The Next 97 Days

A glance at my calendar for the next three months:

April 11: Attend Flying Squirrels game courtesy of my daughter who purchased prime first base line seats for my birthday.

April 15: Submit 50 page tax return and figure out a way to pay the IRS.

May 11: Celebrate Kaitlin’s 27^th birthday with festive dinner at Burger King, since all of my spare change is being consumed by Wedding expenses.

May 17: Attend Patrick’s graduation ceremony from Westminster at the beautiful Princeton chapel where one of the songs will be one of Patrick’s arrangements.

May 18: Flip Mattress

May 19: Celebrate 30^th wedding anniversary with good cheer and warm hugs while we remind ourselves that we will actually get to celebrate in August sometime after the Wedding, with a festive dinner at Burger King.

May 25: Celebrate Patrick’s 25^th birthday maybe by attending the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina where he will be performing, assuming we can afford bus fare down and back.

June 12: Begin final 30 day stretch run of Wedding planning lollapalooza by developing a close working relationship with high end pharmaceutical rep who specializes in “mood altering” drugs. Mike Slagle, call your office!

June 19: Every time one of our friends reminds us that there are only “three weeks until the big day,” remind Pam that it’s just a number and everything will be ok.

June 26: Begin intensive study of weather apps and long range forecasts and no matter what I find, assure Pam that it looks like we are in for a cool down very soon.

July 4: Celebrate nation’s birth with festive meal of saltine crackers and Velveeta, while listening to John Philip Sousa on Pandora, as we enjoy the scorching 98 degree sunshine and soul-crushing humidity that are the last vestiges of a three week long heat wave that according to my weather apps is about to end, ushering in an entire week of “spring-like temperatures.”

July 11: Drive to the rehearsal dinner through gale force winds, golf ball sized hail and lightning bolts that look like they were flashed from King Triton’s trident itself. I remind Pam that this is that long-promised cold front that will usher in the cooler weather just in time for the big day!

July 12: The big day dawns bright and clear, birds chirping happily, temperature expected to top out at 78 glorious degrees. Everyone’s hair looks great as the Wedding goes off without a hitch. All of the expense, planning and late nights were worth it, as Kaitlin walks down the aisle looking like a princess.

July 13: Disappear for a month.

An Indispensible Woman

Yesterday morning a firestorm of panic was released against my wife. As she was about to sit down and eat her breakfast, in the 10 minutes she allocates for this purpose in her manic morning routine, she received three urgent requests for her services all within five minutes of each other. Sadly the first request was mine:

“Honey, can you help me figure out how to upload this video into my blog?”

Hair still wrapped in a towel, she hustled into the study to get to the bottom of my latest technological failing.

Next emergency was also, sadly, of my making. Somehow, I had failed to send in the payment for Kaitlin’s county tags, and now she was driving around proudly displaying her NOV. ’12 stickers for all to see. Jon, who was here and had volunteered to take care of the problem, needed the title number for the car. So naturally he went to the fount of all information having anything to do with the Dunnevant household. While Pam was feverishly scouring her computer looking for a Honda Civic title, she gets an agitated text from our son:

“Mom, I need for you to scan a copy of my Social Security card to Westminster’s personnel office immediately or I won’t be approved to attend the Spoleto Festival!”

This, I’m sure brought back fond memories for Pam of those wonderful calls Patrick used to make from Sherri Matthews’ chorus room back in high school:

“Mom, I left my music folder in my room!! I think it’s on the floor next to the TV right beside that pile of empty juice bottles, next to all my dirty clothes. If you don’t bring it here in the next 10 minutes, Mrs. M is gonna kill me!!!”

Now with three balls hovering in the air over her head, Pam had time to think about what she faces over the next 7 days, everything from wedding planning details to end of school reporting, pending teacher license re-certification deadlines, and as of two days ago the new prospect of …wait for it…jury duty! So much for breakfast.

To her, my life must seem like a sunset stroll at the beach. All I have to do is run a business and make money, and remember to buy county tags on time. My record on all three is spotty. I have loads of spare time to work out four times a week, play an occasional round of golf, and write this blog. Pam’s spare time gets quickly co-opted by a thousand little brushfires that only she can put out. She is the only indispensible person I know. I feel like I should do something to help, like suddenly become more useful at the stuff I don’t know how to do. Or maybe I should send her one of those nice e-card things to brighten her day. The problem is, I can’t figure out how to download the link from the website thing, because it keeps saying that I need the latest version of something called “Java script”…

“Hon, could you come in here for a second and help me with this??”   

My Birthday Ended Better Than it Started

My birthday got off to a terrible start. I received three e-mails in rapid fire succession from my accountant, never a good thing. I don’t believe that I have ever received any correspondence from him that was good news like, “Hey Doug, just wanted to drop you a line to remind you to be looking for that fat IRS refund check! It should be hitting your checking account any day now.” No, it’s always something dreadful and dire-sounding like, “These expenses you have listed on the document entitled RFA expenses for 2013? What do you expect me to do with them,” or even worse, “Can you explain the discrepancy between what you say that you have paid in estimated taxes and what my records indicate?”

Anyway, I could understand virtually nothing in any of these e-mails, and it is this sad fact that troubles me. The problem is this…I haven’t filled out a tax return in over 30 years. I have always had an accountant, and while I’m sure that he has saved me a lot of money, it has resulted in a total ignorance on my part of the entire process, which makes me feel like a moron. I’ll never forget when my kids asked me to help them fill out their first returns. I looked at them and said, “wait,..what?” So here I am in the financial business and I couldn’t fill out a tax return if my life depended on it. When Carl sends me my return every year it looks like it was written by Tibetan monks. I glance at the pages and pages of numbers and columns with a pit in my stomach. Then I find the cover page and look for the words, “WHAT YOU OWE.”

But, enough about our fascist tax code, the rest of my birthday was quite fun. My business partners took me to Hondos for lunch. Then last night I went to Chuy’s with family and friends. I got some truly awesome gifts. My daughter gave me and invite and tickets for prime seats along the first base line for next Friday night’s Flying Squirrels game. For those of you not from around here…yes, our double A baseball franchise goes by the name Flying Squirrels as in, “GO NUTS for the Squirrels!” Then Pam got me some really cool workout shirts and the most amazing gift ever, three, hour long massages at Hand & Stone!! Then my son, who is very broke and in graduate school sent me this amazing video that for some inexplicable reason, I can't manage to upload into this blog post, so you'll have to go to my Facebook page to see it. Take my word for it, it's awesome!

 So, all in all a very good day which ended much better than it started.

The Day I Was Born

The world was a different place on the day I was born, this day, April 3, 1958:

The President of the United States was old, white and bald.

A brand new house could be had for $12,500.

The national debt was 16 trillion dollars less than it is today.

The most popular show on television was The Ed Sullivan Show.

The Beatles weren’t a band yet.

The two best baseball players on the planet were Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle.

The NBA was full of slow white guys.

Only sailors and motorcycle gang members had tattoos.

The most popular singer was Elvis Pressley.

Gas sold for .25 a gallon.

The cars you pumped it into were all huge and the most popular ones had fins.

Kids never wore helmets while riding their bikes.

Gigi won best picture at the Oscars.

The most popular novel was Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote

My father was 34 years old, healthy, larger than life, and wondering how in the world he was going to manage to feed yet another mouth.

My mother was 28, healthy, beautiful, and thrilled with the arrival of her fourth child.

Fidel Castro’s forces began the attack on Havana.

An annual income of $3650 would have placed you dead center of the middle class.

The safety net consisted of Social Security, and the food bank at the local church.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at 456, a mere 16,000 points lower than today.

Pam was still four years away from being born, and Kaitlin and Patrick could not possibly have been imagined.

Washington politicians were just as selfish and stupid as they are today but thanks to no 24/7 news coverage, we just didn’t know it.

The best selling song of the year was “All I Have To Do Is Dream” by the Everly Brothers.

The Washington Redskins finished the season 4-7-1, proving that some things never change.

Yes, a very different world when I was born.

Early Morning Epiphanies

I awoke bolt upright in the bed at 4:45 am. I was not in a cold sweat, but rather clear-eyed and unwavering. I had been the beneficiary of a series of life-changing epiphanies. The scales have fallen from my eyes.

1. It has become clear to me now that my government is awesome, the bigger the better. In fact, since they have done so much good over these last 50 years, I now believe that we all should be taxed at 100% of our income. We should give it all freely and cheerfully to Washington where, free from financial restraints, our government would be able to take care of all of our collective needs.
2. Baseball is in fact a boring, dying sport. However, if I’m going to be a fan at all, I might as well root for the greatest team in history, the New York Yankees.
3. Rap music is awesome. It’s the modern equivalent of Bach, and the lyrics are the Shakespearian sonnets of the 21^st century.
4. The best movies in the world are made by the French.
5. When I see an NBA player covered from head to toe in tattoos I will from now on think, “Wow, what amazing self-expression!”
6. The only morally and ethically defensible way to eat is Veganism.
7. Reality television may very well go down in history as the most creative, uplifting form of communication ever conceived by the mind of man.
8. Soccer is actually the most riveting sport on television, and I can certainly understand its world-wide popularity. I am embarrassed for my country when I see the Nielson ratings for the Premier League games on ESPN. When will we EVER follow the world in our adoration for this most exciting game ever created?
9. I now see that the Big Ten is the finest football conference.
10.  Al Gore will one day be worshiped as our country’s new George Washington for his tireless efforts as a modern day prophet on Global Warming, which is the biggest threat to our existence that mankind has ever faced. Clearly, we are the sole cause of climate change and the only way to save ourselves is to turn over control of the entire world to the United Nations.
11.  If Barack Obama isn’t one day carved into the granite of Mount Rushmore, it will be because of racism.
12.  The Washington Redskins are perhaps the most well run franchise in the NFL and Dan Snyder the most enlightened owner.
13.  The Kardashian sisters are not only beautiful, but smart too.
14.  There is no such thing as liberal bias in the media. The fact that 95% of them vote for Democrats just proves that they are better informed than the rest of us.
15.  All of the Twilight movies are better than Citizen Kane and Casablanca.

It’s been quite a morning!

Stuff I'm Sick Of

I’m tired of rain and the low, dark clouds and sodden earth that come with it. I’m tired of those swiveled brown leaves that cling to the bottom branches of oak trees even while the higher branches are sprouting new ones. I’m tired of watching green mildew paint itself over every wooden surface in my back yard. I’m tired of that breathless smell of compost that rushes into the garage every time I raise the door after another soggy night.

I feel like taking every piece of furniture in my house to Key West and spreading them out on the lawn of the Casa Marina Hotel in the bright sunshine for a week to burn off the dross of winter. If it were only warm enough I would go outside and scrub that milky-white film of salt and snow melting chemicals off of my cars with my bare hands.

If I have been reduced to this by the unrelenting gloominess of this interminable season, I can only imagine how my Dad must feel. Day after day he sits in his chair, covered with blankets in his hot house watching the news. His exposure to the weather is limited to a glance out of the window and our complaints. I’m taking him to one of his doctors tomorrow. I hope it’s sunny and warm. I want him to feel the sun on his face. I want to feel the sun on my face.

There has to be a reason for winter, if nothing else than to make us appreciate spring, to create in us an expectation of something better. April is nearly here. It will be better, warmer and it will bring life.

We need it.

The Stephen Colbert Kerfuffle

I have a nit to pick. It concerns the misuse of language, and comedian Stephen Colbert.

So, Mr. Colbert finds himself in hot water, hoisted on his own petard, as it were. The faithfully liberal star of the Colbert Report, a late night show in which he plays a blowhard conservative, is famous for parodying political conservatives as racist, homophobic, cave men. Everyone yuks it up when the victims of the jokes are the Koch brothers, but when the punch line hits the wrong target, all hell breaks loose on the plantation. While targeting Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins (the right target) for his insensitivity to Native Americans for refusing to change the team name, the show’s Twitter account posted this:

“I am willing to show the Asian community that I care by introducing the Ching Chong, Ding Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever,”(the wrong target).

Soon the twitter-sphere was hot with talk of boycotts. Someone named Suey Park, described in news accounts as a “writer and activist” fired back:

“#CancelColbert because white liberals are just as complicit in making Asian-Americans into punchlines and we aren’t amused.”

Here’s where my nitpick comes in. Of course Mr. Colbert, like any good liberal was horrified to find himself accused of racism, I mean, it’s literally impossible, the very definition of an oxymoron. So, he quickly fired up his own Twitter response:

“I just saw this comment and I share your rage.”

I call barnyard manure.

Words have meaning. Some words are inappropriate modifiers in certain situations. For example, you wouldn’t describe a skinned knee as a “bloodbath.” To reply to negative twitter criticism of his unfunny joke with “I share your rage” is chicken feces of the highest order. First of all, nobody upset about the joke is enraged, and secondly, he no more shares this nonexistent rage than I share Brad Pitt’s good looks. No, this was false outrage designed to shore up his liberal white guilt credentials, and remind everyone that he is faithfully down with the struggle. Rage, my ass!

It is entertaining to see establishment liberals get a little bit of their own medicine, I must admit. A little schadenfreude is good for the soul. Let a conservative Republican call Barack Obama the “first clean African American candidate” and guys like Stephen Colbert would have material for a month of shows. But, a liberal Democrat who says it gets to become Vice-President.

So, have fun Stephen. Have fun stewing in your own juice.