It's a New Year in Hate

In which your humble narrator brings the mad dizdain* to five offending abominations.

1. My house, she is the structural equivalent of  the type of crack-addled, welfare queen that only exists in Republicans' imaginations. She always needs something. A roof, a furnace, a new water heater, new toilets, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum.
2. The intimation from students that I'm supposed to respond to emails sent after 9:00 p.m. within an hour or two. Here's the deal students, my kids go to bed at 7:00. Then it's Me time which involves equal quantities of beer and Netflix streaming. Then I go to bed. 
3. Using** the word "utilize" instead of the word "use." Seriously, why?
4. George Stephanopolous. This one isn't entirely rational. He just bugs me.
5. The recent decision on the part of Child #2 to stop saying "no" and "yes" but rather to say "nope" and "yep" which are, in case you didn't infer it on your own, completely impossible to distinguish between when she's got a damn pacifier in her mouth.

*This is an intentional misspelling for comic effect. I can spell. This is a quality blog. Tell your friends.
** See? If I had said "utilizing the word 'utilize'" I would be a heinous douche.

Why would you replace one perfectly good preposition with two?

In which your humble narrator decries creeping colloquialism.

One of the odder, at least to my ear, verbal tics endemic to the laconic, Scandinavian or German inhabitants of this God-forsaken windswept tundra is the change of the idiomatic construction "based on" to the bastardized alternate, "based off of". This variation doesn't seem as jarring when spoken as it does when written, but it still frosts my grammarian posterior.

In assignments for my class, students are constantly declaiming that an idea or practice is "based off of" some pertinent theory. This makes no sense from a metaphorical perspective. A house can successfully be "based on" a foundation, but it cannot be "based off of" the foundation and retain its function.

In conclusion, get it right, people, or pay the price.

January Can Suck It

In which your humble narrator crowns a new most heinous month.

Named for the two-faced, Roman jerk deity, Janus, January is our most iniquitous month. It's cold. It's dark. It's still snowing, and it's long.

The furnace needs to be replaced. The new roof is leaking in at least one place, maybe two. There is nowhere else to pile snow from the driveway or the garage apron. I've taken to shoveling at night, filling a wheel barrow with filthy snow and surreptitiously dumping it on the property of neighbors who have offended my delicate sensibilities in some way.*

The newly Ph.Deeded wife has still not gotten a raise.

The children have been sick all month. Everyone had a horrible cold last week and both kids got pink eye. This morning I woke up unable to open my left eye. It was cemented shut with dried eye filth. Thank you, so much Child #2, who thought "NO TOUCHING DADDY'S FACE" was some hilarious invitation to a game of "smear mucus into Daddy's eyeballs."

It's an inauspicious start to 2011. February's probably going to suck too, but at least it's short and it can't possibly be colder and darker than it has been.

*"What a hideous jacket, you get three wheel barrows full of dirty snow on your doorstep."

Happy Birthday, Ernest Borgnine!

In which your humble narrator celebrates the life of a featured guest star on virtually every network television program aired during his childhood, including Magnum P.I.

Happy birthday, Ernest; he's 94 years young. Also he was briefly, disastrously married to Ethel Merman. So there's that.

A Teensy Misunderstanding

In which your humble narrator freaks out Wife-a-roo.

Thursday night, while preparing dinner after a long day of finding a leak in the new roof and discovering that it turns out we're going to need to replace our 33-year-old furnace or face the consequences of freezing to death, I was hunting for the can opener. Actually we have two can openers, the good one and the crappy one. To make it more interesting, they look exactly the same. One of them (Ol' Reliable) is a little heavier and actually opens cans. The other one (Seamus McPieceofcrap) lurches around the edge of the can like a drunken Irishman frequently popping off (see drunken Irishmen) and then bursting into a tuneless version of 'Danny Boy."

I couldn't find Ol' Reliable and was using Seamus to open up a can of crushed tomatoes and he did his usual terrible job, leaving two connections between lid and sides preventing me from accessing the delicious tomatoes contained within the can. Using the special 'moron center' of my brain, I resolved to just push down on one side to free the lid. And so I did, resulting in me neatly producing a little deli slice off the side of my left index finger. Being an incompetent clotter (I'm not a hemophiliac or anything, it just takes a long time) I clamped my thumb over the cut and raised my hand over my head.

"Shit," said I, "I cut myself." Wife-a-roo was at the kitchen sink. She whirled around and did her frightened muppet noise and started sputtering, "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit," which seemed a bit melodramatic.

It was then that I realized my left hand was covered in a tiny, tiny amount of blood and a copious amount of crushed tomatoes.

How Dolly Parton Saved my Cousin's Life

In which your humble narrator explains, on the occasion of her 65th birthday, why Dolly is revered in his household.

My mother and her sister (my eldest aunt) are less than a year apart in age and have traditionally done lots of major life steps nearly synchronously. They married near the same time, had children at the same time and divorced at the same time. As such, sister-of-me and I spent lots of time with our similarly-aged cousins during the tandem dissolution of our respective parents' marriages.

This time together includes one particularly interesting vacation; two Moms, four kids go on the road for good times and adventure. Predictably the squabbling began almost as soon as we crossed the border from Ohio into Kentucky (about 20 minutes into the trip). Six people. One crew-cab pick-up truck. 3,675 lbs. of luggage (Mom and Auntie are not adherents of the "packing light" philosophy). We drove down. We stayed in a beach house for a week sniping at each other. At the end of the week we packed up and left for home.

By the end of the week, each of us was harboring murderous impulses toward my cousin (lets's call him Fusspot). Fusspot had spent the week complaining. About everything. All the time. He picked fights with his Mom, with his sister, with seagulls, with inanimate objects. In all fairness, it wasn't really his fault. There is a long standing rule in my family of origin that someone must ruin vacation. If the usual vacation ruiner cannot perform his or her duties, a replacement will be appointed and proceed to do everything in his or her power to provide an unpleasant experience. It has been this way since time immemorial, and so it shall be done until the end of vacations/time.

As we meandered northerly toward home, the air seethed with murderous intent. Fusspot continued to loudly air every grievance that entered his adolescent brain. At rest stops my sister and I debated whether it would be better to throw Fusspot off of a mountain top in rural North Carolina, or if we should simply make a break for it and start new lives as country western singers in Tennessee. The long knives were unsheathed.

And at about this time my aunt remembered that she had brought a book on tape. Perhaps that would help pass the time through the surprisingly heavy traffic. It was Dolly Parton's recently published audio autobiography, "Dolly: My Life and other Unfinished Business."

Her dulcet-toned delivery of the story of her hardscrabble* upbringing in Sevierville, Tennessee, her marriage to a recluse, her entertainment career, and her many reflections on her hairdos were the music that soothed the savage beast. Every single one of us was mesmerized by Dolly's harrowing tale of poverty and triumph. We were transfixed by her tendency to break into song while she told the story of her childhood. It was weird. Dolly is weird. Dolly's take on her experiences is blithely optimistic to the point of delusion, but sort of awesome?  But most importantly, Dolly did the talking. For a blessed four hours everyone shut the hell up, and we didn't commit murder. And that's how Dolly Parton saved my cousin's life.

*The use of the word "hardscrabble" is mandatory in any piece of writing concerning Ms. Parton.

First Day of Term

In which your humble narrator recalls the implementation of a key policy.

It's the first day of term, which fills me with dread. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a better class this semester.

When I was a pale, callow youth I went away to college in a magical land called St. Paul which was conveniently located far away from my crazy family and also in a large(ish) metropolitan area where one rarely saw gun racks and 'chaw' tins all over the damn ground. Though people were surprisingly nonchalant about carrying hockey sticks in grocery stores and churches.

In my first course, my professor (a sardonic transplant from Lubbock) announced at the beginning of class that "In accordance with College policy, I'd like to say from the outset that I care deeply about each and every one of you."