• Wired varmin

    Did you know there are rodents that will eat the wiring in your car? Eat may not be the right word. Chew may be closer to the truth. In either case, I’m a victim of such a creature. And I’m not alone. Dozens of folks at my office have suffered the same fate – some more than once.

    I got off lucky though. I only spent a little over $200 fixing my car. I wasn’t even having any symptoms – other than the “check engine” light on my dashboard. I brought it in to be checked and my mechanic laughed before he told me what was wrong. How often is that a good sign?

    “Well Mr Kauffman, it looks like you had yourself a critter problem. The critter got up in your engine and chewed on some of your wiring, so we fixed the wiring and de-crittered it. Odd thing though – we found a mess of peanut shells scattered around.”

    And that’s how I knew. It was an office critter.

    You see my office is set back from the highway, with a lot of trees and grass. It’s really quite pleasant – and unusual for Pinellas County. We have lots of squirrels and raccoons – and lots of people who like to feed them… you guessed it: peanuts. When I say we have squirrels and raccoons, I don’t mean a couple here and there. It’s more like dust-bowl jack-rabbits, or an Old Testament plague. They’re freaking everywhere, and we’re blaming the peanut people.

    It may not be entirely their fault. Critters like warm places in the winter, even in Florida. Parked cars tend to be warm places to hide out. If this was only happening once or twice a year (chewed wiring incidents) I think I could hold my tongue. But it’s not. It’s a dozen or more cars every year. The air conditioning kept going out in our office. They found a nest of peanuts there too. (They didn’t say anything about fried critters – do they have some innate sense of electrical current?)

    If witness a feeding again I might start picking up peanuts and throwing them back. Hard.

  • Leaving church

    I reached a new low two weeks ago. My patience wore through and no amount of sympathy or understanding was going to save me.

    We were sitting in church and Beth’s verbal ticks were firing on all cylinders. They were loud enough that I had trouble hearing the lessons being read, so I tried asking Beth to lower her voice. We think she has some conscious control over the behavior because she seems to be able to moderate her volume in other settings. So when she didn’t quiet down I told her she was going to have to sit outside if she kept it up. We sat in the back so something like this wouldn’t draw too much attention or embarrass her (or myself, perhaps creating a self fulfilling prophesy).

    Well, she didn’t quiet down so I asked her to go out to the narthex until the sermon was over.

    She said no.

    “Come again, oh child of mine?”

    That’s when I just about lost it, but I bit my tongue. When the sermon ended I told her we were leaving. When we got home, Beth sat quietly outside on the front porch, giving myself a time-out more than anyone.

    And that’s when I started to question myself. It happens a lot when I resort to punishing the kids, but in Beth’s case I’m especially anxious about confusing symptoms with disobedience. I don’t want to punish her for being sick. I want to reward good behavior more often than punishing for bad. I want to be a good parent. I want to be bigger than her illness. I don’t want to be that angry parent we’ve all seen somewhere – flying off the handle any time their child strays from the narrow path they’ve laid out for them. I want her path to be wide, with as many forks as possible.

    Today we’re skipping church. I just don’t have the energy.

    Catholics don’t have a monopoly on guilt. I should know.

  • Greetings from planet Earth

    Sleep deprived, tired from a long day at work, I decide to record a message.

    No script. No preparation. Purely off the cuff.