September 2005 Archives

That is my sarcastic answer when my wife asks, "What should we get COUPLE X for their wedding?" Judging by the strange things people include in their wedding registries, a clue is what they really need. Here are a few oddities I've seen or heard of lately:

• Candles
• Condoms
• Movies or CDs
• Trash bags
• Paper towels
• Garden hose
• Inkjet photo paper
• Wooden toilet seat
• Socks
• A box of those bendy drinking straws

I wonder if the modern wedding registry is designed to let us old hats have a good laugh before having to don itchy clothes and sit on an uncomfortable wooden pew or cold metal folding chair for hours while the betrohed are, well, trothed. I would gladly trade valet parking for a good laugh anyday.

Many of us are tying the knot later in life. My wife and I were both 25 when we were hitched, so we had already accumulated the basics of life (toaster, microwave, socks, duct tape, etc.). We registered for some fine china and assorted fancy things at a large department store, but also went to Target and added things like a charcoal grill, oven mitts and a crockpot.

To us, and probably according to tradition (I didn't have time to wade through all my search results when hunting for the history of wedding gifts), items purchased for newlyweds should ideally help them set up their new house together. The short list above looks more like a grocery list, or weekend to-do list. Granted, they were not all on the same registry. Weddings are special, but they are not supposed to be like a second Christmas (or Hannakuh), or for that matter, a birthday.

We are going to a wedding Saturday. More like, I'm being dragged to a wedding on Saturday. It's at one of the largest Catholic churches in the area that morning, and then the reception – which we're skipping – is at 5. The ceremony had better not last that long. Maybe we should take two cars so I could slip out early. After all, the nuptials are preventing me from exercising my pseudo-celebrity status in the community to serve as a barbecue cookoff judge (believe me, I am totally bummed about missing that opportunity). And the groom is my wife's ex-boss; we don't owe the guy anything other than maybe a punch in the gut.

As for presents, the soon-to-be-coupled souls chose some wacky things, ranging from wooden candle votive holders (Crate & Barrel, $3.99 ea.) to a $2,000 bed. Both are in their 30s, and have lived on their own (including one suffering through a previous marriage) for years. They both make decent livings. That's why, if we can find one in the appropriate color, I still vote for buying them a clue.

Is it any wonder that we're so easily lured into the more-more, gotta-have-the-latest-thing, won't-be-happy-until-it's-mine, stuff-stuff-thingamabobber whirlwind of feeling some strange need to have the latest and greatest? Our technology has built-in obselescence. In a few years, the shiny things we acquire become relatively useless compared to the Next Best Shiny Thing.

Cases in point:
• Apple introduces the iPod Nano. It holds 1,000 songs! It's as thin as a thick piece of paper! It has a color screen like the big iPods! I look down at my iPod Shuffle and think, "Man, I wish it was an iPod Nano." But wait! I have yet to fill up the 1 GB of shuffling goodness my Shuffle affords me. I also don't have the patience to create endless playlists. Who cares about the color screen if it is in my pocket while I'm walking? Or I'm jogging and don't care to look down at it? My Shuffle is more than I need.

• Subaru releases details about its 2006 version of my 2005 car. Now it comes with standard 17-inch wheels! And seven more horsepower! And in new colors! I look at my nearly new car and think, "Wish I could have waited a little longer!" But wait! Having had a car with 17-inch wheels before, I know that replacement tires are more expensive than for the 16-inch wheels I have. Seven more horsepower? Who needs them! I've got enough get up and go for me and four other people. And I still love the color. If I had waited, I would have melted into the old driver seat of the Family Truckster as the A/C cooked me into a darker shade of white (now blissfully someone else's burden).

• Picking on Apple again, the very computer I am using now is no longer the latest and greatest. It's an iMac G4 – one of the first iMacs with the telescoping LCD screen. Not only do new ones come with the faster G5 processor, but also with more memory and standard DVD recorders. For about the same price! Oy vay! But wait! This computer is perfect for what we need, has all the programs loaded and hasn't given us any trouble. It's a keeper (until it stops working; someday I know it will).

• My 10-year-old mountain bike! It's dingey, it's dinged, it's green! So many advances in frame technology since it was built! How can I be seen on it! I wish it was a road bike. But wait! The thing is broken in, and nobody in their right mind would steal it (built-in anti-theft device!). Besides, pedaling would be the same on my long-paid-for bicycle as it would on a new $2,000 model. Yet the latter might leave me a bit sore in the wallet area.

• My 9-year-old TV! It's old-fashioned, and weighs a ton. Look at all the shiny high-definition ready LCDs and plasmas beckoning me to hang them on my wall. But wait! LCDs don't retain their highest level of quality for long. And plasmas, well you know I'd need a second mortgage. Besides, we still don't have cable. Why spring for TV bling when all we'll see is static?

• Cell phones! New features are being added every week to the newest models. I've seen one that can open your garage door, be used as a TV remote, send and receive e-mail with attachments and, if you can figure out how, be used to make telephone calls. The ones we have are basic models. The Petite Filet uses hers for work a lot, so we may upgrade to something more reliable. But does she need to know the exact time in every time zone in the world? Does she need to know currency exchange rates? Is she going to check the latest sports scores? No! And what's more, it doesn't have to be paperthin, because she will keep the thing in her purse (which can hold three bowling balls without touching).

I have a lot. Too much in fact. I didn't mention all the 35 mm cameras that I'd love to trade for a new digital. We've been dealt a reality card because our house's plumbing is (once again) revolting. As in we weren't able to use either of the toilets last night. Let's just say we're well on our way to building a nice compost pile in the back yard. Our plumbers (who know our address without us reminding them) unclogged the clog, sort of. They'll be coming back this week to poke a tiny camera up the pipe to see where the gaping, mud-filled hole is. Then, they'll let us know how much of our new flooring they'll need to rip up before breaking a hole in the concrete slab and fitting a new piece of PVC pipe.

It's back to basics at Casa del T-bone! If anyone wants to contribute to our Plumbing Relief Fund, I'd be happy to trade my 1966 Kitchen Aid mixer for some cash. Well, scratch that. Some things haven't gotten better; they don't make those like they used to. I've actually mixed a bowl of bricks into a red mush with it.

Some people may wonder why anyone would ever live along a coast. Those are probably people who don't appreciate the natural beauty of the ocean, the sweeping sand of the beaches, the cleansing salt air, the sunrises or sunsets that cannot be replicated anywhere else. My flirtations with the shoreline have always been temporary, from weeklong visits to the Texas gulf coast, to monthlong visits to my grandparents' home in Virginia on a barrier island in the Atlantic. I remain in love with the coast, yet it's not where I'm meant to live for a few reasons – the most easily explainable being that I'm too practical. I know the damage that can be done by the very waters I love.

But I understand and support its allure. Most people blessed enough to be there aren't making their livings off the sea, but it draws us there just the same. And the majority of time, there are no threats of flooding or hurricanes. Likewise, people wonder why anyone lives in California with the underlying threat of "the big one" that will someday split the earth beneath. But to visit California is to also love many aspects of it, and in San Francisco in particular, the lovely climate and vibrancy fostered by its inhabitants is contagious.

Where I live, it's pretty drab. The land is flat, the climate resorts to a semi-arid desert in the summertime, and we don't have four distinct seasons because the cooling months fly by quickly. Really, the climate is geared for business. There are literally dozens of neighborhoods being planted nearby that will contain thousands of homes – supersuburbs that bring with them boring strip shopping centers (all with nail salons, pizza places, donut shops), hulking Wal-Marts and ubiquously boring chain restaurants. It's home for now, so I won't knock it totally. There are certainly bountiful shopping and employment opportunities, and this exemplifies the thoroughly modern version of "land of plenty." Even our poor have too much stuff, which means this area was ready, willing and able to respond to the incoming Hurricane Katrina survivors with open arms and full goody bags.

We have the threat of tornadoes – a smaller but patently unfair form of weather that drops from the sky without warning and destroys things at random. I've had close brushes with two tornadoes – including one that hit downtown Fort Worth a few years ago – so I know we're not completely "safe" here. There is always some danger somewhere. In Colorado, there are constipated bears and mountains from which to inadvertently plummet to one's demise.

But we don't think of tornadoes every day. Nor do coastal residents fret and fume about tidal surges and damaging winds; if they did, they'd surely be on the next bus to Ohio.

I've heard it called "the Katrina effect," the mass movement from Galveston and Houston, but the smart ones would have left the area without the fresh memory of the Cat 5 storm that leveled parts of Mississippi and Louisiana. It's sometimes hard for me to have sympathy for those who don't leave, but that's not right. In New Orleans and Mississippi, for example, some people didn't have the option to leave because cash, gasoline and food vanished before it was apparent they were in grave danger. Some had nowhere to go and no way to get there. If the evacuations now to make way for Rita are because of the storm, then it's certainly a positive thing to come from the ordeal. For those who could and can leave now, but decide to stay, God be with you. You'll need all the help you can get.

It's hard to feel the promise of autumn when it's 100 degrees outside. Not that this part of the country really has four full seasons anyhow. It's either hot, cold or about to be hot. And it's what most people would call hot for 7-9 months out of the year, depending on the type of year we are having. Lemmetellya, we're having a hot one in good ol' two-thousand and five.

Part of me doesn't welcome the changing of the seasons, and that part would be my raging sinuses that flare up and produce copious amounts of mucous when they sense ragweed, mountain cedar or any other foreign particle that serves no good purpose other than to irritate said nosular cavity. Bring on the Claritin®. Bring on Arizona, for that matter. At least it's a dry heat there.

I think the universe has some things backward about the seasons anyway. With the pollution alerts and heat we see in our area during the summer – what, with us basically prisoners in our own homes – I'd say that's a great time for the kiddos to go to school. Let them have their three months off when the temperature is more reasonable, say from October to January. Then there wouldn't have to be those weird piecemeal standalone days off to throw monkeys into our schedules.

Another glaring wrongness is the fact that we typically have "spring cleaning." What sense does that make to clean up our homes when the beautiful weather outside beckons us to spend less time inside? I know in colder climes it means a throwing open of the windows after months of shut-in-edness. But I think "winter cleaning" makes more sense, as the blah or cold weather will keep us more often indoors to enjoy our labors. Just saying. In our house, cleaning is more of an Olympic event. Not just because we only clean every four years, but rather that the most effective means of tidying up the place is to torch it.

And speaking of fire, I had the rare opportunity to burn something and really enjoy it over the weekend. In cleaning out our upstairs room to make it the Cutlet's Play Paradise, I came across some old check registers and bank statements from a long-closed checking account. Rather than deconstruct them enough to run through the shredder, I piled them into my charcoal grill and lit it up. What a rush. If not for my genuine mental stability and nagging sense of morality, being a closet pyro could be a new hobby for me. I just don't have that much of a burning desire.

Have a great week, yo peeps of the computer-based form of communication I like to call the World Wide Fred. The word "web" reminds me too much that it's time to take a hose to the ceiling fan in the living room. Danged spiders.

The blog has become mostly a once-a-week thing now that the second-largest newspaper publishing company owns the paper. I had to sign my life away last week, along with any children born after the Cutlet, just so I could have an e-mail address that I didn't want. What that means is I'm bound to limit my personal Internet time at work, and that time can now be monitored. I'm sure if I said what I thought about the whole ordeal that black helicopters would swoop down out of the air and fire me on the spot. There have been too many casualties of the At-Work Blog War for me to enlist. My principles stop short of putting my family's health and welfare at risk. So, no more hammering out a quickie before getting down to business, and that leaves Thursday (a blissful day off with the Cutlet) as the prime day for me to update.

It cracks me up when somebody tells me there's nothing going on in their lives. What? What planet do you live on, and is there room for one more? There is always something going on here. Sure, a lot of it may seem mundane, but we don't sit around to let life pass us by for long. I could use a vacation from it now and then, but mostly it's good. Makes the time fly too fast, really.

Sunday afternoon I single-handedly loaded up 2,000 pounds of dirt into our pickup for our backyard flowerbeds. I told myself that the next time we need such a pile of dirt, that it was going to be delivered via dumptruck and not transported as 50 40-pound bags by me. Next up is a long list of projects that I'm supposed to get done by mid-December so that when family comes to visit for the Cutlet's Dec. 26 birthday the house will resemble a semblance of order. As in loading the dirt, I tell myself that the next house we buy will either be relatively new (as opposed to 40 years old), completely renovated before we darken its doorway or come with a free handyman who lives in the attic and only appears when something breaks.

My birthday was a few weeks ago, but scheduling has prevented us from having the obligatory get-together with my parents. We're going over there in another week and my dad told us to bring the pickup truck because he has some stuff with which to clutter our abode. That really scares me, and I'm tempted to take a random load of junk over there when we go just to even things up. Maybe my lifelong dream of owning a giraffe is about to come true. One can only hope.

Until we meet again, precious blog readers, keep it real– really good if at all possible. As the French say, "See ya!"

Seconds may tick-tock tick-tock tick-tock away, but when time flies, it sounds more like a thud. Or maybe that was the potty chair I forgot in the back of my car that made a noise when I hit the brakes a wee bit too hard.

Yes, we now have a potty chair. The Cutlet isn't quite ready to hop on board just yet – his muscles aren't quite developed enough to wake up in the morning dry. But he is really interested, thanks to ...

If there's anyone with a big head, swelling ego or with thoughts that they are invincible, there have been some stunning reminders the past few years that we are but dust in the ever-blowing wind. I caught myself not feeling sorry for some of the hurricane victims because of the anarchy that is overtaking a handful of utterly desperate, directionless people.

How dare I feel that way? Me, in my high-and-dry home with air conditioning, closet full of clothes, working plumbing and a fridge full of food. Further, if we had been residents of New Orleans, we most likely would have had the means and money to escape the wrath before Katrina churned ashore. We have always had family in many places who would welcome us with open arms as long as it would take to rebuild. But many of those stranded did not have any way to leave and nowhere to go if they did. We have been blessed, and it's important to note that blessings are given despite us not deserving them. They are merciful gifts of grace – no one can earn them because we are all wretched, wretched people.

I see the images on TV and feel like changing the channel, or looking away. Bloated bodies floating in the water, or laying ignored as the living do whatever they can to survive. What I should really be doing is rolling up my sleeves, heeding the call to action that is being shouted from Louisiana and Mississippi and contribute in some way ... money, blood, sweat, tears, prayers, bottled water, whatever it is. Those of us in Texas have a golden opportunity to help, as thousands have and will continue to flow into our state to live for what could amount to years. Some will relocate here with no plans to return to their former lives. Either way, they are coming and we should have open arms.

Such disasters offer a chance for us to count our blessings – something we should do every day in the absence of others' suffering. The things we have taken for granted become so trivial. Our lives are perched on pedestals that, at any time, could be obliterated by natural disasters, losses of loved ones, job layoffs. God bless us all in these trying times.

We'll moan about he high price of gasoline, a rising tide made worse by the hurricane's effects on domestic drilling and production. I'm sure in a few weeks, despite the third-world countryside now on parts of our gulf coast, most of us will return to normal. It happened after 9/11. It happened after the tsunami. It happens during the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. We who live in America, the freedom we enjoy affords us the freedom to forget and surround ourselves with normalcy. But let's hope we can remember for a long time, at least until the last refugee is wrapped in love and comfort. Then, recovery can merely begin.

I turn 32 on Saturday, but birthdays are so silly at a time like this. We're going to hop into our nice car and drive a few hours to get out of town. Seems so dumb to be escaping a land of plenty just because we need to escape the humdrum business of our lives. It's a trip we'd been planning for months, though, looking forward to some family time we think we deserve. Pedestals are frail, ridiculous things. We strive to be humble, even though we know our bounty of blessings isolate us from the death, damage, drama and destruction. For now.