When Lazy Meets Opportunity

Five years ago we moved into a house with an aging, only partially operational, home intercom system. There are speakers in nearly every room but it doesn't operate as an intercom anymore. However, it's built-in FM radio does a great impersonation of a mumbling bumble bee sealed in a tin can... only amplified. In every room simultaneously.

If there is one thing I've learned from living in the U.S. (the land of opportunity) it is to recognize opportunity when it presents itself. I have also learned that soda is delicious, super-sizing is super-duper, and please pass the remote. So in a perfect storm of unexpected opportunity and downright lazy I hatched a brilliant plan to wake the children and summon them to breakfast by blasting melodic tin can bumble bees in their rooms. It worked, and a morning routine was born.

It didn't stop there.

I wasted no time wiring the family's network of 4 computers for Instant Messaging. Sure, I can send playful messages to the house from my office... and, yes, the Mrs. can easily divert me to pick up milk on the way home, but the best application of this lazy-enabling resource is within the home itself. From the kitchen, I can send an Instant Message to our computer enslaved basement dwellers alerting them to the hot and ready status of their current meal service.

It gets better.

Cristy and I each acquired iPhones late last year and Molly recently saved up to purchase an iPod Touch, adding three mobile devices to the arsenal of Internet enabled Instant Messengers in our home. Are you losing count yet? I am. And I'm the help desk.

Last night I was sitting on the couch having a pleasant conversation with my wife when it dawned on us both that it was the kids' shower night, a surprisingly protracted evening activity which draws heavily on round-up skills we picked up at the Cat Ranch.

Inspiration struck, as it too rarely does, and I reached into my pocket for my iPhone. I opened a Group Chat (which allows broadcast to multiple contacts) and sent a single message to all of my online children at once... "SHOWER TIME!" it said. And then we waited.

The dungeon emptied with the sound of begrudged feet moping up the stairs. The sand bag steps continued on up another flight to the bedrooms and eventually the water turned on. I looked at Cristy with wide eyes and she gazed back in amazement. "Eureka!", I said.

Move over electric pepper grinder! Dear Lay-z-Boy Recliner With the Built in Beer Fridge, your day in the shade is over! I had in my very hand the next great leap forward in enabling technology for the lazy man!! A remote control for my children.

Take that, Richard Simons!

Dear Me

Today, I sent a message to my future self... my Day-After-Thanksgiving 2010 future self, to be precise.

I took down Christmas decorations outside this afternoon; collapsed twinkling trees, pulled electrical cord from beneath frozen snow, wound up endless strings of lights, and stuffed tangled lengths of electrical Christmas Joy into boxes with labels like "Thousand Points of Light".  In doing so, I packed a time capsule to be opened in eleven months and it contains a clear message for the future me.  It says... "It's cold out here and I don't have time for this tangled crap! YOU deal with it!"

On November 26th of this year the future me will unseal the snarled capsule and pull out a memory, not of Holiday Cheer but of Christmas Frustration Past.  I hope the future me is patient and forgiving, I hope he will remember the cold day, the frozen snow, and the countless other things I had to do that day.

But if history is any guide, he'll be feeling lazy and still shaking off Turkey sedation.  He'll curse my name and demand to know why I didn't do my part to make his job easier.  And come January 1st, 2011, in a misguided attempt at vigilante justice, he'll stuff a morass of wiry knots into another time capsule that says, "Oh yeah?!  Just try to untangle THIS!"

Conflict Resolution

I have three kids, all very close in age, that are beginning their entry into the "tween" years. Based on my observations so far, this is the stage in development when the Conflicto Gland begins to saturate a young body with Scream-At-Your-Brother hormone.

It's not new, conflict has followed us from wood blocks to cell phones, but the power has recently been cranked up on the conflicto-meter to the point of shrill, ear splitting feedback. I try to impart the techniques of conflict resolution on my kids, sometimes they listen sometimes they.... what am I saying? They never listen!

Our home has also been filled with animals of diverse type, each forced into compulsory and sometimes stressed relationships with their humans and each other. No one asked the mature cat with established turf if she'd like to share her space with a new kitten. The bird did not knowingly sign up to live life in a confined space with predators.

Our home is a complex web of relationships between 13 creatures of various species, many of whom are at each other's throats.  With a little understanding, and some coaching... we manage.  For instance, take this recently witnessed exchange:

BIRD - "When you look at me like that it makes me feel as if you want to eat me."
CAT - "What I hear you saying is... you taste like chicken."