Monthly Archives: July 2012

When My Joke Backfired

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Many years ago, our family went to the World’s Fair in Montreal, Canada. I was a semi-little guy, but a budding young smartaleck  nonetheless.

My mom had a genius: Have shirts custom made for the family, so that all eight of us would walk around the World’s Fair looking alike. There might have been a safety side to the plan, but I never knew.

So mom had eight shirts made by the Dutch Made company. All of the shirts were an itchy short sleeve with cuffs. The women folk all had red and white checkers and the men all had blue and white checkers. This was a highly embarrassing way to cruise around the world’s most prestigious fair.

Being the frugal truck driver-type family we were, mom and dad decided we should save money by taking our lunch in with us. But the days being what they were, mom had no way for us to carry the sandwiches around with us. No picnic basket. No backpack.

Finding an opportunity to insert a smart comment I piped up with “We could put it in Dad’s suitcase!”

Mom looked at dad and they both smiled. Dad raised his eyebrows. I knew we were about to enter a new era of family embarrassment.

The sandwiches, carrots, and pudding were loaded into dad’s metal truck driver suitcase (the one that had seen “one million miles”), and off we went for the entrance gates.

If we had done this in 2012, our entire family would have been suspected of being terrorists, detained in a dank little side room, and our suitcase blown up in the “bomb bin”.

As it turned out, we turned a blind eye to the show stopping presence of the Begly family in Montreal, and had a great visit.

I think it’s time to pass on the “embarrassment”  torch to my children…

How to Sleep When You’re Tired

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If you are tired enough you can sleep under almost any situation.

Take my son Joshua, for example. I went to tuck him in one night, and found him laying in bed with a 2×4 board on top of him. It was no small board either. The thing was almost 5 feet long.

“Whose 2×4 is that?” I asked.

“What 2×4?” he replied.

“The one on top of you,” I said.

“I don’t know,” he yawned as he drifted off to sleep. I kissed him goodnight, and left the 2×4 on him, thinking that the next day he would say to himself, “Wow, I slept with a 2×4 on top of me last night!”

The next night I went to tuck him in and say good night, and what did I find? He was almost asleep with that same 2×4 laying on top of him.

“Why do you still have that 2×4 laying on top of you?” I asked.

“Is there a 2×4 still on top of me?” he replied as he drifted off to sleep.

I guess if you are tired enough, you can sleep under ANY situation. That is if you are a kid…and you haven’t had an 18 hour layover in Istanbul, Turkey.

How to Leverage Wheaties at the Grocery Store

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Leveraging Wheaties is a lost art form.

One evening Caleb and I stopped  by the store for a few groceries.  We noticed that there was a pallet of the new Wheaties “Fuel” cereal on sale, at a substantial discount. We grabbed two boxes, and a few other items and proceeded to the self checkout. When we scanned the boxes of Wheaties, an automatic coupon popped out. “$2.00 off on your next grocery store purchase” read the coupon.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s pretty good.”

“You know if you hit the ‘BACKSPACE’ button on the screen now, you could use that coupon, Caleb said.”

“That can’t be right,” I replied. “You could forget these other groceries, and buy a $4.27 box of Wheaties for only 87 cents.”

“Correct,” said Caleb.

We stared at each other for a moment. Then we tested the system. Sure enough, Caleb could buy one box of Wheaties, use the store discount, manufacturer’s coupon, plus the auto coupon, and buy a box of Wheaties Fuel for only 87 cents. The catch? You had to buy exactly 5 boxes at a time.

Being 8:30 at night, not having anything else to do, and having a pocket full of cash, we began a very strange process: Caleb brought 5 boxes of Wheaties to the self checkout, performed the weird purchase, and I took the cart out to the Subaru, and loaded it up. I was running carts as fast as I could.

As first, we tried to be discreet. But cashiers being who they are, they noticed me on about the 3rd or 4th trip I took out the door. After answering their question about the quantity of purchases with “We really like Wheaties,” we decided to go into overdrive and pretty much clear out the store as fast as possible.

Caleb was loading up carts as fast as he could, and I was running them out the door.

Did I mention that blueberries were on sale at a substantial discount, too? We pretty much cleaned out the blueberry section. I believe I commented to the store clerk how much we like blueberries on our Wheaties Fuel.

Then the store Manager showed up.

Caleb heard the clerk ask a distressed looking manager, “Can they do this?” The store manager wasn’t exactly sure at that moment. Meanwhile Caleb  smiled at him while I ran Wheaties out the front door like a squirrel tearing across the lawn with a wad of nuts in my mouth.

When it was over, we had collected 100 boxes of Wheaties. And cases of blueberries.

We set the Wheaties up like dominos at home and played with them. The blueberries ended up on cereal, and a thousand smoothies.

Next time we might try Snickers bars…

Three Poops Outside

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     My 4 year old son recently discovered what mankind has known for thousands of years: You can actually poop outside. Not on a potty chair, but in full view of God and man.

     He’s actually gotten quite good at it, sort of. He will go in a location that we all walk on, but isn’t visible from anyone doing dishes in the house. (We’ll discuss dishwashers in another blog.)

      Most recently, he got away with 3 of them before poop started showing up in our house. On our shoes. Now we have an assorted pile of shoes, and rubber boots outside of the house waiting for someone to take the garden hose, a scrub brush, and chemical handling gloves to the petrifying organic material on their soles. I look a little funny at work, walking around in a left footed flip flop, and a left footed ski boot, but hey, what are you gonna do?

     It isn’t like we don’t have facilities for the little tykes to use for relief. And even though we have six kids, there is never a line for the Lou if you run downstairs, upstairs, or outside to the rented porta-potty. (If you have six kids, I recommend you rent a porta-potty).

Being the loving parent that I am, I tell my errant son that he has to take some toilet paper, and pick the stuff up, and drop it in the porta-potty, or he won’t get anymore Hot Wheels cars for the rest of his life. That usually does the trick, but I can’t find out why he keeps on doing it. When I ask him  the reason, he simply says “I was HEADING to  the porta-potty. I’d believe him if the porta-potty wasn’t 180 degrees the opposite direction from the messes.

Have you ever noticed that the word “toilet” begins with the word “toil?”