STICKY DOORKNOBS

Dog problem

OK, so we're having a new back fence installed and the fencers are in the middle of the job. Thus, we currently have no fence.

Problem: We have two dogs that have had to be solely confined to the house for the past day. And their routine has been disrupted. They, in fact, have not, ummm, eliminated, shall we say, in over 24 hours because ... well, because they have shy bladders, etc.

I really need help with this one guys. Any ideas? Or, should I just expect the worst when I go home for lunch today.

Make your own stromboli. Or pizza. Or cinnamon bread. And help a sanity-challenged dad

So, anyone interested in buying some zesty Italian homemade pizza-making kits? You can make your own garlic bread, cinnamon pizza, pepperoni, you name it. I have the exlcusive on this one and I would really like to see your palate satisfied...

What?

Oh, yeah, well, sure, anything you buy goes toward The Boy's band camp fundraiser, and it will take a nice little chunk out of our tuition bill. The world needs another drummer, I say, and so it's partially up to you to purchase a stromboli kit so we can actually turn the constant banging from the drum set in the living room into, well, constant banging with some semblance of rhythm.

Help if you'd like. I'd be appreciative.

Or, let me put it another way, parent to parent:

HELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLPPPPP !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Help me Pleaaaaaaase!

She's 21. We've done all we can. Now it's time for her to screw up her own self.

I walked into work one day this week and some of the younger people were comparing notes on how much their children had enjoyed Christmas. The expressions of glee from their kids, the funny moments forever etched in parental memories. And then a friend emailed and told me every time his young daughter opened a gift Christmas morning, she would respond the same way: "I have ALWAYS wanted one of these." And then 15 seconds later, it was on to another box. Cute. I remember those times well.

Christmas at our house has changed now. Even The Boy informed us this season that not only does he no longer believe in Santa in his most human incarnation anymore, but he didn't believe last year either, he just didn't want to tell us and have us be disappointed.

As we speak, our oldest daughter, by now no doubt a full-fledged adult, is driving to San Antonio. Road trip. Don't know why they've become all the rage among college kids types, but road trips are apparently here to stay.

We found out about the trip when our oldest told us just a couple days before Christmas. Ir's enough to completely de-glee the yuletide. News that your 20-year-old daughter is making her first long trip means that that lump in your throat is due more to nerves than egg nog.

It's not easy being a parent, sitting back idly as all this unfolds. I've frankly been pretty much unable to sleep this week. But you have to just let 'em go and you say a prayer and you wait for the call that tells you they're back home safely.

(A personal aside: my first roadtrip after school was when I was 18. I drove from Irving to Muleshoe to see a friend. One night we went to Clovis to party. Obviously there was no reason for mom and dad to lose any sleep).

But for now, our oldest is somewhere along I-10. She's never even driven between Midland and Odessa. Now she's road-trippin' to The Alamo to meet her boyfriend and get him back to Lubbock.

That's our oldest. She will be 21 on the 21st of this month. Please cancel all your appointments that day and reserve the time to spend in prayer without cease. I beg of you. Karen and I, of course, will be first in the prayer line that day, and we won't even be quiet long enough for God to have a bite of his leftover turkey.

21. Wow. Scares me to death but, y'know, as her mother and I have talked about repeatedly, we have done all we can. Now it's her turn to screw her own self up.

As if the oldest going to San Antonio and turning 21 all within the next week weren't enough on our emotional well beings, we have a 17-year-old daughter who told us over the holidays that she'd been in a fender bender. It was unusual the way she chose to break the news to us.

How was your day? we asked.

Fine. Work was good. I got a new schedule. I picked up a shift. Did some community service hours, got some new makeup that I really need and oh someone backed into me.

And I said without missing a beat, Oh it sounds like you had a pretty full day what did you say?

The I-bought-some-makeup part? she asked.

No not the I-bought-some-makeup part. The other part.

The work part?

NO! The backed-into-me part.

It was just a fender bender, she said. Gawwsh dad!! And the other girl got out of her car and apologized. She was really sorry. And really nice. It's fine. You can't even tell.

That's great, I said and I did the only thing I could do at that particular moment in my life. I put down my silverware and rubbed my face and eyes and forehead and hair for what seemed like forever I'm sure.

There are not enough hours in the day to worry about you sufficiently, I told our daughter.

And that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown. For parents who have raised their children successfully and can now do nothing but sit back and watch it unfold in horror.

This is my life

The Patterson family apparently is incapable of just going into a restaurant and sitting down and eating like most normal families. This happened Wednesday night. We'd had a wind storm earlier in the week and so one of the doors to a local Subway broke because of the force of the storm.

Above is a sign that was up at Subway. It said "Due to Texas Wind, door has gotten broke. Please use north side door."

My wife, Karen, whom I love very much, is a fixer. She saw the grammar, which was lacking shall we say, and proceeded to ask one of the sandwich professionals for a Sharpie. She went to the sign on the door, scratched through the word gotten, changed "has" to "is," and inserted the word "this" before the word "door" With a final flourish of her Sharpie, she put an "n" at the end of the word "broke." The sign now reads "Due to the Texas Wind, this door is broken."

We then sat down and ate.

(P.S. Karen forgot to lowercase the word "Wind" on the sign, which in this particular use, should not be capitalized. But I'll never tell her. Or we'll have to go back and do some more fixin'.)

---

So, as we were discussing how it was impossible for us to just sit in a restaurant and eat without providing free English lessons to the help, we began talking about our middle child, now a senior. Apparently this sort of behavior runs in the family.

We recalled how, when she was in the fifth grade, our daughter was confronted with the math problem "5 minus 5." She didn't write down an answer. She left it blank, and told the teacher that the answer was "nothing" and since she was trying to save the ink in her pen, she would just leave it blank which, to her, was the same as nothing.

This is my life.

Halloween 06

Another Halloween gone. Another year passed. Another missed opportunity to dress up like a Hooters girl. And what with gravity beginning to take its toll, there aren't many years left for me to do that. Life can be so depressing.

Killer in a bathrobe

We live behind a field. And when it gets cold for the first time each fall, a family of mice will some years pick up stakes and move into our garage. Seeing that tiny little "Rent me for $25 a Day" flat bed with all that really tiny furniture is funny, but the laughter usually dies quickly. And then so do the mice.

Such was the case the other day. Needless to say, it was time for me to snap into action and ...

Honey, will you buy some of those sticky mouse traps? I think we have a famiy of them living in our Christmas tree box in the garage.

I said sure, I'd get to it.

The sticky traps are so much more humane than the little one that snap their little necks, she added.

Ah yes, I said, so much more humane to kill a mouse by watching it stroke out or starve to death or get eaten by an alley cat who has a sticky trap stuck to its nose.

So I set the traps out over the weekend, and Monday morning when Karen backed the car out and headed to work, I heard it. It was a little noise. A little scraping noise. And a litte squealing noise.

And I looked at the back of the garage near the big garage door and I see a little mouse with one of his back legs dragging along in the sticky trap, running, no limping, for his life. Scrape. Step. Squeal. Scrape. Step. squeal. Scrape. Step. Steal.

I walked up to the mouse and kinda shooed it out into the driveway hoping it would go away by itself because I really did not want to deal with it. But the mouse was trying furiously to head under a piece of furniture in the garage. It made me feel a little squeamish that I was going to have to pick it up and throw it in the trash as it wriggled around. So I found the broom and shooed it out. And when it found a nice resting place in the grass on the side of the driveway, I swiped at it a couple of time and rendered it without consciousness.

It was a sunny morning. About a half an hour before 8. I looked up after beating the mouse and there, standing across the street ... was my neighbor. She looked at me and said nothing, no doubt wondering why I was beating the ground with a broom. In a bath robe. And socks. There was nothing I could say. Humbling.

But at least the mouse was dead. When killing something is the first highlight of your day, chances are it will be not a normal day. I covered up quickly and went inside.

The year The Boy and I Failed Our Science Fair Project

by jimmy

OK, so help me figure this one out, will ya: Why is it that kids can never get their science fair projects done SOONER THAN THE NIGHT BEFORE THEY'RE DUE???

Ours is due Wednesday. And I do mean ours, because let's be honest here: I put the same amount of work into it as The Boy does. It really should be counted as a group project. If The Boy wins a pizza. I should win a pizza.

But I'm afraid there'll be no goodies for us this year. We got too late a start, and we also tried an experiment recommended to us by a college student. OUR college student. Our oldest is studying anatomy and physiology, so she is an instant expert on science experiments, right?

Uh, no ... her idea for a project: put iodine on cotton balls and then tape them all over your body. Next, sweat. According to College Girl, iodine will turn purple when sweat hits it.

So The Boy runs around the neighborhood with cotton balls taped all over him. There is a ball on the outside of one knee and on the inside of another. There's a cotton ball on the back of one of his hands and in the palm of another. There's one in the crook of one arm and on the outside of the elbow of the other. We put one on his forehead (which I'm convinced was the one that had people staring most), and there's another on the nape of his neck.

He went outside and started running and he looked like he was participating in some weird, well, science experiment.

He came home, we took off the cotton balls and we noticed that some were dark brown. Some were light brown. We woke up this morning: they were all the exact same shade of brown.

What happened to purple?

Mrs. P, though, said everything would be OK.

"Just because it doesn't turn out the way you think it will does not mean it's a bad science fair project. It just means your hypothesis couldn't be proven, and that's just as much of an experiment as if it were."

I begged to differ.

"In my humble opinion, you cannot base a successful science fair project based simply on something your big sister says will work a certain way."

And while we're on the topic of science fair projects, let me try this one out on you:

The Great Science Fair Board Science Fair Experiment
Hypothesis: If I go all around town looking for science fair project boards and every store is out of them in 2004, I will begin to look earlier for boards in 2005 and get the project done earlier so I won't have to go all around town when I really don't have the time.

Conclusion: Not only wrong, but stupid.

Materials: Me, The Boy, the car, and about a dozen clerks at stores around MIdland who probably think I am rude, but don't realize I make the same dumb mistake every year.

Result: Some things never change.

OK, so here we are, 24 hours away from getting our grade, and all we have is a title: "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff," which is really much too good a title to blow off the whole project -- it may win on title alone, I'm thinkin'. OK, so we have a title and one other thing: a sheet full of six brown cotton balls. After that, I'm not sure what to do.

We have one night to complete our experiment. Can anyone either please help me ... OR COME TO MY HOUSE AND BE THE DAD TONIGHT?

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