The Adventures of a Dad Run Amok

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, our family recently acquired two rats. Merlin (my rat) and Sniffles (Mrs. Dad Run Amok’s rat) live in a big cage in the living room. We are in the process of upgrading their quarters: the cage currently sits on the floor and we would like to put it on a table. We think that they will be happier that way.

We could not be more pleased with them. It only took them each a week or so to get used to us and I am happy to report that they are pulling their weight. Their tasks are pretty simple at this point: they are required to make us laugh and occasionally to ride around on our shoulders. We have big plans for them (learn their names and only poop in the litter box) but for now, we are quite satisfied with their performance.

I have found people’s reactions to them interesting. The most typical reaction is “RATS?!? EWWW!!!”

This reaction I do not like. I do not like it, but I do understand it (I guess). Rats do not have a sterling reputation in our country. Quick: name more than one movie where rats played a role not found in this list:

Apparently, even the pet industry’s attitude is a collective “EWWW” at rats, since they are typically lumped together with pets like tarantulas and snakes. I did not realize how far we had moved toward the extreme end of the pet ownership continuum.

I had one friend offer her address so that we could ship them to her to feed her husband’s snake. Since she did not ask for the rats’ resumes or salary requirements, I do not believe they will be employed as cooks or waiters. This leads to the inescapable conclusion that their jobs will be of a somewhat more permanent nature.

One of my cousins conceded that they are cute but could not resist adding an “EWWW”. The Dad² Run Amok stated that he was glad they are not horses. A friend of my wife’s decided, after careful consideration, that she would be willing to come over to the house even with the rats there.

One other person seems to think that we found them wandering around our house and decided to keep them. To that I say “RATS?!? EWWW!!”

Ours are pet store rats. That’s the only reason that they are allowed in the house. I greet Sniffles and Merlin with a cheery “Good morning, rats!” when I come downstairs to find my keys and head out to the office. With the wild variety, I would be far less cordial. In fact, if I learned of wild rats living in my house, I’d probably move out (and take all my family and the invited rodents with me).

Here is another short story that exists only because I had fun writing it. Enjoy!
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He stood quietly, hoping that the partial shadow would conceal his form. His quarry was in sight, but he could not allow himself to relax. Not now. That was always his temptation: to allow his focus and control to lapse when he was so close to the goal.
He looked around, scarcely daring to turn his head lest the motion attract the attention of his adversary. This opponent, the one who had dogged him for as long as he could remember, seemed sometimes to have inhumanly keen senses. It almost seemed as if his nemesis could see and hear him though they were not in the same place.
But not today. Today he had done everything right.
Slowly, so slowly, achingly slowly, he moved into the chamber where his prey waited, insensate to his presence. There was just one more portal through which he needed to pass and his mission would be a success.
There! He heard a sound! Ducking back toward the wall, he waited, sure that the pounding of his heart would give him away, as loud as it was to him.
He waited for a long moment. The sound did not recur. The stalk continued.
Again, with maddening, frustrating slowness, he made his way to the last barrier. He was certain that his footfalls would not be heard since he was not wearing shoes. It was an odd decision, he knew, but this was too important not to risk everything.
With caution beyond imagining, he reached his hand out to push aside the last impediment in his progress toward the successful completion of his mission. Now was the time.
As his hand closed on the handle, a familiar voice rang out and he knew he had been thwarted, again.
“Put it back, Billy! You’ll spoil your appetite!”

This has absolutely nothing to do with anything. There is no significance to it whatsoever. It is not very long and does not have a beginning or an end. But since I wrote it, I decided that I probably ought to post it.
~~~~~~~~~~
Lieutenant (JG) Jefferson DeMarco did not know the lavender-skinned humanoid who was standing on the other side of the baryon ray emitter weapon from him. There was not, furthermore, any inkling in the young man’s mind why the alien’s face was screwed up into such a look of determined malice. In fact, DeMarco did not know how this young Velanzian had ended up on a ship flying through space fully five thousand light-years from the Velan system. As far as anybody knew, the Velanzians were still at least two centuries from developing the technology needed even to journey as far as one of their homeworld’s seven moons.

All the young officer knew for certain was that he was looking at the end of the gun that never portends a happy ending.

Just at that moment, the bridge’s blast door slammed shut, separating DeMarco from his would-be assailant and the immediate prospect of blistering death. A moment later, the ship shuddered as the antechamber holding the alien was decompressed, ejecting him into the void with the same suddenness as that of a cork leaving the top of a bottle of Champagne.

“Well, I guess that’s that,” Jefferson thought. He nodded his thanks to Lieutenant Commander Rigby and then, settling back into his pilot’s seat, he returned his full attention to the intricate and dangerous task of navigating the Osmirian Asteroid Belt.
~~~~~~~~~~
As I said, the story does not really have a beginning or an end. I have no idea where Rigby and DeMarco are headed or what they will do when they get there. Like DeMarco, I do not know why the Velanzian was so angry or how he got there in the first place.
If you have found this page and you have some ideas about the heroes of this story, leave me a comment. I would love to blow these few paragraphs up into a longer story…

Our house is overrun with rodents.

Not vermin, just rodents.

It all started innocently enough. Fluffy the Hamster, our first little furry buddy, came to live with us the second spring after we moved into our current home. I have chronicled her deep desire to be a network engineer, so I won’t rehearse that again.

She lived to the ripe old age of two and a half. When she went to hamster heaven we waited a little while and got Tippy the Hamster.

Important note: I don’t know if there’s such a thing as hamster heaven, but if there is, I am sure Fluffy is there now. And most likely, she has found a heater grate across which she can run back and forth in her pink hamster ball.

Tippy was a nice fellow, but nothing like Fluffy. We’re pretty sure that he had aspirations to be a truck driver. His favorite thing to do, at least until he slowed down in his old age, was to run on his hamster wheel (he didn’t want anything to do with the hamster ball). He would not stay on the wheel, however. He would run for a few seconds, then hop off to see how far he had gone, then hop back on and run again. He would do this so fast that the wheel never actually stopped.

I’m pretty sure that with his footwork, he would have made an outstanding ninja. We made sure that people understood the danger with a “Beware of Attack Hamster” sign on the front of the cage.

After Tippy went to that big hamster wheel in the sky, we decided to try something else. We welcomed the gerbil brothers known as Tom and Jerry into our house.

These were the first rodents in our house upon whom we bestowed nicknames. They are known collectively as “the fellas” or “the gents”. They also are known, rather formally, as Thomas and Gerald (naturally!).

They are beginning to slow down a bit, but we love having them around. They live in the aquarium in the dining room and eat cardboard. Lots of cardboard. Unbelievable quantities of cardboard. When we clean the aquarium, we supply them with about an inch of hamster fluff. We have to clean it out weekly or they will end up with only an inch of clearance between the top of the fluff and and the roof of the cage, the product of all of their chewing.

The fellas don’t think they have a cardboard problem, but I am pretty sure that it is a major addiction. When you have a couple of different friends giving you all of their empty toilet paper rolls and cardboard egg cartons, and it isn’t enough to keep up with the demand of the two little furry buzz-saws, some therapy is definitely indicated.

They are not the only ones who may need therapy. After we had had Tom and Jerry for a year, the situation began to get out of hand. Emily’s best buddy got a curious little creature known as a Chinese dwarf hamster. Emily, of course, had to have one also. So on her tenth birthday, we headed out to the local rodent emporium and did some shopping. We returned home with a second aquarium and a little guy by the name of Tiny the Hamster.

Tiny the Hamster’s name is appropriate. That is exactly what he is. But even so, you can tell that he is a bloodthirsty creature who will not be denied in his quest for fresh victims.

Okay, that last sentence isn’t true. He really just stands there when you pick him up. And he is entirely too small to be a danger to anything much larger than a sunflower seed. However, to be on the safe side and avoid lawsuits, we have given Emily the “attack hamster” sign to hang on his cage. You just never know.

Very recently, the family brought to more critters into the house. These are probably the most controversial of our pets. Sniffles joined us about two weeks ago and Merlin came along a few days later.

Who are Sniffles and Merlin? They are rats. Yes, Norwegian rats. Most people learn that we have rats and get a bit, errr, freaked out.

The fact, however, is that they are fun guys to have around. They’re very intelligent and friendly. We have read that they can learn their names, that they like to play peek-a-boo, and that they can be taught to play ball. I guess we will see.

Hopefully that will be all the rodents in our house for a while. I suppose you never know, however. I enjoy having them around and I am getting used to their cold clawy feet.

I wonder if Petsmart sells capybaras…

The other night my wife asked me if I had anything that I wanted to work on in the new year. I was, of course, ready with my answer:

“Yes. For 2010, I resolve to have some great New Year’s Resolutions ready to go by December 31 for implementation in 2011!”

For some reason, she didn’t buy that. I guess I need to work on my believability in the New Year…

That’s probably the last wisecrack in this particular post. Here, in no particular order, are the things that I want to work on in 2010. There are probably twenty or more things that I need to fix, but I’m not dumb enough to try to tackle them all.
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1. This one comes up every year, and given that I’m posting this on fourth fifth fifteenth of January, I guess it needs to be there again: I tend to wait until the last possible moment to do anything.
With the kind of responsibilities I have, I can’t afford to do that. My procrastination tends to have adverse effects on other people. Its been a problem most of my life. This theme, I’m afraid, is going to come up in a couple of others things on this list.
This year I will work very hard on doing things as soon as the opportunity arises to do them and not wait until they become crises.

2. This one may be the toughest.
I wrote an entire post a few months ago about my hobbies. There are just too many to keep up with. I love to tinker with my computer (a post about that is coming just as soon as I can get around to it). I play music, I carve wood, I knit and crochet, I cook.
There are three different instruments that I play well enough to be in front of people with them. But I just do not have the time to practice them all to achieve real proficiency.
This resolution does not sound like a big deal, but it is. When I mentioned it to Mrs. Dad Run Amok, she greeted it with the same sort of groan that usually accompanies the news, delivered by the mechanic, that a car repair expected to cost a couple of hundred bucks is going to enrich said mechanic by four to six times that amount.
I love my hobbies. I don’t want to give any up. But if I’m going to become truly outstanding in any oif them, I have to offload something.

3. For most of my life, I have played music. I definitely think of myself as a musician. Most of my best friends are musicians. Some of them are pros (or good enough to go professional). I feel incredibly blessed to play and sing with them. I believe that they enjoy playing with me. I do not, however, feel like I belong with them most of the time. I realize that it’s the product of huge amounts of work, but when they play it seems effortless.
I want to get to where I don’t have to think hard about playing my bass guitar. I want to get to the point where I can sing and play at the same time. And I want to become a better player in general.

There are many more things I want to work on, but these three feel like enough.

Goto 12:50 PM Update
Goto 3:30 PM Update
Goto Final Update

As longtime readers of The Adventures of a Dad Run Amok are aware, I don’t have a lot of time for “meteorologists”. Ordinarily, they don’t get it right.

This time, however, they’ve gotten it right. If you’ve seen a news broadcast any time in the last 24 hours, you know that the East Coast is getting hammered with snow.

And we live right in the middle:

The scary thing is that they say we’re just starting to get into the heavy stuff.

Last night Mrs. Dad Run Amok and I had a date. We dropped our kids off, ate some of the party food that our friends had out and left for our date.

First stop, the library. It was closed, but we had some DVDs to drop off.

Next, Safeway.

Here in the DC area, the rumor of snow is enough to send grocery-loving residents into a feeding frenzy. And of course, with wintry armageddon in the offing, the joint was packed last night.

As we came through the doors and saw the lines to get out of there, my wife looked at me and said, “do we really want to buy anything here?” The question turned out to be 100% academic.

We were in there for one thing: molasses. So, over to the baking stuff aisle we trooped. As we started our search, a man wandered by, muttering to himself:

“What, do these people think we’ll be snowed in for fifty years?”

I replied that I thought it would be longer. He wasn’t amused, but Mrs. Dad Run Amok thought it was funny. Apparently, others were having a gingerbread craving as well, because there wasn’t any molasses. So we left.

Final stop, another Safeway, this one closer to our house.

This store was not at all crowded and they had plenty of molasses on sale. So we bought a couple of jars. I thought we should also have some eggs, but it was not to be. The only thing left on that shelf was about six dozen cage-free, organic brown eggs. $4.19 a dozen, or about 35 cents per.

I’m happy for the cage-free chickens, but I’ll buy the regular kind. My love for nature does not extend to having to submit to a credit check in order to buy eggs.

I’m glad we went last night, because we’re not going anywhere today.

Hopefully we’ll have another post about snow fun later…

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<<UPDATE – 12:50 PM>>
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The kids are done playing outside. They lasted about 15 minutes. Even after we warned them that they’d be inside for the day when this playtime was over.

I don’t blame ‘em. It’s cold and windy and cold (and windy) out there.

I have just finished my first pass at shoveling the walk. Ready for a nap now. It’s only about 25 feet long, but there’s a ***lot*** of snow. I’m glad it’s cold enough not to pack. It would not have been movable if it was packed at all.

When I was done about twenty minutes after I started, there already was a half-inch of snow on the first patch I shoveled.

Dude.

Just for grins, I had my daughter bring the yardstick. We are already under anywhere between eight inches (on top of the Big Silver Bus) and 12.5 (on the front lawn). By my calculations, if it keeps up like this until 6:00 tomorrow morning, which is what they’re predicting, we’ll get an additional 16 inches of snow.

Again, I say it:

Dude.

Stay tuned to this blog for more exciting news from the land of the white blanket…

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<<UPDATE 3:30 PM>>
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A couple of hours ago, my wife poked her head into my secret lab (where I’m trying to bring a Linux environment to life using nothing but source code) and wondered out loud whether she thought our deck could handle the amount of snow.

I wasn’t worried about it and told her so. Then I got to thinking about it. If there was a foot of snow on there already and another foot coming, maybe we should do something about it.

The snow is, as I mentioned earlier, very light and fluffy. But there is a lot of it. And that much of anything is going to be heavy. So I just shoveled the deck.

Before I did, though, I stuck the trusty yardstick into a couple of spots. Since the deck is high and somewhat sheltered, it’s a good place for a snowdrift. One spot was 13 inches. Four inches to the right, I had nearly a foot and a half of snow.

And it’s still coming down as though it has no intention of stopping.

<<Epilogue>>

The snow stopped sometime between 9:30 and 10:30 on Saturday night. I knew that I’d have a reason to complain about the weathermen. They said it would last all night and a bit into Sunday morning.

As a result of their wrongness, my prediction was off by a fair amount. The final Sunday morning reading, which was a bit difficult to get accurately due to snow blowing all over the place, was 17 inches.

It took the entire townhome neighborhood about four hours to set all of our cars free. There was a plow truck that helped quite a bit, but a whole lot of it was just shoveling.

I figured out that if a person can lift 20 pounds of snow in a scoop, which I don’t think is difficult, it would take only 100 scoops to move a ton of snow. I’m pretty sure we all moved at least that much.

I had a ballgame on today and missed a fair amount of it. That was a lot of shoveling. I’m happy to report, however, that I will be able to drive down to the office tomorrow morning.

Well, at least I will if I can still lift my arms.

This past weekend was another debut for my daughter. And for me.

Last spring, Emily had her first chance to perform on the violin at a recital. This past weekend, she played in her first concert with the Academy of St. Cecilia’s Prep Orchestra.

As soon as we learned that she was in, I volunteered to be the manager of the orchestra. So, for the past three months, we’ve been trooping up to rehearsals together. Her job was to play the violin and not get caught cutting up with her friend Emily (not easy, considering they sit in the front row, right under the nose of the conductor). My job was to set up stands and chairs for the ten members of the orchestra and help them tune their instruments.

Or so I thought.

When I reported on her successful audition, I wondered whether I should go buy a conductor’s baton. As it turned out, I could have used one. Because of the notorious DC traffic, I had to step to the conductor’s podium twice in rehearsals. Being batonless, I had to use a pen.

At least it was a nice pen.

About four rehearsals in, the conductor stopped the orchestra and ran off to the other side of the room.

“What could he be doing?” I thought to myself.

A moment later, his preparations complete, he stood in front of me with a drum and a sheaf of music. The orchestra was going to play excerpts from The Toy Symphony. Since the ten diminutive string players would be otherwise occupied, Mr. Webb needed somebody else to take up the serious business of playing the bird call, the bicycle bell, the toy drum and the ratchet. Since I was there anyway, I got the call.

It’s funny. Each week, he would hand a percussion toy to another parent, and each week, another kid would get dropped off by a parent who would wave a hasty hello to me and make off in a big hurry. Maybe it was just a coincidence.

At first, it was tough to get through the piece. The problem wasn’t so much that they couldn’t play it; it was more an issue that they couldn’t get their little heads around the idea that one of the dads was playing with all these toys!

The performance was a great success. As always, we forgot our camera and I have not yet had a chance to beg pictures from some of the other parents.

One of these days we’ll actually have the camera at one of Emily’s events…

The heat from the soft flames gently caressed the white confection into a state of golden-brown, gooey sweetness. Having been brought to a state of culinary perfection, it was squashed between the two chocolate graham crackers, preloaded with a square of chocolate.

Of course, the s’mores were delicious and everybody enjoyed them. The campfire, however, was missing. The marshmallows were toasted over a can of Sterno in our special s’more making kit (a gift from your narrator’s parents).

The s’mores we had the previous weekend, however, were a different matter. They were made over a genuine campfire at The Treehouse Camp.

About once a year, we manage to gather all of our camping gear into one place and head up to the hills (such as they are on this side of the country) for a weekend of adventure. The adventure invariably involves rain at some point. Or, at least it has every time my wife and I have gone camping together.

My friend Steve has an even worse track record. He knows that if he plans a campout, it will become a swim meet at some point. His prowess in drawing rain out of the sky is so well known that my son specifically asked God to keep the rain away even though Mr. Steve had planned the trip.

And do you know what? It worked! This past weekend’s campout featured better weather than we could have asked for. As for Mr. Steve? He was a bit incredulous, I think, at the weather. And extremely grateful for my son and his prayer.

Saturday night, of course, featured s’mores. S’mores are cool because they’re easy to make and subject to a wide variety of interpretations. Even in our family, there are four or five different styles of s’mores.

Mrs. Dad Run Amok, for example, likes her marshmallow to resemble a lump of coal when she’s done with it. Fortunately, she’s willing to have a marshmallow that’s a bit less well-done when we’re making s’mores on our dining room table, since getting a black marshmallow requires that the thing be engulfed in flames during the cooking process.

My son, on the other end of the spectrum, likes his marshmallows cooked just perfectly. For him, however, the length of cooking time required to achieve perfection is a variable factor defined as follows: how long he can hold out by the fire before he’s overwhelmed by the desire to put the s’more together and eat it. His marshmallows usually end up a bit rare for my taste.

My daughter, being the perfectionist, wants to layer her s’more with a beautiful gem of golden-brown perfection. Unfortunately, she suffers from the same affliction that her brother has—albeit to a lesser extent—and usually gives up before the marshmallow is perfectly cooked. Or she momentarily loses control of the marshmallow stick and ends up with hydrocarbons.

Sometimes, however, she gets it just right. This usually is achieved by the time-honored technique called GETTING DADDY TO DO IT.

After the s’mores were done and the campfire crowd had dwindled, it was time to go to bed. I had delayed just as long as I could because I was dreading bedtime. I knew that the time was going to come when I was going to go mano a mano against the planet with only a thin layer of foam and one thickness of the sleeping bag to assist me.

And it was about what I expected. I know I slept here and there through the night, but based on the fact that I went to bed at 8:30 Sunday night and didn’t wake up until the alarm clock made me do it the next morning, it wasn’t much. At one point Mrs. Dad Run Amok asked me if I was okay. I assured her I was and explained that my constant flipping and flopping over was only to make sure that the bruises were distributed equally about my body.

Yup. You won that one, Earth, but I’m spoiling for a rematch…

Cars.

Ugh.

Now, before we get started on this little rambling bit of prose, let me tell you what it’s not going to be. This is not going to be an environmentalist screed against noise and air pollution. It’s not going to be a rant about my commute. It’s not even going to be a curmudgeonly commentary on the sad state of the American auto industry.

Instead, I need to discuss cars and paper clips.

That’s correct. Paper clips.

And cars.

And specifically, the various uses that paper clips have in the fascinating and rewarding field of car repair.

This all started last weekend. We were on our way home from Church and I wondered, as we all do, just how fast I was going. It’s sort of important to know, what with all of the unmarked police cars and speed cameras out there. I glanced at the speedometer and discovered to my chagrin that I wasn’t moving at all. This was odd because I was keeping up with the traffic on a fairly busy thoroughfare.

Now ordinarily, I’d believe what a precision measuring device tells me despite my own perceptions to the contrary. This time, however, I decided to throw caution to the winds and believe the view through the windshield of my minivan rather than the gauge on the dashboard.

That didn’t mean, however, that I could ignore the speedometer, or as my mechanic called it later, the “speedo” (I’m not sure why, as he doesn’t appear to be a swimmer and he should know just from looking at me that I most certainly should not have anything to do with speedos). A deeper investigation revealed the odd truth. The speedometer needle somehow got onto the other side of the little peg that keeps it from going below zero. There was no way it was going to move in a useful direction.

I could not figure how the needle got there except by spinning all the way around to land under the peg. I didn’t see it happen, so I don’t know when or how. I did, however, know that I couldn’t afford to be driving around Maryland without knowing how fast I was doing it. I often tell my kids, “strap yourselves in, I have no idea how fast this thing’ll go.” That line usually draws a laugh, and it never fails to get them to buckle their seat belts. But I was not prepared for that statement to be true.

Anyway, it wasn’t until Thursday that we were able to get the van to the shop. They had it all day, and when they finally called us, it was to tell us rather sheepishly that they couldn’t figure out what had happened or how to fix it. “How much?” my wife asked. “Not much” was the reply.

That could mean anything. But these guys are honest and we trust them.

Turns out that “not much” equates to forty bucks. But I feel like I got my money’s worth since we had a good conversation when I stopped by to retrieve our bus. We talked about ways I could live without a speedo, like having a pace car to follow, or maybe using the tachometer to gauge the speed of the van. We didn’t talk about swimming at all, even though speedos were a main topic of conversation.

As I was leaving, they advised me to take the car to the dealership and asked me to let them know how it was fixed. So, home to the wife and kids I went.

As we were driving up to the dealership, me in the Shiny Gold Car and she in the Big Silver Bus, my wife called me and suggested that maybe we could use a paper clip or something and fix it ourselves. I didn’t think it would work, but if it meant we might be able to avoid another charge, I was willing to give it a shot.

We pulled into a parking lot near the dealership. There we found a paper clip, bent it into a hook and managed to slip it through the tiny gap where the trip odometer reset button comes out of the instrument panel. We could not get it to move the needle enough and we were a bit afraid that we’d break it, resulting in a mechanic bill that nobody would consider small. After a brief conversation, we put the paper clip away and drove the rest of the way to the shop, leaving the van there for them to work on.

This afternoon, I was sitting at my desk, contemplating the impending arrival of quittin’ time, when my wife called.

“Are you sitting down?”

“Yes. Should I be lying down?”

“Um, yeah, maybe. Would you like to know what the story is on the van?”

“Okay” was my tremulous reply.

“Well, it’s going to be 95 bucks when we pick up the van.”

“I guess that’s not so bad,” I said.

“Would you care to know what was wrong?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“They said that the speedometer came unwound,” she said. “But you’ll never believe how they fixed it.”

I didn’t realize what she was about to say, but I’m sure that my perceptive readers will.

“He told me they bent a paper clip, stuck it up into the instrument panel through the hole that the reset button uses, and pushed the needle back to where it belongs. There’s no charge for the repair. The 95 dollars is to cover the cost of the diagnostic testing.”

Right then and there, we decided that we were going to make them give us the paper clip just so we’d have something to show for the money we spent.

When we got there, we found out that in addition to the $95 charge for the repair, they had to ring us up for and additional ten bucks for dealing with “hazardous waste”. Maybe they used a radioactive paper clip, or one made of a lead/mercury alloy and it needed to be given special handling. I’m just not sure what we were paying for there, and neither was the cashier since she stammered something about “towels and plates” when we asked her what the charge was for.

Since we didn’t get the paper clip because the actual mechanic had already gone home and we couldn’t ask him for it, I drank about four or five cups of their waiting room bottled water on my way out of the shop. My daughter also drank some and Mrs. Dad Run Amok tossed back two or three. So at least we got a little something for our money, especially because they didn’t try to charge us a disposal fee for the Styrofoam cups. We probably should have kept ‘em and reused ‘em to plant beans in or something.

As I was reading this to my wife, she told me that she couldn’t find the original paper clip that we used in our abortive attempt to fix the speedometer ourselves. Now I’m thinking that the dealership stole it.

Before you to off to your next destination on the web, I would ask you to take a moment and think about this. They used our paper clip to fix our van and then charged us for putting it in a lead-lined, magnetically sealed container and shipping it off to the hazardous waste storage site, probably with a full police escort. I’d have thrown it away for free. Naturally, I’m feeling a bit robbed right now. And I could really use the money that I shelled out for this bit of high-tech repair work.

Anybody want to buy a banner ad on dadrunamok.com? It’s yours for only a hundred and fifty bucks.

Or several boxes of paper clips.

Oh my gosh…three weeks since I last posted?! That’s horrible! We really must do something about that. Fortunately, we had an eventful weekend and I’ve actually got something to write about.

Maybe even two posts.

I’m going to put one out here before head hits pillow tonight. Promise.