What do you do with yourself when it’s all over? I mean, completely over. Totally over. The whole enchilada with guacamole and all the fixins.

Well, hold on, I don’t mean death. I’m talking about when you have had so much going on for so long and suddenly, soon, it will all wrap up. My master’s degree is done, and within a couple of weeks, the years of planning and the 6 months of building on our new house addition will quite suddenly come to an end. Poof!

And then what? THEN WHAT?

It’s like empty nest syndrome. What will we talk about at the dinner table? Right now conversations turn to wood floors, paint or how in the world we’re going to get the 13 tons worth of stuff we jammed into a storage unit back to the house. (I think we should just stop paying on it and let them throw it all away.)

Continue Reading »

It was at that moment — that very instant — that I realized I would never be able to travel into space. I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t hack the confined spaces — the cramped quarters. I would go mad, get pushed over the edge by one too many floating piles of space mail. I would fry a circuit and undoubtedly start yanking on the air lock door until I was sucked out into the infinite darkness screaming the whole way, “finally free!”

What got me thinking this way? Well, we’ve reached the mission critical part of our house addition. We’re just a couple of weeks away from completion, which is exciting, but we’ve also hit that rough patch when walls that used to separate living quarters from the construction have come down. Now our house has really shrunk and it all seems to be closing in.

It was tight before, but we’re now experiencing life as canned sardines.

After a couple of days of living on top of each other while the drywall went in, I began to crack. “I just don’t understand why there are so many piles of stuff everywhere,” I complained. “It looks like the Himalayas in here.”

My wife gave me the kind of look that screamed, “If we had a shrimp deveiner you’d be in so much trouble right now.”
Continue Reading »

Crash went the conehead dog. Crash, scrape, bang, crunch, screech, scratch … scratch … scratch — those nails on plastic, sounding like a rat trying to claw through a plastic milk jug. Another crash, clunk, bam, slice … eeeyyyyooowww-OUCH!

The “ouch” was the conehead dog’s lighting fast reaction to a morsel of food dropping beneath the table … lunging between chairs — and my legs — to get it … forgetting there was a plastic cone the size of a deep-space satellite dish rapped snuggly around her neck. Three layers of skin and a bushel of hair were instantly shaved from my leg.

Stupid conehead dog!

You know what a cone is? The kind you put on a dog when they have a wound that needs to heal? You can’t trust a dog with his or her wound. They don’t have the good sense to leave it alone and would just as soon lick their whole appendage off.

In my dog’s case, she had stitches on the top of her noggin and along the elbow of her front leg. A couple things had to be removed and biopsied. Turns out she’s fine. Expensive, but fine.

Continue Reading »

There’s this wonderful line in the movie version of “Annie” when a flustered and frustrated Miss Hannigan (played by Carol Burnett) grumbles at the little ruffians, “Why any kid would want to be an orphan is beyond me.”

I was thinking about that line this past weekend — tinkering and changing it a bit as I loaded box upon box, chair upon chair, tchotchke upon tchotchke into two trucks that were as long as a city block.

“Why anyone would want to move is beyond me?” I mumbled to myself in the best Miss Hannigan voice I could muster.

I now understand why people choose to stay in one place their entire lives. I used to think it kind of strange and lacked a sense of adventure — a taste for change. But then again, I’ve been in my house for more than a decade and wouldn’t leave if gangrene-ridden crickets tried to flush me out.

Now I know why: I hate moving.

Continue Reading »

You can keep all your base-jumping, mountain-climbing, bear-wrestling, gasoline-gargling, whitewater-rapid-rafting, big-city-traffic-dodging, rocketship-flying, strange food-eating, death-defying thrills. You can have ‘em. When I want to tempt fate and walk hand-in-hand with the grim reaper while singing, “Kumbaya,” I turn to the only rush that works for me: firing up the pole saw and trimming some trees.

Not just any trees — the low-lying fruit-kind that hover close to the ground and beg to be snipped. I’m talking big trees. Tall trees. Trees who don’t want to be trimmed and stretch high on tippy-toes into the clouds when they see you coming. Trees that refuse to be trimmed, fighting you every step of the way as they claw and scratch your hands, your arms, your face. They’re tough trees who won’t go down without a fight — an eye for a limb is the motto here.

Just thinking about it, I feel the adrenalin pumping and the blood bubbling. (Lucky for me the blood stopped bubbling after applying direct pressure with a handful of fallen leaves.)

Continue Reading »

There’s only one thing I hate about road trips. One thing — breakfast.

Everything else I can handle. Even enjoy. Endless miles. Rest stops. Bad coffee. Seeing new parts of the country. Meeting new people. That guy at the rest stop who mumbles, “Wanna’ see what I got here in my pocket?”

We went out to Missouri to collect my master’s diploma. Over to Louisville to visit with family. Down to the Smokies to plunk river stones the size of European cars into a stream. We covered more than 2,000 miles, burned through nine tanks of gas, and used a lifetime supply of wet wipes. My stomach is still trying to repair the damage from a cup of tar masquerading as coffee.

But it was an amazing trip, and a thrill for my 3-year-old daughter who had never seen mountains before or spent so much time motoring from one place to the next. And I would do it again tomorrow — hop right back in the car and go … if not for those dang breakfasts. Continue Reading »

I’ve never been hit in the head with a concrete block. Not before I answered the phone the other night. It was my mother and she cut to the chase: “Brian? I sold my house. I need to be out in June. I’m coming up this weekend to see about buying or renting a place. We’re going hunting Saturday. Be Ready!”

Click.

The block hit me flat side down, clean in the forehead.

Ker-splatt!

I sat on the floor watching stars orbit my head and considered calling 911. What would I say? “Yeah, hi, I just got a phone call from my mother about her moving up to St. Augustine. It laid me clean out on the floor and I think I have a concussion. Could you send someone over with a couple Harvey Walbangers … stat?”

What had just happened? Continue Reading »

It swept in like a summer thunderstorm — fast, ferocious and relentless — knocking me on my back. Some 24-hour bug — I swear it wasn’t swine flu — that has been going around. Left me feeling achy, nauseous, grumpy and with a pounding head like a woodpecker was trying to make a home in there.

And then it was gone, as suddenly as it arrived. Strange. But it had sure taken its toll. I normally weather things pretty well. I don’t like to slow down, no matter what the circumstances. My leg fell off? Hmmm. Well, I’ll worry about that later.

I was sick enough that I didn’t go into work the next day. It felt like a mean hangover. Like one of those evenings when you say to yourself, “maybe tequila shooters wouldn’t be such a bad idea.”

As I went about my “sick day,” tired and bored, longing to go do something … anything … I wondered why there was always such an appeal to being sick as a kid. Continue Reading »

Eco-car: Why are you so weird?
A battery in the boot? A push button to start ya?
That ain’t the way I was reared.

It’s a song — an opening line to one I’ve been writing. It came to me as I was driving about in a Toyota Prius, one of those so-called hybrids that are revolutionizing the automotive world.

I rented one while in Missouri last week to defend my thesis. I had imagined a thesis defense would be like standing atop a castle gate during a barbarian siege. It was nowhere near so dramatic.

I hadn’t meant to rent a Prius — it was assigned to me when I showed up at the rental car counter at the airport. It had some kind of super-electric regenerating blah-blah-blah steam-driven, weed-eating, carbonated soda pop engine that ran both on gas and the energy it stored in the batteries out back.

Continue Reading »

Dear mom,

It pains me to say this, but I felt something had to be done. I have to get this off my chest. I just can’t go on anymore holding this inside — bottling it up and trying to keep the cork from bursting out.

Remember, I think you’ve been an amazing parent and never did anything to hurt me (although, giving me those hot toddies when I was a kid to help my bronchitis was definitely questionable.)

So let me get this out: You cannot call me on the phone anymore to ask for help working out issues with your computer. You just can’t. I know it’s complicated stuff to grasp. But it’s killing me. It’s growing a field of gray hair in uneven patches atop my head. It’s making tense muscles in my neck snap under the strain. I blew a blood vessel in my eye the other night. I might have to seek counseling.

In short: I just can’t do it anymore.

Continue Reading »