08 May 2010
We dropped Owen off at his grandparents’ home this afternoon. His grandparents have suddenly surged ahead in the coolness department thanks to their acquisition of a Wii. This causes Owen to want to visit with them even more. He must figure, “heck, I got lots of grandparents…but only one Wii.”
I just gotta mention how much it is possible to accomplish without a four and eleven-twelfths year old under foot. Jennifer and I made significant progress on our final papers for the semester. The dishes are clean, the carpets are vacuumed, the laundry is clean, the bird feeder is full, the plants are watered, the shelves are dusted, and the litter box is de-littered. Jennifer and I even went out to lunch and, as the sappy romantics we are, we chose Applebee’s.
Did you know Applebee’s is actually named for T.J. Applebee’s? I didn’t know that. There was some stained-glass artwork in the particular location, though, that tipped me off to this fascinating bit of trivia. (Question: is there any bit of trivia that’s not fascinating? Answer: yes.) A friend visiting from Germany once asked me what the word “applebees” meant. I told him I did not know, but that the apostrophe indicated it was someone’s last name. Now I know even more.
This reminds me of my 4th favorite job: Lenscrafters. Did you know the place is actually called “Precision Lenscrafters”? I didn’t know that until after I’d gotten hired and worked there for a week. I asked one of my co-workers: “Why are all the stores called ‘PLC’ and then a number?” And he said: “‘Cause ‘PLC’ stands for Precision Lenscrafters, and the number is the number of the store, so this is the 581st Lenscrafters to open.” Then I said: “Cool.” And he said: “No, it’s not really.”
Also, did you know this: Ikea is actually an acronym, so I guess it should always be written as IKEA. The letters stand for Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd, which I think is a Swedish curse.
09 May 2010
This morning, around 10:00, there were two guys out in the parking lot playing with a remote-controlled toy car. The both had the backs of their pick-up trucks open, and they kept fiddling with the little car, then setting it back down and driving it around. Let me say for the record: I hate those things. They’re louder than real cars, which is bad enough, but the sound they make is akin to a dentist’s drill. Squealing, whining, incessant screeching.
At one point, one of the guys (the one with the baseball cap on, not the one with the bald eagle t-shirt), picked up the car, and took a piece off of it. He then shook up a can of spray paint and, leaning on a lamppost, sprayed the piece a beautiful black. In doing so, he vandalized the lamppost, too, but he might not have seen that beyond his third-trimester belly.
They left, but returned about 4 hours later, and played with their car again. My wife walked out on the deck and said: “Do you know how annoying that is?” The bald-eagle shirted fat hick looked up and said: “Sorry.” Which, no, he wasn’t, as was evident from the fact that they continued to play with their car for another ten minutes.
Whenever I see or hear those obnoxious toy cars, I instantly snap back to my first encounter with them. At the risk of hearing “You’ve told me that story, like, ten times,” from my wife again, I will hereby relate it once more:
When I was 14, my family moved to a new home. That summer, we discovered our neighbors (with whom we shared a driveway) had one sole interest in life: racing their toy cars around the pavement. They did it ALL the time, one weekends and weekdays. Even in the rain. Every morning, around 9:00, they’d open their garage door, and these two fat drunks would sit in lawn chairs, drinking swill and racing cars. They’d quit around dusk time, as if they knew that continuing any further would bring the cops down on them
My bedroom, alone of my family’s, did not face the driveway, but theirs did, and my parents and sister came to despise our new neighbors. Even with the windows closed, they could hear the cars. We had just moved out of a mobile home park…so you could imagine our surprise that our most hillbilly neighbors to date were these guys. There were even a few times we had to come to a complete stop while driving into our driveway so that they could move their toys our of our way. My mom would say: “You should just run them over.” But my Dad never did.
Instead, he was bemoaning the situation to my Uncle Danny one day. Uncle Danny, incidentally, has always had the coolest electronic gadgets of anyone in my family. He had a VCR before the 80s began! Anyway, he took my Dad into his workshop, and gave him some kind of special “interrupter” that could cycle through different frequencies until it happened on the correct channel.
That weekend, while eating breakfast, I heard the toy cars being fired up. My Dad flew down the stairs, grabbed the gadget, and went out into the garage. I went in to join him, but he told me no. Peaking through a little hole in the garage, my Dad tuned the knobs on the interrupter until -suddenly – silence. Both cars stopped dead. The neighbors lumbered off the lawn chairs and sauntered to the cars, picked them up, and scratched their red necks. They carried their electronic carcasses into their garage, did some stuff with a screwdriver, swapped out some batteries, and prayed to Lynyrd Skynyrd. But they couldn’t resurrect their babies.
A few days later, they were back at it, but within minutes, my dad arrested their fun.
By next spring, they’d moved out.
I think they left because we were talking loud enough for them to hear about how they had spray painted the lamp post. That might get you a ticket if I had chosen to call the cops, so I think after they realized we were annoyed they didn’t want to risk it. If they come back, we should get one of those interupter things.