Self Defense

From the epicenter of the coming Zombie Apocalypse,

Phillip Joseph Smolinsky, 36, was arrested Wednesday on charges of domestic battery and resisting arrest without violence related to the fruit fight, according to the Pasco County Sheriff's Office. 

He was being held without bond Thursday, jail records showed. It was unknown whether he has an attorney. 

When deputies responded to Smolinsky's Port Richey home, his live-in girlfriend told them he had thrown a banana at her, WFLA reported. Smolinsky denied the accusation and said she had thrown the banana at him.

I'm thinking Smolinsky's girlfriend wishes she had paid closer attention to Monty Python's instructional video.

Symbiosis

We have been in our new home for about 8 months. While the home, and neighborhood, is certainly not new, it is to us, so there are always surprises.

One of those surprises happened last weekend.

First of all, our family has been through one of those weeks that no family should have to go through. And so it was we were rushing out to deal with an urgent situation when a man in a pick up truck pulls into our driveway blocking our exit.

A well worn, wiry, middle-aged Asian man jumps out and approaches our car. My mind is on the task at hand, so I really do not have an interest in talking to this guy, but I'm blocked in, so I ask, "Can I help you?"

Another man, a bit older, balding, and with a paunch, hops out of the other side of the truck.

"Are you the owner of this house?"

"Yes."

"Can we have some of your bamboo?"

Our home, affectionately known as The Compound, sits on an acre of land, squeezed in between two neighborhoods well inside the city borders. Of the acre of land, approximately half is populated with bamboo. We have two separate "bamboo forests" on the property, the front one and the rear one.

The bamboo is so think in the front that I half expect to find a family of pandas out there. A few weeks ago a tree fell within the "forest" and I did not discover it for several days. I can honestly answer the question, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound?" with a resounding "No!"

Maintaining this aspect of our property is a lot of work.

So the Greatest Woman on God's Green Earth (GWGGE) and I share a glance at each other and I turn to the two Asian men at my car window.

"Yes. Of course, but could you come back tomorrow. We have some urgent business to attend to right now."

They agreed, moved out of our way, and we were off.

The following day, while I was out walking the dogs, the older Asian man shows up at the house. The GWGGE gives him instruction and he begins cutting.

I arrive at the house, go out to see what's going on. A lone, balding, Asian man in business attire is hacking away at our bamboo, but only the dead stalks per the instructions. It turns out he is Ming, the lead pastor at the Vietnamese Catholic Church around the corner from The Compound. I go back inside to do the rest of my morning chores.

A while later I wander back out to the front to see how the Vietnamese pastor is faring. And when I do, I am shocked to discover a platoon of Vietnamese bamboo lumberjacks thinning out our Bamboo forest. I report my findings to the GWGGE and we have a bit of a chuckle about the whole thing.

Just before the lumberjacks leave, the pastor invites our family to their annual crawfish festival and their Sunday community luncheons filled with traditional Vietnamese fare. I can't wait to go!

A Pirate's Code: Money for nothing, and your drinks for free

A few years ago we got our financial act together. We were debt free, except for our mortgage, using cash for our daily expenses, and were able to put enough money away to send our kids to private schools.

A new house and a couple years of backsliding later, it was time to right the ship again. Back to a cash budget, could be back to zero debt other than mortgage debt in a matter of weeks, and we are starting to put money away again, and we have a plan to stash even more cash.

Living on cash is important to us. It is harder to spend cash. There is a built in hard stop to spending when you run out of cash. And it just makes our lives less stressful. We no longer wonder if we have the money to buy that new thing; if the money is not in our pocket or purse, then we don't have the money. One less thing to worry about in our anxiety filled lives.

Before you even ask: Yes. We are bound by the Pirate's Code. (That is the subject of a different post)

We have a rule in our home, "He who does the laundry, keeps the money." However, there are certain guidelines that we must all follow for this to work without someone feeling robbed. At some point, when the amount of money is unusually large (say, $20), the money should be returned to its owner. If it belongs to the boys, perhaps that threshold is quite a bit lower.

The cash budget thing has really been a boon to the one who does the laundry. About a two weeks ago, I pocketed $15. The money could have only been mine or Sue's (I was absolutely certain it wasn't mine), so I pocketed it.

Not one to let my new found wealth go to waste, I offered to take my lovely bride to happy hour. We were near the end of our two-week budgeting period, so cash was becoming more scarce and my lovely bride asked, "Can you pay for both of us, because I'm almost out of cash?"

"Of course," I replied.

She queried, "How come you still have cash, but I'm almost out?"

"I just didn't spend as much as you did this week," I replied. "And besides, I held a little back so I could take you out."

We went out; she had a margarita, I had a beer, and we shared some beef fajitas. I spent about $10 more than the $15 I found in the laundry. So our date was essentially dutch.

In case you are counting, that is 3 "brownie points" in this little story.

1. I did the laundry.
2. I asked my wife out on a date.
3. I made it look like I had taken the effort to plan the date.

And I accomplished all this while spending her cash, not mine.

Please don't tell Sue! I'll lose more brownie points than I gained.

A Butterfly Effect

I am a HUGE fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. If any of the three LOTR movies comes on television, there are only a few things that will tear me away. And by few, I mean somebody better be dying!

There are a number of scenes that involve butterflies or moths. Moths/butterflies are messengers, in the movies at least, for the eagles. My favorite moth/butterfly scene from the trilogy has got to be the final battle at the black gate. The key moment starts at about the 3:00 mark in this clip.

The eagles are almost always associated with a sudden and unexpected turn of events in Tolkein's books, and they are always on the side of good in the movies.

...

Nearly everyday, our dogs get a nice little walk, usually just over a mile. On our last couple of journeys we were led out of the gate by some brilliant reddish-orange moths. To be honest, I've been a little nonplussed over their consistency in behavior and presence.

My walk this past Wednesday was something a bit different, though.

The dogs were leashed as I walked to the gate. The reddish-orange moth was there again to lead us out the gate. We walked down the road to the end of the block, more reddish-orange moths lined our path. As we approached the corner, a massive Monarch butterfly met up with us, and guided us for almost a quarter mile!

It guided us around the corner.

It led us down the street.

Amazingly, it continued to lead us around another turn.

Finally, it flitted off over a fence.

It was about this time, I started looking up to the skies. I was a little freaked out. At any moment I expected to see the Great Eagles of Middle Earth bringing about a sudden an unexpected turn of events.

But, alas, I was just walking the dogs. And they did not suddenly behave themselves on the walk, so maybe that butterfly omen is one to remain in Middle Earth, and not here and now in this world.

Pity. It was a really magnificent butterfly.

My Mythology of Rain

I went to worship experience different than most I've experienced last week. It was similar to a house church, but also decidedly Methodist, too. From their website:

Kuneo is a new kind of worship gathering. Hosted at the Union Coffee House near SMU, the Village, and Lower Greenville in Dallas, Kuneo seeks to show the love of Jesus in a creative, compassionate, and communal gathering of people on the journey that we call "faith."

During the gathering last week, the theme centered on knowing your story, the church knowing its story, and then living out that story. We all have a story, and as was implied, that story converges, for all, with Christ.
So I left that gathering thinking about my story.

...

I am a little behind on the entertainment phenomenon that is Game of Thrones. We do not have HBO at home, so I have never seen an episode of the series, but I do have a library card. So I checked out the first book in the series.

I'm about a quarter of the way through the book as I write this, and I've come across a recurring theme regarding the Dothraki people in the story: the important things in a man's life always occur under the open sky.

I got to thinking about that, and it occurred to me that our family has a similar mythology. Except our mythology says that the important things in a man's life always occur in the rain.

Here are a few examples:

• When I was a child I had a major surgery that would come to define the things I could and could not do. The day I was released from the hospital, we drove home in a light, steady rain.
• The day of my wedding, a deluge nearly forced us to switch transportation from automobiles to boats.
• On the day we unloaded the moving van when we moved to San Antonio so I could start at my first "real" job, we unloaded the van in the rain.
• On the day we brought our first child home from the hospital, it was raining.
• And there was that camping trip. I think it was the last time we went camping as a family.

There are other moments like these that have graced our family, but these five stick with me most clearly. Each one of them represented a new direction that required new challenges and new skills. 

There is little hope of rain in these parts for the next six weeks or so, but every time it rains, I can't help but wonder what new direction life will take us, what new challenges we will face, what new skills we will need to learn. Rain is our omen of things to come, I just don't know what's coming. 

And that is awesome!

Baconescence: A Miracle!

Bacon is more than just an awesome food. Bacon is medicine. I explored its medicinal qualities several months ago in a post entitled: What if bacon is actually good for us? In an experiment with my nephew, we were able to isolate bacon as the anti-viral element that cured him of the flu.

That was six months ago. I have not been able to identify any other cases quite as dramatic as that one since then, but that is probably because bacon is a staple of our family's diet and of those dear to us. My mother-in-law is the exception here. She has had some kind of abdominal problem and refuses to adopt the "Take two bacon and call me in the morning" approach. She has not been well for months.

Tyra Banks loves her some bacon

Just within the past week, though, we've had a bacon cure miracle. So far, that miracle has not been verified by the Congregation for the Causes of Bacon, but I expect that to just be a matter of course. So what was this miracle of Bacon, you ask?

Here's the story:

A family member, by marriage, (let's call him Chris) was hastily transported to my house by his friend and landlord. He had been experiencing severe abdominal cramps and the disgusting stuff that comes with said cramps. The symptoms came in waves and the waves came about every 11 minutes. He was a little frightened by the whole thing and just wanted to suffer with people nearby, rather than to suffer alone. The original destination was to be the hospital, but after starting to feel a bit better, they diverted to our house.

Less than a minute after entering the house, he walked hurriedly back outside, for yet another bout of stomach malady. That was his last episode of acute abdominal distress. Period.

A few minutes later, he came back inside.

Here is the miraculous part.

A full day prior, my son, a journeyman bacon preparer in his own right, cooked himself some bacon. He is not the best at maintaining a clean cooking environment, and the smell of warm bacon grease stayed in the house well into the following day. The bacon effluvium still lingered as Chris arrived.

We waited approximately 11 minutes to see if another wave of cramps and nausea recurred. It did not. We waited another 11 minutes. Still nothing. In the meantime I got all the day's laundry folded and sorted.

Chris drank some water.

Eleven minutes later, still nothing.

Another 22 minutes with no symptoms and I brought him back home.

The only thing that the miracle investigative committee could find that might be related to his sudden and complete cure was the lingering smell of bacon.

Not only does bacon have anti-viral qualities, but I believe that even just the faint remnant of bacon fragrance has the ability to improve the health of the flora of the gut. Hence, the immediate cessation of Chris' abdominal distress.

Eat more bacon!

Don't Kill the Bees

A couple of weeks ago, on a Thursday, I went to the nearby grocery store to purchase a few things so we could grill some burgers and hot dogs. We were having just a few friends and family over to the house and did not quite have enough food to feed everyone.

I took my teen-aged son with me. Actually he insisted. Apparently I do not buy the right junk food.

In the mean time, the greatest woman on God's green earth (GWGGE) went to the home improvement store to get some things to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

The boy and I were almost done with our shopping trip, finishing up in the beer aisle (no good outdoor gathering is complete without some nice cold beer) when I get a call from the GWGGE. Here is how the conversation went, as heard by the grocery store shoppers around me.

Me: What's up?

Me: I don't know?

Me: Get the natural stuff

Me: No, the other stuff

Me: No! the natural stuff!

Me: We have to protect the bees, Honey!

Me: No! DON"T KILL THE BEES!

Me: Okay

Me: Okay

Me: Bye, love you.

Needless to say, strange looks from the other shoppers combined with a slightly embarrassed teenager meant that we quickly made our way to the checkout line and out the store.

Fast forward a couple of days later...

Shadow, the dog, loves to bark at squirrels. He loves to chase squirrels. He loves to hunt squirrels. But I think he learned to hunt from those shows on the Discovery Channel where they tag the prey and release it, because, he looks very confused when he catches his prey. Up to this point, Shadow was 0 for 3,486 in his hunt for squirrels. He has cornered a bunny rabbit, a few toads, and a number of insects, though.

There I was in the back yard and Shadow is, much to my surprise, barking at squirrels. But something is different this time. The squirrel seems to be taunting him, staying low on the tree. Suddenly, Shadow jumps up and pins the squirrel by the tail against the trunk of the tree.

I bark the command, "Leave It!"

Shadow, in his confusion, and in one motion, drags the squirrel to the ground and turns to look at me.

He looks back at the squirrel on the ground. Looks at me. I say sternly, "Come here!"

Shadow looks back one more time, not quite sure what to think of his fallen prey, and trots over to me.

I put Shadow in the house, and go inside to report the events that just occurred to the current occupants of the house, GWGGE and her sister. The younger son was in the house, too, but since it was only 11:30 in the morning, he was still fast asleep.

Together sister-in-law and I go out to the fallen squirrel and ponder its condition. It is alive, but there is something wrong with the way its legs are moving. After much consideration of the previous events, we determine that Shadow did not mortally injure the squirrel, but that the squirrel was sickly before its encounter with the dog.

Sister-in-law returns to the safety of the house as I go to do what a man's got to do.

I put the squirrel out of its misery, and add its carcass to the growing collection of critters now buried in the Pet Cemetery out behind the workshop.

All events as traumatic as this require closure for those involved. We had to come to conclusions about the poor squirrel's death, Shadow's innocence, and the distastefulness of the deed I had to do. In the course of determining Shadow's innocence we decided the squirrel was already suffering from some sort of neurological malady prior to the events detailed above. I think the final conclusion we reached came from sister-in-law, who said, "I think it was the bug spray you sprayed a few days ago that made the squirrel sick."

Some related news on bees and pesticides:
25,000 Bees Found Dead In Oregon Parking Lot, Environmental Organization Says
Oregon Issues Temporary Pesticide Ban Following Bee Deaths
50,000 dead Oregon bees to be honored in memorial service