Bleepin' Beepin'

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

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!

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!

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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.