Deep Dark Thoughts – Page 18 – Deep Dark Thoughts

Blowing Hot Air

My air conditioner stopped working. One day, it was humming along just fine, and then the next, I get nothing but hot air blowing out of the vent. Not a great outcome when it’s over a hundred degrees outside and you were hoping for something better than the mid 90’s on the inside.

Fortunately (maniacal laughter in the background), a few years ago I purchased one of those home maintenance warranties for the appliances in my house. The plan includes air conditioners, so I immediately got online and put in a service request for a repair. I received an email thirty seconds later advising that my credit card had been charged $100 and my service request was being reviewed to be sure it fit within the restrictions of my coverage.

That’s right. They were reviewing to make sure they had to fix my air conditioner, but in the meantime they were happy to take my money. I wish I could do stuff like that. It would be nice to work at a store and tell someone, “I will take your money right now, and then I will review our policies to see if I actually have to give you anything in return.

Anyway, apparently the contract said they did have to fix my A/C after all. They sent me another email stating they had sent my request to a local contractor. I would hear from the company within the next twenty-four hours.

I did not hear from anybody within the next twenty-four hours.

I rechecked my email and found some contact information for the contractor and decided I should reach out to them. The email address for the company was just someone’s first name at a personal gmail account. Not exactly the pinnacle of professional presentation. But I was stuck. One of the downsides to a home warranty plan is you don’t get to pick who they send to do the work.

I called the phone number listed and was immediately routed to a voice mailbox with no name on it. I was starting to feel a little insecure about this “contractor” they had chosen for me.

I left a message and asked for the unknown recipient to call me back as soon as possible.

Forty-eight hours later I was still waiting.

I called the number again and this time someone answered the phone. The guy that answered said, “Yeah?”

Good lord. I knew I wasn’t going to be dealing with a Fortune 500 company, but was this really the best my homeowner’s insurance could do? I told the guy my name and what my problem was. First, he asked if anyone had already come out and looked at the A/C unit. My first impulse was to tell him, “I’ve tried hundreds of other places, but I finally realized the only person capable of fixing my A/C is someone with a gmail account who doesn’t know how to set up their voicemail properly. You’re my only hope Obi Wan.” I resisted that urge to be a dick and just said, “no.”

He told me he was really busy and couldn’t come out before next week. I replied that would be fine (despite the weather reports that we would be having 100+ degree heat for most of the coming few days), and he made an appointment to come to the house the following Wednesday.

At the time he made the appointment, he did not ask me for my address or phone number. Imagine my surprise when, a week later, he actually showed up on the day he said he would. It was a small miracle, but it was the only good news I was going to get that day.

When the repair guy opened up my A/C unit, he found several dead frogs that had crawled in, gotten electrocuted, and shorted out the system. Yes, you can read that sentence as many times as you like, it isn’t going to change. I said, “frogs.” The repair guy (let’s just call him “Bad News #1” from now on) looked at me and said:

“I don’t think frogs are covered by your insurance.”

“How do we find out?” I asked.

“You have to call them and ask.”

I called my insurance company and talked to … well, let’s call her “Bad News #2.” I explained the situation and, although I never thought these words would ever come out of my mouth, I asked “Are frogs covered by my insurance?”

BN#2 said she needed to put in a repair request and ask. I would hear back within a couple days. As soon as I passed the word along to BN#1, he was in his truck and driving away. Such a helpful fellow.

I still didn’t have air conditioning.

The very next day, my insurance company called to inform me that they would not cover the repair expenses. Frogs were not an insured item.

“What if the A/C had been hit by lightning?” I asked.

“We would absolutely cover that,” the woman (BN#3?) told me. “That would be considered under the ‘act of God’ part of your contract.”

I hung up in shock. How much more ‘act of God’ do you get than an actual, historical biblical plague of frogs? But nope. Didn’t count. I was going to have to pay for a new air conditioner out of my own pocket. The insurance company had bailed on me.

And they refused to return my initial deposit.

This whole ordeal is why nobody likes insurance companies.

Let this be a lesson to anyone reading this blog. If you ever sign up for a homeowner’s insurance plan, check the fine print.

You might be covered for “Acts of God,” but make sure you’re also covered for acts of frog.

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What a Difference a Year Makes

My youngest child packed up all of her things a couple weeks ago and moved back into her dorm room at college for another year of higher education. Last year, before she started her freshman year, the process of packing took four weeks and multiple trips to the store to buy school supplies, books, new clothes, food, printer ink, etc. etc. When I loaded everything into the back of my truck it stacked up above the height of the cab and I had to tie it all down with several heavy-duty cargo straps so it wouldn’t topple off into the roadway as we drove.

This year, it only took EM2 a few hours to cram everything she owned into an assortment of suitcases, plastic bins and boxes then load it all into the back of my wife’s car. My wife and I kept asking her if she had everything she needed and she repeatedly shrugged and told us, “I’m fine.”

I suppose that’s a good sign. It means that during her first year at school, she figured out what stuff she actually needed to get by and what was just junk and clutter. I am a bit concerned that most of the things she opted not to take with her this year were school supplies, but she’s an adult (sort of) and I just have to trust her.

Another big change from last year was the moving in process. In her freshman year, my wife and I helped EM2 lug all her crap to her dorm room, then sat around as she made her bed and arranged her stuff. We tried to leave a few times, but she kept insisting that she needed us to stay a little longer and help her organize the room. When everything was put away at last, we tried again to say goodbye, but EM2 asked us to take her out to dinner before leaving. She said she was hungry, and we were terrible parents if we didn’t feed her.

Guilt is a powerful motivator. So, we fed her.

After dinner, it still took about an hour before my daughter let us leave. I could tell she was already a little lonely and worried since she had never been away from home on her own before. My wife and I reassured her as best we could, then drove home feeling awful because we had left our baby behind to face the cold hard world all by herself.

This year, after helping her carry her belongings into her new dorm, EM2 shoved us outside and closed the door in our faces. I tried to say goodbye, but all I heard was a muffled “whatever,” from the other side of the closed door.

Again, I guess I should be happy. My daughter is becoming more confident and self-reliant. She doesn’t need her parents as much as she once did. If it wasn’t for the fact she still needs our money, EM2 would probably already have kicked us to the curb. She has her friends and a place to live. What does she need us for?

Becoming irrelevant in your child’s life is part of being a parent. It’s the natural way of things. I did it to my parents, and now EM2 is learning to exist without needing me and her mom. I don’t really like it, but the alternative is having a child that plans on living with you and letting you take care of them forever.

Like EM2’s older sister, who dropped out of college and moved back home with us.

But I don’t want to talk about that particular fiasco at the moment. We can pick at that scab another day.

In just one year’s time, EM2 has gone from being the helpless waif I abandoned at college with tears in her eyes and a note pinned to her shirt that said, “Somebody please take care of me,” to the independent, young lady that boldly slammed the door in my face.

I couldn’t be more proud of her, although I do admit to having a few concerns. If she has made this much progress in only twelve months, what will she be like a year from now? How will she treat her mother and father after another year of living on her own and making her own decisions?

I have this image in my mind of going to her apartment and knocking on the door. When she answers, she sprays me with pepper spray then pushes me down a flight of stairs. Afterward, she says, “Oh, sorry, dad. I didn’t recognize you.”

Okay, maybe that’s taking it a bit far. She isn’t going to forget what I look like in only a year. What is more likely to happen after she pepper sprays me and pushes me down the stairs is that she says, “Don’t forget my tuition payment is due next month.”

I will wave at her and try to say something back, but she will already have closed the door.

That’s my girl.

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When Nature Attacks – The Sequel

Once a week, every week, my entire extended family gets together for an evening to have dinner and catch up on each other’s lives. It’s been going on for years and there is no sign of the practice slowing down in the foreseeable future. This is not the topic of today’s blog; it is merely the setting.

Recently, we were all gathered for the “Family Night Dinner,” at one of my wife’s cousin’s homes. My daughters, EM1 and EM2, had driven there separately so they had their own car. At the end of the meal, we all said our goodbyes and left to drive home. EM1 and EM2 arrived at the house a few minutes before my wife and I did.

EM1 was standing outside her car, looking underneath the vehicle and making several utterances of distress. EM2 saw us pull into the driveway and gleefully announced:

“EM1 ran over a skunk!”

It was about this time that the smell reached me. Yup. She had indeed run over a skunk, and its farewell calling card was all around us.

“It wasn’t my fault!” my oldest told me. “It ran out in front of me and I didn’t have time to stop. I think it did it on purpose.”

My first thought was that skunks don’t actually “run.” It’s more like an awkward waddle. My second thought was that most wild animals aren’t generally suicidal. I mean, I don’t know what this skunk’s family life was like, or if it had suffered a recent tragedy, but I still don’t think it intended a quick jaunt into the roadway to be the last thing it ever did on this planet.

I didn’t say those things to EM1, however. What I told her was to leave her car outside the garage and go through a car wash in the morning.

I thought that would be the end of the skunk adventures for the evening, but I was wrong.

We went into the house and my wife let the dog into the backyard to pee before we went to bed. Less than five minutes later, she tells me, “I think the dog got sprayed by a skunk.” I looked outside and, sure enough, our dog was rubbing her face in the grass and whimpering like a mugger that just got pepper sprayed.

I opened the door to check on her and that smell hit me again. Worse this time since it wasn’t just a little bit on the undercarriage of a car. This time it was a full load, released all over the dog.

My wife asked what we should do. I told her, “Whatever you do, don’t let her into the house.”

We had made that mistake once before. It took months for the smell to leave the living room. No amount of air freshener or carpet cleaner could cover it up, either. Instead of hiding the odor, it just made it more nauseating. Our house smelled like a candle shop that catered to potheads.

As I watched the dog run around the yard, pushing its face through the dirt and weeds of our back lawn, I couldn’t help wondering if this was more than just a coincidence. It’s possible it was sheer dumb luck that the dog got sprayed by a skunk the same night that my daughter killed one with her car. But it doesn’t seem likely.

I’m not normally a conspiracy theory kind of guy, but the timing just seemed a little too convenient. I think what actually happened was there was a skunk wandering around our neighborhood when my daughter pulled into the driveway. I think it sniffed the air as she drove by and thought, “It smells like Rupert got killed. I have to go to this house immediately and avenge my fallen brother.”

I believe there may be a vast network of skunk hit squads, roaming the country and wreaking havoc on anyone who has ever harmed one of their own. I think that’s why the roadway stinks for so long after a skunk gets hit by a car. It’s a homing beacon calling out to the hit squads; telling them that they have another job to do.

I know I sound crazy, but so did Galileo when he said that he believed the Earth circled the sun, not the other way around. So, don’t discount the idea just yet. Keep an open mind and talk to your friends about it. Maybe they saw something that they were too uncomfortable to talk about before. Maybe we just need to circulate the idea for a while before the real truth can come out.

Only time will tell which theory is correct: complete coincidence, or bands of roving skunk hit squads?

Could go either way.

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When Nature Attacks

Living out in the country, I have discovered that there is a large, diverse population of animal life right outside my front door. Hundreds of creatures that run, fly, swim and crawl can be found within a few paces of my house. What I have discovered to be truly remarkable isn’t just how varied the fauna around me is, it’s how many of these things absolutely terrify me.

While I am not saying that the animals roaming the neighborhood want to kill me, I do have the distinct impression that none of them would miss me terribly if I suddenly disappeared. And it’s not just the coyotes, snakes, and other predators I’m referring to.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

A couple weeks ago, I was outside doing some work on my camping trailer. I was cleaning the interior and restocking some supplies for my next vacation trip. While I was inside the trailer, I heard something land on the roof. My first thought was that a pinecone or small tree branch had fallen and hit the trailer, but the noise didn’t stop after the first bang. Whatever was on the roof continued to scrabble around for almost a minute.

With the hair on the back of my neck standing up, I carefully opened the trailer door and peered outside. As I looked up, I saw a crow perched on the edge of the camper staring down at me. My first reaction was to slam the door so it wouldn’t fly into the trailer with me. After a few minutes alone in the trailer with my heart racing in my chest, I convinced myself that the bird was as frightened by me as I was of it and it must have surely flown away by now.

I opened the door again.

The crow was now directly over the doorway and staring straight down at the top of my head. In a panic, I waved a hand at it trying to shoo it away. The damn bird just opened its mouth and screamed at me. I closed the door again to regroup.

It was surreal. I felt like I had slipped into an Alfred Hitchcock movie. You know, the one with all the birds attacking people. I don’t remember what it’s called.

I finally threw open the trailer door and ran for the garage. After reaching shelter, I picked up the first weapon I could find, which turned out to be a four-foot long pooper scooper. I hefted it in my hand and headed back to do battle. The crow did not move until I was two feet away and swinging the metal poop-scoop like a baseball player trying to hit a fastball after coming off of a three-day bender. When the crow finally flew off, it still did not appear afraid of me. It just gave me a look like, “WTF is wrong with that guy?” and sailed away to perch on a nearby telephone wire.

To this day I am convinced that if I hadn’t chased him off, he would have waited for nightfall then broken into the house to murder me and my whole family.

Which sort of makes me a hero.

You’re welcome, family.

My second nearly lethal brush with nature involved the hairy monstrosity in the picture above. I was in my garage minding my own business when that spider from Hell rushed at me from underneath the lawnmower.

I leapt out of the way and she continued to run out onto the driveway. I think she was suitably impressed by my display of athleticism and had last-minute, second thoughts about attacking. Either that, or my screaming simply hurt her ears. (Do spiders have ears?)

I hate spiders. Especially the ones that are big enough to throw a saddle on and ride around the yard. They have no business living in my garage when there is plenty of space outside for them to frolic around. There are also lots of cats and dogs in the nearby neighborhood for them to eat.

Spiders may be the creepiest things that walk on this planet, and there are probably millions of them in my back yard.

On a side note, do you think spiders ever creep themselves out with how ugly they are? Has there ever been a mother spider wandering around with hundreds of baby spiders on her back that suddenly thought, “Holy shit! Where did all these damn spiders come from?! Oh right. They’re my kids.”

Yeah, probably not.

Anyway, man-eating birds and gigantic spiders are just two of the life-threatening beasties that live around me. There are many more out there, each more ferocious than the last. I have to remain ever vigilant if I want to survive, because every one of them is just waiting for an opportunity to take me down.

Okay, not every one of them.

The frogs are cool.

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A Trip to the Vet

Recently, my wife told me she needed my help taking the dog and one of our cats to the Vet. I told her I would be happy to check if the kids were available to go with her. Unfortunately for me, she had already asked the girls before she came to me, and they were busy. It seems she wanted me to go with her about as much as I wanted to go.

That is to say, not all that much.

Despite the fact that neither of us really wanted me to help with this project, I ended up spending a Wednesday morning wrangling unhappy animals instead of the marathon couch sitting event I had previously planned. That TV doesn’t just watch itself, you know.

My wife asked me to start by grabbing the cat and putting it in the carrying case. Knowing that the cat would run away the second it saw the carrier, I ended up waiting until she had curled up on the bed in the back bedroom before bringing the case in from the garage. I don’t know if she is psychic or if I’m just really unlucky, but the moment I walked into the house with the carrier, the cat wandered out into the kitchen and spotted me.

I tried to hide the carrying case behind my back, but it was way too late. The cat disappeared, leaving behind a cat-shaped cloud of hair floating in the kitchen.

I spent the next fifteen minutes looking in all her usual hiding spots before I located her under my bed. It took an additional five minutes before I could get enough of a handhold on her to drag her back out into the daylight.

Bleeding from numerous puncture wounds, I brought her back to the kitchen to stick her in the carrying case. Her head went into the case easily, but the rest of her suddenly melted into a pudding that was too wide to shove through the opening. It was like I was trying to push toothpaste back into its tube, only the toothpaste kept wriggling and trying to squirt back out.

When I finally got her in the case, it was time to gather up the dog. Getting the dog to go to the vet is a much easier process than corralling the cat. All I need to do is pick up the car keys and jingle them in my hand and the dog is already sitting in the backseat, drooling on the headrest, and wondering why it’s taking me so long to start the engine.

Which brings us to the next fiasco in this trip to the vet saga: starting the car.

After packing the animals into the car, my wife sat down behind the wheel, put the key in the ignition, and…

Nothing.

The battery was completely dead. I don’t know how the cat managed it, but she must have snuck out to the garage while I was searching for her and murdered the car battery. I can’t prove it was her, but the circumstantial evidence is very compelling.

We were forced to borrow my daughter’s car since we didn’t have time to get a new battery before the animals were due at the vet clinic. As my kid reluctantly handed over her car keys, she told me with a straight face, “Come straight home after you see the vet, I need the car tonight. And, don’t forget to put gas in the tank when you’re done using it.”

Before I could respond to those statements with the honest response they deserved, my wife reminded me that we were already late for our appointment. I grabbed the keys, made a mental note to myself to yell at the kid later, and headed out the door.

The vet visit went as I expected. We were advised that the animals are too fat, and we needed to feed them less or let them exercise more (Why is it always my fault that the animals have no self-control?) otherwise they were both perfectly healthy. We got a brief lecture about not waiting so long before we brought the animals in for checkups next time. Then, the cat got a shot and the dog got a treat, thereby guaranteeing that the next trip to the vet would be an exact repeat of the ridiculousness we had just gone through earlier that day.

When it was over, we stuffed the cat back in her suitcase, gave the vet enough money to make her next three house payments, and headed back home.

I thought when we got back home that the cat would tell me what she did to the battery in my wife’s car, but she must have still been angry about getting a shot because she wouldn’t talk to me. She just hissed when I let her out of the cat carrier and ran back under the bed.

It was about this time that my daughter demanded her keys back and asked if I had gassed up her car.

I tossed her the keys from my pocket and said, “Here. You’re taking your mom’s car, tonight. The jumper cables are in the garage and don’t forget to buy a new battery on the way home.”

Okay, I didn’t actually do that. I didn’t think of it fast enough.

But I really, really wish I had.

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Saturday Morning Cartoons

Whatever happened to the great American tradition of Saturday morning cartoons? I was flipping around the channels on my TV a couple Saturdays ago and, just out of curiosity, I started checking the networks to see what kind of kid programming they were airing these days. My girls are both grown up now, so I’ve gotten used to being able to sleep in on Saturdays and then doing some writing in the morning. The television is hardly on anymore on a Saturday before noon.

I was shocked and saddened to find there was absolutely nothing for kids to watch on weekend mornings. The major networks are all news shows, college sports, and morning entertainment shows. I even found some thirty-minute paid programming to help me have better abs, make better grilled sandwiches, and have longer, more pleasurable erections.

Not exactly kid-friendly.

Even the cartoon heavy hitters, like Nickelodeon, Disney, and the Cartoon Network, are just running repeats of the same dreck they air twenty-four/seven during the week. There’s nothing aimed at a Saturday morning target audience.

Where did the good shows go? Is Saturday morning not a thing anymore? Am I old and losing my grasp on reality and the modern world?

All right, I already know the answer to that last one, so let’s move on.

I remember as a kid, waking up to an alarm clock all week long to get up and get ready for school. I would crawl out of bed, mumbling and complaining about how tired I was as I put my shoes on the wrong feet and stumbled out into the kitchen for a hot breakfast of burned toast. (My mom was not a great cook, but we can delve into that one on another blog post).

On Saturday morning, I woke without an alarm clock (at least an hour earlier than I did during the weekdays) and leapt out of bed in a panic that I might have already missed some of my favorite shows. I would run into the kitchen to pour a bowl of some sugary mess that claimed to have 8 essential vitamins that made it healthy, then squatted down in front of the coffee table with my breakfast to watch the best television programming of the entire week. The volume was on its lowest setting of course, because my parents were usually still asleep.

Kids today are missing out on the greatest cartoons ever made. I’m old enough to remember the classic shows that were still running from the World War II and Cold War eras, with all their subtle racism (and sometimes not so subtle) aimed at the Japanese and Germans. At a very young age, I would watch images of violence between cats and mice, coyotes and flightless birds, and even some awesome explosions and gunplay between a hunter and a rabbit. If you don’t know the shows I’m referring to, it’s probably because you’re under the age of twenty and too young to have experienced the joy of Warner Brothers at their best.

But who am I kidding? Nobody under the age of twenty is reading this blog.

I remember there was some discussion in the 1980’s about whether or not violent cartoons and kid shows contributed to people becoming violent in real life, but I don’t believe the weekly episodes of Will and Holly running from dinosaurs ultimately did me any harm.

There was an unpleasant incident in college when I was running across the kitchen floor, chasing after a mouse while swinging a broom and screaming “Die, you little bastard. Die!” But, I’m almost certain that little bit of violence was destined to happen, cartoons or not.

During the early 2000’s, when my girls were little, there was much tamer stuff to watch, but Saturday morning was still a mecca of kids’ shows. EM1’s favorites were Bear in the Big Blue House, and Blue’s Clues. There was also a sprinkling of Fairly Odd Parents, and Jimmy Neutron thrown in for good measure.

There was also a certain purple dinosaur, who shall remain nameless, that was banned from our house. If any kid show was destined to create violent, emotionless psychopaths out of an entire generation, it was that one. I still have nightmares about those smiling, dead-eyed children, chanting around a stuffed dinosaur and bringing it to life. A cartoon about devil worship would have been less disturbing.

But, even possessed children and their terrifying, magically animated, stuffed toys is better than nothing.

These days, I don’t see anything for kids to look forward to on a Saturday morning and I think that’s kind of sad. I guess in a world of streaming video on demand, on-line video gaming, and twenty-four hour, content-specific channels, there just isn’t a need for it.

It isn’t special, anymore.

It isn’t Elmer Fudd trying to stab Bugs Bunny with a spear while singing opera songs. It isn’t thinly veiled drug references while Shaggy and Scooby-Doo chase ghosts. It isn’t Snidely and Muttley trying to murder a pigeon for some inexplicable reason.

There is no joy or excitement left in Saturday mornings.

I seriously wonder what kids growing up today will reminisce about when they are adults. What era-specific events will stick in their minds enough that they will talk to their own kids about the good old days?

Based on this blog, I’m guessing it will have something to do with how grandpa wouldn’t shut up about watching cartoons while they were trying to play video games with their friends.

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