Nuclear Family Warhead

This is unbelievable.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  God willing, I’ll never see anything like it again.  THAT’S A POTATO PEOPLE!  All 2lb’s, 12oz’s of it.  You’ll excuse me if I take some liberties here, but I’m calling it a 3 pound potato.  It’s 8 1/2 inches long!  If Arby’s made a curly fry out of it, it would circle the globe twice.  If I thought it would keep, I’d put it in the freezer, buy a cowboy hat and enter it in next years  County Fair.  That’s a blue ribbon tater if I’ve ever seen one.

Where did it come from?  That’s what I’d like to know.  Technically it came from a local store that will remain unnamed until the NEST crew has had a chance to put away their Geiger counters.  The bag said: “Island Potato’s”, I just didn’t realize that they meant Three Mile Island.  I cut it in half and used one half to make mashed potato’s.  We had them last night.  And tonight.  Probably on the menu tomorrow night as well.  The other half will be used to make potato salad.  I”m sure there will be plenty left over, so if you are interested, send me a self-addressed, stamped 55 gallon drum and I’ll be glad to send you some.  This offer is only open to the first 400 people who reply.

I have a theory on this; so stick with me.  I’ve been doing some leg work, and I’ve come across a few things.  I’m not trying to be Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory, but follow me here.  Exhibit A is a picture of an asteroid slamming into the earth at 500 gazillion-billion miles an hour.  Looks to be about the same size as the one that took out the dinosaurs.  A “Global Killer”, they call it.  Now, knowing what I pulled out of my bag of spuds the other day, the photographic evidence of which I have just shown you, I ask you: does there seem to be something familiar looking about that asteroid?  See any resemblance to a certain vegetable that has been persecuted on this planet for thousands of years?  No?  Require further proof?  Fair enough.  Take a look at this:

I give you Exhibit B.  The one in front is shaped more like your classic russet potato, rather than the longer, more tubular Idaho spud, but the family resemblance is there.  Now, do you see what’s lurking there in the background?  See it?  Back in the shadows?  Ducking for cover behind Uncle Tuber?  THAT’S MY POTATO!  I’m convinced of it!  See the straight clean lines down the sides?  The eyes that will be plucked out during the peeling process?  I think the evidence is overwhelming.  My potato came from outer space.  Probably some planet called Spudtron, or Tater Centauri.  The aliens on that planet have been hurling these giant spuds at us for millions of years, and only now is the truth coming out.  I know this to be true, because I saw Starship Troopers and that’s what the bugs did in that movie, so my theory carries some weight, don’t you think? One last question: Do you think that right before the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hit earth that the dinosaurs heard; “Would you like fries with that?” I think they did, they just shouldn’t have ordered them extra crispy.

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.

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”?

$1,000,000.00 offered to the person or persons that remove Dora the Explora’ from television.*

This insanity has gone on long enough.  I do my best to keep her out of the house, but like an annoying insect she slips through the door when you’re lugging in groceries, or letting the cat out for the morning.  Then she attaches herself to your brain stem and starts feasting.   This girl needs to be in the care of a good psychotherapist in order to get a handle on her OCD.  She has to ask herself where she’s going 3 or 4 times before she can get started.  Even then, she’s not really sure so she asks my kid for help. 

It turns out that the producers of Dora didn’t think that she and her boot wearing monkey were irritating enough.  She has a cousin too!  Diego.  He runs around with a dangerous predatory cat as a pet and thinks nothing of bringing this man-eater around the general population.  What is he thinking?  Well, admittedly, they do describe him as a “very special child.”

Dora and her monkey alone would be enough for any grown man to have to endure, but she has an entire menagerie of aggravating inanimate objects to draw from.  Chief among these being The Map.  I can tell you’re a map, you don’t have to repeat it 12 times.  Write some new lyrics for your song before you pop out of the backpack, backpack, backpack, backpack… again.

I care not as to how it’s done, just get her off the air.  Bring her to the Lair and collect your reward.

* Reward paid out at $1 per year for 1 million years.

The Nuclear Family took on more children around Christmas when we adopted 2 beagle puppies from a local Humane Society.  We already had a lab, so putting 2 more dogs in the backyard was, without question, going to increase our volume of “meadow muffins”.  I knew this going in, yet adopted anyway.  I feel now that I don’t grocery shop to feed the family, I shop to have enough grocery bags to clean up all of the “road apples”. 

Cleaning up the yard isn’t happening as often as it should (my fault), and so occasionally the kids step on an apple or squish a muffin.  Clean up the shoes, and we’re good to go, no problem.  But last week, Nukegirl stepped in a pile that wasn’t quite aged yet, and went down.  It could have been much worse.  A tissue for her eyes, a twig for the bottom of the shoe and some Shout for her shirt sleeve and everything was back to normal.  Except for me.  Her little slip had triggered a flashback in me that shakes me to my core to this day. 

I was 6 years old when I experienced “trauma” for the first time.  My family traveled in the summers because of my Fathers job, so each summer we would be in a rental home.  Since we only rented for 3 months, the houses needed to be furnished and often times the houses would come with a little more than we were expecting.  In the summer of my 6th year the house was a duplex, and the “extra” was the owners dog; Hobo.  He was a grumpy, long-haired mutt of the first order.  His breed was a mix of Sheepdog, Airedale and Wolverine.  He didn’t like me one bit, which was fine, because I didn’t particularly care for him either.  We kept our distance, and everything was fine.  Until that one day.  I can’t say for sure if Hobo planned it or not, but the end result was that I went down.  Down hard.

This had to be late July or early August, as my birthday is at the end of July.   I had gotten exactly what I wanted for my birthday: a “Hippity-Hop”.  Some of you may remember them, some of you may not, but just imagine a core training ball with a handle.  Here, I’ll show you a picture.  Anyway, on the day in question, I was in the yard enjoying my new toy.  I was hippity-ing and hoppity-ing to my hearts content.  The yard had a hill that cut right through the middle of it.  I’m sure it was just a little swale, but back then, to me, it was Everest.  I was at the top of the hill, and having “mastered” the Hippity Hop, I was ready for this new challenge; I would conquer the hill. 

Unbeknownst to me, Hobo had made his morning deposit at the crest of the hill.  I was too caught up in my joy to see it.  You already know what’s coming next, but I’m going to have to type it out anyway, aren’t I?  You guessed it.  On hop number two I hit “Hobo’s Revenge”.  It sent me backwards, directly into the heart of meadow muffin hell.  I had to roll over to try and get up, which only succeeded in evening out the coating.  The first attempt to stand resulted in a slip and fall, as did the second and third.  I finally crawled out of the danger zone like a soldier on the beach at Normandy.   I got to my feet, and ran, screaming all the way to the house. 

When I got to the house, I opened up the screen door to the porch while screaming “MOM! MOM! MOM!” My mother opened the back door and almost fainted.  Then she started making sounds I’d never heard before.  All I remember hearing is “DON’T COME IN THE HOUSE!  GET OUTSIDE!”  As I went back outside I could hear my Mother yelling for my sister.  Big sisters get all the fun jobs: dishes, take out the trash and de-poopify little brothers.  The end result was my loving sister standing on the driveway with a spray nozzle hosing off her little brother.  God Bless Her.  I caught a glimpse of Hobo out in the yard.  He had his tongue out, panting with delight and wagging his tail.  I got him back later that summer.  Lets just say it involved a flirtatious poodle and some dogs from Jersey.

Every year it happens.  Every year the Lair is invaded by an insidious adversary know as American Idol.  This attack is always an inside job.  My lab assistant and her junior cohort simply open the fortress doors and invite it in, week after week.  Then there they sit, staring at the television and cheering for the nobody du jour, and debating with each other over which one should be cast out of the inner circle.  The current favorite is a wispy little blond that sings and plays the piano.  Sure, she’s cute, but that’s about it for me.

The one that catches the most derision is a poser with a bad haircut and even worse sense of personal style.  Each week he gets up and belts out some cheesy song that he’s re-worked to try and make himself look innovative and sings it like a man in dire need of a stool softener.  This madness goes on for weeks, sometimes for 2 hours a night!  After every performance a self-appointed jury gives their opinion to each offender.  Almost without fail, it goes a little like this:

Randy Jackson:  “Yo, yo dog.  It was a little pitchy for me, a little pitchy.  It was just okay for me, not that great.”

Paula Abdul:  “You’re just wonderful, I love your voice, and you’re already a star.”

Simon Cowell:  “That was just awful.  I hated it.” (He’s usually right)

I guess if it keeps the minions entertained and distracted, how bad can it be?  As for me, I climb up to the Crow’s Nest and work on projects for English 112.

This evening my 8 year old daughter was watching The Sound Of Music.  Sitting across from her was my 18 month old son, also watching the movie, but holding not 1, but 2 footballs.  Does the presence of athletic equipment cancel out the fact that he was staring in rapt attention to a musical, or do I have something to worry about here? 

Will he drag 300 lb NFL defensive linebackers down the field, or just dance in one, with an apron and a guitar case?

To her credit, my daughter did not make him play Rolfe to her Liesl.

The sounds coming out of exam room 4 at the ear, nose & throat Doctor’s office were enough to send chills down the spine of the most battle hardened nurse.  The inner office data-tech was seen cowering under her workstation, rocking back and forth in a fetal position chanting: “Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop!”  The outer office receptionist, in an attempt to deaden the noise,  had to close her sliding window in between co-pay extortion transactions.  One man was seen leaving the waiting area with tears in his eyes, and a look of utter terror etched on his face.  He told the receptionist that a couple of aspirin at home should help his ruptured eardrum.  Was the horrible din coming from exam room 4 Nukeboy1 or Nukeboy2?  You might think that, but you would be wrong.  The childlike screams were coming from me.

To put this in perspective, let’s go back in time.  At the age of eight my eustachian tubes stopped growing.  What is a eustachian tube?  It is the narrow (In my case, VERY narrow)  tube that runs from your ear to the back of your throat, right about where your nasal passages enter the throat.  Think of it as the ultimate freeway cloverleaf for a germ or virus, they can take any exit they wish!  “How about the middle ear honey, we had so much fun last year.”  “I told you Gladys, we’re going to sinus-land and that’s final!  I should have left you back at the Uvula with your mother.”  It might have had something to do with the 758 inner ear infections I had endured up till then, but my tubes decided they would take their ball and go home.

Why all the screaming in exam room 4?  Because I was getting “tubes” put in my ears.  Yes, those tubes.  The ones they give infants and toddlers who have chronic ear infections.  I may not be a toddler, but my wife will argue that at times, I can behave like an infant.  This was one of those times.  Too bad she wasn’t there to witness it.  It had taken me 3 years of badgering, whining and bribery to get my Doctor to agree to this.  Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.  I got it, alright. 

My problem is that my “cloverleaf” is kind of like Boston’s freeway system before the Big Dig.  Lots of traffic, and none of it was moving.  It didn’t matter where the problem started (ear, nose or throat), within a couple of days my entire skull would be packed tighter than Don Pablo’s on Mariachi night.  Antibiotics would take care of most everything, but, invariably, my ears would stay clogged.  You know what it sounds like when you are under water at the pool, and you hear people talking above the surface?  That toneless garble that sounds like an arguing couple through the paper thin walls of a Motel 6? (Not that I’ve ever stayed at one, I’m just sayin’….)  That’s what I heard all day.  Every day.  For 6 months now.  I think the Doctor knew that if he didn’t give me the tubes today, that it might get ugly.  “Let’s do it” he said.  Yee-ha.

The first tube went in with no problems.  It was over in 5 minutes.  Now, don’t get me wrong, there was nothing remotely pleasing about this.  In those 5 minutes he had lacerated my eardrum with a scalpel, and then inserted a vacuum to remove the “liquid” behind my eardrum.  Only, after 6 months, liquid wasn’t properly descriptive.  Try “muddy”, or “thickened”.  The word my Doctor used was “molasses”.  Wonderful.  Things weren’t any better in my other ear.  Same procedure, but thicker “molasses”.  That’s when the trouble started. 

“Let’s take it up to 7″ he told the nurse.  Now, rather than it sounding like a really bad windstorm in my head, it sounded more like what Dorothy heard before the window shutter rendered her unconscious. Still nothing.  “Better move it up 4 more” Doc said.  11!  His brain-extracting sucker-thingy went to 11?  I could have miscounted, who knows, all I know is that the next thing I experienced must be what a migratory bird hears before it gets sucked into the business end of a Pratt and Whitney engine on a 747.  Time stood still.  My left eyelid twitched uncontrollably.  My life was flashing through my mind, only in reverse.  He was rewinding my brain!  What else could it be?  And then, it was over.  “Whew!” Doc said, “That was rough!”  Yea, hope it didn’t hurt you too much, Doc. 

Now, I had endured the pain and aggravation of plugged up ears for so long, that I was prepared to stick it out, no matter what.  At least, that’s what I told myself as I lay on the chair, gingerly extracting my fingernails from the once plush padded arm rails.  I think I bent them a little too, I was leaning to the left.  “Now comes the easy part” said Doc.  Little did we know.  After the 10 minutes it took him for “liquid extraction” of my second ear, double the time it took for cleaning and placing the tube in my first ear, the rest should have been easy.  But alas, it wasn’t to be. 

The incision he made in my eardrum for the second tube was a tad low.  Now, to his credit, he never once said “Oh, oh” or “oops”,  but I could tell there was a problem.  The amount of noise for the tube insertion was nothing compared to the TWA flight that took off inside my head minutes before, but it was still loud.  Think of the noise your children make when they commandeer a karaoke machine, turn it up to “11″, stick the microphone all the way in their mouths and make burping noises.  That’s what this was like.  After the third attempt I could hear the frustration in his voice.  “It’s not supposed to be this hard” he said.  I enquired as to what the problem was, and that was when he fessed up to the cut that was a little too far south.  “So it’s just going take a little longer, is all”.  Fair enough, he was a great Doctor, and I had come this far, might as well gut it out.  After the fourth attempt I suggested that perhaps leverage was the issue, and would he like to put his foot on my head to expedite the process?  I got a courtesy laugh from the Doc and a “Don’t say another word” look from the nurse.  I think she was in more pain than I was.  The fifth attempt was the charm. The kid burping noises stopped, and the Doc was obviously relieved.  “I’m sorry about that” he said, “I’ve never run into that situation before.”  We chatted for a few more minutes, and he actually walked me all the way out.  I think maybe he had a medical malpractice lawyer as his next appointment, and didn’t want us to see each other.  “Take care of yourself!” he said as I walked out the front door.  “I hear Ya!” I said.  And for the first time in 6 months, I actually DID hear.

The finished product is pictured above.  Although this isn’t MY ear, I’m sure mine looks very similar.  Who knew such a small thing could be such a big pain?

 This IS NOT the Doctor portrayed in the story.

Photo courtesy of: http://www.entusa.com/ear_tubes.htm

Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001 Kevin T Kavanagh, All Rights Reserved

We have named our virus.  His name is Bob.  He lives in my chest, my daughters ear and my sons nose.  He moved in 8 weeks ago and refuses to leave.  I’m hospitable by nature, but this is getting ridiculous.  He comes and goes as he pleases, as if HE was making the mortgage payments. 

It all started 8 weeks ago when he met my daughter at school.  I know what you’re thinking, and no, he is not a pedo-viral.  He’s just “Down on his luck” as he describes it. She brought him home and he took one look at my chest and said “That looks cozy.”  I said “No problem”, just for a couple of days, right?  Got him out of my daughters ear at least.  So in he goes without so much as a thank you. 

Come to find out, Bob’s a nomad, likes to move around.  He told my cochlea he was “Between opportunities” and was “Looking for steady work.”  Seems summer’s coming and his job prospects are starting to diminish.  He said he wanted to end the season with a bang.  Well, Cochlea, in all her infinite wisdom tells Bob that she heard they were hiring at Tonsil Town.  Seems like she’s always getting information first.  So off he goes to hang out with Sal Iva and Hal Itosis.  Like those two need any encouragement. 

Well, I sneezed in the kitchen 2 days ago, and Bob decided it was time for him to go.  Sal left for a minute, but then came right back.   Hal stayed put.  We had garlic bread that night, and he LOVES garlic bread.  My son came in from outside, panting after a game of basketball.  Bob saw the opening and took it.  Now Bob’s looking to move back in with me! Says my son has “Too many white cells.”  If I’d know he was a racist, he would have been gone long before now.  He has until tomorrow to clean out my lung and go.  I don’t think he’ll put up much of a fight this time.  He saw me unpacking the groceries today and saw the gallon of orange juice and the albuterol.  He won’t be back.  At least not this year.