Visitors Are A Good Thing
I used to be one of those grumpy old guys that do not care for a lot of company dropping by for more than a five-minute visit. I stopped having birthdays just so there would be one less reason for people to invade my home.
Silly me, I’ve reversed my position on this issue. The wife and I will be hosting out of state guests from Florida and New Hampshire. Apparently, the thought of non-family members seeing our cluttered home has inspired my wife to begin excavating and tossing 15 years of accumulated junk.
We’re only up to a handful of bags going to the curb or Goodwill, but since my helpful suggestion to rent a railcar-sized trash bin was rejected, this will take a while.
There have been amazing results already. So far we’ve found an entire bedroom we didn’t know we had. We suspected there was a bed and maybe a dresser in among the boxes, wrapping paper, and piles of clothing, but it turns out it is the largest bedroom in the house.
The cleaning frenzy has also revealed a walk in closet in our bedroom and a dinette chair in our kitchen from a set we gave away a few years ago. There even appears to be a second computer desk in the family room. I vaguely remember putting it there, but it was soon covered in print outs and bottle caps.
The kitchen counters have grown in the last couple of days and it looks like someone installed decorative tiles and that the counter top is blue. We’ve also discovered 1400 ceramic coffee cups. This is weird, since I alternate using the same two mugs and my wife likes her plastic “Convenient” cups.
(Gift hint to relatives, we’re good on coffee cups.)
We got really brave and ventured into the basement. Though we’re not crazy enough to try pitch the grandson’s toy, we took down and washed the window curtains. It is amazing how dirty curtains can get in 14 years. We held services for the multitude of desiccated spiders.
My newly skinny wife has gone into hyper-clean and has begun the monstrous task of giving away clothes that no longer fit, or fat clothes as women refer to them. Unfortunately, she now has nothing to wear and I must pay for a new wardrobe.
There are a few other drawbacks to this sudden spurt of dunning, so our friends won’t think we’re one of those odd couples that never throws anything away and has little paths through their home between the garbage bags full of hair and nail clippings.
My carefully cultivated cobwebs have disappeared from the basement walls. The “Munsters” ambience is kaput and it now looks like a regular old finished basement.
The population of dust bunnies has been drastically reduced making it very lonely for the survivors hiding quietly under the stove and refrigerator.
The worst consequence is there is more to clean now that surfaces are not covered with clothing, People magazines, receipts, newspaper articles, paper napkins with telephone numbers and unused Post-It pads, and chewing gum packets with one tablet left.
Maybe we’ll start having guests regularly so we would have to go through this gargantuan shedding of objects we can’t remember buying. Most certainly, we’ll stuff a few items we don’t want anymore into their luggage before they leave.

Random Thoughts
Now and then it gets a bit rough trying to come up with a single coherent theme for a column that I can ramble on about for 500 words or so. When these multiple synaptic misfires occur I string them together and hope you don’t notice.
Yesterday I reveled with satisfaction because I drive a black car. I had made a trip to the bank and encountered streets mounded with fresh asphalt oozing tar. There’s no way to see black on black, so it’s like it didn’t happen.
Here is where the auto industry could make a fortune producing a paint for cars that matches whatever gets stuck to it. This ideal car coating would be white when Ohio’s roads are salt-encrusted, black-speckled when the bugs of spring commit hara-kiri on the grille and windshield and road crews fling fresh tar, dapple when the birds of summer come calling, and dish-water brown for fall’s mixture of leaf dust and road grime. Of course, the laser car wash industry would be up in arms, but we drivers could save a mint.
Each place of business I frequent has a particular verb. I stop at the bank, visit the doctor’s office store, go to the grocery store, run to the post office, and drive by Wendy’s. It’s not certain what might ensue if I were to stop at or drive by the grocery store, but I’m not brave enough to tempt the fates.
There is no correct answer to the questions every wife asks, “do I look fat, or like I lost weight, or do these pants make my butt look like Montana?” If you reply, “no, Dear,” she’ll think you’re attempting to placate her and you will be punished. If you reply in the affirmative, you will be subjected to the home version of the last ice age.
The only viable option is to be somewhere, anywhere, else. I usually try to change the subject while retreating quickly from the room.
Becoming a grandparent is an odd thing because no one knows how to respond to the announcement. When someone congratulates you, it feels like they’re suggesting you had an active role in the process, which is illegal in all states except West Virginia.
However, it is great fun watching the wheels spin as people try to come up with a response when you flash the picture of the wriggling newborn with a freshly snipped umbilical cord attached.
One of the most common remarks is how cute the little critter looks. No one will admit it but everyone knows a brand new baby looks like a piglet with fingers and toes, and they all have the facial expression of someone who’s just smelled something really bad.
My favorite response is when they say the kid looks just like me. Well, except for the nearly baldhead and fuzzy ears it isn’t possible. The grandkids are my stepson’s, so if the kid really does look like me, I have a good deal of explaining to do.
I’ve started spring-cleaning already. An early launch was required because I’m really buried in junk other people won’t throw away. I rolled the second of three full-sized, steel business desks to the curb. That had to have been a sight; a 300-pound desk being flipped end over end slamming repeatedly into the ground in front of a fifty year old pale and panting 170-pound man.
My wife and I are trying to reduce the number of thigh-builders and tummy-busters in our home. We get all our healthful benefit from hauling the boxes of into the house, assembling the apparatus, and then moving the equipment from room to room until it finally ends up in the basement. The only machine either of us has used more than handful of times is the treadmill, two of which my wife has worn out.
There is no such thing as paying off your mortgage and living in your house for free. Just about the time the deed arrives the basement starts to leak, the carpeting disintegrates, and your landscaping looks like the aftermath of Mount Saint Helen’s eruption in May 1980. You end up paying the same amount as your old bank lien, but it goes to all your local hardware and building materials stores.
I’ll try to find a theme for the next column. I’d ask my wife for some ideas, but I’m terrified she’ll ask me if she looks like she’s lost more weight.

The Good Old Days?
Many people reminisce about the supposed good old days when things were simpler and somehow better. I’d have to disagree with that assessment.
Let’s start with driving, my favorite subject. Back in the day cars were simpler, but they also broke down, a lot. I once had to tape a distributor cap with electrical tape to get home. The motor mount had failed and the engine was flopping around under the hood like a fish on dry land. It bounced enough to crack the distributor cap in two, hence the necessity for tape.
They don’t have distributor caps anymore and that’s a good thing. They’ve also gotten rid of carburetors, another one of those really annoying systems no one in their right mind misses. Carburetors leaked, froze, lock open and closed, and got dirty real fast.
Granted, it was nice being having the ability to dump gasoline right into the cylinders on a cold morning. This asset was mitigated by trying to stop your car like Fred Flintstone when the throttle stuck wide open.
One of the best things that ever happen to the driving public was the under appreciated radial tire. The bias ply tire, which still available for some reason, was impossible to balance, worn out in half the time claimed by the manufacturer, and could not be repaired. You could get new tread put on them, but the old glue generally gave out at about 70 mph. The sound of three quarters of an inch on rubber smacking the wheel well is the stuff of nightmares.
In the seventies, if your car broke down it was time for a hike or hitchhiking. There were no cell phones that anyone in the lower 99 percent of income could afford and pay phones (remember those?) were far and few between. Out in the boonies outside of town there simply was no way to call for help. Well, you could yell, but only cows would answer.
If you could find a telephone, it had better have another anachronism, the telephone book. 911 existed only in major towns, so if you didn’t know the number you had to ask the operator. The operator is an extinct species that answered when you dialed “0.” This living, breathing, physical being could call help for you, if you knew where the heck you were.
I’m going to be controversial and say having a cell phone with a massive memory and automated systems for calling AAA is a whole lot better than hitching a ride with the Zodiac killer.
There’s the whole misconception of families gathering around the television sharing a laugh and bonding over Ed Sullivan and Car 54. That didn’t happen in my home or any other I ever knew about. Fathers were always at work and moms were too busy taking care of most everything around the house. We kids were either outside feeding the mosquitoes or waiting for the old folks to go to bed so we could watch a horror movie. The only time kids and parents were in the same place at the same time was Christmas morning and when it was time for the kids to get their annual beating. Sometimes both occurred at the same time.
The largest fallacy concerning the good old days is that the schools were safer. We may have had fewer shootings, but we had bullies bouncing us off of the lockers and riding the busses flicking us on the ear. There were pink bellies and ruthless towel snaps in the showers. The seniors were duty bound to torment freshmen while sophomores and juniors chomped at the bit for their turn at the newbies.
There was also gum in the hair at assemblies, snowballs in the face after football practice, and the neighborhood mutants lying in wait when you walked home from the bus stop.
I’ll take the heady, hectic, and complicated here and now, anytime. I also like being an adult; fewer people pick on you when you’re 50.

Useless Skills
I was feeling pretty good about myself recently until I began rehashing all the skill sets I’d accumulated over the last few decades. It turns out I have a collection of outmoded and worthless skills that will never be needed again.
I know how to rebuild a car’s generator and carburetor. Neither of these relics are standard equipment on automobiles not presently designated as antiques. So, I can work with knowledge and confidence on something found only in a museum.
I can operate a teletype machine, a skill I spent 5 years honing at Ford Motor. What’s a teletype you ask? No, it isn’t the machine that makes yogurt for Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa Laa, and Po.
Long before desktop computers and modems there was a hardwired system consisting of typewriter/printers connected to an IBM card reader. The cards were punched full of holes by a special machine that I also learned to use. It took five cards with 80 columns on each to carry all the information to build a car or van and it took about 50 seconds for the single page of information to print out on the mechanical printers.
The system was already old when I used it and repairs were made by cannibalizing retired machines. Some repairmen simply looked at the squat gray contraption, shook his head and left, never to return.
Police cars and many vans were special orders with special paint colors or equipment. The teletype operator, that would be me, hand typed the details on the bottom of the sheet. At least the typing, now called keyboarding, is still relevant.
During the recession of 1978-81 I was transferred to the body shop at Ford. This was where a few dozen pieces of stamped metal was spot-welded into automobile bodies. Spot-welding was a skill in that you burned holes in your underwear and teeth until you learned how to shoot the bits of molten metal at the guy across from you.
Another part of the finesse of spot-welding was working with the balancer, a huge spring-loaded overhead device from which the weld gun, its massive water-cooling system, and the electric feed was suspended. Maneuvering the welder was kind of like driving a car without power steering fluid.
Spot welding has largely been assumed by robots. I, and various tender parts of my body, don’t really mind not using this particular ability.
Like many older adults, I’ve finally completely conquered the VCR. I can record, set the clock, and program it to catch my favorite movie while I’m gone. Unfortunately, the DVD player is rapidly replacing this technology. I believe the timing of the VCR’s obsolescence was deliberate since it seems all my VHS tapes are degrading so that my library of movies all feature snowstorms and the actors all sound like Marlon Brando and Fran Drescher.
I do not understand most of the options on the DVD player. The instruction booklet is 127 pages long and I go glassy-eyed and zone out whenever I try to study it. Fortunately, my stepsons told my wife and me which button turned it on and off, and which was for pause. We’re happy with that.
Even my manly proficiency with the TV remote has come under assault. I used to have sole command of the remote and we watched what I wanted and I just told the wife her show was cancelled.
Now, the universal remote, apparently designed by a female, defies me to understand its mysteries. My wife loves the apparatus having triumphed over its peculiarities while I remain dumbfounded. I have been effectively neutered and am fated to watch Lifetime every night.
I never thought I’d be a dinosaur, but that time has arrived and I have learned to accept it. This realization became undeniable when I bought my first cell phone with the 86-page instruction booklet. I’ve made it to page 4.

Tax Time Is Here Again
It’s time again to risk “penalties of perjury” and sign that somewhat accurate annual review of your income and deductions for 2005, the Chinese year of the rooster. So, puff out your chest, stick out your neck, and boldly put your John or Jean Hancock on the signature line.
The way I look at it, I have my name on a number tax returns and information documents so somewhere along the line I’m bound to have made a mistake or two. The secret to staying out Federal prison is that they’ll be mistakes. I may not know exactly what goes on Line 89, Part IV, Subsection C of Form 666, but it’s correct to the best of my knowledge.
I’ve met real IRS auditors and not from the nail-biting, ulcer-inducing side of a desk. I attended a daylong seminar in Cleveland for small and medium-sized charities. The main speaker was articulate and warm and he had a great sense of gallows humor that had been issued to him just prior to conducting the conference.
The only frightening aspect I got from the seminar is that the folks at the IRS are on to us. They know we get night sweats worrying about whether we’ll be audited. It is the source of their power and why most of us don’t try that Cayman Island tax shelter or the income taxes aren’t Constitutional scheme.
That’s also the reason that the same simple warning phrase appears so often and prominently located. It’s there for you to eyeball nervously as your trembling hand grasps desperately onto the pen. “Under penalty of perjury” as in, SWAT bursting down the door and dragging you away in chains in front of your crying children and distraught spouse as the town’s people murmur and avert their gaze.
Well, maybe the imagination is worse than reality, but it is intimidating. To try and alleviate some of the stress of filing Federal, state, local, city, and school district tax returns I’d like to give you some assurance. The people who write those utterly confusing forms, incomprehensible instructions, give completely wrong information on the telephone, and record your quarterly tax payments most of the time are the same as you and me.
They have families, file taxes, eat, sleep, and have a dungeon in their basement with an emaciated perjurer chained to the wall just like we do. Wait, that’s not right.
Anyway, there are a few hard and fast rules for any tax form you may be required to file. Keep these in the back of your mind and you’ll probably remain on the visitor’s side of the prison dayroom.
Rule number one, if you received it, someone gets a piece of it. No matter how small the amount or how old you may be you are obligated to share.
Rule number two, make certain you enter all your income, which we’ve established in rule number one is everything you received, somewhere on the form. When in doubt, guess. I look for any lines that include the word miscellaneous. Even if you guess wrong, they can’t say you were trying to hide it. It’s money; the tax-person will find it.
Rule number three, be very careful about who you count as a dependent. Though adult children, girl scouts selling cookies, the guy at the office who’s always taking up collections for something, your bookie, Giant Eagle, and the utility companies all get regular contributions from you they still aren’t dependents.
Rule number four, you can forget about taking any deductions. Either you make too much, earn too little, or you have to be dead. Dead is redundant in any event since, since you’ll finally no longer be required to pay taxes or file any forms. Your heirs, on the other hand, are just entering the taxes and forms purgatory known as probate.
Rule number five, don’t take tax advice from newspaper columnists, especially if they write a humor column. The IRS doesn’t think I’m funny. I swear, under penalty of perjury.