You may recall that I won a television in a raffle.

We drove to Kansas City and back this weekend to pick it up, 9 hours each way.  A long, boring, lengthy, dull, time-consuming interminable drive, although we had Rice Krispie Treats, so it wasn’t too bad.

We set it up Sunday evening when we got back.

So was it worth the trouble to go pick up a 47-inch hi-def TV?

Yes.  Yes, it was.

Obviously, Jif thinks I’m a terrible parent who spends more time drinking with buddies in a strip club than teaching life lessons to my children.  That is the only conclusion I can see from examining Jif’s advertising and labeling.

Jif’s commercials state, “Choosy Moms choose Jif.”  Where are the Dads?  The original advertising continues, “Dads obviously are not there at all, but if  they were, they would choose some other brand to demonstrate how pathetic and uncaring they are.  Their idea of “choosy” means tipping only the hot waitresses at Hooters.  Dads suck.”  This is a direct quote from the original working script for their commercials.

Then there’s the label.  I just bought a new jar of Jif recently because, well, I’m choosy.  On top it says something like, “New larger size means more ‘Thanks, Mom!’”  If you read the fine print below that, it says, “Thanks for nothing, Dad!  Thanks for spitting on a slice of stale bread, folding it over and calling it a sandwich!  How could you do this to your family?  How?  HOW?!”

I firmly believe that the advertising folks at Jif have father issues.

I had a coworker selling raffle tickets to raise money for her Dad’s church.  To support my friend, I bought a ticket.  I got a call on Sunday that I won the grand prize, a 47-inch LCD TV.  I thought it was a scam at first, to be honest, until they gave the name of my coworker.  So why might this be a Poke?

The TV is in Kansas City.  I am not.  My friend didn’t tell me it was a church in a different state.

Facebook really creeps me out.  I opened an account briefly just to test something out for the lovely wife, and the list of people it suggested to me… Well, it really disturbed me how it knew that I would know those people.  I skipped all the setup steps, didn’t give any personal information besides my name and email, and somehow it knew.  I was genuinely uncomfortable with the whole thing, really.  Doesn’t it bother anyone else?

As if the first time wasn’t bad enough, we are re-doing some of our floor due to the “speed bump”, as some people choose to call it.  Except it isn’t easy to remove and replace interlocking flooring, and we ruined quite a few boards just to get them out.  Hopefully everything will be back in order by the time our visitors arrive in a bit more than a week.

The “Second Suffering” title made me think of my old “how I met my wife” jokes, but I decided against trying to add one.  I hope to prevent the Third Suffering.

Why can’t things go at least 90% right?

For some reason, we keep taking on home improvement tasks, despite the issues we have every single time.  This time, it’s lighting.  We’ve searched for a long time and finally found something we liked in the special order catalog at our friendly neighborhood home improvement warehouse.  I ordered 4 large lights and 4 small ones.  There were a few issues with the larger ones I installed in our master bathroom, but it worked out.  The small ones actually went pretty smoothly, although my arms were getting tired from holding them up while I wired them.  So what happened this time to leave me kicking and screaming toddler-tantrum-style?  2 of the 4 large lights were broken in the box.

I opened one up to discover the fixture was, as they say in France, busted up real good like.  I considered checking the others, but did not, thinking, “Surely, this unfortunate occurrence is a rarity, the possibility of yet another light being broken is approximately 3720 to 1!”  Apparently, a hypnotoad had eliminated all my memories of the previous 12700 or so days at that time, so you can forgive me for being absolutely insane and not checking the other boxes.  Because guess what?  After I’d returned the first box, after I’d reordered the first broken light, after a couple of days had completely gone by, I opened the last box to find another broken light.

The lesson I’ve learned is that when things seem to be going at least relatively smoothly, when you haven’t spent the last few hours in tears because things JUST WON’T WORK, don’t forget to check all the boxes, and wear protective eyewear, because there’s probably a spitting cobra in there or something.

Today, a great tragedy was narrowly averted.  The entire population of this fragile planet walked a dagger’s edge, never realizing just how close we all were to total annihilation.  Doom and despair stalked the land, the glares of those twin scourges being of the sharpest sharpness, cutting through the thoughts and emotions of a hapless populace like something that is extremely sharp, sort of like that dagger mentioned a few moments ago.

Yet in the last moments, when the light had reached its dimmest level, when only a few grains of sand remained clinging to the top of the hourglass, when… eh, you get the point.  Anyway, when all those things were happening to indicate that time was running out, that’s when it happened:  I remembered.

Happy birthday, sis.

Read it and weep, you defenders of ugly.

I wonder if things will someday blow up in my face.  I wonder if that might be literal, too.

I like technology.  I like computers.  I like playing around with my computer.  I like doing things with my computer that could go horribly, horribly wrong and then wondering if that was the best idea.

I wanted to try out the new version of Windows that’s coming out later this year.  That meant I had to partition my hard drive.  For you layfolk, Mother, that means I had to create a separate little section to install the software.  Windows XP doesn’t do that on its own, so I downloaded a free program that can.  The first didn’t work, so I found another.  This one did.  I love all the warnings that come with these programs, telling you outright that things could go horribly, horribly wrong, so you’d better backup your data before you press the red button.  I backed up my photos and videos, but the rest wasn’t high-priority.

After several tense minutes, the computer rebooted, and voila!  I had the purtiest little partition I’d ever seen just a’waitin’ that copy of the Windows 7 release candidate.  I had already burned the Windows software onto a DVD so I could install it.  After many minutes and a couple of reboots, I beheld the purtiest little Windows version I’d ever seen just a’waitin’ for me to tinker.

So far, it’s pretty nice, but I’m still getting used to it, it’s pretty different from XP and I never got Vista.  Best of all, my computer did not blow up.  Once again, cloaked in ignorance and good intentions, I have somehow managed to avoid permanent damage to my precious computer, and was able to keep things from going horribly, horribly wrong.

You may recall that I had an issue with my new floor, that it was so tight that one little spot bulged up a little.

Now that the weather has gotten a whole lot warmer, the problem is much worse as the floorboards have expanded.  We’ve now got this huge spot where the floor arches off the ground, probably an inch at the peak.  It’s ridiculous.  We have to figure out how we’re going to solve this problem.  We tried moving our furniture but then the flow of the room is disrupted and my chi has issues with the new arrangement.  (I call my eye for interior design my chi.)  (I don’t, actually.)