"Was it a dinosaur?" - Hurley, Lost

 

A skeleton-zombie T Rex stalks an unsuspecting guy in a white t-shirt. Workman’s Comp rates for this place have to be high. You can click on it for embiggened goodness.

I work really hideous hours. I go to work when the folks on the East Coast are supposed to get there, and often leave about the time that people from Guam are supposed to go home. Do I intentionally work so hard? No. It’s because they beat me if I don’t work harder.

Weekends, though, belong to family, except for errant work-related phone calls that The Mrs. really, really loves.

So, this Saturday we had planned to go to the Houston Highland Games and watch a bunch of sweaty Scots throw cabers (trees). Heck, I had halfway convinced myself that I should go and throw a caber myself. I like throwing trees. The Mrs. reminded me that I didn’t have a kilt, and wasn’t a Scot, was old, and that my back hurt when I got up from chairs. I told The Mrs. that she was being defeatist, and that I could rip a t-shirt and have a kilt, speak with a brogue for the day, and drink enough beer so that my back didn’t hurt when I threw trees.

Didn’t matter. Everybody in the Wilder household was pretty darn tired on Saturday morning, and The Boy and Pugsley were likewise lethargic after bolting through an entire box of those tiny Dolly Madison® chocolate-covered donuts (if we don’t buy those, Pugsley just eats the frosting off of real-size donuts and puts them back in the box. You can get used to the flavor of the de-frosted donuts if you don’t mind baby spit.

Anyhow, by the time we all were awake, it would have been long after all the cabers had been tossed. The Mrs. and I were debating what we wanted to do for the day when The Boy piped up. “Let’s go to the Museum of Natural History and look at all the stuff we didn’t get to see the last time we were there.” I nodded at The Boy’s uncharacteristic bout of sanity, since just before he had been jumping on a tiny trampoline and laughing like a loon at the adventures of an orange cartoon cat that loves lasagna. The Mrs. objected to this. “Ummm, remember you have two boys we’re taking. Museums don’t tend to make toddlers very happy.”

“Oh, piffle, woman,” I replied, since I’d always wanted to say, “Oh, piffle, woman.”

We went. On the way, we stopped at Burger King® and I had to return home after a wardrobe malfunction with a Whopper© left me drenched in, as The Mrs. referred to it, “Meat Cologne.”

One change of wardrobe later, we arrived at the museum. On our previous visit, Pugsley had been in a stroller, now he was a free-range Pugsley. Since The Mrs. had objected to our destination based upon the crazed-weasel behavior of Pugsley, she noted that I was to make sure he didn’t singlehandedly destroy our records millions of years of Earth’s history in a crazed toddler-tantrum.

After watching a Foucault pendulum knock over a block of wood (higher tension than a Die Hard movie), we strolled first into the energy museum. The Boy and I were in hog-heaven.

If you look at what people in the energy business do, there is no real business that’s cooler. They take massive steel drills tipped with frigging diamonds and bore into the Earth and pull out highly pressurized explosive, flammable stuff that they then boil so you can drive to Target© and buy Cheezy-Puffs®.

That’s manly. We walked into a room where the focus was on seismic techniques to determine what the heck is below the ground (voodoo, I think it’s called, or maybe it was geophysics). There in the room they had a column of water with a nifty stainless-steel gizmo in it that periodically shot out bursts of compressed air into the water column. If you can imagine the huge, deep, “thwunk” that makes, well, you’ve probably been shot at with a 12 gauge while you were trying to swim away underwater from, umm, something you’d probably not like to talk about. It sounds just like that.

Anyhow, The Boy, Pugsley, and I put our hands on the outside of the cylinder, awaiting the next thwunk. It came.

The Boy pulled his hand away, thrilled. Pugsley pulled his hand away, and then hesitated in the way that only toddlers can before they either laugh or cry. It was cry. Pugsley was scared out of his little shorts, and it took The Mrs. about five minutes to console him. Stupid geophysicists.

Anyway, we made our way next to an exhibit about chemistry and physics. I could sense a buildup of frustration from The Mrs. as The Boy and Pugsley went from exhibit to exhibit learning about phase transitions, immiscibility of certain fluids, and differential density of various planets.

“What’s the matter, The Mrs.?” I asked.

I could see by the look on her face that the sheer testosterone-fueled nerdish exuberance of all of us was getting to her.

Well, we come by it honestly, even if we didn’t get up early enough to watch the sweaty Scots throwing trees, which, I know, is really, really, what all women want.

" I can't wait til they start the internet." - Crow T. Robot, MST3K

 

How did we ever make it to the Moon without the Internet. Oh, yeah, really big rockets, lots of thrust. Sliderules.

I remember way back in the before-time, before there was the IntraTubes. Back then, The Mrs. and I would get in steel-cage death-matches over whether or not the actress in The Jerk was Jamie Lee Curtis (She wasn’t. I was, I know it’s difficult to believe, wrong on my actress identification.) or whether Jamie Lee Curtis is a hermaphrodite (Internet version: tie).

Now as The Mrs. sits and writes her novels (on the purchased one, the editor said, “I love working on your novel – editing is a dream.”), The Mrs. can effortlessly determine the average, real-time flow of water in the Sabine River in Texas, or view historical data on nose-picking rates among left-handed near-sighted dentists. Not that The Mrs. does that, since she doesn’t write about dentists or the Sabine River. But, The Mrs. could.

The Intertubes have, besides short-circuiting domestic disputes and keeping The Mrs. and I off of “Cops: Nerdville,” also given us instant access to meandering conversations from Pop Wilder in the Wilderbunker:

Pop Wilder: “John, I think they know where I live. Love, Pop”

John Wilder: “Pop, The code guy inspected the bunker when you pulled the building permits. The tax assessor valued the place at $231.34 last year. The Postal Service delivers the mail daily. Yes, they know where you live. Love, John”

Pop Wilder: “John, Is that why the President stopped by for scones and herb tea last week? It was nice. We watched The Wire on HMO. Love, Pop.”

Okay, there’s that, too. E-mail and instant messaging don’t necessarily lend themselves to the fifty-odd pages of letter that George Washington would write to Einstein (assuming that one wasn’t dead before the other was born) detailing the spring planting of hemp in Virginia and the potential ramifications on the Special Theory of Whoa I’m Totally Baked, Dude.

Instead, future historians will need to plumb the depths of recovered SIM chips in cell phones and attempt to decipher the near-hieroglyphic “LOL DUDZ IMO IDK TTYL.” In the future, Shakespeare’s lines of “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate,” may be replaced by Tiffany Q. Lowrisepants version of “U R 1 HOT T.” The English Lit profs will probably be ROFLPITP.

One of the nice things about the Internetnet is that you can get content that would otherwise be unavailable. The Mrs., Alia and I were watching South Park a month or so ago and they did a parody of the Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” Even better, they did a parody of the film of Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” done by Encyclopedia Britannica in the late 1960’s (featuring star of stage and screen, Ed Begley, Jr.). I remember (vividly) watching that movie when I was in fifth grade. Since Trey Parker and Matt Stone probably watched the same exact copy of film (Trey, Matt, and I all grew up in Colorado) I really wished I could show it to The Mrs. and Alia S.

Thanks to Youtube, we watched it that night, so the ladies in the house could understand why I was laughing like a fool at several scenes. Mainly, really, it was so they could indulge my narcissistic side and make them watch that.

The Mrs. and I also loved (back in the day) Mystery Science Theater 3000®. Turns out that Mike Nelson has a site (www.rifftrax.com) that you can download audio tracks that parody currently popular movies. (If you liked MST3K, go, visit, purchase.)

Me? I think can barely remember the before-time, when I had to go to bookstores, and if The Mrs. and I got into an argument that we could factually prove, I could yell, “OMG, IS THAT A HERMAPHRODITIC SQUIRREL THAT LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE JAMIE LEE CURTIS? ROFL!”

Less chance of me being a battered spouse on “Cops: Nerdville.”

Thank you, Internet.

"Nine hundred years of time and space, and I've never been slapped by someone's mother." - The Doctor, Doctor Who

 

The Boy and Pugsley paw through Pugsley’s birthday presents. No actual newspapers were harmed in the filming of this birthday.

I’m a slug. A horrible, horrible bad slug.

Let me explain.

It’s Mother’s Day (or is that Mothers’ Day? I’m thinking it’s Mother’s Day unless you can have multiple mothers.) and I woke up this morning at 11:00 (AM) or so. I looked and worried that there was coffee I could make, or perhaps bacon and sausage and eggs I could make. Instead The Mrs. walked in, gave me the standard WWE® tag-off hand slap and said, “You’re on.”

Me? I’d fallen asleep the previous night while The Boy watched Indiana Jones™ and the Temple of Doom®. I walked into the room when Indiana Jones™ was on his Last Crusade©. I read a book on probability and statistics (well, not so much, really a book on how we fool ourselves through probability and statistics, but that’s another story) while Indiana® and Dr. Henry Jones© deal with amazingly stupid Nazis© to find the Holy Grail®.

It was Mother’s Day, so I let Pugsley pick the next movie, which involved a mouse that’s either unable to talk, or, like Pugsley, faking the inability to talk. Never trust the ones that don’t talk.

During this The Boy said, “Mom picked Indiana Jones©, and Pugsley picked Maisey®, so I should be able to pick the next movie.”

He said this like it’s normal for a thirysomething mom to want to watch an Indiana Jones® movie first thing on Sunday morning, and that he was horrified and tortured to have to watch the whole thing.

I gave him my best “father knows you’re an idiot” stare, but allowed him to pick a Garfield™ movie anyway. I nosed back into my book on probability (and how we’re all idiots).

Eventually Pugsley headed down for a nap (during Garfield®) and The Boy continued to cackle like a grinning goofball at the antics of the lasagna-loving feline.

The Mrs. opened her cards from Pugsley, The Boy, Alia S. and me. She got the stuff she’d picked out yesterday.

Not a lot of excitement here at Casa Wilder after that.

We mulched some trees. I edged the lawn and drank some beer.

So, to all Mothers everywhere, happy Mother’s Day.

Let your husbands sleep in. They like that.

"And I apologize for that. I thought it was a pool toy." - Tobias, Arrested Development

 

Pugsley wonders why fake-microwaved plastic chicken tastes exactly like real-microwaved plastic chicken.

One of the big benefits to living in the hellishly hot wonderful climate of Houston is that everyone has a swimming pool. Everyone. Even the local taco trucks have swimming pools on their roofs, though they don’t change the water near enough for my tastes.

We have one, too. Since we don’t have precious, sweet oil or wonderful, delicious natural gas bubbling up from our property, we don’t heat the pool. I believe, after living in Texas, we are the only ones who don’t regularly bath in gasoline since it’s cheaper than water. (It is. Move to Texas. After you fill up with sweet, sweet gasoline, they put a credit on to your account for helping you get rid of that plentiful stuff.)

It’s really only been the last week or so that the pool hasn’t been colder than an Paul McCartney’s ex’s stare after “When I’m 64” plays on the radio when she’s attempting to get her leg waxed.

On Saturday, it seemed nice and warm enough. My usual modus operandi on getting into the pool is to get on the diving board, get The Boy and Pugsley all excited (The Boy does a countdown) and jump in. I will admit I had somewhat the reputation of being a showboat at certain times (hint, hint, high school) but I never think it’s a bad thing to instill in your children that you’re larger than life, that you could whip an alligator, a grizzly, a rattlesnake (all at the same time, otherwise, what would the challenge be?), cut down a tree, and then whip their little hiney’s at chess while doing one-handed pushups.

In truth, Internet, I do it because I don’t want them to see me wince when I step by step edge a little deeper into the oh-so-cold water. Do you want to see your Dad be a wuss? No. Rip the Band-Aid® off, take the tax loss for unitemized depreciations carried forward into the current tax year, show your courage all at once.

So, we frolicked in the pool like crazed wombats with swim rings.

Did I mention that the pool was cold? It was. I have this little theory that running the water that goes back into the pool through black hoses makes it warmer, since it soaks up all the global warming. I’m not sure if that’s right, but for US$18.34 (that’s like six pesos nowadays) I can pretend that the pool is warmer as my pasty body plunges into its icy depths.

On Sunday, Pugsley turned the ripe old age of three. Pugsley refuses to talk, even though you can talk about very complex, multi-subject and verb sentences and he can carry out everything you ask, “Pugsley, carry out the trash, make me a Swiss cheese and mushroom omelet and work on solving Fermat’s last theorem. Now, please.”

And, he’ll do it. But he won’t talk.

I generally help pick out the presents, but this time The Mrs. bought Pugsley’s presents while I sat in the car and sweated with The Boy and Pugsley. I was busy figuring out how to turn “hot parked car air” into some sort of useful energy with them while The Mrs. picked out a selection of things that Pugsley had pawed at from the comfort of a Toys ‘r’ Us© shopping cart.

Heck, I’m still not sure of all the things that we bought Pugsley. The Mrs. might have gotten him a 12-gauge for all I know.

But one present stuck out from all the rest – a toy microwave.

Of all the things you can call Pugsley, just don’t call him late for dinner.

After cake and presents were done, The Mrs. and I were talking, and Pugsley was two rooms over. I asked (in a normal voice), “Want to get in the pool?”

In ran Pugsley.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!” as he ripped his shirt and shorts off to get his swimming suit on.

Okay. He talks sometimes. And he has dog ears. Heck, he might even be reading now for all I know.

Just hope he doesn’t cause himself fake-radiation poisoning with that fake-microwave. Somebody should regulate those things.

Oh, wait, I think California already does.

" Dad, I have never seen Maris this angry. I swear, her eye was twitching like a frog in a science experiment." - Niles, Frasier

 

”Dude, that’s my skull.” – Jeff Spicolli I don’t know about you, but I thought that the inside of an alligator wasn’t so bony. Perhaps I thought they were made of Jolly Rancher© candy instead. Probably green apple.

The Mrs. says I don’t rest well. I tend to want to fiddle, fix, and fret when I have a few down moments. This weekend I sought to prove The Mrs. wrong.

It started on Saturday. On Saturday I got up (unwillingly and with complaint, as usual) with The Boy and Pugsley. The Boy, fresh off some new transgression at school, was banninated from television. We shared a hearty breakfast of Pop Tarts©.

Upon consuming the delicious chemicals meant to mimic strawberries, I assumed a prone position on the couch and proceeded to watch a special on the socioeconomic effects of the Little Ice Age (in 1732, Alburtus Gorus warned us all that newfangled sailing ships were “stealing the wind” and making the earth cold). As exciting as that was, I still fell straight asleep, but the “parent” kind of asleep, where whenever anything is too noisy or too quiet, you wake up and yell.

On one of those yells, I heard Pugsley rustling around in the kitchen.

“PUGSLEY, GET IN HERE NOW,” I yelled.

“He’s in here with me, Father of the Year,” responded The Mrs.

Oh, good. The Mrs. is up. Now I can really sleep.

The Mrs. walks by. “What is this show? I walked by once and they were talking about the Spanish Armada. Now they’re talking about beer.”

“Little Ice Age,” I muttered.

“Huh. I’m going back to sleep.”

Eventually (two hours later) all the Wilders were ready to head out. By head out, I mean that we had exactly three destinations in mind – Starbucks©, The Scout Shop, and Toys ‘r’ Us™. At Starbucks© The Mrs. and I discovered that the primary cause of our extraordinary malaise that morning was an utter lack of caffeine in our blood. At The Scout Shop, The Boy had to bring his Scout Stamps in to pick out a prize for selling Scout Fair coupons. He picked out an orange-colored doo-dad that had a compass, flashlight, thermometer, whistle, and secret Cub Scout compartment.

Then, to Toys ‘r’ Us® for Pugsley’s birthday presents. Since Toys ‘r’ Us© were all out of One Rings (oooh, my precious) The Mrs. picked out something for Pugsley while he and The Boy and I went back to the car.

I was in the car with the air conditioning and the radio on.

The Boy: “Dad, would you turn off the air conditioning? I want to see how hot the car gets without it on.”

Me: “Sure.” I’m not one to avoid an experiment on myself even if it results in my blood pressure going up forty points, nearly enough that would have sweat blood, due to a massive ingestion of salt (yes, this really happened, and no, I’m not going to discuss it). The Mrs. chastised me soundly for this, indicating that there was a reason that doctors went to medical school . . .

Five sweaty minutes later The Mrs. bangs on the trunk, I press the button that opens it, and she puts in Pugsley’s birthday loot.

The Mrs. opens her car door and gets into the car.

“Jesus, John, are you trying to kill the kids?” The Mrs. asks as she gets into the oppressively hot car.

“The Boy wanted to run an experiment . . .”

From the backseat, The Boy announces, “Hey, cool, it got to 105°F. That’s like 500 kilometers!”

I could see the emotions warring on The Mrs.’ face. Finally it settled on defeat.

“Okay. There are two of you idiots. At least there’s still hope for Pugsley.”

Next:
Swimming
Solar Power
Pugsley Turns Three

"Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?" - Indy

 

If Indiana Jones grew up in Houston, he wouldn’t be creepy about snakes, but instead about fire ants. The picture above is of a fire ant magnified fifty gazillion times.

I remember going to see Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was a kid. I’ll guiltily admit why I went: here was a movie that had Han Solo® in it. I had seen each and every crappy movie that Harrison Ford was in between Star Wars™ and Raiders, hoping that they would not be filled with great gulps of suckage. Sadly, each movie (Heroes??, Hanover Street????) attempted to crush my youthful hope into jaded cynicism. It was like Hollywood© was attempting to do its best to make me hate movies.

It was before the Internet, so I hadn’t heard anything about Raiders of the Lost Ark before it showed up in our little two-movie-theater-town (two showings at each theater a night, except on Wednesdays). Note: two theaters in a small town wasn’t so bad. I learned when I was fourteen that the theater down the street (which showed only R-rated movies) trained their ticket-takers that “cash-in-hand=17.” Oh, the education!

I sat down in my usual fold-down theater seat (before you can drive, if you were a kid you had a usual seat, since VCRs, DVDs, and iPods® had yet to be invented by Al Gore, though Al had invented the first video game, the ALtari™ several years earlier) and prepared mentally to be horribly disappointed again.

No! There he was, Harrison Ford, in a movie that didn’t suck! I floated home with that light feeling in the chest, that feeling of having been uplifted by the ultimate in coolness.

Fast Forward, er, Skip Chapter . . . .

While The Boy was growing up, the Indiana Jones™ movies were released on DVD. I hesitated buying them. First, fifty bucks was fifty bucks, and that was an expensive proposition for movies I’d already paid to see. Second, it’s not like The Mrs. and I were going to sit around and watch them on a Friday night. Or a Saturday night. Heck, we could get into R-rated movies if we wanted to.

Now The Boy is 7. I’ve noticed him enjoying things that aren’t cartoons, and decided it was time. I bought the trilogy on DVD. He walked by my desk after the helpful folks over at Amazon had delivered it.

“Hey,” The Boy remarked, “Indiana Jones™, I’ve heard of him.”

“Seen an Indiana Jones™ movie yet? And,” I continued, “where, exactly, little Mr., did you learn to pronounce ™?”

“Nah, haven’t seen one. And, really, Dad, all the kids at school say ™, all the time!”

I let the whole ™ thing drop. Let The Mrs. handle it. “Want to watch an Indiana Jones™ movie?” said the spider to the fly.

“Well,” hesitating, “I guess.”

The Mrs. and I sat down on our couch, and I hit ‘play’ on the remote.

As Indy walked through the thick South American jungle, into the temple, and retrieving the gold idol, I could see The Boy watching with rapt attention. When Indy replaced the golden idol (which, by the way, is mooning us) with the sand, The Boy clapped his hands excitedly.

The Boy watched Indy run from rock marbles, jump chasms, fly in planes, hate snakes, retrieve the Lost Ark while Nazi’s turn into piles of goo (sorry if I spoiled the whole ending for you) and, finally, put it in a big government warehouse where they keep wooden boxes, probably filled with government forms for requisitioning wooden boxes, or, perhaps they keep our secret government hamster army.

The Boy started the movie in the chair. The Boy ended up on the floor in front of the television, in rapt attention, and, according to my mother, ruining his eyesight. I had to keep an eye on him to make sure he didn’t get sucked into the movie, and have to live in a government box. The Boy would then have to fend for himself against our crack US Hampster Force. I couldn't live with that sort of guilt.

I think I’ll show The Boy the next two Indy movies. Then? I’ll make him watch Heroes or Hanover Street.

Just because I’m mean.

But I won’t make him watch Witness, because even I’m not that mean.

"One of you is gonna fall and die and I'm not cleaning it up." - Mal, Firefly

 

Paris Hilton on a diet.

“Well, tell me thank you, then.”

That’s what The Boy said when asked what The Mrs. and I should do after his stellar performance in cleaning his room this weekend.

Let me explain:

There is a point in the life of a child when they cease becoming helpless and become, well, helpful. This weekend was when that switch flipped inside The Boy. Sunday afternoon, I told him, “Go clean up your room.”

The Boy: “I want you to help me.”

Me: “No, I have to clean the kitchen. You go do it. Pick up your toys. Take the trash out. You can do it.”

I expected him to stamp off and then dither about for a few hours while I scrubbed and cleaned. That would be okay. At least I could get something done.

Then I heard a noise. The vacuum.

A little later, The Boy came into the kitchen and said, “Want to take a look at my room?”

“Sure.”

My actual anticipation was that The Boy had somehow caught the vacuum into the chords on the blinds on his windows and it was repeatedly gouging holes into the drywall in his ceiling.

My bad.

The Boy’s room actually (for the first time in a long time) looked like a place where an actual human could live. It looked, well, good. I didn’t see festering piles of clothing covered in a variety of bacteria and insects that would make the Centers for Disease Control clamp down a biohazard warning on our house. I didn’t see candy bars slowly melting into the carpet so that the infestation of ants was placated and didn’t try to eat The Boy.

Instead I saw something I hadn’t seen in his room since we’d moved in here: carpet.

Someone apparently snuck in and replaced my little-tiny The Boy and put in a little tiny Young Man.

I decided to test this thesis. I asked him to clean up the pit of despair that was the lair of Pugsley while I fed Pugsley some alphabet soup. The Boy marched off. Fifteen minutes later, he showed back up.

“Done.”

If you’ve never seen the hideous devastation a two-year-old can bring down on a room, well, let’s just say that if you had a crazed hammerhead shark (or Nick Nolte) living in your house, a two-year-old can create more havoc than either of them. Or both of them. Or, even if it was Nick, the hammerhead shark, and the illegitimate offspring of Nick Nolte and the hammerhead shark.

I walked into Pugsley’s room. It looked like, well, a room, rather than looking like Tijuana after a visit from Christian Slater and a horde of Visigoths. The Boy had done a good, quick, thorough job.

The Boy is growing up. He didn’t ask for candy, just asked us to tell him “Thank you.”

So, “Thank you.”

Now take the trash out.

Next: Indiana Jones® Meets The Boy