Tag Archives: funny

The house of feral boys

My wife is out of town for a week. I hope she can make it through this time with her sanity intact. It must be a great burden on her mind to know that four males are alone in her house without supervision for seven long days.

There must be many things troubling her. For example, she is convinced that none of the people in her house know how to properly load the dishwasher. Two of them don’t even seem to know where the dishwasher is; one of them doesn’t understand the value of exposing all the dirty dishes to water in the system; and the last is sure he can fit one more dish inside, because it is just a spacial puzzle that can, and must, be solved in the name of efficiency. You just have to move every dish to a new location three or four times, and then the solution becomes obvious.

We’ll probably get some clothes washed, but we won’t do it the right way. They certainly won’t smell like the proper combination of three laundry soaps and two fabric softeners. It takes years to perfect that laundry smell. What can rank amateurs do in a week?

It’s a lead-pipe cinch the washcloths won’t be folded properly.

The kids will be fed, just maybe not whenever they are hungry. The one who has compassion for your pangs will be back after a few more days. Meanwhile, being hungry until dinnertime builds character. We’ll eat after we get some stuff done.

The boys will be clean, such as boys get clean. Mom instituted a regular bath schedule long ago. But it may not matter that the bodies themselves are clean, since the laundry will certainly smell funky from the wrong proportions of chemical additives.

“Mom will be so happy with how we’ve kept house! Now let’s punch each other some more.”

The carpet has already been vacuumed once since my wife left. In the interest of full disclosure, this was done because we were clearing living room space to put up the Christmas tree. Then the boys decided they didn’t want to put up the tree without Mom. So that was a wasted vacuum. Now we must do it again before she comes home. I was toying with idea of mopping the kitchen, but if I have to vacuum all over again, well, I can’t be expected to give my whole life over to floor maintenance, can I?

And just to be clear, we vacuumed not just the prospective tree area; we vacuumed all the rugs (upstairs excluded – we’re not wild-eyed zealots). Add to this the fact that I’ve yelled at the kids to pick up after themselves enough for two parents and I think you’d have to admit I’m really picking up the slack around here.

All in all, we’ve done pretty well for a quartet of cave dwellers.

And no, we’re not gonna talk about the bathrooms.

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Cherished historical figured pulled from his pedestal

For his 7th grade Language Arts class (what we old people used to call English), Big Brother keeps a reading log. Fortunately, he gets to read whatever books he wants, because he is not an eager reader, and is not particularly fond of fiction. He does the best the with history, so he has been reading a book about the American Civil War. For those who did not go to school in the US, and those who did not pay attention during their US schooling, it’s important to the forthcoming incident to know that the American Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865.

Big Brother was getting close to the end of the book, last I checked. This morning, as all the boys were getting logged into school (wrap your heads around that, old people), I asked him if he’d finished.

From his classroom on the couch, he replied that he had.

“How did the Civil War end?” I asked.

He gave the standard reply of any 12-year-old who doesn’t want to be quizzed about schoolwork: “I don’t remember.”

“Really?” I asked. “You just finished it yesterday.”

“You already know how it ended,” he told me.

“But you just read the book,” I insisted.

From his classroom, on the loveseat, Buster (3rd grade) piped up in his brother’s defense. “But you know the most about history,” he told me.

“Yes, but . . . “

Big Man (1st grade) cut me off. Sitting in his classroom on the recliner, he forestalled my argument and closed the case in Big Brother’s defense. “But you were the one who was in that fight,” he told me, just before all three boys broke into a peal of laughter.

I just got cut down by a six-year-old.

Can you blame me for being a proud father?

I’m the guy in the middle. The one holding the gun.

Conversations with my wife: Vitamins

Back when we were first preparing for stay-at-home orders, we, like many people, scrambled to make sure we had a good supply of the family’s prescription medications. On one of her trips to the pharmacy, my wife picked up a bottle of daily vitamins for each of us. I hadn’t been in the habit of taking general vitamin pills, but it wasn’t a bad idea to keep the levels up, with pathogens potentially lurking around every corner.

A contrast between the bottle of Women’s vitamins and the bottle of Men’s vitamins was immediately apparent. I thought perhaps her pills were larger than mine, because maybe the vitamins a man needs are smaller than the vitamins a woman needs. I don’t know how big an individual vitamin is. Or maybe she needs extra supplements to give her the strength to deal with me in isolation.

A vitamin gap?

These notions were dispelled when I read the labels side by side. Her bottle had 200 daily doses, while my bottle held only 120.

I found interesting the theory that I would not need to be kept in optimal health for as long as she would.

ME: Your vitamin bottle is bigger than mine.

WIFE: So it is.

ME: Yours has 80 more pills in it that mine does.

WIFE: Yeah, I know.

ME: Why did you get me fewer pills?

WIFE: Women live longer than men. You don’t like it when I waste money on things we might not need.

 

Give it the old middle school try

There’s an old American phrase: “Give it the old college try.” If you are not American and old, you may not have heard it. To give it the old college try means to lend a task your best effort, even if you believe the challenge may go beyond your abilities.

Saturday morning, we woke up to six inches of new fallen snow. I went out to shovel. Buster was planning on coming out to help, but when I told him he had to wear his snow pants, he decided he’d rather stay inside and whine about how much he hated wearing snow pants.

The snow was wet and heavy – the kind they refer to as Heart Attack Snow, because it takes down so many older gentlemen like me through overexertion. I didn’t experience any coronary events, but it was slow going through the heavy snow.

When I was half way through our driveway, Big Brother came outside, wearing snow pants and not whining about it, which made him my favorite kid for the moment. I asked him to grab a shovel and begin on the neighbor’s driveway. Our neighbor does helpful things for us, and I’m trying to teach the boys to be neighborly.

Big Brother went to work on the neighbor’s driveway and kept up a good pace for all of three minutes. Then he came back, complaining of tightness in his shoulders. I told him that’s what hard work feels like and if he did it a little more often the tightness wouldn’t come around so quickly.

I said he could take a break, which he understood to mean he should go inside. He did reassure me that he might come back out after a while.

A good day’s work – when you are 11 and disinterested in work.

There was no sign of him when I finished our driveway and sidewalks. I walked to the neighbor’s driveway to see what Big Brother had accomplished before his shoulders gave out on him. He’d cleared a fine-looking rectangle with sharp right angles. His work was an ode to geometry – a very small ode. Seeing the extent of his industry inspired me to think of the old college try.

I don’t know why it made me think of the old college try, because there was no evidence of it here. I’m calling what he had given “the old middle school try.” The old middle school try is what happens when your dad asks you to do something and it turns out to be harder than you thought, so you come up with excuses to give up after a few minutes.

I couldn’t leave the driveway in that condition, so I finished shoveling the snow. Thanks to the old middle school try, nearly 10% of it was already done for me. By the time I was finished, my shoulders and forearms were sore. It’s right that I should have more sore spots than the kid, since I’ve had the benefit of college and he’s only been to middle school.