Just a Smidge: July 2024

Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Are You People In-Seine?

The Paris Olympics are in full swing, and many of us have mostly gotten over the opening ceremonies by now.

If you missed the torrential regatta, you were one of the lucky ones. Here’s a brief recap:

Paris apparently cut off all communications early with the International Olympic Committee regarding the opening ceremony plans. Then they assembled a planning and project management committee consisting of the Parks and Rec department, the maritime academy, and a homeless guy named Pierre.

“Why have the opening ceremonies where the athletes can all be together and the people of the world can clearly see them, in a comfortable environment such a giant Olympic stadium of some sort?” they asked. “That’s so sensible and traditional. We have a river.”

So, the athletes arrived to nowhere on boats. They just motored on the Seine in what can only be described as a hurricane without as much wind. I know France cannot be blamed for the rain, but somehow, it’s still their fault.

While the athletes got to mingle with no one except whomever was also on their boat, other people along a three-mile (or 67-kilometer) route got to experience live music and dancing, and people up on poles, swinging in the wind. They did not get to see the athletes, however, since the Olympic games are not about them.

Then the big finale began. A floating rock came up the river with a flaming piano and a seasick singer belting out “Imagine” and later, most of her dinner.

Then a silver, caped, Olympic antihero rode up the Seine on a weird chrome mechanical horse on top of a submarine. Her cape was the Olympic flag, and she was charged with bringing it approximately seven miles along the three-mile route.

After an hour of riding on top of a very visible invisible submarine, the rider got on a real horse and rode under the Eiffel Tower. Then she got off that horse and walked, ever so slowly, up a 2000-kilometer stage, shaped like the Eiffel Tower.

The tower shot lasers. The slowest rider/walker on Earth delivered the flag to some people who did not have the Olympic flame. Where was the flame? Was it extinguished by the rain?

No! Hats off to the Olympic torch designers, because that thing apparently can’t be put out by mere monsoons. We catch up with the flame back on a boat! Another damn boat? Yes, and it’s going the wrong way, opposite the athletes, who are still waiting to see Lady Gaga and have no idea any of this is happening.

Everyone who is not on a boat is under the Eiffel Tower wondering who the weird flag lady is and getting hyped for a Celine Dion concert. The athletes are not invited.

Neither is the flame. It goes on a boat to where no one is.

When they finally dock the flame at a city park of some kind, it gets carried approximately two and a half feet each by 600 people before it reaches a 100-year-old French cyclist, now on four wheels, in a wheelchair. He rolls it to two other people, but at this point, no one has the capacity to care who they are or why they are qualified to be there.

The unnamed duo walks the flame across a gangplank to a balloon and together hold the flame up to the cheers of tens of people.

Then they light the Olympic cauldron, and the cauldron lifts off and brings a massive flame high above the city. Any living French person over 85 years old, including our cyclist, has a PSTD-induced heart attack.

Far away from the flame or any of the athletes, whose boats were last seen entering the English Channel, Celine Dion sings in French, as if she had been speaking French her whole life. The crowd of non-athletes and non-flame-bearers goes insane.

Everyone, including the broadcasters, are confused about whether it's over, until an unfortunate gust from the storm breaks the flaming balloon’s tether. It is last seen heading toward the North Sea over Belgium.

Meanwhile, the surfing competition concludes in Tahiti, because they are thirteen days ahead of Paris time.

France publicly apologizes to Lebron James, and finally ends the opening ceremonies by formally surrendering to the athletes from the Trinidad and Tobago ski boat, the only country to make landfall on French soil from the Seine flotilla.

Thankfully, the English Navy was able to rescue a majority of the remaining athletes, and the rest of the games are under way!

Go ‘Merica!

See you soon,

-Smidge

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Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Whole-House Fan Fan - Repost

Our air conditioner is going strong.

*sound of me knocking on every piece of wood in a six-block radius*

It has been running continuously for four weeks straight – and I mean the 24/7 kind of continuously – minus a four-day period when we were able to turn it off to go out of town. I’m not going to lie – I was a little afraid to hit the off switch. I thought about just leaving it on and eating an insanely unnecessary electric bill for fear of upsetting any delicate balance that may be going on inside the old unit.

By the grace of God it came back on and we remain cool here inside our house that seems to be located on the surface of the sun at the moment. In order to appreciate how blessed we are right now, I decided to re-read what I wrote about almost exactly ten years ago, when we weren’t so fortuitous.

I thought you might want to read it too, so here it is. And if you happen to be currently going through the same thing we were ten years ago, I sincerely hope that you

a) have a whole-house fan, and

b) don’t get murdered by your significant other.

Stay cool, and enjoy.

August 6, 2014

Two weeks ago I wrote about how I failed to fix our broken air conditioner, but on the plus side, managed NOT to barbeque myself with giant exposed electrical cables while doing some amateur and ill-advised work in our electrical panel. All good news aside, I am sad to report that our air conditioner is still broken.

I’m not going to lie to you. It has been rough here. Tensions are high. Nerves are frayed. Wits are at their end.

It is hot inside our house.

We have been without A/C for almost three weeks now, and unfortunately for us, those three weeks have been some of the hottest on record here in Northern California. Other places might have been hot as well, but I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t care. I am afraid to turn on the TV for fear that it will either heat up the house even more or explode.

All I can tell you is our family would not do well in an equatorial country. Last Friday it was 109 degrees outside. Through the miracle of sagging and worn R40 insulation, it was only 94 degrees in our bedroom when we went to bed. Actually, I should say when I went to bed. My wife was sleeping downstairs where it was only 89 degrees. On Saturday morning she threatened to leave me and the kids and go stay at a friend’s house. She had a crazy look in her eyes. “You guys can’t come. There’s only room for me.”

I guess information, whether good or bad, is always handy to have. I now know that our cohesive family bond snaps like a dry twig around day four or five above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and we move into an every-man-for-himself scenario. Live and learn.

There are only two things keeping us from going to a full-scale Lord of the Flies situation at this point: Cold showers and our whole-house fan.

The whole-house fan is really the eighth wonder of the modern world. There are two main types of whole-house fans to choose from. The first is the ducted variety. These have a fan or fans mounted inside your attic, with ductwork that draws the air from the interior of the home. They are very quiet. We do not have that kind.

The second kind is the ceiling-mounted variety. These are basically a slightly smaller version of a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter mounted to the ceiling of your hallway. These are incredibly loud. This is the kind we have.

Deafening prop wash noise aside, all whole-house fans work in the same manner. “The fan creates a ‘positive pressure’ in the attic and a ‘negative pressure’ inside the house, consequently drawing the cooler outside air in through open windows.”

I have not been up in the attic to experience what “positive pressure” feels like, but in the case of our home at least, “negative pressure” can be described better as “a howling 40-knot gale.” Our fan has two speed settings, and if you turn it on high, you have to make sure the children are tethered down.

The loudness and ferocity of the unit might be attributable to its size. We have the biggest model available in the free world. We were smart when we bought it a few years ago, shopping for it in the whole-house fan off-season. Because we purchased it in November we saved at least seven dollars, and were able to parlay that savings into an upgrade. The salesman sold us on the big one, presumably to best fit the size of our house, or possibly because the conversation went something like this:

Me: “Ooh, I want the big one!”

Salesman: “OK. Sign here quick.”

The key point in the operational description of the fan is really the term “cooler outside air.” This is critical, and in the case of our current three-week-long survival experiment, “cooler outside air” didn’t usually manifest itself until around midnight. This put us into a strange schedule of going to bed around one A.M. and sleeping until nine o’clock in the morning. By the time we get moving in the sluggish torpor of our deliciously cool 84-degree house, we are eating breakfast around eleven A.M. and having lunch at four o’clock. Basically, we’re now Italian.

Still, we can’t blame the whole-house fan for the lack of cool outside air. It can only do what it can do with the air it’s provided. On the plus side, even if it is not cooling us off as much as we might want, it is still cooling us down. Also, it provides a nice white noise while we sleep. It’s a lot like sleeping up inside the mechanical housing on an industrial wind turbine.

I love our whole-house fan. Not only for its economical cooling during normal summer weather, but for the safety it has provided us recently. I can say without hesitation that we would be dead without it. It is impossible to say whether we would have perished from heat stroke or from the wrath of mom, but one of them was definitely going to happen.

Thankfully, there was a break in the weather the other day and my wife decided begrudgingly to stay at home with us, and refrain from killing anyone. The A/C is scheduled to be actually fixed today, so our fingers are all crossed. It might just be the heat, but after three weeks of disappointment, I remain skeptical.

One thing is for sure, when the A/C actually does get fixed, we are going to have to ease ourselves back into the cooler temperatures. At this point 85 degrees inside the house actually feels comfortable. We went out to dinner the other night and our teeth were chattering inside the restaurant. I took the boys to the grocery store yesterday and they almost went hypothermic in the refrigerated aisle.

Still, having A/C back is going to be safer for everyone. My wife informs me that there is another heat wave coming, and she looks ready to snap any minute.

If you don’t hear from me next week, send someone to check on us.

See you soon,

-Smidge

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Wednesday, July 17, 2024

I'm in a Pickle

My mother-in-law is turning 80 years young in a few months. She taught our family the game of pickleball. She also taught me that saying cheesy things like “80 years young” is far more beneficial to our relationship than saying “80 years old.”

Pickleball, as you may have noticed, is gaining popularity at a rapid rate. Play it once, and you’ll be hooked, unless you are a tennis player.

If you play tennis, and are serious about it, which every tennis player seems to be, you will not like pickleball ever, because you will refuse to try pickleball, because pickleball is loud and adds annoying extra lines to what are supposed to be TENNIS courts, and it’s loud, and the people who play it laugh and shout, and there is no place for that kind of thing on a tennis court, because tennis is a serious and quiet sport and pickleball looks and sounds fun and loud and there is absolutely no place for fun anywhere near tennis courts!

But, if you actually enjoy having fun, chances are great that you’ll like pickleball. A lot of its popularity comes from how scalable the game is. A group of very athletic twenty-somethings can have a lightning-fast game of doubles on the court next to the group of ninety-somethings with only one original hip joint between the four of them, enjoying a much slower-paced game of the exact same rules on the exact same size court.

We are currently spending the week down in beautiful Morro Bay, California, at my mother-in-law’s house. She is the treasurer for the Morro Bay Pickleball Association, which has four dedicated pickleball courts annoyingly close to two dedicated tennis courts. So close, in fact, that you can sometimes almost hear the tennis players disapproval of all the fun over the noise of all the fun.

The MBPA consists of a very large group of retired people all over the age of 70, who can all kick my ass in pickleball.

That’s the hard lesson I had to learn when I started playing. I don’t think we could name another sport that exists that my mother-in-law could beat me at. She is an incredibly active 79-year-old, but I still have every sports advantage over her, simply because of our age, size, and strength gap.

I really can’t think of another sport – even the ones I’ve never played. I mean, neither of us have ever played jai alai – neither of us even really know what it is – but I guarantee I come out on top if we played a match, or game, or set, or whatever they call it.

But then there’s pickleball - the great equalizer. It’s the one physical activity that legitimately qualifies as a sport that I’m aware of where nothing about your size, strength, or age is going to help you gain an advantage over the lady who plays for three hours a day, even though she’s 79, weighs 90 pounds, and has no cartilage in any of her joints anymore.

And I had come to terms with that fact, after playing with her and her friends enough. It was OK. Pickleball is just like that. I don’t play or practice enough to be very good, so it’s OK if I get beat by old ladies. That was fine.

But then the little kids showed up.

There we were the other day, enjoying a loud, fun time and annoying the adjacent tennis players, when a grandpa showed up to the pickleball courts. He had his two grandsons with him, and they were only six and eight years old.

To our surprise, grandpa took the court with the six-year-old as his doubles partner.

An unsuspecting couple who appeared to be in their early sixties were on the other side of the net. They got destroyed.

Grandpa was good, but his grandson was amazing. Covering the whole back court and hitting a two-handed forehand and backhand, he could place it anywhere he wanted. If the couple was playing back, he’d drop it right over the net. If they were too far forward, he’d make them pay for their foolish behavior by lobbing a beautiful shot over their heads right to the back line.

His eight-year-old brother was laying on the side of the court at the net, casually watching the action. I asked him their ages and which one of them was better. With absolutely no braggadocio in his answer, he said, “I’m a little better than he is.” Just stating the facts.

So, what that meant was, if I found the best doubles partner I could come up with from my circle, which would probably be one of my very athletic teenage sons or my mother-in-law, we still would not have stood a snowflake’s chance in hell against these two elementary-school-age brothers.

I have made my peace with taking staggering losses from my soon-to-be 80-year-old mother-in-law, but I draw a hard line at getting embarrassed by a second-grader and his kindergartner brother.

Maybe I’ll take up tennis.

See you soon,

-Smidge

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Wednesday, July 10, 2024

You'd Better PreCheck Yourself, TSA

When I fly out of Sacramento International Airport and Livestock Pavillion, I usually park in the daily parking lot. It’s a little cheaper than the garage, but only slightly more expensive than the long-term lot, which makes it worth it, because you can walk to the terminal instead of riding a bus.

A lot of people have figured that out, so the daily lot seems to be pretty darn full most of the time, which means the walk can be a little way. When it is hot outside, I tend to sweat a little bit on that walk, and I’m always wearing a backpack and pulling a carry-on bag.

Why am I telling you all of this? Not because you need to know this information, but because the TSA should know this information. The TSA agents that scan the incoming travelers at SMF should be familiar with the local parking and weather situations, since they are local also. None of them fly to work from somewhere else. They all live here!

You’re probably wondering what my point is. That’s fair. My point is this: Why the hell is the TSA operating multi-million-dollar scanning technology that can’t crack the confounding mystery of sweat? I have a theory…

When I arrive at the airport my back is either warm, or warm and sweaty. The TSA scans me in the “stand on the feet marks and hold your hands above your head as shown in the diagram” machine, and needs to do an extra search on my lower back every single time. Summer or winter. Every time.

When it’s extra hot outside, I’m extra warm in other places. On my last trip, one of those places was my crotch.

“Sir, I’m going to need to perform a full crotch search.”

“Go nuts.”

“You’ll need to step over here.”

“You mean on me!? Why?”

“See this big dark spot here in the screen?”

“Yes, I’m sweaty from all the heat outside. I’ve only been inside the airport for 10 minutes.”

“I’m still going to need to perform a full crotch search. Would you like a private room?”

“You’re telling me you want to inspect my crotch, and you’re asking if I want to do that with you privately? I’m thinking no, boss. We’re going to handle this out here with all these nice witnesses.”

“OK, I’ll be using the back of my hand.”

“Well, that sounds just fabulous.”

**Full crotch search commences**

The whole time I’m thinking, is this really what this guy signed up for when he decided a job at the TSA was the move? Because, if the answer is yes, then that’s disturbing, and if the answer is no, then what the hell is he still doing here?

**Full crotch search concludes**

“Well, that was great. Hey, I was going to get some pizza at the gate. Does this mean you’re buying now?”

“Have a nice day, sir.”

“I don’t even get your number?”

“Goodbye, sir.”

Like I said, the TSA has multi-million-dollar scanning equipment. Do you know what else they have? They have a program called TSA PreCheck that lets you bypass the expensive scanning equipment and the impromptu full crotch searches.

Kinda makes you wonder… wouldn’t the TSA want to get everyone on PreCheck so they didn’t have to employ so many crotch guys? You’d think they would, because that would be efficient, but then you remember that the TSA is a government organization, so efficiency is not even a consideration for them.

Do you know what is a consideration for government organizations? The main and really the only consideration? Getting more of your money.

Now, I don’t believe for a second that the multi-million-dollar scanner can’t be set to figure out body heat and sweat, and I also don’t believe they can’t get everyone signed up for PreCheck for the same amount of money they spend on salaries for the multiple layers of crotch inspectors. I mean, have you ever been to a TSA checkpoint that was understaffed?

Nope.

You can get a TSA PreCheck, but it will cost you. Kinda feels like a tax, doesn’t it?

But it’s a voluntary tax. So how in the world are we going to get people to pay a voluntary tax??

I know! Full crotch searches.

We’ll use the back of the hand though, so it’s not so weird.

See you soon,

-Smidge

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Wednesday, July 3, 2024

We Need More Specific Bangs

We celebrate the Fourth of July tomorrow, so I wanted to send out a quick PSA to all you Nextdoor- and Ring Neighbors-type app users.

The PSA is this: For the love of Pete, KNOW YOUR TOWN!

I live in Rocklin, CA. They’re not gunshots. It’s never gunshots.

When you hear a loud noise off in the distance, run it through a quick logic filter to come up with likely causes. Asking on Nextdoor Rocklin, “Did anyone else hear those gunshots?” is like asking on Nextdoor Compton or Nextdoor Iraq, “Did anyone else hear those fireworks?”

Nevertheless, I could go out onto my front lawn, take my sandals off and clap them together to get the dirt off the soles, and ignite a firestorm of “where’s the gunfire coming from” activity on four different apps.

All that being said, tomorrow is a slightly different story. I have to assume that tomorrow is the one day that you neighborhood app people might have a slightly larger “fireworks” option in your logic filters, but we can’t be totally fooled. There will likely be some unusual gunfire also.

We’re a funny breed, us modern Americans. Even though we’re trying our best not to actually have any of it in a lot of facets of our lives, we’re still quite exuberant about our freedom around the Fourth. So, please expect the unidentified loud noises to begin around midnight tonight.

And, in many areas that don’t usually experience nighttime gunshots, there will be the occasional beveragely-enhanced exuberance in the form of celebratory shotgun fire to the sky.

So, starting late tonight and going until late tomorrow night, we will need you to be a lot more specific about your paranoid questions. Yes, we heard the fireworks. And yes, we may have also heard the gunshots. But we don’t know which you’re asking about.

From your couch, as you peek timidly out of your living room curtains if you dare, we’ll need you to frantically ask very targeted questions over the next day.

“Did anyone hear the gunshots? I think it was the 47th through 53rd loud bang noises just now. Can anyone confirm?”