Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Canine vs. Teen

Today is Son Number One’s thirteenth birthday, and the new Lab puppy is officially five and a half months old. It’s tough to say which one of them smells worse.

You might not think it, but besides their general malodorousness, there are a lot of other striking similarities between a teenage boy and a half-grown dog. Let’s stack them up against each other and see which one you’d rather have in your house, shall we?

Obstinance is a key similarity. Both are testing their personal authoritative boundaries by pretending not to hear my voice. This rarely ends well for either of them. This is a draw.

Urine continues to be an issue. For the dog, she has mostly stopped peeing in the house, with only an occasional excitement dribble now and then. For Son Number One, toilet spray issues have not improved for the last eleven years. Advantage dog.

Constant noise – For the dog, it’s barking. Thankfully, not at night {sound of me furiously knocking on my wooden desktop}, but many times during the day, both inside and outside. For the boy, it seems to be a lot of excess energy escaping his body via his mouth, like a boiler’s pressure relief valve. He emits a near-constant stream of random noises in the form of yelling nothing in particular at the top of his lungs, incoherent screaming, singing, clicking, popping, smacking, yelling at his brothers, and occasionally, being dumb enough to yell at us. We have purchased an anti-bark training collar for the dog that vibrates and beeps at her when she barks. It seems to be working. So far, I have not been able to find any such (legal) device for the boy. Advantage dog.

Eating food as fast as I can prepare it – The dog eats like an industrial suction truck, but at least I can buy a thirty-two-pound bag of her food for under thirty bucks. The boy is an avowed carnivore, just like the dog, but he eats more than she does, and his food seems to always cost way more than a dollar per pound. Advantage dog.

Rambunctiousness – Both animals have a ton of excess energy, but I can usually pair them up with each other or one of the other boys to burn it off. Draw.

Chewing up shoes – The dog will maul any unsupervised footwear she can find, sometimes even while it’s on a foot. The boy chews up shoes almost as quickly through scooter riding and general outdoor play, but he’s growing so fast, it tends to be a moot point. The only real issue with his shoe abuse is that Son Number Two gets fairly shredded hand-me-downs. (We help assuage Number Two’s concerns about this by reminding him that life isn’t fair, and to shut up.) Advantage boy.

Dog breath – they both seem to have it, but only one should. Advantage dog.

Messing up the house – They both come tearing in the house leaving a trail of muddy footprints behind them almost every day, so this aspect is a draw. They also both spread clothes and toys all over the house like it’s their job, but occasionally, under the right circumstances – usually involving threats upon his life – I can get Son Number One to pick up after himself. Slight advantage boy.


As we can clearly see from this list, it is far more enjoyable to raise a puppy than a boy. Simply getting another dog based on this evidence doesn’t make any sense, though. It would need to be a trade, ideally with a full-grown and matured dog that’s well-behaved, for my teenager. But besides the fact that no rational person would consider that a fair trade, it’s also probably illegal, so don’t even think for a second that I was seriously considering it. (Unless you know someone who could broker the deal.)

Happy birthday, Son Number One. You get to keep living here, for the time being. Now go share your dinner with the dog.

See you soon,

-Smidge


Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen


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Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Thankfulness

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, a day traditionally filled with family, love, turkey, and yelling at the ref that that pass interference call was crap.

Along with those things, as with many families, we have a tradition around the dinner table of naming the things for which we are thankful. And also, in my case, overeating.

I thought I would get my list together today, before I am too stuffed to think straight (and breathe correctly, for that matter), so this year I might come up with something to be thankful for other than Tums.

Here are a few things off the top of my head:

Gravy
Stuffing
WiFi
Peach Snapple
Ziploc bags
Teachers
Breweries large and small
Four-wheel drive
Boats
My books
Other people’s books
Libraries
Wineries
Amazon.com
Readers
Reviewers
Dr. Seuss
Dishwashers
Distilleries
Doctors
Dentists
Google
Garbage disposals
A/C in the car
AC/DC in the car
Spellcheck
Tabasco Green Pepper JalapeƱo sauce
Literacy
Indoor plumbing
Soldiers
Babies (other people’s)
How babies are made
Kids (sometimes even my own)
Puppies (other people’s)
Dogs (sometimes even my own)
Family
Friends
Pork products
Family and friends who bring pork products
Opposable thumbs
Fireworks
Deodorant
Toilets
Toilet paper
Elevators
Duct tape
Dave Barry
Forever stamps
The five-second rule
Braces (not paying for the braces, just the braces)
Pizza
Outhouses
Comedy
Fingernails
Every day it’s not windy
Salt
Water
Saltwater
Rick Riordan
Zippers
Baseball
The San Francisco Giants (most years, not this one)
Getting to be a coach
Getting to be on a couch
Fortune cookies
Traveling
That travelers’ checks (cheques?) are no longer a thing
Every day without a school project
Beef
Tacos
Nachos
Movies
Popcorn
The fact that the book is always better than the movie
Sports
Compound interest
Lifetouch School Portraits, for all the humor they bring into my life
J.K. Rowling
Any time the house doesn’t smell like boys’ shoes
Our church
When my phone works through buttons and speakers in my car
Google maps
Whoever invented the refrigerator
Costco
And most importantly, my amazing wife.


That’s probably enough for now. Feel free to steal any of those for your own tomorrow.

Have a great Thanksgiving,

-Smidge


Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen


Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Coast to Coast Dirt

It is time once again for our annual house cleaning. When my beautiful wife went back to work full-time and left me here to type away on this computer and forage the cupboards for midmorning snacks, I promised her I would handle all the cleaning.

Looking back on it, I think she probably figured I would keep the same cleaning schedule she had been maintaining. She obviously figured wrong.

We’ve had lengthy discussions on this topic, and piecing together all the information I’ve received from her over the years, I think her philosophy is that you’re supposed to clean things almost on a daily basis, so as to keep the house clean.

That makes no sense to me. If you clean every day, the house will never be dirty. Where’s the sense of accomplishment in that plan? That’s like being a cop in a town where no one ever breaks the law. Bo-ring! I don’t want to be Sheriff Andy Taylor from the sleepy little town of Mayberry. I want to be Dirty Harry Callahan from the mean streets of San Francisco. I want the house to become filthy, so when I clean it up, people actually notice.

My wife, bless her heart, doesn’t understand the Dirty Harry movies.

Even though she fails to see the brilliance of Clint Eastwood, she tends to emulate some of his scarier character traits when the house gets a little too dusty, or “disgustingly filthy,” as she calls it. Let’s just say this time of year, when the holidays approach and house guests are imminent, I am glad she’s not armed.

So, the time is upon us once again for the annual deep cleaning. It’s time for this Dirty Harry to send the filthy dirt packing, just in time for the family Thanksgiving week.

At least, it was time, until my entire house cleaning philosophy was turned upside down yesterday by an article on an art exhibit in New York City. A plucky young journalist named Kyle Chayka on a blog called The Paris Review wrote a piece about something called The Earth Room.

Foolishly, I had been concentrating all these years on removing the dirt from my house. I am an idiot. What I apparently need to do is bring more dirt in. A lot more. If I can cover the second floor of my home in a twenty-two-inch deep layer of dirt, I’m in business. If I can do that, my wife and I will never have to work again, the kids will be taken care of, and we can even hire someone to look after it for us.

How so, you ask? Simple. Fill up a second-floor home with dirt, never clean it out, and invite the public to come check it out. Duh.

Here’s a few snippets from Kyle’s column:

On SoHo’s cobblestoned Wooster Street, tucked above North Face and Lululemon boutiques stocked with neon athleisure, there is an otherwise empty, white, second-floor thirty-six-hundred-square-foot loft filled with 140 tons of dirt. It’s open to visitors from Wednesday through Sunday, noon to six P.M.

This is The New York Earth Room, an installation by the New York–based artist and musician Walter De Maria

In October 1977, the German art dealer Heiner Friedrich hosted The Earth Room as an exhibition at his gallery, which then occupied the Wooster Street space, where the dealer also lived in a front apartment. The installation was meant to last for three months, but it never left, and in 1980, Friedrich helped found the Dia Foundation, an art organization that has pledged to preserve De Maria’s work in (more or less) perpetuity. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of The Earth Room’s quiet persistence, which Dia is marking with commemorative events and ongoing exhibitions of De Maria’s work.

De Maria might have created The Earth Room, but its public face is Bill Dilworth, a sixty-three-year-old abstract painter who has been caring for the installation as its curator for the past twenty-eight years. Walk into the back office room past the glass-protected aperture that opens out onto the field and most days you’ll find Dilworth behind a high wood desk. Tall, gregarious, and preternaturally youthful (a result of dirt therapy?), he has thought more about this particular piece than just about anyone. “My life and my experience here is immersed in art, earth, quiet, and time,” he told me. “It’s a continual growth of time.”


I’m not sure if I have too much in common with Walter De Maria, but Bill Dilworth and I are like long-lost brothers. My life has been a continual growth of time as well, and both of the places we work are dirty.

De Maria called The Earth Room a “minimal horizontal interior earth sculpture.” I am now referring to my desk as a minimal horizontal interior dust sculpture.

I’m not sure how much my dust is currently worth on the open art market, but the Earth Room installation is estimated to be worth about a million dollars. A million bucks! And that’s just the dirt, not the apartment it’s in, which is undoubtedly worth more than that.

Hey, no sweat, aspiring New York artists. You want to build your own dirt room, but can’t afford the hefty price tag? I can hook you up. I have twice that much dirt in my backyard, and I’ll sell it all to you for half that price. While you’re here, I’ll even let you come inside and view the dust in my office. The admission is twenty-five dollars for adults. Seniors get a five-dollar discount, and kids ages twelve and under are half-price on Wednesdays.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go look up the words “athleisure” and “preternaturally,” and then I need to start hauling dirt upstairs.

I’ll be holding curator interviews soon, so send in your resumes now.

See you soon,

-Smidge


Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen


Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

When Life Gives You Lemons, Start a GoFundMe

I just wanted to take a quick second and update you on the fabulous progress of our lemonade stand fundraiser.

If you will recall, two months ago I started a GoFundMe page in response to the heartwarming and totally logical outpouring of support for the Berkeley, CA hot dog vendor who was running an illegal, unregulated, and most-likely unsanitary hot dog stand outside a football game. The police arrived to shut him down, and took his sixty dollars into evidence.

A nice man filmed the episode while kindly giving the police officer career advice, and then put the video on the internet and started a GoFundMe page to help the then-unnamed hot dog scofflaw with his legal expenses. Naturally, they have raised $93,000.

Not wanting to let that kind of largess pass my neighborhood by, I started my own GoFundMe to raise money for our possible legal fees if our unregulated and unsanitary lemonade stand was ever shut down by local law enforcement. And also in case we needed tacos.

You can find our ongoing fundraiser page at: https://www.gofundme.com/smidges-little-lemonade-stand-fund

Again, here’s the compelling verbiage from our campaign:

Describe who will benefit:
Me (and also my poor, deserving children, maybe)

Detail what the funds will be used for:
Possible legal expenses and loss of income if we are ever hassled by the police over business license issues.
And tacos.

Explain how soon you need the funds:
ASAP! Who knows when we could be unfairly ticketed or shut down.
Plus, we want tacos.

Talk about what the support will mean to you:
After the recent outpouring of support for the Berkeley hot dog vendor, I just figured, hey, people love to support other people who run non-licensed and totally unregulated street food operations, so your donation to this campaign will mean the world to me!

Share how grateful you will be for help:
I will be so grateful for your support, I might even "pay it forward" by giving this money (after any upcoming legal and taco expenses, of course) to my good friends at RPAL - the Roseville Police Activities League - an amazing non-profit organization that helps kids in need, and steers them in the right direction, so they don't grow up thinking they have the right to run illegal businesses.



Well, as you can imagine based on the success of the hot dog guy’s campaign, our lemonade stand fundraiser has taken off like a rocket. Thankfully, we have not incurred any stand-related legal expenses to date, and we’ve been mooching tacos off the neighbors, so just this evening we were able to present the entire amount raised thus far to the amazing folks at RPAL.

Thanks to the overwhelming generosity of good folks like you, our steamrolling juggernaut of a fundraiser has collected an astounding $49.44.

I was proud to present the oversized cardboard check to RPAL tonight at the gala awards banquet. It was tough to get a handle on all the emotions of the evening, due to the media frenzy surrounding the check presentation, but I think I kept my composure admirably.

Remember, you can find our GoFundMe page at: https://www.gofundme.com/smidges-little-lemonade-stand-fund

While we are basking in the glow of high achievement tonight, we must remember a lot of work remains to be done. We’re thrilled with our progress so far, but we’re still about $99,945.00 shy of our goal, so please continue to give generously.


Thanks for your continued support!

See you soon,

-Smidge


Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen


Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Frighteningly Safe

I hope everyone had a safe and sane Halloween last night. It is my sincere wish (as well as the wish of our National Safety Council and the American Academy of Pediatrics) that none of you or your children were injured, sickened, traumatized, frightened, scared, worried, startled, disturbed, rattled, jolted, displeased, inconvenienced, set on fire, or over-exercised last night.

You may be saying right now, “Well, yes, Smidge. As a matter of fact my children were slightly startled in one brief instance last night, and I’m still hopping mad about it.”

If that’s the case, you probably did Halloween wrong. You may not be current on all the latest Halloween safety tips and procedures. Unfortunately, that makes you a bad parent. But before Child Protective Services needs to get involved, we’ve all decided to give you one more chance next year.

Please spend the next twelve months reviewing the list below so you’re ready to be a good parent next year.

HALLOWEEN SAFETY TIPS

Select a safe area for trick-or-treating.  Choose streets that are well lighted and landscaped so you can be seen.  Avoid trick-or-treating on streets you are unfamiliar with, and try to go out before it gets dark.

Were you trick-or-treating after 3:30 P.M.? Shame on you. Did you go to the porch of a house that didn’t have perfectly manicured front hedges? That was incorrect.


Always keep the adult who is watching you in sight.  Never go into a stranger’s home while trick-or-treating.  Never get into a stranger’s car or go anywhere with a stranger.

Cross the street only at intersections and crosswalks.  Do not walk out from behind parked cars or try to cross in the middle of the block.

Did you let your kids jump into the stranger’s van to go get the candy that they forgot at their other house? That was wrong. Don’t do that. Did you cross your neighborhood streets at any place other than an intersection? You are an idiot.


Wait until you get home to eat your treats.  Your parents should inspect each item carefully, looking for needles, open packages and other signs of tampering.  Do not eat homemade items prepared by strangers.

This is equally important – If you did find needles, it is not OK to re-use them.


Plan costumes that are bright and reflective. Make sure that shoes fit well and that costumes are short enough to prevent tripping, entanglement or contact with flame.
Consider adding reflective tape or striping to costumes and trick-or-treat bags for greater visibility.

If any part of your child’s costume was a dark, non-reflective, or ill-fitting garment, your children probably already realize you don’t love them.


Because masks can limit or block eyesight, consider non-toxic makeup and decorative hats as safer alternatives. Hats should fit properly to prevent them from sliding over eyes. Makeup should be tested ahead of time on a small patch of skin to ensure there are no unpleasant surprises on the big day.

If you have found the first properly-fitting decorative hat in the history of the world, please let the rest of us know where you bought it. Any makeup or face paint that says “made in China” is radioactive. Seeking medical attention at this point is futile.


When shopping for costumes, wigs, and accessories look for and purchase those with a label clearly indicating they are flame resistant.

This is especially important, since every trick-or-treater attempts to stick his or her head inside your jack-o’-lantern, as is customary and traditional.
(Side Note: While fire retardancy is a paramount issue on All Hallows Eve, “The Flaming Wigs” would obviously be a great name for a rock band.)


Do not carry or wear sharp objects that may poke others or damage eyes.  Objects like swords, wands, canes, etc., should be left at home.  Do not carry toy guns that look like real guns.  A citizen or a police officer can mistake a toy gun for a real gun.

Did your child lose an eye last night? That plastic Harry Potter wand was the problem in that instance. Were your kids pinned down behind your neighbor’s SUV for hours in a firefight with local law enforcement officers? Next time simply leave the toy guns at home.


Carry a flashlight to light the way and to alert motorists of your presence.  Never carry candles or any other flammable object.  Do not use candles for decorations or displays.  They can easily be knocked down or can set fire to a nearby curtain or costume.

Did you set yourself, your curtains, and your neighbor’s curtains on fire last night? The candelabra you were using to light your way was the problem. Most cell phones have a flashlight app now. Look into it.


Motorists need to be extra careful on Halloween.  Watch out for careless children who may run into the street without looking.  Expect the unexpected, and anticipate the actions of others.

If you were not “expecting the unexpected” last night, I loathe you. I will spend some time making a list of all the unforeseen issues that might arise in the next year and send it to you, so that you may stop sucking at life.


Small children should never carve pumpkins. Children can draw a face with markers. Then parents can do the cutting.

Correction – No one should ever carve pumpkins. It’s a slimy, messy job that attracts fruit flies and makes your hands stink like pumpkin guts. We should all stop.


Consider using a flashlight or glow stick instead of a candle to light your pumpkin. If you do use a candle, a votive candle is safest.
Candlelit pumpkins should be placed on a sturdy table, away from curtains and other flammable objects, and not on a porch or any path where visitors may pass close by. They should never be left unattended.

In summary, a concrete and stucco porch is no place for a small flame encased inside a wet, sticky, flame-retardant gourd. Keep the fire inside your home, on a surface made entirely of combustible materials.


A good meal prior to parties and trick-or-treating will discourage youngsters from filling up on Halloween treats.

We’re not sure who wrote this, but they obviously had never met a youngster before.


Consider purchasing non-food treats for those who visit your home, such as coloring books or pens and pencils.

Definitely consider doing this if you’re tired of not having toilet paper in your trees, eggs on your house, and soap on the windows of your cars.


Hopefully this list will help you have a much safer and more enjoyable Halloween next year. I know that was a lot of information at once, but you have a whole year to study.

But if you are ever in doubt, just use common sense. You can start by asking yourself five simple questions.

Have I fastened my child to his trick-or-treat buddy with reflectorized tape?
Yes?
Great.

Is my child carrying anything other than a piece of Styrofoam that I bubble-wrapped for safety?
No?
Perfect.

Is the sun still high in the sky?
Yes?
Winning.

Are there any dangerous jack-o’-lanterns with insane open flames inside them within a two hundred-foot radius of my child?
No.
You are doing great.

Have we come into contact with any candy whatsoever?
No?
You are a great parent!

Enjoy your Halloween done right next year!

See you soon,

-Smidge


Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen


Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!