Pool talk

My 20-year-old son: "I saw what you wrote online about me and my friends using the swimming pool. 'Hippie soup.' Ha-ha. Very funny."

Me: "After you guys left, the pool was like a mud wrestling pit, full of filth and cooties and vermin."

Son: "Yeah, right."

Me: "I had to give it double chlorine! Had to kill off all those youthful hormones!"

Son: "Hormones?"

Me: "You can't leave those untreated. If you do, your swimming pool might rise up during the night and come in the house and hump you."

Son: "You are so weird."

And a birdbeak stereo . . .

I don't understand why, with all our scientific advancements in cloning, etc., we can't develop animals to do our household chores for us.

For instance, I would happily house an anteater-like creature that would hoover up my carpets. I'm tired of pushing around a loud piece of machinery that breaks if it picks up a crumb. No, don't try to sell me a better vacuum or a Roomba or whatever. I want a critter that feeds on dust.

Haven't these scientists ever seen "The Flintstones?"

PS: Birdbeak Stereo would be a good name for a band.

Washtub abs

Most of us like to believe that we’re physically fit, or at least fit enough to get through our everyday lives without serious injury.

It’s easy to maintain that belief when everyday life involves nothing more strenuous than oozing off the sofa and going to the kitchen for more pork rinds. But once in a while, we’re required to actually do something physical -- such as lifting luggage into an overhead bin or tying our shoes -- and the resulting aches and pains prove that we’re kidding ourselves.

I exercise almost every day, walking miles on our Dreadmill and lifting tiny dumbbells (by their ears). But if I try something physically demanding, such as yardwork, I quickly find that I’m not fit at all.

My wife and I moved a seven-foot-tall palm tree from one area of our property to another. It took a couple of hours of surprisingly hard work, including a lot of shoveling and squatting and cursing. I expected to be fine after recovering from the initial heatstroke and mud bath, but hahaha on that. The next morning, every muscle between knees and chest, including some I didn’t know I had, rose up in revolt. For days after, I shuffled around the house like a geriatric German shepherd with bad hips. Even my fat hurt.

Clearly, my time on the Dreadmill hadn’t prepared me for actual physical labor. I might be fit enough to walk a couple of miles without keeling over, but I was unprepared for digging and crouching and yanking on stubborn tree roots.

Which brings us to a recent study by the American Council on Exercise. The ACE study encourages older folks to do “functional” exercise that emphasizes moving muscles and joints together in ways that mimic real-life needs, rather than just lifting weights or walking, which use the same isolated muscles over and over.

(Anybody else think it’s more than a coincidence that ACE is also the name of a brand of bandages? Maybe that’s just me.)

The study, done at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, used 48 volunteers between the ages of 58 and 78. All already participated in a fitness program because of various health problems related to cheese consumption. (Note to Wisconsin readers: Just kidding about the cheese!)

The researchers randomly assigned participants to a group doing functional exercises or to a control group that stuck with “a traditional exercise program of walking and aerobic dance,” according to an ACE press release. The 12 functional exercises, performed three times a week, included moves such as “wall push-ups, lunge and chop, and squat with diagonal reach.”

At the end of the month-long study, the researchers found that those who went through the functional fitness program showed greater improvements in lower-body strength, upper-body strength, cardio-respiratory endurance, agility, balance and shoulder flexibility than the control group.

Participants in the functional exercise group celebrated their gains by beating up the aerobic dancers. (Kidding again!)

ACE said it was hoped that the study would encourage people to incorporate functional strength training into their workout programs so they can “safely and effectively perform their various activities of daily living.”

Good advice. I plan to try some of these functional exercises to see if they help strengthen my muscles and increase my flexibility. Perhaps they’ll even prepare me to do physical labor, assuming the occasion ever arises again.

For sure, the next time my wife suggests that we transplant a tree, I’m doing the “lunge and chop.”

Laundry quandary

Here's a typical load of laundry at my house: 17 black T-shirts, all approximately the same size.

My sons wear black T-shirts all the time. My wife wears oversized T-shirts around the house or under sweaters. And me? I work at home. My whole life's built around T-shirts.

I do the laundry around here, and I follow the rules on the detergent box: Wash like colors together. But that inevitably results in one load that's all black cotton T-shirts.

Even under the best conditions (strong light, perfect vision), it's difficult to sort black T-shirts. I do it in the dim laundry room. Because I love a mystery.

Tags might give a clue, except that we mostly shop at the same stores, and a label that says "Old Navy" won't narrow the field much.

The teens' shirts often have insults or rock band logos or both displayed on the front, but the shirts are always inside-out in the laundry. I either have to turn them right, or peek inside to read the logo upside-down and backward. And then remember which kid likes which band.

I end up guessing. Various black T-shirts end up in various wrong drawers, only to cycled through the laundry again later. ("Hey, this isn't mine…")

In this manner, the T-shirts migrate around the house, from dresser to floor to washer to dryer and back again. Our shirts get around more than we do.

This might seem a minor annoyance, and it is. So, naturally, I've arrived at a grandiose solution that requires government funding:

Families should become color-coded. Each person would have a color that's strictly his or hers, and each family member would wear a different one.

Newborns would be assigned a color, and that would be their color forever. If they draw "green," then it's all green for them. Green clothes, green linens, green toothbrush, green everything. You name it. Green.

They don't like green? Tough. That's their color. They're green until further notice. They're green and that's it. They're green until they turn 18, and move out of the house and wear only black like the rest of the college students. But for now, one color per person. No givesy-backsies.

Color-coding would solve many household problems. No more sibling accusations of "stealing my favorite sweater." No more fighting over which toothbrush belongs to which child. No more trying to recall which sheets fit on which bed.

Laundry could be sorted in no time. Anyone (except the colorblind) could do it, and it would be easier to shanghai children into doing their own: "That's your pile there, Greeny. Get busy."

Imagine how cheery family dinners would be, with each person dressed in one bright color head to toe, and using the same color plate and cutlery and place mat. We'd look like the Teletubbies.

The government funding? We'd need a national publicity campaign to "raise awareness" of the simple Family Color Coordination solution. Then government should butt out. No need to take it farther than that. Congress shouldn't dictate that all moms wear blue, or every fourth child must wear yellow or whatever. That would be overreaching. Families should decide for themselves how to best approach color assignments, if any.

I call dibs on black.

The filthy truth

Do you know why, in war movies, soldiers smear mud on their faces before engaging the enemy? Because it makes them invisible.

Dirt has magical properties. We can't see it. It can be right in front of us, and we look past it or around it or right through it without registering the thought, "Hey, it's dirty in here."

Oh, we can see filth when it's layered on really thick, such as in a service station restroom. Then we get all prissy about it, tiptoeing and making faces and acting like our bathroom at home is always, always spotless. It's easy to get on your high horse when the cleanup is someone else's problem.

But most of us have dirt right in our own homes. Tons of it. Grit and grime and dust bunnies. Windborne sand dunes and tracked-in mud and a fine powder of pollen over everything. It's no wonder so many of us suffer from allergies.

Right now, you're probably thinking: This guy's way off base. My house is perfectly clean. To which I reply: Hahaha on that. Even the best-kept homes have dust bunnies hiding in out-of-the-way corners.

If you don't believe me, conduct this simple experiment. Go to the heaviest piece of furniture in your house -- the piano, say, or that stuffed-full dresser in your bedroom -- and move it out from the wall. Once you recover from the strain, check out the floor where the furniture stood.
Disgusting, right? Doesn't it make you want to rearrange all the furniture and clean under it immediately? OK, maybe not, but it does give you an inkling of what kind of filth you're harboring in your home.

Most of us reach a sort of uneasy peace with hidden dirt: We can't see it, so it must not exist. Better to think that way than to spend every spare moment scrubbing stuff. We've got important TV to watch.

But once in a while, harsh reality rears its ugly head. We move a piece of furniture or investigate a strange smell or look under a bed and we see that, omigod, we live like pigs.

This happened at our house when we hired a crew to paint our home's interior while we were away on vacation. This seemed like the perfect scenario. We'd come home from a week away, and our house would be dazzlingly clean and fresh.

Not so much. The paint looked great, and the painters had been careful to cover all of our stuff so they didn't get paint on it. But in the process of painting, they'd moved all the furniture around, freeing the hidden filth.

Holy dust mites, Batman. It took the whole family a full day of vacuuming and dusting and wiping stuff before we could, once again, persuade ourselves that it was clean around here. Clean enough, anyway. The dirt had slipped back into its invisible form, waiting for the next time someone moves a sofa to reveal grime and stray popcorn and loose change.

Once again, we'd reached a standoff in the war on dirt. At least we didn't have to smear it on our faces.

When laundry goes bad

Every family needs a balanced division of labor.

Each household has many tasks that must be done regularly, and it's only fair that spouses divvy them up, according to time and ability and personal preference. Once kids reach a certain age, many chores can be dumped on them, but it still should be equitable. That's the democratic ideal.

A pivotal moment in my marriage came early on, when my wife and I made the following pact: She would pay the bills and do the household paperwork, and I would do all the laundry.

This was an ideal division of labor, pegged to ability (she's a whiz at organization; I can't do math) as well as personal preference (she hates laundry). I quickly found that laundry was something I could accomplish while watching sports on TV. Like I said, it was ideal.

Things change, of course. Once we had babies, I started wondering if I was getting a raw deal. The amount of laundry quadrupled and I found myself trying to fold, oh, 700 of those little "onesies" every week.

But household paperwork got more complicated, too. Mortgages and escrow accounts and insurance premiums and stock options and credit card statements and other math-related stuff I don't even pretend to understand.

The laundry load got somewhat easier after our sons passed the diapers-and-urp stage of their development. When they hit their teens. (Kidding!)

As the boys got older, I required them to round up their own dirty clothes. I wasn't about to prowl their filthy rooms in search of crunchy socks and moldy towels. If they wanted their clothes washed, they had to bring them to the laundry room.

The flaw in that plan: They didn't care if their laundry got done. They'd happily wear the same pair of jeans day in and day out, until the pants could stand up on their own and they could just leap into them every morning. In fact, they'd think that was "cool."

It became an exercise in nagging. Eventually, the clothes would appear and I'd wash them, along with whatever crayons, loose change, gravel and live frogs happened to be in the pockets.

I was griping about this situation, and my wife asked why didn't the boys do their own laundry. I raised several objections, including a dramatic rendition of a washer overflowing with suds, right out of an episode of "I Love Lucy," but my wife persisted, and we gave the boys the bad news.

Mostly, it's worked out okay. I still nag them when it becomes abundantly clear that their clothes need washing. They, so far, have not filled the house with suds.

But I know they're cutting corners, which brings me to the Hideous Shirt.

Years ago, in preparation for an Ugly Hawaiian Shirt contest, I made a thrift-store purchase of a brown-green-and-gold psychedelic number I thought was a sure winner, but it didn't even place. Who knew how ugly those shirts could get? Whew.

My younger son rescued the Hideous Shirt from the trash, pronounced it "cool" and took it to his room. He never wears it, but it regularly shows up in the laundry.

I know how this happens. After the requisite nagging, he does a clean sweep, picking up all clothes, dirty or clean, and throwing them in the washer. I watch the never-worn Hideous Shirt cycle through the laundry, and I chew my lips over the inefficiency and waste.

At least the boys aren't trying to balance the checkbook. Imagine how hideous that would be.

Out with the old (back)

Yesterday was the day after our holiday company went home, so we put away the Christmas stuff and rearranged all the furniture. I threw my back out pushing a table around, so our sons did most of the heavy lifting. When you need furniture moved, it's nice to have a couple of well-muscled young men hanging around your house. You just have to catch them during the 45 minutes a day when they're both home and awake.

Speaking of back pain, guess who's planning a quiet New Year's Eve?

A dirty business

I go into the bathroom and my wife's in there, dressed in her flannel pajamas with the cats on them. Plants sit around her. She's at the sink, dunking what looks like a plastic bag full of mud.

Me: Whatcha doing, hon?
Her: Warming this sphagnum moss.
Me: Oh.
Her: Why? What does it look like I'm doing?
Me: Never mind.

The housework diet

Trying to lose weight? Now we know you can scour away those excess pounds.

That's right, cleaning your house counts as exercise. Depending on how hard you work, standard chores like laundry and mopping can burn up to 250 calories an hour, according to a recent article I read somewhere.

(It doesn't matter which article. These days, every magazine and newspaper and website is glutted with advice about diet and exercise. Everywhere you look, ominous ads and articles blare that we're being killed by our own waistlines.)

Whether you buy into the obesity panic or not, 250 calories an hour is nothing to sneeze at. I know from my expensive Dreadmill, which has more electronic readouts than the space shuttle, that it takes me about 40 minutes to burn that many calories if I keep a steady pace, walking to nowhere. Turns out, I could've saved my money and simply scrubbed stuff for exercise. I'd be just as fat, I mean fit, as I am now, and my house would be cleaner besides.

The article encouraged readers to find ways to squeeze more exercise into their housework. For instance, use time while you're waiting for the microwave or the coffeemaker to do stretches. If you have a two-story home, alternate activities between upstairs and downstairs so you get a free Stairmaster routine between chores. Sweep instead of vacuuming. Chop veggies with a knife rather than using a food processor, the article said, or do dishes by hand rather than in the dishwasher.

Those last suggestions made me say, "Whoa." The only way chopping veggies will help you lose weight is if you cut off a few fingers. And I'll do dishes in the sink when they pry my dishwasher from my cold, dead hands.

But, mostly, I like the idea of house-cleaning as workout routine, and I've dreamed up more exercises you can use to shed those unwanted pounds:

--Grout Stretch. Try scrubbing the bathroom grout after you've dressed for the day. You'll be forced to s-t-r-e-t-c-h across tubs and shower stalls so your clothes won't get wet and gunky. Keeping yourself suspended on toes and fingertips, while one free hand scrubs like crazy, burns more calories than Marine push-ups.

--Kitchen Race. If you have teen-agers in the house, try to supply food faster than they can eat it. You can cook, serve and load the dishwasher all at the same time, trying to keep up, but their appetites still will win.

--Toilet Bowl Bulimia. The more disgusting the toilet bowl you're cleaning, the more likely that you'll lose your lunch. Works best in households where boys reside.

--Television Scavenger Hunt. You can walk for miles, trying to find the remote control, all while bending and stooping and getting that heart rate up, up, up. Cursing can be aerobic, too.

--Rearranging Furniture. Moving heavy sofas and chairs is a good workout, and can help your home attain a "new look." Also, you'll be forced to clean the floor where the furniture formerly sat because it's covered with dust bunnies, loose change and escaped M&M's. Caution: Eating the old M&M's negates the calorie-burning effect.

--Stubbed-Toe Dance. A night-time event that frequently follows Rearranging Furniture.

--Climbing the Walls. Another exercise most common in homes equipped with teen-agers. Remove cobwebs while you're up there.

So, get cleaning and get fit, America. A sparkling home and a slimmer you awaits.

If that's not incentive enough, try rewarding your efforts with M&M's. Look under the couch.

Today's rap: 2 Cool 4 Chores

Dear Parents:

I found the following on the Internet. We'd always suspected a conspiracy. Here's the proof:

TEENAGERS' GUIDE TO CHORE AVOIDANCE

By "2 Lay-Z"

Yo, dude. If your parents are like mine, they're always laying some trip on you about doing "chores."

Man, they just don't get it. We teens can't be bothered by stuff like dishes and laundry and yard work. We've got more important things to do: Kickin' back. Hangin'. Setting a new high score on our Playstation 2 (and, yeah, yeah, the parents paid for the PS2, like we haven't heard that a million times).

Parents think they've gotta teach us "responsibility" and "pulling our weight" and stuff. Like we're gonna learn anything from doing laundry. All we learn is that work is never really done. You wash the clothes, you wear the clothes, you gotta wash 'em again. How's that gonna prepare us for the Real World? Ain't like we're gonna have a job where we do the same thing over and over, every damned day, right?

Teens across the nation gotta share the 411. Here are some time-tested ways to dodge chores:

1. The Maynard G. Krebs Memorial Panic Response

Named after that beatnik dude on the old "Dobie Gillis" TV show, this reaction involves screaming "Work!" and fleeing the room. Not only allows you to escape, but also alerts your siblings.

2. Amnesia

An old favorite. "I forgot" is like a miracle cure, man. There's no argument for it. Your parents get in your face about why you didn't do some chore, and you say, "I forgot," and they lose all their steam.

3. A Matter of Taste

No matter how slagged your room is, say, "I like it this way." Even if there's so much stuff on your floor, you can only walk around on stilts, the parents will hesitate. They're thinking: Well, if the kid likes his room this way, who am I to insist? While they're dithering, you can escape out the window.

4. Denial

"What work? I don't see any work."

5. Defiance

Outright refusal is sometimes effective, especially if the parent is too tired to argue. Caution: Can result in loss of Playstation privileges, injury or even death.

6. The "Gaslight" Defense

Make the parents think they're losing their minds. Here's how it works: Parent tells you to do a chore. You ignore command. Parent comes around later, asking why it wasn't done. You say: "What? You never told me to do that." Shake your head sadly. Say something like, "Man, you're losing it."

7. Not Mine

This one works on any chore that doesn't involve your immediate room. Say a parent wants you to pick up stuff scattered around the house. You say, "That's not my stuff. Why should I have to pick it up?" This forces the parent to explain about "helping the whole family" and "the common good" and blah, blah, blah. Eventually, they'll forget the whole thing.

8. The Stall

All of these responses are variations on our main theme: The Stall. You're just buying time, dude. The longer you put off doing a chore, the better the odds that the parents will give up and do it themselves.

Remember: You're younger than them. You can afford to wait them out. Eventually, you'll go off to college or marriage or the Army, and you won't ever have to pick up after yourself again.
After you're gone, your parents will keep your room just the way you left it. Because they don't know how to walk on stilts.

Clutter sputter

Sociologists often study garbage to learn how society works, what we value, what we throw away. But it's our clutter that really reveals the way we lead our lives.

Every home has clutter. Couldn't a sociologist decipher the interests and values of the household by examining what's left lying around?

For instance, here are signs of an unhealthy interest in television: All chairs and sofas in the living room face a big-screen TV, and the clutter consists of wrinkled TV Guides, four different remote controls, empty chip bags and pop bottles, and a life-size cardboard cutout of David Hasselhoff.

You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that artsy-craftsy folks occupy a home cluttered with knitting needles, balls of yarn, silk flower arrangements, vats of potpourri, and plaster geese wearing cute hats.

When you enter a home for the first time, can't you tell immediately whether it houses children? Most homes with children look like the aftermath of an explosion at Toys "R" Us. Small kids can scatter toys faster than weary parents can ever put them away. The only answer, really, is to wait until the children get older, then move to a new house.

Teen-agers shed clutter like dandruff. Everywhere they go, they leave trails of compact disks and gum wrappers and leaky pens and electronic gizmos and rock-star posters and dirty socks and dirty dishes and unfinished homework.

Yes, teens' clutter output is prodigious, but what's truly amazing is that they don't know they're doing it. How many of you recognize the following conversation?

Parent: "Pick that up."
Kid: "What?"
Parent: "That. Right there. You just dropped that."
Kid: "Dropped what?"
Parent: "That! Can't you see that? Pick it up and put it away."
Kid: "Oh, that. OK." (Walks away)
Parent: "Where are you going?"
Kid: "My room."
Parent: "Well, pick that up and take it with you."
Kid: "What?"
Parent: "Aaaaauuugh!" (Bursts into flames)

If a team of sociologists studied the clutter at our house, they'd go away thinking my family had two major interests in life:

1) Reading. Which is true. Open books and magazines cover every horizontal surface at our house, including the floors.

2) Shoes.

We tend to be a barefoot family, which means all of us shed our shoes as soon as we land at home. Our sons' elaborate sneakers are so large, they look like furniture. My wife apparently believes her attractive shoes should be out on display rather than tucked away in a dark closet.

Empty pairs of shoes sit at odd angles all around our house, as if a cocktail party had been vaporized, leaving behind only the footwear. Or, as if the Rapture occurred and God said to the assembled, "You can all go to Heaven, but your shoes stay here!"

Once a week or so, we have the Great Shoe Roundup at our house, corralling them in closets, chasing down the strays.

Here's how I announce that it's time to herd the footwear. I say, "Hey there, buckaroos. Pick up those shoes."

And my sons say, in unison: "What shoes?"

Danger, we'll robot soon!

Recent scientific breakthroughs have brought us closer to the day when we can each own a smart-alecky mechanical maid like the one on the "Jetsons."

Several companies have demonstrated new robots lately, ranging from Honda's "Asimo" humanoid to little droids that ferry medications through hospital corridors. Each new model raises the question: When, oh when, will we have our very own domestic robots to cook our food and wash our socks?

It may be a while. Researchers say they've still got a few kinks to iron out, such as giving robots proper vision and a refined sense of touch. (There's a fine line between a friendly handshake and a bone-crushing claw.)

We aging Baby Boomers are expected to once again drive the market. As we get older, we'll need "carebots" to give us medical attention and household 'bots to clean up our spills, or so the experts predict.

(Some of us are thinking: That's why we had children. To clean up after us when we're senile. But hahaha on that. The little ingrates will be busy pursuing their own lives, leaving us desperately trying to scrape together enough pennies to pay for our Depends.)

Many of us already are dependent on machines. Laptops, Palm Pilots and cell phones don't just make modern life possible. In many ways, they run our hectic lives. If you don't believe it, think back to the last time your computer crashed. How was your mood the rest of that day?

Do we really need walking, talking, artificially intelligent machines in our lives, simply to do little chores? Do we need more machines managing our lives? Isn't this situation fraught with peril?

(Example: Anyone who has seen the Will Smith action movie, "I, Robot," can tell you that advances in robotics pose the very real danger of producing greater numbers of mediocre action movies.)

But the robots are coming, whether we're ready or not.

Already, you can pay a mere $200 for a robotic vacuum cleaner called Roomba. The machine -- which looks like a bathroom scale on wheels -- will run around your home, bumping blindly into walls and furniture, vacuuming every square inch of carpet, until it is, in an unfortunate misunderstanding, killed by your dog.

Also available are robot lawn mowers which operate much the same way. You input the parameters of your lawn, and the machine takes off on its own, mowing like crazy. We all know how fallible such human programming can be:

"Look out, it's headed for the swimming pool!" Splash.

Robotics experts are looking for new market niches, and I'd like to suggest a robotic coffee cup that will follow me from room to room. Currently, I misplace my coffee cup an estimated 23 times per day. I thought about attaching it to my dog, since he follows me from room to room anyway, but he tends to drop to a sleeping posture without warning, which could result in undue spillage. I need a coffee cup delivery robot. Or, cut out the cup altogether and design a coffee urn that will follow me and squirt java directly into my mouth. That's what I'd call a "carebot."

Another marketing suggestion for us machine-dependent Baby Boomers: Design a robot whose sole responsibility is finding the TV remote.

We'd pay big money for that.

Bark, bark everywhere

Our dog's bark is worse than his bite.

The dog, Elvis, has never intentionally bitten anyone, despite the fact that he's equipped with a set of choppers worthy of a crocodile. He rarely raises his voice unless he's provoked by something nefarious like, say, a cat.

When I say "bark," I don't mean bark as in "woof," but bark as in "tree." In particular, I mean shredded tree bark that has become my chief nemesis in life.

In our back yard, shredded bark covers a berm that rises to the base of the tall rear fence. The bark was placed there as a landscaping "statement" by the developers. What they're saying with this statement is this: Nothing much will grow on this steep slope of clay and discarded concrete, so we'll hide it with shredded bark.

Well, that's just fine. Until it rains. Or the wind blows. At times of such unforeseen "acts of God," the bark tends to migrate until the berm is a barren slope surrounded by dunes of relocated bark.

Now factor into this landscaping scheme one large fuzzy dog with full roaming privileges.

You can picture what happens. Elvis goes for a romp and collects dozens of bits of the aforementioned bark on his curly fur. Then he comes indoors and shakes the bark onto the handy light-colored carpet. Where it becomes my problem.

I'm in charge of keeping the floors clean, which has put me in a years-long power struggle with Elvis. Our previous home had a large lawn. There, Elvis saw it as his mission to de-thatch the lawn and bring all the dead grass into the house. I vacuumed up so much dead yellow grass that each time I emptied the vacuum cleaner bag, I netted one entire bale of hay.

At the current house, we don't have the dead grass problem. We have the bark gradually making its way indoors. No matter how clean the house may be, one good shake from Elvis and the place looks like a sawmill.

Muttering vile curses, I vacuum up the bark. Once the bag is full, it goes into the trash. Which means the dog and I are slowly sending all the migrating bark to the dump. This, I'm pretty sure, isn't what the landscapers had in mind.

Here's the killer: Twice in the past year, I've been forced to go to the home improvement store and buy hundreds of pounds of shredded bark to cover up the denuded berm. I've hauled the 50-pound bags up the berm and spread the bark around, getting splinters in my hands and dirt in my shoes. And I've done this with the full knowledge that Elvis will come right behind me and move all that bark right into the house.

Sure, it's insane, but I can find no other solution. Replacing the bark with gravel would be expensive and ugly. A naked berm would look even worse. Keeping Elvis cooped up so he can't reach the bark seems cruel. (Cutting his fur extra-short doesn't work; we've tried it.) And the dog's not going anywhere; he's a more integral part of the family than I am.

So I'll just keep cycling the bark through, with the full recognition that our property is a mere way-station on the journey from store to landfill. I can always pretend it's my hobby.

I'm funny that way. And when I say "funny," I don't mean funny as in "haha," I mean funny as in "barking crazy."

Get a grip

Sometimes, when working around the house -- doing plumbing repairs or tuning cars or skinning game -- you'll find you simply must have an extra set of hands.

You need someone to hold a stake while you hit it with a hammer. Or someone to point a flashlight. Or someone to steady a metal pipe while you strip its threads.

Parents often enlist their children for this help, but the results of such collaborations are mixed, at best. Let's look at the positives and negatives of using your kids as that extra pair of hands:

The Positives:

--You can get the job done when it might be impossible without assistance.

--Children learn from watching you, and one day might attempt similar tasks themselves.

--Kids become familiar with tools.

--A successful undertaking can raise you in the children's estimation because they'll see you as "competent." For a change.

--Working on a project together provides that all-important "quality time" with your children.

The Negatives:

--Children learn from watching you, and one day might attempt similar tasks themselves. You don't need your 10-year-old trying to fix a toilet, unless you want an indoor swimming pool.

--Kids become familiar with tools. They'll regularly "borrow" from your toolbox. Your tools will go missing. Forever.

--An unsuccessful undertaking proves you're just as incompetent as they always thought.

--Working on a project together gives the child an opportunity to learn many new cusswords when things go wrong. When these words are repeated at school, the parent will be blamed.

While some children are natural grease monkeys who can't wait to get started, most kids don't want to be recruited as extra hands. They're too busy playing video games.

To escape such recruitment, children develop a "learned helplessness" to frustrate parents. For example, a dad who's working under a car may ask the child to stand nearby and hand him tools. The resulting conversation goes like this:

"Hand me that socket wrench."

"Here you go."

"That's a regular wrench. I need the socket wrench."

"Oops. Okay, here."

"That's a crescent wrench. I said socket wrench, socket wrench."

"My bad. Here."

"A monkey wrench? What's the matter with you? Are you on drugs? Why not just hand me a hammer?"

"Here you go."

"I didn't really want a hammer. I want that bleepity-bleep socket wrench that's lying right there at your bleeping feet!"

Eventually, all the tools are under the car with Dad, within easy reach. He doesn't need that extra set of hands anymore. He tells the child, "I hear your mother calling you."

Sometimes, the helplessness is not learned; it just comes naturally. When I was a kid, my father regularly worked on our cars. My job was to "hold the light." I'd point the flashlight right where he showed me. But holding the light is boring. My attention would wander, as would the flashlight beam. Dad spent more time yelling about the light than doing actual repairs.

Invariably, after an hour or so, he'd hear my mother calling.

(There was also that time when I was behind the wheel and he was under the hood and he said, "Wait," and I thought he said, "Hit it," and I cranked the ignition and the engine fan nearly cut off his arm. But that's another story.)

In conclusion, parents should think twice about involving kids in household projects. The results might not be worth the headaches.

One exception should be noted: If the repair involves a computer, you should immediately put the nearest teen-ager in charge. Teens know more about computers than you do. Trust me.

You can always hold the light.

Wash and wear and tear

If cleanliness is next to godliness, then why does laundry so often seem like a little slice of Hell?

Laundry, like a lot of household chores, is never finished. You wash clothes, you dry clothes, you neatly hang them in a closet. Then somebody comes along and wears them, and you must start all over again.

Doing laundry resembles the eternal punishment of Sisyphus in Greek mythology, whose job in Hades was to roll a heavy stone up a hill only to have it roll back to the bottom. Every time. Forever.

Sisyphus didn't have to worry that someone might've left a leaky ballpoint pen in a pocket of the heavy stone. But such danger exists in any household that includes laundry and children.

The other day, I found a scrunched-up candy wrapper in the bottom of the washer. A wrapper that clearly, until very recently, had contained actual candy. (As opposed to the endless number of empty wrappers that usually turn up.)

Closer examination found that every garment in the load was streaked with chocolate. Repeated washings got out most of the stains, but what should've been a quick load of laundry became an all-day exercise in rolling that rock up that hill.

I wanted to blame my two sons for the candy fiasco. (Actually, I wanted to beat them with wet blue jeans, but other members of the household deemed that a bit harsh.) The truth is, though, that the blame rests solely with the manufacturers of today's trousers.

Have you looked at boys' clothes lately? Each pair of pants now comes equipped with an average of 47 zippered pockets. That's a conservative estimate, and may be a tad low.

Parents of boys know to check every pocket of every garment before tossing it into the washer. This is because boys tend to load their pockets with gravel and homework papers and leaky pens and toys and candy and live frogs. Now, with so many pockets involved, you're almost certain to overlook one. And that pocket, according to Murphy's Law, will be the one containing the live frog.

Contemporary fashions also dictate that boys wear pants so baggy that entire Bedouin families could reside within them. Two pairs of these giant pants can make an entire load. And, at 47 pockets per pair, well, you get the picture.

As they get older, kids change their clothes more often. I don't know what it's like for daughters, but here's how it works with boys: When they're pre-schoolers, they have one or two favorite garments and refuse to wear anything else. A 5-year-old boy is perfectly willing to stand around naked while you wash his Superman shirt rather than slip into something clean.

But once boys reach a certain age -- around the time they decide that maybe girls don't have "cooties" after all -- they are driven by instinct to change clothes every few minutes to remain fashionably "cool." Some garments are worn so briefly they're not even dirty. Yet enough time has elapsed to fill the pockets with leaky pens and frogs. Go figure.

Why, you might ask, don't I make my boys do their own laundry? Why not let them wash their clothes separately and be responsible for their own pocket checks? And if they do laundry the same slapdash way they do other chores, why not let them suffer the consequences?

Good questions. My only answer is: Do we, as a society, really want frogs to become endangered species?

Teach your children . . . work

Parents know it's difficult to keep children occupied during long, hot, school-free summers.

Sure, matinees and swimming and play dates are fun, and might even keep siblings from killing each other during listless, blistering afternoons, but who says summer should be all about fun? (Well, the kids do. But don't listen to them.)

Summer's a great time to teach your children about work. During the school year, they can beg off doing chores around the house, citing homework or time-consuming school activities. But in summer, we parents have the kids right where we want them: They've got nothing more important to do, so why shouldn't they help around the house?

Chores done by children not only lighten the load for parents, they teach the kids valuable lessons about work and cleanliness and city health codes.

Doing chores can complement their schoolwork. What is cooking, after all, but chemistry? Youngsters can learn much about biology by doing yard work. Math skills can be improved as the kids keep track of how many more chores they've done than their siblings. And, believe me, they'll be keeping track.

Kids can learn everything they need to know about diplomacy and negotiation as they try to weasel out of onerous tasks. (This will be a valuable skill when they grow up and have actual jobs.)

Of course, children require a certain amount of supervision. If the parent doesn't monitor the housework, the kids will do the bare minimum, and the parent will be right back where he or she started -- with a filthy home. The only difference will be that much of the filth will be hidden under beds and in closets. While that certainly works for me, it's not the preferred method.

Some chores are too dangerous for children. Anything involving a hot skillet or power tools, for example, should be left to adults. In fact, if the job involves any type of tools, it's probably better to just call a professional. You'll end up doing it eventually.

But as long as a chore is relatively safe and unimportant, children are perfect for the job. The kids might not perform up to your standards, but so what? If you have to go behind them and clean the kitchen all over again, what have you lost? You would've had to clean it anyway. Let's not lose sight of the main goal here: Chores keep the kids busy, and that's a good thing.

Let's look, then, at some chores that are appropriate for children, and the benefits and drawbacks of having kids do the work:

Picking Up Stuff

They're limber, they have young backs and they're closer to the floor. These factors make children better than adults for picking up toys and shoes and other detritus scattered around the house. Besides, they distributed most of the mess, shouldn't they pick it up?

Taking Out the Trash

If a child is tall enough to reach a bag of trash into the garbage bin, then he or she is ready for this job. Just don't be surprised when you find evidence of leaky bags dripped all over the floors.

Doing the Dishes

Whether you have a dishwasher or do dishes the old-fashioned way, kids can be a great help. Naturally, there will be a certain amount of breakage. And, the kids may not always put clean dishes and utensils in their proper places. Cooking can become a daily game of "Where's that ladle?"

Dusting

Give a kid a feather duster, and you can save yourself a lot of cleaning time. But this only works if you don't care how thoroughly it gets done.

Sweeping

See "Dusting" above.

Cooking

Summertime lunches of sandwiches or hot dogs are easy and fun for kids to prepare. Thanks to microwave ovens, children can cook their own meals without ever getting near an open flame. Caution: If your kids use the microwave a lot, they may get the yen to experiment. Keep an eye on the cat.

So, put your kids to work, America. It'll ease the parental workload and the whole family will benefit. Best of all, chores make the children eager to return to school in the fall.

Grass and margaritas

Summer's nearly officially here. That means it's time to experience the Great Outdoors from behind the controls of a lawn mower.

Lawn care is an important component of home ownership. If you want your property to maintain its value, it's imperative that you keep the grounds in pristine condition. This explains the origin of the term "sweat equity."

Yes, friends, it's time to sweat. It's time to mow and edge and fertilize and prune. It's time to spend every waking weekend hour with sweat stinging your eyes and exhaust fumes going up your nose and grass clippings stuck to your socks.

Maintaining a lawn is a form of insanity. We pour precious, expensive water on our grass so it will grow. Then we kill ourselves cutting it every week. Then more water. More mowing. More water. More sweat. You get the picture.

The alternative is xeriscaping, which means using less water and keeping your yard in a natural state. Presuming that anywhere in Nature exists a landscape of uniform gravel dotted with spiny plants, all underlaid with black plastic.

Some of us prefer the illusion of Eden. We want to walk around barefoot. So we opt for the lunacy of grass.

Lawn work can be maddening. A recent example: I set out to attack weeds in my yard. So vigorous was my attack that the head came off the old hoe I was using. I repaired the hoe and got after the weeds again. Then I went to rake up the victims. The head came off the rake. I fixed the rake, cleaned up the weeds. Then I employed the weed-whacker, which promptly ran out of trimmer line. I took this as a sign that it was time to surrender for the day and go indoors for something cool to drink: A margarita or four.

I once had a neighbor who spent all day every day working on his lawn, which was as smooth as a putting green. I couldn't understand why anyone would devote his entire life to maintaining grass. Then I met his wife, and it all became clear. As long as she was indoors, he'd stay outdoors. It was a form of detente.

Most of us, though, don't have the time or the desire to create a perfect lawn. We settle for a yard.

The terms "lawn" and "yard" often are used interchangeably, but they're two very different things. "Lawn" comes from the Latin word for "sweat." On the other hand, "yard" derives from the Anglo-Saxon term for dog poop.

Unclear on which you have? Let's look at the differences:

Lawns tend to be smooth and untouched. Yards have that lived-in look, and often feature a car up on blocks.

Lawns have clean edges. Yards have frontiers.

Lawns have ornaments. Yards have stuff.

Lawns tend to be weed-free and to consist of a single species of grass. Yards are inclusive -- social mixers where all plants are welcome.

Lawns are a consistent shade of green. Yards feature a broader pallette, heavy on browns and tans.

Lawns feel good on your bare feet, but you don't walk on them for fear of bending the grass. In yards, shoes are required, and steel-toed boots are recommended.

If you pay someone to tend your grounds, you probably have a lawn. (Or, you're getting ripped off.)

If you have children and/or a dog, you've probably got a yard. Go out and look at your property. If you find any of the following -- dog bones, soccer balls, old socks, used furniture or appliances, mysterious holes in the ground, marbles, Frisbees, cigar butts, soda bottles, beer bottles, last week's newspapers, last autumn's leaves, dirty dishes, anthills, termite mounds, fallen tree limbs, dandelions, spurge, cactus, sun-bleached toys or dead birds -- then, my friend, you have a yard.

If you'd like to turn your yard into a lawn, then you must work at it. You must attend to details such as dead birds. You must make sure your lawn-care tools are in good working order.

Preparation is the key, and hard, sweaty labor the answer.

A beautiful lawn awaits, Nature's own reward for all your work. But I'd keep a pitcher of margaritas handy, too.

Dodge city

Our 16-year-old son always demonstrates a quick wit when it comes to evasion.

I find him in the kitchen, arms loaded with six different kinds of snack food. He's clearly headed for his bedroom, where Playstation awaits.

Me: "Hey, I thought you were helping with the housework."

Him (without missing a beat): "I'm cleaning out the pantry."

Springtime for hardware

Spring is a time of renewal, a time of reawakening after the long, dark winter. And we all know what that means. It's time to tackle those home-repair projects we are not qualified to do.

We're not talking spring-cleaning here. That's a given. As warm weather arrives, many of us (mostly female) feel the urge to refresh and renew, to scrub off the grime, the muddy bootprints, the road salt and dessicated leaves. The rest of us (mostly male) play along, sweeping and scouring, getting the house ready for the onslaught of our children's summer vacation.

Our topic today goes beyond simple cleaning. We're talking about all those home maintenance projects that we put off because it was too cold. We burrowed in through the winter, hibernating like bears, but now warm weather has arrived and it's time to throw open the windows, assemble our tools and hurt ourselves in new and inventive ways.

For instance, my wife and I stripped some horrendous wallpaper in our bedroom and then painted the entire room. The results are splendid and we feel virtuous because we did the job ourselves rather than hiring professionals. And, we'll no longer have nightmares because of that hallucinatory wallpaper.

But -- there's always a "but," isn't there? -- I made a few mistakes. I didn't wear a respiratory mask while scraping and sanding the walls and I paid the price over the next week as I tried to chisel hardened plaster from my sinuses. All the repetitive stretching and bending served as a harsh reminder that I'm aging. And, naturally, I had to make many trips to the hardware store for items I'd overlooked, such as mineral spirits. (I still don't know what mineral spirits are, but we have plenty now.)

Before tackling your springtime home improvements, you should remember some basic rules. These will help simplify your projects and you'll be better prepared. And, if you follow these rules carefully, you'll soon see that you're better off watching TV.

1. Ignore home-decorating and handyman magazines.

Those beautiful remodeling projects pictured in magazines can inspire you to attempt ambitious projects better left unimagined. Refinishing those hardwood floors sounds great, until the power sander leaps out of your hands and climbs the nearest wall. A new deck seems like a good idea until the ninth time you hit your thumb with a hammer.

2. There's a correct tool for every job.

You will not own this tool. Make another trip to the hardware store.

3. Paint can cover up many errors.

It can also cover your carpet when it spills.

4. Wallpaper is the work of the devil. Avoid it at all costs.

5. The use of basic tools can result in injury. But if you really want to spend some time in the hospital, step up to power tools.

6. Solvents, pesticides, herbicides, cleaning solutions, paints, root killers, roofing tar and many other home-improvement compounds are toxic and should be handled with extreme care.
Might as well just kill yourself and get it over with.

7. Avoid ladders.

Falling is scary, and that sudden stop can hurt. Plus, getting 10 or 12 feet off the ground gives you a new perspective on your house. You'll spot more chores to do.

8. Wear gloves.

Those of us who usually sit at computers all day do not have the proper buildup of calluses to protect us from blisters and splinters. Of course, gloves won't help if you insist on hitting your thumb with the hammer.

9. Fasteners -- nails, screws, bolts, etc... -- must be the proper size to do the job.

Make another trip to the hardware store.

10. If something is supposed to move and it won't, spray it liberally with WD-40.

11. If something is not supposed to move and it does, secure it with duct tape.

Those last two rules come from my in-laws -- hardy, self-reliant ranch folk who live 100 miles from the nearest home-improvement superstore. They're forced to do it themselves, and they know the simplest solutions usually are best. Here's one more from them, which has become the byword for all home repair projects in our family:

12. Get a bigger hammer.

Freedom to assemble

Want to chill the typical American male to his very toes? Then utter these three simple words: "Some assembly required."

Furniture and bicycles, toys and stereos, computers and exercise equipment all arrive at our homes these days requiring final assembly. And the average male gets out his tools and muddles through the "instructions" and proceeds to break whatever item he's supposed to be assembling.

This average male is thinking the whole time: "Don't they have someone more qualified to do this? Isn't there someone at the factory who knows how to do the final assembly?" Sure, the furniture (or other item) needs to fold flat for shipping, but wouldn't we all be happy to pay higher shipping costs to get the item in its finished form?

I'm sure some guys love the challenge of "ready-to-assemble" furniture and color-coded computer cables and toys in which the battery compartment is hermetically sealed, but I'm not one of them. And I think most guys fall into my category: Irredeemable klutzes who have no business assembling anything.

We klutzes know who we are. We'd never attempt to, say, create a piece of furniture from scratch. We know we're not gifted with the innate ability to handle tools properly. We stay away from power saws because we don't want the nickname "Stumpy."

But give us a piece of furniture compacted into a three-inch-thick box, and we're gung-ho. After all, the parts are all there, right? The holes are pre-drilled. The box contains instructions written in some semblance of English. Why, any fool could put it together!

Soon, though, we find that we're not just any fool. We're the fools who can't do anything right, the ones for whom "some assembly required" might as well read, "Forget about it, you idiot."

To be fair, it's not entirely our fault. Ready-to-assemble items rarely are truly ready to assemble. If there were truth in advertising, they'd be labeled: "Random assortment of parts that may or may not fit together. You're on your own."

Murphy's Law is hardly adequate to describe the pain and suffering faced by a guy who's trying to "insert tab 'A' into slot 'B' at a 45-degree angle." Here, then, are Brewer's Laws for Ready-to-Assemble Items:

--Tab "A" never fits into slot "B." There's always a ragged piece of plastic that prevents them from sliding together smoothly. Remove that excess plastic, and the tab will wiggle loosely in its slot. Forever.

--Instructions are written in pidgin English by someone from a foreign land, even if the item is labeled "Made in the USA." The foreign land that produces such writers is "Venus."

--Illustrations in the instructions will be so tiny, you won't be able to tell which part goes where without a microscope.

--No matter how carefully you handle the plastic bag full of nuts, bolts, screws and washers, you'll lose at least one of them. The missing hardware will be the one piece of that holds everything else together.

--Missing screws, etc., will be some oddball size they don't carry at American hardware stores.

--Yes, ready-to-assemble furniture comes with pre-drilled holes to make it easier to line up the pieces, but one of the holes will be in the wrong place. It won't be off by much; just enough to make you slowly go insane.

--If tools such as Allen wrenches are included with the hardware, they'll be made of flimsy metal that just begs to be broken. And, they'll be too small to use with your actual hands. If you try to use real tools in their place, the tools will not fit. The next sound you hear will be the stripping of a bolt.

--When pieces don't fit, you'll eventually get mad and try to force them. This will result in permanent damage, both to the item and to your fingers.

--If you succeed in assembling the item, there always will be a few screws, etc., left over. These parts should be discarded immediately before your wife sees them.

Remember these rules when faced with "some assembly required." They won't make it any easier, but they'll remind you that someone, somewhere, is getting a good laugh at your expense.
My money's on those Venusians.