While we were in Texas with Kathy’s relatives, we were careful to observe all the Traditions. We spent time each day at the pool, and covered dozens of miles in golf cart rides. We ate large quantities of Mexican food, or at least American food made up to look Mexican. We played games and read books and even made a pilgrimage to Alamo Village.

Kathy’s brother and his children were often to be found behind the wheel of a golf cart.

And then there was Pico’s. An otherwise unremarkable gas station chain, Pico’s has the rare distinction to offer the world’s largest (at least in my experience) ‘Single Scoop Ice Cream’ for $1.19.

Pico’s. Now the secret is out.

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, so I’ll have to provide a picture; each ‘Single Scoop’ is really a compacted mass of ice cream requiring more than a dozen individual scoops on the part of the server.

Sarah already ate quite a bit off the top.

Kathy’s Dad and I are not very alike (he’s well-educated, urbane and handy, while I am, er, not) but we share at least one passion: neither of us can pass up a bargain. For this reason, as the last dishes were washed after dinner each evening, a quiet refrain would begin to buzz on the lips of the children:

“Pico’s. Pico’s. Pico’s.”

Clearly, I was standing in a low spot in the parking lot, which allowed Kathy’s brother, her Dad, and my own son to tower over me.

Grand-Dad would look up from his book with a twinkle in his eye. “Did someone say ‘Pico’s’?”

I would wander in from the porch, licking my lips. “Did someone say, ‘Pico’s’?”

And so we would drive the mile or so into ‘town’ and pile out of our minivans to stand in front of the ice cream case.

“What are your flavors today,” we’d ask. “We’ll need eleven, no, twelve ‘Single Scoops’,” we would confide to the server.

“Rosalita,” the girl at the cash register would yell, “you come serve these customers while I check the stock-room.” Rosalita had a strong arm from all that scooping.

Mint Chocolate Chip and Banana Split were two of the favorites, although Butter Pecan and Rocky Road were well-favored as well. One night (gasp!) they had nothing but Vanilla, and we all suffered with home-made brownies.

Everybody got Mint Chocolate Chip that day … everyone, except me, that is.

We had a great time with Kathy’s brother, his children, and Kathy’s parents; but when the stories are told about this vacation, I’ll bet Pico’s will have a prominent place.

These girls were later arrested for loitering, which really livened up the worship service.

Yesterday I attended a follow-up visit with my physician, to discuss the results of my recent physical and lab testing. Now that I’m firmly in my 40’s, I have begun to hesitantly grapple with the idea that I might not be immortal and invulnerable, no matter how many times I watched Stallone or Schwarzenegger movies as a young man.

I told my doctor about Pico’s, my eyes sparkling as a reminiscent smile wreathed my face. “I figure I gained a few pounds,” I chortled unrepentantly. (People with a double chin have an advantage when it comes to chortling, and I made the best of that competitive edge.)

“Yep. Looks like you’re up six pounds since I saw you last, less than two months ago.” My doctor didn’t seem to think it was quite so funny.

I mentally reviewed my options:

1. Find a fat doctor
2. Never get another physical for the rest of my (probably short) life
3. Break into my doctor’s office (each time I have an appointment) and inflate the previous visit’s weight, so it always looks like I’m losing.
4. Investigate my doctor for some vice and ruthlessly blackmail him into silence
5. Attempt to intimidate my physician so that he’s afraid to bring up the subject of weight
6. Change my lifestyle and lose some weight

Doctor’s don’t tend to be fat. Oh, you’ll find a plump one from time to time, but I’ve been cursed with skinny ones the last 10 years or so. They have to learn to live without food or sleep during their time as an intern and resident, and the habits tend to stick, from what I can tell.

Not my actual doctor.

My doctor doesn’t seem to be the kind I could easily intimidate, and I’m not sure he has any easily exploitable vices. Kathy won’t let me avoid annual physicals, and I think it is too late to build my marriage on a pattern of lies, having been pretty forthright up to this point.

The possibilities having narrowed, my course is clear: I must find a way to falsify my weight records each time I visit. On the way out, I carefully cased the office for windows wide enough to allow ingress. It would be poetically embarrassing if I became wedged in a window while engaged in this enterprise.

In the unlikely event that this crafty scheme fails me, and just to give our readers something on which to comment, I’ll throw out this question:

What is the single best lifestyle change you have made to lose weight?

Maybe I’ll do some sit-ups while I wait for your answers.

Tim

Fundamentally, it is all about tomatoes.

Some men have a mid-life crisis that involves a sports car, or a new job. For me, it was gardening, so we spent a good part of the Spring planting tomatoes. Then we had to transplant, stake and prune them, and we even managed to sell some of the plants.

We drew all kinds of deep, philosophical lessons from the planting, growing, staking and pruning, provoking one common reaction from our readers:

“For crying out loud, enough with the tomatoes, already!”

This boy was so sick of tomatoes, he’s packing to leave.

But at last we have arrived at the day we’ve all been waiting for: Harvest Time.

When I returned home this evening, Kathy asked me eagerly, “When are you going to eat one of your new, red tomatoes?”

I chortled with glee. “Maybe today … ” I hinted, waggling my eyebrows in a conspiratorial way.

Later, I went out to water and inspect my little darlings, and to photograph them appropriately. Looking closely, I noticed that there were only two crimson globes, where three had dangled yesterday. Frantically, I searched in the dirt at the foot of the plant — nothing! Could it be possible that someone had eaten one of my precious tomatoes?

The first fruits of my harvest

I rounded up the usual suspects. “OK,” I snarled. “Who was throwing a frisbee near my tomato plants, and what did you do with the tomato you knocked off?” I marched up and down the line of ‘persons of interest’, noting their beady eyes and guilty faces.

But none of them cracked. “We don’t know what happened to your silly ‘ole tomato,” wailed my youngest daughter.

… and then there were two …

Finally, a confession was received from an unexpected source: “Um, I had one, sweetie,” admitted Kathy, scuffing the dirt with her toe. “It looked so good, and the snake said it would make me wise … “

It is things like this that really put a marriage to the test.

Tim
Project 366, Day 220

Time for some summer discussions. How do you deal with boredom among your children during the hot, lazy summer months? Rocks in My Dryer is encouraging everyone to share their greatest and latest tips. I have a few thoughts but am hoping for more inspiration. Here’s what I have so far:

1) Buy a Costco-sized pack of toilet brushes - hand them out at the first sound of the word Bored.

2) Give each child a toothbrush and a single paper towel and instruct them to wash and detail the minivan.

3) Pull everything out of their closet, pile it on the bed and tell them not to come out of their room until it is organized and back in order.

4) Find a stack of instruction manuals for various household appliances and assign Book Reports.

5) Open the doors and windows, put on your favorite Broadway show (NOT any of the High School Musical films) and blast the volume high.

You can see we know about FUN in our house. Anything else I’m missing? More ideas waiting for you at Rocks in My Dryer.

Kathy

One recent morning I was faced with a mystery.

There was no chalk outline, and the police did not festoon the area with yellow tape, but it was still deeply perplexing.

(Not that this is saying much; it doesn’t take much to perplex me.)

In order to save time (and hot water) in the shower, I habitually shave in the car. Driving the quiet back streets in the early hours of the morning, I use a little battery-powered portable shaver given to me by Kathy’s brother (thanks, Phil!) to assist me in my grooming. On this fateful day, I picked up my portable shaver (I keep it in the console of my little silver car) and turned it on, but nothing happened.

“Curses!” I grumbled. Sometimes the AA rechargeable batteries I use, get cold in the car, but usually they have some life in them — enough at least to power the blades so that they grip onto my little chin hairs and yank them painfully instead of cutting them. I cast my memory back — no, the last time I had shaved, the batteries were fine.

Something felt wrong about the shaver — I shook it hopefully and turned it on and off a couple of times, still nothing. I swiveled open the base of the shaver to look at the batteries, thinking perhaps some dust was obstructing the battery terminals, but found instead an empty hole: the batteries were gone.

A shaver without batteries is a sad, lonely sight.

This was very strange. I mostly use my little silver car to commute, and Kathy rarely drives it. There’s nobody else of driving age in the house, and nobody else shaves (at least not with my little shaver). Even if Kathy had driven my car to church or some other event, what could possibly have happened to my batteries?

Sarah looks innocent, but could she be the culprit?

At work, I shared my puzzlement. Soon, intrigued by this mystery, the hypotheses began to fly, as my cow-orkers tried their hands as amateur sleuths.

“OK, here’s how it played out,” suggested my boss. “Some local car thief was looking for valuables or planning to steal a car from the parking lot where you leave your car. He broke into your car, but just then, his Walkman™ ran out of batteries. As everyone knows, car thieves need heavy metal music to encourage them to steal, so he took your batteries as replacement for his own. He didn’t leave his dead batteries in your car for fear that there would be fingerprints on them. Just as he was getting ready to steal your car, something scared him off, and he left.”

Not an actual head-banging car thief.

I tactfully suggested that my boss not quit his day job to become a detective. Another cow-orker piped up with a competing theory:

“With gas prices what they are, these days, your car’s gas tank was targeted for theft. As a professional gas thief, the guy who chose your car has a battery-powered siphon, which chose that moment to run out of power. He noticed the shaver in your console (he’d already broken into your car to open the gas cap cover) and so he took your batteries to run his siphon.”

It does seem as though I fill up my car a lot more often than I would like, and with gas prices at an all-time high, it doesn’t seem unlikely that gas thieves (even savvy ones with battery-powered siphons) would abound. Still, I’ve never actually seen a battery-powered siphon — the one I have in my garage (still in its original packaging, for private use only, of course) is powered by a little bulb that you squeeze (or so I’ve been told). I cast about for another theory. Fortunately, my cow-orkers are an imaginative lot, and work was dull that day:

Turns out there is a battery-powered gas siphon.

“One of your neighbors has a daughter who lost her kitten. Out at night searching for it, he ran out of batteries in the flashlight he was using. Noticing your car was unlocked, he helped himself to your shaver batteries, intending to return them the next day, with an explanation. A few minutes later, he found the kitten in the tree in front of your house, and in the excitement and tearful reunion, forgot to return your batteries. Now that several days have passed, he is too embarrassed to give them back.”

Not my neighbor’s actual kitten.

Sometimes I wonder about my colleagues. Kittens, gas and car thieves, what will they think of next? I shouldn’t have wondered, as another team member chimed in:

“You people have got it all wrong. What happened, is that special operatives were conducting a sweep for terrorists in Tim’s neighborhood, when suddenly they spotted a ‘person of interest’ to their investigation. As luck would have it, the agent responsible to direct the operation experienced an equipment malfunction (his night-vision goggles ran out of batteries). Assessing the situation and keeping a level head in this emergency, he cannibalized Tim’s shaver for batteries in pursuit of this vital mission, as National Security hung in the balance. Neutralizing the suspect, the operative determined that Tim would rather lose two AA rechargeable batteries than be detained indefinitely as a result of knowing too much about this covert operation.”

Not an actual covert operative.

Some of my peers watch a little too much TV, I think.

When I got home, I rounded up the usual suspects, and opened a Court of Inquiry.

This boy looks guilty, don’t you think?

“OK, come clean. Which of you stole the batteries in the shaver I keep in my little silver car?”

“Not me,” chimed several voices, even as my wife and oldest daughter exchanged meaningful glances. The focus of my investigation narrowed.

“What do you think happened to them?” my wife sweetly countered, innocence personified. Sometimes I think she would make a good defense attorney.

Or could it possibly be … Rachel?

I shared a few of the wilder hypotheses that my cow-orkers had invented, while my wife and daughter giggled maniacally.

If you have a theory as to why my batteries were missing, please leave a comment, outlining your theory. I’ll send a valuable prize, worth hundreds of Colombian Pesos (COP), to the person who submits the best guess (either closest to reality or most imaginative, whichever seems right to me).

Tim

I’m not sure this technically counts as a Works for Me Wednesday post. It’s a trifle long, but very worth reading. I can say that somewhat objectively since I didn’t write it.

I call it:

A Lord of the Rings Inspired Hike — by Tim

Every three or four years, I like to venture out into the Great Outdoors™, if only to maintain my reputation as a master woodsman.

It seems like only yesterday when I hiked with my two oldest sons (Slug and Weasel) in the beautiful Duckabush valley. Still, my dedication to the sport is such that I rarely let more than a decade go by, without some excursion or other into the hills and forests. Even a man in peak physical condition like myself must take care to maintain his physique.

We had to park 1/4 mile from the trailhead, because we forgot to buy a parking pass.

I had occasion recently to spend a weekend with my oldest son, as we carefully navigated the excellent Passport 2 Purity curriculum published by Family Life Today. While that is worthy of some discussion, I’ll write about it some other time. My wife, Latte, is often critical of my long, wandering and pointless blog posts. “The server only has 300 gigabytes of storage, you know,” she fleers. (If there is anything worse than a techno-phobe spouse, it is one that knows just enough to be dangerous. But I digress.)

One part of the weekend that the Family Life people recommend, is to bake in 2-4 hours of time for some kind of fun event, in case the rest of the weekend is miserably uncomfortable. “You want this weekend to be a happy memory,” they sagely advise. I asked my oldest son what he would like to do as a father-and-son activity, giving him several attractive options:

• Normalizing a relational database together
• Collaborating on the design of the middleware for a data integrity application
• A joint effort in organizing all the tools in our garage
• Teaming up to mow the lawn
• Hiking together up to a lake in the Olympic Mountains
• Sharing a visit to a local history museum

For some reason he didn’t really consider any but the last two (he is, after all, a history buff). Worried that my manly physical prowess might shame him, I tried to steer my son toward the museum. “Tell ya what,” I wheedled. “If you pick the museum, I’ll throw in a large milkshake and a couple of bucks to spend in the souvenir shop.”

Unmoved, he stuck with the hike. “C’mon, Dad,” he scoffed. “It’s only 3 miles to the lake — how hard can it be? Har, har, har.” While he cannot compare to my brother, Torpid, when it comes to sniggering, Slug has a pretty good evil laugh. “Har, har, har,” I agreed, grinding my teeth.

Editor’s Note: My oldest son has decreed that he doesn’t like being called ‘Slug’ anymore. As a mature father, not desiring to exasperate my son, I’ve reluctantly agreed. In honor of his recent obsession with Tolkien’s work, I’ll bestow upon him the moniker, “Faramir”, although I can’t say I really like being Denethor, even by implication. Denethor was a lot dumber than I ever aspire to be.

Naturally, the forecast for the weekend was rain, sleet, wet fog, showers, drizzles, and a bit more rain. Undeterred, Faramir and I laced up our boots and set forth into the trackless waste.

The Olympic National Forest actually abounds with trackless wastes.

“Ummmm, there sure are a lot of tracks, signs, and candy wrappers in this ‘trackless waste‘”, quipped Faramir, pointing at the large informational kiosk and the well-defined trailhead. My oldest son never has been very sophisticated when it comes to writing (or even living) heroic literature.

“Who’s going to read a story about two bold heroes if they stick to well-marked trails all the time,” I challenged. “‘What a bunch of sissies,’ they’ll conclude, dismissively. No, for proper epic narrative, it’s trackless wastes or nothing.” But there was no use explaining that to an unlettered man of the forest like Faramir.

I let my son lead the way so that he could set the pace, not desiring to leave him behind in the murky forest as I effortlessly bounded up the mountain. Realizing that he would feel pressured to overextend his strides if I followed behind him too closely, I dropped back a bit. “Say, Dad,” my son shouted from three switchbacks above me. “Do you think you’ll be coming along, soon? It’s starting to get dark, Har, har, har!”

He’s a hoot, that boy Faramir. Some time later we found a bridge, and re-enacted the famous scene between Gandalf and the Balrog, in the mines of Moria. “YOU … SHALL … NOT … PASS!” Intoned the wanna-be Gandalf. “I don’t want to pass,” I muttered, under my breath. “I want to go back to the car.” I reflected on the foolishness of Balrogs, which cheered me up considerably.

It turns out, the whole bridge conflict in the Mines of Moria was the result of an innocent misunderstanding.

After trudging at least six or seven miles, much of it bordering on vertical, we encountered another hiker heading down the trail. “How … much … farther,” I gasped. He looked at me in some concern, and then at the nearly flat trail segment I had just traversed. “Not much more than another mile,” he assured me, heartily, with an encouraging smile. His guileless visage radiated integrity and goodwill, so I recognized him immediately as an agent of a dark power.

It is a little-known fact that the Forest Service hires spiteful, ill-intentioned men and stations them on trails all around the nation to spread false hope and to prey upon unsuspecting travelers. Once when particularly enraged, I managed to wrestle one of them to the ground, and, breaking a few of his fingers in the process, snatched a fragment of his guidebook:

“You must always work to lure the unsuspecting hiker deeper into the forest, with optimistic promises that their destination is ‘just over the next rise’ or ‘just around the next bend’. Work to communicate a sense of hearty cheer and use vague measurements of time and distance wherever possible. Freely use your imagination to extoll the beauty and majesty of the destination, especially since it is unlikely the hiker will ever actually find it. Be careful not to …

Unfortunately, the fragment was torn at that point, and the Forest Service operative had already made his escape. I have often wondered what it was, that they were supposed to be careful not to do?

Not more than five miles later, we encountered another troll bridge, where Joshua amused himself playing Gandalf again. “How come I always have to be the Balrog,” I whined, somewhat out of character. It didn’t seem fair that he had a stick, but my whip had to be virtual.

In spite of prejudice, some Balrogs are actually very mild-mannered and thoughtful.

Soon the trail was covered in snow, as we persisted in our hopeless quest for the lake. Various fallen trees and the corpses of earlier hikers littered the path. (Well, OK, I’m exaggerating about the corpses.) The rain settled in happily, and our spirits were low. Suddenly, we noticed what seemed to be a large open field, off to the right. “It’s the lake,” we shouted gleefully.

Eventually the trail wound down to the surface of the lake, which was mostly frozen over. “Go on across,” I urged Faramir, trying to radiate integrity and goodwill.

Quite a bit smarter than you would expect a Ranger of Ithilien to be, my son declined the opportunity. “No, I would not dream of showing you such disrespect by taking the lead. Yours is the place of honor and of command, Oh My Father.” We tussled a bit on the edge of the lake, trying to throw one another in, before a fragile truce was established.

A dark and foreboding lake in Mordor, where the shadows lie.

We sat for a moment at the shore of the lake, drinking in the stark beauty of the scene, still gripped tightly in the claws of winter, despite the warm winds of Spring.

“Ready to go?” I asked.

“Yep. We came to see a lake, and of all the lakes I’ve seen, that’s one of ‘em.” Faramir rose and stomped his boots in the snow.

Some men seek to extract every possible benefit from the Journey of Life, savoring each moment and appreciating the beauty that surrounds them. Of such cloth, my son and I are not made. Ours is a simple existence of tasks and objectives, which we neatly check off so that we can move on to the next one. We climbed this mountain to see a lake, and we saw it. Next objective: get back to the car so we can enjoy our root beer.

Our Checklist

• Get through all five sessions of Passport 2 Purity.
• Climb a mountain and see a lake.
• Eat as many of our snacks as possible before heading home.
• Build some good memories and strengthen our relationship as father and son, and … as friends.

Check, check, check … and check, I think.

On the way home, we passed a group of hopeful hikers, bravely trudging up the hill. “Not much more than another mile,” we assured them heartily, radiating integrity and goodwill.

Tim