Headin' South!

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

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

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

We shall see.

The Crusty Old Fart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deeply Disturbing News

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

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

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

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

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

What's Up With That?

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

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

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

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

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

My Second 21st Birthday

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

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

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

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

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

My Latest Rant

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

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

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

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

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



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

I am wearing out my mute button.

Losing My Freakin' Mind, Part XVIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good News / Bad News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope this stuff melts sometime before July.

Olympics Bucket List

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too Much Time on My Hands? Nah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mission accomplished!

Full Moon on Groundhog Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Book Report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Say... Is That My Butt?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continuing a Family Tradition

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

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

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

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

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

Just carryin' on the tradition.

Beware: Mickey Mouse Toilets!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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