Duty-Free Shopping, Perhaps

I want to point out to the wonderful and kind folks over at the California Franchise Tax Board and the amazingly benevolent and totally cool (and not at all “universally disliked”) people at the IRS that the following tale could be completely hypothetical in nature.

Let’s just say, for the sake of telling a fun story, that my family recently traveled via our Chevrolet Suburban up to Oregon, where we have other family. We potentially traveled there to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. It was, hypothetically, a great trip!

If Son Number Two had happened to catch wind of a smokin’ deal that Verizon was having where he could somehow trade his current iPhone in as long as the screen wasn’t cracked and magically get the latest iPhone 13 for free, he would have been really excited about that.

The one catch to getting a “free” iPhone here in California with a possible Verizon program would be that you would still have to pay the sales tax on the $900 “value” (using that term ironically, Apple) of the phone. That could, in theory, run you as much as $92 in tax in some parts of the Golden State.

If Number Two happened to hear about this program the night before we left for the alleged trip, he would have been pestering me to take him to a Verizon store the minute we had a free minute. I would have buckled under his teenage endurance for pestering and taken him to a possible Verizon location close to our accommodations on Sunday.

We then might have been informed about the true nature of this hypothetically amazing deal, whereas every one of the family’s lines potentially had an $800 or $900 credit for a brand-new phone, due to our possible customer loyalty.

If that had been the case, we surely would have all arrived at that same Verizon store on Monday, fifteen or so minutes before they opened, ready to upgrade all of our phones for free. And during the ostensibly fictional transaction, we may have discovered that my wife’s phone was ineligible due to a previously unnoticed small crack in the corner of the screen.

Getting some fictional advice from a helpful Verizon employee we’ll call Mike, we would then have tracked down a brand-new older model phone, still in the box, being sold, potentially, four miles away on Facebook Marketplace, and jumped in the car to race over and buy it with cash for far less than the sales tax would have been had this alleged transaction been taking place one state to the south.

And after spending, potentially, three hours of our Monday morning at the Verizon store and/or on Janet’s porch paying cash for a phone her daughter ended up never using, we might have walked out with five top-of-the-line, brand-spankin’-new cell phones for a hypothetical grand total cost of $175 in data transfer fees and cash for Janet’s daughter’s phone she didn’t want.

I would have been very pleased, ostensibly, because what we would have avoided, in theory, was upward of $450 in California sales taxes by having this entire theoretical situation occur on the fertile soil of our friendly neighbors to the north.

And if I had purchased a new wallet-style phone case for my wife on Amazon Prime and had it shipped to our Oregon accommodations, I would have, in theory, also avoided paying any sales tax on that.

Had any of this actually taken place, rest assured that come January, I would be reporting those sales to the IRS and the California Tax Board so that I made darn sure to pay 100% of my fair share of the tax revenue they so richly deserve. But, of course, as stated, this tale is speculative. Merely a “for-instance.”

Later that week I also hypothetically put new sales tax-free tires on the Suburban. They rode, in theory, quite nicely back down south.

Duty-free has a nice relaxing hum to it.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen

 

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A Shotgun Wedding? - Repost

My wife and I celebrated our nineteenth wedding anniversary yesterday as we do most every year – on a long drive in the car with our kids and her mom. Don’t be jealous just because we know how to party!

In honor of another successful year of marriage (and another successful summer road trip), I thought I would once again regale you with the heartwarming tale about the night after the night I met my wife.

Unfortunately, the night I met my wife was fairly uneventful. (Besides the fact that I met the love of my life, of course.)

So instead, I will tell you the shocking, explosive, frightening, and downright weird tale about the following night. It’s a tale of a dive bar, a truck, a barefoot man, a policeman, a bathrobe, and a shotgun.

A guy walks into a bar. It was me. I met my wife in a bar.

That’s not the whole story. It gets better.

It was only my first or second time at this particular bar, but she had been there for thirty-two nights in a row. She and her best friend were going for a combined personal record. It was her initiative and dedication to the endeavor that drew me to her. We were both college students in San Luis Obispo, CA, and she was working at a pizza place that summer. She would get off work at midnight and meet her friend at Bull’s Tavern to shut the place down. We met one evening, talked until closing, and said goodnight.

I thought she was really neat-o, so having heard about their record-breaking attendance goal, I had a good idea of where I might find her again the next evening. After missing her a few times, between the bar and the pizza place, we finally connected, and had another delightful evening of bar-booth conversation. This was the kind of bar where “delightful conversation” means you sat in a red Naugahyde booth, taking turns shouting into each other’s ears, in an attempt to carry on a conversation over the AC/DC blaring out of the jukebox.

After the last-call light came on at two A.M. – this was back when we could stay up until two A.M. – we walked back to the pizza place where my truck was parked, and carried on our conversation in the cab of my Ford F150. By about three A.M. I had convinced her that kissing me wouldn’t be so bad, and just when I was about to plant one on her, a sonic boom came rolling down the street. It would have been much cooler if we had heard the explosion as we kissed, but you just can’t plan for these kinds of things.

She said, and I quote, “That sounded like a twelve-gauge!”

I replied, scoffing-ly, “There is no way that was a twelve-gauge shotgun. It was probably just a car backfiring.” In my head I was thinking, Cool. She knows her shotguns. But that couldn’t have been a shotgun.

Roughly four minutes later a barefoot man in a bathrobe came walking down the street carrying a twelve-gauge shotgun.

Now, if I can paint the scene for you - It is past three o’clock in the morning, and the town has completely shut down. We are the only car parked on the street, directly across from the pizza parlor. The only other car that we can see belongs to a police officer who is parked in a parking lot across the intersection from the pizza place. The police officer is standing outside of his car, chatting with a man on a bicycle. They have apparently not heard the big bang and seem very relaxed. The pizza place is located on the corner of the intersection, and the man in the bathrobe with the heavy artillery is walking past the pizza place, toward the cop, but neither one of them can see the other yet. We are parked across the street and have a clear view of both of them, and a pretty good idea of what is about to happen. Between the five of us, we are the only people still awake in the whole town, and two of us are a whole lot more awake than we were a minute ago.

The bathrobe-clad gentlemen rounded the corner and came into view of the police officer, and they saw each other at about the same time. We were positioned at just the wrong angle, so when the cop drew his weapon, he was pointing it right at us. We both did that thing where you slide down below the dashboard in case the bullets start flying, but foolishly keep your head up high enough to see, because you don’t want to miss the action.

The policeman immediately started asking the nice man to kindly set his shotgun down. By “kindly asking,” I mean he instantly began shouting, “Drop the #$*%&@ gun right now! Drop it, #$@*&%!!!” I thought he was handling himself very well given the surprising circumstance he had just found himself in. The bicyclist he had been talking to before the rude interruption did something that still to this day I cannot believe, even though I saw it with my own two barely-visible-above-the-dashboard eyes. He dropped his bike to the ground and fit himself completely underneath the front bumper of the police cruiser. Next time you see an old 1990s police cruiser, take a look at the ground clearance. I think it might have been Houdini himself in that bike helmet.

Well, the nice man with the twelve-gauge didn’t drop his gun right away. He just sort of stood there, trying to have a conversation with the cop. He was holding the gun at a forty-five-degree angle toward the ground, not exactly pointing it at the cop, but not exactly pointing it away from him, either. As the police officer walked closer and closer to the man, yelling commands louder and louder, I was sure we were about to witness something very unpleasant on what had, otherwise, been a really nice night.

Thankfully, for everyone involved, the man finally decided to set his shotgun gently on the ground, and seconds later, the police officer set his knee not-so-gently on the man’s neck, and the standoff was over. As Captain Bathrobe was led to the police car and Harry Houdini extricated himself from underneath the Caprice Classic, I started the truck and drove my date home in stunned silence.

Fortunately, she didn’t hold the incident against me, and we continued to see each other. We searched the local paper for two weeks straight after that night for some mention of the incident, partially to prove to people that we weren’t making it up, but mostly to find out for ourselves what we had seen. Why was there a man firing a shotgun in sleepy, downtown San Luis Obispo, and why was he then walking the streets with that shotgun, barefoot, in a bathrobe? We never found a single mention of it, and to this day, have no idea what happened.

We graduated, parted ways, and met again six years later at a mutual college friend’s housewarming party. We have been together ever since.

After meeting her father, I finally understood her knowledge of shotguns. And after getting to know my father-in-law, I had a strong suspicion that he and my wife might have known more about that night than they were letting on. He was a great guy, and he may have been accused a time or two of being “slightly overprotective” of his only daughter.

Now, he certainly wasn’t a bathrobe type of guy, but he did own a number of twelve-gauge shotguns, and if he was in town visiting and staying at a hotel, he would have had easy access to a nice terrycloth robe.

Where exactly was he that night? Out looking for his little girl, perhaps?

She still claims it wasn’t him, but she always smiles when she says it. And after questioning, he was never able to produce a good alibi. I remain skeptical.

I also remain very thankful to have lived through that night and been able to celebrate nineteen amazing years of marriage.

Happy anniversary, baby!

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen

 

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An Open Letter to the Chevrolet Engineering Group

Dear Chevrolet Engineering Group,

I am in the middle of a series of very, very long family road trips this summer. I just spent eighteen days in our Chevrolet Suburban with my wife, mother-in-law, and three teenage sons. We traveled over 4000 miles across the southwestern United States in just under 600,000 hours.

We’re back on the road again now for the second trip of the summer. Yesterday a wildfire had forced the closure of our highway, which added two hours to what would have already been an eight-hour drive. We had to take a few “scenic byways,” one of which was getting restriped, so six hours into the drive we got to spend a half hour driving exactly eight miles an hour behind a paint truck. Did I mention the whole family was in the car?

Situations like that can cause a man to start thinking. Deep thinking about a number of different subjects. Like whether or not your life insurance policy would still be payable to your family if you faked your own death successfully. And how best to go about faking your own death while on a road trip. And car design.

This brings us to the reason for today’s letter. I have a few ideas for improving the Suburban.

I’m sure when you all designed the interior of the eight-passenger SUV, you were mostly concerned about leg room, cup holders, seat belts, etc. That’s all well and good, but let’s dive a little deeper. You gave us eight seats, but who’s in those seats? Answering that question opens a lot more possibilities for design improvements and add-ons.

For instance, in my case, three of the back seats are being occupied by my teenage sons. This is where a targeted individual seat Taser system would come in very handy. After the first zap or two, I suspect all I would need to do is hover my finger over the Taser control panel to get one of them to remove his hand from the other’s throat.

And why is everyone in the car so close to me? The Suburban is long, and that's great, but can we make it longer? I'm talking six, maybe even seven or eight rows. I’m talking long enough that an intercom system would be required. I don’t care about parking. We can gas up at truck stops.

How about an individual seat belt locking system, accessed with a password, to go along with the Taser control panel? I would like the option to lock one, two, or all of the seatbelts so I can get out of the car and no one can follow me, in case I need some alone time.

And how about one of those glass limousine partitions behind my driver seat? The only controls for it would be up front, of course, and it would obviously need to be soundproof. The option for clear glass as well as blackout glass would be great.

Come to think of it, that glass partition needs to be airtight as well as soundproof. This would solve some obvious problems and also open us up to a bunch of new ideas.

Teenage boys smell, so just closing it would be beneficial in many cases, but what if we added an aggressive air freshener option? Close the partition and nuke the back with a Febreze bomb! That’s what we need.

And as long as we’re exploring gas deploying technology, why not a menu setting for choosing a mild sleeping gas? Nothing major. Just enough to knock out four to six adults for a few hours. Quiet time for the driver at the push of a button.

I think that would be a top selling option on the new and improved Extended Length Family Road Trip Edition Suburban.

We just need to make sure that partition is really airtight. Eight miles an hour is already enough to make you want to nod off.

Thanks for your attention. I look forward to seeing the new improvements.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Google Maps Timeline Alert

From: Google Maps Timeline

Date: May 8^th, 2020

Re: Your April 2020 Update

This Timeline email is an automated summary of places you’ve been, which may be fewer this month due to the COVID-19 response in your area.

Here’s your new Timeline update!

You visited (1) city and visited (17) places

You traveled (110) miles, totaling (8) hours

Hmm, looks like you’re staying close to home and following COVID quarantine guidelines. Thanks for doing your part. We’ll all get through this together. Stay safe!

 

 

 

From: Google Maps Timeline

Date: May 8^th, 2021

Re: Your April 2021 Update

This Timeline email is an automated summary of places you’ve been, which may be fewer this month due to the COVID-19 response in your area.

Here’s your new Timeline update!

You visited (4) cities and visited (37) places

You traveled (460) miles, totaling (26) hours

Well, it’s been a year and it looks like you are getting out a little more. That’s great, but let’s all remember that we are still being advised to limit our travel to only the necessary trips. Take care!

 

 

 

 

From: Google Maps Timeline

Date: June 6^th, 2021

Re: Your May 2021 Update

This Timeline email is an automated summary of places you’ve been, which may be fewer this month due to the COVID-19 response in your area.

Here’s your new Timeline update!

You visited (6) cities and visited (56) places

You traveled (800) miles, totaling (54) hours

OK, let’s all remember that we’re not out of the woods yet. We still need to get a lot of people vaccinated before we can put this thing behind us, and you seem to be getting out quite a bit more. Looks like it’s mostly carpool type stuff between school and home, but we see you’re taking more trips out of town as well. Be aware that we all haven’t been advised that unnecessary travel is OK yet. Take care!

 

 

 

From: Google Maps Timeline

Date: June 23^rd, 2021

Re: Emergency June 2021 Intervention

This Timeline email is an automated summary of places you’ve been, which may be fewer this month due to the COVID-19 response in your area.

Emergency June Timeline update!

You visited (54) cities and visited (232) places, a lot of which we’re not even sure were actual places.

You traveled (4385) miles in just the last 18 days, totaling more hours than we could count, even with our giant supercomputers.

We really need to check in with you! You seem to have gone crazy. We have record of you being at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, so “bat guano crazy” might be a real possibility for you.

Look, man, Carlsbad is so hell-and-gone in the corner of New Mexico that there is no way you can convince us that was necessary. And speaking of unnecessary – the Roswell, New Mexico International UFO Museum? Really, bro?

You also stopped in a place called Cuba, New Mexico. Not sure what business you could have had there, but we have record of a post from your wife, laughing about “peeing in Cuba,” so it doesn’t seem like it was a work-related visit.

Speaking of peeing, we also have record of a post about your whole family peeing “on the middle of Hoover Dam.” We certainly hope there was a restroom involved.

Capital Reef National Park in Utah? How could that have been essential? According to our maps, there is no actual way to even get there from anywhere. We don’t even know what that place is. A reef in the middle of Utah? Sure, pal!

And what the hell is Dead Horse Point State Park? That sounds cheery. Looks like it is near Canyonlands National Park in Utah, but who has ever even heard of that place. Why, man? Why?

And then there were a bunch of places we thought you had just accidentally dropped your phone until we realized you were staying there.

Taft, California?

Glendale, Utah?

Primm, Nevada?

Dolores, Colorado?

I mean, what could possibly be in a place called Dolores, Colorado that you needed to go to? A cattle ranch? An alfalfa field? Besides being close-ish to Mesa Verde National Park, those seem to be the only two things happening in Dolores, according to our satellites.

Look, we’re glad you’re home safe and sound, but you need to settle down. Based on your phone movement, it doesn’t look like you’ve even left your living room today, so that’s a step in the right direction.

We also want to take this opportunity to introduce a new feature of Google Maps Timeline – the Family Factor Adjusted Equivalent Milage Calculator. Your actual map milage in the last three weeks was over 4300 miles, but based on the fact that your wife, children, and mother-in-law were in the car with you, that is the equivalent of driving across the United States, coast-to-coast, 78 times.

Congratulations on a record year!

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen

 

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I Herd You're on Vacation

We are still on our road trip. Our long, long, long road trip. So far, we have seen every national park in the entire United States, and somehow, there are four more left on the schedule we haven’t been to yet.

Our family travel agent, aka my beautiful wife, is very good at her job. She is a master of finding us unique and interesting places to stay. With six of us (remember – try to curb your jealousy – my mother-in-law is with us), hotels are really not an option, financially. Also, our teenage boys, when confined together in small spaces, become feral beasts that can easily get us banned from entire hotel chains.

Thankfully, because of the existence of Airbnb and Vrbo, we are still able to travel. And as educational as our tour of the gas stations and national parks of the southwest has been for the boys, our Airbnb experiences have been even more so.

One case in point was the animal husbandry aspect of our rental property in Glendale, Utah. Our Airbnb was described as “a rustic farmhouse” on a ranch. Upon arrival, it became apparent that our accommodations were actually in a barn. The inside of the barn had been renovated to look and act just like a regular old house, complete with non-barn stuff like a working kitchen and bathroom and beds and such.

The outside of the barn, however, had not been moved from its original pasture-side barn location, so the twenty-five head of cattle (that’s ranch talk for a bunch of cows), would still instinctively come to our house every evening around dusk. And by “come to our house,” I mean walk up to the raised, covered concrete porch we were sitting on, and stand right next to it, so that, if there was no fence separating us, I would have been able to step off the porch and walk across their backs. (I was told that would not go well, so I did not attempt it, no matter how tempted I might have been.)

We would retreat into our housebarn at night, and the cows would sleep six feet from our front door. Literally six feet. You don’t get that at a major hotel chain. You also don’t get the chance to spend a late afternoon on the porch, smelling fresh cow poop and pondering with your family whether the cow that was continually mounting the other cows was in fact a cow (female) and not a bull (male), and if so, why a cow would do that.

Staying at the Hilton almost never presents the opportunity to Google “why would a female cow mount another cow?” and I would venture a guess that no one at a Marriott ever learned about the phenomenon of female cows “bulling” when one or more of them are in “oestrus,” or to use the technical scientific term, “ready for some action.”

I gotta tell you, if you are sitting around the pool at the Hyatt with your family, instead of counting how many times Mocha Latte Cow has mounted Dark Brown Cow versus how many times she has mounted Small Tan Cow, and theorizing why she is focusing so much of her energy on Dark Brown Cow, you are really missing out.

On something…

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen

 

Your new favorite T-shirt is at SmidgeTees

Your new favorite book is from SmidgeBooks

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Can You Desert a Road Trip?

We are on a road trip. For many, many days, spanning many, many miles.

Many.

I don't want you to be jealous, but our first leg was over five hours and we ended up in Taft, California. What's that? You haven't heard of Taft, California? That's not really much of a surprise.

You don’t go through Taft unless you are going there on purpose, so no one ever goes there. It's the kind of town where you stay at THE hotel and eat at THE restaurant.

We stopped at the Taft hardware store to buy some duct tape and when the woman at the register asked me how I was doing, I said, "Living the dream."

She laughed out loud and said, "Yeah, right. In Taft?"

Why Taft, you might be asking, like the lady at the hardware store apparently asks herself every day? Taft exists solely because of oil. When you drive into and out of Taft, you drive past forests of oil derricks on both sides of the road. Some are pumping. Some are still. All of them are stained dark brown. The whole town is the same hue – crude oil brown.

My wife's grandfather worked the oil fields in Taft as a young married man, and my mother-in-law lived there when she was little. She wanted to see the town again.

Oh, did I not mention that my mother-in-law is with us on this long, long, long road trip? Like I said, I don't want you to be jealous.

We stopped in Taft for an overnight and went to the West Kern Oil Museum. Again, please attempt to curb your jealousy. Does the West Kern Oil Museum have an exact life size rebuilt replica of the Old Jameson #17 wooden derrick, you ask? You can bet your sweet ass it does! What color is that derrick, you ask? Crude oil brown, of course. It is located in Taft, California, after all.

I was kidding about the only one restaurant thing, though. There are actually two. We ate dinner at the other one – the Black Gold Brewing Company. They serve their own brewed beers, cook burgers, steaks, and Thai food, and sell guns and ammo. I am not making that up.

Speaking of places that are both crazy and all brown, after we’d had so much fun in Taft we couldn’t stand it anymore, we drove another five hours through the God-forsaken Mojave desert to the depression in the Nevada desert where they keep Las Vegas, for some reason.

Las Vegas happens to be on the way to all the Southwestern national parks that are the actual reason for this road trip, and when my wife was planning the route, she thought it would be cool if we took the boys to see Matt Franco, a magician that they all liked from America’s Got Talent, season 217.

So, she booked us for two nights in Vegas, but when it later came time to get the Matt Franco tickets, it turned out that we would have to choose financially between having two and a half of us go see the show and then live out the rest of our lives in Taft, or do the whole road trip and see all the parks.

So, instead of a magic show, we saw an acrobatic gymnast act and two juggling plate spinners for free at the Circus Circus midway. Both acts were really solid, but just to make sure our boys got the full flavor of Vegas, we spent an entire morning walking the length of the strip to show them why staying in school and not doing drugs is important.

I’m not sure if it was the two fights on the sidewalk, or the homeless woman bathing in a fountain at the Venetian that did it, but they all promised to stay clean and get a good education. I’ll bet Franco doesn’t offer that kind of impact from his little magic show!

We escaped Vegas with our lives and most of our dignity and drove through – you guessed it – more God-forsaken desert. But we made it to Zion National Park yesterday, and as you enter the park the landscape changes almost instantly from hellish desert to red rock canyons and rivers, like nothing you’ve ever seen. The scenery is so breathtaking it can almost make you forget you ever stayed in Taft or saw a homeless fountain bather on the strip.

Almost.

The next two weeks promise to be a whirlwind of long car rides and more amazing sites, and I’ll give you another update or two if I live through it all.

Until then, stay in school and stay off the drugs, kids.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen

 

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An Open Letter to the School District

Dear folks in charge of the decision making down at the School District,

It has come to my attention that you are still planning to have “spring break” next week. I am writing to ask that you seriously reconsider that plan, because frankly, it’s stupid.

Spring break is meant to be a time of joy – a time to “break away” from the harsh rigors of school and the grueling six whole weeks of continuous study we’ve had to endure since ski week in February.

That would be great and all, if we could leave the house, but there’s a little viral wrench in the works this year. I know you know about it, because you guys send me six or seven emails a day expressly telling me that you are aware of the situation, you are proud of how you’re handling it, and you care deeply about my family’s health and safety.

Well, Mr. and Mrs. School District, I’m not a hundred percent sure that last part is correct. Do you really care?

You see, the governor has told us that we’re not allowed to go anywhere or do anything. I’m not sure if you school district big wigs got special travel dispensation, but the rest of us are supposed to remain locked inside our houses for the foreseeable future, which most certainly includes your so-called “spring break” next week.

Even if we could leave the house and go somewhere, all the places we were planning to go have closed. Exactly what are we supposed to do with our children on this “spring break” of yours? Take them to the grocery store? Nope. I’m pretty sure that’s not allowed under state law anymore.

Field trip to the Chevron? “Hey, kids, let’s go get gas! Stay in the car, though. Maybe if you’re good we’ll go through the car wash.”

I don’t think so, and these scenarios are what make me skeptical about your claim that you care about the health and safety of my family. Health includes mental health, and the only thing keeping our mental health even remotely intact right now is the existence of some sort of school schedule for our three boys.

Now, I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that homeschooling is going well. It’s not. It’s not even going remotely well. But at the very least, their online schoolwork is an activity they’re required to accomplish during the day. That means they stay busy for at least part of the day, and more importantly, out of our hair and off of each other. Some days it may only be for fifteen or twenty minutes, but it’s something.

And if you cared at all about their safety, you’d definitely cancel this whole spring break nonsense. Have you people even ever seen two testosterone-y teenage boys and their crazy twelve-year-old brother caged up inside a house with nothing to do? If not, have you ever seen footage of a prison riot? Same thing.

We, as their parents, genuinely fear for their safety, because if they don’t kill each other, my wife and I might just finish the job. Possibly as early as day two. They are that annoying.

And please don’t suggest to me that we should let them play more video games. Screen time is not the answer if you are truly concerned about their health. Screen time is the answer if we’re looking to have them rapidly oscillate between lobotomized drooling and hyperactive insanity, but that’s not exactly the picture of mental health now, is it?

And don’t try to give me any nonsense about the hard-working teachers needing a break. My wife is one of those hard-working teachers, and she is not looking for a break from her students – she’s looking for a break from her own kids. Spring “break” will be the exact opposite of that.

A vast majority of our district teachers are in the same boat. They have kids, too. It’s not an excessive burden on them to teach through what would have been the break. They are all helping keep each other’s kids busy during the day. It’s a circle of life kinda deal.

And the teachers in our district who don’t have kids at home need to keep working just as much, but for a different reason. They’ve had to quickly ramp up to online teaching the past few weeks, and they’re as stressed out as the rest of their colleagues. Normally, a break would do them a world of good, if they were actually able to travel. However, if you make them stay home with nothing to do, they are just going to develop severe drinking problems.

Restaurants are allowed to deliver alcohol now! That’s not good. These teachers are trapped inside like the rest of us, and the fact that they still have to go to work each day, albeit in their pajamas, is the only thing keeping them from slipping off the edge. If you take away the responsibility of needing to be coherent during the day, it’s going to be a nine A.M. margarita-fueled disaster zone.

So, I beg you, for the good of all mankind in our district, please stop the inevitable spring break madness before it even begins. You can even take full credit for the great idea of “pushing on with valuable learning during these unprecedented times to maintain fluid educational continuity,” or however you want to word it to make yourselves sound amazing. You guys are good at that.

Just please, please don’t make me have to buy a monthly pass at the Chevron drive-thru car wash for field trips. I fear we’ll scrub off the Suburban’s entire top coat of paint just trying to keep our sanity next week without a school schedule.

Yours in educational excellence through continued partnership,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

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Freedom from WiFi

We are traveling on summer vacation right now. It’s hard. It used to be a lot easier before we had all this technology.

We have three main issues that are taking up most of our time and energy: charging cords, cell signals, and WiFi.

Our three-week vacation apparently required a bag of charging cords the size of a basketball, conveniently tangled and knotted into the shape of an actual basketball. We somehow managed to get them all loose as the miles clicked off, which was a mistake. After two weeks on the road, the boys have managed to get us down to two cords between the five of us. I have confiscated mine. The rest of the family is on their own. It’s like four dogs scrapping for a single pork chop.

Our trip centered around going to Yellowstone National Park, which the government inconveniently placed in the middle of the wilderness. And in order to get there, you have to drive through miles and miles of wilderness that isn’t even associated with the park. It’s a lot of wilderness.

The end result of all that wilderness is a distinct lack of cell coverage. And on top of all that, we just added Son Number One to the cell plan, so ninety-five percent of our data is immediately sucked into the teenager data void. I already upgraded our plan to unlimited texts, because my wife knows more than two people, but I can’t bring myself to go to unlimited data. We have Verizon, and they want what amounts to a monthly mortgage payment on a large house for the privilege of having unlimited data.

On the plan we can afford without moving into a refrigerator box, we are allowed 8 GB of data between all of us. A GB of data is a mysterious unit of measure that fluctuates wildly in size depending on many factors, all of which are controlled by Verizon. It can equal as much as five full days of web browsing some months, and as little as five seconds of a video the next month. We never know which it will be, so consequently, WiFi is our best friend.

Before the advent of WiFi, when traveling, you checked into a new place, unpacked a little, then went to explore the area. Now, we check in and everyone explores their immediate area for the little sheet of paper that tells us the WiFi name and password. Then comes the gathering of the devices – phones, Kindles, iPads, laptops. Then I spend the next two hours either putting all the devices on the WiFi, or repeating the WiFi password (proudweasel264) about a million times to those trying to do it themselves, while they complain that it’s not working, which it doesn’t, when you spell it “weezal.”

The closer we got to Yellowstone, the sparser the cell signals became, and the more rare the WiFi became, until we found ourselves in a hellish three-day period in a house in the woods near West Yellowstone with absolutely no WiFi, and one single fluctuating bar of cell service, which was just enough to make your phone think it might be able to do something, then eventually give up.

We have worked our way back westward toward civilization and are now spending the Fourth of July holiday week with more extended family in a very big, very modern house in Sunriver, Oregon. It had great WiFi… on Monday.

Yesterday, it left a little to be desired. By ten in the morning I was on the phone with the rental agency to let them know that the WiFi had quit and my attempts to reset the cable modem had failed. They patched me into a call with Bend Broadband, who promptly led me through the very same troubleshooting steps I had taken myself, then shrugged on the other end of the phone and said they would need to send out a technician. On Friday. Between one and five o’ clock.

I guess wilderness is not the only obstacle to a reliable connection.

But I can’t complain. Not having WiFi has been very freeing. It has freed me from the confines of the house and the vacation activities.

The folks at this Starbucks all say hello.

Have a great Independence Day enjoying your freedom. Happy Birthday, America!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2019 Marc Schmatjen

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

Yellowstone, Red Face, Purple Feet

We are in the middle of our epic family road trip adventure to Yellowstone National Park (Motto: America’s Hot Tub, with Bears).

Everything hurts as I write this – my back, my face, my knees, my feet, my wallet – everything. 

Yellowstone is the nation’s largest national park, covering ninety-eight percent of the lower forty-eight states, and much of Canada. On our first day in the park we entered through the South Gate, which is in Arkansas, and exited though the West Gate, located on the Oregon coast.

One thing you don’t realize about Yellowstone until it’s too late is that the entire park is above thirty thousand feet in elevation. Not only is there very little oxygen to share with your fellow hikers, but there is way too much sun.

Yellowstone is tricky, however, and fools you into forgetting about the sun by giving you late June temperatures in the low teens and sixty mile per hour winds.

In addition to a wicked sunburn that hurts my face, I also can’t feel my feet anymore. Besides sitting in the car for forty-eight hours, waiting to make a left turn into a particular geyser’s parking lot, once you find a parking spot a few days later, the geyser is still six or seven hours away on foot. They should really warn you that flip flops are not the way to go.

I tried to suggest wider roads and drive-thru geysers to one of the rangers, but he said something about fragile geothermal areas, blah, blah, and I tuned out.

I also suggested to another ranger that they put the geysers on a more regular schedule to make planning your day easier. I mean, Yellowstone boasts eighty percent of the world’s geysers, and the only one they have on any kind of a schedule is Old Faithful. And they can’t even seem to nail the time down on that one to anything closer than a twenty-minute window!

As far as all the other ones go, you walk three hundred miles to see the geyser and it might not even geys! That can be disappointing for the kids, and lead the adults to wish that each geyser had a bar, which is another suggestion that the rangers seemed to dismiss a little too quickly. I’m not too sure about these people.

In addition to all the geysers, they keep quite a few animals in the park, not the least of which is the grizzly bear. I’m not sure why they think keeping dangerous bears near all the human tourists is a good idea, but then I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, based on how the rangers dismissed all my reasonable suggestions for park improvements.

My theory is that they keep the bears in the park to boost sales of bear-repelling pepper spray. Bear spray is like really industrial strength Mace, and comes in a pressurized spray cannister the size of a soda can. I’m not sure how much Mace costs, but bear spray retails in the park for a little under five thousand dollars an ounce.

But you can’t put a price on the safety of your family, and by “you” in this case I mean my wife. I can put a price on our safety, and it’s well below five thousand dollars an ounce, but my wife strongly disagreed. And she strongly disagreed with that look. You guys know the look. So now we own bear spray.

Thankfully, the bear spray cannister remains fully charged after our first day in the park, which is much more than I can say for myself or any of my lobster-red family.

Now if you will excuse me, I’m going to go ice half my body and apply heat to the other half. I’ll catch up with you after we get done with our National Park adventure. Hopefully I will still have a full can of bear spray that I can sell to you, cheap. I’ll let you have it for the low price of only three thousand dollars an ounce.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2019 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!

Psychic Travel Log, Volume IV

We leave tomorrow on a two-week family vacation. We are taking a road trip halfway across the United States to Yellowstone National Park to see hot smelly water shoot out of the ground at inexplicably regular intervals.

I’m really not sure what we were thinking. I mean, Yellowstone sounds amazing, but we have to get there first. And we have to get home. And we’ll all be in the same car. Together.

We’ve been home, all together, for the past couple weeks, ever since the schools were rude enough to tell us not to send our kids there anymore. Our house is over three thousand square feet in size, not including the garage and backyard, and yet our children cannot seem to find enough space to stay off each other’s nerves. Or ours.

They are, quite simply, really annoying. Two of them are teenagers, which means they are permanently in a bad mood. The other one is a teenager catalyst. Son Number Three is the vinegar to their teenage baking soda. It’s a burbling mess when they are together.

So, in a moment of complete stupidity, we have decided to reduce their available square footage from three thousand down to roughly ten. That should go smoothly.

Since I will probably be a sobbing mess, or heavily medicated, during the non-driving hours, I anticipate being unable to keep an accurate travel log. Instead, I have once again channeled my psychic powers of clairvoyance to envision exactly what the trip will be like, in order to write the travel log beforehand…

Day 1 – Rocklin to Winnemucca, Nevada – We threatened the children with their very lives seven times before we even reached I-80 (six blocks). We stopped the car in Reno and made the kids run laps around the Atlantis Casino while my wife and I went inside and ro-sham-bo’d to see which one of us got cocktails. I lost. Nevada is hell. Winnemucca is every bit as magical as it sounds.

Day 2 – Winnemucca, Nevada to Salt Lake City, Utah – Correction: Nevada is worse than hell. The boys are taking turns to keep up a continuous stream of complaints and everything is ugly and brown. During a lunch disagreement I was hit in the back of the head with a flying turkey and cheese sandwich. Eventually the three boys got into a full-on fist fight in the car and we just let it go, because it was our only hope to break up the soul-crushing monotonous boredom of I-80.

In an unforeseen turn of events, Utah is even worse than Nevada because the road is completely straight. There is literally nothing to do - not even steer. I set a Chevrolet Suburban land speed record while everyone was asleep after the melee. An hour later, I fell asleep for fifteen minutes and it didn’t matter. The road is that straight. Boring is no longer an adequate word. After approximately three months of driving we made it to Salt Lake City. Mormons everywhere. We fit right in in our Suburban.

Day 3 – Salt Lake City, Utah to West Yellowstone, Montana – We have left I-80. We are now on I-15. That is the single most exciting thing that has happened on this trip so far. My wife bought a blackout sleeping mask and $8,000 noise-cancelling headphones from a Best Buy in Salt Lake City and has completely checked out of the vacation. I do not blame her. It’s every man for themselves now. We made it to West Yellowstone by making two of the three boys ride on the roof rack for the last seventy-five miles. It was the only way.

Day 4 – Yellowstone National Park – We drove directly to Old Faithful, which only took eight hours, since our line of six thousand cars drove three and a half miles an hour in between bison traffic jams. The boys complained that the buffalo weren’t exciting enough. We took a picture of an elk. Everyone fought over the camera. The camera broke. We missed Old Faithful by three minutes and had to wait sixty-one minutes to see it again. Those were the nicest sixty-one minutes of the trip, because we were all waiting one hundred yards apart around the perimeter of the geyser.

Old Faithful was amazing. Then we had to get back in the car. Two million buffalo later we were back at the hotel. My wife and I had a long talk that lasted thirty-five seconds, and we decided that we had definitely seen all the good stuff already.

Day 5 – Yellowstone National Park to Idaho Falls, Idaho – After a drive that I have permanently blocked out of my memory, we sold the Suburban for well below market value in Idaho Falls and purchased plane tickets home, with all five seats in different rows.

The boys are home now, and my wife and I are at an undisclosed hotel where they can’t find us.

Happy summer travels, everyone!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2019 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!