O' Christmas Brick

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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.