Long Shrift

Heather Armstrong almost ruined Mother's Day

I'm not good at thinking up gift ideas for my wife, and I often end up trying to find the right gift at the last minute. This is exacerbated by her uncanny ability to get thoughtful gifts for me, and that she tends to think of ideas far in advance. Mother's Day filled me with dread. And then inspiration struck: Milwaukee's Department of City Development has a series of posters, one for each neighborhood in the city. Jenny had been meaning to get the Bay View poster for some time, but hadn't mentioned it for months. A quick Google search turned up the posters, and $5 later it was mine. I figured I had the perfect gift - it implies that I actually listen to her and even remember the things she says.

Earlier this week, she and a friend went to the Body Worlds exhibition down at the Milwaukee Public Museum. (The verdict? Amazing. However, some of the bodies might appear artificial... until you see the hair.) As she was telling me about it, suddenly she lit up. "And wait until you see what I picked up at the museum."

She told me to close my eyes and wait. I wondered if I was going to open my eyes and see a sinew keychain or something. Of course, it was the Bay View poster. She saw the expression on my face, and I had to tell her that I had another one sitting in the trunk of my car. (By coincidence, the very next day, a co-worker who had recently moved to Bay View expressed an interest in the same poster, so he just got the world's cheapest housewarming gift.)

Of course, I got points for the gift anyway, but now I was in trouble. I had a couple of gift ideas, but the poster was to be the centerpiece. The other gifts included:

• The slightly kitschy upside-down tomato planter (which I saw advertised on late-night television, so I knew it was a product I could trust).
• A CD that wasn't going to be a surprise. First of all, we had recently talked about it, and it's not like you're fooling anyone when you wrap up a CD - they're probably not going to think it's a puppy. (Side note: I'm a fan of R.E.M., and I like the CD, but if describe a 36-minute CD as "defiantly lean," you're inviting people to make jokes about how it was not so much an act of defiance, but that the aging band members needed frequent naps.)
• Ergonomic garden tools. My wife has carpal tunnel, and loves to garden, but still, it says "You're an excellent mother, and you deserve gifts" and follows with "It seems like there's a lot of creeping charlie invading the flower beds."

I had an ace in the hole, though. My wife's a big fan of Dooce.com, and I read that the author, Heather Armstrong, recently published a book. Perfect! I meant to go and pick it up one day after work, but the week got away from me. I'd have Saturday to get it, since Jenny would be working. So a quick jaunt to the local Barnes & Noble and done.

Except that B&N didn't have it. They offered to call the other store at Mayfair, a shopping mall that is everything I hate about shopping malls and more. But they had a copy, and they were holding it behind the counter for me. Another fifteen minutes in the car with a fidgety toddler, an aggravating search for parking and a walk the length of three football fields to get to the store... but hey, this book was the centerpiece now. I was so happy to be finished with the shopping, and Quinn was being good, so I even braved the children's book section so that he could get something. (He picked a box of animal puzzles that came in a little suitcase-like box. I later remembered that trying to show a toddler how to do puzzles is extremely frustrating, and I also realized that he was only interested in the suitcase.) The book was waiting for me at the counter - I glanced at the cover and got out the plastic.

Home at last, and time to wrap. I took my first actual look at the book, and realized I had made a horrible mistake. I had been expecting a book by Heather Armstrong, but she was actually the editor of a collection of essays by several bloggers (including herself). The big problem was that it hadn't dawned on me that a book entitled Things I Learned about My Dad (In Therapy) might be, oh, I dunno, a series of essays on fatherhood.

When Jenny came home from work, I told her that I had a gift that she had to open on Saturday, not on Mother's Day. As I routinely get quizzical looks from my wife, I have developed a shorthand approach using a Likert scale; this look rated a 2.

Please indicate your agreement with the following statement:

My wife thinks I'm insane.

1. Strongly agree
2. Agree
3. Neither agree nor disagree
4. Disagree
5. Strongly disagree

She unwrapped the book and laughed. "So why did you have to give this to me today?"

"Because it's about fatherhood, so it just didn't seem like the ideal gift for Mother's Day."

"I was wondering if this was something you didn't want my family to see, like porn or something."

For the record, I have never given her porn. Also, she had already purchased a copy of the book to give to me on Father's Day.

bring on Skynet

UPenn's ModLab recently showed off a robot that re-assembles itself. In the video, the robot is kicked apart, then crawls back together.

While watching the video, my mood changed suddenly from fascination to a lingering nervousness - after all, if an artificial intelligence is indeed going to take over the world one day, this brings us one step that impending apocalypse. Considering the track record of human-on-robot aggression, I think this scenario is becoming more and more likely. (Thankfully, the researchers at Carnegie Mellon are thinking about humans, unlike the irresponsible UPenn students.)

Then again, maybe it wouldn't be so bad if the machines took over.

red eye adjustment won't fix this

Went to a Brewer game earlier today, Quinn's first. Went for a walk around the Terrace level with my brother-in-law Jeff and his daughter Shirley. Went through the children's play area, got some balloon animals (Quinn named his Rickie Weeks), and got our photo taken. Went to the Web site after the game to see how the picture turned out. Probably won't be ordering it.

an unhealthy Muppet fetish

A coworker suggested I need help. I don't know why it is that twisted movies featuring Muppets make me laugh so hard that milk comes out of my nose.

mold

Our basement can be damp sometimes - like after a torrential rain - but the corner where we keep the washer and dryer was always dry. So we put down a couple of sheets of linoleum on the floor, just to make it a little more welcoming if you wanted to shuffle loads of laundry in your socks.

Then we had a winter with near-record snow. And then the thaw, which brought water to the damp corner of the basement, and then some. Some water ran over by the dryer, and my wife foolishly decided to see if a lot had accumulated under the linoleum. She called me at work, anxious and disgusted.

A few days before this happened, I walked into the men's bathroom in our office one morning, only to find one of our staff - a woman - in there, pouring something down the drain in the middle of the floor. I related this disturbing incident to a few friends in the office, only to discover that one of them was no stranger to the custodial arts. "Ah, Backdown," he said. "I remember it well." I asked him how to deal with the mold problem. TSP? Sulfuric acid? Arson? Bleach, he said, mixed with water.

That evening, I pulled up a corner of the linoleum to see for myself. It looked liked a horde of caterpillars had gone there to die. It takes a fair amount to gross me out: I grew up on a farm with three brothers and I've worked in fast food. We have four cats in our house, I assume that every horizontal surface has been exposed to cat butt. And mold is friendly stuff, right? It struck me that if I could cultivate a species of mold that only ate cat vomit, my life would be vastly improved. So this mold didn't freak me out overly much, but it had to go.

We sent off our boy to spend the night with the grandparents. My wife gathered equipment for the expedition: rubber gloves, scrubbing brushes, contractor-grade garbage bags. Side note: if you need to dispose of something toxic, disturbing or otherwise embarrassing - say, 40 square feet of moldy linoleum - contractor-grade garbage bags are the way to go. Heck, you could dispose of contractors in them.

It's not often that we have an evening to ourselves, so we decided to go out for dinner. I failed to convince my wife that my cat-vomit-devouring mold business was a sure thing, despite a catchy name (Mold For The Home®). We had a beer to steel ourselves for the exciting Friday night we had in store. Then we headed home, suited up and headed down the basement stairs.

We've been thinking about moving to the suburbs next year, so maybe discussing the mold problem could come back to haunt us. More importantly, I should stress that I won't be putting any further effort into the designer mold business.

Honestly, the cleanup wasn't all that bad. We cut the linoleum up into strips, rolled it up and carefully placed it into the garbage bags. We kept spraying everything with the bleach to keep things from spreading, then we scrubbed the floor and hosed it down. For good measure, we then bleached, scrubbed and hosed everything a couple more times. Except for the bunny suits, we treated the whole process like an asbestos removal. (Which I have done before. No, not in this house - the only problem here is mold. And the damp basement. And cats. Maybe a few wolf spiders.)