Blog Posts – Page 4 – Deep Dark Thoughts

You Have to Read the Small Print

Recently, my wife and I celebrated our 29^th wedding anniversary. Our daughters, EM1 and EM2, got us the same gift this year that they got for us last year. And the year before that.

Nothing.

They forgot it was our anniversary. They only remembered that night when they were asking what was for dinner. I told them that we were doing take-out from one of their mom’s favorite restaurants. They didn’t like the idea so began to complain that we should go somewhere else. I told them that it was our anniversary and mom’s decision was final.

EM2 responded, “It’s your anniversary? How long have you been married?”

I would expect this reaction from someone I met on the street during a random conversation. Not from a child who has been living in my house for 21 years.

My children are not terribly observant, and the example doesn’t end there. About four days later, EM1 volunteered to run out to the mailbox to grab the daily mail. This is something that she does about two or three times each year, and it usually corresponds to something expensive that she ordered for herself that is arriving that day.

She came back from the mailbox with a large smile on her face and announced to the entire household: “Hey, mom. Dad. I got you an anniversary present.”

My first thought was that I had misjudged my daughter all these years and that I should really be more willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. My second thought was, nope. I know this kid too well. Just wait for the other shoe to drop.

EM1 held up a flyer that had arrived in the mail and told us that there was a restaurant in town that was offering a free dinner for one person and a guest. She showed me the cover and asked, “You like this place, don’t you?”

I told her I did. My wife and I have eaten at this place several times and very much enjoy their food. I then told her that I had no interest in going.

“Well, maybe I’ll go then,” she told me. “And I’ll take EM2 as my guest.”

“You don’t need retirement insurance,” I said. “You can’t retire for another 40 years. You don’t even have a job to retire from, yet.”

She gave me a look like a raccoon rummaging through the garbage that has just been pinned in a flashlight beam. “What do you mean?”

EM1 had clearly not read the inside of the pamphlet before announcing the free meal. I told her to take a closer look. She did. When she still did not seem to understand the significance of the pamphlet, I explained that it was an insurance scam. Someone was trying to get people to sit down and listen to a three-hour lecture on retirement planning by bribing them with a free meal.

It wasn’t even a good meal. The cover of the pamphlet showed a lobster tail and a steak as the main course, but when you read the small print, it only offered chicken or salmon as your meal options.

I had fallen for one of these ploys several years ago while my wife and I were at a casino in Las Vegas. They were offering a “One hour demonstration” that promoted some pans and cooking utensils. In exchange for listening, they would give us each ten dollars credit for gambling in the casino. After almost three hours of watching some dude in a chef’s hat make scrambled eggs with a hacksaw to prove how durable their pans were, we began wondering if they were ever going to stop. The only people who had been allowed to leave up to that point, were three people who had already agreed to buy thousands of dollars worth of cooking crap.

As hour four began with no sign of an ending in sight, we gave up and left. We didn’t even get our twenty dollars for our trouble. We also didn’t get fed, despite the demonstration being all about cooking.

Never again. Fool me once, shame on you.

“Are you still going for the free meal?” I asked EM1.

“No, I guess not,” she admitted.

“Do you have another anniversary present for us, since this one didn’t work out?”

“No.”

She looked one more time at the flyer. Her eyes lit up for a moment, and she said, “What if I gave you a new face mask?”

“Why?” I asked. “Are they offering a free face mask along with the free dinner?”

When EM1 didn’t answer my question, I took the pamphlet from her and glanced at the back of the add.

Yup. I know that kid too well.

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The Danger of Dishes

Danger lurks behind every corner in our lives. We might be peacefully going about our business one moment, then the next we become the victim of fate, circumstance, or simple bad luck. Having worked in law enforcement for 25 years, I would say I have witnessed more than my fair share of random accidents and bad luck.

One event in particular comes to mind. It occurred about twenty years ago while I was working as a patrol officer in the city of Elk Grove. I was cruising around my beat in the late afternoon hours, watching traffic and waiting for my next call for service. It had been a rather slow day (which is always nice) and I was only an hour or so away from going home if things stayed that way.

I observed a car speeding and driving a bit erratically. I accelerated and tried to catch up to it. Before I got close, I saw the vehicle run through a red light. Now I had a definite hazard on the road, and I needed to react to it. I activated my lights and siren and went after the car.

I caught up to the vehicle a few miles later and the driver pulled over as soon as she saw my lights behind her. I used my radio to notify dispatch that I was on a traffic stop, then got out of my car to contact the driver.

The driver rolled down her window as I approached. I noticed her reach across the steering wheel with her left hand to turn off the ignition. I felt that was odd but didn’t really give it too much thought. As I stood next to her open car window, I noticed the smell of alcohol on her breath. That explained the erratic driving, I figured.

I explained why I had stopped her, then asked if she had been drinking that day.

She said, “I’ve had a couple glasses of wine. I probably shouldn’t be driving, but I needed to get to the hospital.”

Okay. She admitted she had been drinking, and even said she probably shouldn’t be driving. In my head, I had already begun to write my report. I was also lamenting the fact that I most likely would not be getting off work on time. Drunk driving investigations typically take a few hours.

Then I paused. The last part of her statement finally sunk in. “I needed to get to the hospital.”

I mentally shifted gears and asked, “Why are you trying to get to the hospital?”

“Oh, I was washing dishes at home. I broke a plate and cut my hand.”

She held up her right hand so I could see it. At first, I thought she was wearing a red glove with something white in the palm. It was not until I realized that I was looking at exposed tendon and bone in the palm of her hand that I understood the “glove” was actually a disturbingly large amount of blood that was no longer inside of her body where it rightfully should have been.

I guessed that it was going to be a coin toss as to which one of us passed out first: her because of blood loss, or me because of the shock of seeing how much damage you can do to the human body with just a broken dish.

I asked her why she hadn’t called for an ambulance. She told me she didn’t think it was an emergency and she figured she could get herself to the hospital faster. She said initially, she didn’t think the cut was that bad.

She was wrong.

It was bad.

I requested that the fire department send immediate medical assistance, then rummaged through the trunk of my patrol car for a medical kit. I grabbed a ball of medical gauze and placed it over the woman’s cut and told her to squeeze it in her hand. I didn’t bother to wrap her hand because I knew as soon as the fire department showed up they would just cut the bandage off so they could see how badly she was injured.

I asked her if she had someone she could call that would come and pick up her car. She narrowed her eyes and stared at me like a grade schoolteacher debating if she should hold back a particularly slow student for an extra year. Then she said, “If I had someone who could drive my car, don’t you think they would already be driving?”

Good point. Apparently, the intoxicated lady with massive blood loss was still thinking more clearly than I was. I told her that I would move her car to a nearby parking lot (we were half a block away from a Target store and I figured her car would be fine in the lot for a day or so), then I would bring her car key to her at the hospital. She agreed.

The fire department showed up and transported her to the hospital. As I promised, I moved her car and returned her car key.

In the end, everything worked out, but I still think of that incident every now and then.

Particularly when I have had a few drinks and my wife asks me to do the dishes. I remind her of this story and tell her that it is probably a bad idea. There are simply too many things that could go wrong, and I don’t want her to have to drive me to the hospital. I wouldn’t want to ruin her whole evening.

She accuses me of being lazy and trying to find an excuse not to do dishes.

She may be right. But with all the terrible accidents that happen every day, I think it is better to be safe than sorry.

I think that is what makes me such a good husband.

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At Least It’s Starting to Get Predictable

There is no such thing as simple in my life anymore. If I think a task is going to take a few minutes to complete, it will invariably take several hours. If I expect it to be done in a day, there is a very real risk it will never be accomplished at all. Don’t ask me to run a quick errand, or do you an easy favor, because I don’t feel like spending the next two weeks of my life trying to finish a project that normal people do without breaking a sweat.

Think I’m exaggerating? You clearly have not been reading Deep Dark Thoughts for very long.

I have told this story so often, it is starting to feel like a journal entry. “Dear diary, Guess what? It happened again.”

This time it started, as it usually does, with a task I have done a hundred times before. I recently hired a contractor to build a new garage on my property large enough for me to park the family trailer inside. The contractor said that the first thing he needed to do was bring in a guy (contractors always seem to have “a guy”) with a bulldozer to level the ground and compact the dirt so he could put in a concrete pad.

Before he could bring in his guy and level the ground, he told me I needed to mow the weeds down in the field they were working in. No problem, I said, not realizing that a new chain reaction of suck was about to be triggered. I said I would mow the field in the next day or two, and he could start at the end of the week.

I’m sure you can already guess what happened next. I’ve told this story before. It’s not a new one.

I got on my tractor the next day, put the key in the ignition, and realized that I was sitting on top of a dead tractor. My $15,000 farm vehicle had become a big blue paperweight. Again.

I immediately got on my phone and tried to call the mechanic I use to work on the tractor. He has taken care of the thing since I bought it and does a really good job. He did not answer his phone. There was also no room in his voice mail box. I sent him a text and hoped to hear from him in the next few hours.

He did not call back. I called again the next day. And the next. Same result. The following day, I called his mother. (Yes, I know his mother. Does that make it weird?) She also did not pick up her phone and there was no room on her voice mail box.

It was time to start looking for someone else that can work on the tractor. I found a local listing for a tractor repair guy that will come out to my property, which is a good thing since the tractor is going nowhere, and I don’t have a trailer to tow it to a shop. Unfortunately, the mechanic said he could not come out for three weeks.

Crap. I still need the field mowed. A friend referred me to someone that lives nearby who will bring his tractor and mower over to knock down the weeds in my field for a reasonable rate. I gave him a call. Miracle of miracle, he answered the phone on my first attempt and agreed to come over the following day.

Problem solved, right? You might think that, but we’re not done, yet.

The next day, a man showed up in my driveway with a tractor and mower attachment. I showed him where I wanted him to mow (although the three-foot tall weeds in a big open field make it pretty obvious where he is supposed to mow) and sent him off to work.

About an hour later, I was doing some weeding in my garden and watching a stranger drive his tractor in circles through my fields. I was feeling pretty good and figured I had a decent handle on things. I made the classic mistake of thinking nothing could go wrong at this point.

I heard a loud “pop!” and a geyser of water shot up into the air in front of the tractor.

I must admit, when I saw the water, my first thought was, “Wow. That guy’s tractor has a water feature? That’s awesome. I wish my tractor could do that.”

It was about that time that I realized the water was not coming from the tractor, but rather from a ruptured water pipe. I ran to the well and shut off the pump. (Much to the chagrin of EM1 and EM2 who were in the house trying to do laundry. Oh well. That’s life on a farm.)

I rummaged through my garage and found a pipe cutter, PVC cement, and a PVC cap that would fit the broken pipe. This particular disaster has happened so many times in the past few years, I already have all the spare parts lying around that I need to deal with it.

You hear that, you fickle gods of fate? You’re getting predictable. You keep repeating the same garbage and it’s starting to get boring.

So, where am I now? Well, the field is finally mowed but the contractor who knows a guy with a bulldozer isn’t answering his phone, so the field hasn’t been leveled yet. The busted pipe is capped, but still needs to be repaired. That will be a job for later. My tractor isn’t working and I’m waiting for the mechanic to come out and look at it.

And to add insult to injury, a new crop of weeds is popping up in my garden.

One step forward, three steps back.

Just like always.

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A Word to the Wise

My youngest child, EM2, recently turned 21 years old. In the U.S. she is now a legal adult in every way that matters. As she herself was quick to remind me, she can now legally drink alcohol. She pointed this fact out to me as she dug through my liquor cabinet, popping open every bottle inside and sampling the contents of each one. She even took the gin and tonic I had been drinking out of my hand to try it.

“That’s awful. It tastes really bitter,” she said. Then she took another sip. “Nope, still awful.” And back in for a third gulp before returning the now half empty glass to me. “I don’t know how you can drink those,” she told me while pouring herself a shot of vodka.

But today’s blog isn’t about my daughter’s new, off-the-rails drinking habits. Rather, I wanted to discuss the phenomenon in our country of picking a random age and then “declaring” that a person is a fully functioning adult. It isn’t even a consistent standard. At 18 years old, we can go fight in a war and vote for president. But we can’t own a handgun or drink until we are 21. (I find that an odd pairing, by the way. I don’t want to get into a gun control conversation, but I do find it interesting that this country says you can start drinking alcohol and buy a gun on the same day. Seems there should be some kind of distancing between those two.)

Since both my kids are now considered adults, in addition to making me feel exceptionally old, it has made me begin to question the way I saw myself when I was that age. I considered myself pretty grown up, but was I really? When I was the same age as EM2, I voted for a president because I saw him playing the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. I figured what more do I need to know to pick the leader of the free world other than his eighth-grade musical training. I clearly wasn’t alone in that thinking.

I like to think that the younger adults in the world these days are slightly better informed than I was. But I doubt it. On November first, last year, two days before the presidential election, I asked my oldest, EM1 if she knew who she was voting for. She told me, “I’m not sure. Who’s running again?”

Yeah. This world is in good hands.

I also recall I had some very questionable decision-making skills outside of the political arena. I remember throwing a small party in my dorm room at college. The only person at the party of legal drinking age was the guy who brought all the beer. We were all risking getting thrown out of school because of that party, and we were all paying quite a bit of money to be there (or at least our parents were). A college education was expensive, even back when I went in the 1700’s.

On a side note, I made another very bad choice during that party as I recall. I hung my raincoat on a wall hook that was too close to the garbage can. Why is that a bad decision, you ask? Well, I didn’t think it was, until the next morning when I found that my roommate had vomited into the pocket of my raincoat because he couldn’t quite make it to the garbage can in time.

Live and learn, I guess.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that maybe age shouldn’t be the sole determiner of adulthood. As they say, you’re only young once, but you can be immature forever. I am a good example of that. We should probably have some kind of test that decides if a person is ready to become an adult. Ancient cultures required their children to go out and kill a large animal or attempt some potentially lethal act of bravery to prove themselves. Maybe we should still be doing something like that. We don’t have to make our kids go out and hunt a lion or anything, but perhaps we could withhold the title “adult” until they at least figure out how to get a job and pay some of their own expenses. That might be nice.

Are you listening, EM1? EM2?

Or if we have to pick an age to be an adult, why don’t we make it 30? Most of the people reading this blog who are over 30 probably agree with me. Those that are under 30 are most likely trying to figure out my address so they can firebomb my house. Which just proves my point.

Violence only proves how immature you are. So nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.

I don’t have all the answers. In fact, I actually have none of the answers. I can only ask the questions. Are we expecting our children to become adults before they’re ready? Are we expecting behaviors from them simply because of their chronological age rather than their psychological and mental capabilities? Should that be changed, or is it good enough?

Should there be a written test? Or a physical benchmark that determines adulthood? It doesn’t even have to be anything dramatic. It can be something simple, like just moving out of their parents’ house.

Are you listening, EM1? EM2?

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Not So Handy Man

I have lived in my current home for ten years. It is the first place I have ever lived that did not have a backyard the size of a postage stamp. Suddenly owning five acres of land to care for, you can imagine that the learning curve is pretty steep. I have destroyed a lot of stuff while learning how to fix that very same stuff.

Over the years, I think I have gotten better at taking care of problems on my own, but every now and then something stupid comes along that reminds me that I still have a lot to learn.

Last week was an example of that something stupid.

I planted a few new fruit trees on the property over the last few weeks and added some drip lines to make sure everything was getting enough water to survive the hot Sacramento summer. As the weather has recently warmed up and the rains have stopped, I turned on the watering timers, activating the drip lines.

Things began dying. I wasn’t sure exactly why at first, but a quick exploration of the yard showed me that most of my driplines were dry. The timers were turning on, but no water was reaching the plants, including my new fruit trees.

I started hand watering the trees with a bucket and a hose while I tried to figure out what the problem was.

Timers were working. Check.

Valves seemed to be opening. Check.

Water flowing? Nope.

I’d done everything I knew how to do, which admittedly was not much. It was time to hire a professional. I was hesitant to call another plumber after the debacle I had gone through in January of this year. A pipe broke under my driveway and it took several weeks, three plumbers, and $2000 dollars to repair. If you don’t recall that particular episode in my life, you can catch up on it HERE.

I still have a small case of PTSD over the incident. I occasionally wake up my wife in the middle of the night yelling, “It’s still leaking! It won’t stop! Why won’t it stop?”

I briefly wondered if, after fixing the broken pipe under my driveway, had they rebroken it? Or perhaps put something together wrong so the water was flowing somewhere else? Was my neighbor getting free water to fill his pool at my expense?

Regardless of the reason, it was beyond my ability to correct. I finally broke down and called a landscaper that specialized in sprinkler repair. I figured, it he can’t fix the problem, maybe he can tap into my existing pipes and set up a new sprinkler valve and timer. It would probably be expensive, but it was better than losing $300 worth of new fruit trees. Or at least better than an entire summer of lugging buckets of water around the property watering those same damn trees.

The repair guy turned up the next morning. He started with the usual:

“Hi. What seems to be the problem?”

I told him the drip lines don’t work and I think there might be something wrong with the valve. I was pretty sure the valve was fine, but I guess I was still hoping I didn’t need an entirely new drip system.

He checked the valve, looked at me, and said, “Nope. Valve is fine.”

With a sigh, I pointed toward a row of trees beside our driveway and told him, “My trees are dying. There’s no water going over there.” I felt like a child admitting I didn’t know how to tie my own shoes.

“You might have a broken pipe,” he said.

I told him about the broken pipe in January, and that the plumber had promised that everything was now fixed.

The sprinkler guy asked, “When they finished and blew out the pipes, everything was working then?”

When they finished and did the who and the what now?

“They didn’t check,” I admitted.

Sprinkler guy gave me a look that suggested he might now also be thinking I didn’t know how to tie my own shoes.

“So, they didn’t blow out the pipes when they were done?”

“I could answer that question,” I said carefully, “If I knew what you meant by ‘blow out the pipes.’”

Rather than explain what he meant, Sprinkler guy simply unhooked the drip line connector from the main hose bib. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry. Neither do I. I’m just repeating the words he used because it sounds better than saying he unscrewed the blue twisty thing from the pipe with the handle on it.

He next turned on the water from the main valve.

Chunks of mud and a torrent of brown water came pouring out of the hose bib. When the water finally cleared up, he turned it off and reattached the drip line.

“They didn’t blow out the lines,” he said.

“Yes. Yes, I see,” I told him. Then I held out my left foot and said, “Can you tie this one, too?”

He didn’t understand the joke, but that was okay. He seemed very happy when I handed him a check for $100 for the 30 seconds of actual work he had done.

The good news is my trees are getting watered again and they will (probably) survive the summer. I even learned something new from Sprinkler guy. I now know that “blow out the lines” means run water through the pipes to flush out the dirt.

The bad news is I clearly still have a lot to learn about taking care of a large piece of property.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to go buy some new shoes that use Velcro straps instead of laces.

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Only in Hillsborough

How do you define essential? Is it the job title you hold, or does it depend on the work you are actually doing?

Clearly, as a semi-retired author, my contribution to society today is somewhat questionable. I write short stories and novels that nobody reads, I blog about all the petty little things that irritate me during the week, and occasionally, I come up with a clever joke about genitalia that I post on social media. Hardly life-saving stuff.

But what about years ago? In the 1990’s, I was a police officer working for the Hillsborough Police Department. Was I essential then? There are those that would argue, no. Hillsborough is a quiet little residential town of about 11,000 people spread out over six square miles. There are no businesses of any kind allowed inside the city limits, which means everyone in Hillsborough is there because they live there. There are no commuters and no outside people coming into the city to shop or browse.

It is the ultimate bedroom community. As such, other than neighborhood squabbles and domestic issues, there is almost no reported crime in the city. So, are police essential workers?

I have heard City Counsel members say that the only crime in the city of Hillsborough is every two weeks when the cops cash their paychecks. I’d say that’s at least one vote that we aren’t essential.

So, what were my job responsibilities? What did I do? Um… I guess that depended on what day you asked me. Sometimes I did traffic enforcement. I did neighborhood patrols and responded to burglar alarms. Those sound necessary, right?

I also dragged garbage cans in from the curb, picked up mail and stray newspapers that accumulated in front of homes when the families were on vacation, reported broken sprinklers and streetlights to city maintenance workers, and even moved cars from the street into driveways at the request of homeowners.

Pretty dangerous stuff. Makes the heart pound a little faster and the adrenaline flow, doesn’t it?

My favorite “essential” duty, while I was working for HPD, was the time a resident flew to Europe for vacation. While he was overseas, he remembered that he had left his pool pump running in the back yard and he called the Hillsborough Police. The dispatcher called me on my radio to advise me of the call for service.

This is back in the 90’s remember, so we did not have computers or cellphones in the cars. All we had was the radio, and these radios were not private channels. They were frequently monitored by other police agencies, ham radio operators, any kid with a police-band receiver, and even some news reporters.

The dispatcher advised me to respond to the homeowner’s residence and turn off the pool pump. She said, “Sam-1 is aware of the call and has approved it,” which means the sergeant working that day knew about the request and had approved police resources to deal with the issue.

Police resources being, of course, me.

Next, the dispatcher told me when I arrived at the house, she had further instructions for me. I got to the house, advised on my arrival, then the dispatcher proceeded for the next five minutes to explain where the pool pump was located, how to find the shut off switch, and the proper way to turn it off so as not to damage it. I had to ask her to repeat several of the directions since it took me three attempts simply to locate the “Off” switch. By the time I figured out how to get everything shut off and put away, I felt like I had successfully defused a bomb.

I turned off the pump and left the house. I thought that was the end of it, but I was wrong. Apparently, a local news columnist by the name of Herb Caen heard about my daring rescue of a pool pump. Either he, or one of his staff, had overheard our radio traffic and he decided that my exploits would make a wonderful addition to his newspaper column.

The headline the following day read: ONLY IN HILLSBOROUGH.

I have very mixed feelings about this event, even today. On one hand, he was making fun of me and my department. It was quite hurtful. Funny, yes, but hurtful. He wrote about how little real work the cops in our town did, and he even suggested that we should turn in our police batons and replace them with sprinkler keys.

Not very nice.

On the other hand, it was the only time that doing my job got my name in the newspaper. I still have the article in my scrapbook.

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