What I got for Mother's Day

So I’m considering taking a Voluntary Early Retirement Package (VERP).  One of my concerns is that while I’m at home some family dynamics could be changing.  Top of mind is that without having the ability to grouse incessantly about my unbearable commute…I’ll be expected to do a lot more around the house.  I’m not the handiest guy in the world and on a patience scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the highest…I’m a negative 7.  I’m very good at stripping screws, ruining the finish on fine things, and minor electrocution.  Sharp objects or things that spin at hi-speed are definite “no-nos”.  If they’re both sharp and spin at hi-speeds there’s a real good chance I’m going to the emergency room.  And usually at the end of my projects there are many left over parts.  The phrase, “What the @#$%^” can be heard repeatedly, coupled with things being thrown viciously about.  I’m a joy to be with.

This past week I come home from my unbearable commute…(we really need to see if there’s any leftover TARP money that can be donated to New Jersey Transit.  They need to get parts to fix their “disabled trains.”  They seem to get stuck in the tunnel leading into NYC at least every other day.  As luck would have it, I’m either on one or stuck behind one all week long).  I walk through the door and head up stairs to change out of my uniform into sweats and a tee shirt.  I come downstairs and both my wife and daughter ask me, so what did you think of the bathroom?  Now I’m thinking, “I have no idea, I didn’t look in the bathroom.”  I know this will not be satisfactory because I’m a notorious non-noticer.  My usual crime is haircuts.  Unless my wife is going for a Crew or Mohawk…there’s a good chance it will not register with me.  Then I’m pretty weak as I try to recover.  I know I’m about to go down this path shortly.

As I struggle, my daughter jumps up and says, “I want to be there when you see it”, so we march upstairs.  We’re standing at the entrance to the bathroom and I notice three new small carpets and call them out.   I’m now playing 20 questions calling out items I see… the lights have not changed, we have the same mirrors; we still have sinks…then it finally kicks in.  MY Wife has actually replaced both sink faucets in our bathroom AND the maze of plumbing to and from the new faucets.  And it all works and looks beautiful.  In complete awe, I look at my daughter and say, “I could not have done this.”

My wife tells me about her multiple trips to Home Depot, the different lengths of PVC tubing needed to complete the job, her expert use of plumber’s putty, and the piece of resistance was when she was using her legs and feet banging on a wrench to break the seal of a fitting that wouldn’t come lose. Only for a split second did I envision what I would have been like trying to achieve what she did.  (Picture a mushroom cloud from an atomic blast.)  First we would have needed all new plumbing, new mirrors, glass doors and a trip…at least to the pharmacy.

So my gift for Mother’s Day was not only a new set of great looking faucets coupled with the saving of my sanity…but the pleasure in knowing that my wife is not only tech support for all of our user friendly electronics, but also, more than capable of doing my chores.  (I have a very old lawn mower that now electrocutes me when I try to turn it off…maybe she can fix that for Father’s Day)

Spring Break 2014

We’ve gathered up a couple of life-times of flight miles so me and the Fam are going to Italy on Spring Break.  (8 days of touring & 2 days of flying bliss)  And with this mountain of accumulated miles, all four of us are flying “Business Class”…very nice.   The seats are more like personal size pods placed in a large spacious lounge area.  Each Pod has a Hi-Tech chair with 17 different points of adjustment.  If you’re a yogi or contortionist, you’re in 7th heaven.

 

So before the trip I was told that there are fabulous “deals” to be had in glass and leather goods. Needless to say, we overpaid so many times I lost count.   At times I felt like we were wearing signs that said, “Will Pay More.”

At the Rome Airport they also have a clever way of trying to ensure you will not collect your VAT Tax back.  They send you on a multi-terminal chase where nobody is really quite sure where you’re supposed to go.  It’s a great game where they’re hoping you’ll give up in fear of missing your flight.  We’ll have none of this.  We’d rather miss our flights “Business Class” than not get our $ 150 dollars in VAT tax back.

We get our VAT tax back and now race to the terminal for our Flight.  Drum Roll… this is how our ride home went down:

Some history: We started out months ago with four Business Class Direct Flights from NYC to Rome and back…all using mileage…lovely.  About 4 months ago we got a call from the Airline.  Seems they’ve cancelled our flight home, it no longer exists.  We’re told they can fly us direct from Rome to Los Angeles and then fly us from LA to NYC.  I asked the person on the other end of the line, if he was pinching himself to keep from laughing while giving that offer.  Too quickly he countered with, “Well we can just cancel all your flights if you like.”  I turn the situation over to the Mrs. and now we’re flying from Rome to London, changing planes and then London to NYC.  Not great, but what can you do.

About a month ago, we get another one of these mysterious calls from the airline.  Seems they’ve cancelled another flight of ours out of Rome.  The Mrs. fixes this too…we’re now flying from Rome to Chicago (11 hours), changing planes and back to NYC.   You can’t make this stuff up…but it gets better.

As we arrive at the Rome airport and check in unloading our luggage the girl behind the counter ask us if our son had requested, “Not to have a Business Class seat.”  Bizarre question, but we assure her; no he definitely wants to sit with us in “Business Class”.

We get to the end of the line at the gate and people from the airline approach us asking us to come with them to the counter…I’m thinking maybe we’ve won a prize or something.   This is not the case.  They have terrible news for us, which they seem less than broken up about.  Seems that two of our four Business Class seats have a “life vest” issue and no one can sit there.  We volunteer to wear our life vests during the flight but unfortunately that will not be acceptable.  After the required amount of raising of the voices and challenges, we realized they held all the cards…and we still needed to get home.  (Personally I couldn’t deal with another $400 spaghetti dinner.) We’re the last four people on the plane and they close the doors behind us.

Sure enough the two front seats that were ours are empty.  Then an interesting set of events happened.  They announce over the PA system that they have a couple of flight attendants that are retiring today and this is their last flight home.  They wanted to make it special for them.  Sounds nice. Right after that announcement one of the flight attendants comes up to me and my son sitting in business class and says she just wanted to let us know that a flight attendant is going to be sleeping in one of the seats we had.  She goes on to say, she can sit there because she works for the airline, but we can’t.  I tell her if my wife finds out you’re going to need to get the Air Marshall.   It gets better.  She comes back about 30 minutes later and says, “Someone got sick near another stewardess’s jump seat, and that stewardess is going to need to take our other “Business Class” seat.”  At this point my wife is dragging both flight attendants by the hair out of our seats, and the Air Marshall is on her back trying to take her down…at least that’s what I’m envisioning.  Fait Accompli.

More Fun – We land in Chicago tired, pissed, irritable, and late.  We’re now the family from the movie Home Alone running through the Chicago airport trying to get through Customs and make our connecting flight back to NYC.  We have Priority Tags on our luggage because we’re flying “Business Class”, but literally, our bags are the last ones off the conveyor belt.   When we finally get our bags and run to another check point, someone from the airline tells us that we have a shot at making our flight, but that our bags will never make it on the plane.  She asks if we want to reschedule our flight home…more screaming and yelling…we decide, no, we’re going to try to make this happen…the Gods have to cut us a break sooner or later…or so we thought. 

It was good that Chicago’s O’Hare airport is like the 2^nd largest in the nation.  We’re now on our fourth jammed tram ride trying to get to our terminal and depart.  We explode off off the Tram, blowing through anyone in our way as we race to our gate.  We’ve been up for about 24 hours now and running completely on adrenaline…and spite.  Again, large airport, running on empty…can feel my heart starting to pound…like out of my chest…so glad I made the decision to give up physical exercise.  We reach the gate and no one is there…confusion and depression set in.  We look at the board and it says the flight is delayed 30 minutes…Eureka!  This extends to about 90 minutes.  We then get on our plane and are ready to go.  Then the pilot gets on the air and tells us that they can’t find the workers who tow this plane out of the gate…he says, “They must be on a coffee break”,…Really?  Coffee break is over, we get towed out to the runway, and now that we’re 2 hours late…we’re number 73 in line to take off.

We avoid a crash landing; baggage again is last off the plane, as I get my final reminder of why I’m a homebody who prefers “Staycations.”

Things that Live in the Basement

What would Christmas be without a story about cockroaches.  I watched “Home Alone” for the BaZillionth time last night, and my favorite part of the movie is still when the kid puts the tarantula on the burglar’s face.  So back in the 80s…when I was young and fearless, I made my first real estate purchase.  It was a studio apartment in a Pre-War building turning coop in Brooklyn Heights.  When it turned coop we decided to renovate the building and hired a contractor.  I was on the board, “The Treasurer” I think…scary right?

One day the contractor needed us to go down into the sub-basement to check out some work that needed to be done on the sewer pipe.  No problem I thought.  So when they said this building was pre-war, I thought maybe pre-WWI…it was Pre-Civil War.  To get down into this sub-basement you needed to climb down this thin metal latter that was bolted to the brick wall.  Like way down.  It gets better…there’s no lighting.  Its pitch black…like being in the bottom of a coal mine.  The contractor has “a” flashlight.  We’re all assembled now and the contractor begins to shine the flash light along the sewer pipe, I want to say it’s about 12 inches in diameter.  He gets to a point in the pipe where it’s cracked and leaking…just lovely.  But what made it extra special was that there were about a dozen cockroaches feasting on the waste.  They also must have been part of an atomic experiment, because each cockroach was not less than 5 inches long.  So I’m staring at this horror show and a couple of thoughts race through my mind:  One, the contractor has done a very nice job of selling his services.  I’ll pay any amount of money to fix this situation.  The next and more important thought was, I wondered if any of the other guys down here were faster than I was.

The contactor makes some comments about the correct way to fix the broken pipe…we all cut him off before he can finish and just tell him to do whatever is required.  With that, the flashlight leaves the small predators and what comes next is an episode of the Three Stoogies.  There is an immediate case of the hebe-geebees where everyone is imaging the cockroaches are attacking.  There’s a race to the latter, or at least where we think the latter is.  There’s a sense of urgency probably similar to what goes on when a ship is sinking.  The last thing I remember is wishing I knew how to fly… as someone was using my shoulders as a latter rung. 

So my real estate expertise is very similar to my stock trading motto of buy high and sell low.  I bought the coop for $75K.  After owning it for less than 6 months I could have sold it for $100K.  Stock Market crashes and coops get obliterated…I wind up giving the coop away for $25K.  Roll forward 20 years…my daughter and I are spending the day in Brooklyn Heights in September.  We walk past a real estate office and a saleswoman comes out and asks if she can help us.  I say, “Just for kicks, what does a studio apartment on Columbia Heights go for these days?” ----- They start at about $450K.

You Snooze, You Lose

So one of my kids is going to a writing camp down at a North Carolina University.  I come up with the brilliant idea to drive her down.  So we get up early on the Saturday of 4^th of July weekend and from Northeastern PA get on Route 81 and start heading south.  I really shouldn’t complain because the weather was beautiful and the highway was very do-able…but I will anyway.

We’ve been driving on Rt. 81 for nearly 7 hours straight (one gas/bio break…which I guess in my case is a redundant phrase).  I can’t remember the last time I drove 7 hours straight so I’m pretty beat.  We finally get off 81 and start heading east.  In the back of my mind I’m thinking, “We maybe have another 45 minutes to go.”  I finally look at my MapQuest instructions and they tell a different story.  There are multiple 29, 32 and 40-mile segments that remain.  I have another 3 HOURS to go.  Forget about having the wind completely taken out of my sails; immediately a combination of depression, frustration and exhaustion sets in.  We arrive at our hotel, almost 10 hours to the minute from when we left.  I’m completely toast and will eat anything that’s put in front of me.  (That last phrase will produce immeasurable damage as this story progresses)

I spend the next day getting my daughter moved in and eating extremely greasy fried, really “butter-laden” foods.  Now you combine that with the fact that if I leave my zip code and drink the local water, my digestive track goes into a complete state of disrepair…trouble can’t be far off.  Next morning I’m back in the car driving up to Annapolis to do some fishing on the Chesapeake with a good friend from college.  Naturally I wait too long to get on the road and I run into traffic around DC and Baltimore.  As I sit there cursing myself, I hear a gurgling in my stomach begin…not a good sign. 

Without visible damage, I arrive at my friend’s house late in the day.  His wife, he and me go out on his boat and have a great time taking in the sites on the bay and maybe we down a couple of sociables.   We then pull up to a restaurant on the water…consume a couple more beverages and a fantastic burger & fries.  The burger might have been cooked in the same oil as the fries but I wouldn’t know, I’m back in the state of mind where if you put it in front of me…I’ll eat it.  We get back to the house and I have one more responsible beverage (mind you we’re on the water the next day around 5 AM to pull in monster-size Stripe Bass!)  I take a Zantac “Ha, like that’s really going to help” and go to bed at a reasonable hour…and that was the last reasonable thing that happened to me for the next 18 hours.

I woke up around midnight with cold sweats.  My digestive track is feeling like I’m the runner up in the national jalapeño-eating contest.   You know you’re in trouble when you get to the bathroom and you can’t figure out if you should be driving the porcelain bus or sitting on it.  Scary thoughts of a dual effort start to run through my mind but I fight them off.   This goes on for hours with no relief at either end.  Finally around 4AM I make the call, it’s time for the Woodbridge two-finger jam.  With a small amount of relief I head back to bed to see if I can get more than an hour of sleep.  No such luck.  About 5 minutes after I lied down, I heard the garage door opening under me.  My friend Brian is heading out to get bait.  He comes back about 20 minutes later with bait, sandwiches, and two massive coffees.  One is for me…what a good friend.  As much as I needed the coffee, as the toothpicks I wedged under my eyelids were about to buckle, the thought of pouring hydrochloric acid down my throat into my ulcerated stomach was frightening.  Time to Man-up.  I grab the coffee; quickly swallow about five large gulps (think of those episodes on a Survivor when the challenge is to eat nasty hunks of squid that have been sitting out in the sun for a couple of days.)  Almost immediately I feel a rumbling, probably not unlike the rumbling that the inhabitants of Pompeii felt when Vesuvius was about to erupt.  I put down the coffee, re-thank my good friend and excuse myself to a remote bathroom in the house.  I won’t be too graphic, but if I could have scheduled my long awaited colonoscopy that morning, I definitely could have killed two birds with one stone.  (It’s a been there and done that kind of thing…if you’re of the right age, you know what I mean)

So I emerge from the bathroom, a lesser man, but much better for it.  We pack up our gear, I swallow an Imodium AD, and we head to the marina.  On the short ride over, Vesuvius begins to rear his ugly head again.  It’s about 5:30AM and no one is in sight.  My friend can sense that I’m struggling a bit and just before we shove off he says, “Last chance to hit the head…pointing to the marina bathroom.”  I consider it for a second but didn’t want to hold up the fishing operation, so I say, “No, I’ll be fine.”  Nothing further from the truth could have been true.  We’re about 100 feet from the dock and I get a significant wave of gastronomic pressure that causes me to reconsider my captain’s offer.  But now we’ve pulled away and to go back would be an even larger gaff.  So I soldier on…praying that the modern technology built into Imodium will prevail.  We go about a ¼ mile and now I’m close to a panic stage…but again to turn around now would be a such a slap in the face to fishing etiquette and manhood in general, that’d I’d rather jump overboard than ask that question.   (You really have to pause and wonder where my priorities in life are.)

Now we’re miles out, we drop anchor and I have no choice but to go with “Mind over matter.”  (There was an old episode of Star Trek where these small alien creates would attach to your neck & spine and inflict such severe pain that you’d go out of your mind and shortly there after, die.  Spock get’s infected but because of his superior Vulcan mind, is able to hold the pain at bay…every once in a while getting an excruciating wave of pain that he needs to concentrate on to control…this is what the day was like.)

So we get to what seems like a good spot , bait up and cast off.  We have three poles on the boat with us.  Two are in stanchions, and one is laying on the back seat.  My friend is now towards the front of the boat and I happen to look at the smaller pole lying on the back seat.  It’s in motion and starting to fly out of the back of the boat.  I yell to my friend, “Brian, the pole!”  He grabs the pole and battles in a 24 inch Stripe Bass.   You may ask, “Steve, why didn’t you just grab the pole, you were closer?”  And here in lies where the title of the story comes from…”You Snooze, You Lose.”  And as things usually work…I caught nothing the rest of the day.

P.S.

Once Brian hauled in the bass, fishing boats from out of nowhere surrounded us.  One about 40 yards away caught about 10 fish the size of Brian’s in a matter of 40 minutes…I finally said to Brian, “What do you say we pull up the anchor and ram those &@#$%ers.”

Weekends are for Relaxing

So, after an unbelievable battle with my customer and then with my own company over end of quarter business…(and then having it spill over into the weekend), I get to our PA lake house on a Friday night around 11PM.  I’m Toast. 

The follow day I’m still in a complete fog, but we have company coming up, so I need to strap on my happy face and be a delightful host.  Being that I’m a curmudgeon by nature, this saps just about all the remaining energy I have.

We haven’t been up for weeks so I need to clean the yard.  (outside of being lit on fire, there’s not much else I really wanted to do more than clean the yard…Ah but patience, that’ll come later).  Also the battery in the boat was dead, so my wife took it out prior to me coming up and attached it to an overnight charger.

This is how the rest of the weekend went:

1)    While doing heavy lifting in the backyard cleanup project, I threw my back out…just wonderful.  (now you take the curmudgeon factor & the bad back, and my happy needle is hovering just above empty)

2)    Still in a funk, I wasn’t paying attention and put the battery back into the boat… backwards.  I attached the Negative to the Positive and… (I had a clue something was wrong when I couldn’t turn the engine off.  But what really gave it away was when smoke started coming out of the ignition key slot… as well as the battery compartment)  So I fried the boat…disappointing a waiting crew, clad in swimwear and tubing gear.  I also missed the only two-hour time slot that it didn’t rain that weekend.  Question you may be asking yourself is, well if you melted the ignition and the boat was running…how did you turn it off?  Simple, I electrocuted myself a number of times as I disconnected the sizzling battery.  (Now I can recharge my Blackberry in about 30 seconds by just holding in the palm of my hand.)

3)    Next, time for Chef-Boy-R-D to spring into action.  I go to start the dinner charcoal briquettes in my Weber Kettle…taking a stick match and flicking it on the box.  As I strike the box, the matchstick breaks in half, flying in different directions.  The head of the match lands on the underbelly of the last digit of my left thumb.  I look down (and again in my crispy mind this is happening in slow motion) I see the head of the match begin to ignite on my skin…kind of like when a sparkler goes off.  (Think Homer Simpson) 

4)    Sunday morning, still in a daze, I go out to buy bagels and fruit for breakfast.  Not paying attention but yet again, I find when I get back home that half of the bagels I bought are as hard as rocks and more than half of the fruit is rotten.  (People are loving me)

5)    Sunday night, being that my back is still spasming, I had my 17-year-old son drive me home.   Of course that won’t be stressful. This is the first time he’ll be making this 2-hour drive that includes a nasty patch on route 80.  I won’t provide details for fear that the Good Hands people will take my auto insurance policy and with those good hands…viscously rip it into a thousand pieces.  The only thing I will say is that a couple of months ago I was asking my insurance carrier how I might lower my rates since we’re adding my son to our policy. They suggested that they insert a blue box in the car he uses that monitors his driving.  We’re going to pass on that option…

P.S.

Last weekend I had too many friends and family over.  I had to breakdown and use the small propane gas grill to augment my Weber Kettle capacity.   The push button starter on the communist gas grill wouldn’t work, so I walked across the deck and got my trusty box of stick matches…the same ones that attacked me three weeks before.  I throw a match into the grill…remembering way too late that I had “not” turned the gas off.  This is not good at all.  I will say, “I got the grill lit.”  It happened literally in a flash – as the bursting cloud of flames were at a “Holy Sh*t” level.  One good outcome is I no longer have to worry about the hair thinning on the top of my head. 

The last thing I remember was my Godson screaming to my wife, “Hey Aunt Joanie, have you ever seen Uncle Steve without eye brows?”

How to Mortify your Daughter

So I’m not perfect.  Family members have told me that my sneezing is so loud and violent, that I can cause a heart attack.  I’m not the kind of person that slowly brings a sneeze along and then finally delivers anticlimactically.  With me, its kind like the sneeze is in stealth mode lurking in my body.  Then when it’s ready to explode, without any warning what so ever, it comes with the force of a raging Tsunami.  Lord help you if you’re in the way.  And not that I want to get graphic ;-} but unless I’m wearing a catcher’s mitt, the friendly-fire that’s generated by one of these episodes can be catastrophic.  (I’m only human).

So we’re at the airport, the Fam and me.  We’re waiting for our plane to arrive and take off with us on it.  We have a plane and most of the crew.  But due to a scheduling snafu, our pilot is just now leaving Mexico to arrive and drive our plane to its destination.  (If anyone could figure out why these unconscionable things happen so regularly, they’d most probably also have the ability to pick the PowerBall Lottery numbers too.)   We perform our requisite foot stamping, cursing of the airline gods and settle in for a few more hours.  My teenage daughter and I decide to get on line at the La Famiglia Italian restaurant in order to bring back some fine dining to our comfortable seats .  (Side bar: I am no longer welcome at any La Famiglia restaurant)

There’s an “L” shaped order/waiting line at La Famiglia.  As you walk along you can order what you want and then get to the end and pay.  The two of us are somewhere in the middle of the line facing each other having a nice conversation.  (Remember…the speed of a raging Tsunami)  Then with literally a split second’s notice, I feel this Godzilla of all sneezes coming on.  Now with only nanoseconds to spare, my fatherly instincts kick in.  In a heroic effort to save my daughter, I turn away from her…and the food that’s on the line counter (Yes you’re welcome), and launch my Sneeze and all of the fall out that comes with it into the middle of the room. 

Post mortem:  I saved a family member that day, but sadly there were two casualties who never had a chance.  As I can’t get this vision out of my mind (I‘m hoping that writing about it will be good therapy) I replay it over and over again in slow motion…which is really amazing considering how fast it happened.  As I’m turning away from my daughter… and releasing my payload if you will, I open my eyes and look down.  Sitting right behind us are two guys (literally 3 inches away) having their La Famiglia meals.  All I can say is, “Excuse me” didn’t come close to cutting it.  (I have to apologize for the lack of detail, but I’d need at least 3 pages of adjectives to describe the looks on their faces and the motions their flailing arms were making).  So now I turn back around to my daughter and expect to get a, “Hey Dad, Thanks for sparing my life.”  Instead I’m now facing a stranger.  My daughter is completely mortified and staring stone-faced straight-ahead acting like she doesn’t know me.  I might have also detected an air of “Why is this grotesque individual trying to talk to me?”  So this made things very awkward, as I should have been given an Oscar for keeping it together when I violated these poor guys meals.  But the look on her face was too much and I cracked up….still standing right next to my victims who were not in the mood to be laughed at.

Fisticuffs were never had; we didn’t even get to the point where someone said, “Well Oh Yeah!?!”  But my daughter did suggest that we should pay quickly, and that I should remain silent (although she didn’t say it that nicely) before these two guys punched my lights out.