Tactical Nukes

From what I can tell, that's the only thing that will kill white water mold in your hot tub.

Well, we've lost another blogger on the blogroll. Ellie has decided to hang up the gloves on her fitness blog so that she can concentrate on her 300 new friends on Facebook. I don't actually know what Facebook is, other than it is something that was originally designed for teenagers to gossip about their friends but that actually is being used largely by middle-aged people to gossip about their friends. That's about all I plan to learn about it, as Twitter is now all the rage, with both blogging and Facebook being soooo last year.

Twitter, from what I can tell, is like blogging except for people with really, really short attention spans, or possibly people who are crippled by not having a slide-out keyboard on the phone on which they compose their blogs. I won't have much time to investigate this Twitter thing for a while, though. At least not until you can sell ads on it.

It's not often that you go out to fetch the mail, and the street two houses up is swarming with cop cars. Well, it's not too often in this neighborhood. In our first house, we used to pray that the police would finally catch those guys at home (though they never did). And then, it's sad to dash back in the house to grab your po-lice scanner (a tenth-year anniversary present from The Company), only to realize it is still programmed for San Schmose frequencies, not Fort TomCollins frequencies.

So, lest you get caught unprepared again, you spend some time programming it. That involves just doing blind broad-range frequency scans and storing any frequencies that hit.

This, of course, will drive your wife into an absolute frenzy because she has not given you permission to make any noise whatsoever, and she has very specifically instructed that you are not allowed to use the gift your loving The Company gave you in exchange for wasting ten years of your life on a so-called "career". But, you know, as an adult, you don't need permission from your wife to program your own po-lice scanner. So you do it anyways. And then you teach your boy how to work it and let him wander all over the house with it.

And then, naturally, she has to get even with you. So she waits until you're sitting quietly and surfing the web, then she sneaks up behind you and starts wadding up paper into balls as loudly as possible right behind your head while yelling, "Yeah! Yeah! You like this right? You like just mindless noise at random intervals, right? Yeah! Yeah!"

And, really, this is quite annoying. You should never underestimate the ability of a woman who is the product of a broken home and thus has no idea how a husband and wife are supposed to interact to come up with the most mindless and petty ways to intentionally annoy her husband. As I have heard tell, during her formative years, her mother decided to embark upon a course of behavior that was specifically designed to try to annoy her father enough that he would finally divorce her. And, unfortunately, this is really the only parenting by example she ever got.

So I don't really blame her so much as I pity her.

And myself.

After a few minutes, she managed to goad me into a reaction, during which time I said that the next time she was sewing, I'd stand behind her and make really loud sewing-machine noises, since that's clearly what she liked. And then I did my impression of an enraged sewing machine, which, if I do say so myself, was dead nuts on.

The Mrs. disappeared for a while, and then she showed up with a camera and was literally waving it around in my face, and she asked what a sewing machine sounded like. After enough of this, I said something that would be considered nasty if one were to just hear that and not the story leading up to it. And with a great, "Ah HA!" The Mrs. announced that she was using the moovie feature on the digital camera, not the still photos, and she had captured me being mean to her, and she insisted I put it on my blog so the everyone else who reads my blog would know how mean I am. So I did, only I did a small edit at the end later because Ellie was horrified after seeing the unedited footage that this video showed me being mean when I am actually a most wonderful and caring person who sometimes can't take the constant nagging and lashes out. (I may be paraphrasing a bit there.)

And that is the back story from the previous post.

Upon reflection, The Mrs. was clearly feeling like her gratuitously nasty behavior needed some kind of explanation. Not an apology, mind you, but an explanation. So she used her favorite don't-blame-me-I-come-from-a-broken-home excuse: "My stepfather had a police scanner."

I now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming.