All Hallows Month

Original Post Date: October 27, 2010

When I was a kid, Halloween was on October 31^st. We figured out what our costume was going to be sometime between October 25^th and the 30^th, and we dressed up for one night and set out on a mission for candy with our pillowcase in hand to hold the loot. Our costumes were simple, and consisted of clothes or cardboard and duct tape that we already had at home. The houses in the neighborhood were decorated with a single jack-o-lantern and a porch light that was turned off.

These days, Halloween is still on the 31^st, but it has turned into a month-long event. We purchase our kid’s costumes at giant seasonal Halloween warehouse stores, and we do it in September. The kids wear their costumes to school, birthday parties, church functions, and around the house throughout the month of October. By the time Halloween night finally rolls around, the kids are putting the costume back on for the 200^th time. Families begin preparing their houses for the big night promptly on October 1^st. There is no time to spare. The house must be decorated from sidewalk to roof.

To be honest, I’m not even sure why we have Halloween anymore. In my day, we trick-or-treated to get candy. Plain and simple. We never had candy the rest of the year. At least, we didn’t at my house.

If you do not currently have small children, you may not be aware of a disturbing trend in birthday parties and get-togethers known as “The Gift Bag.” These days when kids attend a birthday party, the guests all go home with a “thanks-for-coming” goody bag full of little toys and candy. That strange new development, combined with the fact that almost every party has a piñata, has my children bringing home more candy from one birthday party than I saw all year as a kid.

And, let’s talk about pumpkins for a minute. I don’t really remember where my parents purchased our pumpkins when I was growing up. We may have gone to a pumpkin patch, or maybe they just picked them up at the store. One thing is for sure, we did not buy them at an amusement park like my kids do. Somewhere between my youth and my becoming a parent, the pumpkin patch turned into Disneyland for Vine Fruit. There are parking fees, parking attendants, gate fees, gate attendants, food pavilions with $8 hot dogs, train rides, petting zoos, side shows, giant play structures, face painting, cotton candy, stroller parking, support staff, hay rides, pig races, haunted barns, and… oh, yeah… pumpkins.

And how about the change in decorating for this “holiday?” Gone is the simple one jack-o-lantern porch. My wife has no less than three huge plastic storage tubs on our garage shelves dedicated to Halloween decorations. She chooses to mix genres when it comes to the outdoor decorations. We have the cutesy country décor hay bale and scarecrow on the front porch, combined with the spooky giant spider web and grotesquely large furry black spiders guarding the front door. We have eight small ghosts flying around underneath our tree on the front lawn, and they have been vigilantly guarding the place for three weeks now.

You will notice I said “outdoor” decorations. One very big change since my youth is the addition of indoor decorations for this all-important month-long holiday. We have Frankenstein on our sliding glass door. We have ghosts on our microwave. The boys have ghost and goblin pillow cases. We have a four-foot-tall witch on our staircase landing. We have a wood carving of the word “Boo.” We have scary napkins. There is something Halloweeny in every room in our house. Yes, every room. We actually have fuzzy jack-o-lantern floor mat/toilet seat cover combos for the bathrooms.  Our toilets have been reminding us of the impending All Hallows Eve since October 3^rd. That’s different.

I think the biggest change I’ve seen over the years, however, has been the change in the point of Halloween. The reason for the season, if you will. In my grandpa’s day, Halloween was a night of mischief. He and his friends used to roam around on October 31^st performing one simple, yet effective prank on as many homes as they could hit in one night. They would sneak into the backyard and move the outhouse. Apparently, most outhouses just sat over the hole without much foundation, and they would slide them backward, just one outhouse width, so the hole was open to the world in front of the door. They were hoping for the inevitable outcome if the homeowner didn’t notice the outhouse had been moved in the dark. (I’ll let you take it from there.) And if you happened to get a backside full of birdshot while relocating someone’s commode, well, that was simply the price you paid for having so much fun.

In my day, we went out on Halloween to make sure our neighbors were following the rules. We felt we were owed candy, much like a mob boss is owed protection money. We said, “trick or treat,” and we meant it. If there was no treat, there was going to be a trick. The older kids had eggs or soap for the windows. Fair was fair. We wore costumes for the same reason armed robbers wear ski masks - anonymity. People had candy by the front door out of self defense more than anything else. When someone decorated their house above and beyond the single jack-o-lantern, they were actually trying to scare the kids away, not entertain them. Halloween was a night run by the kids and tolerated by the adults.

Today, in the suburban neighborhoods across this land, Halloween has been hijacked by the adults. We adorn our front lawns and living rooms for our own amusement, often competing with our neighbors in a game of decoration one-upsmanship that used to be reserved only for Christmas lights. We buy our kids expensive costumes so they can look just like a Star Wars storm trooper or Hannah Montana as we escort them from house to house and congratulate each other on how cool the front lawn graveyard looks with this year’s addition of the fog machine. If people don’t have candy, or no one’s home, we just say, “Oh, well,” and move on to the next house.

What is that all about? We’ve managed to get way off point here. How will our kids ever know what Halloween is really all about?

Come to think of it, what is Halloween really all about? It’s been a weird deal since its inception. Moving outhouses? Defacing your neighbor’s property as part of a sucrose extortion racket? That’s just plain strange.

The more I think about it, the more I think this new trend is a good thing. I mean, there’s always a truckload of candy at the end of the night that I get to commandeer for my own consumption, my outhouse hardly ever gets moved anymore, and I never have to try to get soap off my windows. Plus, my boys get into enough mischief the other 364 days of the year as it is. I guess it’s OK if we’ve moved away from the annual night of mandated mayhem toward a kinder, gentler Halloween.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go turn on the hydraulics for the automatic creaky coffin lid and fill the water tank on the new fog machine. I am really going to outdo my neighbors this year!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of “My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh,” Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

No More Tears

I have a new theory on my role as a husband and father. I think my main job, when it all gets boiled down, is to keep my wife from crying.

Let me back up a little… I don’t like irrigation. That probably goes back to high school, when I worked for a summer on my uncle’s farm in Oregon. My buddy Scott and I went and spent an entire summer “moving pipe” in the potato fields of the fertile Willamette Valley. (Pronounced will-LAMB-et, not WILL-ah-met, for all of you non-Oregonians.)

Moving pipe involves grabbing the middle of a 30-foot long, 4-inch diameter aluminum pipe, picking it up and shaking it loose from its attachment point to the next pipe, curling it up to chest height like a tightrope walker’s balance pole, high-stepping over fifteen rows of waist-high potato plants, and setting it back down. Repeat the process for eight to ten hours a day for two months.

I won’t tell you I hated it, but “liked it” isn’t the right term either. Scott and I ended up having a good time overall, and we were in great shape at the end of the summer. While the experience may not have done much to illuminate our future career aspirations, it certainly did serve to give both of us a really good idea of what we did not want to do for a living, and a strong desire to go to college.

During college, I ended up having to take a few engineering-related classes on irrigation and irrigation theory. I had had enough irrigation practice up in Oregon to outweigh any irrigation theory that some professor who never moved a pipe in his life wanted to tell me about, so I wasn’t really very interested in hearing what he had to say. There are some things that text books just can’t teach you, like how to get a whole bullfrog out of a 1/8-inch diameter sprinkler hole at high pressure. I suffered through the classes and moved on.

Fast-forward to today, and you likely know my stance on home irrigation. I simply do not like to spend my time or money operating and maintaining a sprinkler system. Especially for something that is not a crop, and has no possibility of paying me back for my investment. Only the social convention of suburban houses having year-round short, green lawns keeps me from shutting off my sprinkler system entirely and letting the grass go native. I would do it in a heartbeat if the neighbors would cooperate.

I am willing to bend to social pressures when it comes to the lawns, but the very first thing I did when we bought our house was to shut off the drip irrigation system that was responsible for the trees and bushes. I was not about to waste time and money maintaining a system of tiny plastic hoses meant to water things that, in my opinion, should be able to fend for themselves. That was all fine and dandy until a week ago.

We had a long, hot summer here in Northern California, and a few of the leafier plants in our backyard ended up a lot more brown than green. My wife had made a few comments to me about them that went in one ear and out the other, but last week at lunch, she sat me down and said flatly, “I want a drip system for the backyard plants.”

When I said, “No way,” she cried.

Now, she claimed it was not my refusal to irrigate that started her tears. She claimed that my rebuff was simply the last straw on a large pile from a frustrating week, but I know better.

Apparently the appearance of the plants around the back fence of our yard is tied directly to her self worth, and it embarrasses her to have dead ones. I, on the other hand, could not honestly care less about them. When people come over to our house, I am not the least bit ashamed of the dead yellow bush in the corner. In my mind, it is the bush’s fault that it could not survive a summer in this climate, not mine. That bush is the one that should be ashamed for being weak.

She doesn’t see it like I do.

I was very taken aback by her tears. While she does have a long track record of tricking me into doing home improvement projects using deception and false naiveté, my wife is not one for employing emotional blackmail just to get her way. It was obvious that her desire for green shrubbery not only outweighed mine considerably, but was a much more serious concern to her than I had realized. Or not realized.

I don’t like it when my wife cries. I especially don’t like it when I’m the one who made her cry. So, guess what I did last weekend?

When I flipped the switch on the electronic sprinkler timer in the garage, and the drip line valve came on, our backyard looked like the grand finale of the fountain show at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Water was shooting straight up into the air from under almost every bush and tree. I hate drip line systems.

I ended up spending $64 at Home Depot for the supplies to patch the 18 geysers and replace the 16 feet of main line that I had torn out during a fencing project last year, thinking foolishly that I would never use it again. Shows you what I know.

It seems to have made her happy that she can now have green plants all year long. But, I didn’t do it to make her happy. I did it to keep her from crying. I will attempt to make my wife happy as often as I possibly can, but if I can keep her from crying, I think I’m really doing my husbandly job.

It’s a subtle difference, but an important one that I think extends to all my roles as a husband and father, and will help me keep my eye on the ball, long term-wise. For instance, if I’m great at my job and make a ton of money, my wife will be happy. But also, if I’m marginal at my job and make a marginal amount of money, she’ll still be happy. However, if I’m bad at my job and get fired, or let my emotions get the better of me and quit one day, we’ll have no money. If we have no money, she and I will have to stop eating so the kids don’t starve to death, and that will make her cry, because she gets very cranky if she doesn’t eat. So, I need to maintain a marginal or better rating at work, and keep my job.

Another good example is our kids. If I do my job with the boys, and all three of them grow up to be something awesome, like astronauts, or doctors, or beer brewers, then my wife will be happy. But even if I do just an OK job with them, and they turn out to be just accountants, or managers, or computer programmers, she will still be happy. However, if I totally neglect them, and they grow up to be jobless ne’er-do-wells, she will cry. So, I need to make sure I do my part to make sure they grow up to be fine young men.

The way I see it, I need to focus on maintaining a level of operation as a husband and a father that strives to reduce spousal crying to a minimum, or in a perfect world, eliminate it altogether. If I can do that, I think I’m doing my job. If that job has to involve drip irrigation from time to time, then so be it.

Home improvement and career issues aside, I will be concentrating most heavily on the boys. I need to keep a sharp eye on them and make sure they’re heading in the right direction, because, as I said, if they grow up to be unemployed lazy bums, she’ll cry. But if they really take a wrong turn and grow up to be lawyers or, worse yet, politicians, we’ll both cry, and I do NOT want that!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

A Bad Call at First Base

A few years back, when I was coaching Son Number One’s T-ball team, we had an incident with a phone. We were in the middle of practice, and the kids were goofing off just a little too much, so we sent them on a run to the fence and back to dissipate some of the excess energy. One of the boys fell way behind the group, due to the fact that he was “running” at a pace that barely qualified as a brisk walk. I jogged up to him and said, “Let’s go, dude. Pick up the pace!”

The six-year-old stopped and looked me in the eye and announced, “I can’t go any faster than this, because my phone is really heavy and it’s banging around when I run.”

“Your what?”

He reached into the front pocket of his windbreaker and produced a BlackBerry smartphone. With a big wide grin, he declared, “It has BrickBreaker on it!”

Since he was not my own son, I was forced to resist my natural urge to snatch the phone from his hand and hurl it as far as I could. Instead, I simply told him to put the phone away and move his little patooty, or he would be running to the fence and back for the rest of the school year. He picked up the pace to a moderate jog.

I left the conversation dumbfounded. Why would his parents have given him their old phone? And more to the point, why would he be allowed to bring it to practice? And what the heck is BrickBreaker?

About ten minutes later, we were running a hitting and fielding drill, and the aforementioned T-baller was playing first base. When the batter hit the ball, the infielders were supposed to scoop it up and throw him out at first. Simple. Except for the fact that on the third or fourth batter, the shortstop fielded the ball and rifled it right over the head of our young BlackBerry owner. He had lost interest in the drill and was standing with both feet on first base, his glove on the ground at his feet, his head down, and you guessed it… playing with his phone.

When we saw the ball heading toward him and realized he wasn’t looking, three coaches and ten parents all shouted, “HEYOOW HEY AHHH LOOK OOOUT!” at the same time. He never even looked up. Complete oblivion.

Needless to say, he was removed from first base, and the phone was removed from his possession, at least for the time being. One of the moms later joked that he was probably updating his Facebook status. “Playing first base.” “Coaches seem mad.” “What’s up with these guys?”

Fast forward to today, and I am once again dumbfounded. This time by my own actions. I just gave Son Number One and Two our old BlackBerry phones.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Wait a second, Smidge, you’re the guy who said your kids couldn’t have a phone until they were 35. I know I said that, but allow me to explain. I am just trying to save money.

This all started when my wife mentioned that she wanted to get MP3 players for the boys. For those of you over 60 years old, an MP3 player is the modern equivalent of a Walkman. For those of you over 80 years old, a Walkman is a portable music player with headphones. (And a BlackBerry is a mobile telephone, or “cell phone.”)

Anyway, she mentioned that she would like to get them MP3 players, which, with my wife means she had been shopping for MP3 players for about three weeks and was minutes away from buying them. I had to act fast. My initial response of, “I don’t think the kids need those,” only held her off for a day, then she was right back at it, listing all the reasons why music was important and why I was wrong and stubborn and wrong.

I could almost hear the Visa card being swiped at a Best Buy checkout stand, so I had to react quickly. “Why don’t you just give them our old phones?” I said, not believing the words had come from my mouth, even as I uttered them.

“Really?” she asked. “That would work?”

“Yes. They would be able to play music, plus they could take pictures and video.” Who is talking right now? This can’t be me saying this. “They could even record voice notes and type messages.” What am I doing? I’m breaking my own “no technology for kids” rules.

Or am I?

Yes, I am, but here’s how I can sleep at night: There is no cell service for the phones, and I disabled the Wi-Fi, so they have no connectivity to the internet, which is my main concern about children and technology. Also, I saved a bunch of money on MP3 players. (I know, I know. That’s weak. I don’t want to hear it.)

After going this long owning nothing more advanced than an Etch A Sketch, the boys are beyond thrilled. They actually like the voice recorder and the ring tones more than the music, but the camera is their favorite part. All in all, it is working out well, but here are two handy tips if you decide to follow my lead and recycle your phones to your kids:

Tip # 1: They still dial 911, so be careful! All cell phones, no matter if they are active or not, can still call 911. I know this because the nice 911 operator that I ended up talking to on my old BlackBerry told me so.

Tip # 2: Perform what is called a “security wipe” before you hand them over. This function removes all your contacts and email accounts from the phone’s memory. This ensures that even if your kid does figure out the Wi-Fi password, they can’t send an email to your best client or your pastor calling them a butt munch.

Other than those two things, there’s not much trouble they can get into with them, so I’m OK with it. But I swear, if one of those phones ever shows up at baseball practice, the next thing that comes in contact with the bat is not going to be a ball.

I will personally be seeing how much of an old BlackBerry I can hit over the fence.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

The Mortgage Jokers

Did you know that the word mortgage means “death pledge?” That should tell you almost everything you need to know about borrowing money to buy a house.

We recently refinanced our mortgage down to a significantly lower interest rate, and since we re-upped the loan for another 30-year stint, our monthly payment is a lot less. To compensate for adding additional years back onto the loan, we are making larger-than-required principal payments to reduce the length of the loan, and minimize the amount of interest we’ll pay.

At least, we tried to do that. The bank looked at our first larger payment and immediately chose the most inane way imaginable to allocate the funds. I won’t tell you the name of this whiz-bang financial institution, but it rhymes with Wells Fargo.

Here’s what happened: (I have chosen round amounts for simplicity, but not because I think you, the loyal reader, couldn’t follow along. I am attempting to make this as simple as possible in case anyone from the bank reads this, so they might have a fighting chance of understanding it.)

Let’s say our total loan amount is $100,000, and our monthly scheduled payment is $500. We sent them an October payment of $1100.

If we were to pay the scheduled $500/month for the next 30 years, we would pay a grand total of $180,000 to the unnamed bank. We would have paid them the $100,000 principal back, plus $80,000 in interest. We don’t want to pay them $80,000 in interest, so if we pay them $1100/month, paying an additional $600/month toward the principal, it only takes 9 years to pay them the $100,000 back, and we only pay $22,000 in interest.

Simple, right. We thought so.

Not to them, I guess. They took our October payment of $1100, looked at it carefully, and decided that we must have wanted to pay our standard October bill of $500, pre-pay our November bill of $500 -- $400 of which is interest -- and put the remaining $100 toward the principal. They sent us back a statement telling us that’s what they did with the money, and the good news was that our next payment wasn’t due until December!

An open letter to our mortgage lender:

What the hell are you guys smoking over there? You geniuses actually looked at my more-than-double-sized mortgage payment and concluded that I wanted to pre-pay next month? Really?

Has anyone in the history of the mortgage ever pre-paid a month? That is some serious outside the box type thinking right there, fellas!

You guys seriously thought that I am sending you extra money so that I can get a jump on paying you the entire $80,000 in interest as scheduled in the 30-year payoff plan? It didn’t even cross your minds that I might be trying to pay down the principal faster? Really!?!

So, by that same superior banker’s logic of yours, if I came into a bunch of money and wanted to pay off my mortgage tomorrow, and I sent you the entire $100,000 principal amount, you would naturally assume that I wished to pre-pay the next 200 months’ payments, so that I wouldn’t have a care in the world until the year 2028, at which time I would happily resume paying off the remaining $60,000 loan balance with interest over the next 160 months?

That makes perfect sense.

Now, I understand that I just sent the large payment in without any specific instructions. I can kind of see where you might have thought twice about what to do with the money if I had sent it in as a check, with no instructions, and the amount had been exactly two payments. Maybe you might have thought to yourselves, “This man will obviously be out of the country next month, and unable to send his November mortgage check to us on time, so he is obviously sending us that money now, so as not to disturb our fragile cash flow situation here at the nation’s fourth largest bank.”

I mean, if I squint really hard, I can almost see that scenario playing out at that think tank you guys are running over there. But, fellas, seriously… This payment came in electronically from my bank. Do you brainiacs think that I was smart enough to set up an online bill payment account with my bank, but I wasn’t smart enough to find the “recurring monthly payment” button?

This isn’t looking good, boys. You guys are facing the same conundrum that most of this country’s politicians are in right now. You can’t be even remotely mediocre at your job and screw it up this badly, so you are left with two unpleasant choices: Either you have to admit that you are about as smart as a box of hair, and unfit to run your own life, let alone a bank, or you have to admit that you are a crooked cheat. It’s either one or the other, because nobody with an IQ over room temperature would make that kind of mistake in earnest.

Thanks for giving me the loan in the first place. I really do appreciate it. But, play fair, or I swear, I will go through the long and painful process of refinancing my “death pledge” again, just to make sure you never get another penny of my money.

Sincerely yours,

Smidge

Watch your bankers closely, folks. As with our politicians, something tells me I already know the answer as to why the “mistake” was made.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Phone on the Toilet

The other day I walked into the men's room, straight into a dilemma. When I entered the restroom, there was a guy in one of the stalls, sitting on the throne, talking. We were the only two people in the room, so for a moment I got very worried, because men, as a rule, do not talk to each other in the restroom.

The only time it is acceptable to have a conversation in the men's room is when you are with a friend, and located two or more urinals away from each other, or at the sinks. It is not acceptable to carry on a conversation with a friend from adjacent urinals, or from two or more urinals away if there is a stranger at one of the urinals between you, and it is never acceptable to carry on a conversation from a stall.

A perfunctory "howdy," or "hey," or the preferred silent upward head nod can be extended to a stranger at the bank of urinals, but only if accidental eye contact has been made. Any deliberate or excess stranger-to-stranger eye contact at the urinals is strictly forbidden. No talking or eye contact of any kind is allowed if circumstances require you to be at adjacent urinals.

Speaking of adjacent urinals, the only time you should be right next to another guy at the bank of urinals is when there are only two of them, or there are a lot but the rest of them were full and it was unavoidable. Walking up to the adjacent urinal if there is another one available further away is considered very, very bad form. You are even required to use the super-low-to-the-ground children’s urinal before resorting to side by side.

Basically, we try very hard not to talk to each other or get too close to each other when in the restroom. Even the friend-to-friend urinal conversations should be kept to an absolute minimum. The sinks are really the only acceptable location for restroom communications, but again, only the amount of perfunctory chit chat required to maintain a civilized environment, and nothing more.

Now, back to the stalls. Speaking to other people in the bathroom from inside the stalls is strictly off-limits. This is a hard-and-fast rule. If the toilet backs up on you, or you run out of toilet paper, you’re on your own. A man following proper restroom etiquette will sacrifice his own socks before he would ask for some toilet paper from inside the stall.

We are so serious about the stall rules, that if you happen to be occupying the only stall in a particular restroom, you will clear your throat or shake the newspaper every time you hear the restroom door open, in order to signal that the stall is in use. This is a universal notification of stall occupancy, meant to avoid the awkward moment when the newcomer attempts to open the locked stall door, forcing the stall occupant to say, “occupied,” and making both men feel uncomfortable.

So, back to my dilemma from a few days ago, I walked into a restroom situation where three very strict rules were being broken. There was a lot of talking going on by him, we were strangers, and he was in a stall. I would have turned right around and left, but I realized a second or two later that he was on the phone.

In the stall. Sitting on the toilet. On the phone.

On the timeline of the modern flush toilet, cell phones are a relatively new phenomenon, and it is very obvious that we, as men who use public restrooms, need to get our arms around this problem. Cell phones have made it possible to talk with someone outside the restroom, while you are inside doing your business. Just because it is possible, however, does not make it OK. Like nuclear weapons, just because you have them, doesn’t automatically mean you should use them.

Since I realized he was not talking to me, I stayed in the restroom. I had gone in only to wash my hands, so I took care of that, and it was as I finished up at the sink that my dilemma came. This particular bathroom was brand new, and had no paper towels of any kind. The only means of drying your hands was the air blower mounted to the wall next to the sinks. I had been using this bathroom all week, and I knew all about the air blower. It was called the “XLERATOR,” and it sounded and felt a lot like a jet engine. It was so loud, I was actually a little worried about potential hearing loss from its use.

Here was my quandary. If I stuck my hands under the jet engine nozzle, the XLERATOR would fire up, and any type of phone conversation inside the room would be immediately impossible. That thing was so loud, it would even be hard to text near it.

Do I wait for him to get off the phone before I dry my hands?

That would be the polite thing to do. He would still be able to hear the person on the other end of the line, and I wouldn’t be forcing him to have the awkward conversation about what that noise was, or where he was. He could try to lie and say he’s at the airport out on the airfield, but most likely he would have to fess up.

On the other dripping wet hand, he should NOT be on the phone. I was well within my rights to go about my business, and firing up the 6000 decibel hand dryer and drowning out his conversation would ultimately teach him a lesson. The hopeful end result of the lesson would be one less guy in America who thinks it’s OK to talk on his cell phone in the bathroom.

His conversation ended as I was still standing at the sink, drip-drying my hands and contemplating what to do, so ultimately, no lesson was learned and no forward progress was made. He will probably go on to do it again.

While phone-stall talking is less uncomfortable for the other bathroom occupants than talking directly to them, it is still a serious no-no. The person on the phone is still talking to someone from the stall. It is a once-removed, long distance violation of the no talking in the stalls rule, but a violation nonetheless.

I’m not sure what all you cell phone stall talkers out there are thinking, but you need to knock it off. You are breaking the guy code by ignoring the men’s room rules, and you need to take it outside.

As for you ladies, I have no idea what your bathroom code of ethics looks like, but I would imagine, like most other things, it’s 180 degrees from the men’s. You probably chat with strangers from stall to stall, and share toilet paper under the walls. It’s unthinkable.

You will have to decide on your own what to do about cell phones in the ladies’ restroom. I’m not getting in the middle of it. Just please don’t call us from the stall. And don’t answer our calls, either. That’s a twice-removed, long distance violation of the men’s no talking in the stalls rule, but a violation nonetheless.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

When Good Grandmas Go Bad

We took a road trip recently, and brought my mother-in-law along. Actually, I should probably say, “she came with us.” She’s not really old enough yet to be “brought along.” I think that phrasing changes as soon as the person stops being able to help drive. Or when they start to drool on themselves. Anyway, she piled into the Ford Expedition with my wife and me and the three boys, and we headed north for Portland, OR, a mere ten hours away. We left early, and had our first stop for gas two hours into the drive, at 8:00 A.M.

It was at this stop, inside the Shell station's convenience store, that I realized she is going crazy.

When the gas pump had finished draining my checking account balance into the tank, I went inside the store to buy a drink with my leftover change. There stood my seven-year-old, holding a king-sized Kit Kat bar the size of his head, asking if he could have it.

"Of course not.”

“Well, if he can't have that, can he have a donut?" inquired his grandma, on his behalf.

 "Absolutely not." I replied, slightly bewildered that I was having this conversation with either of them, but especially with the adult.

"Well, why not?" she asked.

 "Yeah, why not?" my son chimed in.

"BECAUSE IT'S EIGHT O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING!”

"Well, what does that matter?" she asked. "It's a road trip."

She had obviously gone completely off her rocker. Why does it matter? Well, for starters, we don’t normally feed the children 18,000 mg of processed sugar for breakfast. We usually shoot for actual food. On top of that, we try to avoid feeding them enough sugar to power a small city when we are going to be cooped up in the same car with them for EIGHT MORE HOURS!!!

I jokingly say she had gone crazy, but that was obviously not the case. She was able to carry on a perfectly coherent conversation, despite the fact that she wanted to feed the children hyperactive fit-inducing amounts of sugar. Since she was lucid in all other areas, I pondered why an otherwise sane woman would want to lock herself in a confined space with three sugar-crazed Tasmanian Devils.

Only one answer makes any sense. She’s trying to earn points with them. You see, us parents usually have no concerns over being the favorite. The kids get one mom and one dad, and that’s it. You're stuck with us kid. Too bad. Grandmas, on the other hand, usually have some competition. Now, our boys’ two grandmas get along great. They love each other to death, but I am now sure that they are secretly at war for favorite grandma status. And sugar, in one form or another, seems to be the main weapon in their arsenals.

When my mother-in-law comes to visit at our house, she gets up early each morning to walk to the nearby gas station to get the newspaper because my wife and I don't subscribe. I would like to sound hip and say that’s because we get all our news electronically, but the real reason is that the paper is expensive and always filled with depressing news. Why would I want to pay to be depressed?

Anyway, she always comes back with the morning paper, and some form of Hostess brand sugar for the kids. She does this so often that our kids refer to Chevron stations as “the donut store.”

The first morning we were in Portland, she took the boys and walked from the hotel down to the grocery store a few blocks away and came back with the morning edition of the Oregonian, a gallon of milk, and two boxes of cereal.

Cocoa Puffs and Trix.

Really, grandma? Was there no cereal with a higher sugar content?

Our kids have never even seen or tasted those cereals in real life, but they have apparently been waiting for the right time to try and get their hands on some after seeing them on commercials. They are smart enough to know who to ask, because grandma’s explanation for the purchase was the ever-popular, “They asked me if we could buy them.”

Oh, well, then I understand. There’s no getting out of that trap once they ask nicely and all.

She followed that up with, “Don’t worry, we decided they only get one bowl per day.”

Oh, good. I was afraid it would take less than a week for them to develop diabetes.

I was raised on healthy food with no traces of processed sugar. I would almost go so far as to say my mom was a health food nut before it was cool. She put wheat germ on our cereal and yeast in our orange juice. It was special. Today, as a grandma, she still can’t seem to bring herself to give junk food to a child, so she has taken a different route. She vies for favorite grandma status by providing them with their favorite fruits. Since she is competing with pure, refined sugar, she has to go out of her way to find exotic fruits that my wife and I would never think of buying. It started with simple pears and pineapples, but it has ratcheted up as the years have progressed.

“Nana is here, and she brought us kiwis, papayas, mangos, passion fruit, and something called a cape gooseberry!”

I guess the sugar from the fruit is a little better for them than the junk food, but the “healthy” treats are not without side effects. I’m not sure which I like less: Dealing with the emotionally un-wound child who ate too many Ho Hos, or the digestively un-bound child who ate too much pineapple. Can I see what’s behind door number three, please?

As I reflect a little more on my own childhood, I realize the grandma/sugar conundrum is nothing new. My sisters and I only had one grandma, so she wasn’t even competing, and she still gave us “syrup in every square” on our Eggo waffles at her house. My mom would cringe when we told her, and we thought that was endlessly funny, just like my boys do today.

All the same, I wish the grandmas would compete with each other by buying the boys shoes or underwear instead. Those we can use!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Tooth Loss

Son Number Two lost his first tooth the other night. He is six and a half years old, and he had been wiggling one of his lower front teeth for over a month trying to get it loose enough to come out, because the way he figured it, he was behind. His older brother started losing his teeth at age five, and being a naturally competitive middle child, it was not sitting well with Number Two that none of his had fallen out yet.

I pulled Son Number One’s first loose tooth out of his mouth with my fingers, and all three boys thought that was pretty cool, so ever since then, that has been the only acceptable way to lose teeth in our family. Other kids wait until they fall out in an apple or a sandwich, but not my kids. Number One pulled two of his own teeth out at school while sitting in class. My kids are kind of weird.

I knew Son Number Two’s first tooth was getting really close to coming out, because he could bend it back and forth almost 90 degrees. He was sitting in the back seat of the car attempting to pull it out of his head as we were driving to his soccer team pictures, so I had to beg him not to mess with it until later that night, or at least until after the team photo was taken. Luckily, he listened to me and I won’t have to have this future conversation:

“Great team photo. Which one is your kid?”

“The one with the missing tooth and the blood dripping down his chin. It was a rough league.”

After he had brushed his teeth that night, he was continuing to play with the very wiggly central incisor, so I reached in there and wrenched it from his jaw. This is one of the things that I just don’t get about kids and losing teeth. I ripped the tooth out of his mouth, and handed it to him. Instead of being upset about that, like any normal adult would be, he was beaming with pride and joy. He was smiling a newly-toothless grin from ear to ear, holding his own tooth in his hand, bleeding profusely all over the bathroom counter and sink, and joyously admiring his gruesome countenance in the mirror. He exclaimed, in a cheerful and blood-spattered voice, "I've been waiting for this for six and a half years!" Like I said, my kids are kind of weird.

Because Son Number One began losing his baby teeth when he was five, I have been thinking about this subject for a while now. My January, 2011 column, “The Tooth Fairy,” asked many questions that still go unanswered today. Namely, why don’t kids ask more questions about the Tooth Fairy and his or her motives? I also discussed the need for a universally adopted fee schedule, as well as solicited advice for what to do with all the teeth I am collecting.

While no one had any good advice for my wife and me on these pressing issues, one of our good friends did give us a book entitled Throw Your Tooth on the Roof. It’s about all the different tooth traditions around the world. While it was interesting and funny, all it really served to do was add to the list of questions I have about kids losing teeth.

Apparently, saving your kid’s baby teeth and doing weird things with them is not a uniquely American phenomenon. We even stole the Tooth Fairy from another culture. Why? Why would we have done that??? Why? Couldn’t the early Americans see that the end result of parents having to be the Tooth Fairy would be very, very annoying and expensive? They were visionaries in so many respects. How could they have been so short-sighted on this issue?

Were there just not enough good opportunities to give your kids money in the olden days, so they decided to pay them for their teeth? Why did we feel the need to complicate childhood tooth loss? At the very least, couldn’t we have adopted one of the other tooth-related traditions?

As the title of the book would suggest, a lot of cultures feel that throwing the baby teeth up on the roof is the way to go. The mythical end result varies from country to country, but basically, the overriding theme is good luck. I like it because no money is involved, and there is no need to remember to make the money/tooth switch at the hopelessly inconvenient drop location of directly under the sleeping child’s head.

Besides having an imaginary flying nymph pay for them, or throwing them into the rain gutters, the next most popular tradition was planting them in the garden. Again, I like it from the standpoint of no money and no time-critical, potentially emotionally devastating situation where the child wakes up to find his or her tooth still under the pillow, caused by tired parents going to sleep on the job. What I didn’t really understand is what is supposed to be accomplished. Since losing teeth seems like a really big event in any kid’s life, I would expect the planting them in the garden thing to backfire more often than not. I know if that was our family’s tradition, our kids would be at the garden every day, examining the exact spot where the tooth was planted, waiting for the magic beanstalk.

Maybe the parents sneak out to the garden after the planting, and replace the tooth with an actual seed. If that’s the case, I am less excited about that one, because based on my lack of green thumb, my children would be convinced that they had a mouthful of defective teeth.

The book outlined all the crazy tooth traditions around the world, but never answered the one burning question: Why? Why do we do anything with kids’ teeth? Why don’t we just high-five the kid and throw the tooth in the trash? Doesn’t that seem simpler to everyone?

And why do the kids get so excited about it? Why is it such a universally anticipated event for the world’s children? Things are falling out of your mouth! Trust me, kid, that is not a good thing when you get older.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Swimming Upstream

Can someone please tell me what is so difficult to understand about “kick from your hips, not your knees?”

Pivot your legs from your hips. Don’t bend your knees. Well, bend your knees a little, but just a little and only on the down stroke. Keep them straight coming up. And you’ve got to keep your toes pointed. Point them straight back away from you, not down toward the bottom of the pool.

What is hard about that?

Apparently, a lot, because my boys cannot seem to figure it out.

A few nights ago was my oldest boy’s very first swim practice. I think we paid just under $47,000 to have him and his younger brother, Number Two, join the youth swim club for the two-month “Fall Program” this year. If we want them to keep swimming after October, we can make that happen for another $300,000 or so.

I was a swimmer and a water polo player in my youth, and I have visions of all three of my boys excelling in the pool and becoming Olympic water polo players. I was not tall enough -- or anywhere close to good enough, for that matter – to be Olympic-caliber. They just need to practice a lot, and beat the odds and end up over 6’-4” tall. I plan to feed them a lot and hang them by their ankles whenever possible.

So, given my dreams for their aquatic success, I was very excited about Son Number One’s first practice. I was so excited that I didn’t even bother to question where the practice might be taking place, and drove him to the wrong pool complex. Once I realized my mistake, I drove across town at 96 miles per hour, hoping to still make it on time and preserve our first impression with his coach. Instead of that, I was the parent that brought his kid to the first practice seven minutes late. Great.

OK, we’ll try to move past that, and just wow him with your superior swimming skills. No problem.

The first few swim practices of the year involve a lot of kick boards. There were a lot of kids in the pool, but since they are still small at six and seven years old, they had them three to a lane. (After getting a rough count of the number of kids and doing some quick math based on registration fees, I estimated that it must cost about three trillion dollars to run a kids swim program. That seems like a lot.)

Off they went across the pool, holding their kick boards out in front of them and churning up the water behind them with their little legs kicking like mad. All of them except my son. He quickly fell behind the group. There was no churning of water going on behind him. An occasional foot could be seen rising above the water near his butt, but that was about it. I could see his legs under water moving like mad, but he didn’t seem to be making any progress. At one point, I’m positive that he actually went backward for a little while.

To give you a good idea of how slow he was compared to every other kid in the pool, here is an example. At one point the coach was sending the kids in each lane one at a time down the pool, spaced out at reasonable time intervals to avoid having them too close together on their way down the pool. Son Number One was the first to be sent in his group of three. The second kid to be sent passed my son almost immediately, and when the third kid in the group had traversed the entire length of the pool and made it to the opposite wall, Son Number One was just approaching the middle of the pool. He had gone an astonishing five feet in the time it took the third kid to go 25 yards.

The coach was working with him as much as possible. “Kick with your whole leg, not your knees. Keep your legs straight and move them from your hips. Point your toes.” The coach didn’t have a lot of time for one-on-one instruction, though, since he was in charge of 65 other kids, presumably to justify his estimated 45 million dollar annual salary.

The practices are only a half-hour long, so it seemed to be over almost before it had really started.  OK, buddy, we’ll come back tomorrow night and work on kicking some more.

The next night, Son Number Two got to come to swim practice also. He had missed the first one due to a conflicting soccer practice. Don’t even get me started on that. Anyway, into the pool they went. They are a year and a half apart in age, but they ended up in the same group, which was slightly surprising based on what happened the week before at try-outs. They both did pretty well, but when Son Number Two was asked to show the coach his backstroke, I’m fairly sure it was the first time he had even heard the term, let alone attempted the stroke. He resembled someone who had been lying on their back in the grass, and suddenly realized that they were covered from head to toe with ants. It was not pretty.

Off they went across the pool, kick boards in front, little legs working like mad behind them. There goes the group, across the pool, and there are both my boys, still five feet from the starting wall, kicking like crazy and not going anywhere at all. It seems Son Number Two was born with the same inherent kicking deficiency as Number One, exclusive apparently, only to our family.

“Kick with your whole leg, not just your knees. Point your toes.”

Hmm… I’d better start working with Son Number Three right now.

Maybe they’ll do better when it comes time to start using their arms and breathing to the side. Or, maybe there will be some openings in the Olympic water polo team’s equipment management department.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Computer Illiterate

Computers are funny. Short of perhaps, toilets, we rely on computers more than any other device today. Actually, I take that back. We could live without toilets if we had to. I mean, we all have backyards, right? Computers on the other hand, have become essential, yet almost no one knows how they work. If you look at our population as a whole, only a minute fraction of us actually know why and how computers work. The rest of us just use them.

Compared to my mom, I am an IT professional. And compared to most people over 80 years old, I’m Bill Gates. But that does not mean that I really know anything at all about computers, and chances are, neither do you. You may think you’re computer literate, but are you really? Can you look at the registry and spot an error? Do you really know what BIOS is? You might know what it stands for, but do you really know what it is? Do you have any idea what the company Oracle even does? I didn’t think so. Neither do I.

I would be willing to bet that even the most un-mechanical person knows more about the inner workings of their car than they do about their computer. I happen to know a lot about cars and how they work, but here’s what an auto-related problem would look like if my car expertise was as sub-par as my computer expertise:

Car stops driving correctly all of a sudden with a loud bang.

Pull over on the side of the road.

Turn it off and turn it back on.

Pull back out onto the road.

Same problem.

Pull over again.

Turn it off and turn it back on.

Try to drive again.

Same problem.

Pull over and get out.

Stand right next to the blown and shredded driver’s side front tire, oblivious to what the problem is.

Call someone to come and fix my unknown problem for me. “Car won’t go. Don’t know why.”

The thing that got me thinking about all this was a familiar pop-up message the other day, from the lower right corner of my computer screen.

“Adobe Flash Player needs to be updated. Click here to continue.”

I, of course, click on the message and say, OK. I feel like I have to, because the message didn’t say “would like to update,” it said “needs to be updated.” I take them at their word.

The update begins, which takes up my time. I am forced to answer inane questions like, “Is this the destination folder you would like?” What am I going to say? No? If that is the destination folder that you guys who wrote this software think this update should go, then who am I to argue?

Downloading commences, and the familiar status bar begins to fill from left to right, giving me something to do while I wait. Look, we’re over 50% complete! Yippee!

When it has finished downloading, it immediately begins installation. One hundred percent-filled status bar later, it tells me the installation was successful. Then it shares some other news with me.

Not only did it apparently update the Adobe Flash Player like it said it needed to do, but it also went ahead and installed Google Toolbar on my Microsoft Internet Explorer without asking me if that was OK. It also tried to install Google Chrome without asking, but it failed to do so, because I already had it installed.

Imagine if this computer was my car:

I hop into my Ford Expedition and open up the garage door. I start the car and am about to back down the driveway when I notice a Ford mechanic standing at my window.

He says he needs to change my fan belt right away.

I turn off the engine and let him get to work.

An hour later he knocks on the front door and says he changed the fan belt, and also replaced the rear cargo door on my Expedition with one from a Chevy Suburban. He tried to replace the steering wheel with one from a Suburban, too, but couldn’t get the bolts loose, so he put spinners on my rims instead.

Why is that scenario OK when it comes to computers?

Amazingly, at the end of my Adobe Flash Player update experience, I received this query:

Please pick 1 thru 5 stars to rate your experience with this update. Did this update accomplish everything you wanted it to? Yes/No

Well, let’s see. You told me you needed to update an Adobe product and then you installed two Google products onto my computer. I have no idea why I needed an update to the flash player, if you actually updated it, or even what the flash player does, so I guess I have to answer this way:

I don’t know what the update was supposed to accomplish in the first place. I didn’t want it, and I don’t know if I needed it. If this update miraculously kept my computer from crashing behind the scenes, then my answer to your question is yes.

On the other hand, if the “update” to the flash player was simply to change the name from 4.0 to 4.1 and the real reason for this exercise was that Google paid you a lot of money to install their products on my computer without my permission, then my answer is no.

I wish I knew enough to know if I should be mad or not.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

The Jigsaw is Up

I always knew my wife was smart. She’s an accomplished mathematician, a master statistician, and a wonderful teacher. She can even keep the official score at a baseball game. Also, she’s a whiz with whodunits. Here’s a typical one-hour murder mystery TV viewing experience with me and her:

Show begins:

Me – Glued intently to the screen

Her – Barely paying attention while playing on laptop and/or phone

5 minutes into show:

Her: “Bob did it.”

Me: “Who’s Bob? Did what?”

So, this weekend, when I discovered she was brilliant, it came as no surprise. It did come as a shock, however, when I realized she was using her powers for evil. She is brilliantly devious. I did not see that coming.

Truth be told, I can see now that she has been manipulating me for our entire marriage. I am sad to say I just figured it out this last weekend, but it’s all so clear to me now. My epiphany came on Sunday while I was on a ladder, 15 feet off the ground, painting our shutters.

Son Number One had a sleep-over at a friend’s house Saturday night, and I drove over to pick him up on Sunday morning. That was just the situation that my wife was looking for. In fact, I think my going to pick him up was no accident. The sleep-over itself might have been part of the master diabolical plan for all I know. Nothing would surprise me at this point.

I arrived back at the house with our son, and there it was. The setup. I have seen it before a hundred times, and it all seemed so innocent. The paint cans were out on the workbench in the open garage. The hand-held power sander was plugged into a 50-foot extension cord, strung out to the front yard. The extension ladder was extended, leaning up against the house at a funny angle. And there was my loving wife, standing below the ladder. Pretending to be just about to climb up.

We have three pairs of decorative window shutters on the front of our house. The lowest pair is easily 15 feet off the ground, and you have to walk up the steep concrete roof tiles to get to them. The other ones are higher, and can only be accessed directly from the ladder, leaned up against the house. It’s a toss-up which ones are more precarious to get to.

“Hi, honey. I decided I would paint the shutters today. It shouldn’t take me more than an hour. Do you think this ladder looks OK like this? I’m not really sure how to set it up to get up there. I’m a little nervous about it, really. That roof looks so steep and slippery. Oh, well, I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

I hadn’t even been out of the car for two minutes and I was standing on the steep, scary roof tiles, sanding the peeling paint off our decorative shutters. That was at 10:00 A.M.

It was at 5:00 P.M., when I was putting the first coat of paint on shutter number five of six, that it all became clear to me. Son Number Two had been hounding me from below all afternoon about helping him with a birdhouse project that he wanted to make out of Home Depot paint stir sticks. I kept putting him off, telling him I would help him when I was finished with the shutters. He was getting impatient, and it was a little hard to blame him, since he’s six years old and he’d been waiting for seven hours.

My wife, (probably feeling guilty, now that I can see it all so clearly), offered to help him with his project since I was tied up. Off they went to the garage, and up I stayed, paintbrush in one hand, ladder death-grip in the other. Ten minutes later he was back playing on the front lawn underneath me.

“Why aren’t you doing your project with your mommy? Did she have to go do something else?”

“No, we’re done already.”

“What do you mean? It’s only been ten minutes.”

“Yeah. She went really fast.”

I had some idea of what his project was going to entail, so I was very curious. Down the ladder I came, and when I looked in the garage, I knew immediately that I had been lied to for years and years. There, sitting on my workbench, was a birdhouse made out of paint stir sticks. By my estimation, at a minimum, she had used my back saw and miter box, brad nails, my cordless drill, my combination square, and the wood glue. There sat a bird house, firmly clamped in three of my bar clamps, letting the glue dry.

She never came out to ask me what tools to use. She never came out to ask me how to use the tools. She never came out to ask me where the tools were. She never came out to ask me anything. I didn’t even think she knew I owned bar clamps, let alone where they were or how to use them. But there it was. The evidence.

She’s handy!

Big deal, you say. She’s handy with tools. A lot of women are.

You don’t understand. For ten-plus years I’ve been tricked. Let’s say my wife wanted shelves put up in the bathroom. Did she ask me to put shelves up, letting me give input on design and schedule? No. She simply spread the shelf pieces and directions all over the bathroom, got most of the tools required for the job and some that were all wrong for the job, (on purpose, now that I can see it all so clearly), and then proceeded to ask me a question like, “Should I use the Sawzall or the claw hammer to make a hole in the wall for the shelf mount bracket?”

“What are you talking about? Neither. It should just screw into a stud. Let me see the directions.”

I was walking past the bathroom from my office to the kitchen when she asked me the question. Two and a half hours later, she’s getting home from the gym just about the time I’m finishing hanging the last shelf.

That scenario, in one form or another, has been happening for our entire marriage, but it took me until this past weekend, seven hours into a painting project I never consciously started in the first place, to realize what has been going on. I am a grown man, fully capable of making my own decisions, and I woke up that day having no intention whatsoever of painting shutters. Yet there I was.

It was then and there that I realized I have been continuously tricked into doing home improvement projects against my will for years now. Projects that she, herself, was more than capable of completing. The birdhouse was masterfully-built proof. She has been feigning incompetence this whole time! My wife has been manipulating me like a puppet on a string. She is an evil genius.

Oh, well. I guess it’s no big deal really. I mean, the shutters do look good, and the home improvement projects are few and far between. I’m just glad she doesn’t have that kind of manipulative power over me with anything else!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go. I just heard the buzzer on the clothes dryer. I have to get the clothes out and fold them right away. They’re too hot for my wife’s fingers when they’re just out of the dryer, but you have to fold them when they’re that hot or else they wrinkle permanently and you have to throw them away.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Soccer Season

My boys started school this week, which is just wrong, because it is still August. School is not supposed to start until after Labor Day. That is how it was when I was a kid, so that is how it should be. School in the middle of August should be illegal. Anyway… as happens every year, along with the beginning of school comes the beginning of soccer season, and the end of parental free time as we know it. Now we have a very regulated schedule as to when and where we will sit in our lawn chairs and sweat, as opposed to July when we could sit and sweat anywhere and at any time we chose.

So there I sit. In my chair, at the park. Inexplicably watching a soccer practice. If you read my August, 2011 column “Soccer as Birth Control,” you already know all about my feelings on this subject. Somewhere on the timeline between when I was a kid and when I had kids of my own, parents developed the need to attend their children’s sports practices. My parents never attended a single one of my practices, and I think they would have been asked to leave by the coach if they had. Nowadays, parents are almost required by the coach to help out, and if you just drop your kid off at practice and leave, you are known as “those parents.”

“Billy fell down and scraped his knee. Quick, where are his parents?”

“Oh, they’re not here. They just dropped him off and left.”

“Oh, they’re one of those families, are they?”

So there I sit. In my chair, at the park. Watching Son Number Two’s soccer practice. Watching the poor coach try to get thirteen six-year-olds to all do the same thing at the same time. That is a statistical impossibility. Have you ever tried to get two six-year-olds to do the same thing at the same time? Very difficult. Five or more? Not going to happen. Do I feel sorry for him? No, because I coach T-ball, and as far as I’m concerned, he has it easy. Try to teach thirteen six-year-olds the rules of baseball some time. Talk about impossible. At least soccer only has four rules. Don’t touch the ball with your hands unless you’re the goalie, don’t kick the other guy above the waist, drink lots of water, and don’t kick it into your own goal. How hard can that be?

The infield fly rule. Now that’s hard to teach a six-year-old!

Actually, there may be a few more rules to soccer than that, but no one knows them. I’m pretty sure that is why the league was very adamant that every parent receive a copy of the “code of conduct” this year. We were even required to sign that we had read and understood it, and promised to abide by it. Strangely enough however, the code of conduct had very little to do with the player’s conduct. It was mostly about the conduct of the fans, meaning the parents.

We’ve all heard stories and maybe even seen first-hand the “nightmare parents” at kid’s sporting events. Those marginally sane people who take their child’s sports “career” way too seriously, and voice their opinions about the coaching decisions and referee’s calls obnoxiously from the sidelines. They exist in all sports, but soccer is the only sport where I have ever had to promise in writing that I wouldn’t yell at the ref. I would never yell at the ref anyway, but I can sort of understand why someone might. Americans don’t understand soccer. There is a good reason for that. Soccer is not understandable. Plus it is insanely boring.

The pros play for about ten hours on a field the size of Rhode Island, getting near the actual goal an astonishing three times, resulting in a 0-0 tie at the end of regular play. The referee then adds an additional 45 minutes of “stoppage time” at his or her discretion, resulting in a 1-1 tie after numerous “free kicks.” Thrilling!

The referee might give you a yellow card if you cause a foul, but he might also allow play to continue under the advantage rule, if your foul would have helped your team unfairly. If play stops, the clock doesn’t, so a common tactic is to fake injuries to run the clock down. Corner kick, goal kick, free kick, indirect free kick, penalty kick. Charging, sandwiching, worrying the goalkeeper, cautioning, dangerous play, encroaching, fair charging, obstructing, impeding, late tackling, off sides, on sides, yellow cards, red cards. I am willing to bet that at any soccer match at any time in the United States, only four people actually know what is going on. They are the ref, one of the two coaches (the one who played soccer in high school), and the European couple in the stands.

So, of course some of the parents are yelling at the referee. We’re not yelling, “What was that?” in the context of, “Are you crazy, he was totally off sides!” We’re yelling, “What was that?” in the context of, “What does off sides mean? I totally don’t even understand which team you just called a foul on, if indeed you just called a foul. You stopped the entire play, but the clock is still running, so shouldn’t someone turn it off? I have no idea what is happening, and I feel like I need to yell because you are out in the center of the field which is 2000 feet away from my lawn chair.”

Since I signed the code of conduct, I will refrain from yelling, “What was that?” at the ref. It won’t be hard, since I have no interest in soccer in the first place. I will simply keep watching my sons play, cheering them on in a positive and encouraging manner while not disparaging the other team’s players or their efforts, per the code of conduct, patiently waiting for the day they decide to skip the next soccer season to concentrate on baseball.

And if, while I’m trying not to be one of “those parents,” the coach asks me to help out at practice, I’ll do my best. I will encourage my son and his teammates to drink lots of water and kick the ball toward the correct goal. Hopefully that will be helpful. The most help I could really offer our coach however, is a simple suggestion. Have the rest of the kids always pass the ball to Felipe, the Brazilian kid. He’s the only one out there who looks like he knows what's going on.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

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Caber Tossing Pongers

Last week I wrote about Michael Phelps, and what an amazing career he has just capped off at the 30^th Olympiad in London.  As a swimmer, he competes in a sport where it is possible to win a medal for each event he is entered in, and he is ending his career with a second-to-none count of 22 medals to his name. That makes him hard to compare on an apples-to-apples basis to a decathlete, who can earn just one medal while having to compete in more events than Phelps ever swam in any one Olympics. Medal count aside, however, there is no doubt that Phelps is one of the greatest Olympians of all time.

You know who is not one of the greatest Olympians of all time? Any ping pong player.

I have nothing against ping pong as a hobby. It goes great with beer and it’s a good way to kill a half-hour in a rec room. And I have absolutely no problem with professional ping pong players - especially the ones at the Olympics. They are phenomenal. I even enjoyed watching it for about three minutes. What I do have a problem with is the fact that someone can go to London, play ping pong really well, and end up with the same gold medal that Michael Phelps, Jessica Ennis, and Usain Bolt currently have around their necks. That is ridiculous.

To keep everyone on a level playing field, all the Olympic athletes are rigorously drug tested. If ping pong is considered an Olympic sport, then the International Olympic Committee has obviously lost sight of the reason for drug testing in the first place.

The IOC needs to apply a theoretical drug test to their screening process. They need to sit down and look at the list of events they are offering at the Olympic Games and decide if taking performance enhancing drugs would actually help the competitor win. If the answer is no, it should not be an Olympic event. Ping pong? No.

They try to dress it up by calling it “table tennis,” but let’s all be serious for a minute. You’re hitting a little plastic ball with a tiny wooden paddle. Take all the steroids you want. Get steroid injections between matches. Who cares? You’re still just playing ping pong. It’s not a sport.

If they don’t want to apply the theoretical drug test, they could apply a very simple theoretical alcohol test instead. If the game in question can be played while holding a beer in your other hand, it should not be an Olympic event.

Hammer throw – Pass. Ping pong – Fail.

Hammer throw. Now there’s an Olympic event. Pick up a 16-pound lead ball on the end of a steel cable and throw it as far as you can. A gentleman from Hungary just won the gold medal in London by tossing that measly little hammer 264 feet. He could probably eat a ping pong table. The hammer throw has deep Olympic roots, and is also an integral part of the Scottish Highland Games, which also features the caber toss, the only throwing-heavy-stuff event that is cooler than the hammer throw. A caber is a log that is 19 feet long and weighs 175 pounds. Pick it up and throw it. Plain and simple.

It is patently obvious that the caber toss should be immediately added to the Olympics to take the place of ping pong. And on top of that, every medalist in ping pong since its bewildering inclusion to the Olympic Games in 1988 should be forced to enter the caber toss in 2016, just so they can get a feel for how ridiculous their medals for ping pong really are. We could force them to enter the swimming events, but I thought it would be a little harsh to actually drown them, which is what would obviously happen.

I am not saying that professional ping-pongers don’t need a competitive venue to showcase their “sport.” Like I said, I think they are amazing, but let’s remove it from the Olympics and leave the table tennis pro tour where it belongs – in Las Vegas at the Horseshoe on a Wednesday.

If the IOC fails to take my incredibly insightful advice and get rid of ping pong, then the least they could do is make the medal sizes proportionate to the events. If you medal in the decathlon, you should get a medal the size of a truck tire. If you medal in ping pong, it should look like a dime on a string. The silver medal could be an actual dime.

Other dime-sized medal “sports” would include race walking, badminton, and trampoline. Come on, IOC! Really? The race walking course was 31 miles long. Big deal. It’s still walking. My mother-in-law just did a fundraiser where she walked 30 miles in a day, three days in a row. I guess that means she’s a three-time Olympic hopeful! Badminton is just a larger, but somehow less exciting version of ping pong, and don’t even get me started on trampoline. Have you ever seen a kid throw a 16-pound lead ball on a steel cable 264 feet in the backyard for fun? Enough said.

The medal ceremonies should be proportionate also. Actual Olympic-caliber events can maintain the current pomp and circumstance, but the ping pong players should just be handed their dime-sized medal on their way out of the arena by one of the ushers. “Here you go, big guy. Great match.”

To any Olympic ponger, fast walker, shuttlecocker, or bouncy-bouncer that disagrees with me, I offer this simple solution: Get a tape measure and lay out 29 feet on your floor. Now stand back and look at it.

That’s how far Carl Lewis flew in a single long jump.

By the way -- huge congratulations to Jike Zhang, Long Ma, Hao Wang, and Xiaoxia Li for their amazing gold medal wins at the 2012 Olympic Games.

Who?

Exactly. Good luck in the caber toss, boys.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

Marc Spitz Hot Dog at Phelps

Michael Phelps just turned in one of the most amazing sports careers of all time. He leaves the sport of swimming at the end of the London Olympic Games with a career 22 medals, an astounding 18 of them gold. No other single Olympian in history even has double digits in gold. In fact, he has more gold medals than the entire country of Argentina. He has more career Olympic medals than India.

At the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, Phelps made history by winning eight gold medals in eight straight events. He broke the long-standing record of fellow American swimmer Mark Spitz, who went seven golds for seven events in Munich in 1972. When Phelps broke Spitz’ medal record, the world crowned him as the new “Greatest Olympian,” and there was very little public debate about it. Now, as Phelps finishes up with his astonishing career medal count, crushing former Soviet female gymnast Larisa Last-name-ina for all-time individual medals won, and ending up with twice as many career medals as Spitz, he will be written into the history books as the greatest, bar none.

I am here today to dispute that. I am here today to tell you that Spitz was better.

My case for Spitz being a more dominant swimmer doesn’t even take into account that he won most of his 1972 Olympic races by body lengths, or that he set new world record times in all seven swims. I’m not even focusing on the fact that he swam without goggles, that he swam without a cap, or that he swam with an afro, all of his rather prodigious underarm hair, and a Tom Selleck moustache. My argument even ignores his 1970’s red, white, and blue Speedo, which is hard to ignore.

My argument has to do with eating. A lot of fuss was made during the 2008 Olympic coverage about how much Michael Phelps ate every day. While it was certainly a lot, in the world of competitive swimming, it was pretty standard. World-class swimmers do two things. Swim and eat. When I was swimming in high school, I would come home from practice and eat the entire right side of the fridge. That’s just par for the course, swimming-wise.

The amount of food that Spitz and Phelps put away during their swimming days is not where my argument lies. My case for Spitz’ athletic superiority comes from the amount of food he could put away during a race.

When I was in high school, our swim coach told us a story about Mark Spitz. Back when Spitz was in high school in Santa Clara, California, Coach Pete had seen him race at a nationals meet. Spitz already held national high school records in every stroke, and he was heavily favored in every one of his races, but when the swimmers took the blocks for one of his events, he was absent.

His name was called over the loudspeaker, and everyone at the pool and in the grandstands began looking around for him. When the race officials called his name again, telling him to report to his lane to start the race, he was seen jogging toward the starting blocks from the snack bar. He had three hot dogs in one hand, and he was eating another while he was running toward the pool.

He reached his starting block at one of the middle lanes of the pool, chewing the last of the hot dog he had been eating while he ran. He handed two of the three remaining dogs to the timer behind his block, asking the man to please save them for him. He then joined his opponents, stepping up onto his starting block, still holding a hot dog.

Now, let’s be clear for a minute. We’re talking about an Oscar Mayer wiener, in a bun, with the condiments of Spitz’ choice. In his hand. On the starting blocks. Of a nationals race. He had just wolfed down one of them while running. He was now standing over the end of his lane holding another.

As the crowd looked on in awe, amazement, and amusement, Mark Spitz proceeded to stuff the entire hot dog into his mouth, reach down to touch the block at the “take your marks” command, and dive into the pool with seven other swimmers, starting his race while chewing and swallowing a whole hot dog on lap number one.

He beat the nearest finisher by almost two body lengths.

Michael Phelps is undoubtedly awesome, but all he ever did was swim. It probably never even occurred to him to combine competitive eating with competitive swimming. Mark Spitz was a trailblazing, groundbreaking, lightning fast, “I can eat a hot dog during this race and still whip your ass” kind of an athlete. Wait 30 minutes after eating before getting in the pool? No thanks. I’ll eat while I’m swimming.

Phelps says he did everything he set out to do. That may be true, but until he can do that, Spitz is still the greatest swimmer that ever lived. In my book, anyway.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!