Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle -- Hey! Come Back Here With That!

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I read a funny article today. Some kids stole the Salvation Army donation pot outside a store in Addison. Witnesses said four teenagers grabbed the pot, stuffed it into a car and drove away. What the heck? What's the world coming to?

The local cops are checking the store security video to see if they can identify the thieves. If they catch them, I hope I can help post their bond. They were doing the world -- or at least the shoppers at that specific store -- a favor. Giving them a few minutes off from the month-long passive-aggressive panhandling that IS the Christmas Season according to the Salvation Army.

Before anyone declares me a Scrooge -- or worse -- I have to say that I approve of their mission, and I donate to their cause. And I greatly respect the people actually ringing those bells and freezing their collective and individual asses off this time of year. They are unfailingly polite, whether you donate or dodge them. But how about a day or two off during the week?

My local Jewel must be a Gold Mine for the Army. Both doors are covered, and every day, every shift, it's a new bell ringer. You never get the opportunity to get to know one of them; to make eye contact; to get a nod and a smile and a PASS because they know it's your fifteenth trip into the store since last Thursday and it's MAYBE OK NOT TO STUFF A DOLLAR IN THIS TIME JUST ONCE!

I even mentioned it today to the guy at the north entrance, how I never see the same bell-ringer twice. "They didn't just start doing this, you know," he said with a chuckle. I stuck in a dollar. It was my second one today, maybe 20th of the past week.

And they don't stop there -- the Army's direct mail continues. But honestly, if they'd offer me a lapel pin for $50 or so, I'd buy it, just to dodge the daily door-tax at Jewel, Ace Hardware, the adult-video store, etc.

Not that I'm against charity. I donate. To the Salvation Army, the Leukemia/Lymphoma Association, my church. (Just check my tax records on that one! It's amazing how generous I am. And if I go to Hell for lying to the IRS, it's almost certainly a case of bad record-keeping in Heaven, but I digress.)

Anyway, I just don't like the Army's omnipresence. Which is why I laughed when I read that someone stole their pot of money. Those kids probably have more one-dollar bills than the average stripper.

Which just makes the phrase "Ho ho ho" seem even funnier, now that I think of it.

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DO NOT Try This At Home

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I don't think the word "Ouch" came out of my mouth, not even once.

Oh, I'll admit, the first few moments after I shot a nail through my finger a lot of thoughts went through my head, and more than a few words came out my mouth, but none of them were "Ouch." Go figure.

Last Saturday my son Steven and I were working on a side job, framing up a few walls and installing a few pre-hung doors to separate some rooms in a Kindergarten. We had been at it for about an hour, and to my mind, we weren't going as fast as I had hoped. I needed to finish to a certain point before we could leave and I didn't want to have to work Sunday. A late quit was out of the question, since my buds from University of Illinois were getting together that night, and I didn't want to miss the party. It's been 29 years since we graduated, and I was really looking forward to seeing everybody.

So I suppose I was rushing. And when my hand slipped as I steadied a stud in the wall frame, everything happened at once. The nail gun fired, my hand felt like it exploded, and I found myself skipping and hopping in several directions at once, squeezing the living daylights out of my left middle finger. I hopped/skipped out to my truck to get a band aid, desperately hoping that that was all I would need. I couldn't make myself look -- if it was bad, it would ruin the day's work and screw up my life in a major way. The electrician would have wasted a trip. The client would be very unhappy. And I would have to pay the ER bill myself -- working a sidejob with no Workman's Comp insurance has it's risks.

No band aids in the truck. Well, they were there, but I wasn't able to locate them in the three seconds I spent looking. I took a chance and looked at my finger -- bleeding out of both sides, but the nail missed my fingernail and it missed the bone. It went through at an odd angle, and apparently I yanked my finger off the nail without mangling much flesh. Damned good luck. And I was still too shocky to feel pain. So I squeezed the Hell out of it again, and went to find something to wrap it up with.

About this time, Steven noticed my odd behavior. "Are you alright? Did you do something to your hand?" he asked, noticing that I was about 17 shades of pale lighter than I was 5 minutes ago, and gripping my left hand like I was afraid it was going to escape from the end of my wrist...

I found my glasses and two cough drops, which had all flown out of my shirt pocket in the initial leap. I unwrapped a cough drop and tossed it in my mouth like it was a huge Oxycontin.

"Go in the truck -- get me two Advils. I shot a fucking nail through my finger," I explained, as calmly as a man with a fresh nail-sized hole in his finger might explain. Not exactly Clint Eastwood cool, but at least I wasn't crying.

Steven was suitably impressed -- he offered to drive me to the ER or wherever. He seemed skeptical when I said I was OK and that we'll just keep on like nothing happened. "Shouldn't you get a doctor to look at it? Don't you need a shot or something?" No thanks -- I just had one... (RIM SHOT)

I wrapped the finger in a kleenex, and wrapped that with some green electrical tape to keep pressure on it. I was operating at Level 10 Denial. If I just believed it would be alright, the it would be alright. Steve got me 3 Advils, just to be sure, and ran some water in the sink. He turned on the hot water in all the excitement, but I washed down the Advil with it anyway. Then I pounded the nail back out of the 2x4 and put it in my pocket. I don't know why -- maybe subconsciously I thought if it was in my pocket, it couldn't do that to me again.

The finger bled for a while, which is a good thing. Bleeding cleans the wound, I thought. And I changed the bandage every hour or so. I washed it off about noon with some hand sanitizer, at which point I said a lot of things that substituted for "ouch," but were much more colorful. That was the first time it really hurt -- up till then it just throbbed and ached.

We finished up the job a little ahead of schedule. Aside from a garbage can full of bloody bandages, you'd never even know I did something really, really stupid in there this morning. I'm sure some Kindergarten teacher had a puzzled look on her face at some point on Monday morning.

And once he knew I was OK, Steven got to use my accident as a shield... every time I gave him grief about anything, he'd just grin and add, "this coming from the man who shot a nail through his finger this morning."

So we learned a valuable lesson, made some money, and I never even said ouch.

Until the tetanus shot Monday morning. Ouch.

There's A Sucker Born Every Minute... and Two Born to Take Him...

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That's a quote from P.T. Barnum, famous circus owner and all-around huckster.

It's as true today as when he said it several generations ago. My great-grandparents owned a circus until the depression, when Barnum & Bailey bought them out. The Floto Circus. Based in Wisconsin, I think, but they toured the entire country in their day. There are a few artifacts from their operation on permanent display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, so you can check it out -- I am not making this up.

About this time, the average reader may ask themselves, "What's this got to do with anything?"

Beats the shit out of me.

Oh yeah, I was thinking about eBay. I usually have a couple of random things up for auction on eBay, and lately I've been pretty busy selling and shipping all sorts of silly crap out to the hungry populace. People never seem to tire of buying stuff that I find basically useless. Pre-eBay, this stuff used to end up in our garbage cart. Sometimes so much of it that I had to tape an envelope with a $10-spot and a quick note to our garbage can. (This way Groot wouldn't charge me extra. My service plan used to be the "unlimited" plan. Turns out, the "unlimited" plan was limited to two garbage carts, or one cart plus two garbage bags. This didn't seem as "unlimited" as the name may suggest, so I switched to "basic," which allows only one cart a week. I soon learned I could leave a dump-truck full of crap at the curb, and as long as I tipped my collection dude, it disappeared without a trace. Imagine that.)

But as for eBay, I'm finding that every time I sell something, I end up buying something else, so I never seem to get ahead. And I never gain any space in my garage, either.

This week I "won" an auction for an electric ice-cream maker. But the picture didn't do it justice. Instead of a tiny little thing -- it looked pretty small in the photo -- it's the one-gallon model. About three feet tall, counting the motor. I left it in the breezeway while I looked for recipes on the internet, since it was too big to bring into the kitchen without some major counter-top re-arranging.

After a few minutes, Robin came home, passing the new appliance on the way in. She asked me whether that thing in the breezeway was a sump pump or a pool filter, or what? We don't have a basement, and unless we got a pool overnight, the filter thing didn't make sense, so WTF?

I explained my well-thought-out high-minded idea... I saw it on eBay and I was the only bidder, so I WON! Your husband's a WINNER!

And since she'll get some home-made ice cream out of this, I didn't receive the usual ration of shit that I get when I do something genuinely hare-brained (think buying a new snowmobile or the electric dog-polisher thing...) So we have a new toy around here. We'll try it out this weekend, and sooner or later, it will be back in the garage, adding to the general clutter.

And when the pile falls over, burns down or sinks in the swamp, I'll have another blog to write. I look forward to it. Now that my neighbor has taken to mowing his lawn regularly and taking his garbage cans up each week, the dick. You're going to be a good neighbor now? WTF? I need something to write about!

Pause Real Life with your DVR!

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Had a television disaster today. Courtesy of DirecTV, and our new DVR.

My youngest son, Steven, has developed a serious personality disorder, as defined by most Americans of my generation. He's a devout follower of the World Cup soccer tournament. And he had recorded today's semi-final game between the Netherlands and... and.... the Netherlands and their worthy opponent.

Steve was savoring the thought of watching the entire broadcast from beginning to end, and to kill time he had been watching a recording of the Tour de France. When that was done, he deleted it -- and to his horror the screen switched immediately to live TV -- where they were celebrating the Netherlands win over whoever they beat. So the surprise was ruined.

There was a whole lot of thrashing and swearing around here for a brief period. The remote control survived, just barely. His sister, Sarah, threw herself on it before any serious damage occurred.

I truly sympathize. It's hard to watch a recorded sports event when you know the outcome. And of course, it was a great game, fought to the bitter end, etc. etc. blah blah blah. Anyone who ever watched a sitcom knows what it's like when someone blows the ending. But it still sucks.

I did it myself the first day we had the DVR. The only reason I got it was to record the CBS shows on Monday nights, during the hockey playoffs. Robin and I don't watch a lot of TV. But we kinda got hooked on the four shows on CBS Mondays. How I Met Your Mother; Rules of Engagement; Two-and-a-half Men; and the Big Bang Theory. Even though I quit drinking, I still tend to stick to rituals. So somewhere we got into the Monday Night Is TV Night habit. We'd get come cheap chicken from Jewel (8 pieces for $5.99), eat it fast and watch TV.

But playoff Hockey was beginning to interfere, so I booked an upgrade from DirecTV, which came in the form of a free DVR. They installed it on a Monday, appropriately, and I got a whirlwind lesson in using the remote, which I promptly forgot. But it was then I became aware of the COOLEST feature of DVR -- you can PAUSE LIVE TV!

So later in the evening, we watched the hockey game while the DVR recorded our CBS shows. The Blackhawks came from behind in the second period to tie the game. The third period was a hard-fought give-and-take battle. All went well until about 5 minutes were left in the game. There was a TV time out, and Robin and I used the opportunity to do a nature break of our own. I paused the DVR. We luxuriated, happy in the knowledge that we can see the whole thing play out before our very eyes, delayed a minute -- two minutes -- whatever delay our hearts desired -- without missing a second of the action. We even had the phone turned off, so there was no chance that anyone would call us and blow the ending.

All ready now, we set the game back in motion. But it was still on a commercial. So I started pushing buttons, to fast-forward through the ads. It's a guy thing, a control thing, I don't know what.

You don't have to be Norman Einstein to guess what I did. Somehow it went to live TV -- and the Hawks were up by a goal. By the time this had sunk in, the Hawks had scored again on an open net, and the game was over.

Those of you who don't know my wife well cannot possibly imagine how angry that girl can get. I've known her 32 years, and I never before saw those veins in her neck, not even during childbirth.

I gave her the remote and asked Fido if I could bunk with him for a night or two... he said no. Smart dog.

Is There Life After Hockey?

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Now that the Chicago Blackhawks have finally done it -- they've won the Stanley Cup after a 49-year drought -- life around the Teeters household can come back to normal. The winter sports season -- on June 9th -- came to an end.

The past seven weeks have revolved around the Hawks' playoff schedule, and the mood in the house has been dictated daily by the recent successes or failures of the team. Robin is a long-suffering fan, and I'm a fully-converted hockey lover. The kids all have Robin's devotion, and if I'm not mistaken, even the dog looked forward to the occasional breakaway one-on-one rush that ended in a Hawks score. When the Hawks won, everyone was happy. After a loss, the mood went dark.

But now it's over. No more planning meal times around the starting time, or planning mid-day naps to accommodate the west-coast late-night finishes. No more scheduling the lawn mowing, car washing, and laundry-doing around the games.

And no more putting off the blog writing. Now I can finally get back to hatin' on my neighbors.

The Hawks' success gave me a period of serenity about my neighbor, the dick -- the Polish feller across the street. He still leaves his garbage cans out in the street for days on end, and his lawn hasn't been mowed in three weeks.

But a while back I made a prejudice-induced guess that he may like hockey, being Polish and all... In my experience, my eastern-European acquaintances -- especially the vowelly-deprived ones -- are more into hockey and soccer than baseball and American football. So I cut him the same slack I expected everyone to cut me when I was too busy drinking to do anything until it became a crisis. But the playoffs ended last Wednesday, and he still hasn't mowed his yard. That leaves only drinking or laziness as his excuse.

He's had a great scam going over the last few years. As a contractor, he has a few connections in the local white-slavery trade. So about every other week you would see a new landscaping company attack his yard. Mexican guys everywhere -- mowing, raking, trimming -- the whole nine yards. Then, I have to assume, the check would bounce. Two weeks later, a different company was on the job, whacking away making a great first impression. Never to return. Eventually I think the word got out, because the weed crop is coming in strong across the street.

He could get my kid to mow his lawn for pretty cheap, as I have an awesome lawnmower. But I don't think he wants to be too friendly with us over here. Maybe it's because when he leaves his garbage cans in the street past Monday, I pull them into his driveway at 5 a.m. Tuesday. Then his wife has to get out of her car and move them in order to go get more vodka and cigarettes. That's the kind of passive-aggressive neighbors we've become.

I really want to steal the cans outright, or lay in some heavy Fourth-of-July ordinance and blow them right off their freaking wheels, but I'm sure that's over the line. Besides, I heard their house is going into foreclosure, and I don't want to be too mean.

Because, like Earl and his mentor Carson Daly, I believe in karma.

Fighting Depression One Toilet at a Time

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Lately I've been fighting depression. Well, not really.

My job situation isn't the best, but a helluva lot of people have it worse, so I'm not really fighting depression, more like Having an Argument with depression every once in a while. And every once in a while things just add up to make a real good case for being depressed.

Not the real shit, like last month when my sister Donna died. That shit would depress the Good Humor Man, for Christ's sake. But the little things that just bum you out. Like the billboard parade this morning.

I'm driving north on I-57 between job sites, and I'm getting paid for windshield-time. So far so good. I spot a cute kid on a billboard just north of 147th Street. Smiley little shit with a knit cap. He seems to be wearing motorcycle-gang colors, and the copy over his head reads "BORN TO DIE."

WTF?

In smaller letters -- probably only as big as my truck -- it says "Arms and limbs form in the first six weeks..." Aw shit, it's an anti-abortion message. Not the thing I want to think about on a day as nice as today.

Next billboard is a clever one. A view of a rear-view mirror, with some teenager holding a sign that reads "Let's go for ice cream after you paralyze us!"

Jesus, I'm behaving! I'm doing the speed limit! But, of course, I have three youngsters to think about -- one with a wife and a baby -- and they could be driving recklessly this very second. So now I've got THAT to think about...

Next sign points me to a great hospital that does Hip and Knee replacements. Nice. I'm not feeling too old already, worrying about my adult children, now hit me with that crap.

After the 1-800-Quit-Now billboard, reminding me about how many people die from lung cancer every year, here comes the Debt Erase offer. Hmmmm... after the paralyzing car accident and the hip and knee replacement, I may need that number. Damn, dude, I just turned off the news radio station two minutes ago because they wouldn't quit yakking about Insurance Reform. Now I'm thinking that if the economy doesn't pick up... and I still have a mortgage and a shitload of education loans to cover...

OK, I have a good sturdy rope in the truck. So I'm thinking about where's the nearest park with a good strong low-hangin' limb when this asshole-with-a-death-wish cuts me off from the right lane on a red motorcycle. Close enough for me to flinch and hit the brakes -- just after the nick of time -- and call him a dick. He wasn't going real fast, and traffic was slowing down, so I caught up with him. He was an older black feller, wearing a leather vest, and I read something about Riding for Christ on the back. "Riding for shit," was my mental response, then I quickly apologized to God in case he misinterpreted my meaning on that one... I'd hate for that fleeting thought to be the "tip in" that sends me where I might be going anyway.

Anyway, my mood lightened right up when I spotted a huge billboard for some new kinda toilet: "Traffic backed up? This baby won't!"

I Love it! A toilet billboard! Maybe this weekend, me and Robin can road-trip up to Wisconsin and score us a nice new shitter in slate blue. On the way home we can stop at Conejito's in Milwaukee, load up on beef-and-bean burritos, and test that baby out on Sunday morning! Now you're talking... fuck suicide, I have a toilet to try and clog up!

It is so nice to have something to live for. Now all I have to do is get Robin to go along with my new weekend plan! Wish me luck!

Lately My Job is Simply Electrifying

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Sometimes my job gives me the creeps.

Like the time we were replacing the skylights in the Reptile House at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Before we started, I had to put plywood over the tops of the snake pens. That meant I had to get up on top of several 50-year-old cages, while underneath me -- some 12 feet or so -- lay a bunch of lazy 20- and 30-foot-long reticulated pythons, boa constrictors, and other legless reptiles. If the cage failed, I'd find myself right there with my least favorite lifeforms -- other than lawyers -- and probably with a few broken bones for good measure. Like I said, it gave me the creeps.

Recently I've been getting the creeps again. My recent assignment has me working in several old electric facilities, part of Metra's electric railroad division on the south side of Chicago. The buildings are part of the former Illinois Central commuter rail division, and they were built in the later 1920s.

With the recent economic downturn, our company is pretty slow. So slow that I have lost my stripes as Superintendent, and have been working as a carpenter, laborer, janitor -- any damned thing to get a day's work on the books. That means I no longer command the construction battles from my windshield. Instead, I'm in the trenches again. With chipping guns, shovels, brooms -- whatever it takes.

What's giving me the creeps is all the live electric equipment I have to work around. The buildings we are renovating are called "sub-stations." Every six miles along the railroad, they need to feed electric power out to the overhead power lines that drive the trains. So ComEd brings the power to the sub-station, where they transform it from high-voltage AC power into lower-voltage DC power. That's done with these huge "rectifiers," which are just giant-assed versions of the transformers we had on our electric trains and slot-car sets when we were kids.

Remember those transformers? They had a vague ozone smell, and hummed when you turned on the power. Now imagine that times 10,000 or so, and you know what the places smell and sound like. A constant hum and buzz all day long in the air. Only now, it's not just a hangover or the dull ringing in my head from the 30 or 40 rock concerts I went to 25 or 30 years ago...

But the really creepy part is all the exposed electric equipment. All of it dangerous.

When we first started the job, Metra told us simply not to touch any equipment. Period. Which was a pretty easy to follow directive.

But as the job went along, you get used to the hum and the buzz and the fact that the electric equipment right next to you -- the thing you just leaned your broom against -- is carrying enough power to blow your ass half way to Florida if something goes wrong.

The basement of these buildings is the wildest thing -- many exposed solid-copper buss bars, switches and taps and levers you haven't seen since the last time you caught "Frankenstein" on Creature Features on Channel 9. When the newer electronic gear fails -- and it DOES fail -- the Metra guys can run downstairs and throw these Franken-switches to bypass the power to other sub-stations. There is virtually nothing preventing a dumbass like myself from reaching out and actually grabbing a live cable. Maybe a sign like "Danger - Alive," or "4000 volts" or, better yet "13,500 volts," but that's all.

There are four types of equipment downstairs.

1 - Live electric, which WILL kill you if you touch it.

2 - Live ground bars, which MAY kill you if you touch it.

3 - Emergency equipment, which will kill you if you touch it when it's energized. How can you tell if it's energized? Here's the fun part -- you can't.

4 - Abandoned equipment. If you touch it, you don't die, you just shit your pants, because you try not to touch ANYTHING at ANY TIME when you're downstairs.

How can they leave stuff exposed like this? Easy. These buildings were built in the good old days, before you could sue someone else when you did something completely stupid. Back then, if you were down there, it was assumed you knew better than to touch anything that looks electric.

When someone fucked up, the widow wouldn't sue. If she did, it would go like this:

Judge: "How did he die?"

Widow: "He grabbed a live, bare 13,500 volt electric cable."

Judge: "What was his job again?"

Widow: "He was an electrician...."

Judge: "Working for the electric railroad company?"

Widow: "Yes, but..."

Gavel: BANG! Case closed.

But the judge still awards her $2.50 anyway because the deceased had already put in his money for the 1934 fantasy football league pool...

The Economic Recovery is On The Horizon

Or maybe that's just another airplane...

That's what it always was when we were kids, laying in the grass at night, looking up at the starry sky, hoping to see a UFO. We'd see something that looked promising, but it always turned out to be another fucking airplane.

Occasionally it was a satellite. That was exciting. And one time it was SkyLab, but we all knew that way ahead of time, and we were all expecting it. It was on the news all day, and we weren't disappointed. But most of the time it was just another airplane.

With the job situation as it is, I spend a good deal of time hoping to see a UFO -- or the economic equivalent, which would be our company landing a big job. Our industry lags the economy by a year or so, which means the crappy economy is just hitting us hard about now. So I've been working with the tools again, not as a boss. Haven't had to do that since 1987, but I seem to remember how it goes...

In any case, I keep looking and hoping for a UFO, and all I see is airplanes.

Happy Freaking New Year

So far 2010 has been pretty damned cold.

Nothing going on around here. New Year's Eve came and went pretty uneventfully. The kids went out and made it home safely. The wife and I went to a friend's house for an early party, then came home to watch the Blackhawks kick the collective shit out of New Jersey. Those Hawks are awesome to watch. We got tickets to see them play Detroit in March. Should be fun.

The party was very nice. The host, Rod, was pretty well lit by the time we arrived. He's a real outgoing dude with a booming voice and a more booming personality. He was making some wicked Cosmo's, and their effect on him was apparent. He was a busy bee, and the Cosmo's made him a most entertaining host.

We met the new superintendent of schools for Libertyville High School. He was nice, and so was his wife. He got me talking about flying small planes, so I was in my element. I couldn't shut up (insert your "Duh!" here...) and yapped for an hour or so. They wanted to hear all about the engine failure we had in my dad's plane a few years back, and I indulged his curiosity until I was hoarse. Then he and his wife wanted my opinion on just how the Hell did John John Kennedy screw the pooch... he looked out the window too long, then didn't believe his instruments when they told him he was rolling upside down. Rookie error -- and a fatal one, at that. Too bad -- that was a nice plane he wrecked.

The party broke up about nine, as it was a "starter" party. After the hockey game, we both fell asleep, but woke up just in time to ring in 12:15 a.m.! I hope that's not an omen about the year to come.

Played a Led Zeppelin tune right away -- Ten Years Gone, off the Physical Graffiti album. Thirty years ago, we played that tune to ring in 1980 at "the white house" I lived in with two of my buddies. It seemed poignant back then, so every year I play that tune, especially to ring in the new decades.

If you notice, the ads next to the blog changed since my last post -- at least one of them did. It's now about snowmobiles, so I'm pretty sure I was right, that Google looks for keywords and posts ads to match the subject matter. No luck on the naked Asian chicks, though.

But I'll keep checking, cause they seem to keep changing. Never give up hope. Naked Asian chicks. There -- I said it again.