I mention it only because these posts serve as a mental note. I honestly don’t miss it at this point. Although it’d be pretty cool to get hold of a cigarette machine. How cool would that be to have in the house? People have jukeboxes, pinball machines, bars and shit like that. I want a cigarette machine…and not some fancy thing. I want the old 70′s/80′s shit where you plunked money in and had to pull that lever out to drop the pack of smokes. Like This.

I like that we do things (some consciously, some not) that buck conventional tradition.

If I were to be completely honest, I take secret pleasure in the fact that our tendency as a family to not do things the ‘normal’ way wigs out my mother in law. She’s very much a “you do things because that’s what people do” kind of person and that bugs me. I truly think she’s never taken the time in her life to stop and consider anything on more than a superficial level. It seems most of what she does, believes and lives is based on the idea of “that’s what you do” – and that’s always annoyed me.

So when she calls my wife and asks if we have pork cooking on the 1st, I smile on the inside when my wife explains that we’re doing sushi and the muffled Charlie Brown trumpet voice on the other end of the phone that you can barely make out seems just a little deflated at the notion that someone might actually not do what everyone else does.

Might as well start at the very beginning. I’m thinking the whole thing should be a picture book.

I expect this trend to continue in 2012.

That is all.

My wife and daughter were on rake and removal. Little man had the shovel and wheelbarrow and did a great job going down the curb. I fired up the lawn mower and made a mess with a combo of its mulching ability, bagging capability and general ease of spitting leaves into the woods. Then I doubled over the entire yard – essentially mowing the week before Christmas.

It was still pretty wet. Leaves were packed and stuck. The yard was a mess, but we made an impact. It at least looks like we care now. It’s really only three months (probably less) until we need to start thinking about maintaining outside again. I hope we can get on top of it. That’s the one place I feel like we’ve let things go since we moved it. We started off strong that first spring/summer and then just petered out. It really needs some attention. I’d like to get some curb appeal going.

When I was a kid, I lived in the same house from a few months before my 4th birthday until I moved in December of the year I turned 18. That was 20 years ago this month. I lived in that house for 179 months – just shy of 15 full years.

In the 20 years since I moved out of my parents house I’ve moved 17 times if you count the short stays at hotels when we’d make big moves. If you ignore those month-long stays and just count it as part of the moving experience then I’ve moved 13 times. Of those moves two were short stints back to the parents for a total of 3 months. Those moves take place over 6 different cities/areas.

We bought this house three years ago and as of this month, it’s the longest I’ve lived at one address since leaving home as a kid. In April, the Dayton area will serve as the area I’ve spent the most time since then.

I guess for us this area has slowly become home. Both my wife and I were born and raised in western PA. Different areas, but still western PA. My daughter still identifies with western PA to a small degree. She was born there, although I doubt she remembers it as we moved when she was about a year and a half old. But we returned in 2003 and stayed until we headed out here in 2006. She’s 14 now, but she was 8 when we moved here. She was a third grader starting at her third school in 4 years. My son however, pretty much knows this area as home. He was born in Jacksonville, FL. We left there before he was two months old. When we came to Dayton he was just 4. He’s 10 now. It’s all he knows. The only school he’s ever gone to is the one he’s at now.

It probably seems crazy to move around that much, but I don’t think it was bad. It’s easy to get complacent and jumping around as much as we did for so long kept it exciting. We generally followed the opportunity first and foremost. Now that the kids are older, the focus has shifted more towards stability. When you’re the ages of my kids, moving would suck balls. However, I do think all the moving when they’re younger is good. They see a lot of things, meet a lot of different people – generally learn to be adaptable.

We don’t really have a hard, concrete plan looking ahead. The general goal is to try to stay here until the kids are adults…which means 8 more years for the youngest to hit 18. Realistically 9 for him to finish school. After that, who knows? Suddenly, we’re not quite as tied down any more. Possibilities are endless…except for Florida. Florida is the worst. We’ve gone twice and couldn’t wait to escape both times.

At any rate, it’s weird to think I’ve spent more time in this house than anywhere else I’ve lived since that house I spent my childhood in. Even if we do stay here another 9, that puts us up to 12. I wonder if I’ll ever live at one address as long as I lived with my family in that house as a kid?

1. It took them like 15 minutes to find our paperwork when we showed up to get the car. They tried to be semi-apologetic, but the old bitty got cool when my wife threw attitude over their seemingly endless incompetence. It got awkward.

2. My seat was moved. I hate when my seat is moved. Now it doesn’t feel right and I’m tweaking it every time I get in the car. I’m convinced it’ll never be exactly right. Have I mentioned the car has the most confortable seats in the world. Everyone mentions it when they first sit in it. I’d argue they’re more comfy for straight upright sitting than any seat in my home.

3. They completely deatailed the car. That was a bonus. With the new bumper and total cleaning, it looks like it did the day we took it off the lot originally.

4. The service tag number was 689. It looks the same if you turn it upside down. I thought that was cool. Then we were watching TV tonight (I actually think it was during the movie Hall Pass) and one of the couples’ house numbers was 689. Isn’t it weird how numbers like that tend to pop up in several places?

I could go one with examples and examples of thing just in the past year, but I’m going to go with the just one that broke the camel’s back and compelled me to write this. It serves as a perfect example of thew ‘not the end of the world” but ‘not insignificant’ shit we run into where the response when questioning it is pretty much little more than a grumbled, “Sorry.”

A few months back (the first day of school to be exact) some asshole old dude pulled out into my path and I tagged him and fuckered up the Camaro’s rear bumper a little. Mostly cosmetic, but the insurance guy was cool and hooked me up.

We figured we’d just go back to the Chevy dealer to have the work done. Due to the hail storms we saw over the summer, a lot of cars had a lot of body damge and they were super backed-up. We were ok with that and made an appointment for December 12.

Well, December 12th rolled around this past Monday and we were there bright and early dropping off the car. We asked how long the work would take and were told best case was it’d be done by end of day on Tuesday the 13th and to call and see where they were. Cool.

So we heard nothing all day Tuesday and figured we wouldn’t push, it probably took a little longer. On the 14th (Wednesday) right around noon my wife called to see what the staus was. She was put on hold. About five or six minutes later a second person picked up the phone and asked how he could help her. She explained everything again and was put on hold a second time. Roughly five more minutes pass and a thrid guy picks up the phone and asks what she was calling about. This guy didn’t bother putting her on hold he just laid the phone down. You could hear people talking in the background, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. A few minutes pass and the third guy gets back on and says the bumper just came in today. Best case scenario is that it’s finished by end of day Friday.

Wait! What the fuck. There’s so much wrong with this.

1. Why didn’t they order the bumper ahead of time?
2. Why didn’t they tell us they still had to order the bumper when we dropper the car off and have us drop it off when the bumper came?
3. Assuming neither of those, why didn’t they call us to let us know what was going on?

So my wife gives him a little shit and he pretty much mumbles, “Sorry” and pushes her off the phone.

At what point is something a fuck up and a case of shit happens and at what point has the business fucked up and the customer deserves to have it made right in some way? I don’t know where that line really sits, but it seems to be shifting more and more towards, “Too fucking bad, I fucked up. Get over it.” with every passing day.

What’s worse is that we’re finding if you try to take it higher, often those people are unreachable or just don’t care as muchas the lower-level people. And if you try to fight back via customer satisfaction surveys – well, those seem to be about as biased as anything. Surveys all seem to be worded in a way that doesn’t hit the issues. I suspect it’s stacking the deck in order to sell your “record-high customer service scores” to people.

I just see it happening too much to be coincidence. No one cares and nothing seems to matter much anymore. We live in a time where “Yup. I’m an asshole.” seems to be a valid apology.

I’m getting real close to making “knocking your teeth down your throat” the valid response to such apologies.

Oh, he likes to build hybrid human/mechanical cyborg demon dragon-beasts from hell that only Ninjas of Death can subdue and ride.

But your son’s little truck is nice, I suppose.

I cannot express how much I love this. LOVE!

I think he’s dead on. In fact it’s scary how much he took directly from my head…almost word for word. I’d also add that the same generation also grew up in uncommonly prosperous economic times as well – their entire youth as a generation was about unrealistic expectations top to bottom.

Ass douches!

For the record, 80′s hair band White Lion had Vito power.

So to start thinking Xmas and maybe start scoping trees we decided to go check out our local Christmas Tree Shoppe. We knew a little about it and had been wanting to check the place out for a while. Well, our mistake for not looking into it more, but it’s probably the worst place in the world. I expected a cute little seasonal holiday-type place. It’s actually essentially a Big Lots with 1/4 of the store filled with seasonal holiday items of the Big Lots quality you’d expect. It fucking sucked. If it burned to the ground tomorrow, I’d chuckle with approval. I actually wished I were in a Big Lots. (for the record, Big Lots is one of my least favorite places on Earth)

Just a big fucking waste of time.

We noticed there was a Burlington Coat Factory in the plaza. We hadn’t been to one in ages, but we used to find pretty great deals at the one in Allentown when we lived there.

Mistake #2.

It smelled…mostly like sad. And there was absolutely nothing worth seeing there…except (and I swear we found these there) for the boys mustard yellow courduroy pants straight off the kids in early-70′s Sesame Street episodes. I had flashbacks.

We quickly slipped out of there and beelined to the other location we planned on hitting – Hobby Lobby. I don’t think I’d ever stepped foot in one prior to this. We saw an ad that said they had a buttload of trees in all shapes and sizes at great prices. It may have been a bit of an oversell. They had one 12-footer, but it didn’t look very real and was a bit bare…and even with the 50% off sale on all Christmas decorations, still came in at a price closer to four digits than two. Meh.

What a waste of a couple of Friday hours.

On Satuday, we had football equipment turn-ins in the morning, then my son and I decided to drive across town to see one of the semi-final tournament games. Looked to be possibly the best game of the entire tournament at the 4th grade level. One team was a sleeper that went undefeated and gave up just one touchdown in the 8-game season and only two TD’s in three tournament games. No one ever put up more than 6 against them. They were playing the team that has been a thorn in our side not just once, but twice in the past. They’re consistently good and passed us in the final week of the season for the highest scoring team in the 4th grade.

On paper it was the unstoppable force against the immovable object.

It didn’t play out that way. The sleeper team gave up 28 points. In one game they gave up more TD’s than they had total in the 11 games prior. We still had fun. Might go to the championship game at UD next weekend.

It was also my daughter’s birthday. I have a 14 year old. Her party was last weekend, so she got to spend the day alone while my wife was at work and my son and I were at the game. She got a cake from Ritters. She wanted a Mud Pie cake. Too chocolatey for me. A weird little quirk of mine is that I’m not fond of chocolate ice cream. Even worse, chocolate ice cream with more chocolate shit mixed in…and then topped with more chcocolate. Not my thing. But Ritters is awesome. It took us a while to discover them (we’re DQ people for childhood), but we haven’t been to DQ in ages. (for the record my very favorite ice cream is Whitehouse)

Tomorrow? Little stuff around the house and a Steelers game tomorrow night. Normally we rake/blow leaves the first weekend in November, but all the leaves haven’t fallen yet. Trees are still surprisingly full for this late in the year. Maybe next weekend.

I’m livin’ it.