My father and brother succumb to what I call the “Roomba Paradox” which is that any time saved by using the device is lost to simply staring at the thing operate. My father has faithfully followed mine around to three rooms on our ground floor to watch the pattern and my brother will physically relocate dirt in front of his rather than just letting it roam about. I appear to be immune to this phenomenon and in polling other Roomba owners the brake seems to occur sharply with those born in 1983. Maybe additional data will narrow it to a particular month.
Tag: Dad
Getting to the Bottom of Dog Health
My dog Max had two tumors removed from his haunches three years ago and we’ve been checking for returns regularly. Over the last year my dad’s been noting the growth of a large… something near where Max’s legs meet his body.  We took him to the vet and my dad asked me to interpret the results:
Dad: Doctor said Max had “excess fat in his subcutaneous tissue”. What do we do about it?
Me: Feed him less and have him get more exercise.
Dad: What’s that going to do about a tumor?
Me: It’s not a tumor.
Dad: Certainly sounds like it.
Me: Dad, the vet’s telling us that Max has a fat ass.
Dad: Oh.
Magic Box
I started cutting my own hair this past weekend and did a touch-up today as I realized the spots I missed. A seasoned autosartorial maintenance wiz told me that doing a blind shave followed by a mirror-assisted second run is what separated the men from the boys. Next time I’ll try. For now, I’m collecting the shavings into a cardboard box as I don’t want to muss up my dad’s bathroom floor. The box is full of magic wrappers from opening stuff for the latest set and is now interspersed with a few strata of clippings.  Normally, I reseal the box but failed to and left it in the master bedroom.
Heard in the Robinson household at about 7:00 PM.
My Dad: Terry, what the hell have you and your friends been doing?
Magic Box
I started cutting my own hair this past weekend and did a touch-up today as I realized the spots I missed. A seasoned autosartorial maintenance wiz told me that doing a blind shave followed by a mirror-assisted second run is what separated the men from the boys. Next time I’ll try. For now, I’m collecting the shavings into a cardboard box as I don’t want to muss up my dad’s bathroom floor. The box is full of magic wrappers from opening stuff for the latest set and is now interspersed with a few strata of clippings.  Normally, I reseal the box but failed to and left it in the master bedroom.
Heard in the Robinson household at about 7:00 PM.
My Dad: Terry, what the hell have you and your friends been doing?
Computer First Discoveries
The draw of the computer has been stronger than I anticipated to my dad and I’ve had to relearn some basics about the interface. For instance:
Dad: Hm… I’ve heard a lot about Google. But every time I search, there’s only two results.
Me: Two results?
Dad: Yeah, look. It says “results out of 2 million pages” where are they?
Me: Have you tried paging down?
Dad: Hm… Is that what the PgDn key I’ve been eying does?
Me: Yes.
Dad: This is easier than I thought.
On search specificity:
Dad: I’m getting too many results on snowplows. How can I narrow it down?
Me: Well, add other terms, like a brand, a size, or a region.
Dad: You mean you can search on multiple words at once? Hot damn.
Sometimes I get drunk with power and search on whole sentences or even a phrase and a name all at once.
21st Century Christmas
Procuring the gifts were the easy part but the advent of advanced computer technology have added the confounding variable of having to now configure a gift for the end user. My father is getting a digital camera and a tiny computer that will be his. I took the liberty of setting the date/time on the camera and began the XP Crapware Rite of Purging which ended after 3 hours of saying “yes” to “are you sure you want to remove this trial version of a program of dubious utility?” I made the icons giant, replaced IE with FireFox and set up my Windows Home Server to run a backup daily so should he discover the glories of the registry reversing the aftermath of exploratory computational surgery should be trivial.
I then started to pad the corners of the furniture, as it were, adding AdBlocker Plus and NoScript to Firefox but stopped at adding parental controls. I was mostly thinking of this as a way to stop phishing sites but am keen to avoid the “Terry, why can’t I get porn?” conversation. In fact, I’m tempted to have Firefox automatically clear its history so under no circumstances could I encounter a scenario where I could have this conversation.
Meeting the Vacuum
My cleaning methods are stepwise. Rooms or sets of rooms are purged of the extraneous. This has included trashing vestiges of youth, vestiges of family, and, in some cases seemingly, vestiges of others’ sanity. I recently attacked the chunk of rooms around my father’s bedroom and he decided to clean too. He filled four or five garbage bags with un-needed clothing and decided to do something he simply may have never done: use the vacuum.
I love our vacuum. It’s an early model Dyson and is capable of pulling a cats worth of hair out of the carpet. My brother and I have logged near a hundred hours on it and my dad broke it in ten minutes. Ten minutes. 10.
Me: How did you break the world’s greatest vacuum cleaner?
Him: I don’t know.
Me: Fix it!
— 12 hours later —
Him: Well, I think I fixed it.
Me: What was wrong?
Him: I somehow sucked up a ballpoint pen. I thought the Dyson was poorly designed but after the third hour I came to an understanding. The vacuum was more than the sum of its well constructed parts. I once thought it was overhyped plastic but I have learned. I’ve made peace with the vacuum.
Good to know my father’s enough of a man to be able to make peace with an inanimate object. One day I shall too.
Improvisational Pet Medicine
So, the cat’s head wounds have largely cleared up but it still looks someone went at his throat with a fillet knife. My father’s convinced he’s scratching at it. I proposed we get him a cat cone much like we’d used on our dog, Max. My father thought this would make an outdoor hat a sitting duck against the various feral beasts that roam our grounds and in a flash of inspiration he proposed we tie a sock around his throat. Yes, a sock. I caught him trying to size one up for our cat but it appears that to make it work we’d have to get a very long sock or tie a knot so tight that the neck wound would no longer be our cat’s greatest issue.
Hiding Food Crimes
Me: When Dave gets back, I think he’ll be miffed the mice ate into his box of mini-muffins, Pop Tarts, and Cookie Bars.
Dad: Do you think he’ll believe the mice have built an arctic outpost in the freezer?
Me: Why?
Dad: Because I’m slowly eating through all his ice cream sandwiches.
Culinary Amnesia
I’ve been doing a flurry of my regular baking plus some casseroles trying some options (I’ve yet to use Sabbath mode) but appear to have lost track. My dad informed me that he finished my pie and he thought it was delicious. When did I make a pie? I haven’t made one in weeks, and it was clearly done in one of my pie dishes. So either I’m baking with such ferocity my mind is repressing the memory or my dad just finished of a pie that saw Obama inaugurated. Hm..