Still here

It might look as if I've let this blog go dormant, but that's only temporary. It's been a crazy time around here, and some things are bound to get neglected.

We're still down-sizing our household for our anticipated move to an empty nest in Santa Cruz, CA. We've gotten rid of tons of stuff, and still have one shipment of furniture/furnishings going to a consignment store after someone buys our house.

The house has been on the market three weeks now. No buyer yet, but lots of lookers. Fingers crossed.

Amongst all this household tumult, I finished my latest work-in-progress, a crime novel called 'The Big Wink,' and sent it off to my agent. Now I'm learning about Kindle, etc., so I can make my backlist available for e-readers.

I'm still posting my "Rules for Successful Living" at least once a day on Facebook, so if we're not friends there yet, get on board.

More soon.

Garage sale shuffle

'Tis the season of garage sales, as millions of Americans try to unload their accumulated stuff on the unsuspecting public.

It's the Great Black Market of summer, the annual redistribution of wealth. People out in their yards in lawn chairs, marking down their worldly possessions.

We've all got too much stuff, piling up everywhere and thwarting every attempt to park in our own garages. So we sell off some of it, thin the herd, streamline things around the house.
And, before you know it, the house is jam-packed again, and it's time for another garage sale.

Why does this keep happening? Because we're buying stuff from our neighbors' garage sales, stuff they in turn got from garage sales years ago. The stuff goes round and round, and you end up buying a Salad Shooter that's just like the one you used to have . . .

There's a whole food chain of kitchen gizmos and baby furniture and bowling trophies circulating untaxed through the economy. Some items -- and I'm thinking here of ceramic panthers -- have moved from house to house for generations.

Next time you have a garage sale, do a quick inventory. Half the stuff you're selling probably came from flea markets and other people's garage sales. Stuff you never should've bought in the first place. Stuff people were GETTING RID OF.

(Thirty percent of the stuff you're selling will be things you bought "on sale," even though you didn't need them. The rest will be wedding gifts that you'll never unload.)

Getting rid of it all becomes more complicated once you have children. Kids never want to get rid of anything, ever. Broken toys, commemorative T-shirts, filthy sneakers, rocks, bones, lumps of dirt -- all these things have great sentimental value to children.

This detritus accumulates around the house, filling our lives with sentimentality and whimsy and punctured bare feet. We parents can never throw any of it away because of Murphy's Law of Parenting: The item you throw out will be the one the child really, really needs to finish the big school project on deadline.

This law applies to all homework papers. No matter how much the parent may try to parse out a date or a grade or some other signal that each stray rumpled page is no longer current, he or she will make the occasional mistake and throw out the child's important homework. Or, worse, some other child's important homework. And the parent will never hear the end of it. So school papers amass around the house like bales of cotton on a riverboat dock.

Same goes for any plastic "action figure" or balsa-wood airplane. Throw it out, and it's the one the child was using to prove Important Facts About Gravity in the science fair.

Any teddy bear or toy the parent tries to discard will immediately become the child's favorite one. How could you possibly get rid of that broken Shrek we got for free at some burger joint? The child LOVES that toy and is now emotionally bereft and will require expensive therapy.

When spring cleaning comes around, parents are forced to engage in stealth operations to get rid of their children's stuff. We ship bales of old homework off to the dump when the kids aren't looking. We creep around in the middle of the night, stuffing toys into black trash bags, hiding the evidence. On the day of the garage sale, we ship the kids off to Grandma's to keep them from scaring off customers with crying fits in the driveway.

We roll out the bazaar of baby clothes and broken burger toys and ceramic panthers and important homework, and a few customers trickle by and haul off some of the stuff. American commerce carries on.

Unfortunately, most of the inventory doesn't move. All the unsold stuff must return to the "warehouse," otherwise known as the space in the garage where the car should live.

So what if we must park on the street? At least we've thinned the inventory. We've cleaned out closets and raked toys out from under beds. Our lives are organized and ready for summer.

Just in time for the flea markets.

King of the castle

We've all heard that old saw, "A man's home is his castle," meant to convey independence and safety and the sanctity of private property.

The adage no doubt dates from the days when a man's home really was a castle, and anyone who dared interfere risked a moat and vats of boiling oil. Men were kings of their domains, as long as they "kept the home fires burning" under the oil vats.

Over the years, some men have taken the castle allegory further, using it to convince themselves they're the rulers of the household.

(Back in the "Ozzie and Harriett" days when I was a kid, my brother and I sometimes would try to put unpopular parental decisions to a vote. This was met with derision from my father, who would always say, "This isn't a democracy. It's a monarchy. And I'm the king." We children would shuffle away, muttering and plotting an overthrow that never came.)

These days, equality is the coin of the realm, and men who try to pretend they're kings are fooling themselves. Those emperors have no clothes, no matter how much they may rail about "wearing the pants in this family." Wives smile to themselves, knowing who's really in charge, and the kids can't even hear the king's commands because they're wearing headphones full of thumping rap music.

It's time to modify the old saying. Here's my suggestion: "A man's GARAGE is his castle."
In the house, Dad may be an impotent potentate, his blustery decrees overriden by calm females, his kids screaming for his head like an angry mob. But when Dad goes to the garage, he's still the king.

Drive around any suburban neighborhood on any Sunday afternoon and peer in the garage doors that are standing open. You'll find men in there. Building stuff. Tinkering with cars. Or just lounging in lawn chairs, sipping Buds and watching sports on portable TVs, sometimes in the company of other monarchs from neighboring realms.

Why the garage?

--All our stuff is there. Family men can't just leave oily rags and random tools lying around the kitchen. Not if we ever want to see them again. That stuff belongs in the garage, preferably on pegboards. Wrenches and hammers and mowers and drills and old saws, all carefully organized. We men can spend hour upon hour just arranging our tools. It's a harmless activity, akin to collecting baseball cards, and it keeps us occupied. And, when we need a particular tool, there's always the long-shot chance that we can actually find it.

--Men need time alone with their thoughts. These aren't necessarily deep thoughts, often no deeper than "where did I put that wrench," but the garage is the only quiet place where we can ponder them. We all need "down time" so we can sit among our sharpened lawn tools and fantasize about the demise of our bosses and other enemies.

--Garages are, by their very nature, dirty. Men may be afraid to set a beer on the coffee table without a coaster, but in the garage we can spill oil and paint and grease. Nobody cares. We're in our little fiefdoms, and we can make them as filthy as we like.

--The garage is the only place where we men might actually fix something. Most men, when attenpting a tricky car repair or reassembling toilet innards, need solitude so we can concentrate. Also, alone in the garage, we can curse with impunity when we're injured or the repair job goes wrong.

--We get a break from that raucous "quality time" with our families. Our wives and children know to leave us alone when we're in the garage. They know, if they interrupt whatever manly endeavors we're attempting out there, they're likely to be put to work. Plus, they don't want to hear all that cursing.

So, men of America, go to the garage. Consider it your hideout, your clubhouse. Heck, call it your castle, if you so desire. Fashion yourself a crown and wear it while you tinker. Be the King of Greater Pegboardia.

You'll get comfort and peace. You'll finally get some solitude. You can even spit on the floor if you want.

But don't try boiling oil. It spatters, and those burns will only set you to cursing.

Where the toys are

I have chattering teeth on my desk.

Not just your standard plastic chattering teeth. These have big, pink bare feet attached. The whole thing hops around while the teeth chatter. Worth a smile the first 30 times you see it.
After that, you try to ignore the little gizmo, which sends you telepathic signals all day: "Wind me up. C'mon, it'll be fun."

Where did this laugh riot come from? I have no idea. I assume one of my sons set the teeth here, then forgot them.

Desks collect toys and gimcracks and gewgaws and freebie calendars, whether they're sitting with their mates in some big office or all alone at home. Such is their nature. If zoologists traced it back far enough, I'm sure they'd find an evolutionary branch where four-legged desks split from the same primitive species that spawned the packrat.

In large offices, workers decorate their desks to liven up their personal spaces and to show off their toys or photographs of their families. You can tell a lot about people by the artwork and cartoons and accessories they keep on their desks

For instance, a person who uses a ballpoint with a large pink plume attached tends to be the fun-loving sort. A man whose desk is covered with photos of dogs, but no people, might seem shy at first, but he'll be loyal and friendly and will respond well to praise. A bowling trophy may indicate a heightened appreciation for healthy activity and beer.

Desk decoration can also be a warning flag. I've never gotten a satisfactory answer from a secretary who had Garfield prominently displayed. Never enter into a conversation with a man who keeps on his desk a photo of his boat.

Some items are silent protests against the powers that be. Is there any cubicle in America that doesn't sport a "Dilbert" cartoon? Once, when I didn't like my supervisor, I placed a portrait of the Marx Brothers on my desk as mute comment on the way we were being managed. In the photo, the brothers were choking each other.

I worked with an unhappy woman who kept a plastic lamp on her desk. The lamp was shaped like a mushroom cloud and had a red bulb inside. When her superiors walked past, she'd flick on the light and say under her breath: "Boom. Heh-heh-heh." We were all secretly glad when she moved away.

In a home office, a desk is like a big stationary goathead. Everything that travels past sticks to it.

In the past week or two, along with the chattering teeth and the usual mail, I've found the following on my desk: a round plastic rock, a stuffed Roswell alien (twice), several Transformer beasts in various stages of mutation and undress, six shoes, two yo-yos, four Super Balls, a chocolate heart left over from Valentine's Day (how did I miss that?), seven Hot Wheels cars, a toy dump truck, two Koosh balls (don't ask), a dead flower, nine coffee cups, a dozen action figures, three Beanie Babies and 37 dirty socks.

I didn't want any of these things on my desk. I prefer a clean, organized work space. But detritus moves through, and the desk picks it up.

The problem is worse at our house these days because of our shaggy dog, Elvis. He's learned to pick up toys and other items around the house and chew them. He's trained us to take the item away, praise him for handing it over and then put the item on a horizontal surface out of his reach, such as my desk. Then Elvis goes to get another item and we do it all over again. As the numbers show, he's particularly keen on dirty socks.

I think Elvis sees it as his way of cleaning the house. He finds stuff on the floor, brings it to me and I eventually put it away. He's just trying to help. And I'll keep doing my part, cleaning off the desk for the next inevitable accumulation. But I'm keeping the chattering teeth.