Mellificent Tales

Annual BCS Bashing (not really, though)

2012-01-20T14:23:00.002-05:00

Most of you (okay,really only Kurt) have been wondering where my annual BCS bashing post is. Well, this year the BCS pretty much did itsown bashing, admitting that the system could be improved and they were open tosuggestions. I predict that in a fewyears, we'll have a "plus-one" format (like a Final Four), and thenonce everyone sees how lucrative it is, teams will be added prettyregularly.

It was prettyobvious that this year's championship was the worst game ever, made worse bythe fact that it was the exact same game as 2 months ago. The ratings for this game was 10% lower thanlast year's game, which is a pretty steep drop-off. Alabama and LSU fans will contend that theirteams were the best, and therefore, deserved to play. What we are all forgetting here is that,despite whatever Lombardi said, sports is not about winning, it's aboutentertainment.

Whether you'replaying or watching, the reason why you do it is to be entertained. Sure, there are side benefits, likeexercising or the false sense of superiority you get from handing your opponenttheir own rump on a platter, but you play sports for fun, and you watch sportsfor fun. The competition drives most ofthe fun, but there's no reason to take it so seriously that you can't sit backafter a loss and admit that you had a great time watching/playing the game.

I learned thispretty early. I'd much rather be astarter on a bad team than a benchwarmer on a great team. I played AAA soccer (playing teams all overUtah) when I was 10 and 11. When I was10, I was pretty good and got lots of minutes and scored a few goals. When I was 11, my teammates spent theoffseason practicing, and I didn't, making them much better than me. All of the sudden, I was riding the pine andwatching our team win. I didn't carethat we won, I only cared that I spent 10 hours at practice every week, andplayed only 10 minutes in each game. Notonly that, when I did play in the game, I was so much worse than thecompetition that I didn't even WANT to go in the game. So I demoted myself to AA (playing teams onlyin Utah County) and found the competition to be much weaker, but not so badthat it was unfair. My favorite years ofsoccer were between ages of 12 and 16, but our team never did better than 2ndplace, whereas we were winning Utah State championships at the AAA level.

When I was in 7thgrade, I played on an awesome Jr Jazz basketball team. Austin Berge, future Orem High star, was an8th grader and the star of our team. Wewon the Orem city championship. I rodethe pine and scored about 10 points the entire season. I hated it. The next year, I was the tallest kid on a crappy team, but I loved itbecause I played the entire game (until fouling out, since I had to guard theother team's tallest player) and scored about 10 points a game. I think we won one game.

BYU intramurals doesthis perfectly. You choose a division toplay your regular season in, which lasts 5 games, and then the scorekeepersrank your team and you get assigned a division based on how good/crappy youare. There were 4 divisions, and thebest was Division 1. The eventualwinning teams in Division 1 usually featured ex-college players like MarkBigelow and Nate Call. Thank goodness Inever played in that division. One yearwe went to Division 3 and made it all the way to the Final 4.

Recently, I've donemy best to not dwell on the outcome of the game. In fact, for certain teams and sports, I willrecord the game and only watch if my team wins. That way, I'm never in a bad mood because "we" lost. Some may say that it takes the passion out ofit, and in my case, that's the whole point. I found I enjoy my team winning regardless of whether I watched it liveor not.

I've also found thatwinning championships isn't that great. I, personally, have never won anything major, like a high school statetitle or whatever. But I've won my fairshare of league and school intramural titles, and it's nice, but who reallycares? Even when my team wins the title,like the Colts or the Cardinals, I found that it was a fun ride, but it's notlike my week improved substantially. This last year's World Series was a lot of fun, and I watched all thepost-game celebration and analysis for the next couple of days, but then prettymuch stopped thinking about it after that. It was fun, and now it's over. Let's do it again next year.

I will admit thatwinning increases the enjoyment by tenfold. I always play to win, and I get steamed when I lose, but I always needto remind myself after each meaningless pickup game that it's just a game, and that turd on your team who neverpasses is actually a nice guy and you probably shouldn't have taken that cheapshot at his knees. Those who know meknow that I play hard, and I play to win, and there's nothing worse thansomeone ruining a perfectly good pickup game by horsing around. But winning's not that important, especiallyafter the fact. There's been many timesI've been embarrassed by my behavior in these games, so I need to focus on thefact that it's only just for fun.

That's what thisyear's championship game lacked: fun. I wasn'topposed to the game from a "2 best teams" standpoint, although thatcertainly is debatable. I was opposedfrom an entertainment perspective. Theyplayed each other already that season in the 2nd worst game of the year, asnoozefest ending in 9-6. Why on earthdid we have to watch them battle each other again?!?! BOOOOORING! So I didn't even bother watching the rematch, and when I found out aboutthe results, I was bored just reading about it and glad I didn't waste my time.

The only good thing about this year's game wasthe controversy, which will probably lead to a playoff that will make finallymake the college football postseason entertaining. And that's what it's all about.

Follow Your Dreams, Do What You Love, and other nonsense

2011-12-01T10:58:00.000-05:00

Every day, I walk past a park on my way to work from the train station. It's a 5-minute walk, through a chain of parks called the "Greenway". The Greenway is new, replacing what was once an ugly interstate that cut right through downtown, obstructing harbor views and creating much noise. The 8-lane highway has been moved underground in the "Big Dig", and I have watched them transform a hideous pile of rubble into beautiful parks. I go out of my way to walk through them, so I can look at the flowers, shrubs, and trees as they blossom, grow, and beautify.

Unfortunately, these parks are being run over by Occupy Boston (OB), one of the branches of Occupy Wall Street. Dozens of tents are crammed into the park outside of South Station, displaying leftist signs and emitting a noxious odor. I have never seen any active acts of protest by these people, only the passive signs that I read as I walk past:

"Make love not GREED"
"America wants to work"
"Finance is pure evil"
"9/11 was an inside job"
And my absolute favorite: "Boycott student debt"

I initially laughed at them, not really understanding their overall message and goal. I figured they would be gone in a few days. This was in late September, and they are still there, even marching up the street just yesterday as a "Free Speech Protest". What baffles me most of all is the empathy they are getting not only from the media, but from everybody. Everyone seems to relate to the plight of the "99%", and the top news story for the last year has been unemployment. While it is unfortunate to be jobless, nobody seems willing to blame themselves: "It's the economy"; "It's the government"; "It's Wall Street and corporate greed"; "It's the baby-boomer generation" (side-note: dumbest article ever).

Since when is it not your own responsibility to find, and then keep, your job? Who's stopping you from starting your own business? Why is a job, along with healthcare, a perceived "unalienable" right?

I personally think that my generation, and the generation coming up, has been coddled. Look at the media we've been digesting for years: Most of the movies involve some youth trying to "find himself" or "follow his dreams", and features a bald, old, stern-looking white man who is holding him back, representing "The Man". Not to burst everyone's bubble here, but unless your dreams include reviewing large legal documents, writing mounds of code, working long hours for "The Man", or researching stocks (aka what most people consider "boring" jobs), you're going to need to give up on your dream and pursue something more marketable.

Case in point: I happen to work in a field (Information Technology) that is very marketable. This is not my dream. Besides being a professional athlete, my dream was to be a City Planner (instead of an architect), as growing up I loved maps and the flow of traffic and other related items. I even took a few geography classes at BYU. However, I did some research and found that: 1. Working for the government totally sucks; 2. It's very competitive and probably not nearly as enjoyable as, say, playing Sim City. So I decided to go into Information Systems, knowing that every business uses technology to run their business, therefore, there would always be a need. My dreams would be accomplished via video games, where the sole purpose of video games is to live in a fantasy world where you're playing in the NBA, designing cities, or conquering the world.

Now? I have a good job. Guess what? We're hiring. In fact, we need people so badly that we opened up around 50 positions nationwide last March, just in my small group full of data specialists. These spots have still not been filled. I know for a fact that other companies are hiring aggressively, looking for accountants, lawyers, IT consultants, systems analysts, etc. Jobs are out there for the hungry and qualified.

Let's look at a scenario where one of the unreasonable demands of OB were met: Let's say the government decided to create jobs and take away some of the "greed" on Wall Street by offering the OB positions where they would be the personal assistant of some fund manager, for example, for a percentage of the salary? They obviously wouldn't be qualified to research stocks, so being a personal assistant is the only thing they could do. This wouldn't work, though. The people in Tent City wouldn't be satisfied as a "Personal Assistant", especially not for a greedy fund manager. They are too principled for such nonsense. It's not their "dream" to work in such a capacity. They want to write songs, craft sculptures, discuss politics, or research history. They wanted a first-class education that has taught them about the nuances of 17th-century French literature, but they don't want to work a boring job to pay for it.

Why are they so quick to blame everyone else when it was their poor decisions that got them there in the first place? Information about salaries, job openings, tuition, and really ANYTHING has been at our fingertips for more than a decade. What were the OB thinking when they decided to pursue a degree in Philosophy at Northeastern University? I just googled "average tuition at northeastern" and clicked on the first link. The answer? 51K annually, right on the university's site. Then I googled "employment rate by major" and found that Philosophy was 9.6%, which was about average*, but noticed that "Architecture and Urban Planning" was a staggering 18.2%, so I'm glad I didn't pursue my City Planning dream. Of course, I don't know the validity of the survey, this is merely an example of how easy it is to get information. 2 minutes of research would save them a lifetime of debt with iffy job prospects. With this much information available, why is the government accountable for people's careers, student debt, or lack of a job? The difference between the OB and potential actors is that the actors at least realize it's a long-shot, so they work crappy jobs until they make it (and they also don't have mounds of debt, unless they went to Julliard).

*If you look at the percent of "Still in field by Major", Philosophy is at 36%, which is the LOWEST of all the majors, meaning: you can get a job as a Philosophy major, but it's not because of your major. It's probably because you went to Law school. This particular chart is probably the best indicator of the real-world value of a degree.

At what point do we need to just be realistic with ourselves? If I told you I still wanted to play in the NBA, you'd laugh me out of the room. But what about people who want to be Broadcast journalists? Their chances aren't much better.

Why must we do what we love, rather than learn to love what we do? I wasn't crazy about working with data, but I learned to enjoy certain aspects of it. I don't go home at night and work on data for fun, but I don't dread going to work. I work because I get paid, and I use that money to follow my dreams, which makes my time and motivation at work much better.

I'm like most of America, and think that getting jobs is not about waiting for the government to hand you one, it's about working hard, sending out applications, following leads, taking temp jobs, and doing what it takes to get a career you can be satisfied with. Melanie is a great example of this. She got a first-rate education at Boston College and a mountain of student debt. She graduated in Marketing, which is a "marketable" major (yuk-yuk), but also very competitive in the job market. She couldn't find a full-time job, so she took temp jobs to pay her rent and her loans. She did a great job at these places, and finally one of the temp positions turned into a full-time one. It took her 2 years of working temp jobs to get a full-time position. And you can ask her, those temp jobs weren't exactly thrilling.

A lot of the OB people think that firing an employee is a crime next to murder. That's just ridiculous. If someone doesn't see the value in me, I wouldn't want to work there. If I'm not adding any value to the company, then why should they keep me around? Companies should not be concerned about my self-esteem, only the overall morale of the work force. At my current job, we are always under observation, having to get constant performance feedback. Once a year, we get an annual rating, and if that rating is low, we need to look for a new job or be fired in a month or so. I like that I have to constantly be earning my position, because then it makes me feel good about my role here. If I lose my job, it's because they don't need me, or I don't deserve the job.

My theory on the high unemployment: Computers and systems have made every business much more efficient and effective. Data is available to make better decisions. However, it took some time for businesses to realize this. They didn't need Carol in Purchasing to file invoices since 2001, because they automated her job with computers and streamlined the process. However, they didn't lay her off until 2008 because they were doing so well, and why would they lay someone off when they were doing well? All of the sudden, the stock market took a dive, real estate crashed, etc., and businesses had to adapt. It was the perfect time to trim the fat, so Carol from Purchasing, along with others with similar roles, was let go. It was sad. But necessary for the long-term.

Now there are thousands of Carols from Purchasing on the streets, looking for jobs. "What are your skills, Carol?" "I'm real good at putting papers from stacks into folders." "I'm sorry, but that's not really a skill. My monkey can do that." Carol from Purchasing now realizes that she is obsolete, and she won't be able to get a job as high-paying as the one she held with the skills she has. Is this the government's fault? Maybe it's Wall Streets, after all, their greed caused the stock market crash! Or maybe Carol from Purchasing should have realized at some point that she's easily replaced and should learn a more marketable skill? The grim reality is that Carol from Purchasing will have to work in retail, restocking shelves or, if she's lucky, as a supervisor, probably making 30% of what she was before. It turns out that Carol from Purchasing is a single mom of 3 small children, one of which has diabetes. Seems unfair.

But look at it from this perspective: Maybe Carol from Purchasing has been overpaid for 7 years by 70% (if not 100%), practically stealing from the company. Has she never once thought to update her skillset? Did she really think that filing paper invoices was a lasting career choice? It sounds heartless in my made-up situation (even I'm starting to feel sorry for her), but how could she not try to protect herself? How could she not think ahead? Is the government responsible for every poor decision, whether active or passive, made by us?

I think most companies that survived the 2008 recession are in a decent place. Unemployment will take years to go down, because it has to do it organically. If companies aren't hiring, make your own company-necessity is the mother of invention. Unemployed college grads that aren't too busy whining will find ways to make money/products/sell services. Maybe they will start selling items on eBay, finding a niche and making some money. Maybe they will make a revolutionary widget that changes the way you think about pomegranates. Maybe they will start offering services on Craigslist, the epitome of the free market. I called an out-of-work licensed electrician off of Craig's list and paid him $400 for a day's worth of services. A few more days like that a month and he could be making enough to pay rent and feed his family. He didn't realize this, but his quote was half of what the established businesses were quoting me. Same with plumbers, plasterers, cleaning services, etc., that I've hired. I find almost all of my services on Craig's list for a fraction of the price. You're telling me that the OB can't clean a house? Maybe if they did it well, they'd pick up more clients. They'd charge more for doing such great work. They'd hire people to do the cleaning for them, making sure the quality didn't suffer and the clients didn't have issues. Pretty soon they have a well-run cleaning business and they don't even have to work anymore. Isn't that the American Dream?

Most of the people in OB wouldn't agree with me. That's fine, this is only one man's perspective. You can certainly have success, financial and otherwise, in other ways, but you can't count it as success if someone does it for you. Get your Liberal Arts degree. Get your dream job if you can. Pay off your student debt or default and kill your credit. Go camp in the park either way. But do it without the government's help. Otherwise, let's just stop with this "99%" nonsense and call you what you really are: A bunch of commies.

Mathlete of the Year

2011-11-17T11:17:00.001-05:00

There's no way to write this post without sounding like I'm bragging ("Kent, that's not true! We all know you're the most humble guy in the world--you tell us all the time!"), so I'll just come right out and say it: I was the Utah State Math Champion for my 8th and 9th grade years.

Bragging about winning math competitions is similar to bragging about your comic book collection. Nobody's really that impressed, if anything, they think less of you. Of course, if it was an athletic achievement, like winning State back in '82, everybody would be impressed, but also think less of you for bragging about it. Nobody really thinks you're bragging if you admit to winning a math competition; it's more of a confession, like fessing up to owning all of the Star Trek seasons on DVD. What a nerd!

You'd think that my dear, sweet, loving wife would appreciate my math abilities more. She doesn't. She brings up my math trophies when we're all trying to one-up each other in hilarious stories. "Yeah, you should see Kent's math trophy collection! It's just a bunch of triangles!!!" "Bwaaaahahhahahahahahahahahah!!!" Or, if I try to impress someone with my stories of mathematical prowess, Melanie just touches me on the shoulder and says, "Kent, dearie, no one wants to hear about your stupid math contests. Now be a moose and freshen up my drink. Please don't ever talk to our guests again."

Nobody appreciates my genius. I shall now create a death ray and kill you all. I feel like Megamind.

Okay, that's not true. My brother Brian appreciates my genius. He was, after all, my mentor. It was 6th grade, and Brian was competing in something called "Mathcounts", a national association of math nerds who have contests to see who's the nerdiest. He was doing well, in fact, he won State in '92, but it was in math, not football. They flew him out to DC to compete at the national level. He won the national title, a huge scholarship, and went on to found Microsoft. You know him now as "William Gates".

Okay, that's not true, but he did win State, and it was '92. I was super jealous of him. Not that he won State, but that he got to fly on an airplane and stay in a hotel. I'd never flown on an airplane. The closest I'd been was watching my brothers leave on their missions in an airplane. I'd never stayed in a hotel. The nicest place I'd stayed at was a Motel 6, that time in Cheyenne when I got the spot on the floor next to the TV. I heard that at hotels you get your own bed!

I was super motivated to get that plane ride, so I asked Brian to show me the way of the math nerds. Brian was naturally good at nerdiness, it was a skill he'd been working on his entire life. He read encyclopedias for fun, had an obsession with statistics and whales (obvious correlation there), and was shrimpy and wore huge glasses, so he looked the part, too. Being a jock like Homer Simpson, my natural enemies were the nerds, and so I'd spent the better part of elementary school making fun of them. I had no idea that I would become one of them.

The first thing Brian did was to get me out of my 6th grade math class and into Pre-Algebra at the Jr High school. This would allow me to start Algebra in 7th grade and Geometry in 8th grade, which is key to winning Mathcounts, a competition for 7th and 8th graders only. Taking Algebra in 7th grade completely destroyed my social well-being. 7th graders had their lunch after 3rd period to reduce the beatings the 8th and 9th graders would dole out, since they had lunch after 4th period. Since Algebra, a class for 8th graders, was in 4th period, I had to eat with them. I knew absolutely no one in my lunch period except my brother Brian and my friend Baldwin.

Brian got me into the math club, I think it was called "ACE" or something nerdy. They met after school and did practice tests. This was disappointing. Staying after school to do more school? Jocks like me don't "do" school, we leave as soon as possible to play pick-up basketball and football games in the 'hood, and maybe even take off our shirts if some lovely ladies walk by.

Nonetheless, I went to the club meetings. I took the practice tests. I learned new concepts and practiced faster ways of solving problems. We did our first competition, which was some mail-in test. I did surprisingly well in it and I remember Brian being especially surprised at my success. "You're pretty smart for a dumb jock," he said. "Maybe you don't need to rely on your specimen of a body to get into college after all." I'm paraphrasing, it was a long time ago.

Later, it was time for the Mathcounts tryouts. Each school could only have 1 team of 4 nerds, and an alternate. I was hoping to make the team, but the nerds I was up against had awesome pedigrees:

1. Bryon Clark - he'd been shunning sports since elementary and was the worst softball player ever, so you knew that kid was crazy smart.
2. Bart Llewellyn - Mad uncoordinated and into all sorts of nerd stuff, like Star Trek and comics
3. Chuck Wood - Really, that's his name. Chuck "How Much Wood Could a Woodchuck if a Woodchuck Could Chuck" Wood. Uberdork, plus he was in my ward so I had to endure a few campouts with him.
4. Jason Maas - 8th grader, I didn't know him at all. Seemed nerdy enough.
5. Brett Gilbert - Only slightly nerdy. No glasses and followed sports, so there was no way he was making the team.
6. Michael Bateman - I'd been making fun of this kid my whole life, even beat him up once or twice in elementary. Now he was looking for payback, nerd-style.
7. A few other inconsequential nerds with thick glasses that were never heard from again. Maybe a girl or 2, as well, but everyone knows that the female brain is smaller, so they didn't have a shot. It's science.

I can't remember what I placed, but I made the team. It was me, Jason, Brett, and I think Bryon. As they called the members of the team, they deliberately called me last, as I was the controversial jock. There was a lot of heresay about affirmative action and my qualifications, but all unsubstantiated. I smiled smugly as I walked to the podium to take my place with the team. "Take that, nerds!" I thought.

We went to the region competition, which was Utah County and some remote neighboring ones. I took 2nd place to Jason, who turned out to be very smart, but of course he had a year on me. All of the regional winners got to go to a banquet in SLC, which featured a 3-course meal. The faculty advisory, Miss Price, must have thought my parents didn't feed me because I finished off everybody's leftovers at the table, including the salad and of course the dessert. I thought it was the best meal ever and didn't even care if I went to DC, this banquet was reward enough.

State was in March, I think. I was a nervous wreck. It was up in Sandy somewhere and super early in the morning. I took the tests and took 9th place, before the Countdown round. In the countdown round, they take the top 10 and then 10 goes head to head against 9, and the winner then goes head to head against 8, etc. The top 4 get to go to DC to represent Utah. I beat the 10th place dude, but then lost to the 8th place dude, and that was that. No State trophies for me. Jason didn't make it to the top 10, I believe.

But it was only 7th grade! I still had one more year. Miss Price created a special class for us, called "Math Excel" and about 10 nerdbags were invited to be in it. I was easily the coolest of the math nerds, which is like saying a restaurant is the healthiest of the fast-food chains, but nonetheless, still cool.

Math Excel was insane. We took all sorts of tests and did practice problems, discussing the fastest way to solve problems. It was all so nerdy, but I found it invigorating. This led me to challenge the very core of who I was. Was I really a nerd at heart? I'd been playing sports since I could walk, does this mean I've been fooling myself this whole time? Everyone knows you can't be smart AND athletic.

In the end, it paid off. I took 2nd at Regions again, this time Brett Gilbert was my nemesis who beat me. This was a surprise to me, as Brett's nerdiness was at limited capacity. It turns out, however, that he was ridiculously smart and had taken great strides in the Math Excel class. Bryon and Chuck made up the rest of our team that year, and we were hoping to take the school trophy, beating those douchebags from Butler Middle School who won it every year.

When State came around (after another delicious banquet), I was even more a nervous wreck. This was it, I'd been training all year for this, and it all comes down to this. We took the tests first off and I felt horrible about it. When they announced the top 10, I was praying I was in the top 5. Number 4 was called off: Some dude from Oak Canyon, Jeff Something, was 4th place. I was stoked about that because I knew Jeff Something from soccer, and he was a fellow jock. Us jocks were really breaking down barriers that year.

I was sure that I was in the top 10, and since I wasn't called yet, I figured I was in, but still was nervous. 3rd place: Kent Hansen! I was in! I was going to DC! I don't even care about the Countdown round, I'm in baby! 2nd place: Brett Gilbert. 1st place: Ashley Warner!

WHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!?!?!?!

A girl! No way! She must've been cheating! Or a Sederbergian nerd-bag. She stood up and acknowledged her awesomeness. It turns out that she was hot! A hot girl that wins a math competition? My world was turned upside-down. I questioned everything.

I was determined to not lose to a girl. Before, I didn't care about the Countdown round, but now, I had to beat Ashley. The Countdown round began. Darren Raggozine, the epitome of nerds, was 10th place, and he worked his way all the way down to a competition with Jeff Something. I was rooting hard for Jeff; I'd much rather hang out with Jeff than this Darren loser. But Darren won. He seemed invincible. Now I had to face him, or get the crappy 4th place, which doesn't even get a triangle trophy. They put the questions on an overhead projector and had buzzers in front of us. First one to answer correctly wins the point, best of 5 format.

I swept Darren, 3-0. Take that, nerd. I'll save the physical beatings for DC.

Then it was my good buddy Brett. I'd been facing off against him all year. I swept him, too. Turns out I'm a ruthless assassin.

Finally, it was Ashley. Her long legs were tantalizing. I'd been in the presence of such a beauty before, but never accompanied by any sign of intelligence. It was quite intimidating.

I got the first one right. She got the second one. I got the third. I got the fourth.

It was all over baby! I won it! HAGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!! (crowd noises) UTAH STATE MATH CHAMPION!

I was so happy, so proud of myself. I went to church the next day and told my friends. They laughed at me. Nobody cared. I cried in the corner.

As it turned out, we lost by only a few points to Butler Middle School, even though both me and Brett placed in the top 3. Bryon placed 8th or something, I think. It turned out that Chuck scored terribly and cost us the title, which meant we had to go with the Butler teacher, instead of cool Miss Price. Stupid Butler! Here's the original story. It was obviously submitted by someone from Butler, because it failed to mention that while Ashley won the individual test score, I stomped her brains out in the Countdown round, which is like writing an article about the baseball season as if the Phillies won, because they had the best regular season record, instead of the Cardinals, which won the World Series.

Miss Price did end up going to DC with us, although I think she paid for it. The plane ride was everything I dreamed about. I had no idea what to bring, so I packed my ghetto blaster and a bunch of my tapes in my duffel bag. We stayed at a Sheraton somewhere near DC. Me and Brett shared a room, but then because Ashley was a GIRL, she got her own room and they brought in a cot and Mr. Darren Raggozine. He snored like a pig. It was okay, though, because I stayed up late and watched rated R movies on HBO. They kinda freaked me out, and I repented immediately.

Miss Price and the Butler ~~doucher~~ teacher pretended like we had a chance at nationals, so we got together a few times before to "practice". I couldn't care less about it. The prize for the top person was like a 20K scholarship or something, but that was so unlikely that I didn't even bother. The kids that win national do math problems for fun. I wasn't one of those kids. So we took the tests and I took 112th out of 224 kids, right smack-dab in the middle. The other Utahns, including that ~~skank~~ nice girl Ashley, did much worse than I, like they weren't even trying or something. We took 42nd out of 56, because the territories (like Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands) were invited, too.

KSL-5 came out and did a news story on us. They asked us a bunch of questions but I only remember one, since my answer showed up on the news. The question was, "Do you think you'll win?" I felt like a coach at NW Boondocks State, being asked if his team had a chance against Notre Dame. "Uhh...no way in fetchin' heck." What I actually said was "It's pretty darn tough, I don't think we'll win." The news story then said, "It turned out to be tougher than that, as they took 42nd place!" Then it cut away to the anchors talking. "What a bunch of losers. Disgrace to our state. Isn't that right, Karen?" "Yes, they certainly don't look very smart. Only one of the kids had glasses, and that girl looked too pretty to be using her brain."

So, we lost. Badly. I didn't care at all. The food was delicious, we got to tour the city, and ride a plane. I even made friends with Ashley by the end, and we made out in her room (just kidding!).

You may recall that I said I was the Utah math champion in 9th grade, as well. Well, there is an official Utah State Math Contest which is run by various universities every year. The rewards weren't as cool, but there were nice banquets involved. You can see the results here, and you can see that I won the Weighted Scores for the Junior Exam (grades 7-9), and took 2nd in the unweighted scores, which no one cares about. You can also see that I won the 1994 unweighted score title, which counted more at the time. You can also see my nemesis Darren (I've been spelling his name wrong on purpose), my buddy Brett, and my brother Kurt in the Junior Exam Results. My mentor Brian, also showed up in the top 4 for the Senior Exam. The state math competition wasn't as exciting as Mathcounts.

I gave up participating in most math contests in high school, mostly for the reason that I had nothing left to prove and the prizes weren't that great. I had a Pre-Calculus class as a sophomore which really sucked all of my math enjoyment out. I was pretty sure that I was going to be a DJ at that point. However, finding myself as an IT consultant working with massive amounts of data, it turns out I was a nerd all along. Time to embrace it, finally.

There is no charge for awesomeness...or attractiveness

2011-11-06T17:27:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I've proved my awesomeness, leading some to question it. How dare they!?!?! Anyway, our firepit area in the back was a big fat mess, usually muddy with weeds as tall as me. It was time for an upgrade, so I went to work.

Here are the before pictures:

As you can see, it's just a big area full of weeds. If you look closely, there are some big logs and a pile of sticks in there where the fire pit is.

I decided to make the area 10x16. First, I dug 6 holes for posts. 1 in each corner, and 2 in the middle of the long side. Then I "planted" the 4x4 posts in the ground, and secured 2x10s to them.

You can't see the posts here, but the 2x10s are attached to them.

In most areas, I had to dig a trench to get the 2x10 across to the other post and keep it level. I tried to dig the holes about 20" deep, but some areas were really rocky so I only got them like 15". I wanted the top of the posts to be 2" below the top of the 2x10.

When finished, I had a well-defined boundary that was level, which is key. This whole process was the hardest part. It took me 2 Saturdays of back-breaking shoveling. If you haven't noticed, I'm pretty out of shape and so this required a long recovery time for my body.

Once the perimeter was level and secure, I dug up the center area, tossing dirt from the higher areas to the lower areas, and also digging a 4' hole in the middle for the fire pit.

Next, I built the ring, using old broken bricks from my brick-path days. Then I used whole bricks for the top row to make it pretty on top. I decided to not use any sort of mortar, because that would be way too much work.

The next step was to fill the area with sand. I got a cubic yard of coarse sand delivered and spread it in a couple of hours.

Then, I got large stepping stones from a quarry in Hingham. 700 pounds' worth, which barely fit in the Jeep. Melanie told me where to put the stones. We turned out to be a little short of stone, so we used large stones from our yard to fill in the gaps.

The final step was to put crushed stone in the gaps. That was pretty easy. I think it looks pretty good. The overall cost was a little under 400 bucks and about 30 man hours.

Now, for the final before/after:

Happy birthday to Melanie!

2011-10-22T01:08:00.001-04:00

My wife is awesome. Have I told you this? It's true-she's awesome. How awesome is she? Let me count the ways:

1. She is a great mother. She always gets up in the middle of the night to comfort Hendrik, allowing me to get my VERY necessary beauty sleep.
2. She is an exceptional cook. Part of her being a great cook is her ability to take the "hard truth" about some of the things I don't like, which means she doesn't make that same meal in the future, which would mean I would pretend to like it again. I love her homemade pizza the most. She also tries new recipes regularly, which is great.
3. She is a diligent employee. Melanie's work situation isn't as good as it once was, with a lot of political battles with the higher-ups leading to discontent and other various dramatic situations. However, she plugs away, always making sure her work gets done, even if it means going to bed at 3:45 AM to get up the next morning at 5:30. Not really sure how she does it, actually. She will get promoted to BFO this year, pending the higher-ups getting their act together and finally putting the paperwork through. (Note: BFO stands for "Budget Fiscal Officer", not "Best Friend of the Organization", which is what it should be) If I ever become unemployable, which gets more and more likely with each day, she could easily carry the financial burden of our family, especially with my expensive habits like Laffy Taffy. As it stands right now, she makes more than double!
4. She is super attractive. People walk up to her all the time and ask, "Are you a supermodel? And why are you with this schmuck (pointing to me)?" To which she answers, "Yes, and he's my slave."
5. She is a great listener. I think. I just assume she's listening to my long, drawn-out soliloquies.
6. She makes up for my lack of _______. When we meet a nice couple, I usually say things that make the couple hate us, but then she cleans up the mess with her dynamic personality and we're all BFFs after that.
7. She's selfless. Mel never worries about her own comfort, just that everybody else is happy. She organized this fundraiser for MS and was able to raise over 5K this year, after around 3K last year.
8. She's very intelligent. She's only made one wrong decision, although it was a big one.
9. She's faithful. Most Sunday mornings involve a certain amount of kicking and screaming, but never from her.
10. She's athletic. Once, she beat me in a game of H-O-R-S-E, as well as in bowling. She can also kick my trash in any foot race longer than 10 ft.
11. She allows me to watch all sorts of sports. As long as her Nook is fully charged, she can sit through 10 hours of football next to me.
12. She is awesome at folding laundry. As much as I've tried to replicate her garment-folding methods, they still end up bulky and tilty. She folds them as if they were going on the shelf in the Gap.
13. She is the least judgmental person I have ever met. When I told her I murdered 23 people when I was in college, she just said, "We can work on that!"
14. She's always game for whatever. I drag her on all my little expeditions and she takes it like a champ, even if it involves camping in the mud.
15. She's a great writer. Just 3 years ago, she wrote a blog post!
16. She hates scary movies and all of that kind of trash. I also hate that trash, so we just stay away.
17. She doesn't spend hardly any money on clothes. We'll go shopping for her, and we'll end up spending more money on me than her. Most people reading this would assume it's because I'm such a cheapskate, but I swear it's not the case. She's very picky about what she buys, and never buys stuff that just sits in the closet.
18. She's hilarious. Her humor is very subtle but clever. Unless she's making fun of me, then it's pretty obvious and low-brow.
19. She doesn't follow the crowd. She likes what she likes, but not because someone told her to like it. She even likes the movie "No Reservations", which NOBODY likes.
20. She's sensitive, but not weepy. She's very stingy about her tears, she won't give them to just anybody.
21. She's selfless. She's not happy unless everybody else is happy. The past 2 years, she's put together a fundraiser for Multiple Sclerosis (MS), as her good work friend Theresa has it. She spends months getting companies to donate items for her auction, including some Red Sox items that are signed by the players. This year, she even got David Ortiz to sign a game-worn jersey for the auction. Last year I believe she raised somewhere around $3,500 and this year it was something north of $5,000. I'm very proud of her generosity.

I wrote 21 items because it's her 21st birthday. So everybody wish Mel a happy 20th and let's hope the next 21 years are as productive as the first!

This is a true story. Pretty much.

2011-09-15T09:07:00.002-04:00

We sat on the beach that day. It was sunny and the waves were monsters. All of the sudden, a man dressed in a black cloak and a three-cornered hat galloped by on his horse. "The hurricane cometh! Gather ye children! The hurricane cometh! Get ye hence!" After the horseman passed, the lifeguard raise his arms as if to gather us from both sides. We left our umbrellas, blankets, and sand castles and gathered round.

"Alas, 'tis true. Yarrrrr, there's a great storm a-brewin'," said the lifeguard. "Nary a soul shall survive! Pack up yer steeds and carriages 'fore Irene come! She will show no mercy, not to no one! Yarrrr!" The lifeguard paused, perhaps thinking of a former companion lost to such a storm. "Mandatory evacuation for all non-residents by Friday at 5. No dilly-dallyin', no procrasinatin', no general tomfoolery! This here's serious!" He looked us all in the eye, somehow simultaneously. His long, ragged, sun-bleached blonde hair flapped in the wind like a flag of surrender. "Now git, I say!"

We scattered. Umbrellas, blankets packed up with haste! Sand castles demolished with enthusiasm! Nothing left behind!

Back at the beach house, we turned on the television. The Important Newscaster forecasted our doom: "Irene is coming at a furrrrrrious rate! It is a Category 26 Billion! It will kill us all! Repent now before it's too late!"

We changed the channel, but it was no different: "You'll need 5,000 gallons of water. 36 days' supply of food. If you are in a coastal state, or bordering a state that borders a coastal state, or ANYWHERE EAST OF THE MISSISSIPP--you must dig yourself a shelter and eat prunes until October. That is the only way to stay alive!"

We were far from home, 8 hours in good traffic. First, we needed to evacuate Ocean City, then we needed to go home and evacuate our home. The dreaded double evacuation--we'll be packing for days!

We left Friday morning. Along the way, roadside preachers sang our doom. "The hurrrrrrrricane cometh! It's too late!" Cars pulled over along the way, the drivers too panic-stricken to go on. They lay in the ditches, in the medians, moaning and grumbling. "If only I would've saved more water…" said one of them. The air felt heavy with rain and desperation. It truly was Hurricarmageddon.

We arrived home. It was hot, muggy. The rains had not arrived. It was eerily quiet. The stores were all out of prunes and plywood-the 2 essentials. I started to dig a shelter, but it was no use: survival wasn't worth this much work! We filled up our biggest cup with water. "This will need to last a month," I calculated, "so everybody gets 17 drops a day. 5 for breakfast, 5 for lunch, 5 for dinner, and 2 for a special treat after you've done your chores." We all hesitantly agreed and waited for the apocalypse.

The rains came on Saturday. It poured furiously most of the day. I chopped up our living room couch to fashion a canoe before I realized there was very little wood in the couch. I did the same thing to the loveseat before deciding that modern-day furniture does not have nearly enough wood for a canoe. Frantic for a boat, I dragged the dining room table out to the yard for a raft and sat on it, waiting for the floods to come. By 5 PM, the table was very wet, but not afloat. By 9, it was still very wet, and still very not afloat. We decided to go inside and wait out the storm upstairs. Hendrik had first watch. That was a poor plan, as he didn't even wake up Melanie for her turn and we slept through the night.

When I woke up, I looked at my digital clock. 7 AM. How are we still alive?!?! How is this clock still working?! I looked outside, it was still raining, but no wind. The table outside was still very wet. I scolded Hendrik for not waking up Melanie and we went downstairs to watch TV and fret. Melanie had first Fret Watch, since Hendrik didn't wake her up. Church was cancelled, due to our impending doom. TV, thankfully, had not been cancelled. Perhaps they were all located in storm-free country, if that even exists.

The winds came right on schedule at 10 AM. They huffed and they puffed, and they blew some branches down. Small ones, medium ones, big ones. Our early afternoon viewing of "Tangled" was interrupted several times by flickers of power. This hurricarmageddon was very inconvenient! I went outside to yell at it, but it didn't listen, it only got stronger.

The rains stopped around 3 PM. There was no flooding in our area. Just a very wet table. It was just as well, since it had been my turn to clean the table for the past 2 months, and I led the league in Avoiding Duty. I deemed it sufficiently clean and dragged it back inside.
We all gathered in the living room and celebrated the successful weathering of the storm. There was no need for all of those precautions. What ridiculous weathercasters and newspeople! Their fear-mongering was all for ratings! It was all a conspiracy by the prune and plywood sales reps! We laughed and laughed at how superior we were. We thumped our chests and roared. We were very prideful then.

But then, tragedy struck. At precisely 3:34 PM, the power went out. For good. This time, there was no foolin' around. This was fine, we could manage a small outage. We barely use electricity anyway. We dusted off our books and relearned how to read.

"Gree…green…egg…eggs…an…and…h…ham" read Melanie. She was a very advanced reader for her age. I picked up a Richard Scarry book to look at the pictures. Hendrik practiced his animal sounds. It was all very 1913.

When it got too dark to look at the pictures, I went over to turn on the lamp. It didn't work! Well, the lightbulb may have burnt out, I'll try another light. No luck! I went through the entire house, and not one light worked. What a coincidence that the same day that the electricity goes out the lights all burn out! Mel found a flashlight and turned it on. Phew! At least that didn't burn out.

Our gas stove also worked. We cooked water and pasta. The water tasted funny, but the pasta was delicious. When it got completely dark, we went to bed. It was 7:30 according to my phone. When we wake up tomorrow, everything will be back to normal.

Just as I suspected, everything was back to normal. The house was completely lit up the next morning, and it didn't matter that our light bulbs were all burnt out. The TV still wouldn't turn on and there was no hot water, but other than that, it was back to normal. The fridge was warm and the meat in the freezer was bad, but everything else was the same. The dishwasher wouldn't turn on and I had to heat water on the stove to do the dishes, but besides that, things hadn't changed. I dropped Hendrik off at day care and went to work, as Mel had left an hour before. We knew that when we came home everything would work.

When we returned, the house was dark and nothing worked. Without light, there was nothing to do. All our frozen dinners were ruined, so there was nothing to eat. The microwave wouldn't even pop the corn, and the oven wouldn't heat the fish sticks.

We started to go crazy. Hendrik ran around in circles like a mad-man. Mel lay under the table, scratching at the tile and singing lullabies. I climbed on the roof and howled at the moon. This was the end. We had lost our minds. Irene had taken away our light, our food, our entertainment, and our sanity.

Our family was in disarray. Hendrik left to live with the wolves. Melanie became a recluse, living in a fort of empty chick-flick DVD cases. I couldn't string together a coherent sentence. We had become animals.

On the roof, I heard the growl of what must have been a great beast. It came from multiple directions. We were animals now, I thought, and we would have to defend our herd like wildebeests in the bush. I assumed these great beasts were coming for us, but the constant growls did not grow nearer. I crawled back inside and approached Melanie's fort.

"Who goes there?!" demanded she.

"Husband. Want. Talk," said I. It took a while, due to my diminishing linguistic abilities, but we planned our attack on these growling beasts across the road from us. Melanie had retained the ability to walk on her hind legs, while I was forced to use all fours. We crossed the dark street, into the neighboring human's automobile shelter. The growling was louder now, we were close. My heightened sense of smell picked up the stench of fuel. This beast possibly was feeding on lawn-mowers and other gas-driven equipment. He must have horrendous teeth, sharp as a Cutco knife! We stalked around the shelter and saw the beast. It had a metallic shell and wasn't as big as I imagined. It moaned and growled somethin' terrible and constant. That's when we noticed the human's shelter had light.

Melanie pointed to the window. "Look, Ken-wah!" She called me Ken-wah now, I wasn't sure why, but it felt right. "Light!"

"Light?" I stepped out of the shadows and into the rectangle of light on the grass. I saw inside the human shelter. There was indeed a light and I looked directly at it.

Mel tackled me. "Don't look directly into it! It will destroy your brain!" We put trash lids on our head to protect us from the brain-eating light. However, we couldn't resist watching how the humans inside the glass lived. Inside, there was a flat box with moving pictures. The male sat on a couch watching it with his mouth agape. The female sat under the light and read a collection of papers with writing on them. I got too close to the glass and the trash can hit it. The female saw us creeping outside and called to the male, who picked up a shotgun and headed to the door. We scattered, Melanie on her hind legs, me on all fours. Melanie was much faster than me and hid behind a tree. I was in the rectangle of light when the male human fired his gun at me. It struck me in the leg and I thought I was a goner. Melanie came back for me, pulling me back into the bush, licking my wound and comforting me.

We went back into our own shelter for the rest of the night. Melanie retreated to her fort, and I slept on the roof. The metallic beasts growled through the night, and it was truly a junglescape.

The next morning, I was back in human form. The daylight gave me strength and intelligence. Humans weren't meant to live in the dark. I told a cold shower, dressed, and went to work.

When we returned that evening, the electricity was back! We turned on all the lights, we cranked the A/C down to 50 degrees, we plugged in the space heaters. We turned on the TV and stereo, putting it to maximum volume. We ran the washer and dryer with no clothes, the dishwasher with no dishes. The generators around the neighborhood were all turned off. Our next-door neighbor's flood light that they never turn off and shines directly into our room was back on. After 2 solid days of no electricity, we were back in paradise. We slept soundly that night, with all the lights on. It was a relief to be back in modern society.

I hate kids

2011-08-30T17:55:00.002-04:00

But not yours. Yours are great.

To be honest, the title of this post is more a gimmick than a fact. I'm resorting to gimmicks nowadays to keep people interested. You probably saw this title and thought, "The nerve! What a jerk! But now I have to figure out why he hates kids." And here you are reading, to which I say, "Ha, I tricked you! Please don't click away…"

So, I don't hate kids. Especially not yours. Yours are great. Of course I love my own son, and also love my thousands of nephews and nieces. I like my friends' kids in differing amounts, depending on the friend and the kid, but I certainly don't dislike any of them. I would say that my love for little children of all kinds has gone up tremendously since I've been a parent. I'll see a baby in the grocery store and smile, whereas before there's no way I would be caught DEAD smiling in a grocery store.

So what is this post about if I like kids so much, you ask? It's about the biggest surprise of my parenthood: I had no idea how hard it is to like, or even tolerate, kids that are idiots. I'm talking about the jerk at the playground who's climbing backwards up the slide, running everywhere at full-tilt, knocking 1 year-olds over, making all sort of noise, and just in general being outright obnoxious and ruining everybody's day. I'm also talking about the little brats that are obviously never being told no at their houses, and act like entitled nobility. I had NO idea how hard it was to not hate these kids, their parents, and everyone who says they like that kid.
Let's go through some examples:

1. Whitman playground, early spring-time: Hendrik has been walking for a couple of months and is still pretty wobbly. We start him off at the little kid section, with the small slide and the big red tube, which he loves to climb in. He's having a dandy time when these 8 year old boys come sprinting over from the big kid side, knocking Hendrik over and acting like drunken fools. Hendrik isn't hurt much, but the rage inside me grows quickly. I feel myself turning into the Hulk. I keep a watchful eye on the idiot kid to make sure he doesn't inflict more damage. Later, while Hendrik is playing in the tube, this kid climbs on top of the tube, kicking it, and being loud. He wasn't doing anything bad to Hench, but I'd had enough. I tapped his leg to get his attention and told him to go back to the big kid side and not be such a tool. I can't remember this part that well, but I didn't really touch him (although I really wanted to smack him), and I definitely gave him some sort of old-guy lecture. He looked sufficiently scared and whimpered off to the other side. Mission accomplished!

Later, I began to feel bad. I mean, besides knocking Hendrik over, what else did he do wrong? I decided to let it go and resolved to be nicer to other kids, especially the ones that are idiots, because they probably need the most love.

2. Braintree mall, a few weeks later: We discovered that this mall had an awesome play area very close to the food court. It was designed for pretty small kids, with various tubes to crawl in and what-not. It had a tree-house type theme, similar to the University Mall's play area in Orem. However, unlike the Uni Mall, the play area was totally enclosed, meaning there was no easy escape for wanderers like Hendu.

Mel was shopping for whatever women shop for, and I was in charge of the boy. When we arrived at the play area, it was overrun by chumplings. Chumplings are native to mall play areas, and are a very invasive species unless controlled. These chumplings were especially wild, not unlike a monkey house at the zoo, except monkey houses have less poo-flinging. The chumplings were zooming around at 40 mph, swinging from the branches of the tree, diving through the small tubes, and causing massive commotion. I was hesitant to allow Hench to play around these chumplings for a few reasons: A) He'd get trampled to his death; 2) He'd get knocked over violently; or D) He'd get bitten by one of the chumplings and turn into one of them. I was pretty weary from following him around all creation and keeping him away from escalators, which he loves to no end, so I decided I'd take that risk. H started playing like usual, going into the tubes first. Just then, some smaller chumpling swooped down from the tree and pushed Hendrik right out of the tube so he could go through it. I was on the other side of the tube, waiting for my son to come through, so the chumpling came right at me. I grabbed him on both arms and was foaming at the mouth, I was so angry. "Watch where you're going, ya little runt!" I yelled, saliva flailing from my lips, steam shooting out of my ears. The kid gave me a quivering look and I realized he probably thought I was going to murder him. I let him go and tended to my screaming boy, who needed a good chunk of cuddle time before he was back at it. Later, I sat on the edge of the play area and watched the offending chumpling at work. He didn't change his routine, he continued to run around with the cautiousness of a bull. I identified his parents and judged them for a while. What irresponsible parents! I would NEVER have a child as rambunctious as him!

Then I started to feel bad again. Deep in my heart, I had some serious hatred for that kid and some lite hatred for his parents. What right did I have to hate them? They're probably just regular parents doing the best they can, and he's just a boy who likes to play. Soon enough, I thought, Hendrik will be a chumpling and I'll be glad that he's having fun like a little boy should. If a few toddlers are knocked down in the process, so be it. So, after about 3 months, I let it go.

3. Our house, sometime after that: From February 2010 to April 2011, Hendrik and another boy were watched by a babysitter, first at the other boy's house, and then at ours. It was fun watching them grow up together, learn things together, etc. A bonus was that the other kid was black, and we were secretly proud of the fact that our kid had a black friend, much sooner than I ever did (it still hasn't happened). However, after this kid turned 1, he turned into a nightmare. He had a nasty hitting habit, and was just violent in general. He was very mobile and coordinated. He was constantly knocking Hendrik down with his aggressiveness, even though he wasn't doing it maliciously. It really irked me, especially that it happened every day.
When I would work from home, I'd take a break every so often and play with Hendrik. Of course, the other little boy would want to play with me, too, but, frankly, I wasn't that interested in him. I'd pick up Hendu, tickle him, throw him around on our bed, etc, and all the while the other kid would just watch from the side, trying to get involved. Occasionally I would throw him a bone and chuck him around, but that was more to just chuck him than to play with him. I'd do that for about .5 seconds and realize that I had zero willingness to play with this kid who was always beating up on Hendrik, especially because any time spent playing with him meant less time playing with H. I felt bad about not playing with him, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

In April, the babysitter took a full-time job and the other little kid disappeared, which is when Liesl came and watched Hendrik. Since then, I only see the other kid at church and I've found that I like him again. He seems to be calm at nursery, and they play with each other relatively nicely, from what I can see.

4. July: There's this little girl that we know who's right at Hendrik's age. She's on the spoiled side, and by that I mean there doesn't seem to be an end to the toys she has. This is great for Hendrik, who has a much, much smaller collection of toys. However, this girl gets possessive and acts like a mother hen who's feeling threatened by a wolf every time he tries to get near the toys or near her. Hendrik is a pretty social kid for the most part, and likes to give hugs to little girls that he knows. This little girl is obviously much too good for Hendrik, and on this particular occasion pushed him away. That wasn't a big deal, but as Hendrik walked away she ran at him just to smack him right on the forehead, pretty much the toddler's version of a punch to the face. It was pretty cold-blooded and malicious, and I'd never seen any kid of that age act with so much violent intent towards another kid. I was totally shocked and angry. Her mom was right there and took action, but I was so angry about it that I couldn't stop thinking about how much I hated that girl. Even as I write this, I still feel the same way. Give me another 3 months, and I may be over it.

5. July/August, at the beach: Hendrik likes to approach other kids at the beach and tries to play with them. Some kids ignore him and he moves on. Occasionally, he will find a kindred spirit, usually a 4 or 5 year old, who loves to play with Hendrik just as much as Hendrik wants to play with him. There was this little boy who did that, played with him for almost an hour, as they played in the waves and sand. It was the greatest thing ever. I thanked his parents for his kid's willingness to play and asked them if he was for rent ("Rent a brother", not to be confused with "Rent a brotha"-totally different business). I wanted to give the kid a big hug and a present. I mention this as a contrast to stories 1-4 above, to show that when a kid is good to mine, I'm totally in love with them.

As you can see, I've got a lot of ground to cover. I have to figure out a way to stop hating kids. It's just so hard when most kids are so obnoxious. But not yours. Yours are great.

The Art of Flying

2011-07-19T10:53:00.000-04:00

What is it about flying that sucks the life out of us? At the beginning of the month, our little collective made the seasonal trip to The Promised Land. Due to my wife's Irrational Boss Who Overstates the Importance of Work, we couldn't get tickets at a reasonable price without a stopover at JFK. This is the story of that trip:

I have a theory. When people step into the world of air travel, they typically leave behind any goodwill towards men. It's every dude for hisself here, starting at the check-in lines all the way to the baggage claim at the Final Destination. Perhaps this could be a metaphor. Perhaps not. Anyway, every process along the way seems to decrease our Happiness Meter by a few points. To illustrate, I shall take you through the trip to Utah, giving you some insight into our personal happiness meters. We'll start out at the max of 100, since 100 is "I'm happy that I have a week off of work and am going to see my beloved family" and 0 is "I've watched way too many episodes of 'Handy Manny' to retain any semblance of sanity".

We step into the airport, luggage in hand. We're toting a large suitcase, a duffel bag, a car seat, a largish stroller (which is toting Hendrik), Liesl (kid sister) and a YM, age 15. The YM's name is Samir, and he is going to EFY in Provo, and we are his escorts. I won't list their happiness totals, as I don't really know them as well as my wife and kid.

Happiness Meter:
Me - 100
Mel - 100
Hendrik - 100

We try to check in at JetBlue. The computers are ridiculously slow. Hendrik starts to get impatient. Waiting for 5 seconds for a screen to refresh is like 5 minutes with an impatient toddler, and like 50 minutes with an impatient toddler in an airport. The screen asks us for some sort of Redress Number. Not only do I not know what a Redress Number is, I've never even heard of it, and furthermore, is it even a word? I think JetBlue is making stuff up now. I ignore it and power my way through the screens and print out the boarding passes.

Liesl is not having much luck. They won't allow her to search by destination, only by confirmation number and blood type. We fake a few numbers and power through it, but it's taking forever. Hendrik has had it by now and is demanding a rewrite of his Airport Contract. We are all frazzled, except for Samir, who has a completely blank stare on his face.

I leave Liesl to press the final 2 buttons and get her boarding passes to get in line to check our bags. Mel has taken H out of his prison and is wrestling him near the security gates. Liesl shows up a minute later with her boarding pass. Singular. We are going on 2 flights, and there should be a baggage claim ticket, I tell Liesl. She runs back to get the other documents before some pervert steals them and flies in her spot! Thankfully, there are only 5 other people in the entire airport, and they are in front of us in line.

Happiness Meter:
Me - 85
Mel - 90
Hendrik - 0

Even though the sign says "Baggage Check Only", most people in front of us are occupying the clerk's time with standard check-ins, with no baggage in sight. When we finally approach the bench, I ask the clerk if people try to check in here, and she laughs in my face, meaning "Yes, of COURSE they do!" Melanie requests that they put our car seat in a plastic bag, and the scholarly baggage dude behind her eloquently states "We ain't got no plastic bags." The clerk pretends to find one herself while the baggage dude chucks the car seat with no great care into the mysterious section of the airport that bags disappear into and reappear out of. Melanie is incensed.

Happiness Meter:
Me - 75
Mel - 50
Hendrik - 100

We head over to the little slice of Communist Russia most people call "The Security Check". They strip us down under watch of machine guns and dobermans, loading us onto cattle cars headed for Siberia. We spend days on these cars, urinating in the corner and picking lice out of our neighbor's hair for food. Wait, no, that was the first few chapters of "The Long Walk". But frighteningly similar to the indignation of TSA. We grab 20 bins, putting an individual item in each. I made the rookie mistake of leaving my keys in my pocket as I went through the new-fangled security thingee where you put your arms up like you're frozen in the upward motion of a jumping jack. That little nugget of forgetfulness won me a free lecture from the overweight TSA woman and an intimate pat-down by her man friend, aptly named "Pat". After my "moment" with Pat, I continue my streak of forgetfulness, leaving the keys behind as we hastily redress (maybe this is related to the "redress number"? No?) and escape from Siberia towards our gate.

Happiness Meter:
Me - 55
Mel - 45
Hendrik - 0

On the way to the gate, we see a play area, perfect for Hendrik. Mel and company (Liesl, Samir), continue to the gate while I stay behind with Hendrik. At the play area, there is a small family consisting of a speck of a human mother in her 40's, and 2 adolescents sitting practically on her lap. The male adolescent has a thick Harold Potter book open, rivaling him in thickness, reading aloud as the other 2 listen. He'll read a few pages and then stop, and they discuss in a Slavic language, even though he's reading in English. What appears to be another member of their family is a 3-year-old, possibly 4, blonde girl, running around from toy to toy, pushing Hendrik off of each one. Hendrik takes it pretty well, but I want to give the girl the spanking of her lifetime. I refrain, holding to my feelings of superior parenting as my small victory over the Tiny Slavic Family. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew arrives at the gate and relaxes.

Happiness Meter:
Me - 50
Mel - 50
Hendrik - 1,000,000,000,000

It's time to board on our small flight to NYC. I remember that I forgot my keys, so I run back to security, where they actually have it placed to the side, labeled as to what time it was lost and my description ("white male, 2:30 PM"). I am pleasantly surprised at this. I hustle back to board just in time. The plane is small, only 2 seats on each side. Liesl sits behind us, Samir across from us, and Mel and I have a row to ourselves with Hendrik. H finds the tray enchanting, unlocking it, letting it fall, and then putting it back up. He is running on all cylinders now, nowhere close to a nap. It's 3:30 in the afternoon. The flight goes pretty well, except for the constant wrestling match with Hench. We finally pacify him with his heroin: Toy Story 3. He is calm as a Single Ward's sacrament meeting.

Happiness Meter:
Me - 50
Mel - 50
Hendrik - 100

We land in NYC. It's 5 PM and our flight to Utah isn't until 8:30. We find an overpriced grill in the food area. Hendrik eats almost my entire 7-dollar hamburger, which is ironic considering he barely touches the hamburgers we make for him at home. We take turns chasing him around the terminal. I get a craving for Corn Nuts and look in all the shops for them. No luck. I had to settle for trail mix. 7:30 PM comes around and we're sick of waiting and chasing Hendrik. We put on Toy Story 3, hoping that it will relax him and get him ready for sleep right at 8:30. However, the flight is delayed. We don't end up boarding until 10 PM, and by then, all the passengers have descended into Apocalypse Mode. Allow me to explain, I don't mind. Apocalypse Mode is when people have ceased to care about anyone's survival or well-being except their own. There is no help with strollers or bags. There is the constant grumbling when a little child is around. There is the accusing looks, which pretty much say, "Your kid better be SILENT on this trip or I will KEEL you!" It takes hold of me, too. I start muscling my way to the front of the boarding line, using Hendrik as the reason to board first. "Small child here! We got dibs on boarding!" It doesn't matter, though, since Dibs are not honored in Apocalypse Mode. We only board when we get to the front of the line, and that only happens after I clear out a few Asians.

Happiness Meter:
Me - 20
Mel - 25
Hendrik - 50

We board the plane. Since we are late, the attendants make sure everyone is ready for take-off: no electronics, no trays down, no bathroom breaks, no General Tomfoolery. We are to sit still and prepare for take-off! However, there is one problem. We aren't moving. We sit on the plane, ready to go, but we don't even pull away from the gate. This goes on for 30-45 minutes. It felt like 30 days. I was losing it. Hendrik was losing it. Mel was keeping it together.

Happiness Meter:
Me - 1
Mel - 20
Hendrik - 0

We finally get moving and take-off. We're in the air! Hendrik falls asleep and we're watching TV. Life is slightly better.

Happiness Meter:
Me - 2
Mel - 21
Hendrik - 100

The flight goes okay. I get exactly 3 minutes and 28 seconds of sleep. Melanie appears to get more, and Hendrik still more. Hendrik is out pretty well until about 90 minutes left, when he wakes up super crabby and won't go back to sleep. We put on Toy Story 3 on my computer, since the DVD player ran out of batteries because the plane was delayed. My computer runs out of batteries with 30 minutes left. It's a battle of endurance as we try every trick in the book to keep him still/quiet. He doesn't have a tantrum so it's a small victory, but he does whine a lot, so we get lots of annoyed looks. We're almost there.

Happiness Meter:
Me - negative 5
Mel - 10
Hendrik - negative 1 billion

We land at SLC at 1 AM local time. It's 3 AM in Boston, and we left the house nearly 14 hours ago. My brother Bruce is ready to pick us up and drive us to his house. All that's left is to get our bags. We get to the claim and wait. And wait. Hendrik has had it, he wants to escape to the street and get himself runneth overed. I chase him around the terminal, inside and outside, bringing him back to the baggage claim every few minutes. Still no bags. My inner patience (which already runs pretty low), is completely on "E", so I just hate everything by now. I hate JetBlue, I hate the SLC airport, I hate JFK (both the person and the airport), I hate it all. WHERE ARE MY FREAKING BAGS!?!?!??!

Happiness Meter:
Me - negative infinity
Mel - 1
Hendrik - 0

The bags finally come. We load it all into Bruce's van and escape from the airport. We are all very tired. Forsooth.

Happiness Meter:
Me - 0
Mel - 0
Hendrik - 0

Oh So Special

2011-06-26T21:51:00.004-04:00

Meet Special Agent Oso. The. Unique. Stuffed. Bear. He's on a special assignment to help a kid somewhere. With help from you, there's nothing he can't do. He's Oh So Special.

I've watched Oso so many times that I feel the compelling need to let you into the world of mind-numbing kid's television. We DVR a few shows that we put on for Hendrik when he's whiny (5% of the time), tired (2% of the time), or his parents don't feel like parenting (93% of the time). The shows we watch are as follows, in order of Hendrik's favorite to least favorite:

1. Sesame Street
2. Special Agent Oso
3. Chuggington
4. Jack's Big Music Show
5. Curious George
6. Super Why
7. Handy Manny
8. Yo Gabba Gabba (we stopped recording this for reasons of our sanity)

I've taken these shows and ordered them from most tolerable to driving-me-absolutely-bonkers:

1. Curious George - No annoying songs, not formulaic, I only despise that stupid wiener dog. I envy the Man in the Yellow Hat's wardrobe (and property! A condo in the city? A house in the country? All on a semi-competent biologist's salary, too!), and I like the black kid who calls George "city kid".
2. Jack's Big Music Show - Lots of songs, but very low on the annoying factor. I also prefer muppets to cartoons.
3. Super Why - Formulaic, but low-key and not that annoying. Except Super Red is kind of a skank.
4. Sesame Street - If Sesame Street had more old-school stuff and not these incredibly-long sketches that are super boring, then I'd rank it #1. I despise Abby's Flying Fairy School and just hate anything involving the super whiny monster Telly. Grover is still pretty cool, and Cookie Monster is awesome. Elmo gets a ton of air-time and I've gotten used to the fact that he speaks like Ricky Henderson (always in the 3rd person), plus it's hard to totally hate something your child absolutely adores.
5. Chuggington - The kid trains just piss me off in general, and the song gets stuck in my head for centuries (Chuuuuuuuuuuggington. Chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chuggington). The kid trains always blatantly disobey the rules, get in trouble, and then don't even get in trouble for it! Where's the stern lecture? Where's the grounding? Where's the back of the hand or belt on the backside!?!?!
6. Special Agent Oso - See this entire blog post, but not as annoying as…
7. Handy Manny - Handy Manny is not so annoying as it is INCREDIBLY BORING. 15 minutes to change a light fixture? And when is Manny gonna hook up with Kelly? There's not much to like with Handy Manny. The tools are either incredibly stupid ("I'm a hammer!") or huge wusses (see: Rusty, Monkey Wrench). The next store over features Mr. Lopart, your prototypical Chester Molester, who scores 11 out of 10 on the Creepy Factor. He owns a candy shop (red flag, anyone?), has a cat as a best friend, and is just the most unlikeable character ever. It baffles me how this show ever got on the air. We never watch it anymore.
8. Yo Gabba Gabba - I like this show, aside from the fact that I feel like I'm on drugs when I'm watching it. You have to be in the mood to watch this, and I've never been in that mood. When my buddy (who had kids at the time) was visiting us a couple years ago, he convinced me to turn on "Yo Gabba" to see how awesome it was. There were no kids in the room, and I had no idea what Yo Gabba was at the time. We turned it on and watched it for like 5 minutes and my brain turned to mush and I collapsed to the floor.

So there you have it. Now let's get back to Oso.

This show is about a yellow bear that works for a stupendously inefficient global spy network with a seemingly bottomless budget. He gets called by his boss "Mr. Dos" to help kids with everyday tasks in 3 Special Steps. The show is very formulaic, and always starts with Oso trying to complete some ridiculously easy training exercise, like covering his spy car with a car cover. Oso always screws up the exercise, sometimes causing major damage to his spy plane/car/submarine/spaceship while almost killing everybody within 10 miles. He always screws up because he can't listen to more than one instruction at once. The animals in charge of him are Wolfy (a wolf), and Dotty (a dot--J/K LOL!--she's a cat).

Wolfy, Dotty, and Oso get plastered

Both Wolfy and Dotty are extremely patient, considering Oso almost kills them every day. After he ruins his exercise, he gets a call from Mr. Dos to help a kid who is in dire need, for example:

a. A kid can't tie his own shoes
b. A kid can't figure out how to throw a Frisbee
c. A kid needs to perform CPR on his dying father (haha-just kidding! Oso's only teaching essential life skills here)

So Oso takes his talking helicopter halfway across the world in a matter of seconds (from what I can tell, their headquarters is in Norway). This heli is called "Whirlybird" who also is the worst character of ALL TIME (worse than Lopart), and who also hates Oso so much that he's always trying to kill Oso by twisting his words ("What's that, Oso? You said you wanted to die today?" "No, I said I'd like some pie today! Whirrrrleeeee!!!") and dropping him 1000 feet to a certain death, which Oso usually avoids by luckily falling into a pillow-soft pine tree and into the family's kitchen, ruining everything, which could be the title of the show: "Oso Ruins Everything".

Once Oso meets the kid, who of course recognizes this bear whose company has been stalking him this entire time, and they commence solving the perplexing dilemma using the 3 Special Steps. It goes without saying that every single problem can be solved with exactly 3 steps, no more, no less. Sometimes, if it's something easy, like throwing a Frisbee, they really have to stretch out the steps:

1. Pick up the Frisbee
2. Inspect it for asbestos
3. Throw the Frisbee

Sometimes, it's a harder task, like baking a cake, so they squeeze everything in one step:

1. Find the cake mix
2. Preheat the oven
3. Ask your mom to do everything else while you watch the tube

Even though the steps are spelled out for Oso, he usually struggles with even the simplest of concepts. In fact, usually the kid has to show Oso how to figure something out, which makes me wonder about Oso's qualifications as a task mentor. Paw Pilot, this annoying talking-head character that lives in Oso's PED, usually has to give Oso some special tip. I'm always hoping she'll say this: "Here's a tip, Oso: Use your #$*& brain!"

Oso is usually on a pretty tight deadline. Paw Pilot will give him an exact amount of time to complete the task, usually in seconds: "Hurry up, Oso, Ashley's dad will come in the door to inspect her cake in 8 seconds! Also, he has a gun! And a short temper!"

This is when Oso gets frantic (potential show name: "Oso Gets Frantic") and starts ruining everything again and they have to start over. However, Paw Pilot is an extremely slow counter, and the 8 seconds usually translate to what feels like 37 hours. They succeed in the end, the dad puts his gun away (although he's slightly tempted to go bear hunting), and everybody's happy. The family usually invites Oso to stay ("Yes, we'd love to have a smelly, stupid bear who never listens stay at our house indefinitely!"), but he declines (family breathes huge sigh of relief) so he can finish his training exercise, which he never should've screwed up in the first place.

Once Oso successfully completes his training exercise, Wolfy howls, "Outstanding, Oso! Owwwwwstanding!" with much zeal. Sometimes, Wolfy or Dotty will even give him a present for completing the task. One episode, Oso put together a puzzle for his training exercise and they gave him a TRAIN. Not a toy train, an actual train with a French accent whose name is Rapid (pronounced "Ra-PEED"). I'm always a little curious about what Oso's compensation package includes, and how much insurance his spy agency needs to cover all the damage he causes.

The most irritating thing about the whole show is the title of each episode, which is always a play off of a James Bond movie title. They even make a mind-numbing song out of it which Paw Pilot sings in the middle of each episode. If you recall, the James Bond titles don't make much sense as it is, so you can imagine how horrible these songs are. Some examples of titles are:

A View to a Frisbee
Hopscotch is Forever
Octo-puzzle
Hide Another Day
Live and Let Dry
For Show and Tell Only

All in all, Special Agent Oso is a brilliant show with complex plots, stunning cinematography, deep character development, and should be a force to reckon with at this year's Academy Awards. I give it 5 out of 5 stars. A must-see! 2 thumbs up! The feel-good story of the year! If you only watch one show this year, make it "Special Agent Oso"!

Tip your blogger

2011-05-27T07:12:00.002-04:00

We went on a horseback riding excursion on our recent trip to Hawaii. I'll let you take a couple moments to reflect on how awesome that last sentence makes us sound. Okay, that's enough. Now that you're filled with envy/hatred/awe, you're in the proper frame of mind to read this post.

Anyway, the excursion was 85 bucks per rider. Our beloved little boy was not with us, so that added up to a whopping 170 bucks. That may not sound like much to you, but we've been known to stretch 170 dollars into a week's worth of groceries, an extravagant trip to Costco, 5 mortgage payments, and a medium box of toothpicks. The excursion was into a remote valley called Waipi'o that has various waterfalls, farms, and was supposed to be very pretty. It was indeed pretty, and we enjoyed the valley, thank you very much. The guide was decent, at best, trying to be funny (the nerve!) all the time and wouldn't really give me a straight answer to my questions very often. I felt like I was annoying him with all my questions, which, if you're a tour guide, is not the feeling you want to be giving your tourists. Frankly, I don't care if you're annoyed with my questions, I paid a lot of money to be on this trip and I'm going to ask them anyway! He probably shouldn't be a tour guide if he doesn't like dealing with tourists.

At the end of the tour he made a few more canned jokes and then gave us a tip spiel, adding that "the customary 15%" was expected. His tip spiel was longer than ordinary, and it reminded me of the Simpsons bit where a park ranger gives a bland explanation about something and then enthusiastically thrusts his tip jar out, shaking it, with a big smile.

I don't like where this tipping culture is heading. Almost every store I go into has a tip jar next to the cash register. Most people just toss their change in there, but I pay with credit cards usually, and even if it's a cash-only place, I like to hoard my money like so many Genghis Khans (oh, it's "horde", you say?). You're probably thinking, "Tipping is optional, Kent, so just re-LAX!" Well, I'm here to suggest that tipping is no longer optional, and is now a Guilt Charge. If you don't want to feel guilty for not tipping, you tip. If you're fine with the guilt, then you don't have to tip. You're paying either with cash money or with emotional distress.

I would like to consider myself a guilt-free non-tipper, but I survived on tips for around 6 years of my life, so I can't. First, I was a pizza delivery boy, and then I was a server at TGI Friday's (flair!). So, therefore, I have the guilt and feel obligated to not only tip, but tip WELL.

I think some occupations certainly deserve a tip, especially because they are paid barely anything without tips. My base pay as a server was $2.15/hr. My paychecks were so worthless that I never picked them up until my boss broke into my car and stuffed them into my glove box. My base was a bit more as a delivery dude, up to $5.50/hr until I got promoted to manager, when I made a whopping 6 bones/hr.

The 15% rule should only apply to servers. The amount of work they're doing for the table, bringing out drinks, taking the order, cleaning up dirty dishes, etc, is certainly worth about 15% of the bill, especially considering their base pay, which essentially implies that the server works more for his customers than for the restaurant. I can't think of any other occupation where the provided service is worth 15%. As a delivery boy, I kept stats on my deliveries, and my average tip was $1.50, and my average delivery was about $15. Although I always wanted more than that, I can be a little more objective now that I'm a deliveree instead of a deliverer, and I say that the service provided is worth about 10% of the price.

What about valet parking, bellhops, and maids? I've always been iffy on this, and they say that you should tip 2-3 clams per bag, and I really have no idea what to pay the valet or the maid. If I'm on the company's dime, I'm much more generous than the norm, getting all my money back when I fill out my expense reports (filed under "sundry"). On my own dime, a few factors come into play: Did they have a good attitude? I don't feel compelled to give a tip to some surly bellhop; How many singles do I have in my wallet? I hate getting change just for a tip; How much money have I spent already on this trip (i.e. am I feeling rich or poor)? How essential was the service? How messy was my room?

I usually tip valets about 3 bucks for getting my car. For a few months back in 2007, I parked in a valet parking lot across the street from my building, as they were having a deal on parking. Because I was paying 200-ish bucks a month to park there, I didn't ever tip the valets. I was mostly fine with this, however, I did see other monthly parkers tipping, but I got over it.

I tip the bellhops about 2 bucks a bag, for a max of 5 bucks for lots of bags. In February 2010, we went to this "all-expenses included" resort in northern NH for a ski trip when Hench was 4 months old, and we had all sorts of junk with us. The bellhops were very helpful and I gave them 5 bucks or so and felt that they deserved it. However, when we got our final bill, there was a 15% Gratuity Charge tacked on the final bill, and the gratuity charge was over 100 bucks! Because it was an all-inclusive resort, every meal was in this pretty fancy ballroom with menus, servers and ushers and the lot. I also had to wear a sport coat to dinner, which totally sucked because who wants to pack a sport coat on a ski trip? You already have to pack enough winter equipment as it is. Anyway, did I get 100 bucks' worth of service there? Not even close. The most valuable thing I got was the help from the bellmen and I already tipped them. We only had 4 meals in the ballroom, and 3 of those meals were buffets with no need for servers, whose only responsibility was to provide drinks, which didn't come until 20 minutes after we sat down and finished our meal. I really could write a novelette about how much of a rip-off this place was.

I don't tip the maids unless we made some egregious mess, or if we hadn't spent much money on the trip (this is theoretical- hasn't happened so far). Once, on the company dime, I left a 20 accidentally on the shelf and the maid took it, thinking it was the tip. I figure that covers me for the rest of my life.

I certainly don't feel obligated to leave anything in a tip jar. Somehow people feel justified in putting a tip jar out and somehow deserving extra money for doing their job. The way I understand it, a tip is to reward someone for giving exceptional service. It's hard to give exceptional service while ringing up my sandwich for 6 bucks and taking my money.

I am a notoriously bad tipper when it comes to taxis. I hate taxis with a violent passion, and every time I have to take a cab, I can feel my lifespan getting shorter by the month. Cab drivers are the absolute worst drivers. The reason why they are so horrible is because they are from crazy countries that pretty much have anarchy on the streets. The worst country I've been to is Egypt, where crossing a street requires an arm and a leg and a hope and a prayer. After each and every cab ride, I feel dirty, violated, and nauseous. Dirty because the back of cabs are next to outhouse toilets in filthiness. Violated because I paid 40 bucks to go 3 miles across the harbor to the airport in a smelly car. Nauseous because the drivers don't know the meaning of the word "gradual". I have 2 memorable cab stories:

1. In 2007, I took a cab from the airport on a Sunday afternoon to my apartment in Somerville. I got a Bulgarian cab driver who deliberately took me on the worst, round-about route. Once I saw him going to the wrong freeway, I asked what he was doing and he said he was taking the best way. We argued the entire way home, about 20 minutes, him insisting that it was the best route, me angry that he was running up the meter and taking minutes away from my precious Sunday. I was on the company dime, so I didn't care about the fare, but it was the principle. The guy turned off the meter to "appease" me, even though I would've just appreciated it if he admitted he was trying to dupe me. At the end, he asked me how much it usually cost, I said 45 bucks and I gave him 40. He was livid, but I just grabbed my stuff and got out of there before he punched me. He would've beaten the crap out of me, too.

2. In 2008, I was in Manhattan and had to catch the Delta shuttle at La Guardia. I wasn't in a huge rush, but that didn't matter to the cabbie. He drove like an absolute mad man, honking at everybody, flipping off pedestrians and grandmas, driving over sidewalks, on shoulders, etc, using the F-word with each breath, and just being that crazy driver that everybody sees and rolls their eyes at. I was embarrassed to be in the back, as if this was somehow my fault. Also, I was about to puke. I didn't want to leave him a tip, but I was scared of the repercussions if I didn't, so I did. Once again, company dime. This is the part where that annoying person who lived in NYC for 6 months laughs and says, "Oh you silly non-New Yorker, all cabbies are like that!" My retort is that I've been on enough cab rides in that city to know that's not true.

So what is my general rule for cabs? I rarely take them when I'm paying, but my hatred is so deep that I am a lousy tipper regardless of who's ultimately paying for it. For a 40 dollar ride to the airport from downtown, I tip 5 bucks max. For an 80-dollar ride to Whitman, I pay 5 bucks again. I just can't give these cabs a good tip, even though cabbies are notoriously confrontive about bad tippers.

What about guides, though? I took a 6-day trek through the Himalayas in Nepal with a porter and a guide. The whole package, all-inclusive, was 100 bucks for all 6 days. The porter took my pack, the guide kept me company, and all I had to do was carry my day-pack and hike. I was still a poor student at the time, but I believe I gave them the equivalent of 20 bucks each at the end. I read somewhere that the average yearly salary of a Nepali was 150 bucks, so I was feeling pretty good about myself after that. They certainly deserved it, doing all that work, and they didn't even ask for a tip, although the company I booked it with suggested that I tip my guide and porter. Which is exactly the way it should be, because I have no idea what these guys are getting paid. I'm pretty sure the company guy said, "Make sure you tip these guys, because we're not paying them jack."

I've been on a couple Boston Duck tours here. There's about 20-30 people on the ride, and the price is 25 bucks, and I believe I gave the guide 2 bucks, and felt fine with that. Also, when I did it, I just handed it straight to him, not doing the "secret tip handshake" with the bills tucked in my thumb fold like a drug exchange.

Which leads me to the horseback excursion. First of all, we weren't feeling rich at all. Hawaii is DARNED expensive, and this excursion wasn't cheap. Secondly, the guide did a decent job with the information/jokes, but his overall demeanor was condescending and arrogant. Thirdly, there was this other native dude that was his helper, and that guy was much nicer and friendlier. Fourthly, the guide didn't really DO anything except point and talk. He just sat on his horse, brought up the rear, and said factoids every 5 minutes or so. And finally, his last tip spiel was way too forthcoming, and it was apparent to me that he was mailing it in. As we got out of the van at the end, back at the ranch, I noticed the other horsebackers were giving the secret tip handshake with the guide, with what appeared to be twenties. I had left my wallet in the car, so I had to go back to it to get some cash. We only had about 20 bucks, but I gave Mel 12 bucks to give to the guide. I didn't want to give it to him myself because I didn't like him. When Mel gave it to him, she handed him the money like a normal exchange, but he quickly shook her hand in the process and stealthily took the money, leaving Mel with an ounce of cocaine in her hand to finish the transaction.

All in all, our tip amounted to 7%, less than half of his suggestion. And you know what? I still felt like I was ripped off. I am generally known to my friends as a cheapskate (although my family thinks I spend money like the Kardashians), but I think I'm a fine tipper. I just don't feel like giving money to people when I didn't get any value from it. I would've been fine giving him only 5 bucks, as I felt that's how much value I received from his services, but the other 7 bucks were for the Guilt Charge. I would've preferred that the company either baked his tip into the price or suggested giving him a tip via credit card, making it obvious that we should be leaving a tip, and sparing us the awkwardness of the transaction. The company also had a misleading sign out front that said something like "Tip your horse, pet your guide" which I thought could be meaning that we weren't expected to tip the guide.

Despite that, the horseback excursion was quite fun, one of the highlights of the trip, the others being seeing the volcano glow at night and the black sand beach. The Waipi'o Valley was stunning and riding the horses through the jungle and through rivers was fun, and I would recommend it. Just bring some cash for your guide.

Now, it's customary to tip your blogger 15% of your monthly internet bill. I accept Paypal, checks in the mail, and stomps on the head.

Bound Away

2011-04-30T21:21:00.003-04:00

Hardcore fans of this blog (which don't, unfortunately, include my wife, who, as I write this, has yet to read the last post(sub-parenthetical statement: I just broke the record for word/comma ratio (not including lists (now I just broke the sub-parenthetical statement record!!))) know that I have been posting once a month pretty regularly now. The main reason for this is that I don't want to break my streak of months with a posting, which is now at 42. There is no other reason.

Every month I hem and haw about the subject of my posting. I don't like to repeat subjects very often, and don't want to write about sports too often and risk losing my female reader (Liesl). I also try to stagger my complaining posts, which are far too easy to write. My first thought was to write about how much I hated dogs. However, that violates the repeating principle, since I already wrote about it, even if I had new material. It also violates the complaining principle, because my last post complained about my former roommates.

My second thought was to post a cute video of Hendrik attacking a dog with love, which he does fairly regularly. This, however, is a cop out, and only gives my faithful readers 2 minutes of entertainment, instead of 10 solid minutes of entertainment on the first read, and then 10 minutes for every read thereafter (I'm sure you all read my posts dozens of times. No?). If there's a video post on the last day of the month, you know that I've ran out of ideas before the month ended.

Midway through this month, I had zero ideas. However, while listening to "Bound Away" by Cake, I came up with my inspiration. Unfortunately, it involves me exposing myself to my audience as never before. The only time I've ever been more naked than this was when my friends dared me to take off all my clothes during General Conference. I was around 5 years old, and in the basement with similarly-aged chumps. My family was in the living room, surrounding the monstrous 13" TV placed on a chair for the special occasion of Conference. It must've been a Sunday session, because we never moved the TV in for Saturday sessions, which were "optional" at our house. Somehow, I had friends over, which must have been some sort of coup since traditionally friends weren't allowed over on Sundays. NO FUN ON SUNDAYS was the general rule growing up.

Anyway, someone double-dog-dared me to take off all my clothes, and of course I did just that. I mean, what was I supposed to do? NOT FOLLOW THROUGH WITH A DOUBLE-DOG-DARE?!?!? There are really no other options at that point. All I remember after that was a whole lot of giggling about me being naked. Even though I had no clothes on, I still wasn't that naked. That came later, when my snarling mother found out about the double-dog-daring going on during conference, and I was dragged by my wrist up the 13 shag carpet stairs to the main floor and through the living room with all of the older siblings giving me looks of disgust and disdain for ruining Conference. They probably don't remember any of this, but it happened. Mom could've dragged me through the kitchen and dining room and avoided the living room altogether, but she wanted me to experience the Drag of Shame. Then I was dressed appropriately and disciplined by forcing me to watch the entire afternoon session, which was also optional.

So here I am, telling you the deepest, darkest secret you may not know about me. Well, you probably do. In fact, you probably won't be surprised in the least when I say it. You'll think, "Yeah, I already knew that." Which makes it that much worse. Okay, I'm stalling. Here's my secret:

I cry.

All the time.

Almost every day!

"What? No! Say it ain't so!" Calm down. Let me explain. It's not what it looks like.
I don't cry, like bawl or anything. I just get all choked up. My eyes well up. A tear may or may not escape. Sometimes it's enough to do the "cry hiccup", where I try to stifle my emotions that are running up my body and end up doing that hiccup type thing which makes it worse. My nose may release a sniffle. If that's crying, then I cry. Almost every day. I blame it on my mom, who cries pretty regularly.

I cry during movies. I cry reading articles in the Ensign. I cry when I "get real" with someone. I cry when I listen to particularly poignant songs. See the following examples…

Movies:

I really get into movies. If I watch a movie, it's like I'm in the movie. The actors are my friends, the story is part of my life. If they are mad, I get mad with them. If they rekindle lost romances, I'm happy for them. If they tell their mom or dad they love them, I think about how much I love my own parents. If they hug their kid, I think about Hendrik. If they connect with a love interest, I think about Melanie. If they say goodbye to their favorite toy, I think about Gibby, my first stuffed lion.

You're thinking, "Yeah, I do that, too, but you don't see me choking up."

Wrong! No you don't, tough guy. You're totally detached. You don't even care at all that Elizabeth Bennett has finally confessed her feelings for Mr. Darcy! You're just watching P&P because your wife is making you, and you're really just using that as leverage for the 8 hour NBA playoff marathon you're planning on watching tomorrow.

If you asked me which movies made me choke up, I couldn't even tell you. There's been so many. Most of them aren't even good! Pretty much any chick flick in which I wasn't simultaneously playing Civ IV. You know the moments where they bring up the violins and there's the moment where the burly, quiet dad tells the longing son, "I know I don't say it very often, and I should, but…I love you." It doesn't even matter if the rest of the movie was painfully awful. It still happens. It's why I don't watch "Full House" (that, and the fact that it's awful).

Fun fact: "Full House" is Baldwin's favorite show.

Melanie eats it up. She knows I do it, but pretends like she doesn't. "Oh, I didn't even notice." Or, if she sees it happen, "I think it's so cute!" Shut up, is what I say to that. If we're spooning and she feels me do the "cry hiccup", she'll turn around and play dumb, like she totally doesn't know it's happening. She gives me the same look that Hendrik gives me when "Elmo's World" comes on. Melanie is an emotional statue. She has never cried. Ever.

Kid's movies are the worst. I intentionally skipped these for the past few years, knowing that I would be watching all sorts of them once I had a kid. Having a kid opened up a whole new sentimental part of me, which I'm sure most of you parents understand. Despicable Me, Toy Story, Monster's Inc, etc, really get to me.

Ensign:

I read the Ensign every morning on the train. I'm usually sitting next to someone who probably sees the huge graphics and titles and is thinking "What is this religious nut reading?" I know I should reach out and share my testimony, but, you know, I'm a horrible person, so I don't. The articles that really get to me are the conversion stories about some poor South American 90-year-old lady that bakes bread for the sacrament every week and walks 2 miles to do her visiting teaching. It's always just so touching and inspirational.

I'm always curious if the person next to me can sense that I'm having a moment. There's not much evidence for it, but there are a few eye wipes and nose sniffles, so I figure that they think I have a cold, so I don't really try to mask it.

"Getting Real":

This doesn't happen very often, but as soon as I try to tell someone, especially someone I rarely "get real" with, that I appreciate them or that they did a great job, I get all choked up inside and have to look away to keep from them seeing me misting up. Last week, our babysitter of 1 year had her last day. She did a pretty good job overall, although we were about ready to move on. As she was getting ready to leave, I paid her, and then told her how much we appreciated her help with our son. It seemed simple enough. Nope. Made me misty. I cleared my throat and faked like I had to go do something urgent.

I usually do pretty well with goodbyes, unless my mom's involved. As soon as I see her getting misty, it's all over, including the crying. Nothing can trigger my tears like the sight of my mom crying. Or an especially stinky Hendrik package.

Music:

As mentioned above, the idea for this post was whilst listening to "Bound Away" by Cake. The song is for travelers, never home, and always bound away from their families by their occupation. Even though I don't travel for work, it still seems to bring out the wimp in me. I just imagine what it would be like to leave my family for extended periods of time and that's enough to get me all emotional. My imagination really gets the best of me, especially when music's involved, because there's nothing to do but listen and think.

Hymns and various classical pieces get to me, as well. Just yesterday, on Easter, we had a very talented member of the ward play a rendition of "O Divine Redeemer" on his cello, with some piano accompaniment. I struggled to contain myself, and if I didn't have Hendrik crawling all over me as a distraction, it would've been waterworks. I also tear up whenever we sing "Abide With Me, 'Tis Eventide", because that's my grandpa's favorite hymn, and I think of the old reunions when it would normally be the last song we'd sing before we departed.

Those are the triggers to my emotions. It's almost like Pavlov's bell with me at this point. Hit one of my triggers and watch me unravel. I'm so predictable. I started realizing it when I was about 12 years old. I remember when my dad said he was getting called as a bish, and for some reason I just cried and cried. Then during my Aaronic Priesthood ordination I pretty much cried through the whole thing. I hated the fact that I was so tender. I tried to toughen up-and succeeded-for most of my teenage years. That even lasted through the mission and through college. When I got married, there were a lot of moments that I had to keep it together, and for the most part, I did. Then Hendrik was born and it was all over. My heart was exploring uncharted territory, and I didn't know how to handle it. This time, however, I decided to just own it and let myself go. So, here it is, an official declaration of wimpiness. I hope you'll still be my friend. I don't think I could handle it if you weren't!

All time favorite roommates

2011-03-25T10:14:00.002-04:00

Most of us have had a few roommates in our day. It's part of growing up. For some reason, I feel the need to get down on paper my feelings about the particular painful ones. Here is a list of my worst roommates, listed in chronological order:

1. Daniel

Daniel was my first roommate that I didn't know beforehand. It was the semester after my mission. I moved into Moon Apartments at the B3, which was famous because a Hansen had lived there since the Ute Indians built the complex in 515 A.D. The nice part about Moon was that it had furniture from the original construction, which added to its character. I did 1.5 years there, which was about 2 years too many.

Anyway, Daniel was a nice, well-dressed guy who liked to talk about girls and how much he hated Utah. He was from the backwoods of Virginny, where they fashion pants out of tree bark and haul water out of the crick. He served his mission in Peru, and had a soft spot for Latinas. He played the guitar and was the lead singer of our band, "The Man in the Yellow Hat".

What made Daniel obnoxious was that he acted like- as my high-school buddy Dan put it- a "teenie-bopper". He wore hemp necklaces and dressed like a preppie. He laughed at sophomoric jokes with a little too much zeal and overlaughed in general at the stupidest things. He lacked a lot of basic common sense and wasn't considerate in the least. One of his favorite things to do was to belch. His belch wasn't an accidental burp like the dainty ones Mel releases after a sip of Caffeine Free Diet Doctor Pepper, these were intentional, spirit-breaking belches.

The absolute worst was his morning routine. He had classes at 8, and I didn't have class until 10, therefore, I was always asleep when he woke up. First of all, he was one of these guys that had to hit snooze several times before actually getting up. Secondly, he let out a floor-rattling belch as he got out of bed, when most people would simply yawn. Thirdly, he would open and close the bedroom door as if nobody in the entire world was asleep. Fourthly, he wouldn't bring his things into the shower with him, which means he's doing all of his dressing and grooming in the room, not even trying to be quiet in the least. Fifthly, he wouldn't keep his deodorant/cologne/hair gel/who-knows-what-else out on his shelf or on top of the dresser, they were all haphazardly placed in his top drawer. It always sounded like he was opening and closing a drawer full of billiard balls and shuffling through them. Sounds are always 20 times louder when you're trying to stay asleep. Last of all, there are loud belches, at least 5 of them, scattered throughout this whole process. I could even hear him belching in the shower, through 2 doors and a pillow pressed against my ear. It was with Daniel that I perfected the Pillow Muffle, which is the art of muffling all noises with your pillow, while still staying comfortable and ideally asleep.
Daniel had some redeeming qualities, too. I'm sure of it.

2. Alex at B3

Alex actually wasn't that bad of a roommate at all, and I actually barely even remember him. My brother Brian is encouraged to leave a lengthy comment on Alex, as I only have one complaint: When he cooked a meal, which was usually for 1, possibly 2, people, he dirtied EVERY SINGLE DISH IN THE ENTIRE APARTMENT COMPLEX. It was uncanny! Spaghetti and Meatballs? 30 dirty dishes! Chicken Parmesan? 45 dirty dishes! PB&J? 1,734 dirty dishes!

3. Radiohead

Ah, Radiohead. So named because of the size of his noggin, clumped together with his similarities to Radio, played so affably by Cuba Gooding, Jr., in the movie of the same name. Radiohead was not aware of this nickname.

Radiohead moved into a tough situation. Sam, Jason, and I were dominating the Enclave at the time. We were in our prime - Juniors, nice tans from a summer at the pool, long enough at the Enclave to know who was cool and who wasn't, but not too long where we'd worn out our welcome (although I was doing my best to wear it out and that right soon). We'd been the only 3 dudes in a 4 bedroom apartment, so we were nervous about the 4th roommate. In fact, the annoying EQ president from a couple doors down had enquired about our spot. We had the gall (such jerks, us!) to give him "the talk", which was that we didn't want him to even think about signing the lease for the 4th spot. This coming from the same dudes who avoided "the talk" with any girl we were dating.

We naively thought that nobody would move in. But, alas, we came home one day and there was a scent, nay, stench in the air. Somebody's stuff was in the 4th room. We considered tossing the stuff out the door to send a message. Cooler heads prevailed.

It took a few days, but we eventually met him. He was about 5'9", stocky, and hairy as the day is long. This guy looked, walked, and smelled like a gorilla. We didn't notice the smell at first, but then after a few weeks we started to see clouds of green stench escaping through the cracks of his bedroom door. He never, ever, left his door open, so we were started to wonder how many crates of spoiled eggs and raw breasts of chicken he was keeping to create the stench. So we pulled our shirts over our noses and broke into his room. It was for the best.

Immediately, it was clear: these shirts weren't near enough protection. Sam donned a gas mask he bought from the Army Navy Surplus, and went inside, reporting to us through a hose like a deep sea diver. 1 pull meant more slack and 2 pulls meant to bring him back. He was in there for the better part of a minute, and we were sure we'd lost him. Jason was all but moving his stuff into Sam's room when Sam tugged sharply twice. Using all of our strength, we barely managed to get him out of there alive. We were expecting tales of dead bodies, dog excrement, or rotting brains, but instead we got:

"Nothing. There's nothing in there!"

It was true. Just heaps of clothes, books, and other miscellaneous stuff you'd find in a typical college guy's room. How could ordinary stuff smell so bad? He even had a scented candle in there to try and mask the odor. It just made it worse, like cherry BO.

The one redeeming thing about Radiohead was that he had 15 bottles of cologne. I'm not kidding. Sure, I made up a few things in the past few paragraphs, but he really did have around 15 bottles of cologne. I shared a bathroom with him, and he just left them all right there on the sink. There was barely enough room for my toothbrush and toothpaste. We'd all use a few samples of his cologne now and again, but the worst abuser of Radiohead's cologne was Sam. I think he even just stole a couple of the bottles outright. Don't try to deny it, Sam.

That year, Jason and I were on an intramural team. We were in the living room trying to create a dream team of guys that weren't so good that would make us look bad, but not so bad as to make us look REALLY bad. We wanted to have 7 players, but only came up with 6. Then Radiohead came in. Sam asked with a plotting smile if Radiohead liked to play basketball. The reply: "Why, yes, I love basketball!" Then Sam, his evil smile cornering up in his cheeks like the Grinch, said, "Kent and Jason need 1 more player, you should play on their team!" Of course, we had no other option but to allow him on our team. We'd kill Sam later.

However, it didn't turn out to be so bad. Radiohead was a hustler, knew his place, played good D, and got a few rebounds. When he turned his ankle in the tournament, we found that we actually missed him. We made the Final 4 that year, but lost badly to a team of 10 players. We only had 6 players, and had played 6 games in 6 days.

The best Radiohead story was the Donut Incident. Every Monday, Jason, Sam, and I would go to Macey's for our weekly grocery shopping. We'd buy the same crap every college dude buys: frozen burrito's, candy, milk, cookies, and, if we were feeling rich, hamburger helper. I also would treat myself to a few fresh donuts from the bakery, as Macey's donuts are delicious. We went home, and I left my remaining donuts on the table, leaving them for the next day.

The next morning, the donuts were gone. I asked Sam and Jason if they ate my donuts, but they didn't. I didn't believe them at first, but they swore on their future wives' future graves, so I had to. I just couldn't imagine why Radiohead would just take my donuts without asking. When Radiohead got home, I asked him if he saw some donuts on the table, and he said he did, and ate them, because, he said, "It didn't look like anybody was going to eat them." I told him they were my donuts, and I was planning on eating them the next day.

Fast forward a few days. I come home and Radiohead approaches me with a box of Krispy Kreme donuts. He told me the donuts were for me, and that he was sorry for taking my donuts. Apology accepted! I put the donuts down on the table and went to bed, dreaming of eating donuts the next morning for breakfast.

You know the rest. The next morning, the donuts were gone. I asked Jason and Sam if they stole them. They had to swear on their future children's future graves to get me to believe that they hadn't eaten my donuts. I mean, it had to be them, right? Why would Radiohead get me donuts to make up for the stolen donuts, and then eat them again? When I asked Radiohead if he knew what happened to his gift donuts, he confessed that "it didn't look like you wanted them" and had eaten them. Classic Radiohead!

Once, we were just chilling in the living room, watching the tube, when Radiohead came home and parked himself on the loveseat. Within minutes the whole room started to smell foul, like the inside of a hobo's kneebrace. We started to blame each other for the stench, thinking that someone had cut the cheese, but the smell did NOT go away. When Sam had enough of the odor, he walked out of the room, passing near to Radiohead. When he was out of Radiohead's view, he waved to us, pointed to Radiohead's feet, and plugged his nose. It turned out that Radiohead had kicked off his shoes when he sat down, and the smell fouled up the whole room. Now we knew the reason for his smelly bedroom.

I always felt sorry for Radiohead, but couldn't stomach his stench long enough to do anything about it. You can judge all you want, but I don't think you would've done any more than we did.

4. Matt

When I moved into the hole in Somerville (just outside Boston) in November of aught-5, I moved in with a former roommate, Lane, and a new guy, Matt. Both were Mormons. Because Mormons liked to live with other Mormons in the singles scene in Boston, the places were usually dumps. Plus, most of the places in the city were 200-years old and dumpy anyway. But they had lots of character!

Matt was a super nice guy. But he was really effeminate and weird, and just awkward in general. Matt wasn't a bad roommate, per se, he was clean, organized, and didn't smell weird. But he always wanted to be involved, and talk and stuff. I liked my privacy and my peace and quiet. I'd be watching a football game and Matt would come in and sit down and try to talk football with me. You know those conversations with people who don't really know much about sports? It was like that. Someone would make a nice play, and he'd say "Great action!" or something weird like that. He didn't really understand the concept of downs and yards to go, and it was just annoying. "Go team! Make a goal unit!"

The funny thing was that I didn't mind when Lane watched football with me, but Matt just made it awkward. Once, he bought cheese dip and tortillas to watch "the big game" with us. He then would make comments like, "Yup, just sitting here, watching the game with my boys." Who SAYS that? It must have been the first and only time he was doing that, and he was fulfilling a lifelong dream.

You readers are probably judging me and saying things like "C'mon, Kent, he was just trying to be nice." Which is true. But when you have to live with a dude and he's ALWAYS trying to establish some sort of relationship with you, it starts to wear on you. If he talked to me about stuff that he knew about, like music, which he did at times, then I wouldn't find it annoying.

The absolute worst thing about Matt was that he came into the bathroom while I was in the shower. Our bathroom door didn't even close all the way, so there was no way I could lock him out. But almost every morning, he'd come in and do his hair while I was showering. It wouldn't have been so bad if he would've just did it and got out, but he liked to try to have conversations with me. I'm not much for talking in the morning, and I certainly didn't want to talk to my effeminate, annoying roommate through the shower curtain. This drove me absolutely bonkers.

Matt had a huge crush on our Bishop. He'd come home from church and just talk about him for hours. Matt just loved church in general. Once I came home from church, and he was already at home, watching General Conference DVDs on the couch. "Can't get enough church?" I'd snicker, and then go to my room, wondering if I was a bad person for not watching it with him. I concluded that I wasn't, but my snide remarks were certainly not helping. On the flip side, his spirituality was getting in the way of my football viewing!

Another time, I missed church because I was super tired and slept in. When Matt came home from church, I was on the couch playing Civilization IV, which he himself played. He then sent me an email about a Civilization Addiction group that I could get involved with. I'm not gonna lie, it was nice that he cared.

Matt also had a huge crush on Lane, similar to George Constanza and tough guy Tony. He went everywhere with Lane, made meals for him, etc. One Saturday in late October, I came home in the evening and Lane and Matt greeted me in the doorway. Matt asked me in a super-excited tone if I wanted to hang out with them that night. I asked what they were doing, and Lane shrugged his shoulders. Then, Matt suggested giddily, "We could go skinny-dipping in Walden Pond!" Lane rolled his eyes, and Matt whined, "Well, we gotta do SOMETHING!" Skinny-dipping with my effeminate roommate did not sound like a good time, so I said I was tired and went to my room. Poor Lane.

All in all, Matt is a great guy and genuinely cared about me, which is saying something because I pretty much ignored him. He moved out of our place that summer and into a pad in Cambridge with 3 other like-minded Mormons, and I'm sure he loved it. I thought I might get a cool replacement. Nope.

5. Christian

Christian was a former tight end for George Washington University. He was a big guy, super nice, and super old. And by super old, I mean 31, which, in Mormon Single Years, is practically dead (no offense, Brian!). He moved into our Somerville apartment for my second year, and I was relieved to not have to live with Matt anymore. Be careful what you wish for.

Christian was much worse than Matt. He was a complete slob. He filled up the freezer with his frozen foods, and then filled up the garbage can with the packaging from the frozen foods. He never did his dishes, never took out the trash, never did any cleaning of the communal areas, like the bathroom or the kitchen. I can't tell you how gross our bathroom was.

After a few months of taking out the trash every week, which was mostly full of his crap, I asked him to take out the trash. Which he did, right away. Then the next weeks I and our other roommate, Chris, took out the trash. It was then his turn again, so I decided to see if he would do it without me asking him. I wanted to see how overflowing the trash would get. That was a bad idea. Christian called my bluff and completely ignored the fact that it was heaping over. He started putting boxes next to the trash to put his garbage in it. I finally gave in and took out the trash. From then on, I just asked him to do it every few weeks, like I was his mother. If you remember back to your roommate days, asking a roommate who you barely talk with to do anything in the way of chores is extremely awkward. I hated doing it, so after a while, I just took out the trash for him.

Christian set his alarm for early in the AM, like 6 or something. He hit the snooze a few times, which didn't bother me because I was in the other room. What bothered me was that he would hit snooze and jump in the shower, or hit snooze and leave altogether. That resulted in me spending 10 minutes trying to sleep through the sound of an alarm in the next room, and then finally getting up to turn it off. I debated chucking the clock out the window.

Christian found out that we played basketball at the church every week, so he decided to come join us. He was really good and really big. About 6'4 and 225 pounds, he was much bigger than us regular-sized chumps. Sometimes I would have to guard him, and the guy would play NBA-style against me, using his body to dominate me and back me down in the post. I would employ the hack-a-Shaq defense and just foul him as hard as I could. He'd get so mad at me, once he even threw the ball at me. I didn't particularly blame him, because I was fouling him pretty badly. However, what am I supposed to do? Let him score every time? Anytime I have a much smaller guy defending me, I don't go straight to the post and push him around. There are unwritten rules of pick-up basketball, and one of them is that you don't push around the smaller guys. You also don't swat the shots of the 12-year olds that you need to get enough people. You also don't draw charges, And you need to shoot lots of threes.

6. The Dude (can't remember his name)

Both Christian and Chris sublet their rooms for the summer, starting in late May. I got married on June 21, so I only lived with this guy for 3 weeks, but it was enough to make it into my worst roommate list. The guy kept to himself, kept the place clean, and was pretty much ideal except for 1 very large problem: he smoked pot. All the time. He tried to keep it in his room, but it pretty much made the whole apartment smell. I didn't have to deal with it for very long, but it made every minute in the apartment a whole lot worse.

When the subletters moved out of the place at the end of the summer, I had to go back and clean the entire place. I asked for 75 bucks a piece from Chris and Christian to do the cleaning. I would've hired a cleaning service, but they don't remove junk. I ended up moving 15 bags of trash out of that place, and worked all day on it. And then I went home and told Melanie how glad that she was my roommate now. We've lived together for almost 4 years now, and she hasn't annoyed me once!

Fave TV shows

2011-02-24T12:42:00.002-05:00

Okay, I'll say it: I watch a lot of TV. Judge all you want. It's cheap entertainment, and I love nothing more after work than crashing on the couch and watching some brainless tube. I've never been a reader, because it makes me so tired. If I got home from work at 7 and read a book, I'd go to sleep every night at 7:30. Here are my favorite comedies and dramas, and then least favorite shows, because I love ranking things and you love to read my rankings.

Top Comedies

1. Parks & Rec - Ron Swanson catapults this show to a whole different level. Everything he does is hilarious. Like The Office, the main character (Amy Poehler) is the least interesting/funny. By the same creators of The Office, I had high hopes for this show from the very beginning, knowing that there was a large chance it would be better than The Office, since they weren't encumbered with an inherited story.

2. Community - Every week I flip-flop between Community and Parks & Rec, I love them both so much. Community has the most clever writing, on parallel with #3 on this list, but funnier. I also have a crush on Annie.

3. How I Met Yer Ma - Despite its laughtrack, I've really found myself looking forward to this show. It's very well-written and clever. My favorite character is Robin. She's hilarious.

4. The Office - I can't wait until Michael leaves the show. The cringe factor is way too high when the story focuses on him, which it does most of the time. I think the most comedic potential lies in Andy, Dwight, and Darryl, which is why the episode at the Roller Skating Rink was so hilarious.

5. Big Bang Theory - At times predictable, but the dorks just found a place in my heart. It's always entertaining.

6. 30 Rock - Let's just admit that it's gotten pretty stale. Most episodes I chuckle a few times, tops. Rarely a moment where I have to rewind because I'm laughing too hard to hear the next joke.

7. Rules of Engagement - The first season was great, but now it's fairly predictable. However, Putty is worth the price of admission.

8. Modern Family - I find this more entertaining than ha-ha funny. It's a tad overrated, but overall, a good show

9. Cougar Town - I didn't think I'd like this show, but it's got a lot of "Scrubs" in it, with the same creator and all. Like #1 and #4 on the list, the main character isn't what makes the show good, it's the supporting cast.

10. I felt bad leaving "Cougar Town" last on the list, as if I barely like it enough to make the list, so I'm just putting a blank number 10 to represent all of the other shows that are too crappy to DVR. If I DVR a show, it means I like it. How much I like it depends on how fast I choose to watch it after it's been recorded.

Top Dramas

I love serial dramas, you know, the shows that don't end each week with a nice pretty bow on it and nothing changes from week to week. I like stories that require 15 episodes to tell. I like the character development that's required, and the writing that goes along with it. That's why I can't get into shows like "Monk" or "White Collar" or anything on USA, really. Sure, they're entertaining for a few episodes, but then they all kind of blur together after a while.

1. Friday Night Lights - This was a great show. Most fans were sad to see it go, but I thought it was the right time. The best season was season 4, when East Dillon won only one game, but against their cross-town rivals. Season 5, the last one, was pretty good, but I think if they tried to continue the series it would've just gotten stale and repetitive. It enabled the show to have a perfect ending, which it did. I think good shows know when to call it quits. Unfortch, The Simpsons just don't know the meaning of the word.

2. Justified - I've always loved One Man Against Everybody shows. Die Hard, Blade, Payback - those are some of the great OMAE movies. I remember secretly watching Die Hard 2 in the dining room on our 13" TV while my parents read newspapers in the next room, volume set to 1/16 of an inch above mute, my hand holding the power cord in case I heard footsteps, because the power button didn't work. I loved how Bruce Willis saved the airport from the terrorists, then put them on a plane that he blew up as it took off. "Yippee Kaiyay, Mister Falcon" is what the TV-edited version said as the plane blew up. Coolest. Movie. Ever. Especially for an entertainment-starved adolescent. I went downstairs immediately and made up Die Hard scenarios with my Chuck Norris action figure against 50 bad guys. Yes, I was too old for it. So what?
Well, Justified is a great OMAE show. I would even consider putting it above FNL if there was more than one season of it. The first season had an awesome pilot, then the next couple of episodes didn't really follow a serial arc, so I lost a bit of interest. Then the last 6 or so episodes did, and it involved a lot of Timothy Olyphant being awesome and killing bad dudes and being awesome some more, so I was hooked. I hope Season 2 has another serial arc as well-written and intense as the first one.

3. Mad Men - I didn't much care for the last season, but the character development is so well-done that Mad Men just never fails to rope me in. I keep wishing for Don to make good decisions, however, but he never does. I guess that's not "who he is". May we all learn from Don Draper's mistakes. Plus, he's such an awesome businessman, it's fun to watch.

4. Breaking Bad - This show just makes me nervous. I watch each episode scared, not because it's a horror, but because it's so intense. Will Walt get away with it? Will Jesse do what's right? Will they evade the super bad guys of the drug cartel? Nervousness!

5. Lights Out - This is a new show with an intriguing serial arc. It always takes a few shows to build the story in these types of shows, which is why they fail to sell to the masses: America doesn't have the patience to wait for a story to develop. However, I've committed to the show after the 4th episode, which featured the main dude having to beat an MMA fighter to save his brother's life. This isn't a show about boxing, just like FNL isn't a show about football. I don't even like boxing.

6. House - I haven't really been watching this, I only like to see how the characters' stories progress. I can't stand the premise, every episode is exactly the same: Guy has a weird disease. They think it's lupus. Then something crazy happens. So now they think it's hepatitis. Then something TOTALLY crazy happens. Then House figures it out and that's that. It's only entertaining because House is a jerk and the acting is good. Plus, I needed to have something here so that "Lights Out" wasn't last.

Most Hated Shows

1. American Idol - I fail to understand the appeal for more than 1 or 2 seasons. What's the difference between this and karaoke? I've watched it a few times and was bored out of my mind.

2. Glee - I decided to watch a full episode so I could say I hated it with more of a foundation than "I hate it cause it looks stupid." Turns out I didn't need more of a foundation, the show was just as stupid as it looked. And they call it a comedy? Unintentional, maybe. I guess it's just not my thang.

3. Any CSI or CBS crime drama - I watched a few CSI's with Mel at the beginning, then realized they were all the same. I guess I don't understand why people are fascinated with the same exact plot every week: Gruesome murder, find a ridiculously impossible clue, chase a few leads, find the right sicko, then catch him in a dramatic ending. I guess old people like this trash, reminds them of the good ol' days and makes them paranoid.

4. Any competitive cooking show. I didn't mind them at the beginning, but Mel loves them so I just got really sick of them and those stupid British judges. What is the deal with the need to have a British judge? I just hate all the judges. I'd like to see the judges compete for a show or 2 and have the contestants judge them. Like has Simon Cowell ever sang in front of an audience?

5. Any competitive reality show with judges, really. And the more dancing/show tunes/celebrities are involved, the more I hate it. Women try to make the same argument about sports, but, come on, sports are so much less contrived than this garbage. I don't even watch figure skating or gymnastics in the Olympics, because I don't like sports that require judging.

6. Private Practice and "Grey's" - Mel loves these shows, but they are just too ridiculously over the top for me. People getting married/divorced every other episode. Crazy weird hospital drama with more weird medical emergencies in a season than a regular hospital would see in 20 years. Psychos with ridiculous emotional problems and unbelievable back stories. I can stomach these shows for a season or 2, but no more. I force Mel to watch them on her computer, because we have other shows on Thursday nights to record.

So those shows are pretty much how I spend my weeknights. When none of the above shows have new episodes, I watch "House Hunters", "Entourage", or "Curb Your Enthusiasm". And let's not forget the plethora of kids' shows when Hendrik gets his TV time, but that's a whole other post.

Ode to the train

2011-01-24T20:32:00.002-05:00

One of the things I love about living near Boston is that I get to ride the train as my commute. Since I've lived here, I've taken everything except a boat to work:

1. Car - When I lived in Somerville and Allston (only a couple miles outside Boston), I drove in. Parking was about 10 bucks a day and the walk from the lot was about 15 minutes. The actual door-to-door time was betwixt 30 and 40 minutes.

2. Bike - I gave the bike a try in Somerville. It was about 15-20 minutes in, mostly downhill, but 30 minutes back, mostly uphill. The problem with this was the shower schedule. I arrived sweaty and puddly (you know, from being splashed or doing the splashing of puddles), so I had to shower in the "shower room", which was on the 10th floor of my building. It was this tiny closet of a room, across the hall from an audit room, so walking from my desk on the 6th floor to the 10th in dirty shorts and a stinky shirt got a little too embarrassing for me. Also, the uphill ride after a tiring day at work was not ideal so I gave that up after a couple of months.

3. T train - I rode this for a year after we got married when we lived in Melrose. This took about 35 minutes door to door usually, but in some cases it took 90 minutes. There are 2 types of T trains in Boston:

a. T train (regular) - These are subway trains, but really old. These are always packed with commuters, but there are enough weirdos and hippies and other smelly people from Cambridge to ruin the ride. You only need a couple of the riffraff to spoil an otherwise mediocre ride. Also, if you get a seat, the ride is 10 times better, but of course, you can't get a seat without mowing down some old people first, ala George Constanza running from a fire. Another problem with the T is that the tracks and trains are so old and inefficient that almost every day there's a "disabled" train, which means that every train in the city has to sit in place for about an hour, which turns passengers as claustrophobic as Elaine Benes (continuing with our Seinfeld theme). There is nothing worse than this. Once, to avoid standing indefinitely on the train, I ended up walking 5 miles home. Even though it took much longer than waiting for the train, I didn't regret it.

b. T train (Green Line) - They pretend this is a train, but it's really just a tram that goes underground. This insufferable line only goes underground in downtown, but then it goes above ground and that's when it gets bad. Stops are about every block, and it has to wait for traffic lights, and really isn't much better than a bus. These get unbearably packed during rush hour and it pretty much takes 45 minutes to go about 5 miles. I've never had to ride this on a daily basis, but I've ridden it enough to despise its very existence.

4. Bus - The all-time worst form of public transportation. They seem to have stops every 100 feet, I always get sick on them, and the smelly-to-normal ratio is dangerously high. They are never on time, unless of course you're late by a couple of minutes. I only did this for a little while in Somerville, taking the bus to catch the Red Line in, but I hated it. It added 30 minutes to my commute and only cost 4 dollars less than parking.

5. Commuter Rail - The topic of the post! I've been riding this for almost 3 years, and I didn't like it as much at first, but I've really grown to love it.

a. It's much better than driving because you can read, write blog posts, sleep, or do work on the train. Also, the door-to-door is around 55 minutes, and driving alone is about 70-90 minutes, and carpooling it's 60-70 minutes. It costs 6.25 each way, so 12.50 a day, which is about what gas and parking cost. The only plus to driving is the flexibility of leaving whenever you want, but if you have to deal with rush hour traffic, it's no comparison.

b. It's also much better than the T, which isn't an option anyway where we live, but I would gladly give up the 20 minutes each way for the comfort of the commuter rail. Not only do I always get a seat, sometimes I get my own BENCH. On the commuter train, there's a 3-seat bench on one side, and 2 seaters on the other.
Depending on the train I take, I have a strategy for each day. See, you can't sit in the 2-seaters on a busy day because there's a high chance that someone will scootch on in and you'll be touching rumps for the better part of an hour. But sitting in a 2-seater by yourself is better than sharing one end of a 3-seater (aisle or window), because you have more privacy, and you don't have to worry about accidentally putting your foot on their bag or something. Of course, the most desirable spot is getting a 3-seater all to yourself because then you can lie down and take a nap much easier. The absolute worst is when the train is so crowded you have 3 people on a 3-seater, and then it just feels like a clown car.
On the Monday morning train, I sit on one end of the 3-seater, preferably the window seat, because sitting in a 2-seater is too risky, I'll probably have to share it when more people get on. Tuesday through Thursday I get a 2-seater, and then on Friday I take a 3-seater in the middle of the train because the chances of getting it to myself are high. Coming home on the 5:38 is always a tough choice: Do I risk sharing a 2-seater and go with the guaranteed space of one side of a 3-seater, or do I go for the glory and get my own 2-seater? Usually, I go for the 3-seater, because sharing a 2-seater is just too risky. Coming home on the 6:20 and later is usually a pretty good chance I'll get my own 3-seater, so that's always nice. Except today, we got the oldest train available, I'm pretty sure I saw the conductor come by with a wheel full of coal. Usually we have double-decker trains, but not this train. Single deckers are the worst! Loud, uncomfortable, and crowded. There is no redeeming quality about single decker cars.

c. The train is obviously much better than the bus, if for the sole reason that it's so smooth. You can read books without getting sick and there's rarely a smelly person on. Sometimes, however, someone gets on with a meal they bought at South Station, and the whole train smells like fatty food. This is torture for a hungry person coming home on the 7:30 train. I'd almost rather sit next to Mr. Urine, the guy who rides the bus all day while mumbling to himself.

d. One of my favorite things about the train is that we don't have to buy a 2nd car. Sure, sometimes it's inconvenient that we only have 1 car, but, more often than not it works to our advantage: "I'd love to go to that superfluous church meeting on a Saturday, but Melanie needs the car then." Brilliant!

All things considered, I'd much rather have a 10 minute commute to work like my dad does (or a 0 minute commute like my mom), but this is where my job is and so I figure I'll make the best of it. Since most of you don't ride a train every day, I wanted you to get a taste of the train commuter.

Annual BCS bashing

2010-12-18T20:19:00.004-05:00

I was going to harp on all the big sports media outlets for not really stepping up and calling out the cruddiness of the BCS, but in November, SI came out with an expose that was well-written and boisterously against the BCS, so I couldn't complain.

However, I still feel like I owe Kurt my annual post about my/our hatred of the BCS. This year is the year that the BCS looks the best, because it's clearly no argument that Oregon and Auburn are the best teams, as they are the only 2 undefeated teams. Well, except TCU, but they're from a crappy conference and we all know that teams from crappy conferences, no matter how good that particular team is, can never beat the best teams from the BCS conferences:

2008: #7 Utah 31, #4 Alabama 17
2006: #9 Boise St 43, #7 Oklahoma 42

Clearly TCU wouldn't stand a chance against Auburn or Oregon, so let's just forget about it. When the Frogs beat Wisconsin by a couple of touchdowns, we'll know that there's no way that would've happened against Auburn or Oregon as well. So the BCS worked out perfectly this year. They got it right.

I have to give Mark Cuban major props for trying to get some change done the old-fashioned way. It's pretty easy to find BCS-haters nowadays. When I wrote my first post, I had to search and search for anti-BCS anything, and it was scarce and never from any main media outlets. Now all you have to do is a search on "BCS Bill Hancock" and you'll get pages of articles detailing the secrecy and hypocrisy of director Bill Hancock's work as directory and weak defenses of criticism.

Anyway, I have a lot of faith in Mark Cuban. A lot of people dislike him, I love him. I won't defend everything that he does or says, but I like his enthusiasm and determination to follow his own path despite the constant media mockery. And if he takes down the BCS with this current "business idea", then he'll be my hero. Of course, the meathead college football announcers at ESPN like Jesse Palmer mocked him, but that won't stop him. 95% of America wants a playoff, and by gum, we'll get our playoff before this century's done. The other 5% of America are old geezers who think these new plastic helmets are for wimps, Army is still a national power, and that FDR just barely died.

BCS Director Bill Hancock's main defense of the BCS focuses on its popularity. It's true, the BCS championship games get more viewers than most sports finales. However, it is not BECAUSE of the BCS that it gets so many viewers, it is in SPITE of the BCS. Football is America's sport, and we love it. We watch football because we like the strategy, the intensity, the battles of strength vs wit vs speed vs surprise. We love the deep pass, the big hit, the 4th-and-short, and the crushing block. We love football because we invented it. It's our baby, and soccer can get pretty tedious. College football exists in every corner of the land. You can pick your local team or your father's team or your enemy's rival team. We watch because we have to, it's in our blood. It's the only sport on during the dark, cold days of Christmas break, where we don't have work but also don't have anything to do. College football is a great product, and it might even surpass the popularity of the NFL if it had a playoff.

Pointing to its popularity as proof that "the system" works is like the producers of The Office attributing good ratings because of Michael Scott. This couldn't be further from the truth: people watch the show for all of the other characters and The Office's popularity is in spite of Michael Scott.

Let's also stop pretending that the main interest of the BCS is the student-athletes. If not for the millions of fans, college football would be like every other college sport, like volleyball. If only a handful of people cared about each game, then I guarantee there would be a playoff. The way Bill Hancock talks about it, the bowls just want the student-athletes to have a great time at their bowl game, and to heck with the fans.

Well, I'm going to keep it short this year. There are much better articles out there that skewer the BCS much better than I ever have, but for those of you who don't want to read them, just take my word for it: The BCS is evil. Secret combinations abound. Don't you stand for it, not for one second.

BYU Game Log

2010-11-21T06:50:00.004-05:00

The Cougs are playing the Cougs tonight. The ol' BYU-Chicago St Cougar rivalry. I decided to write a blogpost about my 2 alma maters facing off because it was such a historic game. You don't remember me going to Chicago State? Well, Chicago State was one of the 2 schools that I graduated from "In Mine". Iowa State was the one I mentioned in my post last year, but Chicago State was another school I attended to turn around its pathetic program. We won 4 NCAA tournament championships, and I averaged 50 points a game.

Tonight's announcers: Dave McCann and Andy Toolson. Dave is my favorite announcer this side of Todd Christensen's hair, and Andy Toolson has been known to say things like "You have to really like Charles Abouo's body." Should be easy targets.

One of tonight's subplots: the budding rivalry between Davies, who started Game 1, and Hartsock, who started Game 2. The animosity between these 2 goes way deeper than race. I'm pretty sure they both dated the same girl over the summer.

There are 2 Collinsworths on the team, brothers. To avoid confusion, I'll just clump them into one person. In fact, I could probably combine all of the white players into one person except for Jimmer.

Jimmer opens the game with a deep 3! Dave says he's in range past the halfcourt line. I think this would offend Jimmer.

Hartsock clangs a baseline jumper off the side of the backboard. Davies taunts him from the sideline: "Nice shot, Mr. Bad Shot!" High fives all around.

Hartsock gets yanked after missing a 10 foot J. However, Davies doesn't come in, they put in the tremendously lurpy Anderson. A note about Anderson: He runs like a Yeti, like he's about to fall down every other step. I'm guessing the other Cougs have a hard time keeping straight faces while running suicides.

I love the commercials on BYUTV. There's only like 2, and they're all just pushing other programs on BYUTV. I'm pretty sure today's main audience isn't interested in "Scrapbooking Workshop".

Collinsworth with a 2-handed jam! Makes all of us white boys proud. "He's gone from knockin' on doors to knockin' down dunks!" says Dave. I have no idea what he's talking about.

I think it would be pretty great if these BYUTV broadcasts would openly preach. Since they don't have sponsors, they could have free throws and plays of the game brought to us by scriptures: "This free throw is brought to you by Helaman 5:12, which reminds all of us that it is upon the rock of Christ we much build our faith. Now let me tell you, Andy, I know for myself how true that scripture is, and I know that you can lead a fulfilling life by following those words of council." "I couldn't agree more, Dave, as it reminds me of when I was on my mission and..."

After a few Wet Willies and noogies, Coach Rose puts Zylstra in between Davies and Hartsock on the bench. Coach is this close from turning this car around right now, Mister.

Jimmer nails another 3, 22-6 for the Cougs! Melanie lets her opinion be known: "Jimmer is the stupidest name." A weekly tradition!

Jimmer already with 12 points, 4-4 FG, 3-3 3P with 12 minutes left. He's already thinking 100 points. Toolson talks about his great passing. Jimmer leads the NCAA in "begrudging assists".

Dave calls CSU "the visiting Cougars" and "the Green Cougars". I think he's out of adjectives.

BYU goes to a zone. Is it fair to call any defensive scheme "racist"? I guess any man-to-man defense against BYU is probably racist.

Announcers discussing the lack of diversity on CSU, as almost the whole team is from Chicago. What about that white guy they got from Orem, Utah, a few years back who led them to 4 championships in a row? What about that diversity?

Davies comes in finally. Hartsock hurls insults from the sideline. This is getting ugly.

CSU throws up an airball from downtown. About 2 jerks from the student section chant "Airball! Airball!" for 5 seconds before they realize we're up 34-13.

Davies get hammered inside by 3 CSU big guys. Hartsock seen cheering wildly from the sideline.

Dave previews the upcoming broadcasts on BYUTV. Then he fairly mentions the upcoming schedule for CSU, for all 0 of their fans who even realize their team's playing a game on TV tonight.

Abouo clanks his second wide-open 3. There's a REASON you're always open out there, buddy. And it's not because you've got a nice body.

Davies hits 2 tough shots and smirks in Hartsock's direction. Davies picks up a foul and Hartsock takes off his warm-ups and goes to the scorer's table before Coach pulls him back to the bench.

Fredette with a throwdown! The crowd goes wild! We haven't had a white guard who could dunk since...well, since Joseph Smith posterized David Whitmer in a pickup game in Nauvoo.

Hartsock comes in for Davies. No jokes here, strictly informational.

A BYUTV commercial profiles a Pinewood Derby with Cub Scouts galore. Some bitter memories for me, taking last place and crying in the corner in my only Pinewood Derby.

Highlights from a BYU women's game with 10 parents in the stands. They should play in a church gym so it doesn't feel so empty. I'd volunteer to operate the scoreboard, like I did in church ball.

Fredette nails another 3 from deep. In the back of his head: "4-5 from 3, 1-3 from 2, 3 assists, 2 rebounds, 2-3 FT, 16 points. Get me the freaking ball!"

Emery with a steal and a dunk. That ties the NCAA mark for Improbable White Guy Dunks in a game (3). Someone get the ball to Zylstra on the break!

All the starters are sitting and we've got a white-wash on the court (all 5 white guys). Excellent time to show off our polished fundamentals and 3-point shooting!

CSU hits 2 contested 3's in a row, bringing the lead down to 29. Bring in the black guys!

Halftime: 60-29. Coach Rose is seething: "The score should be 80-0!" Jimmer, about his 17 points: "Oh, 17 points? I didn't notice. I never do. I just care if we win." Sure, Jimmer.

Today's halftime segment is about Hartsock's courting of some volleyball chick. Fast-forward! I end up sitting through it, the chick tells it in typical BYU chick style (I swear I'm not really exaggerating, for reals guys): "All his friends wanted me and I didn't want any of them because I'm totally hot. He totally wanted me, I hated him, I didn't want to date an RM cause I didn't want to get married, because you know that every RM would marry me because I'm totally hot. But he swindled me into it and I've never been happier." Their kids are going to be 9'6" monsters.

They ask the chick a bunch of questions about him, and she gets them all wrong.

Hartsock nailed her ideal vacation location ("Bahamas"). Of course he did.

She was just asked which show to DVR a week, and I was surprised she didn't answer "the scriptures". Real answer: "Pickers". How non-Mormon of her!

BYU's lead going into the 2nd half: 60-29. You know Coach Rose's halftime speech was focused on maintaining the 2x lead and scoring 100: "Press! 3's! Stats! If the shot clock goes under 25, you're all benched!"

CSU's coach after halftime: "We just have to work on getting better." AKA, "we have no chance and I hope we don't lose by 50."

Davies hands a CSU player a 20 dollar bill and points at Hartsock. "Watch out for number 33, Noah!" yells his self-proclaimed super hot wife.

Emery bricks a 3 to open the half. Coach Rose looks agitated.

Abouo fakes a 3. Nobody flinches.

Davies misses a gimme layup, Hartsock taunts him from the bench.

Only 9 points so far this half in 4 minutes. Coach Rose calls a time-out and chews everybody out. "Good timeout here," says Toolson. "Can't let this game get away from them."

Jimmer's dad shows up in the booth. Seems like a good guy. Which, of course, leads to no jokes here. He does plug a local restaurant, but I got nothin'.

Nice move from Davies along the baseline. After, he celebrates by walking over to the bench and punching Hartsock in the face.

Jimmer hits his average and Coach pulls him. And people say that coaches don't care about stats.

Melanie makes fun of the Collinsworth brothers: "Collinsworth to Collinsworth, and Collinsworth passes back to Collinsworth. Collinsworth drives to the basket and dishes to Collinsworth. Collinsworth with the assist and Collinsworth with the basket!" Ladies and Gentlemen, Melanie Hansen! She'll be here all week.

Mel makes sure that I don't make her sound like a typical woman who says, "Their uniforms are so pretty!"

Zylstra cans a 3, and BYU's up 93-44. BYU needs to let my brother Brian in the booth to do his Marv Albert. "Zylsta. For 3. Yes!" I'd say that the only thing better than Brian's Marv is Marv himself, but even Marv has to admit that Brian's Marv is better than his own.

I vote that when the game gets out of hand, they stop shooting free throws.

CSU puts in their only white guy. And he's matched up against our only black guy, who scores over him. Our token is better than your token!

CSU mounts a furious comeback, 99-58. Coach calls a timeout to calm everybody down. The crowd starts leaving, realizing that a 2x victory is out of reach.

The other Collinsworth throws it down! That breaks the record for Improbable White Guy Dunks!

Final score: 109-60. Real hard-fought game, but the better team pulls it out. We'll see you next time.

The Second Annual Halloween Park Trip

2010-10-31T22:29:00.009-04:00

We've decided to make it an annual tradition to visit our town park on Halloween. Last year it was unseasonably warm and I looked a little like this:

My favorite part of that day was later when I answered the door for some trick-or-treaters and a little girl (at eye-level to my belly) asked,

"Are you having a baby?"

I just handed her an extra piece of candy and replied,

"I certainly hope so..."

This year it was a little chillier than last, but was much more fun, at least from my perspective...

Boisterous parents

2010-10-07T12:41:00.003-04:00

We were at Babies "R" We the other day, and I was letting Hendrik crawl around while Melanie studied various car seats for the better part of an hour. The Babies R We crowd is very similar to the Utah crowd, which is to say that everybody around has their own babies and they don't think that other babies are all that cute or amazing. Hench would approach people, as is his custom, and climb up on their leg, looking up for a little hint of humanity. Some people were amused, others gave me this look like "How dare you let your child crawl around in here and touch me! Do you realize how many germs he has!!! For shame!" This one particular grandma gave him a little more attention.

"Oh, how cute! How old is he?"

"11 months."

"Oh, wow! He's so tiny! My grandson is 4 months old and is also his size! He's growing like 2 inches a week!"

Then, the Babies R We employee assisting them also put in her 2 cents: "Oh, yes! What a little peanut!"

"Yes!" said the grandma, "a little peanut! Are you a little peanut? Yes, you are! Come here, peanut!"

End of conversation.

Let me just put this on the record: There is nothing more annoying that boisterous parents/g-parents when discussing the size of their chunky offspring, especially when comparing to other kids. It's like they take personal credit that their kid has a slow metabolism or whatever else causes fat babies to be fat. They like to extrapolate their kid's size, thinking they will be 6'9 offensive linemen or whatever it is that large women aspire to be (plus-size models? talk-show hosts? birthing machines? garbage-women?). They like to pass judgment on the parents of smaller kids, whispering to their spouses, "Do they even feed him? Can they not afford food? Are they just spending all of their money on booze? They probably lock their kid in the closet when they go boozing! What awful parents!"

They might as well just come out and say it: "My baby is larger than your baby, and, therefore, better. That is a direct result of my superior parenting, which implies that I am a better parent and, therefore, a better person than you are or probably will ever be. I win. I win at life."

In full disclosure, Hendrik is not a small baby. He's average. 50 percentile in height and weight. I have no room to brag or complain. I point that out to everybody who says he's big ("Actually, he's exactly average."), or small ("HE'S NOT A &#%$ PEANUT!!!"), if I have the chance. The grandma who says her grandson is 22 pounds at 4 months is probably either batty or blind (or both), so I didn't bother clarifying that Hendrik isn't a "peanut", in fact, he's an orange, which seems to be an average-size food.

Hendrik also eats ridiculous amounts of food, so much that we have to just stop feeding him when we think he's had enough, otherwise he'll just keep eating. We thought he'd be bigger than average, but it turns out that the food just goes in one end and out the other.

If he was huge, I'd probably be taking personal credit for his hugeness and rubbing it in all the sad sacks' faces that my kid was destined to a successful life without need for step stools or platform shoes, and their kid will probably give into a life-threatening disease as a direct result of their poor parenting (calm down-this is a joke).

Actually, I wouldn't. I made a pact to myself before Hendrik was born that I would never brag about the things that I couldn't take credit for. Which is pretty much everything, because I don't do any parenting. I just give a lot of "performance feedback" for my wife. So I'll just take credit for how great of a mom she is.

Our latest love

2010-09-11T10:42:00.003-04:00

Hendrik is a BIG fan of Special Agent Oso on Playhouse Disney. He particularly enjoys the main song of the show, "3 Special Steps." We think he might have a crush on Paw Pilot, who is singing the song.

India Jones

2010-08-16T13:29:00.002-04:00

I realize it's been a lonely while since I've written a meaningless post about my musings and recollections. This is because:

a. I don't like you that much
b. I'm more than just a meaningless blog writer! I'm a family man! Why doesn't anybody comment on the family posts? Don't you realize how long it takes to post pics to Blogger?
c. Hendrik is much cuter than I
d. Who cares? Nobody reads these anyway! Except Kurt. Thanks, Kurt!
e. No matter how much I thought about it, nothing came to mind that was interesting enough to write about.

Pick your reason. Now onto the meaningless post...

Growing up in Utah, I never thought twice about the meaning of the word "Indian". These were the people with tons of feathers, who were good with buffaloes, and who kept our land warm for us whilst we were stuck in Europe.

Now? If someone says "Indian", I assume they are talking about our Apu-type friends from the Indian Subcontinent. I work with tons of Indians. Most of my underlings are Indian. I get offended when somebody says "Indian" when they mean "Native American". Not because of the PC-ness, but because I work with Indians so much that I just assume Indians are from, well, India. If you're talking about Native Americans, well, I just can't be bothered.

The trickiest part about working with Indians isn't the language barrier. It's the name barrier. Some of them have last names longer than my full name (Granted, "Kent Ed H" is only 7 letters), which is a huge problem when writing emails...

"To: Anuradha.Anatpartantatlayaga.Pamanatauayaglauwani@p.com"

To which I get this reply:

"Error 505: Message undeliverable. Couldn't be done. What is wrong with you?!?! The email address you gave me was WAY off and so now what do you expect me to do? Go to every server in the world and ask them if they know anybody that has this email address?! Check the address before you hit send already! Also, I couldn't help but notice that you consistently misuse the word 'regardless'..."

The other problem is that I never get to meet, or even talk to, these people. For all I know, they could just be robots, similar to Bender from "Futurama", only much, much more polite. I put data on a server, send them an email with the instructions:

"Dear India-bot,

Please do X and Y.
Have it done by yesterday. Last week would have been nice, too.
Or death.

Thanks!

Love, your affectionate but omnipotent superior, who can make or break you with one email of positive or negative feedback, depending on your performance,
Kent Ed H"

Another problem is that I have no idea if their names are girl names or boy names. In America, we don't have that problem (nor do we have any problems, as our culture is much more superior than anything, ever, even if you created an imaginary Utopian world, it would still be better than your stupid Utopia. I spit on your Utopia!) . For example, if you say you named your kid "Kelly" I know right away that your baby is a girl. If you say "Lindsey", it's a boy. If you say "Braden", then I say, "What's wrong with you, does every name need to end with an 'aden'?!?!?! "

I work with an India-bot named Anshu 3000 ("Anshu" for short). He was always on the ball, checking over his work, and making sure I was adequately pleased with the quality of the deliverable before putting himself into hibernation (somebody please explain to Mom that you can put a computer into "Hibernate" mode when you are done with it at the end of the day. It's funny because I'm essentially saying that Anshu is a computer/robot. Still nothing? Okay, let's move on). Well, I was talking to Randeep, an expatriate Indian, and said that I thought that Anshu was doing a great job, and should be in line for a CPU upgrade (See, Mom, that's how they promote computers in my make-believe world of India-bots). Randeep agreed, saying, "Yes, she's done a great job."

She? Anshu is a she? How many emails have I written to Anshu with the assumption that she was a he? Did I ever use a gender-specific pronoun? Does Anshu 3000 hate me with every wire of her being?

We've learned from Futurama that robots can either be man-bots or femmebots, but I'm sure it's just as offensive to call a female computer a "He" as it is to call a manly man a "She". I didn't sleep for nights after this Anshu incident, worrying that I'd offended someone, no matter how mortal that being may have been. See, readers, this is how sensitive I am. If I've offended you, I can sense that, and therefore, lose much sleep. I lose about 5 seconds of sleep for every time I've offended somebody. It averages out to about 3 minutes a night. These 3 minutes can sometimes be 3 minutes of uninterrupted sobbing into my pillow, or 3 minutes spent getting up to go to the bathroom.

My favorite thing about working with Indians is how polite they are:

"Dear Kind Sir Kent (Ed H),

It was our supreme pleasure to work on the data set you had generously given us. We are forever indebted to you for imparting your wisdom on this project. When you are afforded a few minutes in your busiest of schedules, would you most kindly review the humble deliverable we have prepared?

Yours sincerely, the lowest of the low,
India-bot #5"

A similar email from the American equivalent:

"Jerky Jerk-store:

Here's the stupid work you wanted done, whip at my back. I did an awesome job, so if you dare review it, don't you dare come back to me with comments. I will kill you. I hate you, you're a jerk, I'm the best, you suck at everything, I deserve your job, you're a jerk, and more jerky stuff. Jerk.

Thanks!

Love,
Captain Ridiculously Awesome, III"

Another thing that I love about the Indian way of communication is their use of the phrase "the same". If they ever mention something in an email, they will refer to it later in the email as "the same". For example:

"We have prepared the deliverable. Please review and let us know of feedback of the same."

In this case, "the same" is referring to the deliverable. Now, why don't we put that same logic into place when telling stories?

"A man and his dog went to the park. The same threw a ball to the same in the same. The same decided he'd had enough of the same, so the same left the same to go to the same."

You could interpret this story a number of ways, making for some very interesting stories!

"A man and his dog went to the park. The man threw a ball to the dog in the park. The man decided he'd had enough of the park, so the man left the park to go to a ball."

OR:

"A man and his dog went to the park. The dog threw a ball to the park in the man. The man decided he'd had enough of the dog, so a ball left the park to go to the man."

FURTHERMORE:

"A man and his dog went to the park. The man realized 'THIS DOG IS A COLOSSAL WASTE OF TIME AND I'M SICK AND DURN TIRED OF CLEANING UP HIS POOP', so he left his dog at the park. The dog then ran off a cliff, where millions of other dogs followed him to a bloody death. The world was a quieter, cleaner, much more enjoyable place. Don't worry, they all went to Dog Heaven (which is actually Hell for humans! How's THAT for a twist?!?! HAHAHAHA!!!)"

There was an Indian who used to work with me named Kalyan. He was super skinny, so we called him "Skindian", Skinny Indian. I liked the name, then realized that the nickname "Skindian" was just about as clever as Famerican, as just about every Indian is skinny.

Finally, I'd like to say that I have to rate Indians as my favorite people that aren't my own people. They are all ridiculously nice, they all have awesome accents, and that's really all I got. But that's a start! Also, congratulations to everyone who survived this post.

Ocean City

2010-08-08T19:15:00.007-04:00

We decided for our family vacation to get a beach house this year. Mel and I are both beach people (from Planet Sandusky), so we figured it would be worth it to get a place for a week and just laze about on the beach. We did this for our honeymoon, as well. The problem with our honeymoon was that it was in Florida in late June, and the weather was stupid hot and crazy humid. Also, we didn't have a cute little boy to entertain us then. At least that any of you know about.

We started looking around at the websites and found that the most affordable places with the least amount of Guidos on the East Coast was Delaware/Maryland. The beach houses in Mass, which are much closer, are ridiculously expensive, plus you can't really count on the summer weather here. This is my 7th summer here, and each one is pretty different. Last year's was pretty rainy and cold, so I didn't want to get stuck paying a huge chunk for an abysmal week on Cape Cod.

At first, we tried to get some friends to go in on a house with us. Around February/March, we had a group that was interested, but when it came time to sign the dotted line, everybody had commitment anxiety. I was disappointed, and didn't think we could afford a place on our own. I figured we'd wait until the last minute and lowball all the available houses for the week we planned on, and that's exactly what I did.

2 weeks before our trip, I went online and found all of the available properties near our price range and emailed them all, asking if they would be willing to negotiate. Most people came back with 50 or 100 dollar off deals, which wasn't nearly what I had in mind. I had overestimated their despair, meaning that the owners were obviously not as desperate as I was hoping.

However, one of the owners of a 2 BR condo, very close to the beach, gave me a 250 dollar discount, which barely squeezed into our budget. We snapped it up and sent them a check. It was in Ocean City, Maryland, 5 blocks from the Delaware border. Ocean City is more of a beach city than a beach town, with large blocks of apartments and condos set up from beginning to end, in contrast to the beach towns of Delaware. I would prefer the beach towns, with the less-crowded beaches and less riff-raff and all, but it just wasn't affordable for one family by itself. Ocean City turned out to be a pleasant surprise, as it was almost entirely families. Although it was crowded, we visited a Delaware beach and found that it was equally crowded, so no big loss there.

When we arrived, it was obvious that we were paying for the location. This place wasn't exactly luxury, featuring some 70's decor, a 13-inch TV, old leather couches, and A/C units in every room. The kitchen was redone and updated, but that was about it. The building was this sad-looking brick affair, in contrast to the brightly-painted stucco buildings surrounding us. It was a little disconcerting at first, with Mel and I looking at each other with these "Can we be happy here?" expressions on our faces.

Then we walked to the beach. 74 paces from our building, and we were on soft sand. After that, it didn't seem to matter that our place was old, and we just adapted to the firm beds and covered the cheap leather couches with blankets. (Is it just us who hates leather couches? They're hot in the summer, cold in the winter, stick to your skin, what's the appeal?) It also didn't seem to matter that we tracked so much sand inside.

From there, it was just beach, beach, beach. Our regular schedule was this:

7AM - Hendrik wakes us
8AM - After feeding Hendrik and watching his beloved "Special Agent Oso", we put him down for his morning nap
9-10AM - Hendrik wakes up and we make our way to the beach, which only takes a couple of minutes.
10AM-noon - Hendrik crawls up and down the beach, making friends, double-fisting sand into his mouth, crying when the waves get too loud, and smiling at the camera. Everything he touches turns to sand. He's the King Midas of sand. King Sandus?
Noon-2PM - Mel takes Hench back to the condo for lunch/nap. I stay out on the beach to body surf, do crosswords, eat grapes and Cheeto's, drink Gatorade, and soak up the rays. Mel volunteered to go back to the condo mostly because she likes to take breaks from the sun and she's a peach in general.
2PM-4PM - Hendu comes back out with his Mom for more of the same (see above).
4PM-8PM - Dinner/naps/showers/bottles/Phineas and Ferb
8PM-11PM - FREETIME FOR MOM AND DAD!!!! YESSSSS!!! FINALLY!!!!! (Usually we just watched a movie and went to bed early.)

Below are the pictures of our fun, mostly of Hendrik, of course. He is easily the cutest of us, although Mel has her moments.

Peering out from behind the castle that somebody else made.

"Ladies, ladies, ladies! There's plenty of me to go around!" Hendrik made friends everywhere.

These toys entertained him for 5 minutes, tops.

"Nice guns, Daddy!"

More attention, more friends. These folks we sat next to all week. As most people were there for a week (Saturday-Saturday), we pretty much recognized everybody by the end.

He loves his shoulder rides.

Don't ask what I'm doing in this pic, but Hendrik's smile was so cute I had to include this pic.

Trying to get out of the pit I dug.

Being cute. Easier than it looks.

This looks like a Far Side cartoon. "Water, water!"

"How many times have I told you, young man!"

We went to this place called J/R's, The Place for Ribs. I love ribs, so we tried it out, and it was delicious. I gave Hendu my rib bone once and he gnawed on it like a dog for 10 minutes. Turns out he loves ribs as much as I do.

This is the only good thing that came out of a overpriced trip to Nathan's.

Family Picture!

A week before our trip, on July 24th, the Carnival came to Whitman. They set up in the baseball fields and there were fireworks planned for 9:45. We kept Hendrik awake for it.

Ferris Wheel!

Spinny Thingee!

The carnival in its entirety. Pretty small. We didn't actually do anything, just walked around like cheapskates watching everybody spend their money on puke-inducing rides and games for crappy prizes. Mostly we were killing time waiting for the fireworks. I still had a lot of fun soaking in the Americana of it all. Hot, sweaty summer night, all the town folk out, smell of cotton candy, popcorn, and BO, cheap rides built in the 30's, teenagers trying to look cool, I loved it. I'm not being sarcastic. Seriously, I'm not. Why does everybody think I'm making fun of everything all the time! The fireworks went off at 9:45 and they were decent for a small-town production. The best part was that we could walk to the park to do all of this, and therefore didn't have to fight traffic or deal with parking or anything. Hench was scared by the loud booms and was too tired to enjoy anything.

One last happening: Hendrik was crawling around our room and found a "fun-size" Reese's underneath the bed and somehow got through the wrapper before Mom noticed. Here is the result:

He's never been happier/prouder of himself.

Hendu Hijack

2010-07-01T12:00:00.000-04:00

I kept waiting for my lazy parents to get off their rumps and post about the big trip to Idah-er and Ut-er (forgive my Boston accent, I lived there when I was young) a few months ago, but you know that's never going to realistically happen. My parents are about as motivated as a 3-month old (take that, 3-monthers! Oh, to be young and foolish again...) on welfare when it comes to blogging. They probably won't even check the blog in the next month, so I can rip on them as much as I want.

Anywho, this was my SECOND plane ride in my life, which means I'm already 19 years ahead of my dad, whose second plane ride was going on his mission (which he won't shut up about btw--yes Dad, we get it, you can speak Polish. Get yourself a cookie. While you're at it, could you mix up some pureed yams and rice cereal for me? Thanks, you're a moose!). I was all set to whine the whole way, but Mom took some Dramamine and gave me some second-hand style, and I was out! The flight out was whine-free from my side, a feat I'm not particularly proud of. You win this round, Mom.

We arrived at Great-Grandma Ann's house in Twin Falls, Idaho, right around 1:30 AM. Dad was complaining about it being 3:30 AM Eastern Time, but what isn't he moaning about nowadays?

The next few days we spent running from place to place, my parents constantly shuffling me around. I got my deserved attention from the various aunts, uncles, and grandparents, and why shouldn't I? Have you seen me lately? I'm delicious! Seriously, check out these pics of me in action:

A bath in Great-g'ma's sink

Hangin' with Gramps

Sweet Aunt April - much nicer to me than Mom

Test driving a 2010 Jeep Wrangler. Couldn't find where the ignition was

A forced picture with my embarrassment of a father

Another forced pic

They wouldn't let me eat the flowers!

You're boring me with all the details of the reception, Auntie.

Look how tall I am! Rah!

A rare moment of fun with Mom

Hey, ladies! Over here on the grass!

You look like an interesting fellow, what's your name? You smell like mirror, though.

Havin' fun with a big stuffed dawg

Didn't exactly want to touch the carpet, know what I'm sayin'?

Help!

Forced to take a nap during the recepsh.

Say what you will about Dad's stank, but the man can tango.

Man I look cute here!

Great-Grandma rocks! Nnnneeehh!

After a few rousing days in Idaho, we drove down to Utah to visit Dad's side. You can tell they're all pretty desensitized to cute babies, as the fawning and adoration was down a few notches from Idaho. You can't blame them, I'm the 521st grandchild on that side, I'm just happy if they remember my name.

All my uncles and aunts at Joe's. Danged if I can remember them all.

Sittin' tall on Aunt Paula's counter

Hangin' with Camille, or as I like to call her, Camiracle.

Another pic with another Great-grandma! I look pretty cool here

We had a pretty good time in Utah, and my parents even ditched me for a day to go up to Park City. Talk about offended! JK, I totally needed a break. Mom was getting pretty naggy and Dad's stink can get to you after a while. LOL!

My cuz Drew was helping me break out of the exersaucer.

Good times!

Discussing economic policy

4 generations of handsomeness

Get used to this sight, Ma, flanked by women

Below are some videos that I'm not particularly proud of, but I don't mind looking foolish in the name of a good laugh:

It's great to be home again, back in the familiar crib with my favorite toys and gadgets. I don't want to get sappy here, but a few tears of joy crawled out my eyes when I saw my trusty mat. I don't want to ever be parted again! Well, at least not until I'm sick of it.

Until next time, signing off!

-Hendrik aka Hendu aka Henchman aka Henduriffic aka The Cutest Boy in Whitman

Video killed the Radio Star

2010-06-15T22:10:00.003-04:00

I think my cousin Drew and I are going to be really good friends...

And check out what I'm learning to do...

The True Cost of Candy

2010-05-05T16:44:00.002-04:00

Making money has always been a quest of mine. I've mentioned before than my yearly income was 10 dollars, 9 bucks net (after tithing), a year. I got this money from my grandma, inside some card applicable to my age/interests. I usually chucked the card without barely looking at it and admired the check inside. 10 DOLLARS! The world is my oyster!

Mom would take us to the grocery store when we didn't have school. We would head straight over to the toy section whilst Mom bought her boring food items. We would admire the plastic swords, the rubber balls, etc. But that only lasted for a few minutes, as the toy section at Macey's is pretty minimal. After that, it was sneaking candy out of the bulk candy section, and then walking down the aisles looking for Mom.

Sometimes we were lucky enough to go to Kaybee toystore in the mall. That place was like Willy Wonka's as far as I was concerned. All those action figures! All the lego sets! Matchbox cars! Basketballs, footballs, sports stuff galore! It was impossible to figure out where I wanted to spend my 10 dollars. It had to be a good enough toy to last an entire year.

One year I bought a Lego set. You can't get a very big lego set for 10 bucks. I usually put it together in a day or 2, then tried to make other things with the same set, but it always ended up being a house or a building, nothing cool like a plane or a helicopter. I quickly realized that Legos lost their appeal pretty quickly for me.

Then one year I got Gibby for Christmas. Gibby (who my mom called "Gibson") was my first stuffed animal ("stuffedy"). He was a lion with a big long tail. He was pretty big, too, a lot bigger than the hand-me-down crap stuffedies we got from our siblings/neighbors/gutters. Brian got himself a hippo he named "Blab" and we started playing endlessly with them. Mostly sports or wars. After that, we started to spend all of our income on stuffedies. I started accumulating lions, and Brian hippos.

Me with Gibby, Brian with Blab, Kurt with Mikey (who was worthless), and Heidi with her crap stuffedy just trying to be included

We outgrew the stuffedy phase around age 10ish and I became focused on one thing: candy. I needed candy, and I needed it always. We didn't get an allowance in our house, instead, we were paid in candy bars. If you did your job every day that week, you got a candy bar. If you cleaned your room every day and made your bed, you got a candy bar. If you mowed the lawn you got THREE candy bars. Natch, we fought over who got to mow the lawn, because you could just knock that out in one day. The everyday jobs were the tough ones. Almost nobody cleaned their room or made their bed, that was pretty much impossible.

The problem with the candy bars is that even if I did everything, the max for candy bars was 5 per week. In what universe is 5 candy bars enough for an 11 year old? I'm a growing boy! How am I going to gain any weight without stuffing my face with enough Starburst to put a racehorse to sleep?

Lucky for me, the neighbors needed a babysitter while we were "off-track". For those of you who didn't have year-round school (pretty much everybody), we got a month off in the summer (July), and then 3 weeks off at 3 different times during the year. We were usually track "A", which was the best track, where track "E" was the 2nd best and track "D" kids were the losers. The neighbor kids were also track A, so I watched them for 3 weeks for $1 an hour. The best part about that wage is that I thought I was ripping THEM off. 7 bucks a day to watch Price is Right and Crocodile Dundee I and II? Sign me up! At home, Mom was making us slave our free days away with menial tasks and "character-building" activities, making us learn and junk. If we wanted to learn, we'd go back to school! And the only TV we could watch was the morning PBS shows and the afternoon ones. In the morning, we had Captain Kangaroo and Today's Special, while the afternoon shift gave us Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, and Barney at the 1:30 slot. Barney was intolerable and couldn't be tolerated, and neither could Mr. Rogers once I got to a certain age, but Sesame Street was always entertaining. Today's Special was fascinating and creepy at the same time, and I always couldn't bear to watch when Jeff got switched to a mannequin or back to a human via his plaid hat. Haven't I already discussed this on the blog? I feel like I have.

Anyway, watching PG-13 movies taped off the TV at the neighbor's while making filthy lucre was my idea of a good time. And I could take that money and ride my bike over to the Fruit Stand. However, I discovered that the Fruit Stand was robbing us blind with their 50 cent cans of pop and 40 cent candy bars. If I rode my bike the mile down to Storehouse or Macey's, I could get candy bars for 25 cents each. How could they afford to give away their candy for practically nothing?! How were the employees not buying out all the candy as soon as it hit the shelves?

Mom wasn't a big fan of me spending all my money on things of no lasting worth. So these trips had to be done on the sly. The easy part was getting the candy; the hard part was getting it into my room so not even my brothers discovered it. I wasn't worried about them ratting me out, I was worried about them stealing my loot. Once, my buddy Joel and I had a particular gluttonous trip to Macey's, not just stopping at candy bars. We raided the bulk candy section and bought a couple packs of Old Home donuts. Usually, I would jam the candy in my pants and walk in through the back door and scurry up the stairs whilst the unsuspecting Mom toiled away at her piano lessons. But these donut boxes were too big to fit in my Toughskin-brand jeans, so I climbed up the apple tree, jumped on the roof, and then snuck in through my bedroom window. No one was the wiser!

The problem was getting cash in my hands. I would get paid via check, which would require Mom to take me to the bank and put it all (minus 10 percent) in my savings. I couldn't just say "I'd like 50 clams back, please" without Mom giving me the stink-eye and a lecture about saving money. So I had my millions (probably around $150) in the bank, but I couldn't get to it. So one day I noticed one of those withdrawal forms. It needed a signature, so I came back another day on my bike (on a day that I was ditching school, no less-this was in Jr. High) and forged Mom's signature after practicing. The teller, who happened to be in my ward, wasn't fooled, and ended up calling my mom. Busted! She told me to come home right away because I was in big trouble, mister!

When I was about 14, I got offered some employment from my Teacher's Quorum advisor. He owned a packing company, and if I could make it down to his warehouse in S. Provo, I would make 5 bucks an hour. 5 bucks an hour!?! And you're sure this is legal, right? This kind of money doesn't come around every day. Pretty much my job required taking a stack of folder papers and adding an insert. For about 4 hours every day after school. After about an hour of this drudgery, I realized that 5 bucks an hour was not NEAR enough money. I quit after a few weeks, realizing that some jobs were just not worth the pay.

So I decided on a new career: dishwashing! We had an "in" with the owners of Magleby's, and they hired us on at 4.25/hr. Now you may think that dishwashing is pretty much as low as you can go on the employment chain, but I would point you to the packing plant. Dishwashing was a pleasure cruise compared to the packing plant. In fact, I loved it so much that I picked up extra shifts as much as I could. The fact that everything I wore reeked to the heavens and my hands had 2 new cuts every day didn't stop me. I even got a few of my friends to work there, Baldwin, Jonny, and Andy. It became a big party.

After about a year of that, I turned 16. Big Judd from the ward had purchased 5 Buck Pizza in Orem, and he said if I got a car, I could get a job as a delivery boy. Not so fast there, Big Judd. I'm very happy in my current career. How much did it pay, I asked. 5 bucks an hour, plus tips. Well, I'd gotten a raise to 4.75/hr, so the 5 bucks wasn't that great. How much are the tips, usually? About 40 bucks a night for a 3 hour shift.

Where do I sign?

Thus began the beautiful friendship. I bought a buttermilk-colored 1985 Toyota Tercel with poo-brown trim. Then I just sat in my car for 3 hours, drove around with pizza, and collected my tips at the end of the night. I even got paid 75 cents for each delivery for gas money! Then the summer came and I got a day job as a lifeguard at the local country club where the sun was always shining, the food was free, and the women ran rampant. Add that to the 50 bones a night I was making and it pretty much goes without saying that I was living large. After a full day of basking in the sun and cruising around town, I'd go to Macey's and get drunk on Shasta and high on candy. Baby Ruth's were always on sale at 4/1.00. But this fast lifestyle came to an abrupt halt. I was fooling myself not thinking it would ever catch up to me. One snowy night in January it did, and I got in an accident. Dad forbade me from delivering pizza ever again. He paid the 1500 in damages to the other driver, as my insurance didn't cover "commercial delivery". I had to work it off that summer.

How, you ask? Well, I'm glad you asked. He made me help him with his computer program all that summer for 5 bucks an hour. That meant I had to go into his office at 8 AM, which might as well be 4 AM for a 17 year old boy wasting his last free summer ever toiling away at dead-end jobs. Of course, the irony is that I learned how to program, then I wrote my own program for pizza restaurants, sold it to 20 different 5 Buck Pizza franchises, and paid my way through college with that. It also got me my current job, because we all know my slacker GPA wasn't getting me any great jobs, but running my own company did.

Now? I still buy candy by the truckloads. I went to Costco and bought a box of 72 Snickers. It was gone in a couple of months. I bought 3 boxes of Tangy Taffy (now Laffy Taffy) online. Cost? 80 bucks. I have a slice in my budget carved out for this. Tithing, mortgage, utilities, candy, food. In that order. One month we were low on cash so we substituted Twix for hamburger. Nobody noticed or complained.

I only have one regret: my teeth hurt.

Swears

2010-04-28T14:32:00.003-04:00

Mom and Dad, you'd better not read this post. This is a fair warning.

Growing up in Orem, aka Family City USA, aka Happy Valley, aka The Highest Percentage of Mormons Ever Assembled Since 1847, life was good and clean. The biggest problem was the consumption of caffeinated sodas, but that was stopped by the Prohibition Act of 1988. That opened up a whole new bootlegging industry, but that's for another post.

This one is about swears. In Orem, especially at the Hansen household, I grew up not knowing what swears were. In fact, at my house, you couldn't say the following words:

Butt
Crap
Shut Up
Fart

And you sure as fetchin' HECK couldn't say any swears. And, for some reason, there was no punishment for saying the wrong words. No soap in the mouth and no swear jar. Us kids had no problem with this, because we had appropriate substitutes (in respective order):

Rump
Grunt
Be Quiet
Bep or Big G

Most of you are familiar with the first and third on the list, and I'm not going to explain number 2 (I swear I didn't do that intentionally), but the fourth? You deserve an explanation.

I'm not really sure where Big G came from. I just know that when somebody tooted, the rule was that you said "Excuse me" to all offended parties. When nobody claimed a certain stench, Mom would say, "Who had a Big G?" Thinking about it now just cracks me up.

Once, when we were driving to Salt Lake, we saw this G on the mountain in Pleasant Grove, just like the Y in Provo. So us little kids, probably 6 of us crammed in the carpeted back section of the station wagon (no seats and certainly no seat belts back there), saw it and enthusiastically yelled, "THERE'S A BIG G ON THE MOUNTAIN!!!!" and laughed all the way to Salt Lake about it. Then, on the way back, right when we were just about to forget about the impossibly hilarious Big G on the mountain, we saw it again and renewed our laughter. Our parents probably had been wishing that we'd never connect our euphemism with the actual Big G.

I'm not entirely sure about the origins of "Bep", either. I know my brother Brian invented it, but I'm not sure how. All I know is that when he said it, it just felt right. It was a great word, and it quickly replaced Big G as the main euphemism.

Because we were so well-trained, I never used those words. Although there was one time when my older brother Craig was playing us twerps in basketball, 3 on 1 with a mini ball. Craig was about 15 at the time, and we were 11, 9, and 7. He was having a horrible night and then, after he'd missed his umpteenth shot in a row, he took the ball, punted it about 563 feet in the air, and yelled, "gosh-DARN it!!!". We twerps looked at each other with quivering lips, as if we'd just witnessed a stabbing. "Is this what it was like when Bambi died?" we asked each other. The terror of that moment made me that much more committed to a Life Without Swears.

That changed. When all the kids in 3rd grade were saying "butt" with impunity, I felt left out. If I said "rump", I'd look like a fool. So I just avoided it altogether. But sometimes, you HAVE to say it. "Where's that sticker?" My friend would ask. "Oh, it's on your...", I hesitated, just like when you know you're about to do something wrong, "...BUTT." "Oh thanks."

Can you imagine what would've happened if I would've said "rump"?

Friend: Where's that sticker?
Me: Oh, it's on your rump.
Friend: My what?
Me: Your RUMP.
Friend: What's a rump?
Me: You know, what your grunt comes out of.
Friend: My what?
Me: Your grunt.
Friend: What's grunt?
Me: It's like a Big G, but in solid form.
Friend: Like a what?
Me: YOUR RUMP IS YOUR BUTT!!!
Friend: You call this a rump? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Hey everybody, guess what Kent calls a butt? A "rump"!
Entire School: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
Me: BE QUIET!! EVERYBODY JUST BE QUIET!!!
Entire School: What does "be quiet" mean?

Can't you just imagine? Of course, this scenario must have been avoided at all costs. So I quickly learned to say "butt" at school and "rump" at home. It's obvious now that although "butt" is not really that profane a word, it's what the experts call a "gateway swear", a swear that will lead to other, much worse swears, possibly leading to a lifelong addiction of profanity.

It's true that my willingness to say "butt" led to my first actual swear. We were in the 4th grade, preparing for the 4th grade play. We would go over to the Jr High to use their auditorium. I was a "Royal Dancer" for a meaningless 2-minute scene that got 40 kids a chance to get their names on the program. Then the rest of the time I would sit in the chorus and sing all the dumb songs we had to sing, like "Lavender Blue", for the 5 billionth time. It was worse than singing time in Primary. Well, we got bored of it and snuck into the bathroom, where we did Gosh-Knows-What in there for hours. Finally, Miss Nelson got word of it and burst into the bathroom, which was dark because we were telling ghost stories or something. She yelled, "ALL OF YOU BOYS BETTER GET BACK INTO THE AUDITORIUM OR YOU'RE GOING TO THE PRINCIPAL'S OFFICE!!!" and then left. I whispered to my friend:

"She's an @#*"

The moment it fell off my tongue I regretted it. First "butt" and now THIS? I was on the slippery slope. I repented immediately. And by repented, I mean I didn't tell anyone and showed no remorse.

Fast forward to the end of 7th grade, my first year of Jr. High. I was quickly becoming a nerd, despite my best efforts. I was in the Math Club and was in Algebra whereas most of my peers were in Pre-Algebra or that lower math class for the incredibly popular and stupid. My dad was the bishop, and all my siblings were Perfect Children. I didn't want to be the goody-goody or the nerd. That wasn't going to get me noticed by certain girls. I wanted to be the Bad Boy. I had to do something drastic. I need to start saying swears.

At first, it was just awkward, forced, and ill-timed. I'd say something out of context, like "I think that kid is a dang" just so I could swear. I tried to keep it to the mild ones like heck and durn until I mastered them. I was sure that I'd never stoop to the fetch level.

Even though I'd pretty much started on my own, I started spending time with a certain someone in my neighborhood, let's call him Tyler Fudd, who swore so much that even the bishopric knew about it. He was reckless with his swears, saying every which word at any which time with such eloquence and diction, it was as if Mr. Darcy had begun a career as a rapper. I learned from him, taking actual notes and asking him later what certain words meant. "Oh, I can't tell you that," was his reply.

This summer also coincided with other devious activities, much worse than swearing. But this isn't a confession of PT's. But by the end of the summer, I had mastered the art of cursing like a sailor, and was proud of it. I couldn't wait to go back to school and start dropping swears and watching the girls swoon.

I was the best at keeping it quiet. Even though my aforementioned devious activities were discovered by my parents (and I was appropriately punished, mind you), the swearing wasn't. I wasn't doing bad things anymore, but I could still be a bad boy by appearing bad and rehashing my devious activities at opportune times. But when I got home, I was never in trouble as long as my grades were up and my chores were finished. I checked my mouth at the door.

Once, however, I was playing basketball with my brother, Brian. I was playing miserably and missed shot after shot (why is it always basketball?). Somehow, I let a swear get out. "Dang-NAB it!" It was easily loud enough for him to hear. He confronted me about it in the kitchen. "Do you swear, Kent?" "That's the only word I say, I promise! Don't tell Mom and Dad!" He then gave me the scornful eye, but he never squealed.

I slipped! I was losing my edge. Then, one Sunday in Teacher's Quorum, Br. Parker taught a lesson on swearing. I swore (yukyuk) I would kick the habit. I started keeping track of the swears I said each day and tried to beat that record. It took a few months, but I got so good at it that I completely stopped swearing, even when I was angry.

I'm not sure when I started swearing again. I think it was sometime after college. I moved to Boston, and everybody here swears, even at work. ESPECIALLY at work. I'll be in a meeting with the partner and f-bombs will fly. Well, I'm not proud to say that I've picked up the durn and heck words again, and occasional bigger ones, usually involving road rage or pain. And definitely basketball. I think I'll need to start counting again, but I don't know if that will work because I say "dangit" under my breath so often. Maybe we could start a swear jar. Because when I would watch my soccer coach get upset, he would cuss and I was always proud that I never heard my parents swear. So I'd like to think that Hendrik would be proud.

You might be a bad driver if...

2010-04-26T09:55:00.000-04:00

We all spend a ton of time in our cars. Most of that time is spent singing loudly along with Backstreet Boys (or NKOTB, if you prefer), digging through your console for your hand's free device, or shaking your fist yelling "Just GO ALREADY!!"

Yes, I realize I have Road Rage. I, personally, prefer the term Avenue Annoyance. Because, frankly, all this bad driving annoys me. It's not like we're all bad drivers, in fact, call me an optimist, but I think most drivers are good. Otherwise we'd be getting in accidents once a week and cars would be made out of pillows and the speed limit would be 2. So after much deliberation (with myself), I've decided there are 3 types of drivers:

1. Drivers who are mostly good drivers who have lapses of bad driving and a few bad habits (most of us)
2. Drivers who are bad drivers who still insist they are good drivers (5% of the general population, 90% of the teenage population)
3. Drivers who recognize they are bad drivers, and drive accordingly (3% of the general population, 95% of the geezer population)

Of course, what is "bad" and what is "good" driving? For simplicity's sake, bad is "unsafe, slow, and/or unpredictable" and good is "safe, fast within reason, and predictable". I think predictability is the key here. If you have turned on your blinker, we can safely predict that you will be turning in that direction. If you are in a lane on the freeway, we can predict you will stay in that lane until you turn on your blinker.

Now, since all of you are pleased at this point, lumping yourself in the number 1 position as a good driver, let's discuss the lapses of bad driving.

First of all, don't deny that you have lapses. We all have lapses where we are lost in thought, talking on a cell phone, frantically changing the station to avoid the Shane Company commercial, or frankly not paying attention as well as we should. Driving, for the most part, is boring. So we make it more interesting by listening to talk radio, painting our toenails, calling our friends, or screaming at our kids. We can all try to limit these by trying to pay more attention:

1. When the light is red, let's maintain eye contact with the light until it turns green. Let's not use every red light to send out a text, tie our shoes, or punch our children. If you absolutely must punch your child, don't get all huffy with me because I honked at you for sitting at a green light. It was a "Hey, dear kind friend of mine in the Dodge Caravan with Simulated Wood Paneling, I'm just politely letting you know that the light is green, and if you could please stop punching your ingrate of a son, who certainly deserves it, we could all start getting on with our child-punching lifestyles" honk, and not so much of a "Hey, buddy, get the #$*& out of my way!" honk.
2. When you're driving through an unfamiliar area, or making a difficult maneuver, it's probably best that you didn't make that phone call just then. I'm sure it's urgent and can't possibly wait another second, but your BFF will just have to wait another 5 minutes to hear what insanely cute thing your little Jeffrey did with his poop.
3. Check your blindspot. Always. While you're at it, check mine. I'm too tired to check it right now, but I'm sure no one's there, so I'm going to change lanes.

And here are some bad habits, which of course you are never guilty of:
1. Breaking at every green light, you know, just in case
2. Slowing down almost to a stop without any sort of a turn signal or motion toward either side of the road
3. Not staying in one's lane
4. Not being able to choose a lane
5. Swerving right to make a left turn and vice versa
6. Not leaving enough room for the people behind you to go around you while making a left turn.
7. Tailgating
8. Driving just a smidgen (by smidgen, I mean "CHEESE AND RICE YOU'RE GOING TO KILL SOMEBODY") faster than you probably should be
9. Taking corners on 2 wheels. This only annoys/scares the bejangles out of me if I'm in the car making said corner WAY too fast

Because I live in Massachusetts, it's tempting to blame this bad driving on the people here, but that's just not fair. Although there is definitely a unique culture of driving here, probably like every other state.

One of the most irritating things about driving in Mass is how each stoplight, in every direction, will turn red when a pedestrian presses the button to cross the road. Forget the fact that they can just wait for a green light and cross. Nope, we ALL have to stop and wait the 30 seconds for the 1 pedestrian to cross.

Now you may be thinking, "Well, Kent, isn't it better that everybody stops for that person, so that we can make sure that Dear Old Grammy can wobble across the street without getting flattened by Mr. White Trash in his Ford Heavy Duty truck with Fox Racing stickers across the back?"

I'm glad you asked. This, in theory, is a legitimate point. Although I consider most old people to be a drain on society, they still have a [small] right to live, and I don't necessarily want them flattened. But do you know what happens instead? Dear Old Grammy (DOG) doesn't press the button! Instead, she just waltzes straight into the intersection, regardless of light color! And it's not just DOG. It's EVERYBODY! It's me, it's you, we're all impatient pedestrians who will cross the road as soon as we want. Some people have the patience to at least wait until no cars are coming to cross (I include myself in this group), but a lot of people just assume everyone will stop at a green light for them, the Almighty Pedestrian. Once the Almighty Pedestrian has caused all the cars to stop at the green light, he then proceeds to saunter at a leisurely pace across the street. This is usually when I mumble "Serenity Now" under my breath rapidly.

Mass drivers also don't understand the concept of "Right of Way". It is common to be cruising along yet-another 2 lane highway behind a long line of cars at, say, 40 mph. A Silver Subaru with hippie earth-saving stickers, about a block ahead of you, pulls next to the main highway from a grocery parking lot. He just pulled up, there is no long line of cars waiting to get onto the main highway. Instead of just WAITING for 15-30 seconds for the long line of cars to pass, Mr. Silver Subaru simply does not have that kind of time. He starts inching into the road, waiting for Mrs. Black Minivan to completely stop and let him in. This is great for Mr. Silver Subaru, who doesn't have to wait for all of us who are less important, and also great for Mrs. Black Minivan, who can pat herself on the back for being so considerate. Of course, the 15 cars in line behind Mrs. Black Minivan are all unimportant, inconsiderate jerks for obeying the rules of the Right of Way when we should be stopping on a dime for any car or pedestrian who even considers getting in our way. Serenity Now!

The worst instance of this is what I alluded to in the last sentence. A pedestrian will be hovering near the crosswalk, maybe crossing the street, maybe not, but not really showing any signs of "I'm definitely crossing this street so unless you want a huge lawsuit, you'd better stop". However, Nervous Nellie in front of me, driving a Buick LeSabre, doesn't want to take any chances. He stops. But the pedestrian isn't crossing! Nellie waves to the pedestrian, as if saying, "Look, I've stopped! It is now completely safe for you to cross! Aren't I so considerate?" At this point, it is clear that the pedestrian has no intentions of crossing the street. They don't even notice that Buick Nellie has stopped, because they are just goosestepping on the sidewalk, probably waiting for someone to meet them there at 7 pm so they can do some comparison shopping for crappy produce at Stop N' Shop and/or Shaw's. But Buick Nellie is now determined to not have stopped in vain. He even honks at our pedestrian, finally getting her attention. But she waves him off, and Nervous Nellie drives on, scouring the sidewalks and side roads for someone else to stop for.

A red Jetta now approaches the street Nervous is driving down, which Nervous is thrilled about. "Now I can fulfill my good deed of the day!" Nellie stops to let the Jetta in. However, the teenie-bopper driving the red Jetta is on her cell phone, not exactly thinking about her next driving move, more about the extremely poignant conversation she's having with Jenna about which Twilight hunk is the "dreamiest". Nellie is again waving frantically at Red Jetta, trying in vain to feel good about how courteous he is, ignoring the dozens of cars behind him containing people who actually do not want to spend the entire evening in their car. But Red Jetta doesn't realize this until Nellie flashes his brights and honks at her, to which she turns in front of him and acknowledges him with her only free appendage, a wiggle of her nose.

This happens so frequently, that it's almost rare that people DON'T stop to let you turn in front of you. For example, most cars will assume you'll stop for them when making a left turn from the opposite direction. Once, I was in Wichita on business. My coworker was driving, and we needed to make a left turn. We pulled out, signaled, and waited for the long line of cars to pass from the opposite direction so we could safely turn left. However, this line was pretty durn long and my coworker, from Mass, got impatient. He started inching into the oncoming lanes of traffic, a normal move in Mass, but not in most other places I've driven. The people in Wichita all gave him dirty looks and got into the other lane to go around him, as he was blocking the left oncoming lane. He then exclaimed "What is everybody's problem here?!?! Nobody will let me in!" I didn't have the heart to explain the Right Of Way laws.

Another thing that we have here is the dumb "No Turn On Red" signs. Has anybody else seen these? It's to prevent people from turning right at a red light. I'm not sure why the rest of the country is able to turn right at a red light without complications, but I guess the government here just doesn't trust us enough with our right-turn abilities. The funny thing is that there some lights without the No Turn On Red sign, and everybody always knows which ones, so we turn right there like it's going out of style. We barely even stopping to check for oncoming traffic, we're so excited to turn on red. Sometimes, I'll stop on green just so I can turn on red.

Other than the whole no turn on red, the Right Of Way issues, and the pedestrian thing, the Mass drivers are just like everybody else.

With that said, Old Spice has the funniest commercials currently on TV.

Serious Hendrik time

2010-04-11T19:36:00.008-04:00

Welcome to Hendrik time! Meet our main subject, Hendrik, with his pal King Striples.

Nyet picture, you stupeed American! You tink I like dees pictures? You tink I guilty in the war crimes? Nyet! Nyet, nyet, nyet!

You stupeed Americans and you stupid Mac-uh-donald, you not know how cook real meat sandvich! I give you meat sandvich right in nose!

My old mission comp, Kevin Gertsch, graced us with a visit a couple of weeks ago with his family. His daughter, Jillian, loved to pay Hendrik quite a lot of attention, just like he gets at church.
Mel, Hench, Peter, Chelsea, Kevin, and Jillian in front of Old Ironsides.
2 little ones admiring each other.
It was the coldest day of the month!
Avast ye scurvy dogs! Yarrrrr!
In front of the city he was born in.

Harvard-Kent! What a great match!

Guess who cleaned up with the spoils of Easter? Guess who didn't give a flying hoot? (Hint: It's the same person)
Last Wednesday, the stars aligned and we took Hendrik into work with us and it also happened to be almost 90 degrees in the city. So we walked around the Common and took pics.
Just let me finish up this report and I'll be right with you.
Buy, buy, buy!!! Wait...sell, sell, sell!!!

Where's Hendrik?
There he is! Now where the H are his parents?

One of the reasons why it's been so long since we posted is because our basement flooded 3 times in the last month. We got 19 inches of rain in March, the 2nd wettest month in Mass history, second only to August 1955, when we got 2 hurricanes! We're pretty sick of rain.

Calling All Captions

2010-03-06T19:48:00.003-05:00

While I sort through all of the photos I just uploaded, give us your best captions for these pictures:

Underrated

2010-03-03T13:38:00.000-05:00

You were probably thinking to yourself today when you clicked on my blog, "I wonder what's going on with Kent and Melanie and Hendrik? We haven't heard from them in a while."

And then you saw the new post. "Great! Now I'll find out what's been going on!"

Brace yourself for disappointment. Nothing about us in here. Just more of my opinions shoved down your throat.

I want to pay a little tribute to an underrated band and an underrated TV show: Cake (the band, not the dessert), and Malcolm in the Middle.

Cake, to me, has always been somewhat of a guilty pleasure for me. They seemed like nothing more than a novelty band, with one quirky hit an album. Even though I bought Fashion Nugget in high school, and enjoyed it immensely, when their next album, Prolonging the Magic, came out, I didn't bother checking it out. No way it was better than Fashion Nugget, I thought. It wasn't.

But it was still good! A few good songs, that, to this day, I still enjoy.

That was it for my Cake days. It would seem that 2 albums chock full of clever lyrics interwoven with toe-tapping bass lines wasn't enough to warrant my loyalty. They weren't worthy of my devotion, instead banished to the cold grip of "Just friends" status. I wasn't sure they could be much more--they seemed too shallow, too flippant, to be considered for a serious relationship.

Then, as I worked at TGI Friday's, a couple songs from their latest album, Comfort Eagle, found their way onto the Friday's playlist. These songs were awesome, so I went out and found someone who owned Comfort Eagle, and had them burn me a copy. I only listened to it a few times through, not really giving all of the songs a chance, only the 2 I heard at Friday's. Then the CD got buried in my Giant Pile o' CDs, now obsolete due to the MP3 format.

I had to dig out my GPOC because I was using Mel's old CD stereo while finishing the basement. This forced me to listen to the CD's the entire way through, as I wasn't going to go wash my filthy hands every 4 minutes to swap out a CD. I then discovered the beauty of Comfort Eagle, and repented. Most of it is now on heavy rotation in my iTunes library, and it's not going anywhere soon.

Here is a small sampling of the subjects of Cake's songs:
1. An Austrian nobleman commissioning a symphony in C
2. A vain opera singer
3. A long line of cars, thanks to you
4. A guitar being chucked out a high-rise window
5. Stick shifts

Malcolm in the Middle is my favorite underrated TV show. I always dismissed it as a kid's show, thinking that it appealed to teenie boppers and adolescents, and I'm not going to stoop to that level. Well, not today, at least.

Then I started catching episodes on FX every so often, usually in the morning as I was getting ready, and I started laughing at some of the episodes. As an avid DVR-er, I'm always looking for something to watch when there's nothing else to watch. Usually a series of some sort, something in syndication or whatever. I usually watch all the episodes and then move on. First it was Scrubs, then Futurama, then This Old House, then Sweat Equity, then House Hunters, then Modern Marvels. As you can see, the last 4 were more or less educational, so I got tired of learning and decided to find something that required less brain. I settled on Malcolm.

The more I watched, the more I realized that each character is more complex than I thought. And I certainly can relate to growing up in a messy house with penny-pinching parents. My favorite characters are the parents, and Hal (the dad) is hilarious. In one episode, Hal has a dialogue with his early adolescent son Dewey, who wants to buy a watch off of the back of the cereal box:

"See, it says 12.99, but that doesn't include the hidden costs. Shipping, handling, box tops, by the time you're through, you're paying on the high side of FIFTEEN dollars. I've never owned a 15 dollar watch."

"But I NEED one, Dad!"

"Son, a cork and a piece of string make a perfectly fine sun-dial. AND, a nice conversation piece with the ladies!"

Then, later, after Dewey comes home complaining he missed the bus because he didn't have a watch, Lois (the mom) retorts, "You wanna know what time it is, Dewey? It's half past a roof over your head, clean clothes and 3 meals a day. THAT'S what time it is!"

Malcolm is a bit Seinfeld-esque (especially in the last seasons, for both shows), because each key character has their own story line that eventually comes together at the end with all the other story lines. It's also a bit Seinfeld-esque in the sense that the first couple of seasons were just not as funny. I watch it and think, "How did this show get renewed after the first season?" I guess it was groundbreaking at the time (still talking about both Seinfeld and Malcolm).

Now, don't get me wrong: there's a reason why these are underrated. Cake is no Pearl Jam, and Malcolm is certainly no Seinfeld. But if you're looking for some alternative tunes to listen to while doing the dishes, then I would recommend Cake. And if you need a new TV show to watch when all of the reruns are rerunning, then DVR Malcolm.

I don't think I've learned my lesson about underrated entertainment. I still don't have the "newest" (2004) Cake album ("eh, it's probably not that good"), and I'm sure I've dismissed a witty TV show or 2 without a chance (like Sealab, for example--is that still on TV, Kurt? Was it ever?). But maybe I'm just saving those things for 10 years from now, when I need some different but familiar tunes, or a new TV show to DVR.

Why Girls Need Girlfriends

2010-02-11T19:46:00.000-05:00

Girls need girlfriends because their husbands just don't cut it. Not in a bad way, they can be AWESOME husbands, but they just aren't able to fill the girlfriend void. We want to be best friends with our spouses and tell them EVERYTHING, but the reality is that while we don't keep secrets we don't have to try and discuss every topic with them.

During our first year of marriage I learned a lot about talking to a boy vs talking to a girl. BIG difference. I love Kent. I can talk to him about anything. Whether or not he enjoys the conversation is another story. So I learned quickly that he didn't want the gossipy, juicy details about my day at work, a simple grunt and "ok" would be a perfect answer to his, "How was your day?"

There was one particular instance that really defined this "girlfriend" thing for me. I was talking to Kent about some other girl I knew (and liked, maybe even loved), but I was conveying a truth that was perhaps unkind. I even prefaced the comment with, "I know this is so mean, but..." and finished up with an "I should feel bad for saying that." Now, ladies, we all know that whenever someone finishes like that it is our job as the listener to promptly follow up with an "I know, but the truth hurts sometimes" or an "I know, but you have to be honest with yourself." You know, something that makes the other person feel like less of a jerk. Here is what Kent responded with:

"Wow Mel, that is mean. You probably should feel bad."

Uhhh....

To which I responded, "Kent, you're not a very good girlfriend." He didn't understand what I meant, but of course he didn't! He has no experience as a girlfriend! But moments like that have taught me to save certain comments/conversations for my girlfriends and not my best friend of a husband.

One other key difference is that girls like to get together. We like to hang out and talk, possibly for hours. Whenever I come home from hanging out with my friend Lauren, or really any girlfriend, the following conversation almost always takes place:

Kent: What did you guys do?

Mel: Hung out, talked.

K: Talked? For 2 hours? About what?

The answer is anything and everything, my friend.

One thing I love is how womens' conversations just flow from one subject to the next. Topics that don't seem related when listed out individually somehow find themselves side-by-side in a girl's conversation. Have you ever caught yourself in the middle of a conversation and wondered, "How did we get on this topic?" I've actually attempted to trace my way back through the conversation to the beginning - try it sometime, it's fun. It's really no wonder why men look so confused if they are ever stuck surrounded by Chatty Cathys - they can't follow the train of thought.

And finally, I need girlfriends because they are just as crazy as I am. Girls, embrace it. We women are crazy. It's just how we're built. That's why we need Girls Night Out or Ladies Who Lunch. After you've been spending lots of quality time with your main man, who is logical, unemotional, and simple, you start to feel really ridiculous. Like maybe you are the craziest person in the world. So then you turn to your lady friends, spend a little time with the girls, and you realize, "I'm not crazy, I'm normal!" And then you can make it through another week without ripping your poor, loving husband's head off.

Junior High Kent

2010-02-07T16:04:00.002-05:00

There's nothing funnier to me than thinking of how I used to be. 5-year old Kent was funny. 10-year-old Kent was even funnier. But they've got nothing on Junior High Kent.

When I arrived at Canyon View in the 7th grade, I was still in my elementary mindset. I had my worn out t-shirts, faded terry cloth shorts with holes in them, dorky H.I.S. jeans, etc. I didn't care how I looked in elementary school. I usually wore my soccer jersey on game days, and when I was younger, my cub scout shirt on den meeting days.

I shared a locker with the super popular Shawn Hansen, who expected me to go halfsies on a $2.50 locker room shelf when my yearly income was $10.00, $9.00 after taxes and tithing. Shawn had a sleek black Polo shirt (an actual Ralph Lauren) tucked into his awesome Girbaud jeans, complimented by a nice bowl haircut, parted neatly down the middle (the infamous "butt-crack" haircut that I eventually had until halfway through my mission). Somehow he had tons of friends already, even some that were girls, when all my elementary friends had somehow disappeared.

I deduced that his fashion sense was the reason for his success. I started looking around, paying attention to what everybody was wearing: Jean shorts were the biggest thing, and if you were especially rich, you had Girbaud jean shorts, long enough to roll up a few notches. Most of the kids wore polo shirts, or some kind of collared shirt that was always tucked in. If you wore a t-shirt, it'd better be a Mossimo, No Fear, or Big Johnson. Everybody that was anybody had a Jansport backpack, and the rich kids could afford the ones with the leather bottoms. If you didn't have a Jansport, then you'd better not show your face around with a no-name brand of backpack. The only acceptable shoes at the time had swooshes.

I consulted my wardrobe, and discovered that I was seriously lacking. 7th grade Kent had accumulated NOTHING, and I was totally unprepared. I asked a popular kid in my ward, JR Cook, how I could be popular:

"You don't have to buy $100 Girbaud jeans. You can probably just get some cheap $50 Lucky jeans at The Copper Rivet."

Oh. Just $50. Let me check my budget...

Since I didn't have the scrilla for the duds, I had to beg Mom to take me to the mall. Of course, we didn't go to any of the cool, small, trendy shops, we didn't even make it past Mervyn's, where the brand in our budget was Cheetah. So we got one pair of jean shorts and one pair of khaki shorts. We then spent about 8 bucks on a black polo shirt. I begged my mom to get the longer pair of jean shorts to leave room for the roll-up, but she balked at the idea: "You don't need shorts that stretch to your calves!"

I wore the polo shirt the next day, tucked in neatly to my khaki shorts, and, to my great disbelief, a popular girl in my English class said, "You look nice today, Kent." Which, when heard by a hormone-driven 7th grade boy, is roughly translated to: "I have a GIANT crush on you, Kent, and so does every other girl in this school!"

Nice!

Propelled by the adrenalin from the self-esteem boost, I knew I couldn't show up the next day in my crappy old clothes, and I also couldn't wear the same ones. No way Susan was taking me back to Mervyn's (or, as she called it, "Mervyll's") again. So I panicked, and ransacked my house, looking for clothes that would potentially get me another compliment. The best I could do was a red polo shirt that I stole from my older sister JoEllen's closet. The buttons were on the wrong side, but who cares? They went perfectly with my jean shorts. I could even get a tiny roll-up if I wore them a few centimeters low on my waist.

The next day came and went with no compliments from anybody, which, when analyzed by a hormone-driven 7th grade boy, roughly means: "You are the ugliest kid in the school, and we'd prefer if you never showed your face around here again."

Compliments became a drug that I depended on. And not those superficial compliments like "You're good at math" or "You're a nice person with a good heart". I KNOW I'm good at math and that I'm a great person!! How is that going to help me land Jolene Shaw, the pretty 8th grade brunette in my Algebra class?! I needed real, juicy compliments like "I like your shoes" or "Nice shirt". Jolene will notice how good-looking I am and follow me around school. She will know that she can see me near the vending machines after 1st period as I walk to 2nd period, and also remember that she can see me outside the gym after 5th period.

One of the hardest things to learn was how to do my hair. All through elementary school, I barely even touched my hair, let alone run a comb through it. Now all I cared about was my hair. The cool kids had the bowl haircuts, combed so it was right down the middle, perfectly straight the whole way. My hair is naturally wavy, so I couldn't get it to go straight without hair spray or gel. The problem with that was that P.E. was 1st period for me, so after the mandatory showers, I had to do my hair with no hair spray or gel. I wasn't about to ask Mom for my own personal thing of gel, so I went into their bathroom with a sandwich bag and filled it with gel. I kept this little baggie of gel hidden in my P.E. locker, but my archnemisis Kyle Clindt (more on him later) saw it and mocked me in front of the whole class.

"Kent has a bag of goop in his locker that he puts in his hair! What is it even?!?! Is it [not suitable for reading on a family blog]? Or is it [unmentionable]? Gross!!!"

I hated that kid. He was the fat jerky kid that somehow was popular because of his clothes and his obscene languages and vulgar jokes. He's one of the popular kids that is probably still holding on to his Junior High glory days because he dropped out of high school. I'm much better than that. I hold on to my Junior High glory days because they were so hilarious. Although I found his profile on Facebook and he's a Colts fan, so I guess I can forgive him.

That year's Christmas was a gold mine. I begged Mom for all sorts of clothes, and she got me some very nice collared shirts. One was this Arrow-brand collared shirt that became my go-to shirt. It went nicely with the royal blue-dyed High Sierra jeans I begged for (colored jeans were all the rage-denim jeans were dorky, unless they were jean shorts). I wore it as much as I could without being conspicuous about it, sometimes every other day. Then one day, Kyle Clindt observed mockingly, "Didn't you wear that shirt yesterday?"

"What?!?! This shirt?!?! NO!! I've never worn this shirt twice in a row. Plus, I have 2 of them! No, 3!"

The jig was up. I could never wear the same clothes in the same week again! I started keeping a wardrobe calendar to keep track of what I wore. At the beginning, I only had enough "cool" clothes to last a week, but my birthday was coming up, and that just meant a whole lot more begging!

I got a lot more clothes, but as my dependency on clothes became stronger, I became more particular about clothes. One item my mom refused to buy were the baggy jeans, which were becoming all the rage. So one day I tried on a pair of my dad's jeans, a khaki shaded pair of Bass brand jeans. They were size 36 waist. I was about 5'3" at the time, and 30" waists were big on me. But if I didn't tuck in my shirt, nobody would notice the bunched up belt loops around my waist. Plus I had plenty of room to roll up the legs.

8th grade was much better than 7th grade. Now that I had a decent wardrobe, I only needed to add a few things here and there, and before I knew it, I had 2 weeks' worth of clothes (I still kept my calendar). I also got a few odd jobs here and there, and saved up money to buy my own clothes. First purchase: A snow-white pair of Levi's 501 jeans (button-fly). This was clutch, because the girl I was in love with this year was Julie Hocking, and I was sure she had a thing for white jeans. In fact, one day I noticed that inside my blue English folder, the class that Julie shared with me, there was written in girl's handwriting:

"Kent is the cutest boy in the 8th grade, all the girls LOVE him!"

No way! I mean, I kind of saw it coming, what with my incredible sense of fashion, but wow! Who did it? Was it Julie herself? Or was it her annoying friend Lindsey who was the only girl in the class who talked to me? For weeks, I was perplexed at who had written that. I tried to sneak peeks at Julie's handwriting to analyze. I mean, come on, I caught her looking at me a few times, there's NO WAY she wasn't into me.

Then, one day at home, my sister JoEllen, the same one that pointed out each and every zit on my forehead, asked me: "Have you seen the note I left in your folder?"

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!

Talk about destroying all of my dreams. She could've just kept quiet and I wouldn't have struggled with my self-esteem all year. Oh, who am I kidding? All 8th graders struggle with their self-esteem.

I never did talk to Julie, nor Jolene, my 7th grade crush. So when I started 9th grade, I was determined to do something about my new crush, Katie Heward. She was this hot new girl in my 3rd period history class, and I couldn't stop dreaming about her. 9th grade I think is the most obsessive of all grades, I'm not really sure why, but I was totally in love with Katie. I would hatch up these fantasies of us meeting in random places, and her totally falling for me, and we'd ride off into the sunset. These fantasies were not unlike the ones I'd had for Julie and Jolene, but with Katie it was different, because I was determined to do something about it.

The worst part about my crush with Katie is that she sat RIGHT NEXT to me. Like 3 feet away. And I COULDN'T TALK TO HER! I'd never, ever, talked to a girl I liked, and I didn't know how to do it. I figured she would be so amazed by my good looks and bad boy image (which I was working DARNED hard on), that she would be overcome and just surrender her love to me. Surprisingly, this didn't happen.

So I went with plan B: talk to her friends. However, I didn't know any of her friends. I mean, I knew who they were, for crying out loud, I knew EVERYTHING about Katie that I could possibly find out (don't pretend like you weren't as obsessive about your Junior High crushes). But I couldn't talk to them, so I had to talk to someone who knew them. Because of my bad-boy image I was trying to maintain, I got sent to PASS (Positive Alternative to School Suspension) quite often, and the PASS lady, Robin, was this 20 year old college girl who was more interested in hanging out with 9th graders than disciplining them. Me and my friends took full advantage of Robin, and got sent to PASS as often as possible. Robin knew that I loved Katie, so she schemed up a plan to get Katie sent to PASS. Once this happened, Robin sent me to PASS to tell me about their convo:

Robin: So, Katie Heward and her friends were in PASS today.
Me: Keep talking...
Robin: I asked them what they thought about Kent Hansen.
Me: Tell me more, tell me more!
Robin: They said you were "totally cute".

SCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!!!!

Me: Okay! Alright! Here we go!
Robin: So I said that you totally had a crush on Katie, and were going to the Christmas dance on Saturday, and you could meet then.

That was on December 14, 1994. Why do I remember this date? Cause I went sledding with my friends at Rock Canyon park and I broke my arm after going way too fast over a jump, and landed right on my wrist. I stayed at home for the next week, missing the dance, missing my only chance at true love.

I was desperate to unite with my princess, so I did everything I could to find out where she was going to be on New Year's Eve. I went over to her stake dance a few blocks away, but she wasn't there. My buddies found out she was at her friend Jessica's house, so we invited ourselves over there. Jessica opened the door to about 5 of us, and let us into the living room. Our older and cooler friend Logan did all the talking as I tried to figure out where Katie was. There was lots of girls laughing in the kitchen, but a wall separated me and my lover. It wasn't to be, apparently, as Jessica said that "we're in the middle of a game" and "boys aren't allowed". Don't you mean that "Men aren't allowed"? We told her that we'd be at the stake dance so we went back. I spent the rest of the dance staring at the doors waiting for Katie to arrive, but she never did.

I never did end up even so much as talking to Katie, but every time I saw her in the halls after that, I knew she was thinking, "It's too bad he broke his arm, because we'd have been married by now!" Or maybe not. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself to ever talk to her or make an actual move on her. Don't worry-that didn't stop me from stalking her for the next few years.

And that's why Junior High Kent makes All Growed-up Kent laugh.

Note: I slightly changed everybody's names in this post so they can't Google themselves and find this. Also, I've found out since then that my one true love was Mullanie McKindondale.

Hendrik update

2010-02-05T14:31:00.004-05:00

It's been a while since I've posted, but I have work to blame for that. I have about 4 half-written posts in my queue that I just can't seem to get around to...including a Terrence. In the meantime, some nice folks in our ward offered to take some Hendrik pictures for us, and you lucky buggers get a small sampling.

Put It To a Vote

2010-01-15T20:24:00.008-05:00

Who do you think Hendrik looks like?

Kent:

He's the one in the bouncy seat, and I'm pretty sure he didn't have lazy eyes as a baby...

Melanie:

Adventures In Babysitting

2009-12-17T21:46:00.012-05:00

Now that Hendrik is in his second month of life I feel like we are starting to get into the groove of this whole "baby" thing. We still have very lazy days where I feel like the 2 of us lay around on the couch all day while Kent slaves away at work. However, so far this week I have had 2 1/2 fairly productive days so I'm giving myself (and Hendrik) a pat on the back.

Anyway, Kent has been nagging me about posting on the blog, but I just feel like I don't have anything interesting to post about. Then I read this blog and feel so lame because no matter what Vanessa writes about, it's hilarious or at least interesting to read. Seriously, she could write about hanging Christmas lights and it would be the greatest thing ever.

Speaking of which, we are about to celebrate our first Christmas in our house. Remember: last year we were enjoying 85 degree days in Thailand/Cambodia. Since we'll be here we decided to decorate a little bit. And I do mean a little. See the photo for evidence. Go ahead and guess which side is ours...Our neighbors take holiday decorating seriously. It was the same at Halloween.

We'll go ahead and have a Merry Christmas anyway.

And now a few highlights of the adventures I have with Hendrik:

1. I braved an airplane ride alone with my 5 week old son. I especially loved taking him out of his car seat, folding up the stroller, taking off my shoes and pushing it all through the security x-ray all while holding said baby. I also enjoyed the looks of "Oh, please tell me that lady and her crying baby are not on my flight" from the other passengers waiting at the gate. Eat it people. My baby slept the whole way, both directions, and is ALWAYS adorable. Hendrik and I were traveling to Maryland to visit his cousin Sophia who is 2 days younger than he is. Oh and he also saw his Aunt Christy, Uncle Jonathan, and all of his cousins on my side of the family.

Sophia is not as impressed with Hendrik's smiles as I am.

Uncle Jonathan (my brother) and his daughter, Debbie. His son, Gabriel, was running around with his friends and I wasn't able to capture a picture.

2. I had my 6-week follow up with my doctor and we decided to swing by my office to say hello while we were there (I work right next door to the hospital). Now, when I was pregnant I kept waiting for crazy strangers to try and touch my belly, and luckily it never happened. Now that I actually have the baby, I've been waiting for the crazy strangers to touch/hold him. While he gets lots of oohs and aahs from everyone he passes, no one has tried to actually hold him yet. To the population at large: Thank You. I appreciate your admiration and constraint. However, as we were walking through the hallway toward my office, this lady is approaching us from the opposite direction and calls out, "What a beautiful baby." Two thoughts run through my mind: "Thank you very much, he is quite fabulous" and "Can you even see him from that far away?" Not to worry, as she gets closer and I notice she has a big bandaid over one eye with a hole cut out of it so that she can see (read: CRAZY LOOKING), she says, "May I look at him?" So I say sure, and turn him towards her so that she can look. Then she precedes to hold her hands out and ask my 6 week old if he wants to come to her. Lady, he barely holds his own neck up and you think he can gesture to indicate whom he would like to be held by? Oh yeah, and you're a complete stranger, in a hospital no less, during flu season, but yes, please hold my baby. I just politely turned Hendrik away from her, mumbled no, and bee lined for the end of the hallway. Strangers: Please don't ask to hold my baby. I don't know you. I will have to say no. And I may not be polite about it. It really depends on the day. Basically don't make me be mean to you.

Visiting Auntie Sherri at the office, she's not the crazy lady, we love her.

3. I have realized that shopping during the weekdays puts you out there with all the senior citizen shoppers. Now, I love my seniors as much as the next guy, but they definitely have their quirks. Take today for instance. Being a productive day, Hendrik and I headed out for a little shopping, stopping first at Costco. By the time we got there, I knew I had a half hour before he would need to be fed again, so I shopped as quickly as I could, sticking mainly to my list of items. I was pretty successful and decided that instead of subjecting all the other Costco shoppers to my nursing in the food court area, I would just feed him out in the car. So there I was, minding my own business, nursing my son when I see this little old lady walking up to the driver-side window. Here's how it played out:

Little Old Lady: (knocking on the window) Can you move your car back a little bit?
Me: What?
LOL: I need you to move your car back a little bit. I'm in the space in front of you and I need to move up a little more. Can you do that?
Me: (as I look down at the covered bundle currently enjoying lunch on my lap) Uh...
LOL: What? Can you? You're over the line.
Me: (again glance down) Uh...yeah...I guess so.
LOL: WHAT? (because I've refused to roll down my window and let the 20 degree air in)
Oh, do you have a baby in there?
Me: Yes
LOL: Oh, well, sorry. So can you still move back?

Lady, seriously? The best part is that she had me move back about 3 inches. What did that really do? Not to mention she had already parked her car and turned off the ignition before asking me to move. So we both had to start up our cars just so she could have her Toyota Camry parked in the spot the way she wanted it. I would also like to note that when I had originally parked there was already a car in that spot and they didn't seem to have any issues hanging out a few inches.

Whatever.

On a more positive note:

Our little Teddy Bear bundled up to go pick out a Christmas tree.

With his "token" friend.

Something's GOT to change

2009-12-07T17:09:00.004-05:00

I have been considering my relationships to sports and how much time and emotional energy I spend on it. I mean, every year I follow my favorite team and inevitably get disappointed when they don't win it all, which they've only done twice (Cards in '06, Colts a few months later). Was the euphoria from winning it all greater than the sum of all my disappointment? Not even close. So why should I follow sports?

Well, I've realized that it's fun to care about sports. The more things you care about, the more exciting your life is, the more you have to talk about. I don't limit my caring to just sports, I care about important things (family, friends, church, God) and not-so-important things (TV shows, music, gardening, sports). I've realized that apathy is not for me. I liked to consider myself a laid-back person, but does it bug me when my plants die? Yes. Does it bother me when my favorite artist has a disappointing album? Yes. Do I hang onto these things for days, weeks, or months? No.

So I've decided that, yes, it is worth the time and emotional investment to watch sports. Plus, since I have DVR, I don't need to plan my life around watching sports. I watch it when it's on, and if I care enough about it, I'll record it and watch it at my convenience later (usually when I'm holding The Boy).

I also don't understand why anybody would watch sports without caring one way or the other about who wins. What's the point? It's like watching American Idol for the quality karaoke. You don't care about the singing (unless it's atrocious), you care about the winning. In our leisure, we want to watch anything that entertains us more than a substitute activity. To me, that's sports.

That's why college football bothers me so much. A playoff has so much potential! Take March Madness, put it into 3 jam-packed Saturdays, and think about how much entertainment that is! Plus, the timing couldn't be better. You've taken a couple weeks off of work for the holidays, so there's plenty of time to watch football.

Instead, we have 40 meaningless game and one "meaningful" game, although we're never really sure if that game has the right teams in it. As a BYU fan, I barely care about our bowl game, another boring Las Vegas bowl. Even if BYU wasn't in the playoffs, I would find all of the playoff games more interesting than BYU playing the 9th best team in the PAC-10.

Who really wants that? It's getting ridiculous. How can something this unpopular go unchanged for this long? I thought we lived in a capitalist society, where the majority gets what the majority wants?

If we had playoffs this year, how great would the match-ups be? Now, from all playoff scenarios I've heard or read about, I think the best, most-likely one would be the one found here. Although I would prefer 12 or 16 teams, I would settle for 8. Beggars can't be choosers. What I like most about this is that each conference would only be allowed one representative. Say what you will, but frankly, if you're not the champion of your own conference, then you shouldn't be the champion of the nation. The next 2 spots would go to the highest ranked non-BCS conference champions, or an Independent ranked higher. Even though this is still not completely fair, it's a step in the right direction. The difficult thing is getting rid of the pointless bowl games. Once that's done, changing it to 12 or 16 teams will be much easier.

Using that format, what would we have (using the BCS poll)?

1. Bama vs Ga Tech
2. Texas vs Ohio St
3. Cincy vs Oregon
4. TCU vs Boise

Although TCU still plays Boise St (a matchup that nobody wanted except the BCS conferences-do you realize that the only ranked team from a BCS conf that's playing a non-BCS team is Oregon St? More on this below...) at least the winner would go on to the 2nd round to play a BCS team in either Bama or Ga Tech.

But look at the games! Aren't they that much more compelling because each of those teams has a shot? If you're TCU, you have to beat Boise, then maybe Bama and Texas to win it all. I'd watch each one of these games from kickoff to the last down. It's a fantasy every college football fan has.

But the bowls want to keep the monopoly on their money. Did you know that each of the major bowls has a CEO? They generate so much revenue through one game to support an entire company for a year! How hard do you think that CEO works? Maybe 5 days a year? Or does he have a second job to supplement his huge salary? Did you know that the Rose Bowl CEO makes around 250K?

Playoffs will generate more money, but these greedy bowl reps are worried about their shares. If they're so greedy, why can't the NCAA guarantee them their current salary just to make them happy? Instead, they're intent on doing everything to protect the BCS, even scheduling bowls to keep the big conferences happy, so they won't lose their credibility. Of the 5 ranked non-BCS teams, BYU is the only one playing a ranked BCS team. Utah is playing a crappy Cal team, and TCU is playing Boise St, of course. The other team? Central Michigan (ranked 25 in the AP poll) is playing Troy. It's especially suspicious because TCU played Boise last year, too, when both teams were in the top 15, but left out of the BCS. Utah was graciously given Bama, but I think the BCS learned from that mistake.

Well, that's it for my 3rd annual BCS Bashing. See you next year!

Quick Hendrik Dosage

2009-11-30T16:59:00.001-05:00

He's doing okay adapting to both his friends (the lions) and foes (the hippos).

Rich vs Poor

2009-11-25T09:54:00.006-05:00

Remember judging other kids in elementary school? It's purely based on clothes, toys, stories, and lunches. Because of this, I thought I came from the poorest family ever.

Point 1: T&C Surf Designs.

In 2nd Grade, there was a kid who was liked more by the teachers and other little girls (like I even CARED what they thought) than anybody else. His name was Bryan Dahlberg, and he must've been the richest kid EVER. Why? Well, because he showed up to school in what seemed to be a brand spankin' new T&C Surf Designs t-shirt with matching shorts. I don't know if you remember T&C Surf Designs, but most of the designs had a big cool-lookin' gorilla surfing, lookin' all cool with sweet shades and stuff. The symbol was a yin-yang thing and it was SO COOL you have to believe me. And I was stuck in the back wearing a poop-brown crushed velvetish shirt with a dorky collar much bigger than my neck and my Toughskins jeans probably found in the clearance section of K-mart. 10 years ago. No way I was getting little Aimee McCallister's attention now. I never felt poorer.

This Hobie shirt I'm wearing above is the closet I ever got to a cool surfing t-shirt. I wore this pretty much every day.

Point 2: Dorito's

Not just Dorito's. Your OWN PERSONAL BAG of Dorito's in your brown-bag lunch, or, even better, pulled out of a shiny GI Joe lunchbox. If you were lucky enough to be the kid with your OWN PERSONAL BAG of Dorito's, then you were the envy of the entire table. The whispers would go around the table..."That kid must be rich." "How can his family even afford that?" "Yesterday, he had an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FLAVOR!"

I'd see that and go home and BEG for Dorito's. "Okay," said my mother, "we'll get you some Dorito's." So I told my friends, teachers, and anyone who would listen. "I'm getting Dorito's in my lunch!" And the next day I'd have Dorito's in my lunch. In a plastic sandwich bag. Not a nice sandwich bag with a ziplock seal at the top, the cheap ones you have to fold over and hope that nothing falls out. In front of everybody, I had to pull this transparent, crappy bag out of my lunch. My lunch that was in a sack that used to contain a loaf of whole wheat Old Home bread, bought a month ago at the day-old store. You know, with the bread crumbs still in the bottom. The bread crumbs that got all over the whole tomato my mom put in. Yes, a tomato. I would've left it in the bag and thrown it away later, but what's the use when you have a transparent bread sack?

Nevermind the fact that my mom was raising 11 kids (at the time, maybe 10 or 9). Nevermind the fact that I always got a healthy, well-cooked meal for breakfast and dinner every day. Nevermind the fact that the tomato was garden-fresh, picked the day before. Nevermind the fact that my mom was so "Green" that she reused everything she possibly could, including Kleenexes, way before it was socially acceptable. Nevermind the fact that I had more Dorito's in my cheap sandwich bag than the Rich Kid with his OWN PERSONAL BAG. Nevermind all that! I'm in elementary school! I have an image to uphold! I don't want to be the poorest kid in the class! I want my OWN PERSONAL BAG OF COOL RANCH DORITO'S!

Point 3: Brick Oven

We never, EVER, went to sit-down restaurants. In fact, one of my greatest anecdotes to tell now is how I won a writing contest in the Orem Geneva Times in the 2nd grade. The contest was for Mother's Day, and my teacher had us all write a short paragraph as to why we love our mothers. I wrote: "I love my mom because after we picked up all the prunings in the yard, she took us to Burger King." This is paraphrasing, I wish I had the original. Maybe it's in the Family History somewhere.

I'm pretty sure I won the sympathy vote on that one, because I took 1st place. Our family got what was probably the best prize ever: 40 dollars worth of Little Caesar's pizza. For one day, we lived like kings.

So imagine my jealousy when I would go to school and hear about the kid whose family went to Brick Oven for his birthday. I didn't even know what Brick Oven was, but from his description, it sounded somewhere between heaven and an amusement park. "They had a guy come make balloon animals! And they gave us free breadsticks! And I got an ice cream sundae afterwards!" Man, that kid must be RICH.

Point 4: Picture Day

There's nothing worse for a poor kid than picture day. You show up, thinking it's just a regular day of school, except every kid in your class except you had an envelope and a check from their parents to give to the photog. They were wearing their coolest surfing t-shirts or whatever girls wear to look good, and discussing what package they were getting.

"I've got package D. There's 1 big picture, 4 medium ones, and 10 small ones."

"Oh, that's too bad. I've got C. 2 big pictures, 8 medium ones, 20 small."

"Really? Seems small. I've got A." A hush falls over the crowd. "10 big pictures, 50 medium ones, 512 small ones. I've got all sorts of people who want pictures of me. It costs 150 bucks."

Wow, I thought. That kid is RICH.

"What about you, Kent? What package are you getting?"

Then I realized that the smallest package, E, still costs more than "Free". I lied, and said, "C" or something believable. But the truth was, I only got the class photo, which was free. I didn't even get in line for the individual photos. Just went back to class after the class photo was taken. Nothing made me feel poorer.

Of course, I know now that Picture Day was just a tremendous racket for the photog. Show up, take a bunch of money from little kids, take a ton of photos, take the next year off. One day of work a year sounds about right.

Point 5: Super Soakers

I'm not sure why I equate supersoakers with wealth, but I was always at a serious disadvantage in waterfights with my small gun that held about 2 squirts' worth of water. There were lots of toys that other kids had that made me envious and think they were rich, but the only one I'm thinking of right now is supersoakers.

Point 6: Skiing

This is the penultimate separation of the haves and the have-nots. The skiers would buy their overpriced ski coats and wear them from September to June, just so you knew that they skied, and for all you knew, they were great at it. This is probably the only point in this list that actually accurately reflected a family's wealth. Skiing ain't cheap. And it's pretty fun. But to hear the skiers talk about it, you'd think that skiing was a day of unimaginable fun. YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW AWESOME SKIING IS. And of course, it's just implied that you're awesome because you ski. The best part about skiing is that nobody really knows if someone's actually good at it or not until you see them on the slopes, which rarely happens. So you could just say that you're awesome, wear your parka year round, and everybody's convinced. Why didn't I try to pull that off? Instead, I wore this coat until my mission, everybody in school knowing full well that my idea of fun was building a half decent snowman at best (I'm on the left):

Now that I'm a parent, I will make sure this little guy has to go through the exact same things I did. I'm going to a thrift store to buy him hand-me-downs. I can't wait until I put that first tomato in his lunch, next to a sandwich bag full of imitation Oreo's.

Ready for My Close Up

2009-11-05T11:01:00.009-05:00

**WARNING** This post contains "graphic" pictures. Of the baby, not me. But if you're sensitive like Kent you may want to avert your eyes...

I won't be ready for any close ups for a while, but Hendrik doesn't seem to mind all that much.

After the longest 3 days of my life so far, Hendrik Bryan Hansen decided to make his big debut:

Hendrik Bryan Hansen
November 1, 2009
6:26pm
8lbs, 11oz
21 inches

No, I wasn't in active labor for 3 days, but contractions started late Thursday night and continued at varying degrees until he was born on Sunday evening. We drove into work on Friday and around 4:30pm we went over to the hospital to see if the contractions I was having were actually labor. The short story: they weren't. Well, they kind of were but not enough to make anything happen.

There is really nothing short about this delivery story, so I'll do my best to wrap it up quickly. We saw a movie in the city to see if the labor would progress, it didn't, but because I was so uncomfortable they let me stay overnight. In the morning I was still right where I had been, so they sent us home. Saturday was a not-so-fun day as I tried to sleep in between contractions, take walks, clean the kitchen, etc. Things got a little more exciting Saturday night as the contractions got closer together and much more intense until eventually they were 5 mins apart and really painful. So risking another false labor, we headed to the hospital.

By this point, most of the nurses in labor and delivery knew us since we had been in a few times, so they were almost as excited as we were when they saw that I was in pain. Sounds backwards, doesn't it. Anyway, they determined that I had broken my water and I was slowly progressing. I immediately signed up for an epidural, and I don't care what anyone says - that thing is the greatest discovery in medical science. Especially considering that I had been having contractions for so long, not feeling them for a little while was some welcome relief. Not to mention there is no way I would have survived the 2 hours 45 minutes of pushing without one. I'm not one to stand on a soapbox, so if you prefer natural labor, kudos to you, the epidural was awesome for me and I don't regret it.

All of the doctors and nurses were surprised by Hendrik's size when he was born. He came out and one of them said, "Woah! Where were you hiding that kid? Behind your kidneys?" Honestly, doc, yes, I think I was. That would explain why my ribs have been sore for the past two weeks. But, all in all, I guess he was worth it. And thank goodness he has hair...

Don't judge him for his HUGE conehead. If you were stuck in the birth canal for 3 hours, you'd have one too.

For those of you wondering about the name: Hendrik is Kent's middle name and his great grandfather on his mother's side. He was the ancestor that first came to America and joined the church. Bryan is my dad's name. So our son is named after two of my favorite guys in the whole world. So by default I guess I just have to love him.

In Mine

2009-10-26T13:05:00.003-04:00

I've always loved sports. I can remember my older brothers huddled around the TV watching Monday Night Football, BYU football games, Lakers vs Celtics, and the World Series. We had what was probably a 19 inch TV that sat in an unlikely spot in the dining room, next to the cookbooks and piles of sheet music. Watching TV was a crime next to domestic violence in our house, so it was never watched. The few programs that were legal included sports, General Conference, Anne o' Green Goblins, and Sesame Street. Over the years, boundaries were pushed and walls were torn down, leading to the Freedom of TV Act in 1996, which was quickly repealed by Dictator Gary, but that's a whole other post.

The main problem with sports at the Hansens in the 80's and 90's is that there just wasn't near enough of it. If I got to see one game a week, it was a good week. The MLB Playoffs were great because I could watch TV every night, at least until my 8 PM bedtime. However, there was just too much time to kill inside my house, so I started creating my own leagues. At first, I did what the other kids my age did: play a pretend basketball with the nerf ball and hoop in my room where I was the star, winning the championship game. But that was over in like an hour. I needed MORE. So I started to create leagues of my own.

The first league I remember creating was based off of this old, monstrous, large-print Quadruple
Combo that had pictures of every temple in the world and all the prophets, too. It must've been from the 70's, and this Bible/BoM/DC/PoGP was probably 5 inches think and weighed about 20 pounds. It was my book of choice for early morning scriptures, because I could look at the pictures of the temples and prophets when it wasn't my turn to read.

So how did I create a league out of this Quad? Well, one day I looking at Brigham Young's picture and wondered why he had a university named after him but Joseph Smith, or any of the others, didn't. So I decided to create a league with universities from each of the prophets: JSU, BYU, WWU, JFSU, ETBU, SWKU, to name just a few. I also decided that each university should have a home field, based on a temple in the book. BYU's was the Provo Temple, of course, and JSU's was the SLC temple. I can't remember the rest of them, but I'm sure one of them played in Hawaii, and one of them was even at the Swiss temple. Don't worry, I took the distance into account for the home-field advantage.

My favorite part about creating a league was making the composite schedule. Every year, in the BYU Football Media Guide there would be a composite schedule at the back. I loved studying it and found it so fascinating how it all worked. Also, the greatest thing about making schedules is that I could do them during sacrament meetings, holding open the humongous Quad, making it look like I was reading the scriptures. Church and Sundays in general were a great time to work on the admin of my leagues.

Once the composite schedule was made, I played out the games in the backyard by myself. Now, you may ask to yourself, "Doesn't Kent have, like, 100 brothers? Why didn't he just play with them?" Well, I say to you, that playing by myself was always infinitely more fun than playing with my brothers. When you play by yourself, you have complete control of the outcome. If I played with my brothers, do you think I would've thrown for 500 yards a game and also somehow managed to have 200 rushing yards and even 200 receiving yards?

Now, the sports that were hardest to play by yourself were in the following order, from hardest to easiest:
1. Baseball
2. Football
3. Soccer
4. Tennis
5. Basketball

Baseball was hard because I just had to toss it up to myself, hit it, and then go shag it. That never really worked out.

Football was hard because I would go back to pass, throw the ball to an imaginary receiver, and then, depending on the quality of the throw, I would make an amazing catch approximately where the ball landed by tossing it up to a point and running to catch it. That actually got pretty fun, but also looked the most embarrassing. I always made sure that no older brothers or neighbors were around when I was playing football by myself.

Soccer was pretty easy, but there wasn't a whole lot of passing going on. Plus, it wasn't really that fun since I played so much real soccer.

Tennis was at a later age, around 10-13 years. It was easy because we had a cement patio with a brick wall that was just about net size that I could hit it against. I would design these elaborate tennis tournaments. I always loved the concept of double-elimination tourneys, but I felt they were lacking. So I designed these quadruple-elimination tournaments. During church, of course.

Basketball was the best sport to play by myself because I could play it in my room with the Nerf hoop or later downstairs on the Little Tykes hoop that my parents bought for my 3 year old brother, Ralph. That hoop was perfect because you could raise it to about 6 feet high and the ball was easy to dribble, unlike those Nerf hoops where you couldn't dribble at all, so you had to do the fake dribble where you held onto the ball but you motioned a dribble.

I found that playing the entire schedule of the Prophets League got a little tedious, especially because I couldn't be on every team, and where's the fun in that? So then I started thinking that I could make a league with all of these cities I found in the atlas that didn't have professional teams of any kind, but were still kind of big. This league featured about 60 teams from Canada, US, and Mexico, with a conference for each country and it was divided into like 12 divisions. The main reason I created this league was just for the fun of making an elaborate composite schedule during church--I had no intention of playing out these games. I think I killed a good 10 Sundays with that league.

One year, one of my brothers got a Sports Alamanac for Christmas, I think it was the 1988 edition. This was the BEST PRESENT EVER. This Almanac was like having ESPN.com in book form. Of course, this was before Al Gore invented the Internet, so we pretty much lived in that Almanac, studying all the stats and records from that year and years past. The greatest part about it was now I didn't have to rely on the newspaper to get a listing of all the obscure colleges and conferences, which worked wonders. This is when my leagues got so realistic, they almost mirrored the real leagues.

I decided that I wanted to have a whole career, where I worked my way up through the high school basketball ranks and signed on with the crappiest team ever and led them to an NCAA championship. So I looked through the Almanac, and narrowed down the crappy teams. The team I first decided to put myself on was Iowa State. Their 1988 basketball record was something like 1-29, and was one of the worst in Division 1 that year. So I put myself on their team, as a Freshman named Spike Hansen (I thought Spike was the coolest name of all time). I started as a no-name walk-on, who barely made the team that season as the 12th man. Finally, after losing the first 7 games by 30 points a game, Coach finally put me in during garbage time. We were down by 30 with 10 minutes left, but I hit 12 3's and had at least 4 dunks in traffic, scoring around 50 points and leading the team to its first victory in 36 games.

Of course, despite all of that, Coach refused to start me the next few games, not wanting to shake things up with his starting 5. This meant that we were always down 20 to 30 points when Coach would finally put me in, and I would come in and score 40-50 points each game to lead the team to victory. Finally, he swallowed his pride and started me, and our team never looked back, winning every single game for the rest of my college career.

Of course, I would always doctor most of the games to either be close games that went down to the wire, or a ridiculously obscene blowout, like 165-23 or something. I think I ended up averaging around 70 points a game by the end of the season, and we ended up winning it all for each of the 4 years I was there.

By the time I entered the NBA, I was the 1st round draft pick and played on the worst team, which I believe was the Clippers (still are). I probably averaged 70-80 points a game and broke every record (including assists and rebounds). I'm sure we won the title every year until I was retired. The only reason we ever lost a game is if I was injured or something. It was the greatest ever!

One day, I was telling my brothers, Kurt and Brian, that Iowa State had come back from a 30-point deficit to win the game. They were amazed, and wondered how I saw/heard about that game. When I realized that they thought it happened in real life, I had to clarify that it was in "my own league", which was shortened to "in mine." Only then did I discover that Kurt and Brian also had their own leagues going, each with a different plot line, albeit very similar to mine (averaging 70ish points a game, for example). I'm not sure theirs were ever as elaborate as mine, as they spent a lot of time playing Lakers vs. Celtics on the computer. So from then on, we had to differentiate amazing sports stories from real life from the ones "in mine".

For example:

"UConn was down by 16 points with 45 seconds to Clemson, but amazingly got a bunch of steals and hit 6 3-pointers and won the game! In Mine."

"In Mine, I scored 102 points in my best-ever game, as the Clippers beat the Knicks, 182-93."

Most of the "in mine" leagues happened in basketball, as the basketball season started in October (once it got dark after dinner) and went all the way until June. Then I would play Tennis for a few months in the summer, and football would start in August. The tennis In Mine and football In Mine weren't nearly as elaborate or ridiculous as the basketball In Mine.

The funniest thing about In Mine was that I continued to have make-believe leagues and tournaments all the way until I was a Senior in college. I just wouldn't tell anybody about it, but I've still got a pretty vivid imagination.

The riskiest part about playing basketball outside in the driveway was my arch-nemesis and next-door neighbor, Chris Goodwin. He spent an inordinate amount of time in his front driveway belching and doing who-knows-what. He was a pretty big kid, and also 4 years older than me, and delighted in making fun of younger kids, so therefore I hated him and was deathly afraid of him. When I went out to play, I couldn't make too many loud announcer or crowd noises, else he might hear and mock me to no end. The worst was when I thought I was safe outside, got wrapped up in a particularly exciting game, and then turned around to see Chris mocking me. I hated it!

I'm pretty sure that when we get a basketball hoop in our driveway, In Mine will resume. Maybe I'll buy a Little Tykes hoop for my kid and pretend that I got it for him. Mel will know where to find me in the winter: Downstairs, averaging 70 a game, dominating my opponents. In Mine.

Pregnancy thoughts...by Kent

2009-10-13T15:59:00.004-04:00

Not a whole lot has been going on around here. We're preparing for the baby by painting the nursery (Mel), having showers (Mel), putting together furniture (Mel), and watching football (me). The nursery is pretty much good to go, although we're still missing a few things like a bassinet, a TV ala Fred Savage's room in "Princess Bride", and a baby. I'm not sure we'll get the TV, but we will DEFINITELY get RBI Baseball. Maybe we'll get a baby, but I'm not sure we can fit it in the room.

Putting together the crib and changing table was easy enough. I do remember some new parents sharing with me their frustrations in putting together those things, so I was dreading it. Turned out that Mel had no trouble at all.

All I know now is that our kid who isn't even ALIVE and hasn't done JACK to deserve all of this brand new stuff has more stuff than me. The nursery is packed with new books, clothes, diapers, bottles, and furniture. I need to have a "Kent Shower" so I can start catching up to my boy.

In the meantime, Mel pretends she's not pregnant by living her life as normal, making meals, doing dishes, and hanging pictures, making me look bad. Burly Steve and wife just had a baby and Steve literally did everything short of going to the bathroom for her. I don't do that much because I don't want to keep Mel from progressing. Who am I to deny her a ticket to the Celestial kingdom all because she has something growing inside of her? (Mel! Make me a sandwich! I have a mild headache!)

Mel spends most of her free time surfing the net looking at cute baby stuff and learning all of the gross parts of the female anatomy and reading all about the process of delivery. She's really into this baby stuff. I pretend not to be bored by it all, but our conversations are like this:

"This week, our baby is developing his lower kneecap!"
"I don't think the Cardinals have what it takes to win the World Series this year."
"My friend said that at 36 weeks she could barely walk, and then she complained about her ankles."
"The thing about hooking up the 240 volt heaters is that I have to buy a ganged circuit, and I don't think we have the space on the panel for it."
"I read today that the chances of having an autistic kid are going up."
"I'm pumped that the grass is really starting to fill in."

Of course, I'm joking (sort of). I'm stoked to have a kid, but I know it's going to be really tiring watching Mel take care of it (stolen joke-name that comedian!). Everybody I know, including you, has been telling me how tired I will be and how everything changes and so on. I know all of this is true, but couldn't we just talk about sports? I don't need to discuss this non-stop, that's what the wife is for. She eats this stuff up, she could talk for hours about the most mundane things, like the baby's sleeping schedule. I'm sure I'll talk about these things soon enough, but for crying out loud let's talk about something else while I can.

In other news, it's getting cold. This is good because Mel has been burning up lately. It gets down to about 60 degrees in our room at night so I put on my flannelest pajamas, crank up the mattress pad heater on my side, pull the covers up over my head and try to survive til morning. When I wake up, I notice that Mel is lying without any covers, sweating buckets. It's working out nicely.

There haven't been nearly as many creepos rubbing my wife's belly as I thought. There's a few people that I wanted to say something to, like, "I'm sorry, we don't like you enough to allow you to do that. What did you give us at the shower again? Oh, I'm sorry, onesies don't qualify for belly rubbing. We have a 20 dollar limit. Better luck next time."

Mel continues to be the envy of her coworkers and ward members, as they think she just swallowed a pumpkin. She hasn't really gained much weight except for at the belly. I also look great, but nobody says anything to me. I don't get near as much attention as I deserve. I think this has less to do with Mel being pregnant and more to do with me being a jerk.

MAJOR catch up

2009-09-25T13:00:00.000-04:00

Editor's note: Because Mel started this post a month ago, I had to take it over or it would've never been posted. My comments are in italics.

As Kent mentioned, the two of us have been neglecting this blog lately, but in way of an excuse we have been keeping very busy. Summertime is definitely not a "kick back and relax" time for us, at least not this year. Or last year. Or the year before that.

The week of July 4th Kent's dad happened to be in Providence for a work conference, so we picked him up and he spent the weekend with us. We gave him the "Melanie & Kent" tour of Boston, showing him the places we visit on a regular basis. Then for the big holiday we went down to Cape Cod for dinner and a Summer League baseball game. We had thought they would supply fireworks after the game, but it ran into extra innings and we were all too tired to stick around. We did happen to catch some on the drive home. There were no postable pics from his visit, probably because he doesn't fit in the camera.

For the second weekend in July, I had the Young Women come over and camp out in our backyard as a pre-camp sleepover. They seemed to have some fun. Probably the best was when Kent snuck up behind 3 of the girls sitting around the fire pit and jumped out at them. I don't think I've ever seen people jump that high or that fast. A couple of them almost landed in the fire, so maybe not the safest choice, but hilarious nonetheless. I also had to take off my flips so I could sneak up on them, and ended up stepping on a hot coal, which hurt like the dickens and caused me to walk funny through scout camp and the reunion. Still worth it.

The following week Kent spent a few days at Scout Camp. It wasn't too far away from our house, so he was able to come home every night so I wasn't left completely alone. Scout camp was full of regulations. You couldn't have a fire without permission from the camp director, lights were out at 10 pm (no late night tomfoolery), etc. Those were the only 2 things I liked about scout camp: staying up late and having fires!

Then the last week in July we headed out to Utah for the Hansen Family Reunion. The flight out was fairly uneventful, and when we arrived in Orem we had a BIG surprise for Kent's family.

Our week in Utah was pretty exciting, it was nice to be able to see all the members of the Hansen Herd all in one place. There are SO many kids, it's kind of amazing. Meal time at the reunion was quite the production. Especially when the power goes out while you're cooking assembly-line style with an electric stove and oven...but everyone got fed, I think. After a pretty wet June in Boston, it was almost amazing how consistent the weather was everyday in Utah: dry and sunny during the day with a temperature cool down at night.

Craig's kids getting front row seats for the spectacle that is the Hansen Family Talent Show

Mom looking weary and Bruce looking surprisingly cheerful

Holly holding Lucy, Paula, and Alice with Chuckles

Chuckles!!!

Lana the duck for the Bruces' talent

Max (token black kid) inserted himself in every talent

Oh look! It's Max again! Also, it turns out that Gary CAN fit in the camera

Hurling their challenge to the foe...

About 10 years ago, Brian and Craig came up with these "Air Sports" sketches where they would mimic sports and events in exaggerated form, and in a close space. It's hilarious. Previous mimicries included Baseball, Basketball, the 200m dash, and I know I'm missing others. Anyway, this year Craig had the idea to do a football one. With limited people (me, Kurt, Brian, Craig), you have to play multiple positions. I won't explain the whole thing, but it was a ridiculous option play, involving about 5 pitches going back and forth across the "field". At the end, Brian broke all of the tackles and went into the end zone. I wish I had a video of it, pictures don't do it justice (don't you have a video of it, Heidi?):

Brian as the QB, Kurt the RB, I'm the center, Craig the entire defense (for now)

This was the super slo-mo part of the skit, Kurt and Craig trying to bring Brian down, while I catch up to anticipate the pitch (which didn't come, as Brian wanted to selfishly score himself). Oh, and there's an imaginary ball.

The Bergeson boys rockin out

Chuckles wowing all with his rendition of "Linus and Lucy". Move over, Mozart!

We knew we couldn't compete with the various comedy sketches and numbers, so we appealed to the sensitive side by singing a stirring rendition of "Lucky" by Jason Mraz. Mel nailed it. And hated every second of it.

The female cousins performed a very entertaining and confusing fairy tale, which I am unsure how it ended.

Undokai

Mel showing off her wheels in the bubble-blowing relay. Maw is taking her time blowing her bubble. This is what I get for being too lazy to post the pictures myself...I'm really not that fat, I swear.

The water pouring relay. We took second place, but Paula was cheating, so we would've won.

Scott hurling Thys in the Toddler Toss. He threw him 50 yards and won the gold medal. Thys escaped with minor injuries, if you count a broken femur as minor. The real story: we chose Super Scott to do the Firemen's Relay. He had to carry 4 different team members to safety using 4 different carrying methods - he is truly impressive. I did not participate in this event for obvious reasons.

Maw giving her best effort in the javelin. The javelin is currently orbiting the earth.

Mel in the Croquet hit competition. She lost badly, but for the sake of this post, let's just say she won.

Scott is neck and neck with Thys (broken femur and all!) in the headstand competition. Thys won, getting Scott back for his Toddler Toss. But since they were both on our team we earned MAJOR points in this event.

More Chuckles and Max (above)

I also got to see my little sister, April, whom I haven't seen since our wedding two years ago. Thanks so much for making the drive down April! Hopefully I'll get to see you again soon.

And naturally Max had to insert himself in the photo-op.

We also got to spend some time with the Sam Palmers (including the infamous Turkey Sub) while they passed through Utah on their grand move to the midwest.

Does anyone else see "Christmas Card" with this photo? It's just too cute.

Our trip back home was a little more stressful, what with delays in Dallas, waiting for the bus at Logan, oh yeah, and Kent leaving his wallet at his sister's house that morning. I don't think Kent has EVER left the house without his wallet, but he manages to do it on the day we have a 6am flight with a pretty tight layover and a train schedule to meet in order to make it home at a decent hour. Luckily Paula married Super Scott who, against all odds, managed to drive to the airport and bring Kent's wallet, just in time, to save the day. Thanks, Scott! My bad!

The second week in August I spent up in New Hampshire at Girls' Camp. A few people thought I was crazy for going, but it really wasn't all that bad. A little hot and humid at times, but nothing a bottle of water and some time in front of a fan couldn't fix. I had fun being with the girls and am glad that I stuck it out and went. Kent was very brave, staying at home all by himself for the whole week and I'm happy he was able to survive. I subsisted on grasshoppers, honey, and frozen pizzas.

I was over the 4th year girls, and out here they are responsible for choreographing and performing a light show for the rest of camp. They worked really hard on it and it turned out so well. I was really proud of all the girls.

After an eventful few weeks we don't have any major travel plans in the coming months which is nice. Although we do have plenty of work to do around here...

Frame job

2009-09-22T21:12:00.002-04:00

I'm not sure how interesting people will find this post, but I won't mind if you just skip it. There are no people in these pictures, just lots of basement and lots of wood. I will give a good chunk of details, mostly for my own record keeping so I can remember what it looked like before I put the drywall up. I'll probably consult this post whenever I need to find a stud.

Anyway, ever since we bought this house I wanted to finish the basement. Now, I have zero construction experience, just small, odd jobs here and there and nothing using major power tools that can maim/kill you if mishandled. When I was in college, my mom had me redo a couple of the bathrooms in the house and I learned quite a lot by doing that. I look back at my work, and boy did it suck. I've also learned that most anybody can do this if they take their time and have the right tools.

I'm also not sure how to display this in any way that makes sense, but I'll do my best.

The Stairs

Looking down, pre-construction. You will notice the vapor barrier I've installed along the wall, and the floor plates which I put into the cement using a Ramset, which is a powder charged nailgun, using .22 bullets. It was pretty fun, and loud.
Anyway, we decided to take out the left wall along the stairs to open it up a little more. That was pretty fun, as I took the circular saw and just cut along the joist. So much dust kicked up from the drywall that it caused all of the smoke detectors to go off.

Here's a view of the wall that we took out. Don't use the couch as a point of reference, as I moved it a few times.

And, voila! The wall is gone. I think it really opened up the downstairs.
You can also notice all of the framing I put up next to the stairs. With the huge discharge pipe in the middle, it made it a tremendous pain. That took me a few days.
Here's a closeup of the stairs.

Here's the door frame leading to what will be the laundry/storage room.

Here is what will be the hallway leading from the stairs to the family room. You'll notice this is before I took out the wall.
This is actually looking from the bottom of the stairs down the hall, through the door and into the family room. The door in the picture leads to the outside, a steel exterior door. Burly Steve helped me put that in a few months ago.

Here's the family room, looking left from the outside door. This is the best pic I got pre-construction.
Starting framing

Finishing my first wall, framing around the window.

Second wall
I had to build a soffit (the box in the corner) to hide the various pipes. We'll have to put in a drop ceiling because of all the pipes/ducts.Looking through the bathroom door into the room.

The south wallWhere the couch sits is where the bathroom will be, but that won't be in this project.

I decided to frame underneath the stairs so that the little ones can play under there without boppin their heads on the steps.

My original goal was to have the basement framed out by the end of Spring 2010. However, I got the bug and enjoyed it so much that I just went down there every chance I could.

Next step: Wiring the basement!

Chompin' like Pac-Man

2009-09-16T18:33:00.003-04:00

Where I sit at work is dubbed "the fishbowl" as it is this smallish room with windows all around it. There are about 9 desks and 3 offices in the room. Last month, 3 Indians, fresh off the boat, moved into the fishbowl for the next couple of months. They're all nice, great guys, who speak just enough English to get by and have perfected the art of quiet talking, so I have to ask them to repeat everything they say about 10 times:

"What hotel are you staying at?"

"The Langham."

"What?"

"The Langham"

"Which one?"

"The Langham"

"Where is that?"

"Just down the street."

"Where again?"

"That way, one block."

"What is it next to?"

"PO Square."

"Which square?"

"PO!!!"

"Oh, the LANGHAM! Why didn't you just say so?"

Anyway, they're dashed nice people and all, but every morning the dude to my right eats what has to be the crunchiest apple of all time, possibly made of iron. I can't overestimate the amount of chomping that goes on, for what seems to be 45 solid minutes. This is what it sounds like:

CRRRUUUUUNNNNCHHHH!!!!!

sluuuurrppp

(smack)

Chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp

(smack)

Chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp-chomp

(smack. lick. slurp.)

CRRRUUUUNNNCHHHH!!!

And so on. It's usually not an incredible deal because I can put my headphones on, but still.

Last week, at one of Mel's appointments, we were in the waiting room. Now, Mel's hospital (and work) is smack dab in the middle of Chinatown, so there is no lack of Chinese and other miscellaneous riff-raff on some government subsidized health care plan. This Chinese couple sat across from us, and the dude had a piece of gum that he refused to chew with his mouth closed. We sat there and tried to read some "Family Fun"-type magazine together, but neither of us could focus on the book with Mr. Chomper McChompathon chomping across the way from us. Then Mel proceeded to tell me of various accounts of people in Chinatown hawking loogies and doing farmer blows just out on the sidewalk. I'm sorry for grossing you all out, it's awful.

It reminds me of the time I was in Nepal, where I couldn't walk 5 seconds without either stepping on a loog or hearing one being hawked. Here is an excerpt from my travelogue:

"The national pastime in Nepal seems to be hawking logeys. It's quite thoroughly disgusting. Walking down the street, you'll hear Nepalis of all ages and genders clearing their throats, hawking up something juicy, and spitting in a conspicuous spot, to be later seen or stepped upon by me, both experiences causing me no great joy."

And then, from the same travelogue, when I was in Tibet, sharing a bus with about 15 other tourists:

"Many people call Americans and Westerners barbarians, but I strongly object to that. For example, take the infamous nose wad story. The Mongol opposite me asked me for a few squares of my toilet paper while I was clearing the nostrils. I had squares to spare. So I ripped her off a chunk. She rolled it up like a cigarette and shoved in both nostrils like the nose-ring of a yak. Fitting, I suppose."

"I didn't find that particularly barbaric. A little odd, perhaps, but not uncouth. But an hour later Ms. Kahn decided she'd had enough of the nose-ring, plucked it out, and tossed it to the floor in disgust as if she had barely noticed it was there and flung it off as if it would explode in seconds. The thing landed right in front of me, no more than 2 inches from my left foot. Well, there was no way I was going to stare at that thing until Lhasa, so I kicked it under the next seat like it was a hot rock. I shuddered and shot the Mongol the stinkeye. In vain, however, as she was too busy applying her next nose ring. This time using her own toilet paper."

I try not to be "foreignist", but it's very hard to deal with some of these obnoxious and disgusting habits that may not be frowned upon in their country. Of course, Americans have their obnoxious habits, but it seems a lot more prevalent among foreigners. So, no, I'm not apologizing for this post.