It's Not Tundra

Some thoughts after flying across the country to move. You try to teach your kids good manners,but sadly, the rest of the world doesn't want to help... The behavior on commercial flights has changed since my father insisted on a coat and tie to fly coach. It is not well known that Lindbergh flew his legendary trans Atlantic flight togged up in white tie and tails. Memoirs of barnstorming pilots would include passages about flying biplanes in top hat with his platinum tipped walking stick doubling as an especially dashing aileron control. Sad to say, these standards no longer apply even to first class cabins, let alone steerage. Please allow me to offer a few humble suggestions to make air travel a more pleasant experience. Do not berate TSA employees for their lack of speed. Most of them are honest, caring, hardworking people dedicated to ensuring our safety. The rest are mildly retarded and may cry if confronted. Such behavior will result in a cavity search and proper standards of...

IN HONOR OF THE FIRST BIG SNOW IN THE 367 DAYS WE'VE LIVED HERE... THE DRIVEWAY!!!!!! [1] “Oh, how can you handle shoveling all that snow!” people would say. The cold was the first thing people commented on, the snow was the second. And it’s true. You did have to move it out of the driveway and the sidewalk. God knows that I was yelled at often enough to get off my ass and go shovel the driveway. My father would get pissed off occasionally at my lack of concern for snow removal and would bestir himself to do it. My mother would then go into something resembling a religious fervor [2] and scream: “Your father’s going to have a heart attack! Your father’s going to have a heart attack!” And the implication certainly was “Because of you”. And I would drag myself outside. Begrudgingly. [3] We had a large collection of snow-removing implements in my childhood. My father, far from a handy man and who I don’t think I ever saw swing a hammer, seemed incapable of parting with ...

For a creature that naturally gets by in the wild, everything you read on rabbit pet blogs (and yes, there are a ton of them) point out what a fragile creature a bunny is. They can’t stand direct sunlight, they can’t stand extreme variances in temperature, and a sudden shock can kill them. It was like keeping my grandmother as a pet. [1] So you had to be careful, especially with stories flying around of prize-winning super-champion dogs dying in cargo holds because they froze to death or someone didn’t get them water or they got their rhinestone collar mysteriously magnetized to the propeller or something. So you have to choose carefully. You have to ask them what experience they have in transporting rabbits – no matter how embarrassing it is. [2] I finally settled on the company that said they had just transported a rabbit to Germany from Los Angeles for a family where the father had been transferred by the army. Well, not only did they fly rabbits, but they flew them for t...

“Well, she’s worried about this beam…”, Tripper said, continuing on about the apparent danger in the garage. “Stuff’s been up there since before the Martin Luther King Day Earthquake, Tripper,” I said. “The only time I went up there was to pull a door down to see if I could fit it on to take the kids’ door with us.” “What?” “We’ve been measuring their height on the door since they could stand. Seemed like a good thing to take with us.” He looked through the papers on the house sale agreement. “I don’t think we have an exclusion on that.” “It wouldn’t work,” I said. “The door didn’t fit and it started to seem like too big a thing. But the point is, I pulled the door down and nothing fell.” “Well, we’ll have to get it looked at.” “The agent’s trying to screw us, isn’t she?” “Well, she’s…” “It’s okay. Just say it. We’re in a corner and she’s trying to take advantage of us.” “They’ve got someone coming out to look at the garage. Okay?” I knew he was serious, be...

I took off for the afternoon and Tripper took care of the inspector guy. He called me about two hours in and said there wasn’t anything big to worry about, but that the guy was going to be there about an hour longer than expected. When I got home, it was dark. Patricia and Lauren were off at a Girl Scout function [1] and I had the boy with me. I took a look through the house and you could tell things had been moved. Tripper called me as I walked through the house to make sure everything looked okay. He told me that he had to wait for the final report, but that nothing looked too bad and he’s be over later when they delivered the report to him. It was after five and I had to get dinner started. Connor was working on his homework. I turned on the lights in the backyard and noticed that the faucet was dripping. There were two faucets in the backyard – which seemed excessive for such a small house. One was over in a corner by the kitchen and was not only a faucet, but had, for a w...

If you’ll recall from our early reading, this house had an interesting history, at least as far as we were concerned. Patricia was TREMENDOUSLY pregnant when we moved in. Her sister sent her some baby stuff packed in Styrofoam peanuts. I was at the studio and she decided to throw the box and the peanuts out [1] . The wind came as she was waddling toward the curb and suddenly we had a lawn covered in Styrofoam peanuts. Patricia started to pick them up when she saw the woman next door come out. She looked at Patricia, then went inside and came out with five little kids to help Patricia pick up the Styrofoam. “You know,” she said to Patricia, “I run a daycare next door…” Honest to God. We moved in pregnant next door to a family run daycare. A good one. Run by a great woman names Maya who became not only one of our best friends, but also the children’s Godmother [2] . But things end and eventually Maya’s landlord decided to stop renting and sell the house as the market was clim...

I was working at the studio at the time and it seemed such a tremendous pain in the ass [1] and unpleasant to do just the MINOR renovation that it was easier to just buy another house. And we thought about it. We even took a little action now and again by doing the math and looking at what was on the market. When we’d moved into the house as a rental, I was a lowly production assistant dreaming of someday not doing my own Xeroxing. When we bought the house, I was a not-so-lowly-but-still-pretty-small-potatoes Senior Production Coordinator [2] , making about fifty percent more. In the next couple of years I was bumped up a couple of times and making about two hundred percent more. And still, my salary was JUST KEEPING PACE with the L.A. housing market. Patricia was getting raises, but hers was pretty much constant. Because I had started at such a low point, I could get bumped up five hundred percent, as I did at the Warner mines, and still just be making a decent living. Patricia...