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I fixed something.

Those of you who know me know that my abilities are severely limited when it comes to fixing stuff. If it can't be fixed by squirting WD-40 on it, well, I'm stumped.

Yesterday I actually fixed something without going through my regular routine. Normally, I'll squirt some WD-40 on the broken item, which obviously never fixes anything. Then I'll stomp around for a bit, until Mrs. Smoot either fixes whatever it is by herself, or she caves in and lets me purchase a new one.

This time, it was our barbecue grill that was acting up. A week or so ago, we noticed that when you turn two of the three burners on, flames would eventually start shooting out of the front of it. Using my amazing manly abilities, I determined that this was probably an undesirable feature of the grill, especially if we prefer not to have our shirts catching on fire while we're making burgers and such.

Before I took the drastic step of spraying it with WD-40, I conducted my other manly experiment where I ignored the problem for several days in hopes that it would resolve itself. Alas, it did not.

So today I did some manly work on it, requiring the use of an actual Phillips head screwdriver and everything. I yanked a bunch of parts out of the grill, and actually found the problem. Some idiot insect apparently decided to build a tiny condominium unit inside two of the thing-a-majiggers (sorry for the technical terminology) where the propane is supposed to flow. It was apparently blocking those passages, and causing the flames to shoot out of the front.

I took the thing-a-majiggers apart, as well as several doohickies, hoosemfoosits and whatchamacallems, and I cleaned them all up. Imagine my shock when I put everything back together (without any leftover, random parts, either!) and the grill actually worked.

I think I'll probably miss having those flames shooting out, though. They were kinda cool.

THI_ GAME _UCK_

If you would enjoy an exciting evening of television viewing culminating with the overwhelming urge to slit your wrists, I invite you to view Wheel of Fortune with Mrs. Smoot.

Yeah, I have complained about her word puzzle abilities before, but I figure it's an important issue, plenty worthy of continual whining. We had Wheel on while we were eating dinner the other night, and Mrs. Smoot was draining all of the fun out of it, as per normal.

The fun part of watching the show, of course, is playing along with the contestants to see who can guess the hidden phrases first. This is enjoyable, except that Pat Sajak isn't going to send me to Japan or give me money for guessing anything correctly. It doesn't matter anyway, because Mrs. Smoot would win everything anyway.

Pat had just revealed a new puzzle the other night, and someone guessed the letter "S," and there was just one of them on the board. Mrs. Smoot glanced over at the screen for about 1/1,000th of a second and said, "Chocolate-Covered Cherries." And of course that's what it was. I wouldn't have come up with that answer if the category had been "types of cherries, covered in chocolate."

So watching Wheel of Fortune is a pretty bland experience around here. A puzzle appears, Mrs. Smoot announces what the answer is, and we wait 5-10 minutes for the contestants to flounder around until one of them gets the right answer.

At least when we watch Jeopardy! there is the occasional answer she doesn't know. But now Mrs. Smoot has gone back to college and she's filling her brain with all of those answers. So night TV viewing is only going to get worse for me.

Trash Talk

Could I be the only one who sometimes gets a little nervous when the garbage man comes? I'm not afraid of the garbage man, per se, even though he could potentially throw me into the back of the scary truck that smooshes stuff, I suppose.

No, I sometimes worry about whether he's going to accept whatever weird thing I have left at the curb on any given week.

This week, I have a giant section of PVC pipe that I ripped out of the ground. It was one of my many failed attempts at being manly years ago. I had dug up the yard and stuck this pipe in the ground as some sort of demented drainage project, but naturally that didn't work as planned. So I finally ripped it out of the ground and nervously placed it at the curb yesterday.

I really have no idea if there's a limit to what they'll haul away. I know that neighborhoods near us have a different waste disposal company, and they're limited to two bags of garbage a week. Two bags wouldn't be nearly enough for us; I can use that much in belly button lint alone.

I know that some of our neighbors are edgy about a possible limit, too, because sometimes they'll spread their garbage to the fronts of other neighborhood houses in an effort to trick the garbage people into taking a huge mound of stuff. Yesterday, for example, a neighbor stuck an old ladder in with our stuff.

Over the years, I can only remember one instance when the garbage guys refused to take something I had left at the curb, and that was a waterbed mattress. It must have weighed 500 pounds, so it seemed. I left it at the curb, and I remember spying on the garbage man from behind a curtain to see what would happen when he came.

A couple men started to lift the mattress, and once they realized how heavy it was they said the heck with it and left it behind. So the next week I chopped it up and distributed it into about 10 garbage bags and left all of them at the curb, and sure enough, the garbage men took them all away.

I used the same strategy with a barbecue grill last year. It took me the better part of a day to dismantle that sucker into enough innocent-looking bags that it no longer looked like a grill.

We have a spare refrigerator that is probably on its last legs. I'm already eyeing it up to see how I can fit that baby into a series of bags...

The Topsy Turvey Verdict

As you can well imagine, I have been deluged by e-mails, phone calls, fax transmissions, telepathic messages, Western Union, and carrier pigeon queries, wondering how things have been going with my Topsy Turvey Tomato Plant Experiment '09. (Or "Tomatoe" for you Dan Quayle fans.)

And the official verdict is: It's ok.

The Topsy Turvey is this thing that gives you the magical ability to grow a tomato upside-down, much to the envy of all who see it. We had always had problems with deer eating our garden tomatoes, so I thought I'd give this a whirl. After all, I doubt very much that we have upside-down deer in this area... so I would think these devices should be safe.

The problem with this thing is that a bird decided that the top of the Topsy Turvey was a lovely place to build a home early in the summer. So every time I'd water the thing, this bird would flounder around inside and then escape, which gave me some degree of heart failure every single time.

My first instinct was to scare the bird away, and a friend had suggested utilizing a rubber snake to encourage it to go elsewhere. I tried that, and it seemed to work quite well. However, the bird had laid eggs inside the nest, and people made me feel guilty about chasing mommy away from her babies, breaking up a perfectly lovely family unit.

I was starting to think that maybe the bird had simply upped the ante by using rubber eggs to get back at me for the whole rubber snake thing, but at least a couple of the eggs did eventually hatch. The family eventually moved on, thankfully, so I was able to go back to tending to my plant.

So far I have had a handful of tomatoes from the plant, and they have officially been "ok." Nothing spectacular. I may have to try adding a few more plants to the collection next year with a couple other varieties involved.

Or maybe I'll just get some rubber tomato plants. I dunno.

The Sleep-over

Have you ever had 5 grade-school age girls sleep over at your house? I didn't think so... no sane person would ever consider such a thing. But we did just that over the weekend. Little Smoot had a few friends over for the night, and you can just imagine how much sleep everyone got.

We began the night innocently enough. We got them sugared up on M&Ms and other equally healthy foods, and they spent a couple hours playing on the Wii. Their favorite Wii game was called "Fart Wars," during which two competitors fly through the air, powered by their own farts, while attempting to avoid obstacles. And the winner gets flushed down a giant toilet (I'm not sure why this happens to the winner, and the loser merely gets thwapped up against a rock wall).

I suggested to the girls that if their parents asked what they did while they were here, I would strongly prefer that they would claim that we were all playing Bible-themed games while eating healthy vegetables, as opposed to eating vast quantities of chocolate while playing Fart Wars. I'm sure the parents would buy that story.

Later at night, while continuing to eat "vegetables" and such, they played some games that seemed to involve a lot of giggling and slamming of doors. I don't know the specifics of the game, but I did eventually find Little Smoot bound and gagged in a closet, and other girls were complaining because they hadn't had a turn and being tied up in the closet yet.

A little after midnight they played a very short-lived version (thank goodness) of Truth or Dare. I really don't want to know what truths OR dares were involved. There are some things that parents just aren't meant to know.

Around 1:00 a.m., they decided it was time to make a movie. I doubt that Spielberg will need to worry about the competition. I asked them to turn the lights out and get to sleep at about 1:30 a.m., and they fully cooperated that request at about 6:30 (I'm serious).

I'm planning to catch up on sleep sometime in the coming months. For now I think I'm getting hungry for some veggies.

How To Impress the Babes

I was visiting East Branch Dam in Elk County last weekend, and it reminded me of a story. Lots of things remind me of stories; that's why I have a blog.

Anyway... I enjoyed walking over the breast of the dam for a couple reasons. For one, it gave me a legitimate reason to use the word "breast" in a blog entry. And it gave me a chance to think back to the day when a friend and I decided that we should swim the width of the dam for some reason.

I guess the reason we decided to do this had something to do with the fact that we were attempting to impress the girls who were with us. I eventually married one of them, so apparently this stunt worked like a charm. After all, nothing makes a woman more filled with lust than seeing two out of shape guys wade into a seaweed infested lake where there was a good chance at least one of us could drown or be eaten by a school of angry perch.

The swim from one side to the other was about half a mile, and neither of us were exactly Olympians, but we went for it. The girls were counting on us.

Mike and I began our epic journey into the water, and as we were about half way to our goal, we were approached by a patrol boat, lights flashing and everything. They asked us what on Earth we were doing, and we told them that we simply decided to swim across the lake ("because it was there" I suppose).

Much to our surprise, the officer told us that it was actually perfectly legal to swim across the lake. Very stupid, but legal. (This was around 1991, so I'm not sure if it's legal to do this nowadays. It's probably still considered to be stupid, though.)

So the officer allowed us to continue our swim, but they followed us with the boat the rest of the way across the lake, figuring that at least one of us was bound to die in the process.

Both of us made it across just fine, thank you Mr. Boat Cop Dude. And you can only imagine how impressed the girls were.

Mower Tip #132

Here is today's official tip for lawn mowing: No matter how shiny and attractive it may be, do not attempt to mow over a large metal object.

Trust me on that one.

I was mowing our neighbor's yard a couple weeks ago, and I ignored this common tip, and managed to demolish a water pipe thing that stuck out of her yard. When I hit it, the mower came to a rather abrupt stop, and pieces of the water cap were quickly shooting skyward. Some of them are probably still orbiting the Earth as we speak.

Surprisingly, the mower did start up and I was able to continue mowing the yard. It was sputtering and rattling quite a bit, though. If the mower were able to talk (and thank goodness it can't) it would probably have said something like, "Nice work, genius."

I decided to do what I always do when I need manly help. I called our former neighbor, who is able to fix anything and everything. To keep his anonymity intact, for this blog entry I'll call him "Kevin," even though his name is actually Hubert.

"Kevin" was able to diagnose the problem just by hearing what I had done, and generously offered to pound some sense into the mower for me.

Over the years, Hubert -- er... "Kevin" -- has fixed probably dozens of items for me because I'm completely inept at this sort of thing. As if it isn't bad enough that I can't fix these things on my own, I have actually made him a fresh batch of cookies in the past as thanks for his work. Maybe I'll send him flowers this time.

Anyway, I would like to publicly thank him for once again coming to the rescue. The mower is working remarkably well, and I promise to make an effort to avoid the shiny obstacles in the future. The flowers are in the mail.

Two Birthdays

Well, two notable birthdays have just passed by, and I thought I should acknowledge them both.

Most importantly, Little Smoot has just turned 11. As you can see in the accompanying photo, she was very dignified as we celebrated with some of the Smoot clan.

Actually, her birthday has been a rather lengthy celebration these past couple weeks. At last count, she has had something like 27 different parties involving various combinations of family members. She didn't seem to mind the idea of getting presents on a daily basis, either.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Little Smoot! As always, we're tremendously proud of you, and we would like to remind you that you're pretty much done with getting presents this time around.

The other birthday that has recently passed is the anniversary of this very blog. My first post was back on September 3, 2008. And here we are today.

Just think... this blog began as a crappy little corner of cyberspace, bereft of any form of quality control, lacking in direction, and missing any opportunity to make a real impact on society. I'm very proud to say that little has changed since those days at the beginning of last fall. I doubt much will change in the year to come, either.

I Really Enjoyed Intercourse This Weekend!

Yes, indeed! I had a great Intercourse experience over the weekend. And it was my first time! Sadly, I experienced Intercourse alone, though.

By now I'm sure you recognize the hilarity of the name "Intercourse" as a rural community near Lancaster, PA. Intercourse is a small, very Amish town, and a bajillion people seemed to flock there over the Labor Day holiday to gawk at people in bonnets and purchase butter and such.

Personally, I'm growing more and more suspicious of the whole Amish thing. Seriously. Amish people allegedly live their lives as though it was still 1750, shunning new technology and wearing comically old-fashioned clothing, but what kind of sane person would do this?

Let's look at the evidence here. For one thing, the Amish don't use electricity, which would make computers pretty much out of the question. Yet nearly every one of these quaint Amish places miraculously had a web address on their signs. Who puts up these web pages... the cows?

Here's another odd thing I noticed. Later in the weekend I was driving through State College, home of Penn State University and Joe Paterno, and I literally couldn't carry on a conversation with an old college friend because we kept losing the cell phone signal. Yet in Intercourse, where bales of hay outnumber residents by a million to one, the cell signal was tremendously good no matter where I was in that area. Who the heck is using their cell phones out there... the cows?

And the Amish people never look very happy. I strongly suspect that they always look so grim because you only ever see them in the middle of the day while they're putting on their whole Amish "show," and frankly those clothes look awfully itchy. At night, I would bet you any money that they hide out in underground bunkers and have Wii bowling tournaments, just like regular folk.

I think the reason the Amish go through this routine every day is that, frankly, it moves the merchandise. If you were to tell your spouse, "Hey! Let's go buy some jam!" they'd probably roll their eyes at you and possibly threaten you with physical harm. But if you suggest buying jam from people in authentic clothing from days of old, they'd perk up and run out to start the car, wouldn't they?

The Amish know this, and I personally witnessed flocks of people buying butter, jam, pies, etc. And this was during a not-so-grand economic climate. People love this crap, and the Amish are reaping the profits to the extent that they have the entire library of Mario games in their bunkers.

So, needless to say, I am really getting suspicious of these so-called "Amish." And their cows, for that matter.

Punch Bugs and Slap Priuses

Like most normal American families, we have always participated in the popular "Punch Bug" tradition.

The rules have always been simple: When you see a Volkswagen Beetle (hereby referred to as a "Punch Bug," heretofore, per se) the person viewing said Punch Bug is entitled to punch whomever he or she pleases, and without any fear of retribution. While punching the other person, you must "claim" your Punch Bug by yelling out "Punch Bug!" and the color of the car you've spotted.

So we can be driving along for several quiet miles, and suddenly hear "PUNCH BUG BLUE!" from the back seat, and then get a brutal smack to the shoulder. This is the way God intended it. Heaven help us, though, when we pass by a VW dealership.

Anyway, as we have spent many hours traveling in the car, the Smoot family has decided to add twists and turns to those simple rules. We have always added that only one person can claim a single Punch Bug, so you don't have the whole family punching each other over the single sighting of one car. Fair enough.

But as we traveled on our New England trip this summer, things really started to go downhill, rule-wise. Little Smoot and Mrs. Smoot started deciding to claim various colors of Punch Bugs. Little Smoot and Mrs. Smoot claimed all of the typical colors for themselves, basically leaving me with chartreuse-ish mauve as the only color I was allowed to punch anyone for.

So, to help make things a little more fair, I tossed a few of my own rules in. For example, if I see a Prius (other than the one I was driving), I could slap anyone I wanted ("Slap Prius Green!"). And Hummers earned me a free Indian Burn.

You can imagine what we must look like after driving a few hours, slapping, punching and Indian Burning each other ad nauseum. As we stagger out of the car at rest areas, we probably looked a lot like we were emerging from Michael Vick's kennel.

Thankfully the family has not learned how to use the terrorism interrogation technique of waterboarding, because I'm sure that'll somehow find its way into our driving before we know it.

Swimming Toward Elderlyhood

Little Smoot and I spent a significant portion of our summer at our local pool, which we always enjoy. We have a good time together, diving off the board, getting nice tans, seeing friends, and keeping the concession stand in business by ingesting a disturbing number of Chips Ahoy ice cream cakes.

Things were going very nicely at the pool again this year, up until a tremendously disturbing incident last month involving a young boy. Was this kid picking on Little Smoot, or swearing, or otherwise creating a disturbance? No, he did something infinitely worse.

Little Smoot came rushing over to me after playing with this kid for a bit, and she took great glee in telling me that this boy asked her, "Is that your grandfather?" after seeing me playing with her.

I nearly dropped my dentures right out of my mouth when she said that one. "Your GRANDFATHER?" I asked. She said that she told the kid, "No, that's my dad," but he replied, "Well, he does have gray hair."

Just shoot me.

I thought about going over and beating the living tar out of the little whippersnapper with my cane, but I wasn't sure if Medicare would cover any injuries the kid would cause me.

Canadian Metric Time

Speaking of Canada (as I was in yesterday's post), we spent some time in Quebec a couple weeks ago. We had never been to that province before, so it was interesting to see just how foreign a country Canada could be.

We have been to Canada many, many times over the years, and it has certainly never seemed like a very foreign place. In Ontario, where we usually end up, everyone speaks English, they drive on the proper side of the road, and so forth.

Quebec is a whole different land. Every thing there is French. Their fries... the way they braid their hair... their toast... their maids... the way they kiss... etc. There were very, very few places that even had English captions for things.

On our first night, in Saint-Georges, I was assigned the task of locating and procuring a pizza to bring back to the hotel. Several hours later I returned with a llama and two bars of soap, and I was fresh out of pelt. It was that kind of night.

Anyway... it was interesting to introduce Little Smoot to this new culture. As soon as we crossed the border (which wasn't paved -- honest), we got to switch our car's speedometer over to metric. Little Smoot was amused to see that we were able to travel over 100 somethings-per-hour.

Seeing her interest in the metric system, I couldn't help but take the opportunity to convince her that there was such a thing as "Canadian Metric Time." I told her that Canada runs on a 10-hour day, with 100 minutes per hour. She's not usually tremendously gullible, but she actually did believe that one and wanted me to switch the clock in the car to reflect it.

Mrs. Smoot wouldn't let me take this one too far, figuring that she'd end up bringing it up in school or some such thing, and she'd be scarred for life. I'd write more about this, but it's almost 17:72 o'clockometer already.

Ruffled

I have always suspected that there is something inherently wrong with living in the United States, and it actually has nothing at all to do with former President Bush OR Barney the Dinosaur.

Don't get me wrong... I love fruited plains as much as anyone (although I honestly cannot remember ever seeing purple mountains, despite traveling extensively throughout the country).

Anyway, I have always felt like there's just something we're missing, and when we were in Canada a couple weeks ago, I remembered what it was: Ruffles "All Dressed" potato chips.

You can only get this particular flavor (or "flavour" as they like to say in Canadian) of Ruffles chips in Canada. When we visit the Great White North, we always purchase a large quantity of these chips to bring back home.

As a result, we always get a little nervous as we're going through Customs at the U.S. border, worrying that there's some restriction on bringing these babies into our homeland and that we're going to be swarmed by honked off Canadian potato chip agents.

What's the big deal about these chips? They're just freakin' awesome, that's what. The flavor is some amazing combination of a bunch of flavors, and the result is a potato chip that tastes like there's a party in my mouth, and everyone is invited.

Mrs. Smoot has a particularly hard time keeping her hands off the All Dressed chips. I think one of the bags that we were attempting to smuggle back home barely made it to the border. If there were some sort of restriction on bringing these chips across the border, the Customs agents would probably be suspicious of Mrs. Smoot with all sorts of flavor powder affixed to her lips and chin as we were driving through.

Anyway... if you feel as strongly about this injustice as I do, I encourage you to fill out this petition to bring these things here. Thank you.

I'm Sorry... Or... I'm Sorry.

Ok, I've been just a teeny bit lax in updating my log for the past... well... season.

Once summer arrived I realized that it was infinitely more fun to sleep in, rather than come up with some sort of banal rambling every day.

In fact, my typical summer day looked something like this:

10:00: Wake up. Attempt to wake Little Smoot.
10:15: Breakfast.
11:00: Attempt to wake Little Smoot.
12:00: Lunch! Attempt to wake Little Smoot.
12:30: Little Smoot wakes up, only because it's time to go to the pool.
12:45 - 5:00: Swim, read newspapers at pool, enjoy "scenery."
6:00: Dinner.
6:30 - Midnight: To the TV for Simpsons marathon.
12:00: Bed.

So as you can see, there was no reason to use my brain at all for most of the summer, so I took a break from the blog. I actually did receive word from a couple people who actually missed reading it on a daily basis, if you can believe such a thing. So my first apology goes to them.

My second apology goes to the rest of the free world, because now that Little Smoot has gone back to school this morning, I'm fully planning to resurrect my blogging habits. So to those of you who have wasted some amount of time reading old posts and are going to find that there are new ones, I'm also very sorry.

So sorry.

The Legend of Alfred Winifred Jr.

It just occurred to me this morning: Good grief! I have a blog!

Ok, it has been a while since I have made a new posting, mainly because I turn my brain off almost completely during the summer months. But I thought you'd enjoy hearing the story of Alfred Winifred Jr.

Last week I was a counselor for a week of Adventure Camp at Jumonville (near Uniontown, PA). We had 17 kids in our group (ages 10-12), and I was one of the allegedly responsible adults involved.

I acted as a counselor for the same camp a few years ago, and during that week we pulled off a highly successful prank as measured by the number of boys who spent an evening crying in fear. So we decided to pull it off again this year.

I concocted a story about a deranged man named Alfred Winifred Jr., who had escaped from the nearby "Home for the Emotionally Interesting," a name I borrowed from an episode of The Simpsons. The name of this facility did not seem to phase the naive boys in my room, God bless them.

Last Wednesday night, my pastor (who was our camp dean for the week) made an announcement at our camp fire. He said he didn't want to alarm any of us, but this man had recently escaped from the facility, and naturally he was last spotted near the camp.

The girls were in on the prank, but some of them were still semi-freaked out by the whole thing. We headed back to our cabin from the campfire, and really enjoyed listening to the boys discuss their fears of Alfred.

Back at the cabin, I told the boys that we counselors were going to have a meeting to get an update about the situation, and that they should remain in the room. While we had our "meeting," the girls sneaked out of the cabin and onto the porch so they would be in good position to further freak out the boys.

I went back into our room and found that several things had occurred. First, one of the boys was working on a homemade grenade, using some combination of a Mt. Dew bottle, bug spray and AA batteries. I have no idea where that was going, but I thought it would be best to put a stop to it.

Then the boys decided on their own that they should form a circle and pray that Mr. Winifred would not harm them. The picture (posted above) was actually used on Jumonville's web site. Parents who saw it probably thought it was a very nice moment of praying before bedtime. By contrast, the boys were taking turns asking the Lord to protect them from the escaped lunatic (Verbatim prayer by one boy: "Dear Lord, please don't let Alfred Winifred Jr. eat us tonight").

When they were done praying, I went on to explain that Alfred had a unique, distinctive breathing noise that we should listen for. If we hear this breathing noise, we need to get out of the cabin -- FAST -- and make a run for it. I'm happy to say that at least one boy was already crying at this point.

One boy actually had the sense to question why we would want to go outside if that's where Alfred Winifred Jr. was hanging out. In a rare moment of thinking quickly, I told the boys that if we stayed inside, he would have us cornered.

Of course my pastor was standing outside the window this whole time, gradually making louder and louder weird breathing noises to attract the boys' attention. A couple of the boys heard it and yelled, "I HEAR SOMETHING OUTSIDE!" I blamed the boys for it. I said, "I don't know which of you is doing that, but this is not funny. Do not make weird breathing noises to scare people." And this led to a round of the boys blaming each other for the noise.

But the noise got louder and it was definitely coming from outside. Ohhhhh nooooooo! I told the boys we had to get out of there! They all sprinted outside where the girls jumped out at them, much to the girls' satisfaction.

Needless to say, the boys didn't get a whole lot of sleep that particular night, and as a result, neither did I. But I would say it was worth it.