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

 

The unrivalled massiveness of Sam Houston towers triumphantly over The Mrs., The Boy, and Pugsley. I personally want to have a cane when I’m older, primarily because I’d like to keep a sword in it, so that if anybody ever got on my lawn, I could give them serious medieval what-for.

The last two weeks have been very tranquil at Casa Wilder. Besides our Bigfoot: The Garden Yeti infestation, we’ve been relatively relaxed. Oh, sure, we’ve had outbreaks of unrelaxedness, like when the phasers® and communicators™ arrived and The Boy and Pugsley took to phasing each other on the front lawn (there is no phaser aim as bad as the phaser aim of a three-year-old, yet our three-year-old giggles like, well, a three-year-old as The Boy fans him with a phaser© blast designed to split him into atoms.

It’s summer in Houston, and fairly hot outside, in a very special Houston kind of way. This special way includes that sweat, due to the humidity, simply doesn’t work here. Sweat has been derided for making you sweaty and salty, but in the climates I grew up in, sweat worked and allowed you to cool down. In Houston? You’re just wetter, and no more comfortable.

That’s okay.

We have a pool. Having a pool makes Houston bearable. This morning, The Mrs. strolled through the bedroom after I had been through a 14-hour hibernation cycle.

“Hey, we’re going swimming. Want to come?”

Yes. Yes I do.

The Boy, and Pugsley and I do all sorts of silly boy things, fighting, splashing, and throwing pool toys at each other. It especially tickles Pugsley when he’s able to catch me, wrap his arms around my neck, and have me swim around the pool pulling him.

The Mrs. floats placidly amidst the turmoil, only occasionally glommed onto by the horde of males in the pool.

The other distraction was the recent Cub Scout movie day where I took The Boy (a Wolf) and Pugsley (an irritating little brother) to the movies. The nice people at AMC© gave us a tour, wherein Pugsley was primarily interested in the HVAC infrastructure of the theater.

We watched “Kung Fu Panda,” which was, well, I was sleeping. It might have been good. Both The Boy and Pugsley seemed happy about the movie, and all my Raisinettes™ and the Coke® were gone when I woke up, so that would indicate a goodly sugar intake took place.

So, if you want to know how the Wilder family summer is going, it can be summed up as: bigfoot, phasers©, swimming, movies, and sugar.

Not a bad summer.

"It's a bonsai bigfoot . . . " Crow T. Robot, MST3K

 

A fuzzy, grainy picture of what could be an unexplained, undiscovered biological specimen: a celebrity that admits that they didn’t finish college because of all the weed, dude, and don’t really know the difference between global warming and the Harlem Globetrotters® bigfoot.

I was on the Intertubes the other night, and came across a most curious web page. No, it did not involve Paris Hilton’s vow of chastity, but instead focused on “The Ten Stupidest Things You Can Buy from an Airline In-Flight Catalog.”

In it I saw the statue pictured above: “Bigfoot, The Garden Yeti.” (Search for this, and you can find him online, if you dare.) I laughed. Ha ha. How stupid it would be to buy that. Inside, however, warm waves of love for the statue flooded the core of my being, which isn’t nearly as comfortable as it sounds. The waves lead to sloshing when you walk, so that would explain why I list to the left when I amble about Casa Wilder . . .

Anyhow, I motioned The Mrs. to come over and look.

“We have to have it!” she exclaimed.

Really? My feverish love for Bigfoot, The Garden Yeti might have led my brain filter to mistranslate “We have to have it!” from the root base language, “What fool would buy that?”

I checked, “So, you . . . like it?”

“Yeah, order it up.”

Inside my heart did little pitter-patters of love for The Mrs. Between the pitter-patters and the sloshing of the waves of love, I guess I just passed out.

But, fortunately, The Mrs. poured cold beer on my face, stuck my credit card in my hand, and I purchased “Bigfoot, The Garden Yeti.”

It arrived a day later, before we even had the opportunity to make up the guest room for it. We pulled it out of the carton (which was approximately the size of an elephant’s kidney) and were pleased that it was the size of a two-year-old, but with feet that approximate a women’s size nine (I think women’s shoes are in metric, so I don’t really know what that means).

When I was in high school, I occasionally played Dungeons and Dragons® with my friends. We would joke (often over an illicit beer) about the various character classes. Since we were all nerds, we made up a character which was a giant dwarf, who, while looking like a normal human, was, indeed, a giant dwarf. Beer and nerdiness made that funny. I’m still nerdy, and still have beer, so The Mrs. and I, noting that we had a tiny-bigfoot, christened it “Normalfoot.”

The Mrs. response on seeing it?

“Oh, we need one for inside, too.”

I passed out again from the pitter-patter-sloshing again.

The following bigfotos show just how much fun you could have with your own bigfoot. (Bigfotos courtesy: The Mrs. You may click on any of them to embiggen it.)

 

The cunning bigfoot stalks his prey, the roaming gnome.

 

Tropical bigfoot.

 

Bigfoot, friend to man’s best friend. Which makes him our second cousin, I think, which means he’s marriageable.

 

Apparently bigfoot is afraid of sliding. He’s also afraid of Adam Sandler. You’d think bigfoot watching “Big Daddy” would be a natural. You’d be wrong.

 

After a hard day of bigfooting, what’s better than a dip in the pool?

 

Spring break, baby, bigfoot style.

"You know, evil comes in many forms, be it a man-eating cow or Joseph Stalin. Evil is just plain bad." - The Tick, The Tick

 

Why does NASA have a tracked front end loader? Because they have it on the back of a NASA flatbed. I peeked under the blue tarp covering the object on the front. It was gold-colored, and had a bazillion wheels. I (just happened) to see a link to what the heck it was two days later. It’s on the Youtube link below, and shows up best about 1:10 into the clip. I know this still doesn’t answer why NASA has a front end loader, but if it were my guess? They had the budget money, and wanted to play with one, which is exactly what I would do if I were NASA.



The only night we stayed in the hotel, Pugsley was happier than a pig in mud. Since we had forgotten our duct tape at home, we had few other choices than to let him sleep between me and The Mrs., since The Boy had claimed the couch for his own.

Pugsley has attempted sleeping with The Mrs. and I many times. After his nightly scrubbing, he’d jump up on the bed and begin to rub around on the sheets like a cat, then claw at the sheets when we pulled him off. My own take on this was that he had decided that he’d prefer to sleep with The Mrs. and I, thank you very much, and leave that room with the doors he cannot open for somebody else, say, his brother. Our answer is always a firm “no.” The last thing we want is our camel to have his nose under the tent. Pretty soon the camel is looking for the remote and wanting to borrow the keys for the car.

The Mrs. and I talked late into the night, about politics, science, the weather, and any subject that flew through the transom as Pugsley reveled on our bed, then finally slept. A wonderful evening. We went to sleep about two AM. The Mrs. indicates that Pugsley slept well, until I started snoring. Then The Mrs. indicated that I woke Pugsley up, and that kept her up all night. Fortunately, I slept pretty darn well, which in the end is all that counts.

The next morning our suite was family central as The In Laws converged. Given that Holiday Inn Distress® has a free banquet, The Mrs. took The Boy and Pugsley down to feed them. I showered, and was walking down the hallway when I ran into an obviously irritated (her nose flares when she’s angry, and by flare I mean that blinding light shoots out) The Mrs. coming back down the hall.

“What’s up?” I ask, knowing that maybe I shouldn’t ask.

“It’s them, the bovine people.”

The Mrs. was referring to the people that were making rounds at the free buffet downstairs. She described a people, not by girth or hairiness, that acted (more or less) exactly like cows.

“When there was no more sausage, they just stood there, expecting more sausage to magically grow from the tray!”

“Moo?” I rejoindered?

“Exactly! And then, when I had to cross in front of them in line to get Pugsley a fork, they stared at me menacingly.”

“Moo!” I replied.

“Exactly! And then, when they circled the line, filling their plates, at the end, they had been eating, so their plates were empty, they got right back in line.”

“Mooooooo!”

I had to have some coffee. I went downstairs and got in line, and saw first hand the behavior that had driven The Mrs. mad. Moo!, I thought.

We then left for the family reunion. The Mrs. had met nearly none of these people before, although when you looked around the room, you could certainly see lots of people that had been kicked by the same genetic mule.

Me? I didn’t know anyone there, ‘ceptin’ The Mrs., The Boy, Pugsley, and the In-Laws. I took it upon myself to make sure that The Boy and Pugsley didn’t crush all the dainty and delicate ceramic looking things around the house back into dry clay.

The first thing The Boy found on his explorations was one of those Wurlitzer® organs from 1970’s. The Boy powered it up and began playing “And The Cradle Will Rock” from Van Halen, but I convinced him (with a slap to the nugget) that was a bit advanced for the crowd this afternoon.

Instead, I took them into the backyard where the relatives had a veritable cornucopia of child-ride-upon toys for their own grandspawn. Immediately, The Boy and Pugsley began to fight over the same one. After knocking their heads gently together, they began to dimly grasp the concept of sharing, or, perhaps, don’t irritate dad. Either one works.

Two hours later, as the rich aroma of barbequed brisket began to permeate the deck, and The Mrs. indicated it was time to leave.

Time to leave? I think, “The barbeque (full of luscious, sweet, grease-dripping meat!) is almost done! How could we leave now??? I’ve snooped and found no beer, but, that might mean they’re just hiding it!”

It was her family. Instead, I said, “Sure.”

We drove home, missing our turnoff, but Texas is a big state with lotsa roads, and Pugsley was asleep in the back seat. A good day, a good trip, and the only worry that I had lingering was that Sam Houston might come and kill me in my sleep for mocking his hugeness. Perhaps, just perhaps, I could pretend to be a cow - that might fool him.

Moo.

"You realize that in Zen terms everything in the universe is just molecules, don't you? Ying and yong, ping and pong, mmm?" - Eddie, Ab Fab

 

Sam Houston is really huge. Really, really huge. He was, unfortunately, smaller than King Kong, but still managed to defeat him using his super-powered Masonic cane. Sam Houston was so powerful he would have probably even defeated Mothra, if it hadn’t been rained out in the third inning. Around the base of the statue, various people bought bricks with their names on them, including Dan Rather and George W. Bush (the only place you’ll find those two together, I’m sure, and Nobel Prize© winner Lech Walesa (a personal hero). If you hadn’t noticed, my e-mails to Stockholm have gone thus far unrequited.

A long drive is either a way to get closer and bond with your family, or to learn to hate each other with a passion not seen outside of the passion involved in hating movies starring Mickey Rourke.

In our case, Zen was satisfied: it was both love and hate.

The backseat was a jungle of juvenile jousting, with The Boy and Pugsley each initiating and retaliating hostilities – it was like watching the news involving Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood sniping at each other. Don’t know about you, but I’d be really scared of antagonizing Dirty Harry®. First he’ll mock you, then he’ll save a million dollar trial with a $1.39 worth of lead and powder. It was noisy, and frankly, I antagonized my big brother the same way.

Finally The Mrs. snapped.

“You,” The Mrs. said, pointing at The Boy, “put on your headphones and shut up.”

“You,” The Mrs. said, pointing at Pugsley, “do whatever it is you do in that smug little mind of yours.”

The Boy dutifully put on his headphones and began listening to a mixture of vintage Judas Priest® (which, for some reason, he insisted I put on the mp3 player), kid songs, and mp3’s of a radio host talking about ghosts and exorcism. The Boy is all about eclectic.

Pugsley began doing, well, he began doing whatever three-year-olds do on a long boring car trip.

The Mrs. and I talked far and wide, about philosophy, about love, about money, and about my hairy ears.

Both The Mrs. and I had read the Scottish Play (if you know Shakespeare, you know we’re talking about the one where the guy named Mac kills the king, etc.). Early on, I had read in the Shakespeare liner notes where “fop-eared” meant that one had hairy ears, generally a sign of low-bred villainy.

I had noticed that my ears were a bit hairy. Since this was going to be (yeah, after 11 years of marriage) the first time that I had met these particular relatives of The Mrs. at the family reunion, she intoned,

“Yea, verily, anon, gaze upon yon fop-eared villain cozening upon near yon potatoe salade.”

Thankfully, Holiday Inn Express® has a free razor that I used to shorn the fop-eared look. The Mrs. knitted a nice sweater out of the foppishness. She’s crafty that way.

Anyhow, we finally got to the hotel, and The Boy wanted to go swimming. The pool was smaller than the one we have at home, yet he was drawn to it, mainly because I think he was bored out of his skull. I put on my swimsuit (Pugsley steadfastly refused to go) and we headed on down.

The Mrs. and I formerly owned a hot tub, which we abandoned in Alaska. The pool had a nearby hot-tub, and I jumped in. Ahhh . . .

Don’t know about you, but I’d turn down a pool any day for a hot tub. Hot tubs are evocative of music, conversation, and, well, beer drinking. Pools? Fun, but not nearly as cerebral. I think that Einstein would have had a hot tub, but Paris Hilton has a pool. Need I say anymore?

Again, Zen is satisfied, Albert and Paris. Yen and Yang. Sort of.

"I have come up with a plan so cunning you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel." - Blackadder, Blackadder

 

The Boy pays homage to the giant, disembodied partial head of Sam Houston. It is a little-known fact that Sam Houston was actually 74’ tall, and weighed 329 tons (an even 300 if he laid off the carbs), and could crush a Mexican army regiment into itsy-bitsy pieces through the power of his mighty thoughts alone.

This weekend we packed up and headed off to go see various relatives of The Mrs. at a family reunion. This is an unusual event for me, since my side of the family (the Wilders) are essentially as feral as a group of rabid weasels, and a family reunion for us would no doubt result in some sort of footage on Youtube that would garner the Wilder family 1,134,532 page views and a lawsuit from the descendants of the Three Stooges for stealing their material.

The Mrs. had set her alarm for 5:30AM on Saturday.

It is my considered opinion that with the exceptions of getting off a boat on a French beach with the intention to invade, hunting, and going off to get firewood (all on the same day, since I don’t think the French would put up much of a fight), there is no real reason I would consider valid to get up at this hour on Saturday.

Fortunately, The Mrs. actually had set her alarm for 5:30PM. When she awoke at 6:30AM, she immediately hit that flood of adrenaline that comes from understanding that she’d grossly overslept. Immediately, she was taking action, doing seven or eight or ten things at once (I swear, The Mrs. was packing her toothbrush while dressing Pugsley while making coffee). Me? I turned over onto my pillow and slept.

It does (generally) not engender goodwill and affection from the fairer side of the species when you essentially abdicate all responsibility for essentially all activities. Does “I was kinda tired,” make a good excuse? Men voting only, thank you.

Anyhow, we got onto the road. The Mrs. drove the first leg of the trip.

Since we had moved to Houston (little known fact: Houston is named after the Houston Astros©) we had occasionally travelled north on I-45. As you near Huntsville, TX (home of, I am not kidding, “Old Sparky”) you reach a point where the road begins to curve northwest – and at that point stands a great, giant of a man – Sam Houston, named after Sam Adams® beers and the Houston Astros™.

Actually, it’s just an enormous statue of Sam. The real Sam is sort of tiny by comparison, and not at all alive. By not at all alive, I don’t mean that he’s an unreasoning, ancient zombie or even in Congress (pardon the redundancy), I mean he’s, well, deceased.

Most of the time that we head on a family trip, our objective is to travel as long and as far as possible, often travelling for 14 hours straight at 74.593MPH (17 kilograms per cubic nanometer), stopping only where OPEC demands or when little bladders get full. During this particular trip, however, we were only going to Dallas. A short trip, by Texas terms. I felt that we owed it to ourselves to stop and see the sights.

“Let’s stop and see that statue of Sam Houston,” I told The Mrs.

Rather than hitting me for my smugness at first making her do all the heavy lifting in getting us ready, and then taking the first leg on driving, The Mrs. just nodded. Huh. Maybe she was tired from all that work earlier on in the day.

We were nearly the first visitors to see Sam. As we walked toward the statue, a young employee of the Huntsville Chamber of Commerce bolted out of the guest office and said, breathlessly, “Please come and sign our guest book!”

I signed the Wilder family in, and The Mrs., Pugsley, The Boy and I went to look at a truly enormous statue, nattering and clawing at each other like the rabid weasels we are.

Next: Big statues, Nobel Prizes, and Hotel Pools

"It's quite a pleasure to see your entire life's work summed up in a three-minute film." - Prof. Farnesworth, Futurama

 

What, me?

It’s hot in Houston, but it’s really supposed to be hot here. I think that’s fortunate, because otherwise nobody could afford a house here, and we would all have a much closer proximity to Paris Hilton, and, frankly nobody wants that.

A friend of mine made the observation that “The only reason people live in Houston is to work.” Since we were both actually working at the time (or more properly, were being paid to have lunch together, which makes it sound so wrong), I find it fairly rough to refute his statement.

Houston is a city with lots of working people, lots of nice cars, and lots of shiny metal objects that distract The Boy, Pugsley, and I.

Pugsley is the new entrant to the scene of being distracted by shiny metal objects. His Grandmama had given him a transistor radio, and he became enthralled. For whatever reason, this radio will only pick up National Public Radio, so for quite a while all he could listen to was opera and classical music at night, and in the morning be serenaded by smarmily over-enunciating talk show hosts that think Obama is the right-wing candidate for president.

Pugsley eventually got tired of NPR after he found The Boy’s radio actually gets stations that play music conceived in the last 200 years. So, Pugsley does what any three-year-old would do: he steals his brother’s radio.

Normally this occurs around bedtime. Pugsley will be in his room, blankie ready, and then sneak out to The Boy’s room and then walk, as quietly as a three-year-old can (US Army tank divisions are quieter than Pugsley) back to his room.

Unfortunately, one of these episodes of brazen theft was accompanied by him dropping The Boy’s radio onto the tile floor, rupturing some sort of tiny unicorn or rainbow that makes the radio emit music. I tried to fix it using the physics theory that the sum of work on a closed path is equal to zero (I dropped it again) but found that my freshman physics theories were incapable of fixing it.

Pugsley still insists on having it in his room, even though now it is less functional than a typical government agency.

I’m wracking my brain attempting to figure out how to get enough work out of Pugsley to pay for a replacement radio. Unfortunately, all he’s capable of is:

Bringing you random small objects you don’t need at the moment,

Taking small objects to the trash (if he doesn’t forget where he was going),

Throwing out pieces of our silverware (I’m pretty sure that’s what’s started the Great Spoon Shortage of 2008, now we have to share one spoon)

Screeching at his brother,

Removing batteries from remote controls,

Rummaging through the pantry for brightly packaged snack food, and

Pulling the dog’s tail.

It might be a while until he pulls his weight around here. At least we get nice smiles until then.

"Judas Priest on a pony!" - Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane, The Dukes of Hazzard

 

Pugsley stairs at a mannequin that will never, ever, ever manage to land the big one at our trip to the local Bass Pro Shop©. I think that between the things The Boy wanted, and the things I wanted, we could have spent $575,321. Thankfully The Mrs. was there to keep us from spending my nursing-home money away.

It started innocently enough.

“I want to dance. Dance for about two hours,” The Boy said.

“Later,” was my response. I can understand the impulse to cavort wildly in the air-conditioned haven that is Casa Wilder, but, frankly on a Friday night after a week of work, I was not inclined to dance. Rather, I felt a much more rational response was to melt into a puddle of lethargy.

Not fair to The Boy and Pugsley, I decided, since I had spent upwards of seventeen minutes with them during the past week. “Okay, let’s go swimming.”

The Mrs. demurred. “I swim with those little hairy men every day. You go.”

We did. The Boy (having just seen the film Master and Commander, about a ship during the Napoleonic era shooting Frenchmen as part of his self-imposed summer curriculum of learning about times around the Revolutionary War) wanted to re-Christen our pool raft the H.M.S. Syren. So we could capture French pool invaders, perhaps?

Pugsley also determined that it is very, very scary to capsize off of your swim ring and have nothing between you and sinking being your natural buoyancy, your panic, and your father’s good will.

After swimming, it was time for Pugsley to head to bed. The Mrs. put on a set of headphones and worked on building an imaginary railroad empire in 19th century Britain while The Boy repeated his request.

“I want to dance.”

Me? I was plumbing the Internet for information related to various types of flightless waterfowl. No, not interested in them, just ended up at that page.

Anyhow, The Boy kept pestering me.

Finally I relented, and put on some music, some vintage 1980’s Judas Priest®. The Boy appeared to feel that, indeed, that if I chipped away at his brain that I would, indeed, have another thing coming. Another thing coming.

I bought a DVD on amazon some time ago of a Judas Priest© concert, so I thought I’d spin that up for him.

“Do you like this,” I asked, as two sweaty, leather-clad, long-haired guitarists (okay, I actually know their names, K.K. Downing and Glen Tipton) flipped solos back and forth between them.

“Oh, yes,” said The Boy.

A little later he made the devil horn (or, hook ‘em horns, if you’re a UT grad) sign with his hand.

“What does this mean, Dad?”

“Rock on, little dude, rock on.”

So The Boy danced to all manner of 1980’s metal as I learned that the flightless cormorant is a bird that I cannot even spell without Spellcheck® and, shockingly, the Internet informed me that gas is expensive.

Maybe he’d like Iron Maiden©?

"I was getting a piping hot cup of coffee. It's far too hot to drink, but luckily my leathery man-mouth can take it." - Stan, American Dad

 

A tiny guy has no idea he’s being stalked by a giant, animated skeleton of a tyrannosaurus rex at the Houston Museum of Natural History. I think he’s a Hillary supporter.

I got a list today:

Sciences:
Electristy
stars
planets
soil

History:
Reveloutonary war
famos invintors
famos Authur’s
famos war’s

math:
3 4 and 5 Diget problems

spelling:
number words
-ate
-ape
-each
-ea

What prompted this list is that The Mrs. and I were talking to The Boy about what he wanted to learn about this summer. I asked The Boy to make a list, and here, Internet, you are allowed to see what this particular seven-year-old is interested in.

School is winding down, and The Boy recently came home with a folder full of awards. There were awards for math, science, spelling, etc. in the packet. Knowing that the educational system nowadays awards pretty much everything to anyone, I asked him if there was an award he didn’t get:

“Citizenship, of course. (well, duh, he’s related to me) And perfect attendance. Didn’t get that one either,” The Boy responded.

Good for him. At least there was some criteria.

The Boy is excited that school is nearly out, and so is The Mrs. This means that, instead of waking to a busy hive of activity as I go to work, I’ll get up (quietly) to a slumbering mass of Wilders and tip-toe out the door. The Mrs. refers to this as “grizzly bear noises in a china shop,” but she’s being kind.

So, summer is here, and Houston moves from the season of being Nice, to the season of being Hot, and finally into the season of Nice and Hot.

"Want to know what the nice thing about humming is? You can stop." - Red, That 70's Show

 

The Fountains of Paradise, or, at least The Fountains of The Museum of Natural History. Which, really, has nothing to do with the following post. Man, I hate that when the author does that.

Ever have an annoying tic that you’re pretty sure is just your own? Yeah, if you’re like me, it isn’t just you that notices.

Every since the first Indiana Jones© movie came out, I think of the theme song whenever we’re getting ready to take a long, cross country adventure trip. I imagine a map with the Wildermobile moving across it. Dunno why – perhaps it makes the trip feel shorter, and much more adventurous than stopping at a bunch of convenience stores so that various members of the family can relieve themselves of the pressures of the road. If you know what I mean.

So, after a recent batch of Indiana Jones™ movies, I noticed that The Boy was incessantly humming the theme song, in places like the grocery store, where I guessed he was imagining taking a twelve-pack of Diet Dr. Pepper® off the shelf, replacing it with a bag of sand, and then steering our cart through the aisles as all of the drain cleaner bottles exploded and having to use a bullwhip to skirt the frozen food section. Frankly, that’s what I imagine, because shopping is boring as can be.

I observed this the other day, and told The Mrs., “You know, whenever we get ready for a long trip I think about the Indiana Jones© theme song.”

The Mrs. looked at me incredulously.

“You’ve been humming that song, nonstop, for the last eleven years whenever we start a car trip longer than ten miles. Telling me you do that is like telling me you snore.”

Oh.

Caught.

Nevermind?

Anyhow, on Saturday we were in Bullseye® buying food, and The Boy, procuring that twelver of Diet Dr. Pepper™ was humming the song.

The Mrs. observed, “At least he comes by it honestly.”

Da-da-DA-da, da-da-DA.