The Gifts We Don't Keep Giving

I'm panic-browsing an online collection of fine gold collar necklaces because last night My Love insisted we don't exchange gifts this Christmas. That's how I know I am screwed.

You know the drill. The spouse says they don't want you to get them anything for an anniversary or a birthday or Opening Day of Baseball Season, so you don't. Then the big day rolls around and you find some special, long-coveted desire of your heart neatly wrapped in a bow on the kitchen counter next to your morning bowl of bran pellets. 

Sigh.

I sigh because I wish that was the case for me.

Thanksgiving Trots are for Turkeys

Our family’s Thanksgiving tradition is to ritually avoid them.

Multiple generations of loved ones gathering under one roof? Rarely. We have more of a shrub than a family tree. Plus, we tend to shy away from forced socializing. If we had a coat of arms, it’d feature badgers swathed in poison ivy.

Football? Ha! We’re New York Jets fans! By the fourth Thursday of November, we find more excitement in scouring the internet for video of curling competitions.

The Day The Sky Went Silent

I worked in a downtown Dallas office building in those days. My 7th floor office window, on a clear day, commanded a look of the flat, indistinctive North Texas landscape that was so broad and distant that one could almost make out where the Earth's surface made its subtle curve toward the other side of the planet. However, on most days the smog and ozone cleared only enough to reveal the lower parking levels of a nearby office building. So instead of marveling at natural wonders, a few of the IT people I shared the floor with would occasionally entertain ourselves by trying to identify which airline's planes from the multiple airports nearby were the ones rattling our windows at any given moment.

I came into the office a little earlier than normal that Tuesday morning, still a bit hung over from the previous week's annual sand, surf and suds vacation with friends, and logged into my computer. That's where I first saw the bulletin about a plane striking one of the Twin Towers.

Some Pup Owners Belong in the Doghouse

Our town is going to the dogs, and you know who is responsible?

Not the developers. They’re leveling historic slums to build luxury slums of the future.

Not the folks in charge of our neglected local infrastructure. They’ve been letting the mold grow in our schools because … well, something has to hold the crumbling bricks together.

It’s the dog owners. You rotten, self-righteous lovers of furry beasts that retrieve old tennis balls, you.

One day, lad, all this minivan will be yours

NOTE: After my unearthing of last week's piece about the Minivan of Manliness, I remembered that I had written another piece about it in 2017 for the fish wrapper that eventually let me go this past December. This one is about Excitable being, well, excited, about inheriting my ride when he started learning to drive. More on that after the story:

My son asked if we could give one of his high school teammates a ride home, so I hit the button to slide open the passenger-side rear door to the minivan. As the two of them climbed in, Excitable told his friend with what I knew to be more of his own brand of goofy pride than sarcasm, “Dude, this here is gonna be my whip.”

Don’t look it up; I already did.

Of Minivans and Men

NOTE: The legendary Minivan of Manliness -- as of this past December -- 'tis no more. Fifteen years and nearly 170,000 miles -- all in good service. Well, mostly good. Things got a little hairy those last few years. Various battery/electrical issues, wonky doors and a strange penchant for developing flat tires on long journeys: college trip to Baltimore, the night we moved -- seriously, drove three hours in the pouring rain and next day, flat as my singing voice; and, lastly, on the interstate the day I was driving to the dealer to test drive a new car. It's nice one of us knew when our time was up.

Here's a piece I wrote about the ol' girl back in 2008 for DadCentric.

Of Minivans and Men

Whrrrrrr -- CHUNK. Whrr -- CHUNK-CHUNK.

Hmmmm, I mused. The garage door track could have shaken loose from the ceiling again. Let's punch in that remote code two, neigh, three more times to be sure.

Whrrrrrr -- CHUNK. Whrr -- CHUNK-CHUNK.

Frickity-frick on a frickin' stick.

I had left the minivan tailgate open while it was inside the closed garage. Now the arm extending from the roller chain to the door was welded into the gate. 

Please, DO Adjust Your Dials

A couple of quick programming notes:

Subscribe by email. Huh? It's 2021

Since Feedburner is shutting down its email subscription service support, I've switched my feed over to follow.it. Boy, are those folks friendly. They helped via email with the whole process.

• If you are already subscribe via email, you are all set -- the subscriptions have been carried over. 
• If you want to subscribe by email, go onto my site and put your email address in the box on the top right then hit "Subscribe."

I'm uncool, dude. I still use a blog reader and RSS.

Dude/dudette -- you are my kind of people.

The Feedburner feed will still work for the time being (I think -- Google owns it, so who knows), but it will soon be deleted. I have redirected the site to the new follow.it feed (https://follow.it/always-home-and-uncool), so if you got this, all is good. If not ...

Now, for my next trick, maybe someday I'll finally get off Blogger.

And finally ...

"New" post coming Wednesday. Note the quotation marks. See y'all soon.

PLEASE STAND BY ...

Don't panic. Just testing something out here at Mission Uncool Control. Meanwhile, enjoy this photo of Dinger trying to decide if he's really an IPA dog.

What We've Got Here is Failure ...

Things have changed in Uncool Land. If you haven't been paying attention, here or elsewhere, let me give you the 411 on what's been going these past several months:

The Modern Age of Youth Baseball

Welcome back to Little League baseball, guys! It’s good to ha–

What’s that, Carl? You want to be called what? Like Casey Stengel, the great baseball manager? No? Like Kacey Musgraves, the great country songstress. Mom and dad on board with that? Cool. Let me grab my clipboard.

All right, let’s try this again.

Welcome back, children, to Little League baseball. OK, so you all have good winter? Play some basketball or hockey, did you? No? Well, what sports did you kids play over the winter?

Fortnite does not count as a sport, Roberto. Neither does Minecraft. I agree, it does help your hand-eye coordination. It also helps prepare your glutes for another three months of riding the pine.

The Headaches of Moving and Downsizing

If you still haven’t found the motivation to clean out even your kitchen junk drawer during all this pandemic downtime at home, try this three-step formula:

1. Sell your current house.

2. Move 200 miles out of state.

3. Then, and only then, buy a house built when lives were simpler and homeowners smaller.

That’s what we did this autumn. My Love received a job offer she couldn’t possibly pass up even though, despite living in a world brimming with deadly airborne contagions and pants-less Zoom calls from home, it required her to work on-site. With live, air-spewing co-workers. And, I assume, a dress code.

Frigga It All! It's Friday the 13th, Again!

Today is the second Friday the 13th of the year. Does that make you anxious and full of dread?

It shouldn’t. If you survived 2020 long enough to read that sentence, brother, you should not sweat friggatriskaidekaphobia. Not even if your preferred freakout is paraskevidekatriaphobia.

Those two tongue-tripping words mean the exact same thing — the fear of Friday the 13th — but I prefer the former because, after the year we’ve had, we should all find it far more satisfying to look at the calendar today and shout “Frigga it all.”

Syrupy Tales of Election Day, Pancakes

It started as either a clever plan to instill the importance of participating in our democracy in my children or a hankering for butter pecan syrup. 

Since my two children, now 20 and 18, were old enough to stand still for a minute in the voting booth, we have followed an Election Day ritual: Wake up on the first Tuesday of November, cruise to the polling place in the minivan to cast my ballot, and then head out for a breakfast feast. The IHOP is our usual destination — owing to that aforementioned jonesing of mine. My family rarely went there in my youth, but its steep royal blue roof had been such a familiar sight to me over five decades, at least from a car window, that it seemed a perfectly stable and secure spot for building a lifetime memory along with a customized pancake combo. 

Life Hands You Quarantine, Make Quaran-tini

Tomorrow, I find a restaurant with a huge outdoor patio and indulge in a fresh, hot burger and fries. And, definitely, a cold draft beer. At minimum, I’ll go get a haircut.

That’s how I plan to celebrate the end of my state imposed, 14-day self-quarantine for the high crime of vacationing in a COVID-19 hotspot even though while there I didn’t go out for a burger or a beer or anything vaguely vacationy beyond sitting on the spacious beach beyond our rental’s back deck for hours and hours. I won’t name the location to protect the many conspiracy theorists who permanently live there, but I’ll offer hints. It’s a state where:

• face masks only became required in public settings in late June,
• indoor dining is allowed at 50 percent capacity, and
• the riskiest behavior I undertook was showing my Blue State issued driver’s license to the Good Ol’ Boy behind the register at the ABC store.

Taking a lickin' at the hardware store

I’ve always been sweet on trips to the hardware store and, quite honestly, it started with the candy. Those old-fashioned striped stick candies, if you must have details.

It never struck me as odd that places where the air is thick with lawn fertilizer and 3-in-1 oil also specialized in sugary delicacies, cellophane wrapped and flavored with root beer, cinnamon or the exotic if not vague “tropical fruit.” But I was knee-high to a sack of Kingsford briquettes then, usually stopping in on a Saturday with my dad so he could pick up a bag of concrete mix or a propane canister for his soldering torch. And those ol’ mom-and-pops had everything. "Hey, Ethel, we already sell slip joint pliers, right? Let’s stock some cavity inducers while we’re at it?"

The Mighty Have Fallen

I contributed to global warming more than usual recently, so: World, I’m sorry. But that tree had it coming.

A 2019 study published in the journal Science concluded the Earth has enough open space to plant more than a trillion trees. This, it noted, is enough to capture some 800 billion tons of carbon dioxide, or roughly the equivalent of a cable news pundit’s daily output of hot air. Actual experts said this could bring greenhouse gas levels down to a number not seen since the days before American women were allowed to vote. 

Yet I, avowed advocate of suffrage and not suffering death by polar ice cap sweat, gave the order to take out a four-story black oak that had shaded our back porch for decades. It was not an easy decision. Initially.

“Smart” appliances, meet the smart aleck

DUCK, N.C. – This oven has convinced me that the Luddites were on to something.

To review that historical reference you can’t look up because your cell phone is down to 3 percent,

Calling someone a Luddite today is a put down. It means the person is opposed to technology and, in general, change and progress. That’s not me. I’ve never longed for the days of manual typewriters or using paper road maps. But while I’m not old-fashioned, I do abhor technology that makes me want to drown in Old Fashioneds because it is unnecessarily complex. Or just simply unnecessary.

Commence Reacting, Coronavirus Class of 2020

Thank you for that warm introduction, Dr. Principalperson. And thank you for your bravery. Some would consider it pretentious of non-medical professionals such as yourself to still want to be addressed as “doctor” during these pandemic times.

What did you say, Dr. P? Huh?

Oh, seems I’ve muted everyone’s microphones for my portion of the Zoom graduation ceremony.

See that, my dearest beleaguered faculty, our hardest-working custodial staff, and most of all, you -- The Coronavirus Class of 2020. The ability to click a button and shut up your alleged superiors is just one feature of COVID-19 life that’s not too shabby.

Now let us ponder that phrase: “alleged superiors.”

Pandemic Thrills in the Produce Aisle

Mere weeks before I first met my wife, she had survived a tandem skydive. That’s jumping out of an airplane with another person strapped to your back and only some polyester sheets to prevent the two of you from becoming a human short stack.

I, meanwhile, was still living with my parents. Living on the edge to me meant swigging their 1 percent straight out of the carton without first giving it a good, long sniff.

Nearly 30 years later, I am now the risk taker. The thrill seeker. The adrenaline junkie. The one who goes out for supplies during The Pandemic.

Bitcoin Bomb Scam Explodes on Homefront

Staying home isn’t even safe for my family anymore during the COVID-19 pandemic because apparently we have an “explosive device” in our house even more lethal than the homemade eight-bean chili in the freezer.

We learned this through an email my wife received last week. It instructed her to transfer $10,000 into a Bitcoin account lest a hidden device be detonated by a hitman “keeping the area under control.” I immediately recognized this as a hoax because, seriously — a bomb, an extortionist AND a hitman? So excessive for the suburbs.