Work it out

I went to the gym the other day. When I signed in, I swiped a little key card, and my name came up on a computer screen, along with a little information about me. For example, it read “Number of visits this year – 1.” Well, it’s only January.

But underneath that it read, “Number of visits last year – 1.” Wow, now I’m getting mocked by a computer. It was a scene right out of 2001.

OK, so last year was a tough year, but this year I’m committed to at least tripling my workouts from the previous 12 months.

I went into the locker room and began changing clothes, and caught something out of the corner of my eye. “Whoa,” I said to myself, “when did they start letting women come in here? And ugly ones, at that!” Of course I soon realized I was looking in the mirror, and those breasts were mine. Now it made sense why that woman had a goatee.

I have to tell you, being this out of shape is making me miserable. I get winded changing the channel on the TV. I used to be in pretty good shape. Now I just have a pretty bad shape. I don’t have washboard abs, I have washtub abs. Babies look at my chest and lick their lips. I spotted myself, or at least my backside, on one of those TV news segments about how Americans are obese.

The tightness of my clothes has become an issue. When I wear blue jeans, I’m afraid that at any minute the button is going to pop and become a small missile. When I take them off, it looks I have tattooed the word “Levi’s” backwards just under my belly button.

My first workout of the year was not particularly strenuous. I got on the treadmill and put it on the “Old man walking to the front of the room to collect his bingo prize” setting. Then I bumped it up to “Teenager working in a retail store” speed. Pretty soon I was sweating like a Tennessee fan taking a drug test (they always worry that they didn’t study enough). Since I wasn’t sure anybody around me knew CPR, I cut the workout short at about 20 minutes.

Hey, it’s a start. I didn’t get this big overnight. I’m going to ramp up my workouts and cut back on my eating and before long I’ll be able to drive home without unbuttoning my pants, and I’ll be able to take my shirt off in the summer at the beach without somebody calling Sea World and reporting an escape. I may not look like Fabio, but I can at least stop looking like a slightly-hairy pregnant woman, and I’ll make that stupid ridiculing computer eat its words.

No rest for the weary

I was sitting on the couch the other night, wearing my colorful superhero pajama pants and a T-shirt. I had a fresh sleeve of soda crackers, a cold drink, a Georgia Bulldogs snuggie over my knees, something about Hitler playing on The History Channel, a fire in the fireplace, a book to read in case the show was boring, and a fat dog stretched out by the couch, snoring and farting in unison. It was 8:05 p.m., and I was settled in for the night.

Take it easy, ladies. I know that visual is making you hot.

There should be a rule. Once a man has settled in for the night, he should be expected to do nothing that requires any effort until the next day. It’s a cutoff point. This lane is closed. Come back tomorrow.

But, no. My reverie was shattered by groans and semi-curses from the kitchen. “There’s water everywhere under the sink,” my wife said, to nobody in particular, but loud enough for me to hear. I suspect that was on purpose. However, that did not prevent me from pretending I didn’t hear it.

“Oh, this is great,” I heard her say, a little louder. I was going to my offer my opinion that it was probably a short-term, one-time, minor leak, and I would look at it the following morning, when she said, “There’s water shooting out everywhere.” Well, now I had a dilemma. It was looking more and more like I was going to have to go check it out.

Look, I don’t mind doing things around the house, but once you’re settled in, if you break out of it, well, you’ll never get that comfortable feeling back. Once the spell is broken, it can’t be remade. But one more scream from the kitchen convinced me that I had better go check it out, or at least pretend to.

After unloading everything under the sink and drying up the water (the volume of which had been highly exaggerated, I might add), I crawled under there and found the issue – there’s a crack in the hose for the sprayer attachment. I instantly solved the problem: “Just don’t use the sprayer any more,” I said. But she told me that she uses it all the time, so I said OK, I’ll fix it. Just not tonight.

I got back to the couch, but as I’d feared, the thrill was gone. Hitler had invaded two more countries since I’d left the TV, Lucky wanted to go out (to escalate the farts, I assumed), my drink was flat, and the fire had almost died. Nevertheless, I gave it a shot and crawled back into my little slice of paradise.

Then I hear, “Dad!” Let me tell you something about kids. Once they reach a certain age, anytime you hear “Dad”, it is followed by something that is not good. When they’re little, it’s “Dad, I drew you a picture,” or “Dad, can you read me a story?” In the teen years, they either want something or they’ve broken something.

My son says, “You need to come check out the sink in my bathroom.” What is with the sinks? Why, I asked. Well, he explained it, but by now he was speaking Teenagese, which sort of sounds like a drunk person with cotton in their mouth speaking Mandarin Chinese underwater, so I went up to check it out myself. It turns out the stopper was stuck down in the drain, and the sink was full of water which would not go down. I’m not going to claim I fixed the problem, but using a plastic cup and a Swiss Army knife, I at least got rid of the water.

So now, I have at least two minor plumbing jobs ahead of me this weekend, assuming nothing else breaks before then. I finally made it to back to the couch, but by then it was close to bedtime, so I didn’t get to enjoy it. I closed my eyes and dreamed of a better day ahead.

No such luck. This morning involved a screaming match, a frantic search for a lost inhaler and a car with a dead battery. I wonder what joys tonight holds in store?

Snow day

It snowed a bit here last night, just enough to make us go crazy and to make all the transplanted Yankees make fun of us for closing school due to a half-inch of snow.

Well, anybody complaining about our snow excitement can do what Jerry Lee Lewis told England to do back in the ’50s. If we want to go insane over a few flakes, that’s our right. We ain’t hurtin’ nobody.

I can remember as a child getting so excited at the prospect of snow. My mother would look up at the sky some times on cold winter days and pronounce authoritatively, “Those are snow clouds.” Now, my mother was born in Hawkinsville, Ga., and never lived outside of central Georgia her whole life. So she wouldn’t know a “snow cloud” from a snow pea, but I believed her back then.

She would also say sometimes, “It’s too cold to snow.” I guess maybe she was just saying that to help me deal with my disappointment, in case nothing happened. It didn’t strike me until years later that it snows quite a lot at the North Pole, for example, and it gets pretty stinking cold up there. Colder than it ever got in Hawkinsville.

The prospect of playing in the snow was always better than the reality. Because once you got out into it, you realized that this stuff was cold and wet and pretty much unpleasant. I’d be good for about 15 minutes, and then I’d be banging on the door to come back in and drink some hot chocolate.

The reason we didn’t have much fun playing in the snow is we weren’t equipped. We didn’t have big heavy coats and galoshes and gloves. There was no need for them. So my mom would send me outside with empty plastic bread wrappers tied over my tennis shoes. Instead of gloves, she would put socks on my hands, and I would be wearing my dad’s too-big coat and a stocking cap. I looked like something out of a Dickens’ novel.

I can only remember a couple of really major snow events in my life. In 1982, a snowstorm hit in the middle of the afternoon unexpectedly, and it was followed by several days of sub-freezing temps, so the roads could never get passable. I was stranded at a friend’s place and spent three days in a small house with five people and a surly Chihuahua. There was no Internet or cell phones or Playstation then, and most people didn’t have a satellite dish, so we ate Little Debbie snacks and watched re-runs of “Meadowlark Lemon and the Bucketeers” on cable TV. Good times.

The other big snowstorm happened in March of 1993, part of a major storm that affected the entire Eastern United States. That one wasn’t much fun because I had a baby, a pregnant wife and no electricity, so we had to stay at my brother’s house for a while. At least he didn’t have a Chihuahua.

I guess we’re about due for a good, old-fashioned snow event that shuts down the whole state for a few days. All it will take is maybe two inches of snow. Well, bring it on. I have firewood, a supply of Little Debbies and a big dog with a good disposition to ride it out with.

Not off to a flying start

This new year has begun, but I want a do-over.

Oh, it started out all right. The first few days were fine. My daughter turned 18 and to celebrate, we took her to a nice restaurant in Atlanta, where I dropped a couple of benjamins on dinner. It sort of made me miss the days of Chuck E Cheese.

Then, Monday came, the first day back at work of the new year, a time of promise, and renewal, and rededication, and what the hell am I talking about? It was a miserable day.

First off, I woke up and it was 18 degrees outside. Hello, I live in Georgia. I don’t function in cold weather. If I wanted this, I’d move to Saskatoon. I was promised there would be global warming, but no. I get 18 degrees. There’s an inconvenient truth for you.

I went and cranked up my car and let it sit in the driveway for about 10 minutes, so it could warm up and wouldn’t feel like the inside of a refrigerator when I got in to go to work. Well, I climbed in, and it didn’t feel like a refrigerator, it felt like a freezer. I had the heat on maximum, but it was blowing out air colder than Hitler’s heart. My fingers froze to the steering wheel. Note to self: get car’s heater fixed.

I drove on to work, and after about 30 minutes, the air changed from frigid to tepid, so I didn’t become the first person to ever freeze to death on I-75 in a 2002 Chevy Impala. But, it being Monday, and in Atlanta, and the first day back to work, traffic was a nightmare because there was ice on the highway.

So I took a detour and rode through a lovely stretch of Atlanta called Metropolitan Parkway, formerly known as Stewart Avenue. Let’s just say this is not the part of the city that the chamber of commerce puts on its brochures. Luckily, it was so cold that even the hookers and pimps stayed indoors.

At this point I looked down and noticed that the car’s fuel gauge was on “less than empty.” Well, now I was faced with the prospect of running out of gas in a sketchy part of town – oh, and did I mention it was 18 degrees? Finally I located a gas station in the shadow of the Georgia Dome, and breathed a sigh of relief, until I noticed that every single pump was covered by a black garbage bag, the universal sign of, “We ain’t got no gas.”

I held my breath and decided to risk it, and I made it to work without running out. That’s when I realized I had left my employee badge at home. If you work in a big company, you are nothing without your employee badge. You can’t even get into the bathrooms. This was foretold in the Book of Revelation.

So instead of getting to park in the employee deck, I was forced to park in the visitor’s lot, which is conveniently located about 10 miles from the building’s entrance. After walking into a freezing 40-mph wind, leaning forward at a 45-degree angle so I wouldn’t get blown away, I got to the building, picked up a temporary badge and began to eagerly do my work.

By noon I felt like I had the Black Plague (trust me, it’s bad), so I went home and flirted with death for a couple of hours. I fell asleep, only to have my daughter enter the bedroom and say, “Dad?” “What?” I moaned. “Nothing,” she said. “I just wanted to see if you were alive.” Yes, I told her, I was alive, and now, unfortunately, awake.

I made it through the rest of the day without incident, all the while silently hoping that the year was only going to get better from here. This morning, I awoke a new man, ready to start again. I had my badge with me, I heard on the TV that traffic was light, and I was going to drive the Mustang I bought for my son to work so I wouldn’t freeze during the commute.

I showered, got dressed, and went outside to warm up his Mustang before I left for work. That was when I discovered that he had a dead battery, as he had left the headlights on all night. So now, I had to drive to work in mostly-heaterless Impala yet again. Did I mention that it was again 18 degrees outside?

This is gonna be a long year.