There’s a field not far from my house where a bunch of guys fly model airplanes: Corsairs and Messerschmitts, Fokkers and Sopwith Camel biplanes, neat Piper Cubs, sleek F16s and huge lumbering B17 Flying Fortresses. There’s even a miniature Huey UH-1A helicopter, complete with a door gun. All day long you can hear the drone, rattle, and buzz of them out there, along with the excited hoots and hollers of their owners. Don’t these guys work? So I walked over …Read the Rest
Yesterday the Nordic Warrior Queen tasked me with cleaning the patio. Saturday is chore day and all that. No big deal really, except there was bird crap everywhere – it looked like a family of diarrhea-stricken quail had taken up residence out there. The walls and floor were graffitied in myriad colors of guano, and there were enough feathers floating about to make a down comforter. There wasn’t a broom or mop in the world big enough for this job. …Read the Rest
In 1962, much of what we know today was yet to happen. The Beatles were busily working on their first album and Alcatraz was still open for business. Most Americans had never heard of Vietnam or the Gaza Strip. Martin Luther King had a dream, but was still keeping it to himself. Construction of the Berlin Wall had just begun. There was no James Bond, and chess master Garry Kasparov was not yet born, nor Johnny Depp, Helen Hunt, Julia …Read the Rest
It was just after four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. The mailman must have come by now. I was expecting a check for one of my boring magazine articles, and with any luck the Victoria Secret catalog would be there as well. I slipped on my TEVAs – I call them my Jesus shoes – and opened the front door, stepping out into 115 degrees and blinding Arizona sunlight. Halfway to the mailbox, I realized I’d forgotten my sunglasses. Worse, …Read the Rest
Boy, the Nordic Warrior Queen was really steamed this morning. It wasn’t thirty seconds after the toilet flushed that she rocketed out of the bathroom, waving the remnants of a toilet paper roll in my face. I assumed I’d put the roll on backwards again. “What the hell is this?” she hollered. Of course I defended myself. “What? I put it on the way you told me.” “That’s not it.” Cautious now, I asked the worst. “I used the last …Read the Rest
The Nordic Warrior Queen dragged me to our friend Becca’s baby shower last weekend. I don’t really like baby showers – I feel bad for those humongous women, as if I’m somehow to blame. And all those silly games – “Guess the size of the mother’s tummy” or “How many baby items can you name,” and even, “Pin the sperm on the egg.” The mysterious rites of passage for an expectant mother are too difficult for a simple male to wrap his head …Read the Rest
The weatherman on the local news is practically peeing himself with excitement. Tonight was our second haboob of the season. Who can blame him? After all, when the weather forecast gets reused for months on end (hot and dry), it’s sure to be a boring job. Who needs four years of college to be a meteorologist in Arizona? In meteorological terms, a haboob is caused by the downdraft which forms at the outer edge of a thunderstorm. They look sort …Read the Rest
The Nordic Warrior Queen complained the other day about the messy state of my garage. “Get rid of all that junk,” she said. “You’re never going to use any of it.” She just doesn’t understand. I don’t think any women do. Someday you might need a piston ring expander for a Chevy small-block, and one can never have too many crowbars. Okay, maybe the 300 foot tape measure is overkill, but that .22 caliber nail gun might come in really …Read the Rest
Driving Highway 125 south through Chula Vista this weekend, I suddenly realized I was out of quarters for the toll. If I didn’t feed it three bucks, the bastard robot machine would photograph my license plate and email it to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, who would then send me a traffic ticket. Like everything else in California, it was bound to be ridiculously expensive. The exit was just over two miles away – how was I supposed to …Read the Rest
While visiting my daughter and her new baby this weekend in San Diego, I’ve come to appreciate motherhood: changing diapers forty-seven times a day, managing a tightly coordinated schedule of bathing, feeding, napping, burping, crapping, and playtime, and keeping the kid entertained with coo-coo-coo and shh-shh-shh in between it all. Raising a baby is a lot of work. My once-tomboy daughter has evolved into a baby-bouncing, wheel-on-the-bus-singing, nursery-rhyme-spouting model of motherhood, capable of changing a cranky, puke-spattered and beshitted infant …Read the Rest