i think a large part of the reason marty and i are as thin as we are is because our kitchen is so poorly designed. i say this after recently hearing a woman go on about the inefficiencies of her kitchen layout and her lavish plans for her new lavish kitchen. by her description things in her original kitchen seemed so barbaric i find it a wonder any food more complicated than ramen ever culminated out of such a primitive setup.

and if you're wondering how ill-conceived our kitchen is, given my record of only living in one-bathroom homes, i'm reasonably sure i've never lived in a home that could claim a smart and properly considered food-making room, by one woman's estimation at least.

bella's room perpetually looks like an orangoutang had a rage-fueled fit in there just minutes earlier. because of this problems exist.

her first problem: it is not just her room. she shares it with one of her brothers. luckily, her brother is the most understanding and reasonable dude i have ever met.

bella's second problem: the room pisses her mother off. i only include marty...

snake, my oldest friend in life, passed through town yesterday and stopped to have dinner with us. i remember when i was younger, before kids, and knew company was coming, i'd clean my place up, putting things away, cleaning the toilets and dusting. now the extent of my civility is when they arrive saying, "if you have anything you care about, you might want to leave it in your car."

another thing i noticed is that when i walked him through the house, instead of saying this is alex's bedroom or this is where mary and i sleep, i was saying things like, "uhhm yeah, some people sleep in here, and uh, this over here is another sleeping room that people sleep in most nights."

and as if all that wasn't enough, the night before we announced my friend's visit at the dinner table, we also said that we were having an unexpected steak night. bella asked if she could put the bacon shield (a metal, three-sided structure put around a pan cooking bacon to contain the splattering) around her plate so our guest didn't have to watch her eat steak. marty said that she'd prefer bella used it as a learning opportunity and try to eat like a proper young lady, even using silverware. conversely, i supported bella's bacon-shield idea and suggested she use it wether we had a guest at our table or not.

and for any daft enough to think i couldn't keep the stool train on the tracks another day, allow me to present...

between marty and their teachers my children have been instilled with maniacal notions about energy conservation. they unplug the microwave after using it (b/c of the digital clock). they turn the light out on me when i'm working in the basement after calling down a feeble and unhearable, "is anyone down there?" (even though i was taught as a kid that turning lights on and off through the day was more costly than letting one run continuously). and some of them don't change clothes as often as they maybe should as evidenced by aleo's lonely one pair of underwear next to bella's stack of eleven on laundry night (i'm not entirely convinced his refusal to change bloomers has anything to do with saving the planet).

as annoying as it is to have to re-plug in the microwave with each use, or to have to stop what i'm doing to go up the stairs to turn the basement light back on, or to get a face-full of alex's unwashed briefs in round of roughhousing, their one and only initiative i'm declaring war on is how seldom anyone in this house flushes the toilet. the policy began innocently enough as the common-ish brown goes down, yellow is mellow. while this approach was not my preference, i learned to deal in the name of the team. but somewhere the rule underwent a sinister mutation and the policy now appears to be if we don't have to rush the person who just moved their bowels to the hospital, there is no need to flush the commode. if you're unable to imagine the cumulative effects of such a practice, allow me to help.

when i was in college and lived in the dorms, my floor had a feud with another all-male floor in the building. i have no idea what started it or why it persisted but on random intervals marked by boredom and angst, pranks would be directed at the enemy floor. after all these years i only remember one. we were the victims. what happened was in the night several people, i'd wager between five and seven, from our nemesis floor came down and took a dump in one of our bathrooms, in one of our toilets. the thing that marked it memorable was they never wiped (there was no toilet paper at least) and they never flushed. they just defecated. again and again. come morning what was left was a pristine bowl with a settled mass of brown matter in the bottom half. the contrast against the white porcelain was mesmerizing and thought provoking like contemporary art. as a gaggle of us stood around this unexpected marvel in morning, we surely resembled the uncertain chimps finding the obelisk in 2001 only we were in towels and holding plastic bins of toiletries. one of us reached forward and pushed the flusher. the rest of us were so entranced no one could say "don't do that!" fast enough. so it was done. but i imagine it had to be done (what else could be done?). a mess ensued. a mess so nasty and vile and inspired that we, young as we were, felt actual sadness and empathy for the poor worker who would be assigned the chore for an unreasonable minimum wage.

this is what my house is like. it's like i'm living with a bunch of frat pledges who have been forbidden to flush their waste. and i'm the janitor.

and need i remind you, we are fortunate to have a toilet that could flush paris hilton's toy canine down with a half flush.

marty answered a knock at the door drying her hands on a dish towel.

CARL
hello ma'am. my name is carl and i clean gutters.

MARTY
oh thanks but i already have someone who does that.

CARL (glances up at our leaf filled gutters)
are you afraid to call him?

due to carl's rich and engaging personality, we now have a new gutter-guy.

something i didn't mention about our neighbors recent departure from the neighborhood is that they offered us first crack at their house. it is a house that is several pay grades out of our reach but they said if we were interested, they would make it happen. interestingly, this is how we landed in our first house which at the time was also significantly out of reach for us. now here we are ten ye...

our neighbors moved into their home in 1962. this was six full years before i was born. or 47 years ago if you rather. last night was the last night they will sleep under its roof because at 10am today they are getting into a car and driving north to chicago to live in a retirement community near three of their daughters.

the couple, both widowers of previous marriages, have been together for many years and are well into their 80's. medicine-wise, the most either of them ever take is an occasional aspirin. they walk to church. they walk to the nearby university to hear lectures. they walk to our local business district to listen to concerts. they are both in great health but are just being pro-active.

norma, the lady of the duo, is more ready. she is the one driving the move. she said she knew she was done after having the gutters replaced. after the work she looked up at them said to herself she hoped to never do another repair to this aging home. additionally, her thinking is that if something happens to one of them, unexpectedly, she doesn't want the burden of a five bedroom home with fifty years of possessions to fall onto just one of them. while it is a fair point, wally, the male of the team, isn't done yet. he's still living and enjoying being in the zip code he's spent the lion-share of his life in, having grown up just blocks away where his father owned a corner pharmacy as well as his own career teaching german at the local high school.

watching the dismantling of a home over the last few months has been sobering. i can't help but think how that will one day be me. that one day i will be expected to step aside and let a younger version of myself step into my place, sleep in my bedroom and eat meals in my dining room. that my children will one day return, knock on the door and tell the current residents that they grew up here, and can they come in and look. all of this wrecks me.

yesterday after the moving truck had left, wally pulled marty and i to the side and said that bella had come over to their house, knocked on the door and said to them in a very heartfelt and official manner that they were the two best neighbors anyone could ask for and she was very sorry they were leaving. marty and i were both surprised at bella's initiative. and it was easy to see that wally was touched if not even moved by bella's gesture. i sincerely share bella's sentiment and will miss the couple who generously and kindly helped marty and i settle into our first home and teach us some of the history and ropes of the community we are now part of. farewell. your village will miss your presence.

i was going to build a couple of chicken wire pens in our backyard to compost leaves. it occurred to me that if i installed them over our raised kitchen beds, we could use the decomposed leaves to nurture the soil before our spring planting. when i told marty of this plan she said i should have bella measure the beds to see how much chicken wire we needed because they were working on area and perimeter at school. when i passed bella during my chores i pointed to the kitchen beds, handed her a tape measure from my belt, and asked if she could sketch them out and measure their length and width. she was headed to friend's house so groaned slightly at the delay but took the tape measure from me and continued on.

the next time i passed through the kitchen, this is what she left me on the counter.


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recently, walking home from work i passed a neighbor trying to remove a 50 year old retaining wall in his backyard with a rented jackhammer. i stopped and wordlessly watched him for several minutes. he paused from his work, wiped sweat from his brow with a sleeve and jokingly asked if i wanted a turn. my face lit up and i exclaimed, "really!". yes really. i ran home, flew up the stairs calling to marty as i passed by. i quickly changed my clothes and bounded back down the stairs and shot out the front door yelling a garbled goodbye to marty on my way out.

i could not recommend the use of a jackhammer more. both so you can say it's something you have done and so you can say it's something you don't have to do for a living.

i like old houses because they know what they are. new houses are like young children and teenagers. they just never know what to be because they are in a constant state of flux.

a new house is only new for a very short time.

then it's kinda new.

then it was once new.

then it's dated.

then it's tired.

then finally, it is reborn into something both special and unique.

if you start with a new or transitioning house, it won't be officially old until your time is done there and you pass it onto a buyer of another generation. so save yourself from spending your days in a schizophrenic home and just buy an old one from the start. it will promise to always be old for you and you can never have enough stability in a family home.

regular readers of this site know my home has only one bathroom. long-time readers of this site know i've never lived in a house with more than one bathroom. marty recently asked me if i've reached the point where this oddity is something i hope to maintain through my lifetime. in reflecting on it, i couldn't answer. having come this far, it would be a bit of a shame to soil such a distinctive record. distinctive to me at least in that i've never had anyone praise the achievement or tout the benefits of a single toilet home, which do exist, whether they are acknowledged or not. for instance ...

i don't like cleaning the one toilet i have so am pretty sure i'd dislike roaming the house with a bristle brush and bottle of soft scrub playing weekend janitor to a bevy of log catchers.

some of our family's best proclamations come out of our one bathroom. like if alex has to use the toilet and people are in there, he rushes in, brushes past all the occupants and starts unbuckling his pants while dancing in place. the moment before he fully drops trow he calls out in his most commanding voice, "I'm going pee and poop. no one see my penis or butt!"

high traffic times of day allow for fun games that would not otherwise happen. if i'm in the shower and hear someone come in to use the toilet, i call out in my ogre-voice, "who is using my toilet" to which bella or alex call back in their fearless voice, "bella/alex is! who is using my shower!" when i reply it's just me, their father, they often don't believe me and say mom is in there too, which she sometimes is, but usually isn't. playing along, i turn and scream as if just noticing her and from behind the curtain stage a struggle of trying to throw marty out of the shower. i yell out OUCH!'s and UHGH!'s and punch at the shower curtain in random spots. every now and then i pantingly poke my head out from behind the curtain to tell alex or bella i am alright and will have her out in a minute and will then feign the classic getting pulled back into the fracas and scream out that pulling there or biting that is against the rules. the kids sit on the toilet with wide eyes, swinging their dangling legs and titter preciously.

humanity happens in the single bathroom of a single-toilet home. especially when an urge sneaks up on someone and they can't wait for the room to clear. it is here that through clenched teeth and face you get to see/hear little people groan things like, 'i ... think ... i ... need ... privacy ...' most times the plop beats the end of the sentence. there's volumes of positive psychology out there on the merits of comfortable public plopping. it's truly an enviable and elusive life skill.

and lastly and most significantly, quality, family time happens in the smallest room of a one-bathroom house making it one of the most valuable assets a modern family can possess. except when your wife mistakes this closeness for permission to use your braun razor to shave her legs, bikini area and all, making it not quite a brazilian but close enough to one to make me a little hesitant the next morning before work. that pause always makes me think of the scene from friends where joey was trying to talk chandler into sharing a wash cloth. chandler asked joey to think of the last thing he (chandler) would wash during his shower and the first thing he (joey) would wash for his shower. joey's face stares off in contemplation a moment before grimacing painfully. while i don't know for certain the order in which a woman shaves her lower torso, i can imagine the end game is not in my favor.

we have a new ritual in our home, although we pass it off as more of a game really. it's called 'everything has a home'. we play 'everything has a home' after dinner. how it works is everyone walks through the house and anything that is out of place gets put where it is meant to go. we start in the dining room and move all the dinner stuff into the kitchen. then we set a timer for fifteen minutes ...

bella had a homework assignment. in it she was to go through her house and count things. things like doors, windows and such. the last page of the assignment was left open. here she was free to pick the object she would count. she chose picture frames. after dinner i ambled through the dining room and found this.


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it seems that bella kept losing count so devised this error-free numbering system for conducting her inventory. and, should you be curious, we have 132 picture frames in our home. and at least 132 post-it notes as well.

this is exhibit A. until 10am exhibit A was a stylish and comfortable-enough mission chair worth a few hundred dollars. after 10am exhibit A had a street value between four and eight dollars depending on how badly the customer wanted to build a fire at the moment of purchase. exhibit A is part of my argument against recent or soon-to-be parents investing in nice and/or expensive products for their home. fact is, i would recommend against acquiring anything you will care about in any way, form or fashion until your children are old enough to, oh i don't know, buy their own home.

exhibit A is a product of alex's most recent play-date. we didn't see exhibit A bite the dust, but we heard it, a full floor away. as marty gazed at the splintered wood on the living room floor, the two boys stood quietly at her side. after a few moments alex turned to his cohort and softly said "my mom is angee." he at times demonstrates great acumen in sensing the moods of others, especially when that mood is 'angee'.

should you be curious how many exhibits will be part of my presentation, i can give you a hint; a lot. i cannot be more precise because my bank of accountants have not yet finished itemizing the heap of tangled objects piled in the far corner of my basement. problem is, the collection is growing faster than they can complete their paperwork.

thus far i've learned this; you can love your stuff or you can love your children, but you can't love both.

i recently built a bench at the foot of our basement steps. my intention for the seat was to provide a place where kids could undress after playing in the snow/mud before tramping through the house. before the bench could be used a single time, bella commandeered it as her own. and not as a mutli-function and utilitarian staging area but as a long worktable to accommodate her most recent project, dissecting each and every block of styrofoam in our home and surrounding community, one squeaky nodule at a time. she has twelve mason jars lined up on the nearby shelves which she intends to fill with the small white balls and then walk the country feeding hungry animals. when i told her that i didn't think animals ate styrofoam, she made a quizzical face and wordlessly walked away which is pretty much how people at work respond to my insights also.



here she is seen with the new neighbor girl who moved in three days before christmas. it took bella all of three hours to recruit her for the task. the first day the new girl, sofia, came down she was at our house for six hours, five of which was spent toiling at bella's makeshift workshop. listening from the top of the steps, they sounded like two waitresses working the night shift. while much of the banter centered around the pending christmas holiday, sofia at some point informed bella that she was mispronouncing the word breakfast (bella has always called it bresfast). in that this was one of my very favorite bella-isms i was a little miffed that my bench was the glue that made that learning moment possible. oh well, i still have bagina.

our home breaks more dinnerware than a 24-hour dennys. when i gathered the family to discuss this performance matter i was told that not only am i not in a position of authority over them i was actually several rungs below them on the chain of command. i kind of saw this coming when i overheard alex call bella to the meeting by saying 'della, the giant poophead wants to talk to us'.

before we had children, when accommodating out of town guests marty and i would straighten and clean our home. now that we have children, all we look to do is remove any visible blood, feces or urine from our kids. that said, if we see a bodily excrement sprayed or wiped on a wall or piece of furniture we will attempt to clean/remove/hide it. although, i don't do ceilings. so if an illness, natural event or blood-sport marred something i can't reach on my tippy toes, it's getting left for the visitor's imagination.

and i assure you this is one scenario where the mind's creativity won't surpass or even come close to our life's reality.

i promise.

raking leaves in our 87-year old neighborhood is like wiping sweat off the brow of a heavy guy treadmilling. nonetheless there are some lawn-purist out there who insist on battling the fallen debris. i think marty put it best when she simply said "why can't they just enjoy it". apt point because it is a rich tapestry of color out there. so vibrant and alive, ironically.

i'd love to pratt...

our bathroom door doesn't lock. come to think of it, our bathroom door doesn't even latch. it stands wide open much of the time, occupied or not. casting a glance that way while walking down the hall often results with spying bella sitting on the john chin resting on her bracing arm and her legs dangling from the seat.

you may think that given the state of our door hardware, people would respect that when the door is swung closed, the room is occupied. we're not quite there yet. five minutes before the writing of this thought i was attending to my late afternoon constitution when the door pushed open enough for bella's head to pop through. "oh!" she exclaimed. "sorry dad, i just need one of these." her arm reached to the back of the door and pulled a bath towel off a hook and she and it disappeared. she called a "thank you dad" out as she quickly ran down the hall.

i'm not a math guy but this equation is one which i'm all over. that is, if bella is hurriedly after a full size bath towel, something pretty bad just went down. there was a time i'd try to figure out if it was one of my valuables or another's but parental experience has shown me that it is always my stuff. the kids have yet to be employed and therefore haven't acquired anything of merit or value. the last thing marty voluntarily purchased out of need or desire was back in 98 and that item fell when bella was just three. so what is left is a house chock full of dad-stuff. and it's not like i prefer delicate and costly electronics or anything. and certainly not stuff that couldn't withstand being doused with a bowl full of milk that got upended during a scuffle between bella and alex for the remote while yelling "my show, no my show, no my show, NO, MY SHOW".

many more of those sorts of battles and that argument will become a moot point because marty and i are in agreement that we're not replacing any more broken household items until the children leave for college. if you could see some of the antics that go on in our miniscule tv room, you'd know the tele is already living on some serious borrowed time.

last week we paid $4,000 to replace our home's furnace which had been acting flaky. after the installation and seeing that our new furnace was equally flaky we surmised that it was instead our $100 thermostat that was having issues.

this is called putting one in the L column of home ownership.

my home needs a new toilet. our current toilet is over 80 years old, the original, and sprays water out of the supply pipe when flushed. it has needed replaced for some time but i have struggled with the decision. you see, the world is no longer accepting of these five-gallon giant killers. they've been banned, cast onto the growing heap of products deemed poor for our environment. for me, it is a...

walt and i watched one of those home shows on the tele last weekend. they were discussing the new age of luxury homes. the encouraging news; we're seeing a departure from the behemoth stone-faced mansions of yesteryear for more intimate, better crafted domiciles. more intimate meaning a 12,000 square foot hovel, complete with the requisite half-court basketball and golf facility in the basement.

i wasn't sweating what we didn't have until one feature was discussed. it seems that what you and i knew as a study while growing up is now known as a knowledge nook. and it seems quite important that these cerebral crannies be 'acoustically open so kids are able to chat with mom and dad if need be'.

a flood of explanation washed over marty and i. in our defense, how were we to know we'd fail as parents without an acoustically open knowledge nook?

sorry i haven't been with you the last few days. we've been sitting in the dark after a huge storm knocked much of our city's power out for a day and a half. many are still waiting to have it restored and are going on day three. while i want to say suck i think some folks over in iraq went six plus weeks which makes 36 hours seem a little on the paltry side.

fact is, if you put aside the food rotting in our fridge, my house kind of enjoyed living like the ingles for a couple of days. marty actually said we should forego electricity for one 24 hour period every month. i'm not sure if that will happen but this latest round of darkness and lack of air conditioning surely proved effective in drawing the neighborhood out of their tv rooms.

sadly, the only thing keeping me from being 100% on board with marty's day of darkness is humor like rock, paper, saddam!.

i mostly know how to do things through stringent missives. and, true to this nature, i've dubbed May the month of reclamation in our home. what are we reclaiming? well, really quite a few things. how about our home itself. our sanity. our dignity. our ability to walk through the the hallways in the middle of the night without kicking something stamped 'fisher price'. i'd like one of the hooks of m...

my garage door is broke. since having a garage we've had the clicker, openy thing. when it stopped working, i just stood there, in front of it repeatedly pushing the button on the wall, with no results. after about ten minutes of this, i did what any cold-blooded american male would do, i went and asked my wife what i should do.

m: pull the red ripcord to disengage the door.

t: then what?

m: then open it.

t: how?

m: with your hand.

t: no button?

m: no button.

suffice it to say, she may has well told me to reach shoulder deep into a water buffalo's birth canal to look for the television's remote control. if it were the 20,000 pyramid the answer to this scenario would be 'things troy just doesn't do'. when i asked marty about replacing it, she said we don't have the money, right now, for a new garage door. i assured her the new opener would be way cheaper than the small child i was prepared pay to stand at the door all day long waiting for me to pull up so he can raise and lower the door for me. marty told me to find a cheaper child.