purchase, and I made this shopping trip a day ahead of time. After all, you want to be sure to have this kind of thing organized so you don't need to make multiple trips to the store!

My list looked much like this: "Cake mix. Frosting." So Little Smoot and I headed off to the store. I chose a chocolate cake mixture that looked like it would be within my baking abilities, and I put Little Smoot in charge of selecting the frosting, which is why we had a chocolate cake with "triple chocolate" frosting.

If you're going to bake a cake with plans on celebrating with it that same evening, I would recommend beginning the process at about 3:00 a.m., or perhaps sometime during the previous week, by the way.

Anyhow, I began the process late after dropping Little Smoot off at school on Mrs. Smoot's birthday (which was her 40th, by the way). I carefully read the instructions, which said something about greasing the pan. First, I had to locate a pan that was in the appropriate dimensions (allow two hours for this), and then deal with the grease (add another hour). I considered WD-40 as an option, but later went with Crisco, or some such thing.

Just a few short hours later, I had my pan all greased and ready to go. Hooray! So I started mixing the batter, which included some brown stuff in a bag, supplied by the cake people, eggs, water, and vegetable oil. It was at this point that I didn't know if the oil I had in front of me was "vegetable" oil, or some other oil, or whether it made a damned bit of difference. So back to the store I went to buy "vegetable" oil.

Back at home, I added the oil to the mix, and had to figure out where our mixer was, and how a person uses such a thing. I was apprehensive, but after fiddling with the knob and getting it to work, I successfully had a bowl of brown glop in front of me, so I was happy (allow three hours for figuring out the mixer, and actually mixing stuff).

I carefully poured the brown glop into the pan, and I was pretty excited to see what looked like the beginnings of a cake. I had pre-heated the oven to 350 degrees, and I popped the pan in. It was a couple minutes after this that I happened to glance at the box and see that I was supposed to have sprinkled flour into the pan before pouring the glop in.

So, I poured the glop back into a bowl, and of course headed to the store to get flour.

Upon arriving back home, I poured the glop back into the pan (which I had to wash and re-grease), and then back into the oven. I spent the next half hour or so nervously pacing back and forth, wondering if this would actually turn into cake, or if this was merely a practical joke of glop that the cake people thought they'd have me create.

Oddly enough, it turned into cake. When Little Smoot arrived home from school, I let her apply the frosting because I knew I'd make a mess of it.

Then I realized that, as tradition, some people like to have candles on the cake. So back to the store I went.

Well, thankfully everything worked out for the best, and we actually ate the cake with very few fatalities involved. Even more strange, after a few days we finished the whole thing! In 40 more years or so, I may even attempt to make another one.

Time for Some Disinfecting

2010-03-24T15:26:00.000-04:00

I would say that I am 97.6% better, having been ill for the last week or so. It had been a long time since I had a cold, so I was definitely due for one. And I was glad to get it out of the way with now so that hopefully I can be good and healthy for our vacation next month.

Mrs. Smoot and Little Smoot are now also under the weather. Mrs. Smoot has virtually no voice, which is nice in the sense that I know I can get away with anything without being yelled at (ok, she doesn't normally yell at me for things, but I had to say that anyway).

The worst thing about this particular cold wasn't my scratchy throat, or my stuffy nose. I didn't cough a whole lot, so that wasn't so bad. No, the worst thing about this cold was reasonably disgusting, and I'm not terribly proud of it.

This cold was unique because for many nights in a row, I would wake up in the middle of the night and make the lovely discovery that I had been drooling all over my pillow. How wonderful!

So I would do what any normal person would do. Namely, I'd think about how gross this was for a few seconds, and then I'd flip the pillow over to the other side and hope to God that the other side had gotten dry since the last time I flipped it. And back to sleep I'd go. Yuck.

Some people would probably have gotten up and changed pillow cases, I suppose, but we only have so many of them. Maybe I should keep a bottle of Febreze by the bed, or something. I dunno.

Mrs. Smoot Hits a Milestone!

2010-03-19T08:09:00.010-04:00

Go ahead and mark Monday on your calendar. If you have a modern calendar, you'll probably find that "Monday" is already on there. But this coming Monday is Mrs. Smoot's 40th birthday!

She doesn't seem to be particularly thrilled with this milestone. And I can't really blame her; I remember being a little depressed about the whole thing when I hit that mark two years ago. Age 40 is definitely another step on the path to elderlyhood.

We were talking to a woman at a restaurant the other night, and in the course of the conversation we learned that she was 43. This was a woman I had met at an event a few weeks back, and I would have assumed she was waaaaaaay older than I am, not just by a year. She used a CANE for heaven's sake. I dunno.

Mrs. Smoot has already been suffering from a variety of pre-40 Imaginary Illnesses. I did the same thing when I was turning 40. When I was getting close to hitting the big 4-0, I spent a lot more time being extra aware of my health, as though we start falling apart limb for limb at the stroke of midnight on a 40th birthday.

I remember worrying about every little "symptom." Was this spot here before? Say, I don't remember having this much nose hair. And let's not even speak of the issue of gray hairs.

It definitely doesn't help that we are avid viewers of the TV show House, either. From watching that show, we know that it's definitely possible to be feeling perfectly normal one moment, and then have blood shooting out of our eyeballs the next. Probably Sarcoidosis.

So I would expect that Mrs. Smoot will have some number of imaginary health issues for a couple months, until she settles in with the whole 40 thing.

Mrs. Smoot is also not too fond of having people make a big deal out of her birthday, so whatever you do, try your best to keep it our little secret (I'll give you her cell phone number if you ask...).

Ok, I'm Back

2010-03-18T09:08:00.000-04:00

I officially survived our trip to Louisiana last week, and I am back. Actually, I've been back since Saturday, but I brought back, as a souvenir, a nasty head cold. I've spent most of the week hacking, snorting, sniffling and wheezing, and in general being fairly miserable to be around. More miserable than usual, even.

The first couple days of our mission trip involved a lot of sweeping at a building where they hope to one day host future mission trip visitors. I eventually succumbed to peer pressure and wore one of those stupid dust mask things, but I'm sure I had already inhaled plenty of nasty stuff by then.

I'm finally to the stage where I only need a normal night of sleep, instead of getting up in the morning to get Little Smoot off to school, and then going back to sleep until the time I need to pick her up from school.

I'm pretty sure it was the dust that made me sick, but also may have been my exposure to an excessive amount of Frank Sinatra, too. My car companions on the trip were significantly older than I am, and they have a fondness for Ol' Blue Eyes. They also had satellite radio in the car, and Channel 73 is "Siriusly Sinatra," which we listened to for the majority of the ride home.

I can be very happy to go years without hearing Frank Sinatra, but we listened to it from Northern Alabama all the way back to PA. I'm pretty sure that I was the only one in the vehicle who was getting a nervous twitch after being subjected to him for that long. I can normally drive long, long distances without getting tired, but I could feel myself swerving around a bit, thanks to Frank lulling me to sleep.

Anyway, I think I'll avoid dust AND FRANK for a while. Maybe I need a nap.

Headin' South!

2010-03-04T15:04:00.000-05:00

Yes, I know I haven't been super religious about posting to ye ol' blog lately, but I will definitely be disappearing for the next week or so. I figured I had better alert everyone so you can mark your calendars. Feel free to do whatever productive thing you would normally be doing instead of using the time to read this jibberish.

Early tomorrow morning I'll be heading south to the small community of Dulac, Louisiana, on a church mission trip. I enjoyed visiting this town last year, and I had also been on a couple similar trips to Mississippi prior to that.

We'll be spending a little time in New Orleans, which is certainly always an interesting place, especially for people who enjoy blogging about weird experiences. Hopefully something will happen that will be interesting enough to write about (like an Elvis sighting), yet not tragic (eaten by an alligator).

We shall see.

The Crusty Old Fart

2010-03-03T07:58:00.038-05:00

I really do hate that I am becoming a crusty old fart. Mentally, I still consider myself to be pretty darned young, and most people who know me will definitely toss the word "immature" around in the same sentence as my name.

So it definitely bothers me when I wind up playing the role of the Crusty Old Fart (COF for short). I had plenty of opportunities to be the COF this past weekend. Little Smoot had a karate tournament in State College, PA, and since it began early on Saturday morning, we headed up that way on Friday night and stayed at a hotel.

I should also mention that the drive took nearly five hours thanks to blinding snow we experienced for most of the trip, and the fact that a Prius does about as well at navigating through snow as an upside-down kayak would. So I was already in a less-than-100%-pleasant mood.

Knowing we had to be up early in the morning, Little Smoot and I went to sleep just after 10 p.m., which would give us a good night of rest. That seemed like an awesome theory until 12:41 a.m., when about 300 girls (judging from the noise) showed up next door for Party Time.

It sounded like they were having a cheerleading festival over there, and extra points were being awarded to those who could be the loudest. After a few long moments, I got up, got dressed -- with some articles of clothes actually on backwards due to anger and being half asleep. I grabbed my COF hat, and stomped over to their door and politely asked them to can it.

That kept them quiet for almost a nano second as I hopped back into bed. And slowly but surely, the giggles turned into laughs, which turned into screaming and who knows what exactly. I pounded on the wall, at least until my knuckles started to bleed, in the form of a hint, which went largely unnoticed. So I turned our room's heater on "high" in hopes that the noise of the fan would muffle their sounds.

Of course the question that comes to mind is "Where are the idiot parents who are letting them get away with this?" My guess would be that the idiot parents are at a different hotel, probably in a neighboring state, to avoid the noise.

A few hours later (notice I didn't say "a few hours of sleep later") it was time to get up for the tournament. At least I got a little bit of satisfaction out of "accidentally" repeatedly bumping up against the neighboring door as I loaded the car.

Deeply Disturbing News

2010-03-02T09:56:00.000-05:00

I read an article in yesterday's USA Today that disturbed me infinitely more than global warming and Tiger Woods combined.

This article sent a chill down my spine as it talks about skyrocketing chicken wing prices, due to their increasing popularity. Apparently every store in America has latched onto the idea of selling chicken wings, and there just aren't enough chickens out there with a willingness to have their appendages amputated for our enjoyment. Stupid chickens.

I have been a chicken wing connoisseur for a couple decades now. I can remember being introduced to them at Clarion's Autumn Leaf Festival when I was in college. I can also remember ordering a dozen of the "Volcanic" style wings at The Casino restaurant in Bemus Point, NY. You could pull a boat up to their dock and eat the wings right there. I got through four of those wings before I had to dive head-first into the water. Ah, the memories.

So I'm deeply concerned about the wing situation, and the possible domino effect the shortage could have. Think about it. I get together with my good friend John for lunch at a great wing place most every week (we're also planning to go there today; God willing, they have not run out of chickens). We stopped in last week, and there were no tables available, so we wound up leaving and eating at a Chinese buffet instead.

Clearly, if things continue to go down this road, and people can't get chicken wings and have to continue to resort to Chinese buffet restaurants, we're obviously going to have to worry about the cat population next.

What's Up With That?

2010-02-24T09:13:00.000-05:00

Little Smoot has now developed some sort of sense of humor, at least in her mind. That's just what our family needs: another person who thinks they're funny, but are actually the opposite. That's my role!

I'm not sure where she picked it up exactly (I'm looking in Sponge Bob's direction, though), but she has decided that you can say pretty much anything, and add a rim shot to the end of it and voilà!... it's funny.

She has also decided that for maximum comedic value, she should also add the phrase "What's up with that?" to everything.

So out of nowhere she'll say something like, "Airplane food. What's up with that? (Bah-dum bum... psssh!)." Or "Salad dressing. What's up with that? (Bah-dum bum... psssh!)." "Car keys? What's up with that? (Bah-dum bum... psssh!)."

I have to admit that this was funny enough to make me laugh the first 300 times or so, but it might be getting a little stale. I'm sure that eventually Mrs. Smoot and the cat will gradually go insane, what with two of us making really stupid comedic attempts back and forth.

My Second 21st Birthday

2010-02-23T07:12:00.000-05:00

Yep, I have done it again. For the second time, I turned 21 this past weekend.

My first 21st birthday was pretty uneventful. Most people mark that particular occasion by filling up on alcoholic beverages to the point where paramedics are often involved. But for whatever reason, I spent that day hitting a bottle of Mt. Dew. Yawn.

The second time around, I was able to enjoy a mostly peaceful day with my family. We headed to our favorite Japanese Steak House, where I ate an obscene amount of food and enjoyed a couple Diet Pepsi drinks. I spent most of the rest of the day on the couch, groaning, while the Olympics were on in the background.

I don't know about this whole aging thing. So far I have definitely been able to keep my maturity level firmly on hold. I'm quite certain that I haven't aged, maturity-wise, since my first 21st birthday.

I was running an errand yesterday morning, and I started thinking ahead to what my third 21st birthday might be like. I got a little worried about it as I was following a dreaded OMWH (Old Man With Hat) down the highway. I really, really hope that I don't follow that trend.

My Latest Rant

2010-02-22T07:48:00.028-05:00

Ok, enough already. I feel the need to express my extreme displeasure with a new trend in television advertising. For some odd reason a number of business owners have begun this habit of having their kids participate in their TV commercials.

Here in the Smootville television market, I can think of at least three instances of this phenomenon. One, naturally, is a car commercial. Another is a father and daughter who want to remodel your bathroom.

It just seems like the guys who own these businesses decide, "what the heck, I have a hot-looking daughter... if they see her in my ads people will want to hire me to remodel their bathroom." I'm sorry, but in reality, it just makes people want to make out with your hot daughter. The heck with their bathrooms.

By far, the winner of the Most Annoying Father and Daughter Contest is the owner of "Allgood Home Improvement," which recently set up shop in our market. Dad and the hot daughter go back and forth, yelling at us about how they can't wait to sell us windows at 2-For-1 Savings! For the First Time Ever! Woooo!

If you can watch this commercial and not want to smack both of these people in the head with a brick -- especially at the end when they scream, "We'll save you a LOT OF MONEY!"-- then you are a much better person than I:

These folks also have a new commercial (which, quite unfortunately is not yet available online) that features a very young, frizzy-haired brother of the hot daughter, who remarks, "Dude that's awesome!" after learning about the 2-For-1 window sale, as though at age 7 he has many years of experience dealing with the issue of purchasing home improvement products.

I am wearing out my mute button.

Losing My Freakin' Mind, Part XVIII

2010-02-19T07:57:00.049-05:00

Yes, I can cite numerous instances in my blog that would suggest to any normal person that I am indeed on the brink of insanity, and other blog entries with nearly the same title as this one. Sure. But I fear I may definitely be crossing the line into True Insanityland nowadays.

For example, I can never, ever, ever remember whether or not I have turned off my space heater. I have this fancy "Presto Heatdish" thing I got at Costco several years ago. It's like a little satellite dish thing that aims wonderfully warm air at me on cold days, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I'll often curl up into a ball beside it, much like a cat by a fireplace.

But I simply can never remember whether I have shut the thing off or not. So when I leave the house during these winter days, I'll hop in the car and drive up the road -- sometimes as far as several miles -- until my mind will latch on to the Heatdish Issue.

I'll try really, really hard to remember whether I turned it off before leaving the house, but I just can't be 100% sure. So I'll turn around and drive all the way home, even if I have reached another state already, just to check on the stupid thing. I should note that I have never gotten home to find that I did indeed leave it on.

What's worse is that now, oftentimes when I get home to check on the heater, I'll suddenly get distracted by my computer, which is near the heater. If I see that I have new e-mail, I'll have to check to see what the message is.

Then I'll head out to the car again and start buzzing down the road, only to realize that I never actually checked to see whether or not the heater was on, what with the important junk e-mail from Nigeria weighing heavily on my mind. So then I have to make a second trip back home.

Then, finally, I can head off to my destination. At least until I inevitably start worrying about whether or not I left the burners running on the stove.

So I would have to imagine that I qualify for some sort of insanity defense, should I decide to go berserk at some point.

Oh, and don't even ask me how many times I have needed to go back out to my car after being seated at a restaurant because I can't remember whether or not I have locked the door.

Good News / Bad News

2010-02-18T08:01:00.002-05:00

So we have good news, and bad news. The good news is that we got a brand new sled! The bad news is that we got a brand new sled.

I was reasonably enthusiastic about getting a new sled. We usually go entire winters where we would not have enough snow to go sled riding. But this year we have so much damn snow that if I'm not careful when I open the door of the house, we could easily go sled riding in our living room.

Little Smoot had been bugging me about getting a sled for several days, so we ventured out to a sporting goods store on one of her numerous snow days and actually found a few sleds in stock.

Well, that was all good and well, but now Little Smoot wants me to join her outside in the actual snow, and of course she insists that I ride the sled. And being the fine father I am, with the mental maturity of a young child, I thought it might actually be fun to ride down the hill in our yard.

We created a track that begins beside our house, goes down over a pretty steep hill, and ends somewhere in the bottom of the yard. I went flying down the hill a couple times, and then it suddenly occurred to me: "This sucks."

And I hate to think that way, because this is yet another sign that I'm not getting any younger. Sled riding used to be a blast! My brother and I would make elaborate trails in our yard, and we had our share of near death experiences on a giant pipeline hill adjacent to our property. We'd be out there for hours and we loved it!

Yet after just a couple rides down the hill, the only thing I could think was: "This sucks." Something about freezing my butt off while my clothes get all soggy from the snow just isn't nearly as appealing as it used to be. And I have to admit that I hate the terrible things that happen to my hair when I wear my dorky wool cap nowadays.

I hope this stuff melts sometime before July.

Olympics Bucket List

2010-02-17T14:43:00.000-05:00

When I was little, I promised myself that one day I would attend an event at the Olympics. I have always enjoyed the Olympics, and I still hope that someday I'll have the opportunity to see some sort of Olympic event live and in person.

I hadn't shared this Bucket List item with Little Smoot, so I thought it was interesting that as we were watching the opening ceremonies she said, "I hope we can go to the Olympics someday."

Well, here we are, several days into the events, and I'm starting to think that not only should I aim for watching the Olympics, maybe I should actually try to be a participant.

I enjoyed lunch with my good friend John this afternoon, and while we were eating, Olympic Curling was on the TV at our our favorite chicken wing joint. It didn't take us long to decide that this was an event in which we could realistically compete.

Curling involves taking long strands of otherwise straight hair and heating it to the point where it takes on a new shape. Ooops! Wrong Wikipedia page.

Ah. Here we go. The sport of Curling is basically like playing shuffleboard on an ice rink. You have this big stone thing that you whisk down the ice, aiming for a target a hundred or so feet (or meters, or hectacres, some such thing) away. Your goal is to get as close to the target as possible, and you're allowed to bonk your opponents' stones out of the way.

Oh, and for some reason which neither of us could quite fathom, after the initial person launches the stone, a team of other people run off in front of it and sweep the ice with brooms. We're a little unclear about the purpose of that whole thing. Maybe the audience is full of rude people who throw litter onto the rink or something.

Anyway, we decided that it doesn't appear that this particular "sport" involves a heck of a lot of physical prowess, and therefore we should be Olympians. As my friend John noted, "I can't imagine they could possibly turn too many people away who show an interest in being on the American team."

So look for us in the 2014 Olympics, which are slated to be held in Russia of all places. I would expect that we'll fare very well, and will undoubtedly be overwhelmed with endorsement deals from broom companies and whatnot.

Too Much Time on My Hands? Nah.

2010-02-11T16:24:00.000-05:00

Sorry I haven't posted for a number of days, but I've been busy shoveling. And as soon as I get done shoveling, it's time to go shovel some more.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Greater Smootville Region, we got around 20" of snow beginning last Friday into Saturday, and then yet another half foot or so yesterday. And there's talk of more snow in the next few days.

I figured that if Mother Nature was going to give us lemons, I was going to screw with the neighbors (isn't that how the phrase goes?). I created a little illusion in one of our snow mounds by sticking an old pair of pants and shoes upside-down, along with a pair of gloves.

An hour or so after putting this into place, I got a call from our next door neighbor, who was laughing so hard she could barely speak. Apparently another neighbor had called her and thought that a guy from next door was "standing at the entrance to our driveway, but something doesn't look right." She replied after looking out the window, and said, "You're right he doesn't look right -- he's upside-down!"

Knowing that I'm demented and everything, she knew it was a prank right away. But other people have apparently been momentarily fooled by it. I ran into yet another neighbor at the grocery store today, and she reported that one of her co-workers had driven through the neighborhood and almost stopped to help!

Oh, and I should note that I saw a police car drive by earlier, and he just shook his head.

Mission accomplished!

Full Moon on Groundhog Day

2010-02-03T09:35:00.006-05:00

Groundhog Day is always a unique experience, and this year was no exception. I headed out the door on Monday with the Smootmobile fully packed with layers of additional clothing so that I'd be nice and warm at Gobbler's Knob while watching Phil make his annual prognostication the next morning.

But instead, I was out until around 1:00 a.m. with my brother and some close friends, and I ultimately decided that it would be in my best interest to just sleep through Phil's forecast in a nice, warm bed at my parents' home. I have officially become a big wimp upon seeing the 12-degree reading on the thermometer under a cloudless sky. We could feel the frost starting to develop on our heads, just by walking through a parking lot.

So, rather than getting ready to watch a groundhog predict the weather, we spent much of our Groundhog Day Eve watching a 20-something year old guy proudly display a bruise he had gotten on his butt while attending a recent event at Madison Square Garden in New York. He said he had fallen down a flight of stairs there, and I will just go ahead and make the wild assumption that alcohol may have been a factor.

A group of these folks (I guess now that I'm elderly I can call 20-somethings "kids") came to Punxsutawney from Long Island so they could see what Groundhog Day was all about. I seriously doubt that any of them were able to actually attend Phil's forecast either, because their blood alcohol levels were probably beyond what any modern instrument could possibly measure.

My new "friend" from New York seemed to continually insist that he stand right next to me to display his bruise -- and the rest of his hairy butt -- in case there had been some sort of new development there since the last time he showed me.

It was admittedly funny at first, but it became increasingly disturbing as the night wore on. I found myself thinking rhetorical questions like, "Why couldn't the lone girl in their group have suffered some sort of bosom injury instead making me see this every few minutes?"

At one point he had left for about half an hour only to return wearing only a bathrobe, presumably because that made it much easier to display his butt, without the unnecessary added inconvenience of unzipping his pants and everything. (My apologies for the poor quality cell phone picture... but if I had to suffer, YOU have to suffer.)

Earlier in the night we had the chance to see actor Stephen Tobolosky from the movie Groundhog Day. He portrayed "Ned Ryerson," the annoying insurance salesperson who accosted Bill Murray's character each morning as they headed to the celebration ("Ned Ryerson? BING!").

It was fun to watch him speak at the annual banquet, and he and his wife seemed to be genuinely thrilled to be there to take it all in since they had never visited town before, let alone on an actual Groundhog Day. And best of all, not one time did he feel that it was necessary to display his butt to us.

The Book Report

2010-01-27T14:36:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty sure that one of the few bright spots in the life of a Reading teacher is to assign book reports. This is clearly their method of revenge on classes full of kids that talk, pop gum, text, disrupt and otherwise annoy them during the early part of the year.

Little Smoot's reading teacher took this form of revenge to an even greater level this year by making her class's reports due on the day they returned from Christmas break. Merry Christmas children!

Normally Little Smoot does a good job of getting homework finished promptly. In fact, that's our rule. It's the first thing she does as soon as she gets home from school, so she doesn't have to worry about it later.

Well, it was a little harder to motivate her to get this particular project done, particularly when she could spend more time playing the Wii while basking in the glow of the Christmas tree. I was pestering her every day about this stupid book report, and telling her how I really didn't want her to put it off, and her answer was always, "I will!"

Naturally, a couple days before returning to school she realized that she had managed to lose the instructions for what all had to be done for this project. She called a friend, and got all of these details, which included a diorama, summary, a word find consisting of vocabulary words from the book, and a bunch of other stuff. I am surprised she didn't have to do a one-on-one in-person interview with the author, or some such thing.

After shedding some number of tears, realizing that she had no idea where to begin (and I'm sure I didn't help with the number of "told-ya-so" comments I made), she was literally up late the final night of vacation to get the stupid thing done.

She finally got her project back this week, and we were happy that she got a 94 out of 100 on it. Apparently other kids in the class weren't so lucky. Most of her class did terribly, and several kids didn't bother doing it at all, and Little Smoot's teacher told the class (this is an actual quote, according to Little Smoot), "I wanted to kill myself while grading these things!"

So I guess we'll be happy with the 94. I can hardly wait until they start assigning her science projects, like making her build a fully functional volcano, or whatever.

Say... Is That My Butt?

2010-01-26T07:39:00.005-05:00

I'm a bit of a news junkie, so I tend to notice various trends and habits of our local newscasts. And over the past several years, I've noticed a disturbing trend concerning news stories devoted to anything related to diets.

I couldn't help but notice that every time a TV station does a story regarding diets, they seem to be obligated to show footage of overweight people while the newscaster reads the story. Apparently the TV people think that we, the viewers, might have forgotten what large people look like, so we need this important visual aid.

So last night, for example, they were telling a story about how Taco Bell is creating their own "Drive-Through Diet" (which I'm sure is extremely effective), and they illustrated the story with footage of enormous people waddling down the street.

To make matters worse, they usually slow the footage down to make it look more dramatic. To their credit, I have not yet seen a news report where they add sound effects, like the ones you'd hear in Jurassic Park when the dinosaurs are stomping around. I'm sure they'll begin doing that soon enough.

I am almost positive that it's the same footage that they show every time they do one of these stories. Surely, as often as they feature dietary stories, they don't tell some poor camera guy, "Hey Mark, go down to the donut shop, and get us some more B-roll footage of the back ends of enormous folks for the 6:00." Instead, I'm sure they just re-use the same stuff time after time.

They usually show these video victims from behind, and they crop them from the neck down, as if to say, "Whoa, that is one gigantic fanny." I feel voyeuristic just watching these stories. And I doubt very much that the video crew asked permission to record these folks ("Hi. I'm from WONK-TV, and I couldn't help but notice that you're enormous. Would you mind if I videotape your butt while you waddle down the street?")

I dunno. One of these days I just know I'm going to see my own butt on one of these stories.

Continuing a Family Tradition

2010-01-21T09:43:00.001-05:00

I'll apologize in advance for having two toilet-related blog entries in a row. Hopefully I'll think of something different tomorrow. But I'll warn you in advance that tomorrow's entry could very well involve toilets. I just don't know.

I have many great memories from my childhood visits to my grandparents' house in Mount Pleasant, PA. And now that they're both gone, I cherish those memories all the more. It seems that now, though, I am reminded every day of one of the more unusual things about visiting them. Of course I speak of: The Toilets.

Their original house -- the same one where my dad grew up -- had a toilet with some sort of crippling plumbing problem, and anytime it was flushed you'd need to "jiggle the handle" to make sure it would fill up properly. The result was that each and every time that my brother or I would announce that we were going to the bathroom, whichever grandparent was the closest at that moment would remind us: "Don't forget to jiggle the handle!"

No matter how many times we'd visit the house, we would get that reminder from them. It was pretty much an involuntary reflex on their part. Upon hearing the word "bathroom," they would automatically reply with the jiggle the handle warning, without even necessarily realizing they were saying it. Come to think of it, I do believe that they had similarly infected toilets at each of the three houses they occupied, so that tradition followed us over the years.

Now here we are, with our very own house with its very own toilets. And, wouldn't you know, our downstairs toilet is starting to develop its own problem which can only be resolved by smashing it with a sledgehammer. Ooops... I mean, the problem can be solved by jiggling the handle, and I find myself telling Little Smoot to do this when the toilet won't immediately refill.

Just carryin' on the tradition.

Beware: Mickey Mouse Toilets!

2010-01-20T10:40:00.000-05:00

I've had a couple experiences this past week that reminded me of a traumatic trip we took to Florida a number of years ago.

When Little Smoot was 3, we decided for some bizarre reason that she was old enough to appreciate the Magic and Wonder of Disney World, so we hopped in the car and headed for Orlando. Little Smoot was a good girl in the car, which probably lulled us into thinking that the trip was going to go really well. This was before we encountered the Disney Toilets of Doom.

We met up with some people we had met on a cruise a year or so prior to this trip, and we all headed to Disney. I should mention that Little Smoot had just kicked the diaper habit a couple months before this trip, so public toilets were still a pretty new and unusual experience.

It didn't take us long before nature called at the park, and Little Smoot had her first experience with one of the wonderful Disney toilets. In an effort to be magical and wondrous, virtually all of the toilets at Disney have motion sensors, which would be a great thing in theory. You see, in theory, the toilets know when you have finished your business, and they'll flush everything into a wondrous magical land somewhere.

But in reality, what happens is that every time you wiggle your butt in the least bit, the toilet thinks you're finished and it decides to flush, and it doesn't care that you're still sitting there. And if you're a 3-year-old, a gigantic eruption of wooshing water right underneath your butt can definitely be a bit traumatic! So Little Smoot completely freaked out and cried her eyeballs out thanks to the Scary Toilet of Doom.

In a seriously-flawed attempt to be helpful, one of our friends we were traveling with suggested to her, "It's okay, Sweetie! Mickey Mouse is in those toilets, and he flushes them for people!" In theory, this seemed like an innocent remark, but in reality, now she was not only freaked out by the toilets, but now she was scared to death of Mickey Mouse. Super.

The rest of the trip was basically a nightmare as she refused to go to any public restroom. On the drive home, she displayed the most remarkable ability to "hold it" that I've ever personally witnessed. We literally drove from Sarasota, FL, to midway through South Carolina before she attempted (and then refused) to use a bathroom. Her eyes were turning yellow, for heaven's sake.

And for the rest of the trip, it was obvious that she had to go to the bathroom, so I'd stop at every single rest area so that she could go into the bathroom and freak out, telling us, "What if Mickey Mouse is in there!?!?!" I could undoubtedly write a book called "The Restrooms of I-95," because I saw all of them. I did finally get her to pee in the woods behind the restrooms at a stop in Virginia.

When we finally got home and vowed never to go to Disney World again, I wrote a snotty letter to Disney to suggest that maybe, just maybe, their toilets could be a little more kid-friendly since perhaps we weren't the only people in the world who thought Disney would be a good destination for kids. They responded a few weeks later, and as some sort of ironic apology, they sent us an autographed picture of Mickey Mouse. I would have framed it and put it in Little Smoot's room, but I really didn't want to have to put her in therapy at such a young age.

Fast forward to this week, where this motion sensor toilet phenomenon happened to me on two occasions at two different public restrooms. I have to admit that I peeked around to see if Mickey was lurking around in there somewhere.

How Did I Miss This?!

2010-01-12T07:48:00.000-05:00

I was greatly disturbed when reading the paper yesterday. Somehow I wound up missing the "No Pants Subway Ride."

There's a group based in New York City (of course) called "Improv Everywhere" which holds various odd events throughout the year. This group sponsors a variety of weird events throughout the year, like showing up shirtless at certain stores, performing an impromptu musical in a grocery store, or freezing in place at Grand Central Station. One of their events encourages people to show up at designated subway stations to take a ride sans pants.

There was an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that lamented the fact that virtually nobody showed up to participate in the event locally. Had I only known! As you're aware if you are an avid reader of the Hank Smoot Files, I am more than happy to toss my pants aside for the amusement of others. In fact, that's how I spent part of Christmas Day 2008.

I'll have to put it on the calendar for next year.

My Next Amazing Invention

2010-01-11T07:52:00.000-05:00

Every so often, I come up with an invention so compelling that I just know I could become a millionaire quickly if I could just get off my butt and do something with it. This is yet another of those moments.

I was busy plunging the toilet over the weekend, a process I find myself doing more and more, and it occurred to me: Wouldn't it be nice if we could apply plunger technology to our noses?

I mean, our noses are basically like head plumbing, right? We have these drains in our head, and every so often they get clogged up due to colds, allergies, or the rancid smell of sauerkraut permeating the house. To relieve this problem, we typically either reach for the Kleenex, or if that's not available, a shirt sleeve. Of course if neither of those are available, this is why God gave us fingers that fit in there so neatly.

Anyway, just imagine how nice it would be to have a small, nostril-sized plunger that we could stick in there to take care of the problem. And people would look so classy using them, too.

You heard it here first. Don't steal my idea, please.

Snow Day!

2010-01-08T15:24:00.000-05:00

Little Smoot's prayers were finally answered this morning. No school due to snow!

This is the first time this school year that our district has had a delay or closing, so she's pretty excited. Granted, she's outside right now shoveling the driveway, so her enthusiasm for snow days may wane a bit in the very near future.

I used to enjoy going out and playing in the snow, but I can't say I have been too excited about it during the past, I dunno, 30 years or so. Growing up, we had a really good yard for sledding, and we'd build some pretty elaborate trails for doing so.

We also had a pond, so we would often make a sledding path that would end up on the ice. So not only did we have the possibility of running into various trees while sled riding, we also had the distinct possibility of crashing through the ice and drowning. Ice was much thicker back in those days, since we didn't have Global Warming back then.

In recent years I haven't been all that excited about going out in the snow, but I did enjoy it one day a few years ago. We had stopped at a relative's house to see if they were home, but no one was around. There was a lot of snow around though, so I decided it would be a good day for a little prank.

This was back in the days when I was addicted to Mountain Dew, so I had a full can with me. I walked up to their house, making sure I was leaving distinct footprints leading up to their door. I also made sure that the last steps I took made a nice, wide stance right at their door step.

Then I poured a generous amount of the Mountain Dew onto the snow between my legs. I didn't have any way of finding out what may have happened after that, but I really like to think that they got home a few minutes later and wondered what kind of idiot would walk up to their house and take a whiz.

My Morning Treasure Hunt

2010-01-07T09:01:00.001-05:00

Imagine for a moment that you are my newspaper delivery individual. Yes, I am aware that you are probably cranky much of the time, because you get up at some absurd hour of the morning to deliver newspapers to people like me.

Let's pretend that you have approached my home and you are about to deliver my newspaper. Where would you suppose would be the best place to put it?

A. Thrown randomly anywhere on the property.
B. Conveniently underneath my car.
C. In a neighbor's yard.
D. In a nice, green mailbox, situated right beside the road and within the glow of a street light for your convenience, with the words "POST-GAZETTE" emblazoned on it; a box I personally erected several years ago because you keep choosing A, B and C!

I cannot fathom why it would be difficult to place the stinkin' newspaper into the mailbox that is obviously there for this single purpose. But no. Every morning it's like a treasure hunt for me. I drop Little Smoot off at school, and then I begin hunting for the paper. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it isn't.

The other day I couldn't find it at all, and I found it a day later by the neighbor's mailbox, buried in snow. I suppose the delivery individual is hiding in the bushes somewhere nearby, watching to see if I am able to locate the paper each morning. When I am able to find it, he/she probably wanders off in a huff, determined to hide it better the next day.

A Night at the B&B

2010-01-06T09:55:00.000-05:00

The Smoots tried something new this past weekend while visiting family out of town. For the first time ever, we stayed at a Bed & Breakfast. We had a really nice time there, and would highly recommend "The Cozy Afghan" to anyone who has the strange, sudden urge to visit St. Marys, PA.

The accommodations were very quaint, the breakfasts were very tasty, and we even had a fireplace. Granted, it took a couple phone calls to figure out how to make the fireplace work since I was not interested in accidentally getting my eyebrows burned off, but we finally found the trick to it (turns out, you flip the button to "on").

So anyway, we give the Cozy Afghan our coveted five-star rating, although I suppose it would only be fair to mention that it is run by one of the members of Mrs. Smoot's family.

This experience got me thinking about how people give names to B&Bs. It seems like they almost always have rather unusual names, presumably meant to sound quaint so that people will be enticed to visit.

I was thinking about creating a web site where people could randomly generate names for their new Bed & Breakfast. People could visit the page, pay me a large sum of money, and the web site would churn out gems like:

The Fluted Peasant
The Poofy Pillow
The Flatulent Frog
The Crumpled Muffin
The Pickled Nest
The Steaming Bucket of Quaintness
The Hairy Barnacle
The Ornery Hen
The Gilded Truffle (oops... I stole that from a restaurant in The Simpsons)
The Satin Slipper
and of course The Floating Inn of Doom

The possibilities really are endless.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Less Like Christmas

2010-01-05T08:05:00.001-05:00

Well, here it is again, that time of year that I look forward to so much. Time to take the Christmas crap down again.

Mrs. Smoot is always very, very anxious to get the Christmas stuff put away. I honestly think that if she had her way, she'd be tearing down the tree while we're unwrapping presents on Christmas morning. It is good that she is enthusiastic about getting it taken down, because if it were up to me, I'd probably put it off so long that we could wind up keeping it up until next Christmas.

I'm also very glad that she is organized and meticulous about putting stuff away. She has boxes that are clearly marked with their contents, and she neatly organizes all of the ornaments as she takes them off the tree. It's a good thing that we don't have that old fashioned tinsel on the tree; she'd probably organize it by length and sort it into color-coded boxes or something.

She knows that it is best to just let me stick to the manly part of the job, so my primary role is to take all of the boxes downstairs. If she relied on me for anything more complicated than that, she knows I'd just grab the tree -- ornaments and all, with the electrical cords still connected to the outlets -- and I'd use whatever force necessary to shove it down the steps, and plow it into the closet, and that would be that.

Sooner or later, though, I will have to tackle the dismantling of the outdoor lighting. Mrs. Smoot has no part in messing with that. I'm not nearly as angry with the lights since we got all new LED strings this season. Every bulb remained lit for the entire holiday (with the exception of the string that some moron decided to steal from our shrub), so I actually have very good intentions of packing things away very neatly for next year... unlike how I did it last year.

Of course the problem is that the weather is crappy, and we're not even supposed to get up to 30 degrees for at least another week. So even if I actually wanted to go out and fart around with the lights in the freezing cold, they're probably pretty well frozen to the shrubs and so forth. I'm guessing it's not a good idea to go out there with a blow torch to try to help thaw them.

It also doesn't help that I basically booby-trapped the lights by using tie-downs to fasten them to the bushes in order to thwart future thefts. I remember thinking, "I'm going to hate myself for doing this when it comes time to take these down in January."

If you drive by and see that my lights are still up, just assume that my excuse is that I'm leaving them up in celebration of Groundhog Day, Easter, July 4th, Arbor Day, etc. It'll be festive.

Welcome to The Future!

2010-01-04T07:53:00.002-05:00

Woooooooooo... it's finally here -- 2010!

I can remember when I was growing up, and thinking about this year. 2010 definitely represented "The Future!" So I'm definitely looking forward to all of the amazing technological advancements we are expected to see, based on how I envisioned 2010 as a child:

- Flying cars
- Self-tying shoes (as shown in Back to the Future)
- The hoverboard (also as shown in Back to the Future)
- Colonization of the moon
- African American President (ooooh... we have that one already!)
- Friendly interactions with alien beings
- Bionics
- Floating houses, like in the Jetsons
- Robot maids, like in the Jetsons
- Oooooh... jet packs!
- Cures for all known diseases
- And of course, the orgasm pill.

I am very excited about these advancements, which we have clearly been promised on numerous TV shows and movies. I must say, I am very optimistic about the decade now that I have read this article. Please let's give these people an enormous government grant.

Feel free to add your own expectations for technological advancements. I'm sure I may have forgotten something.

Resolution Time!

2009-12-31T06:58:00.000-05:00

Well, it is the end of another year. I'm sure that we'll remember 2009 for a number of things like the crappy economy, the death of Michael Jackson and the beginning of Barack Obama's term as president. Most of all, of course, we'll remember this as the Year of Balloon Boy.

I'll look back at the year and remember several fond memories. I had a chance to attend my first Super Bowl (it doesn't look like a second one is in our near future). I enjoyed a great experience as a camp counselor at Jumonville. I had a great week on a mission trip to Louisiana. We took a nice family vacation to New England and into Quebec.

Most of all, of course, I'll remember 2009 as the year I ended up wearing two ties to church on Easter.

Well, here it is, the last day of the year, and it's time once again to consider making a New Year's Resolution. Last year I decided I was going to quit procrastinating, but I decided to put that one off until sometime in the future.

This year, I have spent a lot of time considering what my new resolution should be. I weighed all of the options, and came to the amazing conclusion that I simply have no room for improvement in any aspect of my life. How about that?

Best wishes to you and yours for a fine 2010!

Annoying Jesus

2009-12-30T08:06:00.010-05:00

I never thought I'd use my blog as a place for a eulogy, but there's a first time for everything, I guess.

I had an opportunity to spend a week with a guy named Marcus Crow on a mission trip to Louisiana last spring. (Marcus is the guy on the left in the picture. I'm beside him, along with his son Calvin and Calvin's friend Katie.) Marcus was quite a character, to say the least. We made the trip with a group of United Methodists with the goal of helping people who had been affected by hurricanes over the past couple years.

While helping the people of Dulac, LA, was certainly a goal for Marcus, I think he was there more because it gave him an opportunity to spend some time with his son. Marcus and his wife had divorced, and it was obvious that he cherished any amount of time he was able to spend with Calvin. Normally he only had weekend visits with his son.

I learned quite a bit about Marcus during that trip. He had been a Marine, and fought in the Persian Gulf. He enjoyed cooking, and was really excited about the "Bad Ass Hot Sauce" he bought while we were in New Orleans (he let me try a dab on my finger, and I spent the next half hour gasping at a water fountain). He had been in a very serious car accident several years earlier, and was lucky to have survived it. He had numerous surgeries and many physical therapy sessions since the accident, and seemed to have constant pain as a result.

And I must say Marcus was rather fond of the f-word. I have to admit that I have never seen a person who felt right at home dropping f-bombs in the presence of numerous pastors, apparently never thinking that this was inappropriate. Marcus was a lay pastor at his church, and occasionally delivered sermons when his pastor was away. I would imagine that people filled the pews on those occasions, because it's not every day you have the possibility of hearing obscenities during a sermon. Like I said... he was quite a character.

As lucky as he was to have survived the car crash six years ago, he was not so lucky early Christmas morning this year. A fire broke out at his house, apparently as the result of a space heater he was using at his home near Blairsville, PA. A neighbor smelled the fire during the early morning hours and tried to get into the house, but the smoke was too thick. Firemen later found Marcus, who had apparently come just a few feet from escaping the blaze at his back door. You can read more details about the tragedy here.

I took a trip yesterday to pay my respects to Marcus at his church in Blairsville. While most of the service was as serious as most funerals, there were lighthearted moments where people shared their memories of Marcus. A woman from his choir recalled reminding Marcus "please don't use the f-word in front of the children in Sunday school." Another woman sobbed as she recalled details of our Louisiana trip, and in between tears she said, "I bet he's up there in heaven, annoying Jesus right now."

Since our mission trip, I have kept up with Marcus thanks to Facebook. Most of his status updates were along the lines of "Calvin is coming tonight -- I can't wait!" Or "I'm chillin' with Calvin tonight." Or "I'm sad that Calvin is heading back to his mom's tonight."

Despite his quirks and his tendency to take nothing very seriously, there were two aspects of his life that meant the world to him: God, and his son. I'm sure that when he's not busy annoying Jesus, he's doing a fine job in his new role of guardian angel for Calvin. My deepest condolences.

Not Cool Enough for the Fist Bump

2009-12-29T07:02:00.003-05:00

On behalf of all of us in Smootville, I sincerely hope you had a wonderful Christmas! Now that we have that holiday behind us, it's time to get back to the pressing issues of the day, like whether or not it is proper to "fist bump" someone.

There are two types of people in this world: those who fist bump, and those of us who just aren't that cool.

Perhaps you have seen this fist bump thing growing in popularity these past few years. Instead of simply saying, "hello" to someone, or offering a handshake, or even a high-five, cool people will stick their fist out directly at you, and the expectation is that you will extend your fist and bonk it against theirs. Kinda weird when you think about it.

I remember a couple years ago someone had gotten into the fist bump stance in front of Little Smoot, and she had no idea what she was supposed to do. I think she just waved at them. I remember trying to save the awkwardness of the situation by showing Little Smoot how to do the fist bump with that person, so she'd know what was going on the next time.

The truth of the matter, though, was that I would have preferred to simply wave at the person like she did, because I'm just not cool enough to do the fist bump.

There's a guy I see on the sidelines of Steelers games who is a big time fist bumper. He's a former Steeler player himself, and is part of the team's radio crew nowadays, and he's a really nice guy. He's clearly cool enough that he can fist bump whoever he pleases, and no one thinks anything of it.

But when he greets me and wants to fist bump, I always feel weird about it. Oh, I definitely fist bump him, because he's a rather large man and I don't want to insult him, but I know that if anyone sees me fist bumping, they'll start whispering because people know I'm not that cool.

Oh, and this particular guy wears his wedding band on his thumb. I am obviously nowhere near cool enough to pull off that kind of stunt.

Even worse amongst football players is the full body bump. You see players doing this after pretty much every touchdown now. They used to spike the ball and do a little dance, but now it is mandatory that as soon as they cross the goal line, they have to find the closest player on the field and leap into the air directly into one another. Otherwise they incur a 15-yard penalty upon the kickoff, I believe.

In a matter of a few years, I suppose that when we greet people, we'll just smack the crap out of each other.

Wrap Crap

2009-12-24T07:42:00.001-05:00

If there's one thing I'm just terrible at (ok, there are lots of things I'm terrible at) it's wrapping Christmas presents. I always put it off as long as humanly possible because I really don't want to look at the end result any longer than absolutely necessary, for fear of causing permenant eye damage.

This year I actually got things "wrapped" a little early, rather than waiting until 11:59 on Christmas Eve, as per normal. I guess I just wasn't born with the Martha Stewart Gene. And I suppose I find the whole thing a little pointless. Who came up with this idea of wrapping gifts in the first place?

Think about what a waste the whole process is. We take all this time to wrap the presents in paper to disguise them, and then we shred it all to pieces on Christmas morning to see what's hidden beneath it. Woop-de-doo. The end result is an indoor snowstorm of wrapping paper, flying all over the place, with some pieces still being retrieved from behind the couch as late as Labor Day.

If I hadn't mentioned it previously, I'm also terrible at buying gifts in the first place. You know how some people have a knack for coming up with the perfect gift ideas -- the ones where people gasp with excitement when they open them? I never think of those. People always try to be polite, but I can tell they look at my gifts and immediately think, "I wonder if I could get anything for this piece of crap on eBay. Nah, probably not."

Well, as if it's not bad enough that I stink at buying gifts in the first place, I have to narrow my selections down to things that come in rectangular packages. Otherwise, I'll just never be able to wrap them no matter what.

As I was spending the better part of yesterday afternoon wrapping just a few gifts (thank goodness, Mrs. Smoot takes care of the vast majority of things, so I really just have to wrap her stuff, mainly), it occurred to me that surely by the time a person reaches age 41, surely they should know how to operate a pair of scissors properly. But no.

When I cut the wrapping paper (undoubtedly at the wrong size), I always manage to cut it severely crooked. I would be much better off if I just left the roll outside and waited for deer to gnaw on it. It would undoubtedly be more presentable.

Oh, and I can never seem to use enough tape. I don't know what my obsession is with tape. Even though my gifts end up looking like they were wrapped by escaped mental patients, the wrapping would undoubtedly stay on the packages with just a tiny percentage of the tape I ultimately wind up using. Sometimes I have more tape on a gift than wrapping paper.

Wrapping things as poorly as I do, there is at least one advantage. I really never need to use those "To: From:" labels. On Christmas morning, everyone can simply look at the quality of the wrapping and say, "Ah! This one must be from Hank!"

Anyway... From Smootville to your neck of the woods, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and a swell 2010!

A Christmas Conspiracy

2009-12-23T08:01:00.003-05:00

I enjoy conspiracy theories as much as the next guy, so I'm going to create one of my own. I think that a town near Smootville specifically designed their community Christmas lights in such a way that they allow the local police to collect more traffic fines.

Ok, I suppose I should explain that one.

This particular town apparently has Clark W. Griswold as its mayor, given the number of lights strewn up and down the street. In addition to all of the small, multi-colored lights, they also have these big bell-shaped lights that are strung across the street. And these lights are the same color as the regular stop lights that are tossed into the mix, and they're positioned pretty much in the same way as stop lights.

So as a result, I find myself driving down the street, slamming on my brakes, thinking that I'm seeing a red light above me, and then finding out that it's just a Christmas light. Meanwhile, other people are breezing through the real red lights, assuming that they're simply decorations. It would be very interesting to stand there with a video camera just to capture the various driving oddities that take place on any given night during the holidays.

I can almost hear the discussion during a borough council meeting earlier in the year:

"But how are we going to pay for all of these lights?"

"I've got it! We can make 'em look like traffic lights, and then arrest every other car for driving erratically!"

Of course I'd like to think that this is merely a theory, but part of my brain really has to wonder...

Psychology 101: Vehicular Personification

2009-12-22T07:57:00.010-05:00

Ok, we're in the midst of crappy winter weather, so I thought it would be good to write a cruise-related blog entry today.

I would like to announce my official opinion of the new Epic class of ship being introduced by Norwegian Cruise Lines: It's hideously ugly, and I'm afraid of it.

We love to go on cruises, and we recently got together with some folks with whom we'll be cruising to Hawaii in a few months. Some of us began chatting about this new ship, and some of the people were talking about how exciting they thought it was. I had to offer counter-testimony, because this truly is the ugliest thing in the ocean, and I am including octopuses and squids in that assessment.

At first I couldn't quite put a finger on why I hate this ship's design so much, but I finally did a deep analysis, and I came to some really insightful conclusions. If you happen to be a psychology major, please feel free to steal this idea for your thesis -- I promise you'll get an A.

Ok. Here's the deal. I believe that we have a natural tendency to personify our modes of transportation by giving human characteristics to various vehicles. Think about the movie The Love Bug, for example. Herbie is a cute, lovable VW Beetle. His headlights are his eyes and his front bumper gives him a bit of a smirk. Same sort of thing with the more recent movie Cars.

When we look at a car, we subconsciously think of it as having a human face, and we can either like it or dislike it for those features (are you psychology majors writing all this down? Good). My Prius, for example, has a bit of a round head, but has a sophisticated elegance about him. He's witty, yet restrained in his personality.

Anyway, I strongly believe that the same thing goes for ships (and airplanes, too, for that matter). When we look at a ship, we can sort of think of the bow as a giant nose, and the decks above it make the eyes, etc. A quick glance will make you feel good about it, or it will perhaps scare the crap out of you by having a menacing appearance.

Well, that's where the problem lies with the Epic (pictured at the beginning of this entry). When you view this ship from the front, it looks like the poor thing has some sort of severely malformed forehead. It could be a tumor, or some sort of monsterism. Whatever the case, it has this bulging forehead area that just looks disturbing. I just know this ship has some sort of mental issues, and I would be afraid that it would start veering all over the place, possibly in search of smaller ships that it could eat. I dunno.

Epic is scheduled to enter into service next June. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Peer Pressure at 14,410 Feet

2009-12-21T08:02:00.002-05:00

You know that, as loving parents, we would never make fun of our child. That would be tasteless, and it would come at the expense of her self-esteem. So we would never do such a thing unless she said something that was really quite inadvertently funny.

Little Smoot was at a Girl Scout meeting recently, and they were talking about peer pressure. Her Girl Scout leader asked the group, "Have any of you ever experienced peer pressure?"

Well, Little Smoot put her hand up, knowing that she has indeed experienced this, and she wanted to share her experience with the group. "I felt it when we were at the top of Pike's Peak in Colorado last summer," she offered.

"No, sweetie," the leader responded. "We're talking about peer pressure. Not ear pressure."

"Oh."

12 Step Cat Program

2009-12-18T08:09:00.005-05:00

I think Feline Smoot needs an intervention.

Mrs. Smoot went out and bought our cat these little sticks that contain catnip as a Christmas present. They were in a bag in our bedroom, along with a whole bunch of other Christmas-related bags. Normally we don't allow the cat to hang out in our room, but I apparently inadvertently left the door slightly ajar and he made himself at home.

Not only did he enjoy the comfort of our king-sized bed, but he also apparently detected the smell of the catnip and made it his mission to hunt through each of the bags until he located it. And the evidence suggested that he was quite successful in doing so, considering I found the sticks scattered all over the room, along with the remains of the plastic bag they came in.

For someone who has no opposable thumbs, he did a remarkable job of opening these things and flinging them all over the place. And I won't even mention the mess he made of the rest of the bags, which had contained non-cat related gifts.

Since the "cat was out of the bag," so to speak, we decided to just give the cat his Christmas present early. He is usually fairly rambunctious as it is, but now he has been running around the house, bonking into things, and looking unusually gleeful. And there have been times when he'll be rolling around on the floor, pausing for a moment to say, "Duuuuuuuuude" with his eyes all glassed over.

I'm gonna keep him away from the car keys for a while.

The Red Kettle of Guilt

2009-12-17T07:58:00.000-05:00

Ok, I feel guilty. All the time, come to think of it.

This is the time of the year when the Salvation Army people are right there in front of every single store. I was doing some online shopping this morning, and a Salvation Army lady and her kettle materialized right beside my computer desk, for heaven's sake.

I toss a few bucks into the kettles from time to time, but it would simply be way too costly to attempt to give them money every time you pass them. I spent some time with my calculator and realized that if I donated $1 every time I passed a kettle during the holiday season, it would cost me $77,438 in December alone.

So, much of the time I have to walk past the Salvation Army people without making a donation, and I always feel like a cretin when I do that.

They give you those big, puppy dog eyes (sometimes in the form of an actual puppy), and they'll ring those bells right at you as if to say, "Sure. I'm sitting here in -58 degree weather, getting repetitive stress syndrome from ringing this damn bell, as we attempt to help people at this blessed time of the year. Feel free to walk right by me. I can see that you're doing your best to avoid eye contact, you cretin."

I wonder if we have an extra $77,438 around here somewhere.

Little Smoot's Croonin' Debut

2009-12-16T07:42:00.012-05:00

Ahhhh. We're breathing sighs of relief here in Smootville. Little Smoot had her Christmas concert at school last night, and she did a great job with her solo.

She came home from school just a couple weeks ago and announced that the director had asked her to do a solo. I remember my jaw dropping down to the floor as I asked her, "And you said yes!?"

I can admit it: Smoots are not generally gifted when it comes to singing. I don't even sing at home when I'm alone. The last time I did that, we didn't see the cat for several days. Ok, I will admit that after six beers I will do karaoke, but that's entirely different and carries with it no expectations of being in key or anything.

So Little Smoot said she had agreed to do this solo, and for the longest time she did not know what song she was being assigned. And when she did find out what song it was, she didn't seem particularly concerned about practicing it.

Finally, she came home one day and said she knew all of the words, so I asked her to sing it for me. Let's just say that if she had been singing this on American Idol, Randy Jackson would have described it as being "a little pitchy, dawg." And I honestly wouldn't have wanted to hear Simon's critique.

I was definitely a little apprehensive when it came time to go to the school last night. I considered a few different options, in case she ended up being really, really bad. I thought about sitting next to the exit so I could sneak out. Or maybe I'd sit near the fire alarm so I could trip it if things got really out of hand.

But sure enough, our little girl got up there and did a very nice job with it, and I didn't have to sneak out the exit after all. We were very proud of her; she did something that no other Smoot would dare to attempt! Good job, dawg!

Microwave Mystery

2009-12-15T08:03:00.008-05:00

It bothers me greatly that I don't understand how microwave ovens work.

I mean, I get the gist of how most of our main appliances work. You stick bread into the toaster, and you can see those little red things get hot, and that's how the toast gets burned to a crisp. The blender has a little propeller thing in it, so when you turn it on it makes a really loud, annoying noise and it makes things mooshy.

The stove is easy enough to understand because you can actually see flames making stuff hot. No problem. But microwave ovens don't make any sense at all. Nobody seems to understand them. You stick stuff in there, and you can't see that anything is happening, but sure enough, your food quickly becomes heated.

Microwave ovens have been around for a long, long time, too. According to Wikipedia, some dude named Percy figured out how to microwave stuff way back in the 1940s. This is remarkable for a couple reasons... back in the 40s people didn't know a whole lot of stuff, considering Al Gore had not yet invented the Internet. And even more remarkable is the fact that this guy's name was Percy. Who the heck names a kid Percy? Even in the 1940s, that couldn't have been cool.

When we were growing up, my mom would never allow us to have a microwave oven for fear that they'd melt our brains, or something. So my only exposure to them back then was when we went to visit my grandparents. Most kids were not as amazed by microwave ovens and their miraculous abilities to melt cheese over Doritos as I was.

Ever wonder what would happen if you were able to keep the door of the microwave open and turn it on? I mean, would everything in its path start bubbling and melting all over the place? I've never heard of anyone attempting it, but surely I'm not the only one who wonders such things. I would certainly be tempted to open the door up and aim the microwave at our Swearing Neighbors as an experiment.

Oh, and another thing: why can't we put metal in there? Just another microwave oddity, if you ask me.

Anyway, if anyone can explain to me in simple terms how these things work, I would be tremendously grateful. I would assume that the real answer is something along the lines of "alien technology."

Ice Ice Baby

2009-12-14T07:49:00.034-05:00

We had a bit of an ice storm here in the greater Smootville area on Sunday. People were freaking out, as per usual, driving their cars into one another, sliding down embankments, etc. I saw a picture of one car that was firmly planted in a vertical position in a creek. Only people in this area could be that bad at driving in inclement weather.

Anyway, two of our three major TV stations were doing wall-to-wall coverage of this amazing event on Sunday morning (who could have envisioned such a thing: ice... in December!). I always get a kick out of watching our news stations cover stuff like this. Ok, the driving conditions were a bit hairy, but they made every effort to put the movie 2012 to shame by blowing things completely out of proportion.

Here's what cracks me up. The newscasters spend most of their time pointing out what a bad idea it is to be out on the roads. "Even if you absolutely have to get to work today, or you're having that life saving heart-lung transplant, for the love of God, stay at home! Do not go outside under ANY circumstances! It's not even completely safe to be watching our televised pictures of the weather!"

They'll go through this whole spiel about how moronic it would be to go out and drive in these conditions. And then in the same breath they'll say, "And here's Kent Brockman, standing along I-279 with a live report!" Obviously these reporters are out driving on the highways themselves, as if their presence on the roads somehow makes us safer than if they were doing the entire broadcast from indoors.

And you can be pretty sure that their giant TV vans are sitting there, blocking part of the road. According to the IIYRSS (Institute of Imaginary Yet Real-Sounding Statistics), 78% of accidents on bad weather days are actually caused by news vans blocking the highways.

Mistakes on the Lake

2009-12-11T12:53:00.006-05:00

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's seeing happy people from Cleveland. Clevlanders are not supposed to be happy. They're certainly not supposed to be jubilant. And most certainly not ecstatic. But that was indeed the scene last night as the Steelers lost to the Browns.

The Steelers absolutely suck this year. There's no doubt about that. They have obviously opted to take this season off after winning the Super Bowl last year. I get that. No big deal. We lost last night, and that was that. But the Cleveland people acted as though they had just won every major award given to people on planet Earth.

They were dancing around, kissing each other on their putrid little lips, and in general acting like barking morons.

I honestly hope that many of them are waking up today (probably on the street, covered in their own bodily fluids, I'm guessing), and they're coming to the realization that they really don't have a whole heck of a lot to be excited about.

I mean, woop-de-doo... they are now 2-11! They have won two games this year. Get out the champagne! The Steelers suck, sure, but 2-11? I could probably get a better record with a team consisting of myself and some of my high school friends, while under the influence of NyQuil.

As I was walking back to my car (while wearing a Steelers coat), I had a few unnecessary encounters with some of Cleveland's finest thinkers. As I was crossing a street, a guy rolled his window down and said, "HEY! When is your next playoff game!? Ha ha ha!" I immediately considered several witty comebacks, including:

-- "I'm surprised you're familiar with the concept of playoffs."
-- "You're 2-11 for heaven's sake. If I were you, I'd continue driving straight into Lake Erie."
-- "C'mon... your team was mathematically eliminated from playoff contention during the pre-season."

I kept my response brief, though: "When was your last playoff game?" Of course, that confused him and he went speeding off down the street, presumably to splash into Lake Erie.

As I was driving out of town, another guy made a point of rolling his window down (it as 14 degrees out) so he could offer me a popular obscene hand gesture, apparently based on the fact that my car has a Pennyslvania license plate. I assume that another mile or so down the road his arm probably froze off, but I'm sure he was still very proud of making such a witty and though-provoking statement in my direction.

Anyway, I would like to think that things are getting back to normal up there on the Mistake on the Lake. The Steelers may stink at the moment, but we know it's a temporary thing. Cleveland will always be... well... Cleveland.

I Gnant Galk Gnow.

2009-12-10T08:04:00.001-05:00

I had my dentist appointment yesterday, and that's always a good time. I was already in a great mood, because I woke up and learned that my damned Christmas lights had been blown off the highest gutter of the house overnight.

Someday the police are going to knock on my door after I throw one of my Christmas light-related fits ("Uh, sir, we received a report that someone at this address was dancing around the yard, screaming 'fa la la la la' while throwing lights and plastic clips all over the place.").

So anyway, I got to my dentist appointment, full of Christmas Cheer, and God bless our dental hygienist lady, but why does she ask me all of these open ended questions while she has my mouth pried open and she's poking me with that pointy metal thing?

That really drives me a little bonkers. She's a really, really nice lady, don't get me wrong, but surely she is aware of the fact that her fist is half way down my throat, and it would be pretty hard for me to carry on a whole lot of a conversation. Yet she asks me questions like, "What do you think about this... what do you think about that...?"

So I can either ignore her, which seems like it would be rude, or I can attempt to come up with an answer, either using sign language or a series of word-like grunts. I used a combination of these techniques today, and I have no idea if she understood anything I was trying to communicate to her.

It would be cool if they'd give people little keyboards to hold on their laps so they could type in an answer to whatever small talk we're trying to have. This would also solve the problem of what I should be doing with my hands during my appointments. I usually clinch them together hard enough that I could probably squish coal into diamonds.

So now my teeth feel nice and squeaky clean, and I'm able to communicate again. But guess what? I have to go back in a couple weeks. Wanna know why? Because I brush my teeth too well. Yep... I have managed to brush my teeth to the point where I've eroded some of the enamel, so they have to paint some pretend enamel back onto my mouth for me.

We live in a very strange world.

Another Facebook Member

2009-12-09T08:03:00.000-05:00

Little Smoot is now on Facebook. Now it will be much easier for her to tell people about her various academic and social accomplishments, like dancing on the stage with Flo-Rida.

She had been bugging us for a good while about getting a Facebook account, and we successfully avoided it for quite a long time. The other day she told me, "But everyone in my class is on Facebook!"

Suuuure, they are, I said. Just like everyone in your class has their own cell phone, and everyone in your class has their own pony, and everyone in your class has a vintage Corvette, etc.

Well, I got a friend request from one of Little Smoot's classmates the other day, and this gave me access to see this girl's list of Facebook friends. And, oddly enough, practically every other member of her class was indeed on Facebook. Go figure.

Not wanting her to be a social networking outcast, I helped her set up her account. I figured it would take a bit of time to explain all of the intricacies of Facebook to her, since it took me several months to really understand it. I wanted to help her learn how to ignore some of the stupid crap on Facebook, like Farmtown (part of the site where you can manage your very own pretend farm... the heck with that), and whatnot.

But, like most things, she caught onto Facebook pretty much immediately. And as we speak, she is busily messing with her stupid Farmtown application.

Calling All Shawties

2009-12-08T14:11:00.001-05:00

My taste for music has never exactly matured. Granted, I haven't matured in most any other way, either, but anyhow...

I have done a pretty good job of keeping up with current music, long beyond most of my contemporaries, who have either adapted their listening habits to age-appropriate music, or they have actually already died, or whatever. My brother was rather dumbfounded at Thanksgiving when I told him I'd rather listen to Kanye West than Dave Matthews.

Nowadays, Little Smoot has been getting into Top 40 music pretty heavily. She can sing all the words to pretty much any song we hear on the radio, and we enjoy listening to these things together.

Mrs. Smoot has taken her to several Christian concerts over the past couple years, and they've both really enjoyed doing that. These are obviously nice, wholesome outings, where they're surrounded by nice, wholesome people, even though the concerts have a rock edge to them and are much like any other rock concert.

Well, to balance her out a bit, I took Little Smoot to a Flo-Rida concert last night in Pittsburgh. Even most fuddy-duddies who have no idea who Flo-Rida is would probably recognize the song "Low," which you'll almost definitely hear if you ever attend a wedding reception nowadays:

"Shawty had them apple bottom jeans (jeans)
Boots with the fur (with the fur)
The whole club was looking at her
She hit the floor (she hit the floor)
Next thing you know
Shawty got low, low, low, low, low, low, low, low!"

We managed to get seats in Row 4, which was nice because Little Smoot could actually see for a change. At age 11, it's often hard to see what's going on at things like this, especially once people start standing up and dancing. And before I knew it, she was not only in the front row, but she wound up on the freakin' stage, dancing with Flo-Rida. They had invited around 25 or so "Shawties" (I had to use my official Rapper to English Dictionary to look that up... it means "girls") to join them on the stage, and of course Little Smoot was right there.

I must say, it was a rather surreal moment to look at a stage where these gigantic rapping dudes were singing, and beside them was my own little Shawty, who for the record sang along to every word of the song.

We made it out unscathed, thankfully, and Little Smoot had some very jealous Shawty friends at school today.

Bleepin' Beepin'

2009-12-04T08:02:00.027-05:00

Every single thing in our house beeps. And what's worse is that everything in our house emits the same beep. Same frequency, same duration, same everything.

Off the top of my head, I can think of several things right near me that share the same beep. Let's see. There's the microwave, the smoke detector (when it's low on batteries), the carbon monoxide detector (when it wants to notify me that I'm about to die of Mystery Fumes), the cell phone, washing machine, dryer, my car (when locking or unlocking it with the remote), and of course the oven (when it reaches a designated temperature). I'm sure there are several more.

So I was sitting here the other morning, and I heard a single "Beep." Swell. Was my laundry done? Was my lunch ready? Did I accidentally unlock my car? Or, better yet, was I about to be overcome with carbon monoxide?

I spent a good bit of the day checking out various possibilities. When Mrs. Smoot got home, she asked me how I had spent the day and I responded by saying, "I didn't do anything today," which sounded a lot more productive than the fact that I was chasing down the source of a lone beep.

Many hours later I finally figured out that Little Smoot had received a text message on her phone, causing the beep. After spending so much time on a fruitless search, I really started rooting for the carbon monoxide, frankly.

Reasons for Having a Reverse Camera

2009-12-03T08:16:00.004-05:00

When I got my new Prius a couple years ago, I thought the back-up camera was a pretty cool feature. There's a full-color screen on the console, and when you put the car in reverse, you get a really nice video picture of what's behind the car.

It seemed like the kind of feature that impressed people who would ride in the car, and I really enjoyed it. There were times that I'd drive into town entirely in reverse, just so I could use the camera for navigation. "Coooooool," I thought.

Well, it turns out that you can also use the camera as a way of avoiding obstacles. I don't know if this was even mentioned in the manual. I really thought it was just there for the sake of being cool. I'm sure that other Prius owners find this feature to be a total babe magnet.

I was on a Geocaching adventure a couple weeks ago, and I needed to turn around on a rural road. So I put the car in reverse, and moved backwards at around 1 mph, and heard this lovely "C-R-R-R-R-U-U-N-N-N-C-H" noise as I backed into a wooden post.

I said a few holiday-oriented words, and checked out the lovely handiwork I had done on my rear bumper. And I drove straight to an auto body shop so I could determine just how mad at myself I should be (by their estimate, I was mad at myself to the tune of $750).

Thankfully, Mrs. Smoot handled this as gently as one could possibly expect, laughing out loud at me and saying, "I thought you had a back-up camera?!"

Merry Stinkin' Christmas!

2009-12-02T07:49:00.051-05:00

Early in November we experienced some really nice weather here in Smootville. There were some days when the temperatures climbed toward the 70-degree mark, so I figured I'd do the unthinkable: I decided to get our Christmas lights up early so I wouldn't have to hang them later on when it was cold out.

I was pretty excited about taking care of our outdoor illumination project, and I got the approval from Mrs. Smoot to go out and purchase brand new lights this year. In the past, our lights have driven me fairly berserk because I'll hang the highest ones on the house (which involves the ladder and a very long poking stick) and then half of the them will go out at random places and random times. It happens every year, even with brand new icicle lights.

This year I decided I wanted to get the new LED lights. There are a couple advantages of having this sort of light, compared to the traditional ones. For one thing, they're reliable. They basically never burn out, and have a life expectancy of 20 years or so. Plus they use only about 10% of the electric used by older lights, so they'll actually pay for themselves after a few seasons.

I found a good sale on the LED lights, and I traveled an hour to a store to get them. And then I got 'em all hung on the house. Ta-da! Even though Christmas was over a month away, I felt a special holiday glow when I got the project finished. At least until the following Sunday morning when I headed out to church.

Much to my surprise, some idiot had stolen one of the strands of red LED lights right off of one of my freakin' bushes. It was obvious that it had been hastily yanked off the bush, leaving another strand behind it, out of place. Who the heck steals a single strand of Christmas lights?

I immediately began figuring out ways to thwart morons from taking additional ones. I thought about rigging up some sort of surveillance camera, or somehow electrifying our bushes so anyone who touched them would get a nice holiday jolt of amperage.

Instead, I went through each strand of lights and used plastic tie-downs to securely fasten them to each bush. If someone wants to steal my lights now, they'll have to go through some serious extra effort, involving the sophisticated know-how involved in operating a pair of scissors. Ha-ha on them!

Whoa... a Blog Entry!

2009-12-01T15:49:00.000-05:00

It has been brought to my attention that I have not made a blog entry now for a month. A few weeks ago Mrs. Smoot asked me why I hadn't been blogging, and I pointed out that practically nobody had been commenting on any of my blitherings, which probably meant that nobody was reading any of this crap in the first place.

Well, to my shock, I had dinner last night with some friends who had apparently all noticed that I had not been blogging lately. (The few people gathered around that table undoubtedly make up 99.9% of the totality of readers I have accumulated over the course of my blogging career.)

Anyway, another person at the table has a blog that she has not bothered updating since August (and that posting basically said, "Wow, sorry I haven't blogged since April!"), so it was rather ironic that she was the one to point out my lapse, while looking at me with one of her eyebrows raised well into her forehead.

We decided to have a contest to see which one of us would be the first to update their blog, which I figured I could win easily, even if I put it off for a few more weeks. But alas, she beat me to the punch by posting an "I WON" message on her blog last night. Lame, but a victory nonetheless.

So that brings me to my additional list of excuses for why I haven't blogged for so long. One possible explanation is that I got confused when it was time to change my clocks for Daylight Savings Time. Instead of winding the clock back an hour, I accidentally skipped my calendar ahead by a month. Therefore, I have no November blog entries.

I'm not sure that excuse entirely makes sense. So let's go with my backup excuse. I've been spending about 95% of my recent weeks unclogging our stupid toilets. This one is actually pretty realistic.

Our house was built in the 90s, and there is actually a law that newer houses can only install "low flow" toilets instead of the older ones that used more water. The result is that these toilets can never quite handle the load, and I wind up clogging them all the time. I can clog a toilet merely by performing a bodily function commonly known as "#1," let alone the much more complex processes of higher numbered bodily functions.

So I have become intimately familiar with our plunger, and I spend a whole heck of a lot of time with it. I even made a song about it: "Poop, poop, poop... flush, flush, flush... clog, clog, clog... plunge, plunge, plunge..." It has a nice beat to it.

Anyhow, I'll try to make a more sincere effort at keeping this updated a little better, because everyone is obviously deeply concerned about the issues that affect my life, such as our toilet problems.

Another Halloween in Smootville

2009-10-30T09:16:00.000-04:00

It's not even Halloween yet, but the fun is over in Smootville. I think there's some sort of law saying that we're not allowed to have Trick-or-Treat on the actual night of Halloween. And it definitely can't be held on a Friday night in the fall, because of the weekly religious holiday around here (high school football).

So we had Trick-or-Treat last night. For the first time, we allowed Little Smoot to just head off with one of her friends. This time I didn't get to play the part of the Creepy Protective Parent Hiding in the Bushes while the kids go from door to door. You see them lurking in the shadows when handing out candy, eyeing you suspiciously as though you're the one responsible for all the stories about razor blades being found hidden in apples, or whatever.

I always debate whether or not I'm going to decorate the house for Halloween for Trick-or-Treat night. It's pretty much a futile effort for a couple reasons. For one thing, we typically don't get very many kids down this way. The way our road is situated, a lot of the kids wind up turning on a side street and they never get down this far.

And it's hardly worth trying to compete with some of our neighbors who apparently spend every last bit of their paychecks on Halloween stuff. We have seen people renting hearses, and this year there were at least two people dressed as Jason, chasing people with chainsaws. One guy had so many strobe lights that he had to notify the Federal Aviation Administration.

I usually bring out my old DJ light show and spooky music, along with a strobe light and some other decorations. I found that the smoke machine actually helps draw kids here from further up the street. If you've ever seen a fire at a building, you know how many people rush to the scene to gawk at it. I figure if people see smoke, they might think that they're going to get to see an actual fire, so they are naturally drawn to it. It seemed to work last night -- we had far more people than usual at the door!

Having relatively few kids show up isn't really a bad thing. I have lots and lots of extra candy to eat now!

Balloon Boy Wannabe

2009-10-28T09:44:00.000-04:00

I had been thinking seriously about dressing up for Halloween this year. I haven't dressed up for a long, long time, mainly because nobody ever invites us to parties. I think the last time I dressed up for Halloween (in the early 1990s, I believe) I had an outfit that created the illusion that I was a baby riding on an old lady's back. It was cool.

Prior to that, I went to a dance in college dressed as an ATM card since that was something that best represented my life at that time.

This year I was seriously considering dressing up as Balloon Boy. For several nights in a row I would lie awake thinking about how to construct an outfit that would look enough like the balloon that people would know what it was, and they'd feel compelled to give me a cash award for Best Costume Ever.

I did some Googling and found that a pre-packaged Balloon Boy outfit already exists (pictured above). But I had something a bit different in mind. I basically wanted to wear the balloon itself, with me coming up through the middle of it. Or possibly wearing it as a hat.

But after thinking and procrastinating about it quite a bit, I finally decided that it would undoubtedly be another of those projects where I'd start to mess with it, get flustered, and toss the whole thing out unfinished. And I'd probably waste a lot of aluminum foil in the process.

And on top of that, I have a feeling that the balloon would probably make my butt look big.

There's Waldo!

2009-10-26T09:28:00.001-04:00

As you probably know, I photograph Steelers games for a newspaper. Sometimes I'll hear from friends who are going to the game, and if I'm lucky, they'll be tailgating prior to the game and I'll get to eat their food. But I'm also very happy to track them down in the stands and take their picture if I'm able.

One of the things I've noticed over the years is that the camera is a powerful tool. Just by merely pointing the camera toward the stands, I can magically get a hundred or more people to stand up and yell "WOOOOOO!" even though my camera does not record sound.

People just can't help but have that reaction, I guess. And when I try to take a shot of a couple specific people, it can be hard to get just those people without some other idiot jumping in with his own personal WOOOOO for the shot.

Such was the case this weekend for my good friends John and Linda, who, as you can see in the photo above, had their very own Waldo right next to them. I think it is actually legal in most states to thwack these folks in the head in order to keep them out of shots. After I took this picture, a beer guy in the front row told me he thought I was taking his picture, as though I was fascinated by the process of selling beer.

I was thinking about these people, wondering what goes on in their demented heads when they feel that it's necessary to jump into someone else's photos all the time. And then I had one of those ah-ha moments, realizing that most of the time I am the idiot jumping into other people's shots. I can't begin to imagine how many photo albums are in existence with at least one shot of me acting like an idiot in the background.

Maybe it's built into the male genetic code.

Bed Time

2009-10-22T09:04:00.000-04:00

I rarely have problems or confusion when traveling into a different time zone. This is because we live in a house that has many of its own time zones, and we deal with that every single day.

In our living room, for example, you can sit in one spot and see at least three clocks, all of which are set at slightly different times. I usually just try to take an average of the three when I'm trying to guess the time. We don't do this on purpose; it's just the way it worked out for that room of the house.

The kitchen is currently on "Blink Time," because for some random reason our power went off momentarily yesterday. So at the moment everything is blinking 12:00.

The bedroom is a whole different story. There are at least four clocks in the bedroom, and they're all set radically differently for psychological purposes (or possibly "psychotic" purposes, if you prefer).

These clocks are set in such a way so we confuse the heck out of ourselves in an effort to get up in the morning. My clock radio is set seven minutes ahead of the real time so that when it goes off I can hit snooze and then wake up just as the news is starting. I always have a brief moment when the alarm goes off and I think I need to get up immediately, but then I'm so excited and happy to remember that I can hit snooze! And if I don't feel like listening to the news, I can always hit snooze again.

Whoever invented the snooze button should, at minimum, be elected the Ruler of the World.

Mrs. Smoot has some other weird time setting on her clock. She often gets up at ungodly hours of the morning to go to work, so I'm sure her methodology is a bit more complex. I believe that she has her radio set something like 23 minutes and 12 seconds fast. I'm sure it involved some sort of complex equation, and I prefer not to think about it too much.

I also have a cool clock that illuminates the atomically correct time onto the ceiling, and alternates with the temperature. This is handy in the middle of the night when I have to wake up and take a whiz; I can see how many more hours of sleep I can get, and how chilly my trip to the bathroom is going to be. I've thought about artificially boosting the temperature for psychological purposes, but you can probably over-think these things.

Urinal Unification Act

2009-10-21T07:48:00.001-04:00

I'm seriously thinking about writing to my congressperson, just as soon as I figure out who that person might be.

Like many people, I frequently visit a variety of restrooms. I have recently noticed a disturbing trend in some public restrooms. It would appear that whoever designs these things can't decide how high to mount urinals on the walls, leading to some weird situations.

The other night we went out to eat, and there was a urinal that was so low to the floor that I almost had to pee while standing on my knees. I took a picture of it (above) with my cell phone because I thought it was pretty weird. Sorry for the poor quality of the picture, but I think it would have been weird on my part to wander into the bathroom with my normal, big camera.

I can understand how some places put urinals nice and low for the benefit of kids, but I think that one may have been designed for people no taller than your average fetus.

Last week, I was in a restroom where the urinals were so high that I almost needed to jump up and down while peeing, and that could certainly introduce its own problems to the process.

So I am hoping to get a new law introduced. I call it the Urinal Unification Act of 2009. It would require all urinals to be at the same, comfortable height, based on a person of my particular dimensions. I'm obviously hoping you'll consider contacting your congressperson, too, if you can figure out who that might be.

The Movie M&M Scam

2009-10-20T07:48:00.003-04:00

I cannot resist M&Ms. I'm not one of these people who can't keep his hands off chocolate like some addicts, but if there is a plate of M&Ms around, I'll dive in head-first if necessary.

When I took Little Smoot to see part of a movie this weekend, I bought myself a $3 box of the candy to chomp on while we watched the show. The box certainly appeared to be large enough to satisfy my M&M craving for 90 minutes or so. I took a picture of it with a can of my other addiction, Diet Vanilla Pepsi, so you could have a sense of scale.

The box certainly looks like it would be big enough to enjoy for a while, doesn't it? Well, the problem is that the box is just a tad bit deceiving. I opened the box and found that it contained a plastic bag of M&Ms. Notice I didn't say it contained a bag "full" of M&Ms. No, it contained a bag that was, at best, 1/3 full of M&Ms. Apparently the other 2/3 of the bag contained some very expensive air.

I can understand that some products have a tendency to "settle" in their packaging, creating some space in a larger area, but these are M&Ms for heaven's sake. How much settling could they possibly do? I figured I must have paid at least a quarter for each "M" in the box. It was a pretty pathetic sham, I thought.

I finished the whole box before the opening credits ever started (and long before the fire alarm chased us out of the theater). I eventually had to resort to gnawing on my coat for sustenance.

Yelling Fire in a Crowded Theater

2009-10-19T09:20:00.001-04:00

Weird things just seem to happen when we're around. I wouldn't recommend hanging around us, frankly.

I took Little Smoot to see Where the Wild Things Are at a brand new theater this weekend. It was cool to smell that new theater smell and everything.

We watched the movie on a new "XD" screen, which is supposed to include several amazing enhancements. The main enhancement I noticed is that they toss in an extra surcharge for viewing a movie in this particular theater.

Anyway, we got through nearly the whole movie when suddenly the film stopped, the house lights came on, and bright lights started flashing. And there was a rather shrill "WOOOP WOOOP!" noise, followed by an announcement that "the preceding alarm is to indicate the presence of a fire in the building. Please evacuate immediately." Lovely.

In a sense, this wasn't a really bad thing because I was getting really, really tired of the guy in our aisle who decided that it was cute that his young son had gotten bored with the movie at about the 5-minute mark, and he allowed the little brat to climb all over everything while talking very loudly. As a form of discipline, the man would smile at the kid every so often.

So we all congregated outside where it was sort of a drizzle/snow mix. The theater, which was obviously very well prepared for such an event, dispatched employees into the crowd to announce that "We don't have any idea what's happening." They were actually telling us that, as though this was the helpful information we were seeking.

After 10-15 minutes, they opened the doors and let everyone back in. Sadly, the annoying guy and his annoying kid had apparently left. Just as we thought they were about to restart the movie, the alarm started sounding again. A man eventually came into the theater to let us know that they couldn't figure out how to turn it all off, so we could just go home and take passes for future movies, possibly to be shown in their entirety.

I'm already looking forward to going back so I can see part of another great show.

Up, Up and Away!

2009-10-16T08:02:00.004-04:00

I did my share of dumb things to get in trouble when I was a kid, sure. I remember when I accidentally squirted glue the whole way across my room's carpet. I gave a kid a bloody nose by thwonking him with a wooden train on my second day of Kindergarten. And I can remember throwing up in my boots one time.

But let it be said that I've never decided to pilot a weather balloon, and I never even accused my brother of doing such a thing. And I don't believe I ever hid in our garage attic for several hours, either. And I'm almost certain that I never did those things in such a way that they garnered international attention and included the activation of the National Guard.

I must say that I got a kick out of watching CNN yesterday when this kid, apparently a member of the Adventure Family from Hell, was thought to be floating through the sky in Colorado. I love watching "breaking news" stories, because the networks usually have every last detail comically wrong, and this was no exception.

For quite a long period of time the news channels followed this Mylar balloon by trailing it with a helicopter. They followed its every move, and it reminded me a lot of O.J. Simpson's white Bronco after a while. The news people seemed certain that there was a kid, somehow stuck inside this balloon, even though to the extremely untrained eye, this looked to be pretty much impossible. It seemed that everyone, including Wolf Blitzer, was convinced that this kid was somehow able to just float away in a glorified Hefty bag.

After a couple hours the balloon finally landed in a field and all of these emergency personnel swarmed upon it and immediately began stabbing the thing with pitchforks and whatnot. I couldn't help but think that if these people really thought that there was a kid inside this thing, perhaps it would be in their best interest to stop jabbing sharp implements at it, unless they also suspected this kid of being Satan or something.

As I (and undoubtedly every other viewer) suspected, the kid was eventually found hiding at home, presumably because he thought he was going to be in big trouble for accidentally letting the giant balloon float away.

I did think for a moment that maybe the kid was a big fan of the movie "Up," where Ed Asner decided to float away in a similar fashion. That would have been a much cooler version of the story.

Pet Ownership vs. Serious Mental Issues

2009-10-15T08:06:00.000-04:00

I am all for having a pet. Heck, we have a pet, come to think of it. I can't help but notice that there are some number of people out there who seem to seriously think that their pets have human qualities, and they treat them as such. There's definitely a fine line between pet ownership and mental illness, that's all I'm saying.

Some people carry on about their pets to the point where I honestly think they should seek some sort of professional help. I know a woman who takes this all to a new level. She's a nice enough person, but her life clearly revolves around this little pesky dog.

It's not even one of those dogs that a normal person would enjoy. It's one of those easily-excited dogs that will start yapping at you, and it will bounce up and down and up and down and up and down until you hope that the owner looks away long enough that you can kick the stupid thing out of the way. Not that I would necessarily do that, of course, but I can't say that the thought hasn't crossed my mind.

The first clue that the owner might be a little whacko is the simple fact that they think it's cute that the dog is bouncing all over you, rather than giving the stupid thing a kick themselves. I'd be mortified if our cat started bouncing all over someone who obviously wasn't enthusiastic about the whole thing.

Another serious mental illness clue is when the owner talks about the dog's aspirations in life. This woman often says things like, "Fifi is really looking forward to her obedience class tonight!" Really? How the heck do you know? Did she tell you this? Perhaps she e-mailed it from her computer?

Speaking of which, there's another sign that a pet owner has lost it. This same woman has established her own Facebook account for her dog, amongst other web sites. I know the dog has been taking some sort of training but I really doubt that typing is one of them, what with the obvious lack of opposable thumbs and everything.

And let's not even talk about people who dress their animals up in clothes, no matter what the occasion.

Well, I have to run. The cat just told me he wants to go watch the Travel Channel.

New Mommies and Daddies

2009-10-14T07:47:00.003-04:00

I was thinking back to my childhood days, and I laughed ("LOL'd," for you hip people) when I recalled some of my parents' tactics for getting my brother and me to shape up.

My brother and I were constantly fighting with each other in those days. Constantly. If we weren't physically beating the crap out of each other, we were making a race out of something that shouldn't have been a race. I wouldn't want to embarrass him, so I won't mention that one time we were racing each other to the bathroom and it resulted in an injury that put him on crutches for several weeks.

When we were younger still, my parents had a hard time leaving the house without one of us freaking out at the idea of being left with each other and a babysitter. Again, not to embarrass anyone, but it was my brother who would cry his eyes out every time my parents left, leaving them no choice but to sneak out.

My dad had a strategy for dealing with us at that age. He'd threaten to place a call to the "New Mommies and Daddies Company," so he could trade us in for newer, better kids. Sometimes he'd actually pick up the phone and pretend to talk to them. I remember one time when he hung up the phone and announced "even they don't want to take you" because we were being so bad.

Little Smoot is old enough now that she'd never fall for the New Mommies and Daddies bit, even though, thankfully, she is almost always well behaved to begin with. I would imagine that most parents would be hesitant to use this strategy with their kids nowadays anyway. Heck, they would Google it right away and know that their parents were making the whole thing up. And then they'd probably file a lawsuit against them.

Somehow, some way, though, my brother and I turned out to be remarkably normal people. Well, he did, anyway.

Step 37: Valium

2009-10-13T10:53:00.005-04:00

So the other day Mrs. Smoot decided she wanted to buy a new desk. She may have made this decision based on the amount of work she does from home, or because she's taking college classes and needs to organize things better. I'm thinking she decided on a new desk merely because I haven't suffered a serious mental breakdown in recent history.

I'm certainly not against the desk, in principle. I didn't really even mind spending half an hour late at night in the a parking lot pondering how we were going to jam this giant box into my Prius. I'm sure we provided a lot of entertainment for the fine employees of Staples. (We eventually removed all of the parts from the box and stuck them in the car individually.)

I didn't really even mind lugging all of these individual, and often heavy, parts up the stairs to the desk's final destination.

The hairy part is putting the darned thing together, given the half-hearted attempt at directions that are hidden amongst all of the parts. And believe me, there were lots of parts. Looking at the room, one would have assumed that I was about to build a fully functional freight locomotive.

If you know anything about me, you know that manual dexterity is not really my thing (I'm not even sure what "my thing" might actually be; I should probably try to figure that out). So the instruction manual was rather intimidating, even though on the first page it described the desk construction as being "as simple as 1-2-3!"

Yeah, well, there's some blatant false advertising for you. All you had to do was flip to the end of the manual to see that it was "as simple as 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14-15-16-17-18-19-20-21-
22-23-24-25-26-27-28-29-30-31-32-33-34-35-36." I guess they just ran out of room when they made their claim.

Yep, there were 36 steps involved in putting the desk together, making me wonder why we paid so much for it since I was the one doing all of the work. It literally took me over two hours before I got to Step 6.

Many long hours later, I finally finished it. I'm proud to say that we now have a fully functional freight locomotive in the house. We're hiring engineers if anyone is interested.

Wanted: Responsible Adult

2009-10-12T08:06:00.000-04:00

I got an interesting call from Little Smoot's school the other day. When I see the school's phone number on the caller ID, I naturally get a little concerned about what might have happened to my kid, but it turned out to be a nice call from her teacher.

She wanted to know if I'd be interested in being a chaperone for an upcoming 6th grade field trip to the science center in Pittsburgh. After all, when you hear of someone in need of a "responsible adult," my name almost always immediately comes up (suuuure it does).

I told her I'd love to join them for the trip! What better opportunity could I ever ask for, in terms of being a huge embarrassment to my daughter? That is my role in life nowadays, and I'm really enjoying it.

I already told Little Smoot that if she gives me any sort of grief between now and the field trip, I am going to call her by her new nickname in front of her entire class: "Thunder Butt."

I'm going to milk this one for all I can.

Grand Illusions

2009-10-09T07:52:00.000-04:00

I had the chance to take Little Smoot to see David Copperfield in Pittsburgh the other night. What a show!

I must admit it is a little frustrating to watch him make a classic car appear on stage... make audience members disappear... walk through a moving fan and appear in the middle of the audience seconds later, etc., and not have a clue how any of it was possible.

It all reminded me of my young days, when I had my own aspirations of performing magic. I can remember those early desires to dazzle audiences with my amazing illusions. I used to come up with some remarkable magic shows, and then perform them for my parents.

I think my parents only agreed to watch my "amazing" performances because whatever amount of time I was spending on them was time I was not devoting to beating the crap out of my little brother.

I don't remember too much about my magic acts, but I did find a stunning picture in one of my old photo albums which demonstrates just how much magical talent I really had back then. As you can see in the photo above, I had managed to invite an invisible man to the doorway of my room!

As I look at this picture, numerous questions come to mind. How did I manage to pull off such a convincing illusion, back in the days when fishing line probably hadn't been invented yet? Based on the height of the hat, exactly how tall was the invisible man? Why was he sitting in my doorway, instead of inside the room? Wouldn't the illusion have been even more convincing if the hat was also invisible, leaving just an image of the chair? Why was I allowing strangers into the house?

I wonder whether our David Copperfield experience will inspire Little Smoot to try her hand at some magic tricks, too. If that's the case, I have a bad feeling that the cat will be an unwilling participant in one way or another.

What a Sale!

2009-10-08T08:06:00.001-04:00

My recent NyQuil-induced radio dreams have reminded me of yet another story from my old days of being a DJ. Lucky you!

I was thinking back to my days as a DJ at WOMP-FM in Wheeling, WV. (With a name like WOMP, you know it has to be a quality radio station.) Come to think of it, I could probably fill a book with stories about this nightmare of a place.

There's the fact that it burned to the ground on New Year's Day, months before I began working there, and the station continued to operate out of the foundation of the burned building. And we had to use an outhouse for our bathroom. And we certainly can't forget the famous memo we received, reminding us that we shouldn't poop in the station's yard.

This time, though, I'd like to share the story of the best commercial I ever heard in more than a decade of working in radio.

After the fire destroyed the building, the station became one of the first in the nation to use new, digital equipment in its new studios. New automation equipment for WOMP's AM sister station required that all commercials had to be either exactly 58 seconds, or 28 seconds long. If you recorded a commercial that was longer, it would simply be cut off at either 58 or 28 seconds.

Well, this requirement came back to haunt at least one advertiser. As I was driving in one day, I was listening to the AM station. One of the ads was supposed to end with the phrase, "Our prices will blow you away!" However... the commercial was just a teeny bit longer than the 28 seconds allowed, and the word "away" was cut off. It certainly gave new meaning to the ad!

The Adventures of Leash Boy

2009-10-07T08:02:00.001-04:00

I probably ask myself this question several times a day: What the heck is wrong with people?

I found myself muttering that phrase again last weekend, during the Autumn Leaf Festival Parade in Clarion, when I found myself seated next to a young mother and Leash Boy.

Have you seen these things? I couldn't restrain myself from taking a cell phone picture of this poor kid, tethered to mommy with this whacky leash thing.

Not only was he attached to a leash, but part of the leash assembly was a teddy bear. So it looked as though this kid had on his back either a teddy bear with a really long tail, or some other kind of 12-foot-long item emerging from its butt.

When floats would go by, they'd toss candy in his general direction and he lunge for it, only to be snapped backwards by mom when he'd get within inches of it. I think maybe she was making a game of it.

Whatever the case, I suspect Leash Boy is going to be in need of some serious therapy in the years to come.

Our Parade Strategy

2009-10-06T09:01:00.005-04:00

I took Little Smoot to my college homecoming parade this weekend. Clarion's Autumn Leaf Festival Parade is a big deal, with tons of bands, dignitaries, floats, and most importantly of all: candy.

Oh, and there were lots of Shriners, too. I can't help but find it ironic that they want to ban cell phones and texting while driving, but it is perfectly legal for profoundly elderly men with funny hats to be permitted to zoom around on a parade route, sometimes popping wheelies. Clearly something should be done about this.

But anyway, getting back to the candy aspect of the parade... we always position ourselves right at the beginning of the parade, because that's when they throw the most candy. By the end, some of the groups realize that they've depleted their supplies and they have to start rationing stuff. Little Smoot came equipped with a big bag so she could stash as much candy as possible.

By the end of the parade, she had amassed more Tootsie Rolls than I have ever seen in one place at one time. Her bag was bulging with every sort of candy imaginable, which is awesome. You see, I'll sneak some of it for myself, and we'll let Little Smoot have a little of it. But before you know it, she'll forget that the bag even exists.

Halloween is just a few weeks away, if you see where I'm going with this. We won't even need to go to the store before Halloween! We'll have more than enough candy to supply every kid in the neighborhood, thanks to the parade. And if we still have some left over, I'm betting it'll keep until Easter! I'll bet Little Smoot would never even recognize that her Easter candy is the same stuff she caught at the parade.

More NyQuil Side Effects

2009-10-02T08:09:00.001-04:00

Like I've mentioned before, NyQuil has some unusual side effects. There are, of course, the perceived super-human powers... and the occasional sensation that you're floating, etc. I have found that on nights that I take NyQuil, I also often have some really odd, and very vivid dreams.

It seems that NyQuil-induced dreams come in two flavors for me:

Dream #1: I go back in time, and am working at a radio station again. Don't get me wrong -- I mostly enjoyed working in radio. But the weird hours, miserable pay, giant ego co-workers, lack of job security, etc., are not amongst the things I miss. And my NyQuil-induced dreams always tend to focus on the worst thing of all: dead air.

As a radio DJ, nothing gets you into more trouble than having dead air. Even the least savvy listener knows you're screwing up when there's absolutely nothing coming out of their speakers. And it really honks off the bosses. Nowadays, DJs have it pretty easy because so much stuff is automated by computers. Dead air is pretty hard to come by now.

But back in the day, I used to play actual records (those black, plastic sorts of things that look similar to frisbees). And when the record was over, you had to start another record right away, or listeners would be treated to the "click-click" sound of the record bumping around at the end of the track.

There were times when nature would call, and I'd have to play really long songs to accommodate these occasions, if you know what I mean. There were times when I'd play Stairway to Heaven, which was something like 10 minutes long, and friends who knew me would say, "Ah, Hank must have needed to take a pretty big dump!"

But if I didn't make it back in time, there would be the dreaded dead air. And my NyQuil dreams focus on that feeling of continually running into the control room to find that nothing was on the air, and no matter what button I push, nothing would happen. That stinks.

Dream #2: I'm still in college. Sure, college was a great period of time. But the NyQuil dreams always convince me that it's the end of my last semester, and I look at my schedule only to find that there's a class I forgot to take all year, and I need this class to graduate. And the finals are coming up, and I can't find the room where the test is being administered! Aaaaah! Noooo!

So I guess I should either start taking less NyQuil... or perhaps I could come to the psychological conclusion that I have some sort of unresolved issues I should be addressing.

Bring on the Fall Illness of Doom

2009-10-01T08:02:00.002-04:00

My body seems to have some sort of adverse reaction to the autumnal equinox. It seems as though there is some sort of trigger in my brain that goes off every year just as soon as fall begins. My brain apparently takes the opportunity to pass along the following instruction to the rest of my body: "Let's make boogers!"

So these last several days, I have basically been a walking, talking booger factory. Mrs. Smoot has done her best to refrain from complaining about the noises I've been making in the middle of the night, but I'm sure it won't be long before I hear the all-too-familiar "STOMP STOMP STOMP SLAM!" when she gets fed up with me and heads off to the spare bedroom.

And it doesn't help that I've been chugging down the NyQuil, either. See, there's an event this weekend for which I will be the emcee, so I have been fighting this illness rather aggressively so that I don't disappoint these people with an inability to speak. Granted, many of them are probably secretly hoping, based on past performances, that I won't be able to speak, but that's another issue entirely.

NyQuil is a double-edged sword in the battle against colds. On one hand, it does make me feel better, most of the time. On the other hand, it often makes me loopy to the extent that I believe that I can probably fly. And it helps me to view imaginary pink elephants that are dancing through the kitchen.

And I spend a lot more time than normal saying, "Wheeeeeeeeeee!" I do feel wonderful, though.