'Twas the Night Before Mother's Day

Today was a full day and the kids were pretty wiped out. For me that’s exciting because it means maybe they’ll all crash pretty quickly, and it’s only after everyone else is asleep that I get to enjoy My Time. Yes, that’s with a capital MT. Sadly, it’s Saturday, and My Time tonight, like every other night since became a father, consists of a date with Microsoft Word. And that’s if I’m lucky. Because while going out for a beer is eternally preferable to sitting at home pecking away on the laptop, a quiet evening with a few pages in Times New Roman is infinitely better than dealing with kids who won’t sleep, and since tomorrow is Mother’s Day I’ll feel more obligated than usual to take the little girl off Mom’s hands until eleven or twelve or sometime around dawn.

My three-year-old boy won’t go to sleep by himself. I have to lay there with him until he’s unconscious. This is the by-product of my wife’s insistence that babies should not sleep alone, it’s too scary for them and they need the psychological comfort of knowing Mommy is always there. Well, now my son is extremely psychologically uncomfortable if I am not there to help him fall asleep. If he’s anything like his big brother I’ve got another two years of this crap. Then it’s the girl’s turn to be scared just like she’s been taught.

But like I said, after today they were totaled and I was able to slip away from my kid at 8:30 – a relatively early start to My Time.

'Wait, Don't Move!' - a guest post

Back in the day - in those beautiful times when I was still single - I started working for a storage and moving company in Colorado. First I worked on move crews. After a while I was put in charge of the warehouse. Not long after that - due to competence in one thing or incompetence in another - I was moved out of the warehouse and into the position of operations manager.

At first I considered myself lucky. I was making more as an ops manager than I ever had at any other job, I got to wear a t-shirt all day, and I was not only allowed but expected to bark orders at everyone. 'Stick with this business and you can be a millionaire,' my boss told me.

One year later I quit. Some things just ain't worth the money.

The bright side is I've got a substantial cache of stories from my two years in that ridiculous industry. As long as I keep up my meds I can talk about them without slipping into another temporary fugue state.

Recently the good people at HireAHelper.com asked me to contribute a post. After a couple extra Xanax I was able to dig up one of the lighter tales from my storage and moving crypt.

Check it out here.

One day you might just thank me.

Happy, Crappy New Year

I thought that once I got married I’d be able to take certain things for granted. Alas, as many of us erstwhile bachelors realize too late, moments that would seem, quite intuitively, to come easier once we don’t have to hide them from the in-laws anymore, prove to be strangely elusive once the honeymoon photos are finally stored away on the external hard drive.

With kids it has gotten even worse. I’m talking in this case, of course, about ringing in the New Year with a kiss.

I wonder if my wife had a bad New Year’s Eve experience when she was a little girl. That wouldn’t adequately explain it though, since she’d made it until midnight every year we were dating. One year she was up until almost a quarter to one, though she was talking like a zombie by the end there, and she doesn’t even drink.

CUTTING BACK ON YOUR HOLIDAY STRESS

6 Survival Tips You’ve Likely Never Heard

Okay, so ever since the wise man bearing the gold sent those two daft men with the frankincense and myrrh scrambling for excuses there’s never been any such thing as a stress-free holiday. There are gifts to be bought, cards to be sent and strings of lights to attach to the eaves with duct tape. And then there’s the specter of putting on a few extra holiday pounds, looming as real as a lawsuit from the ACLU if you refer to them in public as ‘extra Christmas pounds’. These are harrowing days indeed. But by following these half dozen bits of unconventional holiday wisdom, garnered from years of experience involving five sisters, thirty-odd cousins, nine nieces and nephews and now three little elves of my own, you too can lower your blood pressure even as your credit card balances float skyward. So kick back, take heed and then kick back some more – with a bowl of foil-wrapped chocolate balls.

These Times

One day last week – which day I don’t remember because I’d rather forget about it – I spent a sickly part of my morning on the phone with one of the fine folks at the local GEICO factory. Understanding car insurance is hard; getting car insurance shouldn’t be. Yet there I was, on the phone for over an hour as the self-appraised super-representative on the other end subjected me to all manner of informational inquisition. What’s the VIN on the car? What’s your old New Jersey driver’s license number? Date of birth? Social security number? How long has your wife been driving? You drink much? You need renter’s insurance? How many fingers am I holding up?

What am I, on the list of suspected car insurance terrorists?

‘Okay, you’re all set,’ my super-duper pooper-scooper said. Finally. ‘I’ll send you your policy number in a confirmation email.’ An hour later I get a message thanking me for choosing GEICO and confirming the charges to my credit card have been approved for the brand spanking new insurance policy issued to someone named Scott C. Smith.

People Are Strange...When You're a Stranger...

If you’ve been keeping up with my recent move to Long Island (and who hasn’t?) you’ll know that I’ve enjoyed and appreciated the people I’ve been encountering here in my new hometown. I mean, when the people working at the library are so boisterous the patrons have to look up from their books and laptops to tell them to be quiet you know you’ve happened upon a very special place. But as evidenced by the slovenly gray-haired schmuck I watched waddle over to the park area outside the library – he leaned on the fence surrounding the playground and started smoking and flicking his ashes around, then put his cigarette out by grinding the butt into the top of the fence and smearing the ashes around before finally flicking his scrap of dirty garbage into the sand where kids run around with their shoes off – there are a few people around who could use a steel-toed boot in the pants.


Take the trio of eight-year-old girls I saw selling lemonade by the side of their quiet residential road. They were out in the hot sun, making the attempt, and since I had to turn around anyway because I was lost I figured I might as well stop. Call it my beneficent act for the day. Besides, it was hot for me too, beer is criminally expensive here and I was already spending too much on toll bridges and gas. What could be better than a glass of homemade lemonade, procured the good old-fashioned way?

The Good, The Bad & The Bus

As mentioned in my previous couple of posts, my latest move has been marked by run-ins with some excellent people: I wouldn’t have found this house I’m now in without the kind, firm tenacity of Andrea at Signature Realty (and access to the office Keurig); thanks to Lynne across the street my nephew and I didn’t end up waiting at Northport Station for a train that would get us to Penn Station just in time to be stranded there all night after spending the day moving (or not, thanks to a faulty fuel pump); Greg who lives in the converted cottage out back, besides coming through for us with a large pizza, helped me drag my newly-bought, used, half-ton couch from my van into my living room. (Greg’s a big guy and it was still a feat maneuvering the beast through the front door without losing my security deposit on day one. And he's such a cool neighbor he still said 'Hey if you need anything else...')

Also deserving of kudos are various people in the Northport-East Northport School District. Initially I thought I was going to live in this crappy duplex on this hilly, crumbling dead-end street. With this in mind I contacted the people at nearby Norwood Elementary to let them know I would be registering my oldest son for kindergarten there – while simultaneously apologizing for doing so at such a late date. ‘Oh, no problem at all,’ sang Ms. Esposito, the school nurse. Of course she wasn’t the one to have to now prepare extra name plates for the coat hanger, cubby hole, chair, shelf, gold star chart, homework bag, art shelf and whatever else my son would need to be an official member of the class. After forty minutes of pleasant conversation and loads of information regarding the immunization policies of the school district, the good nurse sent me a prepared registration packet in the mail along with a note saying she was setting aside a supply kit for my son to make sure he had what he needed from Day One. Two days later I found a mildly less crappy duplex in the zone of another of the town’s schools.

‘Hi, excuse me, I’m really sorry but I just moved to town (actually I hadn’t yet but there wasn’t time for such boring technicalities) and my son is going to be entering kindergarten…’

Dumb Luck, Bum Truck

I leaned against the wall of the gray and Formica rental office, waiting as the guy behind the counter gave his spiel – for the zillion and eleventh time from the sound of his voice. ‘Here are your estimated charges based on how many miles you say you expect to drive the truck…’ The man across from him stared at the paper contract, his mind seemingly on other things. Nearby a young woman described her apartment with muted excitement, presumably to her dad, rosy-cheeked and prematurely white-haired. Mr. Sunshine droned on. ‘…if no one's here park the truck along the fence and drop the keys in the drop box…’

I’d initially tried to reserve a truck for September 1^st, but there were none available, anywhere in the area, unless I wanted the twenty-six-foot Behemoth. I pictured myself driving over the George Washington Bridge and along the narrowed lanes of the construction I knew was going on. I gave myself pretty solid odds that I’d end up sideswiping someone right into a concrete barrier so I passed, opting to wait an extra day for my fourteen-foot Elf.

‘…Here’s your contract number, here’s the toll-free number to call in case your truck breaks down…’ A second man appeared behind the counter and began talking with a customer in Spanish, and I wondered: out of all the people renting all those trucks this weekend, what were the chances of anyone in that tiny U-Haul rental office having their truck break down that day – and what a crapshoot it was, getting a good or bad truck depending on whether you showed up at the rental office at 9:03 or 9:05; on which set of keys your guy behind the counter happened to grab on his way out to the lot; or on whether the young woman decided she wanted the truck with the picture of the sea turtle instead of the UFO. If someone that day was going to end up using that toll-free roadside assistance number, who would it be?

Renting a Place for Life

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I flew back to New Jersey ahead of my family, giving my wife (she still doesn’t know I flew business class) a chance to get used to having to handle the kids by herself full-time. Yuppers, after an extended post-earthquake transition period involving the labyrinthine process of obtaining a green card legally, battling to no avail the immeasurable incompetence of the stewards of our health care system, bringing our new baby daughter into the world while managing not to take our eternally fighting and screaming sons out of it, and countless changes in plans for the future – move to Oregon (we flew out to make sure we’d actually like it), move to North Carolina (we drove down to make sure we’d like it), move to the Washington, DC area (until we drove down and I remembered how ridiculous the traffic is), go back to school to bring my forensics education up to date and finally get that crime scene investigation job (this idea will be forever on the table, somewhere between the napkins and the Tabasco), move to Summit, New Jersey or somewhere close to one of the trains that go there (for a business venture that would eventually fall through), stay in East Hanover since by this time our son was registered for kindergarten as well as fall soccer and my wife had made a bunch of friends in town (while my own social life existed almost entirely on my laptop), and finally, in a development that occurred while I was still doing pushups on the in-laws’ tatami floors, move out to Long Island to manage someone’s growing butcher shop collection (the guy decided to hire me on nothing more than a relative’s recommendation and my intense good looks)  – I am, I think, about to return to the world of socio-economic utility.

If that last sentence has you feeling like you’ve just been woken up mid-meeting by a co-workers hand-slap to the back of your head then you’ve got a handle on how I’ve felt for the last twelve months. (yada yada, poor me…)

Crying in the Rain

The postponement of the GOP National Convention is not the most ridiculous reaction to the coming drizzle named Isaac. It’s just the most publicized. We Americans love to dramatize our own plight, a tactic which, intentional or sub-conscious, allows us to maintain our self-appraisal as the most important people on Earth.

I had mistakenly thought Isaac had already blown up the east coast; this from one facebook post from someone lamenting the six inches of rain that had fallen overnight in Delaware and another announcing a power outage in Florida. Good Lord above, this isn’t a hurricane, this is Armageddon! I’m sorry God….for everything!!... (Okay I'm exaggerating.)

A check into the situation on weather.com, however, explains, in a series of news clips, the situation – in particular, the American inclination to dramatize our plight. (Please do tune in, these clips are well worth it, if for no other reason than to understand just how keenly incisive my thoughts are.)