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February 24, 2011 · 2:06 pm

Top 10 things I learned during Ice Storm 2011

Those of you who read this post know that we recently experienced a major ice storm in our area.

Here’s my Facebook Post today…

It’s day four of Ice Storm 2011.  As of this morning, Thursday, February 24, power was still out.  Folks at the power company seem confident it will be restored today… that’s a good thing!  In light of all of this, to try and find some humor in the whole situation, here’s the top 10 things I learned during this power outage.  Sorry for a few choice words… it’s been a tough week! 

 10.   A woodstove is a fabulous convenience in a house.  It has saved our asses numerous times over the years, and especially during this outage.  You can heat at least one room to a toasty 75-80 degrees.  You can boil water on it.  You could probably even cook a four course meal on it.  Maybe I’ll try that one of these days when I don’t have anything more pressing to do.

 9.   When people ask if you have power yet and you say no, they say shit like… “oh my god, you don’t have power yet?  It’s been a long time.”  Hey, seriously… I can see that you’re concerned and all, but don’t make it sound like it’s my fucking fault that I don’t have power yet!  If I could climb up the poles and rewire the whole fucking system… believe me… I would have done it by now.  And yeah, it’s been a long time, no shit Sherlock!  I’ve been living in one room of my house with the rest of my family for three days now and pissing in un-flushable toilets.  No one has been murdered yet so as of right now it’s all good.

 8.   Both inventions have their benefits, but I’ve decided that indoor plumbing is a more important invention than electricity.  I can make light and heat with candles and fire.  On the other hand, with all due respect to Tom Edison… yeah, I know the whole kite and key thing, great story and all… but disposing of a shit in your house without plumbing is pretty difficult.  Not that I tried or anything like that…

 7.   If I had to go back and live 100 years ago, and I could take either my TV or my laptop and internet… I’d take the laptop and internet.  I could easily live without the TV, I don’t really like TV, and a few days of NOT having it constantly blaring with iCarly and all the other crap my kids watch makes me realize I really don’t like TV.  I couldn’t live without my computer.

 6.   It’s easy to live without electricity if you don’t have to look good in the morning.  If I was a homesteader and I just had to get up in the morning to start the daily chores… it wouldn’t matter what I looked or smelled like… I could be frickin’ Amish.  The goats don’t give a shit if I am having a bad hair day. Cows, if I had any wouldn’t give a shit either.  But when you have to get dressed and go to work and you just tried to take some semblance of a bath in the bathroom sink in the dark… well you can only do so much with hair gel.

 5.   Butt wipes are an important tool in the world of power outages.  If the original American Colonists had access to butt wipes, they may not have been so pissed off, and we’d probably be under British rule today.

 4.   The folks at the power company deserve a big hug.  Not only the guys that have been working 24 hours a day outside in the cold repairing power lines… but especially the people that have to answer the phone all day and listen to us douchebags tell them that our power is out.  Yeah dude, everybody’s fucking power is out, we just had the worst ice storm in two decades.  They need to get the hospitals, fire stations and police stations on-line before they can get you back on-line.  Sorry you’re going to miss Glee this week.

 3.   Wine, and plenty of it, makes the whole damn situation seem just a little bit better. 

2.   Four people sleeping in one small room with a snoring St. Bernard, and a crackling fire can be uncomfortable and difficult.  But in a weird way it has brought the family together for a few days without the distractions of TV’s and Wii’s and everything else.  When your only focus when you get home is getting the fire re-started, figuring out how and what to eat for dinner and being comfortable for the night, you forget about all the other shit going on in your world… and for a few days that’s a good thing.

 1.   Maybe, just maybe it’s time to invest in a generator.

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February 23, 2011 · 2:59 pm

A Troubling Situation

I wrote a post awhile back called “I Don’t Want to Go to School”. I was having one of those Sunday nights where I didn’t want to get up for work the next day. It wasn’t really even about not wanting to go to school. It was about that feeling I used to get as a kid on Sunday nights when the joy of the weekend was over, and how I have been feeling it lately as an adult. But what I have discovered since writing that fine piece is that it appears there is a rampant outbreak in the child populous, of kids that don’t want to go to school… an epidemic! No, perhaps it should be classified as an endemic:

en•dem•ic:  natural to or characteristic of a specific people or place; native; indigenous.

Yes, an endemic, characteristic of a specific people… those people being kids… and not just any kids… indigenous kids… and not just any indigenous kids… but apparently a rogue band of thugs that think they can take on the world with total disregard to the covenants of law and order and societal stability, kids that are trying to deceive their parents, and ultimately figuring out ways to not have to go to school.

Heathens, I say… heathens!

Personally I am troubled by this development, by this trend towards school based animosity in our youth… I always wanted to go to school… and even when I didn’t want to go to school, which was most days, I got up and went to school. I didn’t try to get out of going to school and I didn’t have the internet to help me design some trickster scheme to get out of it, like these fraudulent children that are sitting in their rooms at night typing away on their computers or their i-phones, trying to find ways to pretend to be sick or incapacitated and unable to attend school. In fact, I was always up and ready for school on time, promptly out to the bus stop, dressed dapperly in my matching Garanimals clothing and proudly carrying my lunchbox… the epitome of grade school scholarly excellence. My older brothers on the other hand… hooligans… always late, running around chaotically every morning trying to get showered and dressed and find their school books and finish their homework and perhaps eat something for breakfast.

So… how, you ask, do I know about this endemic that is destroying our youth, eating away at our future leaders of the free world, sucking the life out of our society? Well, let me tell you… let me see if I can convey the gravity of this dire situation. Each day as I read my stats page, which as you know from my post B.O.O.B.S. can become a serious mental health condition, I have noticed a boon of readership being directed to my blog by an abundance of search engine terms from disillusioned children that don’t want to go to school.

I have listed and cataloged these search terms and expressions below and included some expert analysis about these youth that I gathered from a team of renowned experts and led by Professor of Sociopathology at Harvard University, Dr. Schullis Sukey.

Category 1:  i don’t want to go to school  and  “i don’t want to go to school”

These children clearly have the capacity to become future leaders of a rogue nation, all spelling and punctuation is correct, they are educated, they state the facts clearly and succinctly. Our experts could not decipher the use of quotation marks, perhaps a future blogger or leader of a terrorist organization.

Category 2:  I don’t want to go to school tomorrow  and  tomorrow don’t want to go to school

These children are singularly focused only on the following day, tomorrow… clearly a function of not having an assignment done. These are procrastinators, deadbeats, delinquents, those who will one day be taking handouts and sucking entitlements from our government.

Category 3:  I don’t want school  and  don’t want school

These are not just children that don’t want to go to school. These kids don’t WANT school, they don’t believe in school, as if society would be better off if we didn’t have laws that required our children to become educated and productive members of our society. They can only be classified as renegades, laggards. As adults, these children will thrive only in some kind of Mad-Max apocalyptic society.

Category 4:  Don’t want to to go to school photos  and  I don’t want to go to school youtube

Not only do these children not want to go to school, they are voyeuristic, they are searching for images and video of other kids not going to school. It is suspected that since they don’t know how not to have to go to school themselves, they can only thrive vicariously on images of other outlaw youth not going to school. These children will grow into adults who will be chronically unemployed and will wastefully spend their days viewing videos and images of other non-productive adults not going to work.

Category 5:  I don’t want 2 go school  and  Don’t wanna go 2 school 2 day

These children like numbers, maybe they excel in mathematics. More likely they are chronic texters, technologically saavy, early-adapters of the latest high-tech gadgets. These children can only be classified as those who will someday develop the skills to infiltrate vast government and financial computer systems. Studies show these kids have the potential to cause great harm to society but only if they are able to refrain from the deleterious effects of texting while driving.

Category 6:  I don’t go to school  and  I don’t to go to school

These children are an anomaly. At first glance it appears they have already abandoned any semblance of a productive life. They don’t go to school. They most likely have parents who are so wrapped-up in their own personal problems that they are unaware that their children are not going to school. Yet, on the other hand, these are kids that are the deciders, kids that have taken this whole school situation into their own hands. These children will probably grow up to become successful leaders and entrepreneurs.

Category 7:  don’t go school, do not want to school, I don’t wan school  and  I don,t want school

These children are a major concern. Evidence suggests that they do not want to go to school because, frankly, it’s most obvious that they are struggling in school. Issues with spelling, grammar and punctuation lead our experts to believe these kids are not getting the special attention and access to remedial programs necessary to bring them up to academic speed with the rest of their classmates. The No Child Left Behind program has clearly left these children behind. Rapid intervention is crucial for these children to not become criminally active and a scourge to society.

Category 8:  Kid don’t want to go to school

This classification of child baffled our team of experts. In the search engine terms, this youth clearly identifies himself as a “kid”. It is believed that this youngster has a clear and confident self-image. Evidence here suggests this is just an average kid that doesn’t want to go to school.

So, my friends… now that you have a clear understanding of the issues at hand, I implore you to stay aware and abreast of this troubling situation. I’ll leave you with this message:  to all the kids out there that are reading my blog…

Kids, stay in school and don’t do drugs.

Now, if I could only get control of all of the creepy readership being directed to my blog by my article on B.O.O.B.S.

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February 21, 2011 · 10:30 am

Ice Storm

 

Ice Storm

Trees covered in glass

So magical

Branches glisten in the morning light

And plink like wind chimes

As frozen appendages dance together in the wind

Then crack under the weight

of the ice

And crash to the ground

So destructive

One of nature’s anomalies

I am outside

in the bitter cold

The ground crunches under my feet

And when cars drive by

Everything blanketed

in a glistening coat

But the world does not stop

It will recover from the wounds

And in due time

the warm sun will shine

Where the thick ice

once exhibited its radiant beauty

and wreaked

it’s calamitous ruin

 

 

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February 18, 2011 · 4:01 pm

The Interview

Hey, all you BRC fans… like OMG… you’ll never believe this.  I was contacted by Blogger World Magazine for an interview about my blog. How cool is that?  Crazy stuff… here’s the text of the interview:

BWM:  Steve, thanks for taking some time out of your busy day to speak with me. Let’s start with a simple question… how old are you? 

STEVE:  Last September I turned 43, my hair and complexion is still in it’s 30’s, my joints are in their late 50’s.

BWM:  Okay, interesting… well Steve, it looks like you have been actively blogging since about late December of 2010.  Why’d you start blogging and what is your blog about?

STEVE:  Well I started blogging because I was finding I wasn’t able to waste enough time on Facebook, it was getting boring, everybody bitching about stuff and trying to be profound by quoting famous people.  BORING!!!  Plus I was always struggling to fit my long Facebook posts into the limited number of characters they allow. So, I just started writing stuff about me and my life and I had all these Word documents scattered all over my computer, like a virtual messy desk. I figured I’d consolidate them into a blog. That’s pretty much it.  What is it about?  Well, it’s about my average life in a small country town, living with my wife and my kids and a couple of goats and a 180 lb. St. Bernard named Sarge and a bunch of cats and anything else I can think to write about.

BWM:  Wow, sounds like you have a lot of animals.  Do you plan on getting any more?

STEVE:  My daughter wants a horse, she’s been taking riding lessons. My wife kinda wants a horse too. So we’ll probably have a couple of horses soon. Yeah, I know, how frickin’ nuts is that? Seriously though, I have always liked the idea of horses grazing in our pastures… when I am near them though, they scare the shit out of me. Someday I’ll write about the time I was on a trail ride, about 10 years old, and I was thrown from a horse. At the time I was pretty sure we were running down the trail at warp-speeds like Cowboys and Indians racing across the plains of Montana or something… I freaked out and fell off. Came to find out later we were pretty much just galloping down the path on geriatric trail horses.  A very humbling experience…

BWM:  I’ve noticed while reading your blog that you periodically bitch and moan about your job, what do you do?

STEVE:  I’ve worked in a family retail business for about 18 years. Retail can be great and it can be a brutal business, not only in terms of the crazy hours, but in terms of the beating your body takes.

BWM:  Well then, what would you do if you could do anything in the world, any career?

STEVE:  Honestly I’d probably lie around on a beach and drink margaritas all day, but that isn’t very responsible.  Second choice would be to be a writer, but that’s virtually impossible to make a living at…. fuck you, I hate that question… why would you ask me a stupid-ass question like that?

BWM:  Hey sorry about that… but speaking of swear words, in your blog you occasionally use profanity. In real life do you really swear like a… how did you put it… a stripper in a titty-bar?”

STEVE:  Only when my kids are not around… or if I am patronizing a titty-bar.  Ha ha… no, seriously, I am just kidding! I am a pretty clean-cut dude, but I let do let an f-bomb slip occasionally… hey I’m fucking human, alright!  Funny story… the other day, I walk into the bathroom, my daughter is in there getting all gussied up like teenagers do and I walk over and I’m standing in front of the mirror, man-grooming or whatever you want to call it… and I say out loud, “dude you are so fucking handsome!”  Just slipped right out, right in front of my 13-yr old… she just looked at me like, “Dad, you’re such an asshole.”  She didn’t actually say it, but she had that look… you know, that look…

BWM:  In your Gravatar picture you look like a farmer… are you maybe a little bit of a gentleman farmer?

STEVE:  Seriously, what the hell is a gentleman farmer?  When people say that I picture this dude standing out in his garden in a blue oxford button-down dress shirt, khaki Dockers and penny-loafers… maybe one of those big straw hats on his head… and a hoe, yeah definintely with a hoe.  I just don’t really know what that means… but to answer the question, no, I am about as far from a farmer as one can be. A friend of mine once said “you become a farmer when it no longer bothers you to step in shit.” Well I have to step in a lot of shit and it doesn’t really bother me that much… but no, I’m not a farmer. I do own a full-body winter Carhartt, which I am wearing in that photo and which my mother gave me for Christmas about 15 years ago.  One of the greatest things a guy can invest in… a Carhartt.  That and shit boots.  My wife bought me a nice pair of shit boots this past Christmas.

BWM:  What is that baseball hat you are wearing in the photo?

STEVE:  It’s a Colby College hat.  That’s where I learned to drink… uh, I mean went to college… and that’s where I met my wife.

BWM:  So you’re a drinker huh? What is your favorite alcoholic beverage?

STEVE:  I used to be mostly a beer drinker, about a decade ago I became primarily a wine drinker. I am not picky, boxes and jugs are ok with me. There’s certain places though where you really need to order a beer or you’ll look like a serious nancy-boy sitting there with a wine flute full of Chardonnay, surrounded by guys that work in construction or other trades that are swilling down Budweiser. Funny story… when I first moved here my Dad was visiting and we stopped at a local bar for a drink, one of those great local bars that has a neon sign outside that says “BEER”.  I had never been in there at the time, but that sign should have been our first clue. The waitress asked him what he wanted… he asked for a Pinot Grigio… I’m thinking, “c’mon Dad don’t embarrass the shit out of me, I just moved here… and then the waitress didn’t know what it was… she’s like, “a what?”  He says… “you know, like a white wine”… about ½ hour later we see them opening up a cheap-ass wine box… I still suspect they ran down to the grocery store and bought it. Can’t remember, but I’m pretty sure I ordered a beer that day.

BWM:  That’s funny! Your blog says…

STEVE:  Wait, I got another one.  This one’s really funny!  Awhile back my wife and kids and I and my uncle are at this restaurant near us… out in the middle of nowhere… a place where on weekends they have country line dancing… that says something right there!  So we’re ordering dinner and the three adults are all gonna order wine, so one of us suggests, why don’t we just get a bottle.  So we ask for a bottle and this waitress is standing there and looking all stunned, like a deer in the headlights.  Clearly no-one has EVER ordered a bottle of wine in this place… seriously… I mean no one.  So a little while later, she comes back with one of those 1.5 liter bottles that you buy at the grocery store, uncorks it, plops it down on the table… first words out of my mouth, “this is my kinda place!”

BWM:  Your blog says you grew up on Long Island. Did you have 80’s feathered hair and did you really wear parachute pants?

STEVE:  We moved to Long Island in 1977 from Michigan. My two older brothers and I were grubby Michigan kids with long greasy hair and cut-off jean shorts with fringy strings hanging off the legs, serious dorks!  Couple of the new neighbors thought we were little girls at first.  We quickly converted to be Long Island Boys with feathered hair and fancy clothes… so yes I had feathered hair that was parted down the middle until I was in college. I used to fling it back out of my eyes with my hands and by throwing my head back, probably at least seven-hundred times a day. I think that may have something to do with why I have a herniated disc in my neck these days. As cool as they were, I did not ever actually own parachute pants. My oldest brother had a sweet pair of red ones.

BWM:  Are you still into clothes?

STEVE:  Yeah, I still like clothes, and I still put all kinds of shit in my hair each morning.

BWM:  What products do you use in your hair?

STEVE:  I use cheap stuff like Suave hair gel and hairspray. Look, I’m Metro but I’m also a cheap-ass.

BWM:  How many pairs of shoes do you own?

STEVE:  I have never counted them, but I have roughly four pairs of dress shoes, three pairs of work boots, a couple of pairs of Sperry deck shoes, one pair of sandals, a pair of running shoes, a pair of high-top basketball shoes, shoes that I cut the grass in… I think that is about it!  Your questions are getting a little bit lame, are you running out of questions?

BWM:  Well, bear with me… I have just a few more here on my list. What do you eat for breakfast?

STEVE:  Yeah, that’s definitely lame. Are people really gonna care what I eat for breakfast? Dude, that’s just not that interesting… hey, but since you asked, I mostly eat Cheerios even though they taste like shit.  It helps me keep my girlish figure. I also eat a lot of eggs.  Hey, if I die from high cholesterol, well so be it.  I always say to my wife, “you gotta die of something.”  She hates that shit!  Seriously though, I’m a pretty healthy guy… seriously…

BWM:  What other foods do you like to eat?

STEVE:  I love seafood.  Of course it’s not as readily available as it was when we lived out East, but there’s some good Whitefish that comes out of the Great Lakes.  My wife and I love to eat lobster and steamed mussels.  Not that shit you get at Red Lobster for like $60.00 a plate, where it’s all prepared and soaked in butter and spices, but a real boiled lobster that you buy live and stuff it into the boiling water.  I can’t cook them though, I think that’s mean… my wife does that, she doesn’t care, just shoves ’em right down into that boiling water… they’re like freakin’ out and wiggling and grabbing their claws onto the sides trying not to go in… damn… I can’t do that.  Imagine what that poor lobster is thinking, one day you’re living in the ocean, the next day you’re living in a fish tank at a grocery store, the next day you’re getting stuffed into a pot of boiling water?  Holy crap, that’s gotta suck!  You know, they scream when you do that… ha ha… no they don’t really, that’s just an old wives tale.  Funny story… one of the first lobsters I ever ate, I was up in Maine, summer after high school graduation, visiting Colby College with my Mom and grandmother. We were eating lobsters at a local restaurant. I grabbed the claw with one of those nutcracker tools to crack it open and it just vanished… the whole claw was nowhere in sight… just plain gone.  I looked around and about 20 feet away sitting on top of an empty table was the claw.  I started laughing my ass off… been a lobster fan ever since.

BWM:  What else do you like to do?  Are you a sports fan?  Music?

STEVE:  Yes I am a sports fan, but not like those guys that live and breathe it, that shit is a little over the top.  I have other hobbies like playing the guitar, writing and blogging… and sleeping, definitely a big fan of that.  If I could make a living sleeping, man I’d be set!  I like all kinds of music… my favorite musician though is Jackson Browne, love the guy, have since I was a kid, greatest musician and songwriter to ever set foot on this place we call Earth!  If there was any musician that I’d sit naked with in a jacuzzi with a flute of Chardonnay… yeah, he’d be the guy… not that I’m gay or anything like that… seriously… hey, maybe don’t print that last line…

BWM:  You mentioned your girlish figure, how do you stay in shape?

STEVE:  I lift weights down in my basement two to three times a week.  I call it the Cave because it’s a 120 year old Michigan basement, dirty, nasty, I’m down their breathing in oil-burner fumes and coal dust and other bad stuff.  Great way to stay ripped though, although I’ll probably have lung cancer some day.  Ha ha…you gotta die of something, right?  Seriously though… I’m not really ripped… maybe scrawny is a better word… but, hey when you go to print… use the word ripped… I’m cool with that. I also play basketball every Monday night with a bunch of other old guys like myself.  That shit might just kill me one of these days too.

BWM:  What nationality is your family?

STEVE:  I come from some Irish, Scottish, German, English, not sure what else is in there… thus the whole drinking thing!  My mother did a family tree a long time ago and found an American Indian woman, somewhere down the line.  Not sure if that is really true or not.  We also had a relative that signed the Declaration of Independance.  No one you’ve probably heard of.  Probably just some dude that was drunk and sleeping off a bender in the back of the church and they figured he was part of the Constitutional Convention or whatever it was called.  Can’t you picture Thomas Jefferson handing this dude the paper and pen… “c’mon buddy, sign here, so we can get the hell out of here, we’ve been sitting in this place all fucking day… I just want to go throw back a few brewskies down at Old City Tavern.”

BWM:  Do you have hemorrhoids?

STEVE:  Whoa… hey now, that’s a pretty personal question… where the fuck did that question come from anyway?  I mean sure, haven’t we all occasionally battled hemorrhoids before.  But seriously… don’t print that question… what the fuck is wrong with you… that’s just way out of line… seriously…..

BEEP… BEEP…  BEEP… BEEP… BEEP…

WIFE:  Honey… wake up, your alarm is going off….

STEVE:  What…. huh… oh… okay… sorry… I didn’t hear it… I was having the strangest dream…

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