"Gee, Moe, that seems a bit extreme. Couldn't you just bash my brains in?" - Homer, The Simpsons

Extreme Makeover, Boy Picture Edition. This was a picture taken by The Boy when I was building his swingset. Note that I did not cut off any fingers, as far as you know.

“Extreme Makeover, Home Edition” came up to Fairbanks recently. They took a family with about seven hundred kids, headed by a single mom, and shipped ‘em off to a Disney slave-labor farm while they turned bulldozed their 800 square foot house (11 square metres) and converted it to a 5,000 or so square foot (12 square metres) mansion.

Everyone in Fairbanks knew what was going on. When I stopped to buy beer on Friday, the clerk said, “The family is coming home tonight.”

I thought at first that it was a question. Was my family coming home tonight, hence requiring me to buy enough beer to dull my senses sufficiently so I could tolerate them? No. I thought an instant and realized that the clerk was talking about the family who was to be the recipient of the new house was coming home.

This has raised a philosophical question that’s difficult to process. A nice lady (by all accounts) is getting something very nice for her and her family that she didn’t work for. Is it right?

I have friends who live on the extreme side of personal responsibility as their code of life. They feel that you should get what you earn, not what people give you. “This is wrong,” they’d say, “this is just a form of feel-good welfare that sets up expectations that everyone should have a great big house because they’re good or nice people. This is wrong.”

Thousands of people in Fairbanks felt differently. They donated time, material, and sweat to put up a house that very few in the community could afford (estimated appraisal is about $700,000). I know that $700,000 would barely be enough to purchase a pickup truck in a parking space in San Jose, but is a huge house in Fairbanks, several times the median price.

I didn’t help build the house. I’ve been busy drinking beer donating blood, sleeping in caring for my children, and thinking about hunting praying. I don’t think, personally, that the house is bad. It’s a nice thing for the lady and her family. It doesn’t hurt my feelings that over (in the end) a million or so dollars will have been spent on this, since it might make a nice television program that I’d watch if it weren’t on at the same time as The Simpsons. Like I’m going to miss The Simpsons. That’s what I call extreme.

In the end, I don’t mind that the nice lady, her kids, and her other relatives that live with her are getting a nice house. Fairbanks is a small place, and although I don’t know her, I have friends that do, and they say she’s swell. Good for her.

I’m not jealous, though. If “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” would have come to Casa Wilder, I don’t think I would have liked it a bit. Not so much the new, huge place. That would have been okay. I just don’t want Ty Pennington in my house. It looks like he might shed everywhere. How would I ever get the Pennington out of my carpet? Ewww.