Would it be considered “unmanly” of me to hire a guy to come change a lightbulb for me?

Does it change your opinion if I explain that said lightbulb is about 20 feet up in the air?!

Either this house was originally intended to be occupied by one or more members of The Harlem Globetrotters or I’m in a bit over my head here … pun most definitely intended! The latest challenge that I’ve been faced with recently in our quest to get settled in our new home is changing the burnt out lightbulb outside above our front porch.  Just one stupid, little lightbulb – that’s all it is, and yet here I am at my wit’s end because there’s physically no way for me to get up there high enough to actually change it!

Sure, we’ve got a ladder that our landlord left behind that gets me part of the way, but even violating good ladder safety and standing on my tippy toes it’s still not nearly high enough to even touch the fixture, much less actually be able to open the thing up and swap out the bulb inside.  And yes, I could simply buy a new ladder that would thrust me even further into the stratosphere, but before we throw a parade and hoist up the “Mission Accomplished” banner too prematurely, lest I remind you of one other important factor to consider – I’m a gigantic wuss when it comes to heights.

I’m not afraid of a lot of things – a few things, maybe, but I think overall it’s a good, healthy number with reasonable justifications for each and every one of them.  Rollercoasters – if I really wanted to tempt fate over a quick adrenaline rush, I’d buy a motorcycle.  Deep water – where do you think that sharks live?!  A dark, empty house in the middle of the night – might as well just paint “Come rob me!” right across the front door!  Then again, with my porch light not working right now, I guess any prospective robbers wouldn’t be able to see it anyways…

Regardless, though, heights is definitely the worst of them that I have to contend with, which normally isn’t too big of a deal because it’s a rare occasion when I find myself without both feet firmly planted on good, old reliable ground.  Even around Christmastime I seem to muster up the courage to scale a relatively short ladder in the name of holiday decorating, but this – in truth, I’m probably just as likely to scale Mt. Everest as I am to climb to the top of the 20-foot ladder needed to shed some light on this particular predicament.

How that simple peasant in Jack and the Beanstalk did it, I’ll never know!

The way I see it, I really only have a couple of other options here:

1. Learn to live without a porch light, although it makes coming home with groceries tough, and I’m thinking trick-or-treaters may not be too thrilled come Halloween, either.
2. Hire a Mountain Sherpa to help guide me safely up the surface of our house, or maybe even see if for a few extra bucks he’ll just change the thing out himself.
3. Rent a helicopter to hover over our front lawn in the evening hours, though admittedly this might not make us very popular amongst our new neighbors.

Of course, if I happen to have any 20-foot tall readers out there who might be in the neighborhood anytime soon, what better way to show your appreciation for my hilarious commentary every week than by using your freakish mutation to help me avoid confronting one of my darkest fears?!  In the meantime, I’m going to go ahead and start pricing out mountain men and helicopter rentals, but if you feel like stopping by, my house should be pretty easy to find – it’ll be the one with the burnt out porch light…

Have YOU ever tried to put one of these things together?!

Gingerbread houses are one of those quintessential icons of these beloved winter holidays, right there alongside happy snowmen and sparkling lights and Christmas cookies piled higher than any one man should ever dare to possibly consume!  I mean, what better way to help transition into Christmastime after a bountiful Thanksgiving feast than by building your own edible encomium of holiday spirit, complete with a Skittle-tiled roof and gumdrop shrubberies?

It seemed like a grand idea to my wife and I, too, as we cleared off the coffee table and cracked open The Official Gingerbread House Kit that she had picked up at the store in between shopping for gifts for her ridiculously spoiled husband, however as we were both quick to learn even before getting royal icing over roughly two-thirds of our living room, building a simple house out of cookies and frosting and assorted candies is a lot tougher than it actually looks!  Here I thought that me eating the construction materials would be the biggest challenge that we would face during our gingerbread humanitarian efforts … who knew that not having a child under the age of 12 on hand to provide their vital, structural insight would prove to be our real sugar-coated downfall???

For some reason kids just seem to have a knack at building this kind of stuff – maybe it’s because their little minds have yet to be inundated with zoning regulations and HOA restrictions and the laws of physics! I mean, you look at our house and it’s honestly a wonder that the thing even stands up at all – the entire structure leans like it would be perfect for someone out of one of those V8 old commercials (“V8 – Keep your diet straight!”), but in all reality, there’s no way this house would ever pass a home inspection. And even if it did, I’m sure that the homeowner’s insurance rates would just be sky high – the place would be a real field day for the Big Bad Wolf, to say the least…

Still, I think some good did come of this brief stint of ours into the world of residential cookie construction in that it gave us some valuable pointers to consider when we’re finally ready to buy our own home in a couple of years.  You know, things like:

• M&M’s may not necessarily be the safest material to use for a sidewalk, as they look like they could probably get pretty slippery when it rains.
• Be careful to consider HOA-approved colors when selecting your gumdrop shrubberies.  Also keep in mind that most HOAs have height restrictions, so you’re going to need to keep those beauties trimmed on a regular basis.
• Probably the most important feature to include with your house?  A door! Because although standing outside admiring your new home can be fun, nothing beats a door for actually going inside…

As for the actual building, whether it involves royal icing or actual nails, maybe it’s best that next time we leave that to the professionals!  In the meantime, though, if anybody needs me I’ll be outside playing electrician as I try to get 10,000 lights working without knocking out power to the rest of the subdivision…

Everything must go!!!

…mainly because otherwise keeping a lot of this stuff around would impose a health hazard on everyone within a 1,500-foot radius of our previously humble, but now somewhat frightening abode.  Of course, I probably wouldn’t feel nearly as guilty about my lack of culinary cleanliness if you could take just a moment to check out your own cupboard and realize that you’ve still got stuff in there dating back to before President Obama took office, too…

Yeah, those dates that you can’t even read because they’re so faded?  Not a good sign, or so I’m told…

The funny thing is, unlike cleaning out one’s refrigerator, which tends to have its own set of pungent prompts that make themselves blatantly apparent once your food starts getting to the point of reproducing asexually and growing its own layer of protective, blue fur, there really aren’t any warning signs whatsoever that the seventeen boxes of Cap’n Crunch in your cupboard are going bad until you finally crack one of those babies open and end up cutting the insides of your mouth even more than normal on a handful of stale cereal.  There is no Bleeech Effect when it comes to cupboard-based foods, which frankly I think is a real design flaw because maybe if some of these boxes would’ve started stinking up the joint, I would’ve actually addressed the problem, well, years ago!

For you see, my own journey into the dark and cavernous depths of the inner cupboard this spring didn’t exactly occur out of some sort of sudden concern for public safety or a freshness fetish, if you will (try saying that three times fast!), but in actuality it simply arose instead out of a very basic concept – there wasn’t enough room to put away all of the crap that I had just brought home from the store. It doesn’t need to be any more detailed than that, but I can tell you that the learnings that stemmed from that there moment are still amazing to me as I write this days later!

I learned, for example, that tea bags actually have expiration dates.

I discovered that we had no less than four boxes of cereal in our cupboard that neither of us even like! Presumably, these were purchased during various guest visits over the years, but even then, who the hell eats Fiber One, anyways?!

I found that I really wish that I would’ve just splurged last Christmas and made one extra batch of gingerbread cookies because if I had, there wouldn’t have been a half-empty bottle of molasses in our cupboard to leave really sticky and nasty stains all over the place.

I also came to notice that some companies try to be all clever with their Expiration Dates by instead calling them Best Used By Dates … but don’t be fooled – if that Easy Mac was Best Used By July 2007, it’s done expired by now!

And don’t even ask me where some of this stuff came from because I really haven’t the foggiest idea.  What’s sad is that some of these boxes had dates from 2007 printed on them, meaning that most likely we brought them with us from our last apartment when we moved a couple of years ago.  Worse yet, though, is that a select few items had checkout labels that I don’t even recognize from stores that exist in the State of Florida, which means … you got it – they were stray boxes left over from when I first moved to Florida from Michigan.

Yeah … that was SEVEN YEARS AGO!!!

So needless to say, I suppose if there’s one final thing to be learned from this week’s pickled pantry predicament, it’s this – aside from making extra space for more current eatables, there’s really technically no harm in neglecting to clean out your kitchen cupboards for seasons or even entire years on end! In fact, if you’re somebody who finds themselves blessed with an abundance of cupboards and drawers, I’d heartily recommend just saying, “Screw it!” and hopping from one to another as the mood and lack of space hits you.  Live to the beat of your own drum and leave those antiquated Frosted Flakes for somebody else to toss in the trash after actually getting through two or three bowls because Frosted Flakes are still surprisingly Gr-r-reat! even after they’ve aged, much like a fine wine or a particularly stinky cheese…

You don’t know what kind of joy it brings me to get to tell you this, but laziness can be the answer when it comes to cleaning out your pantry!  Better to spend that time playing Xbox and catching up on your Internet Memes, and besides, with all the popularity for tea parties that I keep hearing on the news these days, you might be surprised to find that those decade-old “expired” Lipton bags might be worth more than you’d think!

You know what they say – You can lead a spider to water, but you can’t make it drink.

No, that’s not right.

How about – A spider in the hand is worth two hiding behind your couch.

Errr, that’s not it, either.

I know!  If you give a spider a cookie, he’s going to want a glass of milk…

If I sound delusional yet, it’s probably because lately I’ve had a particularly rough time with some unwelcome houseguests, and no, I don’t mean Weird Uncle Arnold who still insists on making his annual pilgrimage down to our sofa so that he’s in close enough proximity to fully immerse himself in the 24-hours of zany fun that are the National Kumquat Festival … although note to self: only eight precious months left until we have to entertain that whole fruity fiasco again…

In the meantime, though, I find myself with an arguably creepier problem, and as you may have discerned from my feeble attempt at poetic discourse … well, it’s those damn spiders again, I tell ya!  And mind you, here at Casa de Sevener, we’ve always had somewhat of a problem with insects of varying shapes and sizes, but I swear this year it seems like the spiders are out in full force and more and more of them are taking up residence in the nooks and crannies of my house. Aside from the obvious “bugs in the house – eek!”-related complaints, though, I also have a couple of entirely different concerns that I’d like to focus on here today.

For starters, frankly I don’t even know what I’m dealing with anymore here because it seems like no matter how many of these googly-eyed, little bastards that I kill, another one is always nearby to scamper out of the woodwork an hour later when I’m back to watching So You Think You Can Rake… and my guard is down once again.  It’s almost as if there are hundreds of the things just waiting for the green light to dash out center stage onto my living room carpet, but the really weird thing is … I’ve only ever seen one show himself at a time … which as you would assume can mean only one of two things – either these spiders are ridiculously methodic when it comes to home invasion, OR I’m not actually killing nearly as effectively as I’d like to think and in fact, it’s the same spider that keeps charging out time and time again like some sort of hormone-enraged super spider.  At this point, it could be either one…

The second thing is that throughout my vast research of these wicked invaders (i.e. watching frighteningly close-up spider videos on YouTube), one thing I’ve come to learn is that this particular species of spider is what they call a nocturnal hunter, meaning that they prey on other insects and pests while I’m sleeping obliviously in the other room … and you can probably see where I’m going with this one – what if I finally do manage to get rid of these spiders, only to then learn that they were actually keeping at bay some even more obnoxious and/or disgusting bugs that now have free reign to wander my house and rub their disgusting bug butts across my pillow when I’m not home?  How awkward would that exchange then be, to have to go back to the very same spiders that I kicked out and beg them to return so that I don’t have to check for disgusting bug butt on my pillow each night before I go to sleep?!

It’s a conundrum that honestly I just have no desire to deal with right now.  The weather has been just ridiculously hot out, thanks to old Mother Nature gracing us with an early summer, I’ve been getting really into the new Final Fantasy game that came out recently, and frankly, the last thing I feel like doing is actually having to ponder over these baffling possibilities each and every time I’m required to jump up when I hear my wife utter those five magic words, “There’s a spider – kill it!” Why can’t these six-legged, little freaks fellas just stay outside, or at least out of sight if they’re going to call my house their home?!

Seriously, I’m asking – why?! If any of you out there are psychologists who happen to specialize in human-spider relations, help a brother out here because I’m losing it!

Oh great, there goes another one…

Arrrgggghhhh!

Did you hear that?!

My God, this house is scary at night.  Although I’m fairly sure that the place isn’t actually haunted, it’s nonetheless quite possible that it could just up and collapse at any given moment throughout the night, which still isn’t exactly amongst the best possible scenarios when I’m already in my pajamas…

So here I am – it’s going on two o’clock in the morning, my wife is currently out of town, and I’m freaking out here, man! I mean, seriously – all of these creaks and scratches and insidious noises from just beyond the darkness … how come I never seem to hear them during the day?! Sure, mosey through my house in the middle of the afternoon and all seems calm and blissful, but as soon as the lights go down and I try to get some sleep, the whole place just seems to come alive – literally, figuratively, and seemingly just about anything and everything else in between, too!

It starts out innocently enough – a faint scrape against the wall or perhaps an unusually large bug flying into the window, and then slowly over the minutes and hours to come, the sounds gradually get worse.  The walls creak randomly, as if to sporadically remind me that they could cave in at any time they damn well please; the ceiling hosts the occasional pitter-patter, hinting that it could be filled with any number of vicious, wild animals, all the while knowing that yours truly wouldn’t dare set foot up that ladder to investigate myself!  In the distance, the hoot of a lone owl reverberates through the night as a subtle warning of the creepy dangers that may or may not lurk about.

What the hell – do owls even live in Florida???

As I try to distract my mind from haunts and other wild beasts, I begin to wonder instead if maybe it was a robber that I’ve been hearing … a robber looking to take advantage of an overweight 20-something who’s apparently afraid of his own house!  Hearing another non-descriptive, yet nonetheless frightening sound from the living room, I somehow manage to muster up the backbone to get out of bed and, in a surprising display of courage, I dash out into the other room, shouting and turning on every conceivable light as I go in a bewildering attempt to “scare” the alleged burglar away, or at the very least give him a good chuckle that could buy me enough time to make my own valiant escape.

But of course, there is no such burglar and instead I’m met only by our tropical fish, who proceed to give me the same curious look that they give pretty much anyone or anything that wanders past their tank, day or night.  I sheepishly return back to bed after sneaking a snack from the kitchen in a desperate attempt to calm my over-exaggerating nerves … besides, who can turn down Oreos and milk at 3:37am?  I’m only human!

So I suppose if we had to pick one, the moral of today’s story is … I’m a humongous wuss, but really, we already knew that long before this suburban version of Scooby Doo ever came to pass.  I mean, I can’t watch scary movies at night, or even listen to The Monster Mash, for that matter – I don’t care how much of a graveyard smash it was … all of those ghouls and ghosts slinking around just give me the heebie-jeebies!  But mock me all you will, there’s still something creepy about this place that I just can’t quite put my finger on – go ahead and sleep a mile in my bed if you don’t believe me.  Let’s see how funny it is when you wake up in the middle of the night, drenched in a combined of fear and sweat because there may very well be a robber / giant bug / scary monster just on the other side of your bedroom door…

In the meantime, honey, please make note that before you leave again, we may need to spring for a nightlight or something.  A very big nightlight, in fact – one for each and every room, closet, hallway, darkened corner, and crawl space in this haunted mansion of a domicile we call home … either that, or maybe I’ll just get a hotel room of my own while you’re away!  Of course, at that rate I might as well just go with you…

Strange hotel rooms in new cities are never creepy, right???

Now I don’t want to come off like some kind of jerk here, but just between you and me – I don’t really like kids.

Well, I guess that’s not entirely true – it’s not all kids in general that push my buttons.  I’m sure some miniature people are perfectly cool – you know, the ones that are nice and quiet and generally keep to themselves, but those aren’t the kind of kids that I’m talking about here! I’m a strong believer in the philosophy that children should be seen and not heard … and in the best case scenario, preferably neither … but these days my chances of encountering a group of young’uns the equivalent of the good-natured, quiet kid that I grew up as are about as slim as the possibility of my morning newspaper actually getting delivered to any of the numerous dry spots in front of my house instead of right in the epicenter of where every sprinkler in the front yard seems to go off…

And for those of you rearing up to send me an e-mail about karma right about now – please hold your judgement until this column comes to a complete stop and I turn off the “Just shut up and hear me out!” sign.

For what it’s worth, I like to think that I at least somewhat try to make a vague attempt at tolerating the rambunctious boys and girls of our little, suburban neighborhood, but let me tell you, those little bastards – and I say that generously with all of the love in my heart – sure don’t make it easy!  Between the screaming bloody murder at random intervals to running across my yard in the dead of night to balls of every shape, size, and color bouncing off the side of the house during the day, I’ve got to say that I can definitely sympathize with the stereotypical mantras of “Get off my lawn!” and “Next time I’m keeping it!” that our most elderly curmudgeons have become known for, that’s for sure!

Frankly, I think it’s the lack of respect that burns my britches the most, and it’s not that I expect twelve year-olds to be shining examples of honor and dignity – they can’t all be Citizens of the Month (or can they???) – but it’s the little stuff, like not leaving shit in my yard that isn’t mine. Now mind you it’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure they start teaching kids about the concept of picking up their toys in kindergarten … and yet it’s not at all uncommon for me to look out in my backyard and see footballs and soccer balls and beach balls and tennis balls just scattered at random – seriously, it looks like a goddamned Chuck E Cheese’s in my backyard!  And yet I probably haven’t played catch since I was seven, so they’re clearly not mine…

The other day was even more bizarre – I pulled in my driveway and noticed that there was a kid’s shoe just sitting there, stuck in our front bushes.  Not a pair of shoes (as if that would somehow be more reasonable), but a single shoe. Somewhere in our neighborhood, there’s a kid running around wearing only one shoe, or at the very least, running around barefoot while his mother yells, “Where the hell is your other shoe?!” Nonetheless, I have no idea what the kid was doing in our bushes in the first place or how he was exerting so much effort that he actually lost a portion of his footwear, or better yet, how – after losing said footwear – he didn’t turn around to pick it up before departing from our bushes and proceeding on his merry way, but you know what?  I really don’t care – my only concern was that some random kid’s dirty, nasty shoe was in our bushes and the only folks who seemed the least bit concerned about this were the owners of said bushes!

Really, I’m not trying to be that guy who sits on his front porch with a doberman by his side, occasionally springing up to chase kids off his property with a rake – I don’t even own a rake! I just don’t like running around in the scathing, Florida heat to pick up my own stuff, let alone somebody else’s because they couldn’t be bothered to both enter and leave my yard without taking their matching footwear of choice along with them!  And even though I technically didn’t even invite them to gallivant around my yard while I’m trying to enjoy a warm cup of tea as I watch my stories in the living room, I’d even be willing to concede that bitterness if only to incline them to leave with the same number of items that they threw, kicked, or wore over in the first place.  Is that really too much to ask?!

Seriously, so when does school start back up again???

The unsung heroes of our communities, they are the men and women of the neighborhood Homeowners Association.

You probably don’t think much about your local HOA – I know that I sure didn’t, but that was before I learned just how vital to our quaint, suburban lifestyle their ongoing efforts really are.  And thus it seems only fitting that while we’re all out celebrating with our sparklers and bottle rockets, hotdogs and even turkey dogs, we should also take a moment to honor those who have dedicated their lives to making our communities, well, better.

For if it wasn’t for these tired, old souls who’ve taken it upon themselves to painstakingly patrol our side streets and walk the halls of our community center, the rest of us might forget that the pool and fitness center hours are 6:00am – 10:00pm sharp.  I mean, really, who reads signs like the one on the door when we first enter, or the one by the sign-in sheet at the front desk, or the ones every five or ten feet on either side of the hallway leading to the gym, or even the one affixed to the gym door itself?  And besides, even if we were able to somehow remember when the gym closes, if it wasn’t for those friendly reminders that we’re given at fifteen, ten, and five minutes to the hour, we might be forced to make our best attempt at interpreting that clock that hangs ever so mockingly on the wall.

Right, as if it knows what’s best for our fair community!

But it doesn’t stop there, for our faithful Homeowners Association is also responsible for maintaining the visual integrity of the neighborhood because we all know that some folks, especially the younger generation, if you know what I’m saying, simply can’t be left to their own choices when it comes to things like drapery colors and the contents of their own flowerbeds.  Sure, maybe if somebody didn’t mind living in a neighborhood where every single house chose whatever color schemes they wanted, this wouldn’t be such a big deal, but let’s face it – purple curtains belong on some Hollywood movie screen, not in your neighbor’s front bedroom that faces the road…

They’re about keeping our neighborhoods safe, whether it’s from hooligans who opt to park on our streets during the clearly designed 6:00pm – 6:00am No Parking on Any Side Street timeframe or even simply the random teenager chatting with one or more other random teenagers in a suspicious manner.  They keep us informed and up to date on the latest happenings around our community, such as who continues to violate specific sub-clauses in the Association’s bylaws and what amenities will be restricted if such insubordination persists.  And more so than anything else, they ensure that we remember the most important rule of all about living in an organized community – without rules, there would be no order.

It’s for all of these reasons and so many more to be detailed out in future newsletters that we owe each and every member of our local Homeowners Associations our utmost admiration and servitude.  As they’ve dedicated countless hours of their otherwise mundane lives towards keeping our communities focused on the straight and narrow, it’s really the least we can do to give their creed our undivided attention to ensure that each individual lives up to the rigorous standards of the whole.

…

Now on a completely unrelated note, please be advised that Peter and Janet Murphey of 487 Maplevine Terrace have just been issued their third notice that the pink azaleas that were planted in their front garden on June 14, 2009 are not on the authorized list of flowering shrubberies that was most recently updated by the association on April 13th of the same year.  If no response to the third notice is received by July 15^th, they will be issued a final notice stating that they will begin to incur a monthly fine of $15 per plant for each unauthorized shrubbery that remains in their garden as of August 1^st.

As a gesture of good faith, our resident gardener Mrs. Covert (you probably know her as Nanny) has offered to replace the azaleas with much more suitable yellow sugar blossoms, which lend a more subtle foreground to the fair-minded architecture of our community and have also managed to win Nanny a blue ribbon at the County Bazaar for the last three years running!  We think you’re a shoe-in for year number four as well, Nanny!

Oh good – you’re still here!

Sorry, folks – I would’ve been here sooner, but I ran into a little “traffic problem” along the way, and by “traffic problem” I mean to say that I got stuck behind someone who opted to go approximately .0000002 mph in a 55 mph zone on what seems to be by far the longest stretch of unpassable, two-lane highway this side of civilization. Frankly, I’m surprised I even made it here at all because at the rate I was clipping along, with chipmunks and squirrels zipping by me on the side of the road like I was moving backwards, I was starting to get concerned that by the time I finally did arrive, the home that I knew would’ve by then slowly deteriorated over time, making way for a new golf course or strip mall or whatever else tends to blossom up in the middle of suburbia when something dies a slow and arduous death…

Sadly, this idea of driving without actually moving seems to be the painful norm here in this small, Floridian town that I call home. Some folks “playfully” like to call Florida God’s waiting room, which is cute and all until you realize just how big of a parking lot that God needs for his medical facilities! If you ask me, the almighty needs to look into building a few parking garages or something because his current plan of just letting his patients roam the streets in their cars at the speed of nothing just isn’t working and I’m fairly certain that I’m not the only one who’s at the end of my rope here on this one!

Of course, just like in any community, there are some parts of town that are better than others – for example, the roads not in our town are infinitely more traverseable than those within a lug nuts throw of city hall…except on Thursdays when that one senior center just on the outskirts hosts BINGO night, anyways. And mind you, it doesn’t help that my own particular little village also happens to be one of several specks on Florida’s landscape that plays host to snow birds by the trillions who flock here each winter so as not to wreak havoc on their own snow and ice-laden communities with sub-adequate driving skills and nothing but time to kill until Wheel comes on at 7:00pm. Let me tell you, until it’s taken you 15 minutes to drive a mile and a half because you’re stuck behind a small houseboat driving fifteen miles a month down the highway with its left blinker on the entire duration of the trip, you haven’t truly known misery…

Mind you, though, it’s not only the elderly delaying my transit home after a long and arduous day, as we certainly can’t have a conversation about bad driving without remembering the soccer moms and hockey dads in their mini-vans and SUVs, shuttling a battalion of children to one extracurricular after another in a desperate attempt to live vicariously through little league tournaments and ballet recitals, all the while driving profusely down the center of the road at 20 under the speed limit while barking grocery lists to their significant others or sharing gossip from the latest PTA meeting with others who are simultaneously wreaking havoc in their own sport utility vehicles in other neighborhoods both near and far. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve gotten stuck behind one of these lazy road squatters just distracted enough to not allow me a single opportunity to pass because they’re conveniently speeding up and then subsequently slowing back down each and every time we get to a suitable passing area, I’d probably have enough to at least take a cab a couple of nights a week…which actually might help quite a bit!

Imagine – if only these torturous souls knew of the insanity that they were passively inflicting on the twenty cars lined up behind them. I’d like to think that there would be a general threshold that eventually kicks in when every trip behind the wheel gets a driver aggressive honks, middle fingers, and death threats that one would finally come to the realization of, “Wow – maybe I am a horrible driver! How’s about I do the world a favor and just take the bus from this point forward?!” If only it was that easy, and gumdrops rained from the heavens, and every street was lined with the sparkles of silver and gold, and instead of collecting taxes the government held an enormous, coast-to-coast ice cream social once a year on April 15^th.

Yes, such a world free of vehicular ineptitude would certainly be grand, but alas, our currently reality lies littered with snail-paced drivers and at the end of the day, aside from purchasing a steamroller (which is really expensive – trust me, I’ve looked into it!), there’s little else we can do besides grin and bear it, and buy stock in whatever company makes those squishy, little stress balls shaped like SUVs and station wagons. Just know that the next time you’re out there stuck in traffic behind somebody who would rather do the daily crossword puzzle out of the paper than actually drive anything even vaguely resembling the posted speed limit, you are not alone, for no doubt on a similar highway I’m doing the exact same thing.

The only difference between you and me – I’m getting more material for these things every single time! So look for that new book on How I Learned to Stop Letting Idiots on the Road Get to Me and Love Taking the Bus hitting the shelves of your local bookseller any day now…

It was one of those nights when it just really would’ve been nice to have a small, green, mystery-solving Muppet from your childhood around…

More specifically, it was a dark and stormy Wednesday evening, and I was just returning home after a long and arduous day of not being home. And most importantly of all, it was garbage day – an entire day here in suburbia that’s dedicated solely to the disposal of our junk, doodads, and other decaying perishables. I mean, I don’t want to brag, but it’s a pretty big deal around here, and better yet … it’s something that we get to do every single week!

(except on weeks where there’s a holiday or the garbage men decide to skip work in favor of catching some rays at the beach…)

Nonetheless, that didn’t happen on this particular Wednesday and without folly, our garbage was faithfully picked up and whisked away to some no doubt environmentally-friendly facility out of sight and out of mind precisely as scheduled. In fact, all seemed right with the world, knowing that our household was officially garbage free for another week … that is, until I returned home that fateful evening to find that despite the garbage being disposed of successfully, there was still something afoot … whether it was trouble or mischief or possibly even just raccoons was still to be foreseen…

You see, ordinarily on this special day, I come home to find our empty garbage can resting comfortably at the end of the driveway, but mind you, this was no ordinary day, primarily because … and you may have guessed it by the title of this column … while the empty garbage can itself was found exactly where expected, the device used to cover this receptacle (commonly referred to as a “lid”) was nowhere to be found! It was as if it had simply grown legs and walked away, except that such an act wouldn’t be simple at all because at least the last time I checked, our garbage can lid was an inanimate object incapable of such mobility.

Unable to find any professional detectives willing to take on my case, I knew that if this mystery was ever going to get solved, it was going to require sleuthing from none other than yours truly … which could’ve really gone either way because of all the things that I’m extraordinarily famous for, getting to the bottom of things traditionally isn’t one of them unless we’re talking about a gallon of chocolate fudge ice cream, but enough with the fat jokes, for there’s a garbage can lid mystery to be figured out!

Now I’ve learned from watching many an episode of Scooby Doo and Duckman, the first step towards solving a case is choosing some people to potentially blame it on – some call them “suspects,” others call them “scapegoats,” but they’re really all the same thing. In the instance that you’re aren’t actually able to figure out who dunnit, these will be the folks who will ultimately get pinned with the crime, and since I really didn’t know much about solving mysteries anyways, it just seemed easier to skip past that whole investigation process and get right to the part where justice prevails! The way I saw it, the Case of the Missing Garbage Can Lid had three potential perps:

• those damn neighbor kids – always seen poking around my yard, getting into “mischief”
• the wind – able to rip off entire roofs in a single, hurricane-force bound, so what’s to stop it from playing Frisbee with my lid?
• some random dog – again with the Frisbee analogy, although admittedly it’d have to be a pretty big dog to be heaving that thing around!

At this point in the game, it could’ve been any of them, really, or even some bizarre collaboration of all of them combined – those damn neighbor kids could’ve came riding in on some random dog, stole my garbage can lid right out in plain sight, and then used the lid itself like an oddly-shaped kite to harness the mighty powers of the wind and soar away to safety. I have no way of knowing … like I said, I’m not a detective. All I know for sure is that somewhere out there, someone or something is living the highlife with a misappropriated garbage can lid, whereas here I am left unsure of how our next garbage collection day will unfold, considering that I no longer have a suitable cover for my trash receptacle. Fortunately with putting our latest out on Wednesday during the lid’s last successful run, we won’t need to make use of our secondary weekly pickup date tomorrow, however next week will come soon enough and looking into the future without a lid, I just don’t know what we’re going to do…

The moral of our sad, unresolved story here today? Be sure to bring in the empty garbage can as soon as the trash is picked up? No. Haul your garbage to the dump yourself so as to never risk such tragic lid loss that I’ve endured? Nope. When you first buy your garbage can, pay close attention to what your neighbors already have so that if your lid mysteriously disappears on a dark and stormy Wednesday evening, you still have the option of pilfering theirs as a replacement later?

Is it possible to even buy just the lid anywhere?! My detective skills tell me that I’m about to find out…

“Please grow, baby! Please grow!!!”

No, no – we’re not pregnant – and you should be ashamed of yourselves for even suggesting such a thought to a guy that isn’t even married yet! We’ll deal with that slippery slope soon enough, but today we’re here to talk about an entirely different baby of mine that most certainly has made it loud and clear that she needs a bit of tender love and care as of late…

My fiancée.

No, just kidding. Well, of course, she needs love and tenderness, too, but as far as I know, right now we seem to be doing a-ok in that department!

But you’d let me know if you heard anything otherwise…right?

Anywho, where were we?! Oh yes – my lawn! That’s what all of this fertilizing jargon is talking about, and while I’m most certainly quite happy to have transversed the domestic line between apartment-dwellers and those who are contained within four exterior walls that are exclusively their own, but at the same time I’m also learning that there’s a lot of extra work that comes from living in an actual house! A garage to sweep, gutters to clean, a perimeter to spray for bugs that will otherwise cause one’s previously-mentioned fiancée to wake you up by screaming at three o’clock in the morning when she finds one roughly the size of Nevada crawling across the bathroom tile floor, but from my own personal experience thus far, said gargantuan spiders still pale in comparison to the plights that I’m facing with regards to our less than green front lawn right now.

And you’ll notice that I’m very quick to mention merely the front lawn, as opposed to the entire thing from front to back surrounding our little domicile here in the middle of suburbia because, well, actually one of the first things that I learned about lawn care as we got ourselves settled was that it’s not entirely uncommon for people to put completely different kinds of grass in their front and back yards. Here, I would’ve thought that “grass is grass,” but apparently that goes to show just how next to absolutely nothing I seem to know about lawn care, eh?!

So the grass seemed to be doing ok for a while – we’d managed to rid our land of several massive colonies of evil fire ants last fall and glided through the winter months thinking that there really wasn’t all that much to this here “lawn care thingy.” Every once in a while we watered it (thank god for automatic sprinklers!), every once in a while we cut it (thank god for cool guys willing to brave the hot Florida sun to mow for a nominal fee!), and we certainly had ourselves a green Christmas, but now that it’s started getting warmer, our once-beautiful lawn has started taking a turn for its crispy, brown worse.

Well, the front yard has, anyways, which believe you me was even more confusing to watch our luscious backyard flourish while the front turned to absolute crap! We started watering more and even invited a fire ant or two to move back in, just in case its success was somehow influenced by those venomous, little devils, but still – nothing. I’ve considered just buying a few rolls of that green, prickly plastic carpet that you use outdoors that kind of looks like grass, but something tells me that our landlord might not take to kindly to such an “enhancement.”

Also, it would probably be a bitch to vacuum.

So instead, as you’ve probably deducted by now from the title of this column, we’re taking a different route and are now trying our hands at fertilizing the old girl back to her mid-20s, wild and sexy, yet still responsible enough to hold down a full-time job that doesn’t involve wearing a chicken suit-like self. The stuff that I bought was some spray by Miracle-Gro, which I figured was pretty fitting because at this point it feels like it might very well require a full-fledged miracle to get our lawn looking even minutely healthy again.

Errr, front yard. Sorry about that, backyard – didn’t mean to imply that you aren’t looking as ravishingly beautiful as ever!

Hmmph – lawns! You can’t live with ‘em, you can’t play a rousing game of croquet or host a backyard barbecue without ‘em…