I'm "Watch the Grass Grow" Old

I am unhappy to report that I have found the surest sign of my aging, to date.

I mean, don’t get me wrong – there have been plenty of signs along this road. For instance, it’s been a long time since I could get on or off the couch without making some sort of groan, grunt, sigh, or popping sound.

I can’t tell the shampoo from the conditioner in a new shower, and I never think to inspect everything with my glasses on before I get in. If there is a third option for body wash, it’s all over. The Lord only knows what I washed and “shampooed” with that morning.

I keep Advil in most every room of the house and all the cars, I really can’t watch TV without the subtitles, and don’t even get me started on strange cars parking in front of my house!

Obviously, I’m getting old, but I wasn’t aware just how old until we got rid of our backyard play structure. A few months ago, a young couple with two little girls became the next caretakers of the behemoth wooden tower-o’-fun, and we were left with a large open area at one end of our backyard.

Many ideas about what to do with the space were brought up by my wife, all of which sounded either prohibitively expensive or prohibitively difficult. She finally agreed to my relatively simple suggestion of “lawn,” and so began my latest project.

Simple does not always mean easy, and I am not going to lie to you – digging trenches for the sprinklers to service the mere 540 square feet of new lawn almost did me in. Normally, digging sprinkler pipe trenches is not a big deal, if you live in a place that uses dirt for the ground.

Our neighborhood doesn’t use dirt. We use round, river rock cobblestones to hold up our houses here. You can’t dig in our neighborhood with a shovel. The shovel just makes a ping noise and stops dead on a rock the size of softball, two inches underground. That rock is surrounded by other rocks, ranging in size from golf ball to volleyball, which continue no matter how far you dig down with your pickaxe and digging bar.

The small spaces between the rocks are usually filled in with dirt, but in this case, they were mostly filled in with tree roots, since the whole 540 square feet of would-be lawn is under a massive tree of unknown species. (I have never known what any of our trees or bushes actually are, and I don’t care, as long as they don’t fall onto the house. So far, so good. I think the rocks hold them in place.)

I only needed to put in nine sprinkler heads, but the trenching ran me out of Advil in every room in the house and two of the cars. When I had recovered enough to stand up almost straight, and the new pipes were in the ground and buried, we brought in some beautiful new rock-free topsoil and leveled it all out.

I spread the new grass seed and raked it into the amazing new dirt ten days ago, and in those ten days I have found out how old I really am. I have probably inspected the new lawn area between 50 and 75 times since the seed went on. I have told people I don’t even know about my new grass sprouts that started to happen five days ago. The people I do know are now avoiding me, but I don’t care, because I’m in my backyard staring at my “lawn.”

When I was able to, I even got down on my hands and knees to inspect the little shoots and look across all of them at eye-level.

I had no idea the amount of joy I would get from seeing that one bare patch over there start to show some green yesterday.

I mean, what the hell?

This kind of thing sneaks up on you. One minute you’re skateboarding through life without a care in the world, and the next you’re mad that they rearranged the grocery store. It was fine the way it was.

But it wasn’t until this week that I realized I was “watch the grass grow” old.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go check and see if that middle section has filled in any since this morning. It’s warm today!

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

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We Possess Sprinklers

I noticed one of our clumps of decorative grass by our front walk was looking a little brownish the other day (read: completely dead-looking), and realized I hadn’t turned on the sprinkler system yet.

Spring has sprung, but I had been lulled into a state of non-sprinklering by the winter we just had here in Northern California, which can only be described as a six-month monsoon with slight pauses for drizzle.

So yesterday I flipped the sprinkler controls in the garage to “on,” and this morning they ran for the first time this year. About an hour after they were supposed to have been finished, I was out on the driveway and noticed the three sprinklers on the small lawn to the right of the driveway were still on and sending quite a bit of water down the street to the storm drain.

It was odd that they hadn’t shut off when they were supposed to, but what made it even more odd was the fact that they are tied in with about half the sprinklers across the driveway on the main lawn, and those were off. So one of my sprinkler valves came on but failed to turn off, but some of its sprinklers were off and some were on.

If you know anything at all about sprinkler valves and piping, you know that what I just described is impossible, without demonic sprinkler possession being in play.

I went to all five valves and turned them on and off manually. That did not solve the problem.

I went to the sprinkler controller in the garage and turned it off. They kept running. That should also be impossible.

OK, maybe the sprinkler controller has shorted internally, I thought to myself. So, I actually disconnected each and every valve control wire from their terminals. There was no longer any possible way the valve could be signaled to be on.

The sprinklers kept running.

It was at this point that I got down on my knees in my garage and prayed for God to exorcise the evil irrigation demon that had possessed my home. I prayed hard, because I had other things to do with my morning than battle the Demon of Irritrol, but the good Lord did not stop the raging waters.

He did, however, provide me with some clarity. As I prayed for the sake of my water bill and protection from the rath of the California Eternal Drought Coalition Forces, it finally occurred to me that if half the sprinklers on one valve weren’t on, then those sprinklers weren’t on that valve. The system is wired to appear and operate as if the sprinklers on both sides of the driveway are on one valve, but they couldn’t possibly be, demonic possession or not. Water just doesn’t work that way.

So somewhere underground, that control wire from terminal 2 is connected to another control wire that goes to another valve that controls my three rogue sprinklers, and at some point during the monsoon months, that valve got corroded enough that it no longer shuts off automatically.

Yay!

But where could that mystery valve be, you ask? It’s buried underground in the backyard in a valve box that was abandoned years ago when we put the pool in. I thought the valves in that box only controlled the backyard lawn sprinklers that were dug up by the pool excavator. I was obviously mistaken. At least one of them is pigtail-wired off Valve Number 2 to run three sprinklers next to my driveway that don’t shut off anymore.

Demonic possession officially ruled out. Thank you, Jesus?

So, after shutting off the water to the whole system to stop the flooding, I wrote myself a note to spend Saturday on an exploratory digging expedition.

It was my wife’s idea to have kids and buy a house. I wanted to live on a boat. Boats never have sprinkler issues, because you don’t need a pool.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2023 Marc Schmatjen

 

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An Open Letter to Lowe's

Dear Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse,

A long while ago, you built one of your stores in my town, and you built it literally right next-door to the existing Home Depot. When my wife and I bought our first house, we remodeled the entire place, floor to ceiling, from that Home Depot. We were able to do that because we didn’t have kids yet, so we had all the time and money in the world.

We were rich and carefree. We could go out to eat anywhere, at any time. We could go to the movies any day of the week – not just on Tuesdays - and buy all the popcorn we wanted, even at those movie theater prices. We played golf, both mini and regular. We could do all that while still saving for retirement and pouring tons of money into the home renovations.

We had no idea how much would change when we had kids. No one at the Home Depot warned us. You’d think they would have, since they knew damned well that once we had kids we’d have no more time or money to spend at their store. Go figure.

Anyway, when you built your Lowe’s right next to our Home Depot, I remained very loyal to them. Their employees had always been top-notch (except for the not warning us about the kids thing), and I wasn’t going to share my business with you.

However, over the period of a few months to a year I began to notice a decline in the Home Depot customer service levels. The employees seemed to be getting younger and less knowledgeable, not only about general home improvement how-to, but also about where things were actually located in their own store. Then one evening, a funny thing happened.

I was walking down an aisle and overheard a customer ask one of the employees where something was located. The employee didn’t know what it was. She explained what it was, but the employee still had no idea where to find it. I stopped and told the woman exactly which aisle to find it on, how far down the aisle, and how high off the floor it was located. She thanked me and asked if I was an off-duty employee. I said no, just someone who’s shopped here a lot, as I shook my head in disgust at the pathetic excuse for a customer service representative, hanging his head in shame above his orange apron.

That night was when I decided to give you a try, Lowe’s. And our relationship was good for a long time. Your employees would drop whatever they were doing and walk me to where I could find something, even when I insisted that it was OK if they just told me. Sometimes that was uncomfortable and weird, but it was appreciated, nonetheless.

Somewhere along the way, Home Depot got the memo and stepped their customer service back up, and over these many years, you have both performed fairly well. But I wanted to give you the courtesy of a warning. You’re slipping, big time, in the stocking and returns department.

My wife and I have denied our teenage boys food and shoes just long enough to be able to afford some new lighting and mirrors for our master bath. We bought two light fixtures from you the other day, and I was more than a little upset when I unpackaged the first one back at home. It was immediately obvious that something was wrong, from the complete lack of internal packaging involved.

The only damn thing in the box was the light fixture. No protective bag. No Styrofoam end caps holding it in place, no installation instruction sheet. Also missing were the bracket that holds it to the wall, the electrical connectors, and the screws. And to cap it all off, it was visibly and obviously scratched up. Digging down to the bottom of the box I did actually find one other item – the receipt from the last time it was purchased!

I have one simple question for you: How in the actual hell did this thing end up on the shelf?

Based on my recent past experiences, combined with this incident, both purchasing and then returning this fixture (for at least the second time in its life), here’s my estimation of the current inner workings of your returns department:

1) Customer brings in a return.

2) You ask zero questions about the product’s performance, current state, reason for return, or even origin.

3) You assess whether the product is in the original packaging.

4) If it’s not, you shrug and say, “whatever.”

5) If it is in the original packaging, you will, under no circumstances whatsoever, open that packaging to inspect the item, or even verify that it’s in there at all.

6) You give the customer back whatever amount of money they ask for.

7) You turn around and throw the return into a Lowe’s shopping cart.

8) Someone rolls that shopping cart out into the store and puts whatever it is back on the shelf in the approximate location it came from.

9) Everyone in the breakroom complains about how many returns we’re getting today.

10) Repeat.

Like I said, this is not an isolated incident. It’s just the latest one, and I’m done. I can’t do this anymore. The price of gas is too high for me to make two round trips to get one item. The boys will eventually need to eat again, and the school is complaining about them being barefoot.

So, from now on I’ll be the guy bringing my own box cutter in and completely unpackaging everything right there in your store before I buy it.

And fair warning: If it’s not all there, I’m just going to leave it lying there on the floor.

Do better,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2022 Marc Schmatjen

 

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An Open Letter to the Guy Who Installed My Floor

Dear Captain Staple Gun,

I don’t know who you are, but since my house was built in the early 2000s, I am assuming you are in your mid to late 30s now. You might still work in construction if you managed to get yourself under control. If you did not calm down, I doubt you were able to hold down any sort of real job and are probably reading this from your parent’s basement.

I’m writing you today because I’m in the process of installing laminate flooring in our master bathroom, with which, you are familiar. You, after all, were there about twenty years ago installing the extra sheet of plywood onto the subfloor in the tiny little three-foot by five-foot toilet room.

Your boss, I’m sure, explained to you that the three-eighths plywood was necessary to raise the floor in that room up ever so slightly so the light beige linoleum would match the height of the dark beige carpet in the main bathroom.

In case you were wondering, the key words that identify the need for our new laminate flooring project are ”beige,” “linoleum,” and “bathroom carpet.”

I just want to start by saying thank you. Thank you for not gluing it down. Since the laminate floor will be continuous throughout the bathroom, I needed to pull out your small sheet of riser plywood so the subfloor would all be the same height. I was already on my knees when I discovered it, so I stopped and prayed that it was not glued down.

I’m not sure if you happen to remember which member of your construction crew installed our original hardwood floors downstairs, but if you do, I’d love it if you would do me a favor and set fire to their house.

We had this same laminate flooring installed in the entire downstairs area of our house a few years back, and I decided I would remove the old hardwood floors myself. After all, they were only in the kitchen and foyer. I thought, how hard could it be?

I’ll answer that for you. They were glued down with some substance the Pentagon would love to know about. You could have vaporized all of Placer county with a targeted nuclear strike centered on my home and those floors would have remained securely attached to the concrete slab, somewhere hundreds of miles away.

I had to cut through the hardwood with a Skilsaw, making a cut perpendicular to the board lengths every three inches, and chip the floor off with a giant long-handled scraper. It took our entire family of five a whole week to get the floor out of two rooms. I honestly wished I’d had access to nuclear weapons at the time. I still have a lingering case of PTSD about the whole thing.

So, yes, thank you for not gluing the plywood down, knowing you had access to whatever the hell that stuff was. That being said, this is where my thanks to you stops.

Instead of glue, you used the pneumatic staple gun that shoots two-inch construction staples. Good choice. I would have used that too. And if I was installing the small little piece of plywood to the small little floor of the small little toilet room, I would have used anywhere from twenty to thirty staples total. But that’s because I tend to overdo it a little on my fastener count. I want to know that it’s going to stay nailed down.

Not you, though. No sir. You, my friend, are on an entirely different level. I hammered my prybar under that sheet of plywood and got stopped cold by your first row of staples across the doorway. You had over thirty staples in that first row alone. The door is only twenty-eight inches wide, so you were doing better than one staple per inch. Impressive.

Speaking of staples per inch, or in the regular construction world, inches per staple, it would have been cool if you had some sort of plan or consistency to your work. But you didn’t. In some areas I encountered staples grouped so close together they were actually touching each other. In other places I may have gone a full two inches before I came upon another one of your little projectiles.

There was one spot in the middle where you had a six-inch line of staples so close together it looked like a zipper. A removal project that should have taken me about ten minutes to complete ended up taking me hours. Hours on my hands and knees in a tiny little room doesn’t really work for me anymore. I’m old now. And in more pain now because of your insane rampant stapling.

I just have to ask. What the hell were you doing? Were you hiding from the boss but needed to sound like you were still working? Were you hiding from the crazy hardwood gluer guy? Can’t blame you there. Was it the end of the day and you wanted to milk that project as long as possible so you didn’t have to start something else? I just have to know!

Were you getting paid by the staple instead of by the hour? That would explain why my fifteen-square-foot floor was honestly more staples than actual wood. I’m amazed it didn’t all cave in from the sheer weight of the steel.

Or was it your first day on the job and/or the first time you ever used a nail gun? If that was the case, then I guess I’m glad you had fun at least. And I hope you haven’t lost that childlike enthusiasm for life. I just never want you to do anything like that again.

Ever.

I have to go take more Advil now.

Settle down,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2022 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Prepare for the Scare

This is a message for all you young folks out there. You crazy kids in your twenties, just brimming with enthusiasm and youth. I know you don’t think of yourselves as kids, but trust me, you are, and I’ll prove it to you.

I don’t really remember what drove me back when I was your age. I don’t remember what made me tick. But I know for certain it wasn’t the same things that drive me now. The things that make me tick these days are just downright scary.

I realized (again) the other day that I am no longer a kid and that I have become old. It happened right after I got done skimming every last leaf out of my pool, and I sat back, gazing at the crystal-clear water with a swell of pride, knowing I had my pH absolutely dialed in.

Nothing can prepare you for that jolt of sickening realization that you have become so old and boring that the chemical balance of your pool water is now a significant source of joy in your life.

You young folks have taken a lot of classes in your life thus far, but sadly, none have prepared you for this impending situation – you will become old, and tired, and boring.

I realize you are convinced that you won’t, but trust me. If you don’t want to take my word for it, simply ask as many people over the age of forty as you can find. You can quit polling anytime you’re satisfied (or terrified), but I will guarantee you the answers will be one hundred percent identical.

One day you will:

get excited about the 30% off coupon from Jiffy Lube.

have a deep feeling of accomplishment from putting felt pads on the furniture legs to protect your new fake hardwood floors.

say “Because I said so,” to your own kids for the first time (but not the last). Also, “It’s for your own good.”

worry if you have enough life insurance. You will also have conversations at dinner parties with your friends about life insurance.

wake up more sore than when you went to bed, and realize that you didn’t do any physical activity that should have made you sore in the first place. Then you will sadly realize that you just literally hurt yourself sleeping.

experience the joy of buying your first home. Then you will experience the shock of writing your first property tax check. Then you will experience the utter horror and disbelief of realizing that people who don’t own property still get to vote on how much your property taxes should be.

revel in the feeling of beating them at their own game when you cut up the old dresser with your Sawzall and slowly throw it away over four or five weeks in your regular trash can so you don’t have to pay for a dump run.

These are just a few examples, and by far not the worst. I didn’t want to scare you.

And remember, I tell you all of this in an attempt to minimize your shock when it happens, not as a warning of what to avoid. There’s nothing you can do about it. It will happen.

Just keep living that young life of yours to the fullest, so when the inevitable Sunday afternoon comes and you find yourself swelling with an optimistic feeling that all is right with the world because you just fully refilled all seven compartments in your day-of-the-week pill container, you can look back with no regrets.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

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No Kids at Home Improvement

All our kids are gone! All our kids are gone!

I’ll probably shout the same thing when the third one finally ships off to:

A) College

B) Boot Camp

C) Taco Bell New Employee Orientation Day

(Complete toss-up at this point)

This happy occasion, however, is the result of church camp. All three boys are gone for the whole week, so my wife and I are doing what every healthy, loving, happily married couple does when they finally get the house to themselves – home improvement.

We dropped the boys off on Monday afternoon and immediately raced to dinner, followed by a romantic trip to Home Depot to browse the aisles in peace and quiet.

Then we headed home to get some more ice and Advil. My wife seems to be doing a little better than me after our week of chiseling off our old hardwood floors. I’m still nursing a few sore muscles and joints, pretty much everywhere on my body that I have a muscle and/or a joint. Back when we were first married, we could renovate all day long, but now we need to take it a little slower.

Our first full day without kids was spent hanging out with Jason, Paul, and Larry – the three gentlemen who are installing our beautiful new fake hardwood floors. Thankfully, the new floors do not get glued down, because after last week, if anyone ever tries to glue anything else down to my concrete slab, there is going to be a fight.

The first thing the guys did was remove half the downstairs baseboards, so we were immediately able to start our kid-free week off right – by sanding and repainting our old baseboards. They look amazing!

Today we had breakfast with Paul and Larry and then retired to the pool area to sand and paint. Around noon, we were able to get away for an intimate lunch at the hotdog shack in front of Home Depot when we made a run for more paint and rollers.

When we were finally finished with the morning’s allotment of baseboards, my wife had an amazing idea. She whispered it in my ear. It seemed like the perfect time, so we snuck off to the guest bedroom.

And started to paint it!

If you need us the rest of the week, we’ll be here, in the throes of renovation.

We might even paint the living room!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2019 Marc Schmatjen

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I'm Floored

My fingers are numb and my hands hurt whenever I breathe. Also, the rest of my body hurts. I’m typing this with the end of a ballpoint pen I have duct-taped to my wrist.

You see, we are having new floors installed in our house next week, partially because my wife has wanted new floors since the day we moved in, but mostly because our Labrador retriever retrieved a bottle of blue food coloring from the counter one afternoon and ate it on the carpet.

It looks like someone murdered a Smurf in our living room.

Half of our downstairs is carpet, and the other half is hardwood. It’s the hardwood part that has crippled me.

You see, along with the rather large sum of money our flooring guy quoted us for the actual installation of the new flooring, came a slightly smaller, but still substantial amount of money quoted for removing our existing hardwood.

He explained that we were more than welcome to remove the old hardwood floors ourselves, but the $1600 quoted to remove them was such a big amount in order to cover the possibility that the floors were installed with the Devil Glue.

He explained that when you try to remove the first board from the concrete floor, you will see one of two colors of glue underneath. If the glue is dark brown and hard, the old boards will pop right off the concrete like they just can’t wait to get out of the house. And if the glue is light tan and spongy, your best bet is to sell the house and move somewhere with dark brown glue.

I laughed. “Ha, ha,” I said, “it can’t be that bad.”

On Monday I popped up a four-inch section of the first board, after fighting with it for about twenty minutes, to reveal the dreaded spongy tan Devil Glue.

That wasn’t so bad, I thought to myself. And $1600 is a lot of money. I can do this.

I cannot do this. Our hardwood floors are apparently installed to withstand a category five tornado, and a category one thousand hurricane, combined.

If all the major and minor earthquake faults in California triggered at once, and the entire state was ground into a fine dust by a three bazillion magnitude quake, the only recognizable thing floating out into the Pacific Ocean would be our entryway and kitchen floors, still joined by a short hallway, completely unscathed by something so trivial.

Our floor guy’s advice was to use a Skil saw and actually cut the floor into six-inch strips, perpendicular to the length of the planks. I did that. We now have sawdust on every single square inch of the house, including the ceiling. We have sawdust in the pockets of jackets that were hanging in the back-bedroom closets upstairs.

Besides having six months of dusting ahead of us, and some seriously impressive boogers, I’m not sure the sawing effort helped greatly in any other way.

I have purchased every single prying, scraping, and chiseling tool offered at both Home Depot and Lowe’s, and in the past day and a half I have managed to remove about six square feet of flooring – an area roughly the size of two kitchen chairs.

When I was able to stand mostly upright again, I even suggested the idea to my wife of buying a Bosch handheld planer I saw at Lowe’s, and grinding the boards off, one by one. Plus, I thought it was a great excuse to own my own handheld planer. She politely pointed out that that was probably my worst idea ever, since we would need to back a dump truck up to the front door and load the resulting sawdust out of the house with snow shovels.

I told her politely that it was certainly not my worst idea ever, since about three square feet in I was seriously considering whether I could open some windows and adequately contain a gasoline fire that could burn the floors off. And also grenades.

She agreed those ideas were worse.

I’ll tell you what is starting to sound more and more like a good idea: paying our flooring guy $1600 to handle the Devil Glue. When you think about it, that’s pretty cheap compared to the cost of the full body cast I’m going to end up in to get the next six square feet.

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!

High Pressure Shopping

Yesterday was Prime Day on Amazon. At this point, I would assume that every person in the entire civilized world is an Amazon Prime member, so you no doubt knew that.

The first item that caught my attention was a 9” tall, 5” diameter white metal cylinder with the title “Furbo Dog Camera.”

At first I thought it was like a dog toy, where you could teach your dog to carry it around and take pictures of interesting stuff, like other dogs’ butts and holes in the lawn. But on further investigation, it turns out it’s supposed to just sit on the shelf or counter and act as a canine baby monitor.

All the features and other reasons why I should buy it were very confusing, but there was a handy video to explain everything.

The video featured Cha Cha, a Husky-looking dog, approximately 40-60 pounds, who lives in an apartment with a single woman who leaves him at home to head off to work for the day.

When he’s barking at the door in the middle of the day, she receives a “Cha Cha is barking” alert on her Furbo smartphone app, and she is able to talk to him to calm him down via the two-way microphone and speaker communication system. Her office mates look at her with the appropriate amount of distain.

Later in the day, after an important meeting where she is no doubt ridiculed behind her back by her coworkers for talking to her dog on her phone, she is able to check in on Cha Cha, even though the sun has gone down and the apartment is dark, because Furbo’s camera has night vision.

But my favorite part of the video was when she gives Cha Cha a treat in the middle of the day, via the Furbo’s treat-tossing hole. You heard me. The Furbo has a hole in the middle of it from which it can toss a treat to the dog. Along with a camera and a microphone, this little 9” x 5” cylinder has a bamboo wood cover and is filled with delicious dog treats.

This is how I know this is a fake product. And Cha Cha is obviously a fake dog, because after the first treat launched out, every dog, no matter what size or how well trained, would immediately remove the pint-sized Furbo from the shelf, gnaw the bamboo cover off, and snarf down every single treat contained inside.

Furbo claims to have 1900 reviews with a 4-star average rating, which is obviously a complete fabrication, or else every positive review is about how white it kept their dog’s teeth from chewing all that bamboo.

More Prime Day Deals were coming fast and furious, in what appeared to be a random order, but as we know, Amazon is owned by an astronaut, and astronauts never do things randomly. You don’t just fly your rocket to wherever. There is always some rhyme or reason to the products Amazon presents you with. For instance, I have a dog, so the Furbo ad made sense, even if the product itself is patently ridiculous. I was, however, a little confused by two other deals I saw back to back.

The first was Poo-Pourri Before-You-Go Toilet Spray. If you haven’t heard of this product, it’s something you spray on top of the toilet water before you poop. I am not making that up. It apparently helps trap odors under the water, sort of like a flower-scented layer of Saran wrap. (Note: Saran wrap of any scent does NOT work for this application.)

Again, if you are unfamiliar, I implore you to look up the Poo-Pourri ad campaign with the nice British lady who speaks very frankly about her poop. The ads are solid. (Pun intended)

The original 2-oz bottle was available for only $6.51, dropped from the original price of $9.95, but I had to move on the deal and plop it into my cart in the next 3 hours and 10 minutes before the offer was flushed out of the system. I passed. (Again, all puns intended, however, completely unnecessary and juvenile)

Floating there, right next to the Poo-Pourri, was the next Prime Day Deal. For a limited time, I could score a Generac SpeedWash Model 6882 2900-PSI Gas-Powered Pressure Washer for only $349.00. I don’t know what the original price was, but that sounds like a smokin’ deal to me. I mean, that’s only $0.12 per PSI. Where else are you going to find PSI’s that cheap? Nowhere, man!

Amazon has obviously figured out that I like power tools, probably using the ingenious algorithm of, “He’s a dude. Sell him power tools.” But what I can’t figure out is what a 2900-PSI pressure washer has in common with an anti-stink toilet spray. They have to be connected to each other in one of Amazon’s internal algorithms, because I have never shopped for anything even remotely connected to poo spray on the internet.

I have purchased Saran wrap before, but that can’t be it. The only possible explanation is there must be a strange sector of power tool-loving men out there who have inexplicably rejected toilet paper in favor of pressure washers. A mobile, gas-powered, 2900-PSI bidet, if you will. I will not. These men are probably from Alaska, or Montana, or Detroit, and I have no idea how I became associated with them.

Either that, or the Poo-Pourri and the pressure washer are related to my dog somehow, but she very rarely uses the toilet, and I think she’d bite me if I hit her with 2900 PSI. It’s all very confusing.

I’ll tell you what, though. Speaking of toilets and pressure washers, what the hell have we been doing all these years with that silly little toilet brush? When it comes time to clean the bathroom, the Generac SpeedWash 6882 would put the hurt on that job in a hurry! Why didn’t I think of that before?

Excuse me, I need to get back to Amazon and see if that deal is still available.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2018 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!

Extreme Home Repair - Repost

I cheated death again last week. I managed to successfully add onto an existing 20-amp GFI circuit from my pool’s 30-amp sub panel. (I really don’t know if I used all those electrical terms correctly, but it sounded cool, didn’t it?)

I managed to install two new outlets and two ceiling fan boxes under our backyard patio cover - wired them and everything - and they actually work! And as of today, the patio cover has not exploded into a fireball, so that’s a big win. (I didn’t bother to get a permit, so don’t tell anyone. Also, if you see a big fireball in my backyard, just ignore it, please.)

I learned three things in my triumph over electricity this past week:

1) If I didn’t love being an author so much, I could probably go equally as broke being a slow and unknowledgeable electrician.

2) Using a screwdriver and pliers near a stucco wall shreds your knuckles faster than jamming your hand into a Cuisinart.

3)  Blood doesn’t come off stucco very easily, and if you try to do it wrong, you just add more blood.

My knuckles are still a little too swollen to type effectively. (I have typed this entire thing with my elbows and my nose. It has taken six hours.) So instead, I am revisiting a column from a few years ago about a slightly less successful electrical project.

Enjoy!

I think every once in a while, a man has to cheat death in order to feel truly alive. Either that, or because of our male DNA, we just keep doing really stupid things, surviving them somehow, then telling ourselves that every once in a while, a man has to cheat death in order to feel truly alive.

Since I gave up professional snowmobile motocross, I tend to mainly cheat death these days with home repair. It’s a win-win, really, because not only do I get to feel truly alive, but occasionally I accidentally fix something. This last time was not one of those times.

Our air conditioner quit working last week. That was a very unfortunate situation, since our house is currently sitting on the surface of the sun. It was 104 degrees the day it died. That is not cool. Fortunately - for her anyway - my wife was leaving with the kids the next day for a week-long excursion without me. That meant I would be left to sweat profusely by myself until the air conditioner guy could come out. “No problem,” I thought, as I dialed up the repair man, “I can make it a day or two.”

“Sorry, sir, but we’re scheduled out past a week at this point. We can be there next Wednesday.”

“Uhh… Can you repeat that? I had sweat inside my ear and I thought I just heard you say next Wednesday.”

It turns out that air conditioner problems are a pretty common occurrence here on the sun, and I had heard him correctly. I reluctantly scheduled my convenient four-hour window of time, and hung up the phone. As I wiped my face sweat from the phone’s front screen, I vowed to try and fix it myself in the meantime. I was mildly concerned that I might accidentally dehydrate until I remembered that beer is full of water. No problem there, but I really just wanted to be cool, and I could always cancel the appointment. Besides, I hadn’t cheated death in a while.

Through some very high-level troubleshooting at the circuit breaker panel on the side of my house, I had noticed that the breaker was tripping when the air conditioner tried to come on. I also noticed that the breaker would trip even when I had the A/C turned off. I obviously had a bad circuit breaker! I can fix that! I think…

I know what I’m doing with electricity in the same way that a teenager knows how to drive a car. I am familiar with the main concept, but I am severely lacking in skill and comprehension on some of the finer points.

What I do know is that electricity is amazing. Take a refrigerator for example. Electricity runs the compressor that makes the refrigerator cold, in turn, making your beer cold. Electricity also runs the little light bulb inside the refrigerator, making it possible to find the cold beer, even in the dark. Light bulbs are hot. Electricity is responsible for both cold and hot in the same machine, all resulting in the ability to find and drink a cold beer, any time of the day or night. Simply amazing!

I also know a little about the units involved in describing electrical circuits. Many people are confused by the relationship between Amps and Volts, and many others simply don’t know what they are at all. It’s really quite simple, actually.

Amps are the measurement of electricity’s ability to kill you, in units of consecutive missed heartbeats. Getting shocked by a 3-amp circuit will probably be survivable, but a 30-amp circuit will do you in. You simply cannot survive missing thirty consecutive heartbeats.

Voltage is the measure of how far the electricity will throw you while the amps are killing you. Volts are measured in inches per death. For instance, a 480-volt circuit will throw you 480 inches, or 40 feet, while the amps are turning you into a baked potato.

The circuit for my A/C unit has a 40-amp breaker. Forty consecutive heartbeats are too many to miss. I think it is also 220 volts, which means if I screwed up, my body would be found a little over eighteen feet away from the panel. That would put me squarely in the middle of my neighbor’s driveway.

Speaking of my neighbor, I was a little conflicted there. My family had left, so I was all alone. I wanted someone to know that I was about to attempt to cheat death, on the off chance that I had only missed ten or so heartbeats and was only blown five or six feet from the panel and clinging to life. On the other hand, our neighbor is old and I didn’t want to scare her. I decided someone was bound to drive by and see me smoking on the driveway, so I didn’t bother her.

I removed my wedding ring. I’m not a hundred percent sure why this is necessary, but I just know that professional electricians don’t wear them. I think it’s so when your wife is collecting your personal belongings after you die, she doesn't have to try and pull it off your charred ring finger.

I then watched a few YouTube videos on how to change a breaker, and instantly became an expert. I got my screwdriver and approached the electrical panel, mostly almost confident. I carefully unscrewed the panel cover and carefully removed it, very carefully. I was sweaty.

There, behind the circuit breakers, I could now see the “bus bar,” which is a Latin for “metal strip of death.” It is a large copper plate that all the circuit breakers clip onto, and it is brimming with kill-you-instantly electricity. I was fairly sure that I could disable the bus bar by switching the large main circuit breaker off. I could see another copper plate coming from under another protective cover that looked like it was going to the main breaker, but I wanted to be sure.

I carefully unscrewed the other cover and carefully removed it, very carefully. There behind the panel, I was face-to-face with all of the electricity for the entire neighborhood, coming in from the street on two wires as thick as Costco polish sausages. This was not on any of the videos.

I should not have removed this cover.

Crap.

Sure enough, they were attached to the plate running to the main breaker, so I was almost confident that shutting the main breaker off would kill the bus bar, but I knew for a fact there was no way to shut off the power to the two giant cables of doom that I had just uncovered.

I was now sweating and moving like the guy diffusing the bomb in the action film. If I accidentally touched the metal cover or my screwdriver to either of these humongous wires, I would receive enough Amps and Volts to miss a month’s worth of heartbeats and weld my body to the stop sign at the end of the street. Despite the gallons of sweat and nervous hand tremors, I managed to replace the cover and screw it down without incident.

Crisis averted. Death cheated, yet again.

I switched off the main, removed the old 40-amp breaker, and took it to Lowe’s to find a new one. They had an exact match, and new one in hand, I drove back to my house confident and even a little proud. Today, I know everything there is to know about electricity. Today I am an electrical super-genius. Today I am Tony Stark from Iron Man.

I slapped that new breaker in, buttoned up the panel cover, and flipped the main back on. Confidently, I flipped the new 40-amp breaker on… only to have it trip right back off.

Hmm… Electrical super-genius Tony Stark did not seem to fix anything here. In fact, all I seemed to have accomplished was spending eleven dollars on a breaker I didn’t need and getting to reset all the clocks inside an 85-degree house. Not awesome.

After spending the majority of the rest of the week in my car with the A/C running, I’m now in the middle of my convenient four-hour window, waiting for the real electrician to arrive and actually fix something. I don’t think I’ll tell him this story.

Oh, well. At least I cheated death. I feel truly alive!

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

Better Homes and Garbage

There was this one time that I tried to cut down a tree in my front yard in a wind and rain storm. Approximately ten years before that day, some jackass landscaper had decided to plant a little cedar sapling five feet away from the corner of my house. I guess it looked cute there. Ten years later it was towering over my house and rubbing on the roof. Not cool, landscaper guy. Not cool.

It needed to go, not only because eventually it would swallow my house, but also because it was blocking access for tractors to get into my backyard and dig a pool. Pool good. House-swallowing tree bad. Tree loses.

I asked a tree service guy how much they would charge me to remove the beast, and he gave me a number that made me actually choke a little and accidentally spit on him, so I decided to remove it myself. What could possibly go wrong?

Ever since we had our first child, I’ve never done anything at the optimum time or weather conditions for that activity. I simply do everything when I actually have time to do it, which is almost never, since kids somehow manage to suck nearly every productive minute out of each day. So there I was, on a windy, rainy Sunday, cutting down a really tall tree.

The tree was tall enough that I didn’t want to cut it down in one shot, since it would reach the street and possibly damage the street light in my front yard. I was up on a ladder that was swaying with the tree like a drunk wino trying to stand still, cutting through the middle of the tree trunk with a hand saw, since there was a very good chance that the chain saw would have removed my arm before anything else. When I was more than halfway through the trunk, I tied a rope above the cut and tied the other end to the front of my Ford Expedition. One good pull and I would have the top off the tree and then I could chain saw the bottom half to the ground. Simple.

Apparently the middle parts of healthy cedar trees are really tough. One good pull with my Expedition failed to pull the top half of the tree down. Instead it pulled the whole tree down, yanking the roots halfway out of the wet ground. It came down to the ground in slow motion, the top of the tree missing the street light by six inches. Well, that wasn’t what I was planning, but it worked out great! Let’s cut this baby up.

By this time, my sons and most of the neighborhood kids were braving the wind and rain for the free show. Above the cheering, a voice could be heard.

“Dad, the hole is filling up with water!”

“Because of the rain?” I asked, falsely hopeful.

“It’s filling up really fast.”

Hmm... Let me shut off the main line for the sprinklers. The roots probably broke the sprinkler line. False hopefully...

Nope, still filling up.

Oh, good. I just broke the water main to the house.

Ten hours and one gigantic hole later, in rain that was now blowing completely sideways, covered literally from head to toe in mud, by the light of a halogen work lamp, I finally reconnected the broken water line, and I was able to take a shower. More importantly for my health and well-being, my wife was able to shower the next morning.

Why did I tell you that story? First, to illustrate how much of an idiot I am, so you can appreciate the rest of this story. Secondly, to put into perspective how much I have emotionally and physically invested in my front yard. Now let’s talk financial investment.

Fast forward through the pool building process and the entire front yard looks like a bad day in Afghanistan. Multiple truckloads of soil and sod later, combined with many, many one hundred-degree days of backbreaking labor over the summer, and the once destroyed front yard is transformed into a magical emerald-green paradise of lush grass and happiness.

Why did we expend all that time and significant amount of money and sweat to transform our front yard? Apparently it was to make way for a refugee camp.

Son Number Two, our resident builder of forts, has claimed squatter’s rights on the spot where the cedar tree used to be. Up against my fence he has conjumbled together some scrap 2x4’s, reclaimed plywood, and other construction site trash. It’s all being loosely held together with rusty nails, duct tape, and hope to form what resembles a small shed if you squint from a distance. If you open your eyes it looks like something a desperate homeless person would still take a pass on.

To add to the curb appeal, he spent his own money at Lowe’s to purchase two five-gallon buckets and some PVC pipe. One of the buckets sits high above his shanty town for all the world to see, on top of my actual shed, which resides on the other side of the fence in the back yard, where sheds actually belong. That bucket is the water tank that feeds his “sink” inside the plywood hovel. The sink consists of the second bucket and a leaky drain that is meant to transport the wastewater to one of our landscaping drains, but mostly just leaks through the hot glue gun caulking around the PVC fitting and makes mud inside the fort.

What is the purpose of having a sink made out of a bucket inside your mud-floored fort? So that you can cook, obviously. The neighborhood kids have all pitched in their Melissa & Doug cookware and probably some of their parents’ silverware to outfit the refugee kitchenette. After school they heat up beans in our actual kitchen, then take them outside and eat them in the fort, on chairs made from the log rounds of the cedar tree that used to grace the very same spot. Then they “clean” the dishes in the sink. Afterward, they go off to fight dragons or have Nerf gun wars or what have you - and presumably fart a lot.

My wife and I are torn. As parents, we are all for this kind of creative, outdoor, non-video game type of play time. As homeowners who just spent a crap-ton of money to make the front and back yards look presentable, however, we cannot condone ugly squat houses in our otherwise lovely new front yard. We’re in a quandary.

So far, I have not set fire to the offending structure, but time will tell how much we can take. If only some anonymous person – perhaps a person who enjoys popular online humor columns such as this one – would call the city’s code enforcement office and alert them, the decision would be out of our hands. (Hint, hint.)

In the meantime, I’m just glad none of my neighbors are trying to sell their homes right now. I’d surely have a realtor at our door asking if they could put up some camouflage netting.

Wait a second... camouflage netting! Why didn’t I think of that earlier? Do they sell that at Lowes?

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!

We Interrupt this Column to Roof in a Drawl

I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to write this column this week. I have to be up on my roof.

Have you ever been dumb enough to start a project? Yeah, me too.

The whole thing started when my wife said she wanted to put ceiling fans up under our patio roof.

That shouldn’t take me too long to do, I foolishly thought.

Then over this winter we noticed that a considerable amount of water actually makes its way through the patio roof and down onto the patio when it rains. We hadn’t noticed it before, because prior to this winter it hadn’t rained in California in twenty-eight years.

Now, I’ve proven to myself time and time again that I know very little about how electricity works, but I am confident that water leaking down into a ceiling fan is bad for both the fan and the electricity inside the fan. And the electrons connected to my inside house wires from the outside fan wires. It could all end up being bad for my toaster and my refrigerator. It’s very technical.

All I know is life without toast is one thing, but warm beer is completely uncalled for. I needed to get that leak under control.

So, last week I was dumb enough to go up and tear off the old shingles. Once I was up there a thought occurred to me. The leaking might have something to do with the fact that the patio roof has almost no slope at all. That might also be why (at least as of this writing) I haven’t fallen off of it yet – a fact that my wife points out, rightfully, is amazing. Fingers crossed for more of that success!

Right after I was done removing the old roof, the full realization of the fact that I now had to install a new one hit me. As with so many other things in my life, I’m great with the demolition, but unfortunately, a little light in the rebuilding skills department. (Food, cars, etc.)

This should be no problem, though. I’m fairly confident that I know almost enough of the basic principles behind roofing to be ninety percent sure I’m going to get most of it right. I’m a little under the gun, however, since we have rain forecasted for Friday. So I need to put this column on hold this week and get to work.

(By the way... Does anyone out there know a lot about installing asphalt shingles on a low-slope roof? Please PM me. Asking for a friend.)

There has been a lot of measuring, calculations, research, and purchasing so far. For instance I know that to roof a 30’x14’ patio cover with Owens Corning Desert Tan asphalt three-tab shingles, you’ll need to buy approximately 420 square feet of shingles, or in terms of weight, 28,000 pounds worth. My back hurts.

And I’ve watched a number of YouTube videos, but they’re mostly Southern good ol’ boys up on a roof filming a how-to video with a cell phone about drip edge flashing and shingle starter rows. Between the thick drawls and the phones picking up the wind noise, not all of them were helpful, but I did end up with a lot of good info on what’s hot in camouflage baseball hats these days.

And I have a lot of new words in my vocabulary now, most of which I can say in both Standard English and Southern-American English, thanks to the YouTube videos.

Drip edge, hips, valleys, gables, eave edge flashing, rake edge flashing, asphalt underlayment, standard and increased overlap, ice dams, wind lift, wind-lifting dam ice flashing rake underlayment, etc. I have no idea what any of it means, but I really sound like I know what I’m talking about now, especially when I say it in my Southern drawl while wearing my new camo baseball cap.

So I should be all set. Sorry about the column this week, but the rain’s a’ comin’, y’all.

If you need me, I’ll be on the roof, probably swearing in my new drawl. By the way, don’t tell anyone about this in case I’m supposed to have a permit or something.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2016 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!

Spray on the Glamour

A long time ago when I was up way too late watching TV, I saw an infomercial for spray-on hair. If you had a bald spot, you could simply take the handy aerosol can of hair helper - expertly color-matched to your actual hair - and spray hair back onto the top of your head.

The possibly patented and expertly color-matched hair restoration formula would go to work by attaching to the hair follicles around the bald spot, thickening your existing hair. This would help cover the bald spot, and if the bald spot was too large, the amazing hair restoration formula would simply cover that bald spot all by itself, without needing to cling to and thicken existing actual hairs.

This amazing process would give your hair a natural, full, manly look. Your confidence would be restored, and instantly the world would think you had gone insane, because you just spray-painted the top of your head.

Sadly, spray-on hair only came in black or brown “hair.” Bald blonde guys had to just buy regular beige spray paint at Ace Hardware. The lack of hair color selection is probably why the product didn’t make it to the mainstream. Either that or Rust-oleum was just cheaper. Who knows?

I was reminded of that wonderful and amazingly short-lived product the other day when I read an article about Xtreme Green Grass. This is a company here in Sacramento that will come to your house and spray-paint your lawn. I’m not making that up.

In case you haven’t heard - or you live in another state and just don’t care - California is in a severe drought. We have about nine gallons of water left for the whole state. Those of you in other parts of the country may be thinking, “Ha! Have fun with that, morons.” That is a common (and often warranted) reaction to Californians’ problems, but in this case, just a heads-up; if you enjoy eating fruits, vegetables, rice, or nuts, you’d better start thinking about building a greenhouse and growing them yourself. Colorado can help you with the logistics.

Anyway, since we’re seeing the bottoms of all the lakes here, we’ve been asked to cut back drastically on the outdoor watering. I actually stopped watering my lawn a long time ago – well before the drought. Truth be told, it was because my lawn mower broke, and I was too lazy to fix it. I ended up on the leading edge of the water conservation movement by accident.

Since then, things have gone from bad to worse, and watering anything unnecessary has become a bad idea. Not everyone considers their lawn to be unnecessary like I do, however, and some folks here are still watering their lawns regularly. You can all feel free to knock on their doors the next time you need to make a salad.

They just can’t seem to let their green lawns go. I, on the other hand, have embraced my brown, scrubby lawn much the same way I embraced going bald. It’s more convenient. Less maintenance. And I’m not at all concerned with how it looks.

I was already married when I lost my hair, so no problem there; I’m not trying to impress anyone anymore. My wife is stuck with me. Same with the lawn - I already had friends when the drought hit. I’m not trying to impress anyone. If you don’t want to come over to my house because my lawn is brown, I probably didn’t want you to come over in the first place.

Plus, I haven’t had to mow my lawn in over a year. Score another point for water conservation.

As we know, however, not everyone embraces the loss of their hair or their green grass with quite the same level of enthusiasm as I do. So, Xtreme Green Grass was born. The perfect company for those that have given in to the peer-pressure of stopping the sprinklers, but can’t stand to be seen with a brown lawn.

Dave Bartlett, owner of Xtreme Green Grass, and his crackerjack crew will come out to your house and spray-paint your brown lawn green.

Again, I’m not making that up.

Isn’t that bad for the environment? you might ask. Not at all, says Dave. Apparently, the dye is an “all-natural earth pigment,” whatever that is. I’m not sure how you get the color green from dirt, and if he’s using ground-up live plants to color the paint he’s using to color the dying plants, that just seems unsustainable. But, what do I know? Dave is the plant painting expert, here, not me.  

So it’s all-natural. That’s really all we need to know. Dave says it’s not harmful to people or pets, either. Your pets, your guests, and your children can continue to eat your newly-painted lawn as they normally would, without fear of any side effects.

I’m almost sold, Dave, but just like that late night infomercial, I’m still a little skeptical.

I mean, imagining my lawn with a pleasingly-natural, unidentified earth pigment tone of green applied to all the scorched, brittle, brown blades of Tall Fescue is certainly tempting. And while the estimated five hundred-dollar price tag to paint my yard is almost too good to be true, I think my lawn might have the same inherent problem as my head.

I don’t think spray-painting the bald spots is really the fix we’re looking for.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2015 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!

The Real Tree of Death

Son Number Two got himself some birthday money last month. So, what did our newly-minted nine-year-old want to do with the loot? Buy plywood, obviously.

While many other American nine-year-olds would beg to be driven to the toy store, the sporting goods store, or the ice cream store, my son wanted nothing more than to go to Home Depot. I love him so much.

Off we went to the lumber aisle. His eyes lit up when I showed him four by eight-foot sheets of plywood for only eight dollars each. His eyes got even wider when we found eight-foot-long two by fours for three bucks. He was positively vibrating with excitement when I told him they would cut the plywood for him for free.

I know, buddy. I know. Home Depot is awesome.

Then we both went nuts when we found the cull cart. Seventy percent off. SEVENTY! Sure, they were random, twisted, splintered boards from the island of misfit lumber, but they were seventy percent off! The sixteen-foot-long pressure-treated two by four that has an eighty-degree twist in it would suck for building a house, but it’s worth every penny of four dollars to a nine-year-old building a backyard fort.

Backyard forts built by nine-year-olds do not need to be straight. I don’t think they physically can be. They always look like they were built by Dr. Seuss, not Bob Vila.

So we loaded up the truck with cheap twisted lumber and plywood and headed home. Son Number Two got to work immediately, with his main task, seemingly, consisting of spreading all my nails into the back lawn. Mowing next time is going to be an adventure.

Things were going well until halfway through his construction project I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

It seemed so innocent at the time, like uttering the words, “We should totally go to Mexico for spring break,” then the next thing you know you’re sharing an Ensenada jail cell with a three-hundred-pound ex-wrestler named Julio “El Papi Gordo” Valdez.

We’ve all been there, I’m sure.

Anyway, I looked at his fort - which was starting to look like a cross between an Alaskan outhouse and the rec center at a refugee camp – and foolishly said, “We should put a thatched roof on it.”

If only I had known what hell those words would lead to.

I figured if we put some palm fronds on the roof it might look a little classier when company comes over, in an island slum classy kind of way.

I have never put palm fronds on a roof. How hard could it be? I have never owned a palm tree, so I had no idea.

Our good friends own a palm tree, and when I texted them, they said I could have all the palm fronds I wanted, as long as I came over and got them.

This is the problem with texting – you can’t hear the maniacal laughing on the other end.

In order to cut the old palm frond off a palm tree, you have to put a ladder against the tree and climb up inside all the hanging fronds. If you have never been inside a palm tree, let me try to describe it for you:

Imagine you are sitting under a willow tree in the cool green grass near a babbling brook. You are barefoot, peaceful, and happy. Then imagine you decided to climb up into that willow tree.

It’s absolutely nothing like that.

Now imagine that the tree trimming people show up and cut some of the branches off the willow tree. Then they take them and feed them into the chipper behind their truck that chews the willow branches into tiny woodchips and spits them out at five hundred miles an hour into the back of the truck.

The inside of a palm tree is exactly like the inside of the chipper. Only scarier.

Palm trees look pretty straightforward and non-threatening from the outside. It turns out, however, that each palm frond is really hanging from the tree trunk on a four-foot-long machete blade, lined down both edges with giant curved thorns. Palm fronds make a sawfish’s snout look like a cuddly baby toy.

If you remember the scene in Return of the Jedi, when Jabba the Hut is trying to have Luke thrown into the scary-ass spine-covered hole in the desert, the inside of a palm tree looks a lot like the inverted version of that thing.

Since I am an idiot, I decided to give it a try and get some palm fronds for my boy.

“I have gloves on. I’ll be careful,” I told myself.

That was really stupid.

I was being attacked from every angle. In order to get any fronds I had to saw them off at the trunk. That required actually moving around inside the palm tree chamber of doom instead of staying perfectly still like all my survival instincts were telling me to do. Five minutes into the project I looked like I’d been in a knife fight.

I got hopelessly stuck a few times. I had to climb back down the ladder twice without my hat and once without my shirt. Do you have any idea how hard it is to climb down a ladder inside a cylinder of shark teeth with your shirt getting pulled up and over your head? I didn’t either until I stupidly suggested that my son thatch the roof on his new fort.

A palm tree is built to keep its fronds at all costs. I don’t know why they are called “palm trees” anyway. They should be called sawfish trees. Or band saw trees. Or dragon trees.

I actually managed to get a few fronds off before I had to stop when I finally nicked an artery. I was afraid I was going to bleed out on top of the ladder, and the firemen would not be able to extricate my body from the dragon tree. That’s no way to go out. Not for a backyard fort.

I had to give up. There was no way I was going back in. Son Number Two would just have to use what we had. It turned out that I had managed to retrieve just enough palm fronds to cover the roof on half the fort. So at the end of the day, I made it look like an unfinished island slum. Not what one might call an improvement.

Live and learn.

I have always thought that the Tree of Death was in my front yard, but now I know that’s not the case. My tree may smell like rotting flesh each spring, which is bad, but so far it has never actively tried to kill me when I wanted to pick a few leaves off of it.

Palm trees are mean. Palm trees are evil. Palm trees should be known as the Tree of Death. Or Dragon Tree at the very least.

Excuse me now; I need to continue to apply steady pressure to the arterial bleeding.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2015 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!

Whole-House Fan Fan

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

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

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