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Cry Me a River
My wife and I have five kids. We started with three boys and then, once we'd officially learned the basics, went on to have twin girls. I thought I knew how to parent, but going from males to females was like going from basic math to trigonometry.
I …Read more.
Cat Craze
I have a confession to make. I am afraid of cats.
I'm not afraid that they'll attack me or sneak up in the middle of the night and suffocate me (as they have been known to do to babies for centuries — look it up on the Internet).
I'm afraid …Read more.
Money to Burn
Yesterday, over my morning coffee, I read in my paper that parents in New York City are all atwitter because tuitions at most private schools are just about to creep up past the $40,000 mark. I stared at the story for a full minute before it hit me: …Read more.
Tweenage Dream
Like almost every other American household this year, our home ended up after the holidays with a lot of new electronic items. I got an iPad. It was one of those gifts you don't know you want until you have it. Suddenly, I could check my email and …Read more.
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Odor in the HouseFor years, we have dealt with all kinds of pestilence around our house. We've had mice, thousand leggers, bats, earwigs and spiders (so many spiders, in fact, that I have developed the habit of holding my arms out as I pass through doorways. Spiderwebs, it turns out, taste terrible). I've always been somewhat embarrassed by this, as I've always thought that it said something about us as a family: We were infected because we were inferior. This past spring, though, a whole new set of guests checked in to Chez McKay — strange brown insects with backs shaped like shields. They didn't do much at all, just slowly crawling across the wall until we got around to sucking them up with the vacuum cleaner. I almost felt sorry for them, as they seemed to be waiting around for the vacuum the way a person might wait for the bus. I nicknamed them "Suicide Bugs." I tried everything I could to identify these new pests. I Googled them every which way, searching for "bugs," "bugs that look like shields," and even "bugs that are pretty easy to vacuum." I searched for images of bugs that I'd heard of but never see: cicadas, leaf bugs, cinch bugs and even Japanese brown beetles. Nothing came close. By the time I was finished, I could talk about bugs with great authority and precision, and also learned the hard way that telling people all about bugs was one of the fastest ways on Earth to be left alone at a party. In desperation, I put one of these bugs into a plastic bag and carried it around in my pocket asking just about everybody and anybody I knew if it seemed at all identifiable. (Turns out there's an even faster way to be left alone at a party.) Finally, someone looked at my disgusting pocket pal, winced, and said, "Are you really, truly carrying around a stink bug in your pocket?" "A ... what?" I asked. "A stink bug," they said. "They call them that because if you crush them, they give off a foul odor.
Instantly, I knew that 1) I had found the answer that I'd been looking for, 2) I didn't like it one bit, and 3) I owed my 14-year-old son an apology for all those times I yelled at him to leave the room if he was going to do something like that in our house. We were used to the shame of living in a house full of bugs, but stink bugs were a whole new, amazingly low, level of disgrace. It was almost as if we'd been told our house had bed bugs or our kids were infected with head lice. What sort of people lived in a house crawling with stink bugs? (I know. I know. People like us.) When I told my wife that we had stink bugs, she gagged. We still didn't know exactly what they were, but anything called a stink bug, when it's in your house, might make you gag. The next day, my wife called the exterminator, explaining that we had an emergency call. We were experiencing an infestation of bugs. She held the phone close to her mouth and whispered, in hush tones, that they were stink bugs. The exterminator laughed at my wife, something I've learned from hard experience is not a good thing to do when my wife is stressed out about something. "Hey!" my wife barked into the phone. "This is not funny!" "No!" the exterminator said, "It's just that you and just about everybody else around here has stink bugs. They're what we call outside bugs, and they just come into your house to get warm when the weather turns. There's absolutely nothing you can do about them. They don't bite, they don't get in your food, and they don't chew holes in your clothes. Just wait for them to die." Since then, life with stink bugs has been a piece of cake. We keep the vacuum cleaner handy, and every time we spy one, we quietly suck it up. We know that it's only a matter of time before these bugs, for whom life already stinks, will be goners. For my fourteen year old son, who never cared whether we had bugs in the first place, it's actually been a blessing in disguise. Every once in a while, when I sniff the air and grimace, I'll look at him accusingly and call him a pig. He'll just shrug his shoulders, smile, and say, "Sorry, Dad. I must have stepped on one of those bugs of yours!" To find out more about Peter McKay, please visit www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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