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OA weekend Sundays have three distinct of which the first is to wake up at a time before you ever should and be forced to be fully composed in front of children who’ve just gone through a possibly life changing experience. The combination of fatique, disorientation, and putting on an air of composure will probably be the closest I ever come to being hung over.

The second part is suffering through a 150 minute lodge meeting while the kids elect new lodge officers. Normally this takes a while, as it did this year but for an entirely novel reason: the Ajapeu #33 operating procedures require anyone elected to receive 1/2 the submitted votes, in the case of this not happening, the vote’s reheld with a 2 person run-off that should theoretically guarantee someone getting in. This time, an unusually large number of kids wrote in either “blank” or some non-sense name that even with only two people running, no one person got half the votes cast. The Lodge Adviser had exceptional coolness when faced with this and after the 3rd try, I think the kids got the gravity of the situation. Part and parcel with this are the election speeches, my favorites being those who simply shit talk their predecessor or those that fabricate facts. Lodge participation, brotherhood conversion, and event attendance is on the rise with the only real concern being that event prices haven’t kept up with costs yet each person wanted to make the lodge “more like it used to be”.

The final part is going home and simply faceplanting to recover from the weekend. I wanted to do this but my pillow, comforter, and even comfy shoes were located in Tucson. I’ll make up for this by simply staring blankly at the wall for two hours when I return to my Tucson host’s house.

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There are some little tasks I do around the house that I consider important sorting mail and filtering out things that shouldn’t go into the fridge.  I was worried about these being completed during my time away but returned to see that they’d been done with mixed results:

1) The mail was sorted into two piles: My dad’s mail and everyone else’s

2)The Roomba was on charge and had appeared to run a few times based on the tracks in the carpet but the carpet was dirty.  The operator doesn’t seem to have ever emptied the device.

3) The fridge was very clean.  Partly because whomever cleaned it out threw out the baby with the bathwater in chucking not only the leftovers but the containers they were in.  Also, I’m pretty sure before I left there was 2 lbs of sealed Irish bacon that was nowhere near expiring.  Either something went very wrong with it or something went very right.

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While our tenants are theoretically renters we’ve very much taken a “you break it you bought it” attitude to home repairs.  One accidentally flushed a toilet bowl freshener which stopped up the toilet in ways that polyurethane foam couldn’t.  He attacked it for several hours with a combination of a plunger, a toilet snake, a trash bag, and a beer can (?) and I thought he was victorious.  Based on much loud cursing, a little sobbing, and a sticky note that said “DO NOT USE” affixed to the toilet I guess he wasn’t.

A day later, inspiration apparently struck as I was sitting at my computer and heard him yell “aha!” at 2 AM.  There was a flurry of activity that ended with what sounded like a shower and him returning to bed.  His triumph was confirmed by a new stick it note: “USE!!!”  The previous note had been moved to a roll of paper towels that were… browned.

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I left work early to meet the FiOS technician who was install my father’s TV service.  Four months without the Mystical Hitler/Bigfoot History Channel rendered him near catatonic and he clawed open his wallet to fix it.  The technician arrived and things went poorly quickly:

Him: Where’s your existing install? We’ll need to replace the router with something that supports the TV service.
Me: NO!!! NOT ABRAHAM LINKSYS! There’s got to be another way to do it.
Him: Nope, the new router manages port forwarding and DNS to get the menu stuff.
Me: So you’re telling me that not only are you going to take my router but you’ll prevent me from custom DNS lookups?
Him: Yes.
Me: Well, can’t we do it as a separate install?
Him: If you were an apartment conplex yes, but if you were you’d need a commercial service.
Me: In fact, this floor is zoned separately from the ground floor.  I board here but this closet is shared as part of a communications easement [Editor’s Note: At this point, I began spewing a collection of bullshit that caused the portion of my brain responsible for memory to go into shock.  All I remember is that I ended with “so that’s why there’s an exterior door in my bedroom” and he nodded in agreement.]

I don’t think he actually bought what I said so much as he realized the potential problem caused by disturbing a possibly unstable fat white guy who named his router “Abraham Linksys”.  Sometimes looking a little batshit crazy helps.

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Most rituals of American Christmas were outsourced to one our tenants’ girlfriends.  She decorated the tree, purchased a poinsettia, and even set up stockings.  Today, she filled those stockings but with only two items: candy canes and wet wipes.  Either she was never able to master the tactic of slowly removing the wrapping as one finishes the candy cane or doesn’t think we have.  I suppose an alternative is her simply thinking us pigs, also reasonable.

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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.

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My brother is growing up and buying his a house (with assistance) and I’m mourning/celebrating his imminent departure.  I looked around the house, joyed at the crap he’d take with him, especially the things that were my mother’s that he took over, like the curio for porcelain filled with shot glasses or stereo cabinet that nicely holds 3 rifles, 2 shotguns and enough ammo to stop a smallish epidemic of the Rage.  I hope he takes the television he destroyed innocently enough by repeatedly smashing helicopters into it during his “things that fly with blades spinning parallel to the floor” phase which was succeeded by his “things that fly with blades spinning perpendicular to the floor” phase.  The latter took up much room and our pool room is now a graveyard of Styrofoam and scale appropriate hack jobs or so I’m told.  I didn’t realize that when a plane’s tail falls off it’s reattached with a 18 inch wide piece of cellophane tape and girded with logs or what ever a scaled up bamboo skewer would be.

But the things I’ll miss the most are the odd periods of excitement/terror that accompanied my brother discovering some new problem or situation in the house that was best fixed by a large calibre handgun.  Today’s was “don’t be alarmed if you hear a loud bang *holds up revolver* but the pumpkin has to die”.  Little did I know that the proper tool to open a pumpkin to retrieve seeds was not a pearing knife but a Smith & Wesson.  Who knew?

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I’ve always hated with a profound passion product commercials with ridiculous setups such as the vacuum cleaner that demolishes a pyramid of sand (my favorite was the hand-held vacuum that picked up a bucket of bolts on carpet, like they’d spilled there moments before a party was to begin).  During my road to colonic convalescence I’ve taken to soup and cereal.  As the cereal level dropped the box started wobbling, nudged by the ceiling fan until it toppled, lid open and landed open-side down on the kitchen floor.  I lifted the box leaving a nice pyramid of cereal.  I reached for the un-necessarily strong hand-vacuum and a piece of me died as it casually consumed the cereal that would have otherwise been left for the dog.

Next up: Dropping my bolt collection onto the rug moments before my brother starts a kegger.

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I’ve always hated with a profound passion product commercials with ridiculous setups such as the vacuum cleaner that demolishes a pyramid of sand (my favorite was the hand-held vacuum that picked up a bucket of bolts on carpet, like they’d spilled there moments before a party was to begin).  During my road to colonic convalescence I’ve taken to soup and cereal.  As the cereal level dropped the box started wobbling, nudged by the ceiling fan until it toppled, lid open and landed open-side down on the kitchen floor.  I lifted the box leaving a nice pyramid of cereal.  I reached for the un-necessarily strong hand-vacuum and a piece of me died as it casually consumed the cereal that would have otherwise been left for the dog.

Next up: Dropping my bolt collection onto the rug moments before my brother starts a kegger.

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I was sent home yesterday by one of the camp’s august medical experts after having shat in multiples of 5 for the last few days.  All was well, I thought, until I returned to camp, had a sandwich whereas a four hour count-down began to colonic destruction.

Normally, I wouldn’t mind being sent home, except for I have no bed (it’s at camp), no air conditioning (we’re cheap), and no amazing computer (it’s at camp).  I arrived at home, scared the shit out of my brothe’s friend in the garage, and was promptly visited by my mother who didn’t otherwise know I was home.  At this point, I was sweating over a bowl of hot soup, using my laptop, while my mother kept talking about her damn new house.  I really wanted to go back to camp.

Later, after my mother had asked me to see her tree fort (as I call her new house) two dozen times I went to play Team Fortress 2, thinking my brother’s computer would do.  22 inches on a dual core is nothing compared to 30 inches on a quad core.  I really wanted to go back to camp.  My dad arrived later, said hello, and I rolled my eyes when he proposed we have a quality family meal…. from Taco Bell.  I figured if I was going to shit like a firehose I should at least have an excuse.  He then asked me if I would be home for a day or so.  I said yes, and he told me to mow the lawn.  I really wanted to go back to camp.

I went to bed last night in my room that was covered in stuff that had been put there thinking I wouldn’t be back for a month or so, and cleared space for an air matress.  I did, and it leaked, from like four different spots.  I figure I’d try it and woke up 90 minutes later to a scene that looked like a bad rip off of “Death Bed, the Bed that Eats People” as I sink into the vinyl chasm.  I repeat the re-inflation/absorption cycle a 1/2 dozen times before my brother pokes in, says “the bed has a hole in it” and tells me to pick up a package for him in Langhorne.   I really want to go back to camp.

If I have to fake health with enough Imodium to constipate a sperm whale, by God, I will.