Heating Bills Cause Odd Behavior
The US Postal Service had the bad luck of being the bearer of bad news and taking the brunt of the resultant ill feelings when everyone received their gas bills this month. The term “going postal” is meant to describe events at mail sorting centers, not the reaction of consumers opening their mail. Everyone got a nice cardio workout last week, whether they wanted one, or not.
The collective moan felt like an earth tremor when all ready apprehensive homeowners opened Columbia and Dominion natural gas bills that looked like last year’s national debt. The last time I saw a number that big it was a down payment on a new home.
Drastic expenses call for enterprise and ingenuity. My wife has turned the thermostat down so low we no longer need to put food in the refrigerator to keep it fresh. Instead, we put items in the ‘frig we when we wish to thaw them.
We’ve laid in the Afghans and comforters, and converted to the layered look. We both look like the little brother on “Christmas Story” who couldn’t put his arms down. We fight over who gets the dogs for body heat and who has to break the ice on their water dish.
We would turn the thermostat even lower at night, but we’ve already bottomed it out. We may have to start the A/C back up for warmth.
The enormity of the gas bill has so shaken my wife; she’s considering wearing corduroy for the warmth from thigh friction. I have to warm my hands with my computer’s blue “on” light just to keep frostbite away.
Alternative methods of home heating are suddenly popular. Firewood is at a premium, when you can find it. I’ve never understood where the savings occur by using a wood burning stove. After buying the chains saws, log splitter, pickup truck for hauling, and spending hours chopping, cleaving, and stacking you’ve probably spent enough to buy the natural gas needed to heat Ireland.
In an effort to help the general public cope with the cost of heating their homes I’ve created a list of energy saving tips. The methods are time tested and proven effective.
· Take the colder days off from work and cuddle up with your girlfriend or boyfriend. This will conserve body heat and lessen your gasoline consumption, another high-priced commodity. Just don’t let your spouse find out.
· Move to Arizona, the southern part. Right now, rattle snakes and scorpions sound a lot better than spending your kids’ inheritance heating a house. Then again, they probably aren’t counting on that $200.00 split three ways making a big difference at the reading of your will.
· Visit friends and family. Complain that you’re cold so they’ll crank up the thermostat. Stay until you’ve stopped shivering or they throw you out. This idea may cost you a few friends and a relative or two may stop taking your calls, but with the money you save, you can buy new ones when the weather breaks.
· Rent a trailer in Florida. With all the flooding and hurricanes, it doesn’t make sense to live in, or build, a permanent home there. Enjoy the warm winter and then move back to Ohio just before the mobile home ends up in Kansas or the Gulf of Mexico in the spring.
· Watch a hot movie. For the older guys I recommend anything with Catherine Zeta Jones. I liked “Zorro” and “Intolerable Cruelty.” For the mature ladies my wife says Dermot Mulroney is P.H.A.T.
These are basic suggestions and you may alter them in any manner you wish. The objective is to survive this winter with all our toes and fingers still attached. Missing digits are the occupational hazard of firework and deli workers, not homeowners.
It would also be nice to have a few dollars left in the old checking account so we’ll be able to pay for electricity, it’s going up too, when the thermometer hits 100 this summer.

New Year’s Resolutions for Other People
It’s that time of year again and I hope you’ve all begun to contemplate your New Year’s resolutions. Personally, I’ve taken an inventory of my behaviors and find there is just no room for improvement.
The rest of the world needs some work though, so I’ve made a short list of things everyone else should do to become more tolerable to those of us who are perfect.
The top of the list begins with one of my favorite pet peeves, turn signals. This year I want everyone to resolve to use their turn signals and to turn in the direction they indicate. I know for some this will be difficult since they seem not to know the feature is offered on their particular brand of automobile.
Next, I’d like everyone who has a pet to be honest about what they let their four- legged family member do. We all spoil the flea-bitten little critters rotten. They sleep in our beds, tinkle in our shoes, and claw every piece of molding they can reach while we coo adoringly at them.
Some people are in denial and are afraid to admit they don’t treat Fido like a mutt. An example of this came from the sweet woman who surrendered Sadie “Satan” Sue to us. Sadie’s former owner insisted she was fed only high quality dog food. However, I’m pretty sure a dog that can eat off a fork, enjoys Cheerios for breakfast, and knows the difference between real cheese and processed milk by-products (which she will not eat) has probably eaten people food once or twice. Additionally, a pup that will not touch her food until she’s sure you have nothing better on your plate may be familiar with the human diet.
Seriously, I’ll bet there aren’t more than three pet owners out there that feed their pets a strict diet of real dog food. I bake a Honeysuckle turkey breast for mine every month and share all my meals, except chili for obvious reasons, with my mongrels. They whine and scratch until I relent, so I figure I might as well be magnanimous.
Next, I want Citibank to finally get my closed account cleared up. It’s been six months and they are still trying to charge me for a credit they posted to my account. Apparently, the various departments of this largest of corporations do not talk to one another and they won’t let you talk to anyone in those other places either. They don’t even have an address, telephone number, or e-mail address for anyone outside their building; so don’t ask.
It seems letting the right hand know what the left is doing is counter to good business practice. This is why I went into the humanities. We liberal arts types have all those objective sciences, like abstract art and music appreciation.
Finally, I need fundraisers for the Democratic and Republican parties to look up the word, “No.” No matter how many times we tell them we don’t have any money, or our accounts are frozen, we’re illegal aliens and aren’t allowed to donate, we’re double amputees and can’t write checks, or we’re not whoever they were calling for because we cut those people up and have them packaged in convenient one pound portions in the freezer, they still want us to sponsor a delegate to the next national convention in Zimbabwe.
That should be enough for now. After these items are mastered I’ll have a fresh list for next year dealing with such crushingly important issues as not getting into the self checkout line at the grocery store unless you can read the screen and sign your name, paying attention to the traffic lights so you can go when it turns green, not just before it turns red again so only you get through the intersection, and, of course, using Expedia before you go take a trip so you don’t back up traffic to the Indiana border getting directions from the toll collector on the turnpike off ramp.
Hope your Christmas was great and your New Year is bright.

Memories From 50 Years of Christmases
One of the early signs of Alzheimer’s is you can recall events from long ago, but not what you had for dinner or the name of that woman you wake up next to every morning.
Maybe it isn’t a mental illness, but the lasting impression certain moments make on the psyche. Perhaps, it is a little of both.
The first Christmas I remember is from some time in the early 1960s, so I was probably six or seven. The memory involves getting up in the middle of the night to discover that Santa had already left our booty scattered under the tree.
I can still see the glistening lights and tinsel on the tree and what seemed like a mountain of toys piled around it. I ran to my parents’ bedroom door and exclaimed my glorious find.
I can hear the exhausted voice of my father telling me to return to bed or Santa would take all the toys back. I scampered off to bed, but hardly slept.
The next recollection is of the following year when unbeknown to gullible kids, a guy dressed up as Santa Claus and went to all the homes in Birmingham whose duplicitous adults requested his appearance. It seems his job was to scare the B’Jesus out of anyone under the age of six.
He stood in the doorway and said he wanted to deliver our gifts, but couldn’t until we went to bed. I wasn’t fooled because I could see his three-day growth of black facial hair under the white fake beard. My younger siblings, however, nearly maimed one another trying to get into bed first.
Things get a bit fuzzy until about 1970. That was the year my father bought me a set of free weights, which I still own and move around my basement every few years.
On Christmas morning that year my dad told me my “big” present was on the back porch. Fearing he’d bought me livestock I resisted looking until he convinced me that it was an inanimate object.
The K-mart weights were still in the box, so I got a great workout just assembling my gift.
Again, the next few years get hazy until I had a son of my own, did the dad thing, and bought him a train set that was not only a too advanced for him at three years old, but it hundreds of parts that needed assembly. It was a Lego train set, which due to popular demand they don’t make anymore, with an engine, three cars and a caboose. Even the tracks came in pieces.
I spent several hours reading, snapping, cursing, reading, and snapping. By the time I had it together my son was having Christmas lunch with no further interest in trains.
More blurry images until approximately 15 years ago when I first started running out of ideas for Christmas presents for my wife. She already had a fur coat, jewelry, a new house, and a new car.
The only thing I came up with was new stoneware. I bought the full 8 place settings from Pfaltzgraff with matching silverware, butter dish, salt and pepper set, serving bowls, tureens, and platters. The quandary was whether to wrap all ninety boxes. Being in love, another way of saying temporarily insane, I did just that.
Lacking forethought, I didn’t anticipate the difficulty of carrying all those boxes down a flight of stairs and placing them beneath, beside, and about the tree on Christmas Eve. Who knew plates could be that heavy. It wasn’t much of a surprise, but my wife did have lots of gifts to unwrap that morning. It took two shifts, but she opened every one.
This year I’m looking forward to seeing my grandson open a couple of presents Christmas day under the tree we received through UPS. Hey, it’s real, sort of, and came with lights already strung. It makes up for my outside decorations, an angel flag and a tarp-covered desk.
My grandson is three now and loves getting and opening presents almost as much as his grandmother. This is the first Christmas where he gets the concept of Santa. I don’t know if this will be one of the Christmases that remain in his heart, but I’m sure it will in mine.
The best Christmases are seen through the eyes of a child.

Turnabout Is Fair Play
I can’t prove it, but I’m quite certain my stepsons are now doing to me what I’ve done to my parents, assorted relatives, in-laws and out-laws for years. They are conspiring with their spouses about when and how to escape from the mandatory holiday family gatherings and dinners with my wife and me.
There’s no use in trying to deny it. Every couple, married or not, connives to determine how to escape the infernal ritual of the family gathering. Usually, it’s decided on the trip to the inquisition/supper, but the more organized among us work on it for a day or two. The idea is to agree to a predetermined time or to a particularly annoying phase of the holiday tradition that acts as the trip wire for the “we have to go” announcement.
We all love our near and distantly related family members, however questionable the connection, but we need to ration that exposure. The reason, of course, is that wherever you squander the holiday the hosts spend the entire visit making you feel guilty about one thing or another, usually for not visiting often enough. No matter how many times you’ve talked on the telephone, stopped by to chat, or gone out to dinner with them, it wasn’t adequate, and you are neglecting them.
Now, I’m on the receiving end. They probably won’t admit it, but I pretty certain my stepsons are perpetuating this ritual with my wife and me. (Well, most likely, just my wife. Who wouldn’t want to spend a long afternoon with Mr. Sunshine?)
Why do they show up at all? Well, we’re doing the same thing to them our parents did to us. My mom still reminds me, 50 years later, that she spent several weeks in labor bringing me into the world. She is also fond of restating the fact that she let me remain in the world, though it seems as a child I tried everything to convince her otherwise.
Guilt is a fabulous way to get children to do things. It always worked on me and it continues to do the same with the next generation.
Of course, there’s another reason they begrudgedly pay a holiday visit; the things they need help with that require tools they don’t own or knowledge they didn’t pick up when I tried to instruct them while they lived here.
I attempted many times to show them how to do home and automotive repairs, but it’s certain they weren’t listening on the rare occasion I could get them into the same general area as the handyman lesson. A major part of any repair process is discriminate cursing, at which I am a genius, and something that would have benefited them greatly had they paid attention. It’s not how you do something; it’s knowing the right words to help you do it. My father’s legacy dies with me.
The final reason the stepsons stop by is because they miss those great home cooked meals we’ve always had. You know, the ones that come straight from the freezer or can, to the microwave, the grill, and occasionally the oven, to the table. Throw in a Giant Eagle bakery cake or pie and the repast is complete.
Even if we knew how to make giblet gravy, walnut stuffing, and mashed potatoes from actual potatoes, they wouldn’t eat them.
My stepsons are using another old trick that sets an absolute time limit just in case anything goes amiss and they get their signals crossed: the dinner or date later that day with some other member of the shared gene pool. This is really quite foolproof in that you can set up the excuse well in advance and no one checks to see if you’re fibbing. Sometimes the other dinner isn’t imaginary and it opens up the option of a secondary excuse when you don’t want to see those relatives, either. You just blame the first hosts for keeping you there too long or for giving you food poisoning, which is entirely believable since poisoning one’s relations is just a small part of the holiday fun.
I’m not upset because I don’t fault them for wanting to get out of my house as soon after the meal is finished as possible. After all, it saves me using the “you have to go home now because we have to go visit (fill in a name)” ploy.

Why Girls Outnumber Boys
I’ve been contemplating the well-documented fact that more boys are born than girls, but by the time we reach adulthood, women out-number men. The stimulus for this train of thought was an incident that occurred a week ago.
My grandson had been playing upstairs in one of the several toy boxes he maintains in my home. I had just come downstairs to make him some chocolate milk when my wife and I heard a thump and a meek cry of pain.
Grandmother got to him from two rooms away before I could even set the milk carton down. She asked what had happened and he explained that he was trying to skateboard down the steps. Even better, the skateboard was a three-inch long prop for an action figure from McDonalds.
The genetically inherited male instinct to fold, spindle, and mutilate oneself manifested itself, again. I can’t imagine that a female of any age would ever contemplate something so clearly not a good idea.
However, I digress. This self-destructive compulsion may be passed from the female side of the species. My wife, and world’s fastest moving grandmother, has a skeleton in her past. Sometime around the age of 8, she tied her feet to the pedals of her bicycle so she wouldn’t fall off. Hmmm.
This one episode of a feminine mental lapse is probably a fluke, since males seem to find endlessly senseless ways to maim themselves.
In my sorted personal history, I’ve tried unsuccessfully to kill myself many times. Just off the top of my shiny pate I can remember back spending many a delightful day in the woods around Birmingham falling off cliffs, slipping off algae covered rocks into the Vermilion River, and riding my bicycle after dark with no lights or reflectors and wearing dark clothing.
I also grew up in the time of those lovely missiles of death, yard darts. I thought it was great fun to throw them straight up in the air and then run before one could puncture my skull. Yard darts were obviously the grand idea of a man in on the masculine conspiracy to limit our time on the planet.
I was the lucky owner of a BB gun and had many a BB bounce off my glasses and noggin because I was standing too close to something I probably shouldn’t have shot at in the first place.
I received a hatchet from my father when I was 12 and never told my mom about the pair of shoes with the deep gash in the toe area for fear she’d take it from me.
In the winter there were kamikaze headfirst sled rides downhill. The route was lined with trees and posts for bouncing off of.
I played football for a while in high school and used my head for a battering ram. I had the neck surgery to correct the vertebral compression in 1997.
As a teenager, I spent part of a summer working for a slumlord gutting old houses. All those nice rusty nails, asbestos dust, decades of soot, and Lord knows what it was that had accumulated in the basement may not have been all that healthy, but it satisfied my inborn death wish.
I collected three speeding tickets by the time I was 18 and all of them were momentary lapses in watching the speedometer. They never caught me when I was going for the record for the number of cars passed on a narrow country lane.
Even now, I take pictures of high school games. I find the excitement of several hundred pounds of football player bearing down on me irresistible. Having soccer balls and hockey pucks sail by my ears is sweet music and waiting for pop ups into the sun to bean me into oblivion is just something I feel compelled to do.
I guess the manly art of collecting scars in pursuit of the spectacular accident never really goes away, it just finds more subtle outlets.