This Column is Going Downhill

Our regularly scheduled column has been rudely preempted by Ski Week.

Yes, that’s right, I said Ski Week. Instead of celebrating the glorious birthdays of Martin Van Buren and William Henry Harrison on two separate Mondays in February, like we all did when we were young, our school district changed things up. Apparently, they think we’re all rich.

They tacked on three extra president’s days to the previous two, and lined them all up in a row this week. This phenomenon is nicknamed “Ski Week,” so the idea, apparently, is that we’re all supposed to head up to the slopes and spend the education-free week on a ski vacation. I guess I forgot to let our school district know that we don’t have thirty-eight thousand dollars lying around for just such an occasion.

And our school district failed to check with any of the surrounding districts to see if they were also populated by the idle rich and doing the same thing. Turns out they’re not. Since my wife teaches in a neighboring district, our ski week, could we afford it, would be momless.

Sure, we might be able to shave a few thousand bucks off the total cost with one less lift ticket and no overpriced ski lodge chardonnay, but if you think I’m taking these three monkeys skiing by myself, you’ve obviously been drinking something a lot stronger than wine.

So, what I’m telling you is, the kids in Rocklin, which unfortunately includes MY kids, have the ENTIRE damn week off. And not only that, but this particular week has weekends on BOTH sides of it! Do you know what that means? It means my three boys have been here at home with me now for five whole days in a row already, and we still have four more whole days, also in that row, left before they go back to school.

Those of you with kids, or those of you who have met kids before, should now understand the fact that I’ve got nothing done in the last five days, and that trend will continue for the next four. In particular, I haven’t been able to write this column. I haven’t been able to do anything useful. (Author’s note to aspiring writers: Take notice of how I deftly implied that this column is actually useful through the trickery of italics, even though there is absolutely no historical evidence that would support that claim.)

So, to all of you who are not currently on a weeks-long ski vacation, I apologize for not having a column for you today. I don’t know why our school district is choosing not to celebrate the President’s Days as our forefathers intended, but one thing is certain – our distinguished eighth and ninth presidents are rolling over in their ornate, gold and diamond-encrusted graves.

As for you folks who are swooshing down the slopes this week and sipping expensive ski lodge cocktails in plush leather chairs in front of magnificent fireplaces while I spend another day eating cold pizza and refereeing at the World Brothers Wrestling Federation, I’ll say this:

I am NOT sorry that I don’t have a column for you this week. You’re probably too busy to read it anyway, what with all your swooshing, and expensive sipping, and plush fireplace sitting, and stacking gold coins in your Rolls Royce, and snorting caviar, and whatever else it is you people do.

But I’m not bitter. I would never wish for you to have a skiing accident and break a bone or anything like that. That’s just not right.

But I do kinda wish you’d fall off your wallet in the lodge and get a mild sprain.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 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!

Snacking Dangerously

Son Number Three brought this permission slip home from his sixth-grade cooking elective class the other day:

Over the next few weeks we will be working on a unit focused on making healthy after-school snacks. We will be learning knife skills in class so that the students can prepare fruits and vegetables. Students will be placed in small groups of 4-5 and will work directly with me to learn how to properly hold and handle a knife, as well as how to slice, chop, and dice. In order to participate in the hands-on knife skills training, all students must bring a signed permission slip.

   ___   I would like my child to participate in knife skills training.

   ___   I do NOT want my child to participate in knife skills at this time.

I have a lot of issues with this permission slip, starting with the fact that someone in our school district thought that a permission slip was needed in the first place. My son is in the sixth grade. He’s eleven years old. He has his own monogrammed folding pocketknife that he carries around with him (off campus, of course). If he doesn’t know how to slice a cucumber without hurting himself by now, then let’s just let the natural learning and selection process run its course.

I checked the yes box, and added a note asking if they would also be learning proper knife throwing techniques. I mean, if you’re going to make me sign a permission slip before my kid is allowed to do something as crazy as chop a bell pepper, then let’s really use the parental permission to its fullest. This could be a combination cooking and bladed weapon self-defense class, for example. Appetizers and axe throwing? Brunch and bayonets? I just feel like we’re missing a real opportunity for some higher learning, here.

You know, it wasn’t too long ago that sixth graders were running the radial arm saw in woodshop, and no permission slip ever went home for that. Of course, the radial arm saw gets its name from the fact that it’s great at removing your arm, just above the radius. (The original name, “ulnar arm saw,” didn’t work because everyone thought you were saying “underarm saw,” which obviously refers to a gas-powered thirty-inch-bar chainsaw.)

We have drifted a long way from the days of being taught woodworking skills by an eight-fingered man, but it’s very clear that we’ve gone over the edge the wrong way in the name of safety. That being said, my biggest problem with this permission slip has nothing to do with the knives.

Apparently, the only “healthy after-school snacks” being presented as options to my impressionable young son are fruits and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables!? This is a travesty. I ask you, Rocklin Unified School District, what about the Totino’s Pizza Rolls? You call this a responsible and informed education??

And you want to talk about safety concerns? Let’s talk about a pizza roll that just came out of the oven. The potential for third- or even sixth-degree burns from the explosive molten-lava-marinara and cheese filling cannot be understated. If our military could somehow develop a rapid delivery system to effectively weaponize hot Totino’s pizza rolls, conflicts around the globe could be ended tomorrow. Try to say that about fruits and vegetables.

Pizza rolls - now that’s a situation that should require a permission slip!

And safety goggles.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 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!

Miami Pop Rocks

The Super Bowl was in Miami this year. I don’t want to talk about the game. As a lifelong Forty-Niners fan, it was far too painful to watch the fourth quarter, a quarter in which, traditionally, both teams play. My team decided not to play the fourth quarter for some reason, and I still don’t want to talk about it, so please, just let it go.

Let’s talk about the halftime show, instead. J Lo’s butt joined Shakira’s butt on stage at the fifty-yard-line to entertain us for fourteen minutes. The butts wore skimpy outfits and danced around the stage. The butts swayed. The butts hung on tight to poles and spun down to the stage again. At the end of the show, the swinging butts even knocked all the rest of the dancers off their feet with two powerful sideways butt moves. The butts put on a pretty good show.

Not many people are aware of this, but the owners of the butts, J Lo and Shakira, are actually fairly talented singers. The NFL consented to let them have microphones as long as their butts were constantly visible to the cameras, as per the butt contract, and the two ladies were even allowed to sing a little during the show.

It is not a shock that the NFL would put on a halftime show centered around butts. We’re not exactly talking about America’s moral compass here. Let’s not forget the halftime show centered around Janet Jackson’s boobs. The NFL has a low bar, family entertainment-wise, and they continue to sneak under it to pick up all the dollar bills on the stage.

So, the butts weren’t surprising. Shakira is from Colombia, which also makes perfect sense, since the Super Bowl was in Miami, Florida, a town that operates completely under Colombian national law. I assume J Lo was invited because she is from New York - a nod to where the state of Florida imports the rest of its citizens from.

There were two male performers invited up on stage as well. J Balvin is another Colombian pop star, so he was probably required to be on stage under Colombian entertainment law, as a chaperone for Shakira’s butt.

The other choice for male entertainment was baffling. A guy in a diamond-encrusted silver trench coat wearing a silk dinner napkin as a hat showed up on stage with a microphone, as if he was a legitimate entertainer. It was bad enough until I was informed he goes by the name Bad Bunny. I am not making that up.

He crept around the stage, squatting down in his matching diamond-encrusted sneakers, doing a half-rap song in Spanish. Apparently, Bad Bunny is from Puerto Rico, where I guess you are not required to have any talent in order to become a famous singer, or a famous outerwear BeDazzler, or whatever it is he’s famous for.

I’m not sure why the Colombian government of Miami agreed to have a Puerto Rican join the show. They literally, and I’m using literally correctly here, could have gone outside the stadium right before the show, thrown a churro blindfolded, and hit someone better to be on stage than Bad Bunny.

Bad Bunny, however, was not my problem with the halftime show. My problem was the whole thing took place inside Hard Rock Stadium.

Hard Rock.

Not Hard Butts Stadium. Not Easy-Listening Latin Rap Stadium. Not Whatever-the-Hell Bad Bunny Does Stadium.

Hard Rock Stadium. You have one clear choice for a halftime show at Hard Rock Stadium: AC/DC.

They blew it.

If AC/DC had played, the Niners would have won. I blame Bad Bunny. I don’t want to talk about it.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 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 School Knowledge Week - Repost

I am in the middle of school visit season, and as such, I ran out of time to write a new column for this week. So, in honor of school visit season, I thought I’d re-share a post about a school visit a couple years ago. Everything still holds true today. Enjoy!

I went back to high school today. Not my own high school, but a very similar one. It felt the same. The smell of gym socks and mysterious cafeteria “food” has not changed much in thirty years.

It’s career week at Rocklin High, and they invited me to speak about being an author. I wanted to speak about being a bullfighter, but they said it was better to stick to things I’d had direct experience with, so whatever. Author it is.

I really had a fun time sharing my knowledge and insights with the students about authoring, but I also felt like I left a lot on the table, advice-wise. I mean, I gave them plenty of advice about being an author, such as, “If you want to be able to afford food and clothing, be a dentist instead,” and “Never name your evil villainess after your mother-in-law if you can help it.”

But I really wished I could have gone a step further and given them general high school life advice. The format and time constraints of the day wouldn’t allow for it, but there was definitely more wisdom I wanted to impart, such as:

- Talk to the girl. She’s nervous and self-conscious just like you are, even if all you see is her being amazing and you having zits. If she wants nothing to do with you, smile and say, “OK, no sweat. I hope you have a great day.” Or cover her front yard in toilet paper at midnight. Either way you want to play it is cool.

- Pay attention, you idiot. The things they are teaching you do not suck and are not lame. This is all stuff you will need in life. Except algebra. Algebra does suck and is lame. No one uses algebra in their job.

- Here’s a good joke for your math teacher:

What does the little mermaid wear to math class?

An algebra.

You’re welcome.

- While you are here, learn to form grammatically correct sentences on paper and with your face. If you can’t do that, you will always work at the car wash.

- Drive while driving. And drive as little as possible while you’re in high school. You think you’re amazing at it, but you’re not. You suck at it. So much.

- Stand up straight, look people in the eye, have a firm handshake, and speak clearly. In other words, stop being you and start acting like a human. It’s time.

- Quit wearing beanie hats unless it is below 45 degrees. Never wear them indoors, unless you work in a walk-in freezer.

- Be extra nice to your joints – your knees in particular. Trust me.

- Go to any other country before you start college. Just go. You don’t need any money.

- Get your hair out of your eyes. For you boys, it makes you look like a lazy slob. For you girls, it makes you look like Cousin It. Not good, either way.

- Go to any other country after you finish college. Just go. You still don’t need any money.

- Sit up straight.

- Your parents know a lot of useful information, and they want you to have it because they love you. You don’t know anything useful at all. Listen to them and stop being a turd.

- And no, having “likes” on your selfies is not useful. Stop taking selfies and learn how to cook a steak properly.

- Pronounce words correctly.

- You will get out of college exactly what you put into it. So be sure to study. Also, be sure to learn how to do an upside-down keg stand properly. Both are vitally important to college.

- Seriously, stop wearing beanie hats.

- Get a job if you don’t have one yet. You are not too busy. Throw your cell phone away and you just freed up 80% of your day.

- Once you learn something, start your own business with zero dollars in your bank account. If you fail, big deal. You’ll still have zero dollars. If you succeed, you’ll have more than zero. It’s just simple math.

- Deodorant. Always.

- Don’t say, “To be honest with you...”

It gives the impression you aren’t being honest all the other times.

- And above all else, remember -  Us adults are just as lost as you, but we have mortgages. Stay in high school. You have no idea how good you have it.

I’m going back tomorrow to talk to more students. Maybe I’ll find time to fit some of this good stuff in.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 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!

Insert Emoji Here

It all started with someone turning their head ninety degrees to the left and realizing that this

 : )

looked like a smiling face. It wasn’t too long before a bunch of clever people started exploring their keyboard options and we had a nose,

:-)

a winking face,

; )

and a surprised look.

: 0

It escalated until eventually no one was getting any actual work done, but we had a shrugging guy,

\_( ``/ )_/

and Princess Leia,

@(^0_0^)@

among many other useful little designs. Then, something weird happened. People started including these little designs in actual sentences, as part of the message.

Instead of writing, “I’m happy about that,” people started just putting a

: )

at the end of the sentence. It wasn’t long before it was universally understood that you meant you were happy, and not all colon space parenthesis about it.

We named them “emoticons,” which literally translated from Latin means, “A huge waste of time.”

“Emoticons” got shortened almost immediately to “emoji,” and things spiraled out of control from there.

Eventually, someone at a cell phone company said, “Why don’t we just make pictures?” and the first round yellow smiley face found its way off the Jeep spare tire cover and onto our cell phones. It has been an exponential emoji curve ever since.

I can now be happy with your text in a number of different teeth options, I can laugh until I cry at your text, I can laugh until I cry with a sideways tilt to my head and sneezing eyes. I can look surprised, worried, pensive, mischievous, shocked, asleep, sick, insane, frustrated, and even dead. There is no end to the emotion I can convey with the array of little yellow faces at my disposal.

And that’s just the little yellow faces. I can also do any one of those emotions in a cat face. And as a monkey.

Apple, the phone company dedicated to making phones for people who do nothing but take pictures of themselves and their food, even came up with a way to make an animated emoji face of yourself. You can even add a body and have yourself standing next to a huge congratulations rainbow with fireworks, conveying the emotion, “congratulations a lot.”

The phone companies didn’t stop there, however. Our emoji menus now contain goldfish, apples, camels, footballs, cacti, the Parthenon, Vespa scooters, trumpets, the handicapped sign, protractors, the flag of Albania, the scales of justice, Ferris wheels, flaming meteors, doughnuts, champagne bottles, beer mugs, and of course, poop.

I use the “thumbs up” all the time, but I recently found my favorite one. Someone at Samsung decided to add an Easter Island head to my emoji arsenal. I have no idea why, or what anyone could possibly try to convey with it, but I use it all the time now, like a signature. “Sincerely, Blockhead.”

These emojis litter our texts, but up until now they have been at the discretion of the texter. That is changing as apps are starting to get pushy about it if you don’t use enough emojis. When I type a note on Venmo about what I’m paying someone for, it keeps popping up emoji suggestions that it wants me to use instead of actual words. If I type “piz…” it’s popping up a pizza slice emoji in front of my fingers, basically screaming at me, “Use this emoji, you idiot! No one reads words anymore!”

And can we even really call the pizza slice an emoji? I mean, I have strong emotions about pizza, but I don’t think a picture of a slice of pizza by itself can be considered a feeling. Be that as it may, I can see where this is all headed.

The English language will die out in its written form, and we will all move back to hieroglyphics, albeit now digital and very colorful. We’re basically all sending each other rebus picture puzzles now instead of sentences.

Your phone has become a digital Lucky Lager beer cap.

[eye] [female sheep] soon,

-[Easter Island head]

Copyright © 2020 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!

Tiny Naked Hoarders

My wife and I have been watching some reality TV lately. Normally, reality TV can be defined as anything but reality, but in the case of the three shows we’ve landed on, they are as real as it gets.

The first one is Tiny House Nation. Two guys travel the United States helping people move out of regular-size houses and cram themselves, their kids, their dogs, and about five to seven percent of the stuff they used to own into a new tiny house that would easily fit into the living room of their old place.

They all report that they love their new miniature house when they get handed the keys on the big reveal day, but there is never a follow-up show a year or so later detailing the aftermath of the inevitable close-quarters cabin fever tearing the family apart at the seams. It would show only the husband left in the tiny house, parked behind a 7-eleven so he can find dinner, while his ex-wife and the kids and dogs sprawl out in a normal house, at least two states away.

The next show is Hoarders, which is essentially the opposite of Tiny House Nation. Instead of getting rid of all their stuff, hoarders continue to purchase or collect crap they don’t need and cram their regular-size houses so full, even people who live in a tiny house would ask, “How do you move around in this place?”

A psychologist and a cleaning team partner with the family of the hoarder to help them through their deep-seated emotional and mental issues that led to the hoarding while the house is completely cleaned out and returned to the semblance of a normal dwelling. They take stuff out of the houses using snow shovels. Marie Kondo would literally vaporize from the stress.

Predictably, there is a big reveal, and the “former” hoarder cries and says thank you and that they are grateful. Again, I think the one-year follow-up show would probably show the hoarding returned with such a vengeance that the chimney would be getting pushed up out of the roof, but I am only speculating.

The third show has no houses whatsoever. Naked and Afraid is where a man and a woman who don’t know each other are paired up to survive for twenty-one days together somewhere harsh and unforgiving, like Detroit. Also, of course, they are naked. They are allowed to bring one single item each, which usually ends up being a machete and a fire starter. Why none of them choose to bring a taco truck is baffling to me.

One of the first things they always do is attempt to build a tiny house, albeit in this case out of branches and leaves instead of 2x4’s and ugly kitchen tile. Amazingly, they have even less storage requirements than a tiny houser, since they have no clothes and only own one household item each, so their houses tend to be of the six square feet variety.

They also have significantly less food that hoarders or housers, since they have none, which makes Naked and Afraid a very effective weight loss program. If they make it the full three weeks, which many do not, the men lose about twenty to twenty-five pounds and the woman lose about twelve to eighteen. Women around the globe are outraged by the disparity. Equal weight for equal time!

After watching a lot of these shows, it occurs to me that the networks are not really applying themselves here. Just between these three shows alone, there are countless spinoff and collaboration opportunities for new shows.

Just off the top of my head:

Hoarders Helped Me Go Tiny – hoarders are invited to remove items from people’s houses to help them pare down their belongings in order to fit into their new tiny house. Will the homeowners be able to fight off the growing feeding frenzy of hoarders in order to keep anything at all for the move?

Naked and Afraid I Won’t Fit into My New Tiny House – overweight people go on the twenty-one-day wilderness survival challenge in order to prepare for fitting more comfortably into their new tiny houses. Can they make it long enough to fit, or will they tap out and have to stay in their normal-size house?

Naked and Building my Tiny House – a couple has three weeks to build their new tiny house out of materials found only in the jungle. They are allowed to eat and use power tools, but is that really a good idea given that they are naked?

Afraid My House is too Tiny to Be Naked – They need to go smaller on the square footage, but will there still be enough room for a shower? Or are they doomed to a life of coin-operated truck stop showers?

Tiny House Hoarders – like regular Hoarders, but with eighty percent less stuff. Episodes can be fifteen minutes each.

Naked Hoarders Afraid of Tiny Houses – hoarders have to fit all their stuff into a tiny house and then live there naked for twenty-one days. Why do they need to be naked? Why not?

Hoarding Tiny Houses – one man’s rabid obsession with collecting two hundred square-foot mini houses. Where will he put them all? Tune in to find out.

Hoarding Tiny Naked Houses – same as Hoarding Tiny Houses, but none of the tiny houses have exterior siding. Will the elements consume the houses before his hoarding disorder consumes his life?

Hoarding Tiny Houses Naked – the houses have siding, but now the guy is naked…

As you can see, the possibilities are endless. You’re welcome, network executives. I will await my royalty checks.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 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!

About the Author, 2020

Here at Just a Smidge, we continue to gain new readership each year. This past year alone we have documented as many as two new readers. So, for both of you just joining us, welcome! Let’s start the New Year with a little meet and greet, shall we?

Hi. I’m Marc Schmatjen, aka Smidge, and I’m the lone staff writer and head pool maintenance technician here at Just a Smidge. Based on how much money I make writing this column, it would be inaccurate to call this my job, so let’s just go with “hobby.”

I am a forty-seven-year-old husband of one and father of three. My wife is an amazing woman who teaches high school kids math, which is becoming increasingly difficult now that school isn’t necessarily used for teaching anymore. For a math teacher, she’s an excellent counseloreferee.

We have three boys, whom we affectionately refer to as Son Number One, Two, and Three. Two of them are teenagers and all three of them are loud and smelly and they eat a lot.

Anyway, enough about my wife and kids. Let’s talk more about me. Here are twenty other things that you should probably know about me, in no particular order:

1) I am going bald, and amazingly, getting better looking with every single lost hair off my head.

2) My grandfather killed General Patton's dog. That is the single most historically outstanding thing anyone in my family has done. We are a proud people.

3) Walking out into bright sunlight makes me sneeze. I am one of only an estimated seven people in the world with this disorder. We have a club. I inherited this trait from my grandmother, whose husband once killed General George Patton’s dog.

4) I am related to U.S. president Grover Cleveland on my maternal grandmother’s side, whose husband (my grandmother’s, not Grover Clevelend’s) - I believe I may have mentioned this - killed General George S. Patton’s beloved English bull terrier, Willie. I don't really care about being related to Grover Cleveland since he’s not Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy got shot in the chest while leaving his hotel to give a speech. He continued on to the auditorium and gave an 84-minute speech with a bullet in his ribs. Teddy was the only truly cool president.

5) A few of my literary heroes are Roald Dahl, Dr. Seuss, Erma Bombeck, Michael Connelly, and Dave Barry. My grandfather did not kill any of their dogs, that I am aware of.

6) I am 47 now, and my once-fantastic eyesight is relaxing like a tired dad in a Barcalounger. My arms are not long enough to read small print anymore, or even the medium print. Also, every other part of my body aches.

7) As an author and a writer, I am not afraid to say that books of non-rhyming “poetry” with sentences like, “My mind is a seedless grape, grasping to comprehend the melancholy oration, drowning in a cacophony of humanity…” etc., are written by people who are too scared to attempt to write anything that is required to make sense.

8) Another highlight of being 47 now: My face is going numb. Why does this happen to men? You see old guys all the time eating dinner with food stuck to their faces. We just can’t feel it on there anymore. My chin is completely dead at this point.

9) My three favorite flavors are burnt pepperoni, slightly burnt bacon, and well-toasted sesame seeds. Basically, if it has caught on fire, I want to eat it. Except for my s’more marshmallows. Those should only be browned. (And they will end up stuck to my chin, where they will remain until my wife scolds me.)

10) I was in shape once. I swam 100,000 yards in one week when I was in high school. I could not swim more than 50 yards or so today without needing a floatation device, an oxygen tank, and a defibrillator. See number 11.

11) I love bacon and I sit all day. See number 10.

12) I constantly get my left and right mixed up. This makes driving directions with my wife fun.

13) I am a recovering engineer, so I know there are only 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

14) My favorite joke of all time is:

A guy walks into the psychiatrist’s office wearing nothing but underwear made out of Saran wrap. The doctor takes one look at him and says, "Well, I can clearly see you’re nuts."

15) I like writing dialogue.

“You do?” they asked in unison.

“Yes. I do,” he said solemnly.

16) I like most foods (see number 10), but I have a deep, abiding hatred for cantaloupe. If bacon is a 10, cantaloupe is a negative 3000.

17) I love to travel and I love to stay home, but I don’t want an RV. Go figure.

18) My absolute favorite thing that has ever happened on this earth – and I am including my marriage and the birth of my children in that – was when the Oregon State Highway Division tried to disintegrate a dead whale with a half-ton of dynamite in 1970. I wasn’t around yet, but thankfully they had video cameras back then. (Just Google “Oregon Exploding Whale.”)

19) Coincidently, my favorite thing ever said on television – and I am including anything ever uttered on The Newlywed Game – came from KATU Channel 2 newsman Paul Linnman in 1970 after the whale dynamite was detonated. When large chunks of whale rained down on people and cars over a quarter-mile away, Paul noted, completely deadpan, “The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.”

20) My wife is still laughing right now about number 1.

So, there you have it, folks. You now know everything you need to know about me. We'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming next week.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 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 2020 Do-it-Yourself New Year's Resolution Template

So many of you needed to use my DIY Christmas letter this year that it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if you’ve also failed to plan ahead for your New Year’s resolutions. Have no fear. I’ve got you covered, hopeless slackers.

Just choose one entry from each column to construct your new resolution. If you are super ambitious and want more than one resolution that you can abandon before the middle of January, just repeat the easy four-step process.

Now, get to it. There’s no time to lose.

COLUMN 1	COLUMN 2	COLUMN 3	COLUMN 4
Stop	cooking meth	after	running a 5K
Step up my	meditating	while posting about	crying uncontrollably
Keep	singing loudly	during	weightlifting
Envision	talking back	in the middle of	making love
Start	ignoring the pain	while livestreaming	disinfecting the hookah
Avoid	making painful small talk	prior to	vaping
Quit	drowning my sorrows	while filming strangers	dialing 911
Try	talking to the voices	before	working the crowd
Practice	increasing my swagger	while	sifting through the wreckage of my life
Effort toward	hot-tubbing	when I’m done	babbling hysterically
Continue	winking	while shouting at people	smoking hash
Work my way into	screaming	in addition to	buying burritos
Begin	making an impact	immediately before	running from the cops

There you go. Now get out there and make those resolutions stick. You got this!

No need to thank me, it’s just what I do.

Happy New Year!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 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 Weight of Christmas

Christmas used to be simpler. And harder.

It’s complicated.

One thing’s for sure, Christmas definitely used to be lighter.

When the boys were younger, there was a lot more to the Christmas prep. We had to be careful what we said. We had to make sure we visited Santa Claus somewhere at least once before Christmas Eve, ideally nowhere near a mall.

We had to “mail” letters to the North Pole, which really meant we had to make sure we read the letters without anyone finding out, then I was in charge of making the letters disappear. And make no mistake, that was probably the most life-and-death job I’ve ever had as a parent. The world would have come down around our heads if one of the boys had ever seen me shredding their Santa letters and hand-decorated envelopes. Thank the good Lord they never insisted on walking them down to the mailbox themselves!

We had to put out carrots and milk and cookies for Santa, and I had to eat the cookies and drink the milk. That job was tolerable. But I also had to chew up the carrots and spit them onto the lawn, and collect dirt and freezing cold hose water to make mud in order to manufacture reindeer “hoofprints” on our front walkway at midnight. That job was cold and messy and tasted like carrots, which are not nearly as good as cookies.

Basically, we had to lie a lot and stay up late. But at least the gifts were smaller.

I mean, sure, I spent my fair share of Christmas Eves assembling new bikes and Fisher-Price scoot-around cars, or whatever, but they were all manageable one-man jobs. The boys are older now, and the big gifts have grown with them.

This year was almost too much for me to handle. Son Number Two and Three got an eight-foot-tall lacrosse bounce-back from us this year. The UPS guy could barely get the box up our driveway. He and I managed to get it stored in the garage out of sight, but last night I had to put it together. It’s basically a trampoline the size of a large coffee table, sitting vertically up on a tube steel frame. It has various places where it folds up for storage, but God help you if you fold it all out, stretching all the springs tight, before you thoroughly read the safety precautions section of the manual.

There are two places that require safety bolts to be placed through the hinges before you move on to assembling the rest of the very heavy framework. If you don’t put the safety bolts in, it’s possible for the whole thing to fold in half very rapidly as the springs collapse, beating the holy hell out of your right foot that happened to be standing on one side of the frame. That situation is also very sudden and very loud, which causes your heart to stop for three to four full seconds, which can’t be good for you.

The problem was the giant upright trampoline turned out to be the light, easy gift to assemble. Son Number One wanted a weight bench. I bought it at a local sporting good store, and between me and the five-foot-two-inch female store manager, we managed to get it into the back of our SUV. Just imagine a full-size wight bench with all the weights and everything, tucked into a reinforced cardboard box the size of a standard filing cabinet.

I had to keep it in the box in order to hide it in the garage. Ironically, Son Number One would have been an excellent choice to help me move it there from the back of the car. His brothers couldn’t be trusted to keep the secret safe, so I handled it myself. Luckily, that was about a month before Christmas, so I had time to recover from the hernia surgery before I had to assemble it last night.

It was all actually going pretty well, taking locking plate #24 and using two #37 bolts plus two #78 washers and #45 nuts to secure crossbar #17 to main beam #12. That was fine. It was the un-numbered items that gave me a little trouble. Specifically, the twenty-five-pound plastic-coated weight that slipped out of my tired fingers around midnight and bounced across my already spring-loaded right foot.

That kind of thing never happened with the Fisher-Price stuff. Like I said, Christmas used to be lighter.

On the upside, the boys didn’t wake us up at 4:30 this morning like they used to.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to continue to ice my foot.

I hope you all have a very merry Christmas!

Until next year,

-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!

The 2019 Do-it-Yourself Christmas Letter

You’ve gone and done it again this year, haven’t you? You waited until the last minute and still don’t have your Christmas letter written. Like everything else you did this year, it’s going to be too little, too late now. When will you ever learn to stop procrastinating? Maybe next year, huh?

Well, don’t start drowning your sorrows in Jim Beam’s famous eggnog just yet. At least wait until five o’clock like a civilized holiday lush. And no, conquering procrastination does not begin with drinking earlier!

At least wait until you hear the good news. I can’t help you with your crippling lack of motivation or willpower, but I can get you out of this Christmas letter mess. You see, I anticipated your folly yet again this year, and created yet another Do-it-Yourself Christmas Letter, just for you. No need to thank me with a card I’ll probably get in June. I’m happy to help. It’s what I do.

So, grab your #2 pencil, pour some of that holiday cheer on the rocks, and start bubbling in the appropriate choices. It’s time to get this letter handled!

[heading and date]

O   Christmas 2019

O   Holidays 2019

O   2019 Holiday Season

O   Festival of the Nativity, Anno Domini MMXIX

O   2019, End of Fourth Quarter and Calendar Year

O   Wednesday

[salutation]

Dear

O   cherished loved ones,

O   family and friends,

O   mostly family and friends and some other obligatory holiday greeting recipients,

O   mostly marginal acquaintances,

O   bunch of names on the list my spouse provided me,

[introduction]

O   Merry Christmas

O   Happy Hanukkah

O   Happy Holidays

O   We’re Buddhist, so Happy Public School “Winter Break”

O   We’re Bengals fans, so Happy Last Two Weeks of this God-Forsaken Season

O   Yo Ho Ho

from the

O   Smith

O   Gonzalez

O   Lee

O   Johnson

O   Other

family!

[obligatory opening line]

O   We just can’t believe the year is almost over!

O   Where does the time go?

O   Wow, Christmas is here already!

O   Christmas is upon us again! Time sure does fly!

[letter body]

O   We had a great year here at the (last name here) house.

O   We had a good year here at the (last name here) house.

O   We sure had a year here at the (last name here) house.

O   We’d like to forget the year we had here at the (multiple last names here) house.

O   (first child name here) won another award this year for (activity or service merit here).

O   (first child name here) almost won an award this year for (fourth place finish here).

O   (first child name here) got a participation ribbon for (sport or activity no one cares about here).

O   (first child name or inappropriate nickname here) ain’t never gonna win no awards for (skill or activity they are bad at here).

O   (second child name here) continues to excel in both (school level and sport here).

O   (second child name here) continues to excel in (school subject or sport here).

O   (second child name here) continues to attend (school level or sport here).

O   (second child name here) continues to misbehave and nearly got expelled again from (school name here).

O   (mom’s name here) had another fulfilling year of volunteering at (charitable organization here).

O   (mom’s name here) had another exciting year of working at (multinational company name here).

O   (mom’s name here) had another year off her life working retail at (major store chain name here).

O   (mom’s name here) had another year added to her sentence at (correctional facility name here).

O   (dad’s name here) continues to enjoy retirement, keeping busy with his (hobby here).

O   (dad’s name here) continues to navigate retirement, with his latest adventure being (hobby here).

O   (dad’s name here) continues to be on disability, and can’t seem to keep busy since he hates (hobby here).

O   (latest baby daddy’s name here) continues to enjoy unemployment, getting busy with (female neighbor’s name here).

[closing]

O   We wish you all the best in the coming year, and a joyous holiday season.

O   We wish you all the best in the coming year.

O   We wish you all the best.

O   We wish we could be more like your family.

O   We wish this year had never happened.

Have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

You’re welcome. Now just sign, copy and send. You’re all set.

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!

The Smash Gift of the Year

What do you get the person who has everything? That age-old question is actually easily answered this time of year. You get them the gift of life, of course, in the form of the Emergency Car Escape Hammer and Seatbelt Cutter.

You would never give someone one of these for their birthday, but for some reason it seems to be a perfectly logical gift at Christmas. What says “I love you” at Christmastime better than a tool that cuts through your seatbelt and breaks tempered auto glass so you can escape through your driver-side window after you’ve driven your car off a cliff into the frigid water below?

Obviously, nothing. And there are so many options these days. They all have the standard pointed hammer and safety-recessed seatbelt cutter blade, but there are new upgrades coming out every year.

Some of them glow in the dark now, because, let’s face it, most of your unscheduled cliff diving happens at night, am I right?

Mine not only has a light, but also an electronic tire gauge that will tell me my tire pressure in PSI and also in kilopascals, which will be handy if I ever drive my car off a cliff in Italy.

Mine is standard blue, but many of the new models are coming out in a variety of fashion colors, including pink, making it much easier to accessorize.

There’s even one available called the Car Cane, that doubles as a convenient handle to help you get out of your car through the door during normal circumstances. You simply slip the hammer end into the steel U-shaped latch receiver on your car’s door frame, and, presumably, scratch the holy hell out of your paint as you use the rubber-grip handle to support your weight getting out of the vehicle. I might argue that if you need a crutch to get out of your car in the Target parking lot, you might not be able to Dukes of Hazzard your way out of your driver window while the car is upside down and underwater, but who knows? Adrenaline is an amazing thing.

I found one that doubles as a phone charger, plugging into your cigarette lighter. It has a light on the end that includes LED low beam, high beam, and red strobe light. Unfortunately, the light points toward the driver when plugged into the dashboard, so the only possible scenario would be the red strobe getting activated by a childish passenger, causing the driver to become blinded and resulting in them swerving off a cliff. At least they would then have the tool that they needed to save themselves handy and easily locatable, but one could argue that the tool might not be the best gift if it causes the accidents in the first place.

They have models where the entire handle is actually a large strobe light, for those times when you drive your car off a cliff into the middle of the ocean. Just activate the strobe light and the Navy helicopters will be able to pinpoint exactly where to drop the rescue divers. I assume it also has a dye pack, for daytime ocean emergencies.

There’s even one that has solar panels in the handle, so you can use the sun to charge your phone. That’s handy when you drive off the road, need to extract yourself from the vehicle, then live next to your car for the next six to eight weeks.

These emergency tools are great and all, but here’s the thing - when you are trapped in your vehicle, you have to find this thing in your glove box or center console. But if you need to cut your seatbelt in order to get free of it, I’m going to guess you won’t be able to reach the glove box too easily. And if you keep the knife/hammer in your center console, you might as well just keep it in Cleveland. You can’t find anything in your center console when you are sitting in your driveway. What makes you think you’ll be able to locate your escape tool when you are sitting at a forty-five degree angle with water rising through the floorboards and a deployed airbag in your face?

Maybe this holiday season it’s time for a slightly more useful automotive gift, like a lesson on how to properly use a turn signal.

Or how to merge onto a freeway.

Or how to make a left turn at a four-way stop sign.

Or how to pull forward and not get out of your car in the school drop off lane.

Just some thoughts off the top of my head. If you do want to go the traditional Emergency Car Escape Hammer and Seatbelt Cutter route, just remember - this tool is completely ineffective if the gift recipient is too large to fit out of their car’s window. If that is the case, a better gift might be a personal trainer, or a car with larger windows.

Happy holidays!

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!

A Fourteenth Open Letter to Lifetouch School Portraits

Dear Lifetouch School Portraits,

You know, fellas, life is funny, isn’t it? I mean, just when I thought there wasn’t any more advice I could give you about how to improve your thriving picture business, life throws me another photography curveball.

I get the feeling you aren’t reading my letters, so just in case that’s true, here’s where we stand:

I think you’re pretty bad at your overall job of managing the school picture process. Central to that, I think you just kinda suck at taking good pictures of kids. There’s really no other way to say it.

Based on the results we’ve seen over the years from our three boys, I’d guess you land somewhere in the fifty percent range. That’s an F on any grading scale. Unless we’re talking about the elementary school grading scale. We don’t do letters or numbers anymore, so your grade would be “Standard Not Met.” Still sucky.

After thirteen letters to you and one to Shutterfly urging them to back out of their ill-advised purchase of your little photography hobby shop over there, I thought I was just plain out of free advice to give you. Thankfully for you, I was wrong.

You see, as we’ve talked about many times in the past, Son Number One has a bad case of CFSD – Chronic Forced Smile Disorder. Unless you can get him to relax and laugh a little, his camera smile looks like he just stepped barefoot on a pile of Legos.

In your last twenty-one tries - twice a year from his preschool postgraduate year at Transitional Kindergarten all the way until this year in ninth grade - I’m not sure you have ever once managed to get a decent picture of him. Son Number Two and Three seem to have slightly better control of their facial muscles, but you still manage to screw them up quite a bit.

Anyhow, Son Number One is taking a trip soon, and we needed to get his passport renewed. The city of Roseville, CA has a passport office, which turned out to be nice because we didn’t have to go to the post office this time. I don’t know why, but the post office just feels as hopeless as the DMV, but without all the fun people watching.

Anyway, we were happy about the City of Roseville office because they not only let us set an appointment, but they offered picture services as well. We were renewing all three boys’ passports, so it was nice not to have to go somewhere else to get the pictures taken.

I would say that you might be able to see where this is going, but I’ve seen your pictures, so I’m not sure you can see much of anything. I’ll spell it out for you.

A lady who works every single day on a stool at a counter behind a glass wall in a drab and dreary city office building, picked up a handheld digital camera, and against the background of a plain white city office building wall, took three pictures of our boys that are better than anything you have ever been able to produce for us.

She actually took one of the best pictures of Son Number One that we have ever seen. His smile is natural and bright. He looks radiant with joy and brimming with youthful exuberance. The best you have ever done with him is “possibly not constipated.”

So, there it is, Lifetouch. That’s how bad you are. Lifetime government employees in hopeless little square offices take pictures that are a thousand times better than your “professional” photographers can muster. I’m not sure what you can do about that.

I don’t think there are enough city passport employees that you could lure away from the counter, even if you could match that sweet government pay scale and pension plan. There’s probably enough DMV driver’s license photographers out there, which would obviously be a huge improvement to your business model, but you have the whole government pension problem there too.

Maybe you guys could just figure out who trains these city, county, and state photographers who take such amazing identification photos, and lure that training staff away to help with your folks.

I’ll leave it up to you to figure out.

We just can’t wait to send photocopies of our boys’ passport pictures out in the Christmas letters this year!

Happy holidays,

-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!