Nuclear Family Warhead

They may have found me through a search engine, maybe somebody sent them the link or maybe they hired Lt. Columbo,  but whatever way they did it, Select Comfort has responded.  You may recall that I posted earlier about my Sleep Number bed.  A gentleman by the name of Ian has responded in the comments of that post; check it out.  He has offered to remedy the situation.  The issue now is that we have already bought a new bed.  It is a Serta pillow top, and we up-sized from a Queen to a King.  Getting that thing away from me is going to be like getting Keith Richards his original blood.  Good luck.  Anyway, maybe Nukegirl would like it.  Mr Lady, you want to pay shipping?  Make an offer.

Momo Fali commented last week that some assistance with pronunciation would be nice, so I wanted to point something out.  When you click on the word link, it will take you to the dictionary dot com page for the word(s) of the week.  Sitting next to the word should be a symbol that looks like a speaker with sound waves coming out of it.  Click on it and you will hear HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey pronounce the word for you.  Actually, there are quite a few voices in there pronouncing.  I think I heard Richard Burton the other day.  As long as Charles Nelson Reilly isn’t recruited by them, we’ll be OK.  Thanks again to Momo for the suggestion.

This weeks first word comes from my sister Leta.  She said she liked the Big Word Wednesday feature because as a society we had become languorous with our language.  After she said that, I immediately ran for my keyboard.  I used to run for my dictionary, but that is so 80’s.  1480’s, that is.  That’s when the word originated.  It is synonymous with lethargy and means: listless, lack of physical or mental energy.  I’ve been in touch with that emotion before.  Only one word this week kids, I’m feeling a little languorous.  Don’t forget to check the BWW page  for all of the words we’ve covered so far.

I escaped from TiVo hell.  It wasn’t easy, but I did it.  What was at first a cool, easy way to save shows for my later viewing pleasure soon turned out to be more trouble than it was worth.  At one time, these were the shows that were set up in the Season Pass Manager: House, Desperate Housewives, Lost, ER, American Idol, The Office, The 4400, Nip/Tuck, 24, Heroes, Brothers and Sisters, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Grey’s Anatomy, Holmes On Homes, Intervention, Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles.  Now, before anybody goes and calls me a girl, or a “chick” (Mr Lady) understand that I wasn’t watching all of these shows.  NukeMom had quite a few in there.  I’ll let you debate over which shows she watched, which ones I watched and which ones we both watched.  I swear, drink one wine cooler while listening to Delilah in your bunny slippers and you’re a prissy boy for life.  Besides,  they were Nukegirl’s slippers, and in a court of law I could still plead the fifth.

The original idea of TiVo is sound; record shows when you don’t have time to watch them, then come back when you do have time and get caught up.  Simple, right?  Yeah, that’s what I thought too.  My portion of these programs came out to 9 1/2 hours.  When you factor in the shows that I was watching “live” while recording another one showing at the same time, you can add another 4 hours, giving us a grand total of 13 1/2 hours of television. That’s about how long it took Da Vinci to paint the Last Supper.  Tolstoy wrote War and Peace in less time, and I think I’m going to watch all of this TV in one week?  Well, if I don’t get through all of it this week, I can just save it, and catch up NEXT week!  Genius!

By the middle of October I had enough shows stored in my TiVo to prompt Bill Gates to go out and buy more  of their stock.  If I had started watching right then, skipped through commercials and gave up some frills like eating and sleeping, I could be done by Christmas.  Hey, it was a tangible plan at the time.  The problem was, no matter how hard I tried, I could rarely stay awake for an entire episode of ANY of the shows.  It would go something like this: I would start watching a show, fall asleep, wake up, watch some show,  fall asleep, on and on until around 4am when I would wake up on the couch because Billy Mays had yelled “BAM!” loud enough to wake me up.  I’d turn the TV off, go to bed and dream some very strange dreams.

The problem with trying to stay awake while watching TV is that everything runs together; shows, commercials, dreams, everything.  Ever been dreaming and when you wake up you realize that your dream is strangely consistent with the plot of the show on the TV?  Seriously.  Try rewinding next time you wake up on the couch with the TV on and see if I’m not preaching some gospel here.  The murkiness in my head was toying with my ability to separate fantasy from reality.  It used to take quite a few Miller Lites to do that; now TiVo was doing it.  Jack Bauer was waxing poetic about the attributes of Oxi-Clean and Orange Glo, while Billy Mays was kicking some terrorist butt.  Dr. House was running, er, hobbling on his cane around the Washington Monument in a suit patterned with question marks telling me how to get free money from the government.  At the same time, Matthew Lesko was taunting his interns, popping pills and ogling Dr. Cuddy.  I couldn’t keep it straight anymore.  My cerebellum hurt.  It was time for a change.

I have finally come to my senses.  I have 3 shows that I refuse to miss.  I make time after everyone has gone to bed to watch them, and my new plan has been working famously.  At weeks end, I am at shows end rather than at wits end.  It’s a win-win.  I win, my sanity wins and Franz Kafka can move out of my brain.  At least I won’t have to worry about Dwight Schrute trying to get me to go to Free Credit Report dot com anymore.

I finally saw my first episode of “30 Rock” the other day. It won’t be my last. I was especially taken by the character of Frank and his cornucopia of head-wear.  I used to be like Frank.  I had hundreds of hats. Since this was while I was in High School, the majority of them were either beer hats or State Line Steak and BBQ Restaurant hats.  That’s where I worked.  They changed it later to just “Barbeque”, and most of us old timers were pissed, until we realized that possession of a “Steak AND BBQ” hat was a sign of status and possible future wealth.  Like Mr. Krabs trying to get back his soda drink hat from first Spongebob, and then Smitty Werbenjaegermanjensen and the army of the dead, we knew they’d be valuable one day.

So it was with great trepidation that I ventured into the garage, or, the “Wastelands” as NukeMom likes to call it, to find my treasured hat.  Would it still be out here?  Would I be able to remember where I had put it?   What color was it again?  I searched high and low, and all I could come up with was a “Sticky Fingers” restaurant cap, which is strange if only for the fact that I’ve never been to one and have no idea  where it came from.  I also came across an old “Lite Beer Super Bowl Something Roman Numeric” hat.  I can’t tell you which Super Bowl, I didn’t look.  Did I mention that I’m on a MISSION here?  Oh, and I found my official Masters golf hat!  Hand delivered from Augusta National (Thanks, Ted).

After 15 minutes and thoughts of  hopelessness, something green caught my eye.  It was under the belt sander, and partially under the circular saw.  Not a good sign.  With the care and gentleness of an EMT extracting a crash victim from a smashed up Miata, I pulled the belt sander and saw off of my poor hat.  It was faint, but I could feel a pulse.  Two rounds of mouth to bill resuscitation (blowing dust off of it), and my hat was able to sit up on my head without falling off.  Here’s a picture from ICU; taken post-op. 

I did the best that I could; nursing it back to health.  It wasn’t until my hat was out of the woods that I noticed something: It was only a “Barbeque”, not a treasured “Steak AND BBQ”.  Bummer.  There goes my ebay feedback score.  I cooked steaks later that night, and proudly wore my new found old friend.  I could still smell smoke from the BBQ pits from all those years ago lingering in the material.  Memories started flooding into my head; could they be coming from the hat?  They must be!  How else would I remember that the last “Steak AND BBQ” hat that I owned was lent out, in good faith I might add, to Kyle.  Kyle, if you’re reading this, I want my hat back.  And when I say back, I mean like yesterday.  Don’t forget; I know where you’re living now.  Well, the city anyway.  2nd day air will be fine.

Have you ever wanted to commit murder?  I mean, we all know it’s a sin and all, but if you could be reasonably sure that you could get away with it; would you?  No?  OK, how about this scenario then: the local sheriff deputizes you and puts you in charge of ridding the town of all the oxygen thieves that happen to reside there.  I’m talking oxygen thieves like those responsible for what you see in these pictures.  People who are so lazy that they can’t even make it the extra 4 spaces to put a shopping cart in the cart corral.  Do you see how many there are?  There are literally 18 to 20 carts that have been jacked up on that median so that these lazy asses can get home faster.  These are the same socially challenged people who would be first in line to file a claim against the store if one of these carts damaged their car. “Nope, I’m sure that’s not my cart, I put mine on the median over there.  How do I know it’s not my cart?  Oh, that’s easy, mine had the dirty diaper in it.”

Why am I so pissed about this?  Because my car was in the space you see in front of the median.  I had to move 2 carts that were resting against my car.  That’s right people, some (well, at least 2) of these air pilferers couldn’t even make it the last 3 feet to the median, let alone the final marathon 4 parking spaces to the cart corral.  This store does have cart wranglers, they just couldn’t keep up.  Got their butts kicked is what happened.  What this store needs is someone with passion, someone who takes pride in their job, someone like…well, someone like this: 

God Bless you, Alan Andrew Carter.  The country needs more young men like you.  Sure could have used your help today, though.  Where the hell were you?

Being rather pleased with last week’s offering of 2 words, we will now be listing 2 words every Wednesday.   You can become twice as smart in half the time!  Our first word this week is lugubrious; meaning mournful, dismal or gloomy.  Not the cheeriest of words, but then, they can’t all be, right?  This fits in well if you have kids because the deeper definition states that it is “mournful; indicating sorrow, often ridiculously or feignedly; doleful; woful; pitiable; as, a whining tone and a lugubrious look.”  Yeah, I’ve seen this word in action a time or two; usually after a parental request has been issued.  We parents call it a “request”, the kids usually call it a “demand”.  Oh well, tomato/tomahto.

The second word for this week is pulchritude; meaning great physical beauty; comeliness.  Wow, wonder why this word isn’t used more often.  Pulchritude?  Sounds like a person with a bad disposition to me; but then, my name isn’t Mr. Webster, is it?  I would use this word with caution in mixed company, I have a feeling that unless the person is a semi-sesquipedalian, it could come off as offensive.  I’m almost offended just typing it.  Use your best judgement.  Don’t forget, you can always click on the BWW page  to see all of the words.  Now, go out there and sound smart!

I’ve been thinking about perception lately, because things aren’t always what they seem.  The title pretty much says it all, and I can distinctly remember being at that Melissa Etheridge concert in 1992 when this realization hit me (and NukeMom).  I think NukeMom noticed it first when she said “Wow, there aren’t very many guys here.”   Since this was only our second or third date (we weren’t married yet), I was paying more attention to NukeMom in her hot black top than I was the makeup of the crowd.  After she said that was when I noticed that not all of the short haircuts belonged to men.  Ms. Etheridge didn’t “come out of the closet” until early in 1993, and apparently, there were a lot of people who knew about her closet; I just wasn’t one of them.  I was subjected to endless laughter from my friend Ann the next day at work.  “You really didn’t know?”, she asked me.  “I knew you were gay, because you don’t make it a secret, but Melissa took me by surprise.” I said.  Don’t get me wrong, I was still a fan, but “Come To My Window” never really sounded the same.

I relate that story because I find parallels with Nukegirl.  She is very good at making her reality my perception.  Some will say that she has me “tightly wrapped around her little finger”, while I contend that it is a simple slip knot, and that I can escape at any time.  Nukeboy1 and Nukeboy2 exhibit infrequent feeble attempts at manipulation, but they are no match for their little sister.  Is it in the female DNA?  This superhuman ability to bat an eyelash, or purse a lip that sends the male of the species clambering for the TV remote control?   Maybe it’s the chromosomes: xx=girl and xy=boy.  Do we males have a “Y” because the bottom right leg fell off of the “X”?  Maybe that little piece of the chromosome holds all of the secrets that the females possess.  In that little piece of chromosome is eyelash batting, crying on cue, do these jeans make my butt look big?, the affinity for the Lifetime Movie Channel, the ability to spend 30 minutes in a store and come out having not purchased a single thing and the ability to project their perception into the minds eye of the male.  Just a theory.  I’m not a scientist, I just play one on the Internet.

I first saw this computer game at the in-laws when we were there for a visit.  The kids were having fun with it, and eventually Nukeboy2 convinced me to give it a try.  If you’ve never played, it’s kind of like Tetris in reverse; with 8 different “heads” to shoot upwards instead of shapes dropping down on you.  To eliminate the characters you must shoot one “head” into two matching heads that have to be touching each other.  OK, so I guess it’s not like Tetris at all, but it is just as, if not more, addicting.  Don’t believe me?  Go here and download the shareware.  E-mail me two weeks from now at 3:00am, right before your family’s intervention and your trip to The Betty Ford Clinic-Video Division.

There are several different categories to this game, ranging from “Easy” all the way to “Armageddon”.  Then there is one called “Puzzle”.  Puzzle is my addiction of choice.  It gets under your skin, makes you want it more and more until you can’t control yourself.  Next thing you know your playing 20 to 30 games in a sitting.  The phone is ringing, but you don’t care; you have to beat this level!  It is like luggage, it will be with you for life.  Since it is shareware, you can play up to 100 games on each level.  But puzzle is different.  You can play the first 15 levels of Puzzle until the end of time.  That’s how they get you.  See, there are actually 50 levels in all to Puzzle, but you only get to sample the first 15.  Like a drug dealer who gives out “samples” until they have you hooked.   If you want to see the rest, you must register for $19.99.  This is fair, and the developers should be rewarded for their hard work and I WILL register, it’s just; they made a mistake. 

Each time you start a new game, up top is a graphic that tells you how many games you’ve played, and how much that would average out to per game if you would only REGISTER!  Mine tells me that I have played 783 games; “that’s only 0.03 per game” they taunt.  Well, I accept their challenge: I will play for free until my message says: “that’s only 0.00 per game”.  I figure I have about 1,217 games to get it down to a penny, after that, who knows how long it will take me to roll back the game odometer to zero.

Proceed with caution!  Don’t send the Vice Squad my way claiming I was your supplier.  If you get caught up in it, you’re on your own.  Don’t stand up in your “SA” (Snood Anonymous) meeting and blame it all on me.  Once you have your feet back under you, maybe you can try out Snood Towers.  Did I forget to mention that one?  Oh, yeah, just as addictive; maybe more.  You may fall off of the wagon and break both ankles.  Can you say “Relapse”?

We had a Sleep Number bed up until a couple of weeks ago.  While it was nirvana in the beginning, the end was bloody.   After 5 years of dutiful service, the box spring, or, what a sleep number bed uses as a box spring, decided it had had enough.  Enough of people sleeping on it, of kids jumping on it, of puppies climbing underneath it.  It just quit.  So there I was about 8 months ago, minding my own business, reading a book in bed when I heard something.  At first I thought dinner was coming back to haunt me, but then I heard the sound again, coming from under the bed.  It was a groan coupled with a creak wrapped around a screech.  And then; it happened:  two of the “support beams” of the sleep number bed gave out.  The entire upper left quadrant of the bed fell to the floor.  This was the quadrant where my head and torso resided.  I rolled onto the floor to investigate.

The construction of the “box spring”, really, just a box, of the sleep number bed is molded plastic.  It is hollow, so eventually, gravity and weight bearing are going to undermine it’s intent: to hold the bed up.   You fit together several rails, place them in your bed frame, and then place 4 flat pieces on top to form a lid.  The air mattresses goes on top of that.  Not the sturdiest of beds, but I had re-enforced it with the wooden slats that housed our old  box spring.  Guess that didn’t work. 

The collapsing of the bed became a monthly, and then, a weekly occurrence.  By the end I had re-enforced the bed with more wooden slats, gallon paint cans, and wood shims.  To no avail.  I couldn’t MacGyver it anymore, I was done.  So was the bed.  It was with great pleasure that I heaved the remnants of the sleep number bed from the top of the stairs to the cold, hard, cement garage floor.  Vengeance was mine.  It was a comfortable bed at one time, don’t get me wrong, but if you are going to get one I would suggest hiring a structural engineer and opening a charge account at Lowes or Home Depot.  You’re going to need “parts” at some point.

Do you have keen vision?  Not vision like “I see you!”, but vision as in “I have a vision of what my future holds?”  Do you have keen mental perception and understanding?  If so, then you may very well be perspicacious.  At first glance you may have thought like I did; that when you read the definition of this word it would be something like “Someone who is prone to sweating”, but, like me, you would have been incorrect.  I actually had another word in mind for this week, but perspicacious was too sesquipedalian-ish to pass up! 

The first word nominated for this week was sagacious.  It means pretty much the same thing as perspicacious, except in this definition, rather than having vision, you have discernment; and we all know how vastly different vision and discernment can be.  I like sagacious because of the way it rolls off the tongue: SUH-GEY-SHUHS.  I like to hold my pinkie finger at an acute angle when I say it.  I think a cigarette holder like the Penguin used to use in the old Batman show would pretty much seal the deal: pinkie out, cigarette holder and sagacious.  Think of the ramifications of using those visuals the next time you’re at the store!  There you have it; a two for one Big Word Wednesday.  Don’t forget, you can always go to the BWW page to see all of the entries.