Mild Amusement

As I like to mention, little kids can be ridiculously awesome. I've mentioned it at least six times before (the last time was here ), and it's no less true today then it was the first time I mentioned it. However, sometimes, they are more awesome than others. This, my friends, is a case of extra awesomeness. So, rather than describing several witty remarks like I usually do, I'm going to devote the entire post to a single exchange. Trust me, it'll be worth it. To begin with, the cable went out at my house a while back. I knew just enough about the cable boxes to try a few basic troubleshooting steps, but none of it worked. The end result was that the we couldn't watch anything but the basic channels on TV, and we had to have a technician come out to fix it. The technicians don't usually come out on the weekend, so we had to make an appointment for them to show up in the middle of a weekday. That meant that the kids would be around when the technician showed up...

I know enough about my car to take care of minor repairs with it: I can change tires, change windshield wipers, swap out headlights or fuses, and swap out the suspension. I still don't know enough to take care of anything major, though, so I don't try. When it comes to things like the transmission or the electrical system as a whole, I take it to the professionals. I kinda sorta need those to run well, and I'd rather not learn the hard way that I made a mistake when working on one of those systems. So, when the taillight indicator on the dashboard came on, I started by checking it wasn't one of the little things I could fix. After all, if it was just a blown out bulb, I could fix that myself. First, though, I needed to figure out which light was acting up, so I could investigate further. There, however, was the rub. I couldn't tell which light was problematic. My brake lights all turned on, the turn signals blinked just fine, and the reverse lights turned on as ...

I learned a whole heck of a lot about a shower vent fan  (those things that suck the moisture out of the air after you take a shower) recently. The one we had was starting to show its age, so my brother wanted to replace it. Now, I will readily admit that I didn't even do the bulk of the work, but let's just say that even from my assistant role, some of these lessons erred on the comedic side. First things first, I learned that the basic design for one of those is roughly like that of an exhaust pipe. The fan sucks in air and moisture, and that fan is connected to a duct (a flexible tube) that then pumps the moisture somewhere outside of your house. It's a pretty simple concept. We were only concerned with the fan, because, well, why play around with ducts and sealant and all that if you don't have to? The second thing I learned, however, was that the previous owners of the house were either incredibly lazy or had one wicked sense of humor. They conveniently left o...

Normally, when I'm busy, I either have some sort of function to attend, or work to do. It's not necessarily boring (movies, meals, and parties all count as "functions to attend"), but it's very mundane. Not so much this weekend. I'm training for a half-marathon, so I decided to join the Nike run club for one of their training runs on Saturday. My coworker recommended it, so I decided to give it a go. Now, I know that the Nike marathon is mostly for women (it's called the Nike Women's Marathon, so lay off the sexist label, huh?), and I know that Nike sponsors the training/run club. But did my brain connect the dots & realize that there wouldn't be too many other guys there? Nope. That could have been a good thing for me, but I was there to run 12+ miles. If I had time to chat someone up, I probably wasn't running hard enough (not to mention that my group didn't exactly entice me to gather the courage to ask for a number). I decid...