Giving Beats Receiving by a Sneeze

If you are on the Uncool Family Holiday Card list this year, you are in for a treat!

You will receive not only the much beloved annual Uncool Family Newsletter but also an actual, old-fashioned printed copy of the first known photo of all five of us in which:

• We are all simultaneously looking in the same direction.
• Everybody's eyes are fully open, smiles straight and no questionable hand gestures appear near or behind anyone else's head.
• The dog is not prominently displaying an inappropriate level of lower extremity "excitement."

But wait! There's MORE!

My Love and I personally placed the photos and newsletters into the envelopes ourselves! One of us gently handled each and every card, warmly sliding it with utmost care and love into the velvety slit and then caressing the flap with our own hot, moist tongues.

Oh, baby, yeah.

As such, this year each card also comes with an extra exclusive BONUS!

As special gift from us to you, receiving one of our holiday cards means you'll find yourself in possession of your very own set of … Uncool Cold Germs!

If after opening the envelope, your nose explodes and you develop a persistent cough that rattles you down to your kidneys (and possibly causes unexpected fluid leakage) then you have a card handled by My Love. Opening ones from me will only make the inside of your throat feel like it is being bathed in a searing flow of gravel, rust flakes and glass shards.

Lysol, anyone?

NaBloPoMo in Reverse (or, Life Is What Happens When You're Not Blogging)

My son did not slice me like a honey glazed ham on Halloween night.

Unless he did and my disembodied hands typed this up. Awesome.

That would, however, prove that you don't need brains to blog.

Insert your own joke at my expense.

(Sorry.)

(Must. Stop. Thinking. About. Ham.)

I haven't posted anything in the last three weeks because I'm protesting NaBloPoMo.

For those not in the know (and a belated happy hook-up anniversary to you, My Love), NaBloPoMo -- short for National Blog Posting Month -- is an annual event in which bloggers attempt to post every day in the month of November.

Makes no since to me either.

Didn't we all get into this blogging thing to avoid drudgery, responsibility and hard work?

We were going to write a few good posts early on, be discovered and get a book deal or a movie commitment, then live the rest of our days off residuals and the revenue from our Google Ads (in the last month, I've nearly cleared $4.50 -- thanks for clicking, Mortician Babe!).

We were all going make something out of ourselves without making much at all. It's what real Americans do, right? I mean, when they are not telling their story to Oprah. Or Sean Hannity. Yep, real Americans -- just like you.

So someone please get the memo to those NaBloPoMorons -- stat! You're making the rest of us look like sloths!

Or are you?

Since my last post, I've been doing things that require me to actually get away from my computer. And I don't mean watch TiVo. Well, not all the time.

It all started on Nov. 1, known to me as the holiday El Día Del Lastre, or The Day of the Dead Weight.

That's when, after an All Hallow's Eve traditional indulgence of Mexican food, margaritas and the Butterfingers that never made it into the trick-or-treat bowl, I step on the scale to assess the past year's damage.

It's never a pretty figure -- the one I cut physically or the one my scale gives me numerically. That's the price to be paid for a summer of grilled meats, sweet straw-colored ales and dipped cones from the outdoor Dairy Queen in our town. Frickin' butterscotch Magic Shell.

This year, the numbers were pretty awful and I faced the choice of getting off my ass (actually, mah belly -- she is the problem) or going the Homer Simpson "moo moo and fat man cap" route. I think what drove it home was us buying Wii Fit Plus and, after my first weigh-in, my Mii suddenly looking like he engulfed a mini-Cooper.

And a VW Bug.

And the state of Delaware.

As luck would have it, the weather this month has been amazing nice for November in New England. I've been taking Murphy on some extra long walks, cleaning the garage, fertilizing the shrubs, chopping up or disposing of the last wood pile in the yard (I even bought a chainsaw ... after Halloween, of course), stringing Christmas lights around the yard (nyah -- hate me), getting the Minivan of Manliess winterized, taking the Things to an indoor waterpark, volunteering at their school, etc.

You know -- real life.

Oh, I'm still bulging in the belly department (down three pounds, though). But, for the first time in a while, I'm feeling a physical sense of accomplishment.

Why, then, am I posting today just 7 days shy of my goal of sitting out the month?

Am I lonely?

Of course, but that's a peril of at-home dadness in the 'burbs. Word.

Is My Love suspicious of my non-blogging goings-on?

A bit. That new Webcam I bought probably didn't help matters. Honestly, it's only so I can now video chat with my favorite blogger in Utah.

Maybe I'm just afraid that I couldn't handle the success.

Why I Won't Sleep Much Halloween Night

"Hey, Dad! Wanna see my pictures from art class?"

"That's an scary looking jack-o-lantern, Thing 2. But, uh, what's with the red under the eyes and mouth?"

"That's blood! Oozing out!"

"Uh, awesome, buddy. What else ya got there? That's a big one."

"Yeah. I was the only one to do two pictures. Everyone else only did one. But I did TWO."

 

"Cool looking witch silhouette in front of the moon, dude."

"Yeah. Look down there ...

 

"... That's a tombstone by the house!"

"Nice touch, son... but, um, what's that over there? ...

 

"... Is that a scarecrow? With a chainsaw?"

"Yeah! He came to the life! He cut up the man in the house. That's who's under the tombstone!"

(blink)

(blink)

"So, uh ... wanna tear into the bag of AirHeads I bought for the trick-or-treaters?"

"YESSSSSSS!"

*

Happy Halloween. Be good to your trick-or-treaters. And your kids. Please.

Conditions May Be Slippery

The autumn sky refused to wake this morning. Rain dripped then coldly plummeted and the wind scissored through the Northeastern trees, cutting leaves down in carnival-colored tears.

I told the Things to pile in the minivan. No walking to school this A.M.

The tires tried to accelerate up the driveway, but slipped and skidded on the motley blanket of New England fall. I warned the Things, as they sat seat-belted in the middle row. I warned them that no matter how quickly you need to get somewhere, sometimes you must be slow and cautious because even the most passive beauty can hide the potential for mayhem.

*

The phone rang a few hours later.

The voice from the children's hospital said we needed to increase one of the medications for Thing 1. Nothing to fret over. Thing 1 was growing and the dosage needed to go up slightly to match her weight.

I understand, I said.

I asked about the X-rays and bone density scans.

Good, she said, good. No signs of arthritis; no signs of thinning.

I understand, I said.

The doctor said we could start to taper off one of the remaining meds if everything looked well, I told the voice on the phone, so does this mean we can move forward?

She started her next sentence with "unfortunately."

She looked beautiful, I remember the doctor telling me and My Love, as we stood with them in the examination room. She looks beautiful.

"So we're going to leave the medications where they are for now, except for that one tiny  increase," the voice said in my ear. "We'll see where we are in a few months."

I understand, I said.

Unfortunately, I understand.

Lost in Translation

When the Things were younger, we set the TVs in our house to display the closed captioning under the belief that this might help the runts learn to recognize words and spell while somewhat countering Zack and Cody's best efforts to turn their brains to mush.

I cannot verify this method actually works, given Thing 1's struggles with reading and what happened this past weekend with Thing 2.

My Love sat in the living room watching a movie and Thing 2, taking a break from his ambitious early compiling of his Christmas list (top item: "Everything Pokemon"), joined her. In one scene in the movie, the brother tries to teach his sister's boyfriend to how to say "thank you" in a foreign language.

"Oréa viziá," says the boyfriend to the brother's mom.

In a subtitle, up pops the English translation: "Nice boobs."

Thing 2 giggles.

Curious, My Love asked him what the words onscreen said.

"It said, 'Nice bobs."

Since the movie was My Big Fat Greek Wedding, I can only assume Thing 2 took this to be a joke about shish kabobs.

The Sex Vacuum

I'm firing the people who clean our house. Apparently, they're killing my sex life.

The Wall Street Journal, known internationally as the Masters and Johnson of financial reporting and research, wrote this week about a study that finds the more housework husbands and wives do, the more likely they are to have sex.

Sex with each other, I should note. Cybersex, actual physical affairs and going solo were not mentioned, so I can only assume that when one spouse scrubs the shower grout, even if it is with some Bon Ami, that the other spouse is the sole beneficiary of said scrubbing.

After reading this, I thought back to the time when My Love and I did all the housework. It was when we first moved in together, living in sin and overly indulging in it as young people in the throes of new love tend to do. We spent every weekend at our townhouse dusting away the cobwebs, waxing the linoleum and polishing the knobs …

Then we did the housework.

Sometime after the first month of this cleansing yet apparently dirty bliss, I recall My Love -- the Febreeze blowing through her hair -- moaning longingly into a starlit summer evening, "Oh, baby ... screw this. I'm hiring a service."

Had I known then what I know now!

Was it me that drove her away?

She had always criticized my haphazard folding of the laundry back then, but I laughed at it.

"If you don’t like how I do it, then you can do it yourself," I scoffed.

So she did. For a while.

But we know the pleasure of folding by one's self is fleeting. That's when My Love went outside our relationship.

She hired a 300-pound, cigarette-smoking, former addict and single mom whose beefy biceps could have crushed my windpipe before you said "lemony-fresh Pledge." Every Thursday morning, she came to our condo and every Thursday afternoon, she left the place gleaming and spotless.

And, in retrospect, nookie-free.

Our love life has clearly waned in the quantity department since those lust-filled days of Pine-Sol and Easy Off. My mission, therefore, is clear: 

Every weekend, participate in the dirtiest, wettest ménage à trois ever -- just me, My Love and Mr. Clean.

(Note: Illustration by Michael Witte for the Wall Street Journal)