Lake Tahoe and Diners

I like my camouflage shorts. A lot. I don’t have to do anything except put them on. No planning, just a belt and some sort of shirt. Underwear is optional. It makes dressing a lot easier. I’ve had them for nearly 15 years and they are still holding up. A little threadbare, but still together. They have accompanied me to Mexico, California, Tijuana, Florida, down the Panhandle of Texas, to Wyoming, into various kitchens, through coal mining bath houses and into and out of various relationships. My wife occasionally raises her eyebrows over my wardrobe, which doesn’t consist of much, but she largely leaves me alone. I despise shoes almost as much as I love my shorts, but again, she leaves me be when it comes to dressing myself.

My siblings mostly share my disdain for footwear, content with bare feet or Chaco sandals, which we have somehow all unanimously agreed will work with most any outfit for any occasion that doesn’t involve a tuxedo. My Dad said just the other day that putting shoes on a Matney child is like trying to feed a walrus to a terrier. I’m not sure, exactly, what that means, but it’s pretty funny to write.

It was an impossibly blue day, that day, when I kicked off my Chaco’s in preparation for an ascent on an a previously unclimbed assault on a beautiful granite face just north of Lake Tahoe, on the California side. The kind of day when you really don’t see how anything could go wrong. The kind of day that you can only get in California, where the weather forecasters get it right most of the time. I was wearing the same pair of shorts that I have on right now when we, meaning an expert climber named Cheryl, and I started the route.

She had spent days on end flat on her back studying all the possible lines, and, for whatever reason, chose me to help her on the first ascent. I am anything but an excellent climber – strong, maybe, fearless, ok, but I am not the person that I would choose to help with a new climb. I think she was leaning on my underground experience in coal mining a bit too much. My rope skills are excellent, but why she swapped out with me on leads is beyond me. Normally I climb up to the better climber, hook up to belay and allow them to climb on ahead. That day, she was allowing me to climb all I wanted.

I crouched under the ledge with my thighs wedged against the rock and shook the tremors out of my hands. There was one more hold visible and I shook out the rope. I could hear Cheryl calling to me, but barely. I knew I was hitting the end of the belay line and hadn’t set protection in about one hundred feet. I felt the line play out a little and gambled that it was enough to stick the next hold, a great crack that would have been perfect to set up another belay station. With Lake Tahoe gleaming like a Hope Diamond on my left, I leap for that next hold.  I stuck it. Perfectly. With legs dangling and my right hand in my chalk bag, I felt as if I had won the Preakness. I drew up the rope, placed it in my teeth, and starting removing static gear from my harness.

The next sensation was of wind rushing by my face. I barely had time to register that I was falling, but I was. At 32 ft/s squared, there isn’t much time to react. Yet, time seems to slow when you are that far up. I yelled at Cheryl, but she was already roping off like a western cowboy on a steer. She weighed maybe 110 pounds, me, 200 pounds. Even in the camo shorts. I pushed off the face of the granite, registering for just one split second that there was a vug of granodiorite and most likely pyrite deposits as I twisted about in an attempt to miss Cheryl.

If I’d hit her, we’d both be dead now. I would have sheared her and all her protection off the wall and that would have been the end of both of us. At 50 feet or 1,000 feet, you aren’t walking away from a fall into the trees, tangled in ropes and gear and each other. I don’t care what the movies portray; a fall from that distance is fatal.

So, I propelled my way off the face, desperate to not take her off the face with me. There was no time for movie lines, knives sawing as we looked into each other’s eyes, knowing what decision the director had made. It was just me falling and her roping in to her barely there belay point.

We ate at an unknown diner just outside of Reno, NV that night. It was the best steak and hash browns I have ever tasted. It even came with a side of cole slaw and baked beans. Besides an encounter with the cops in Pensacola, FL, that was our last adventure together. I don’t know where she is now, but I’ll bet she is still pushing her limits. Just with someone a bit more capable than me.  

Baby Poems

Our baby is spoiled you see.

Not from consumer goods for free.

But for the life that he gets to live.

Devoid of day care, nannies and preschool,

He gets to spend his days with love,

Sharing his days with his Mom and his Dad, as they send adoration from above.

As he lies on his back,

On his activity mat,

Fighting with his stuffed worm,

Which we have named Wombat.

After our neighbors dog, you see,

Which isn’t afraid to run up a tree.

Nor is he (Wombat) afraid of his Momma’s new twins,

Which will bless their world with giggles and grins.

I think they’ll all play together, as they get older,

And their activities get bolder and bolder.

Sliding down mountains, getting muddy and bruised,

Only to limp home to some yummy venison stew!

As a Dad I will worry that he will get hurt,

Then I’ll get angry when he hurls an insult.

But as I instruct in the way he must behave,

I’ll be proud of this boy that we just gave,

To our God, who hopefully sees,

That we truly care about the life our son brings.

So with this little poem I write,

I hope that for all his days,

Our son will see light.

Porn and the Food Network

There are a few subjects that are difficult to write about, but impossible to ignore. Within mainstream America, we are blessed to be able to, at best, be oblivious to things that bother us, and at our worst, immerse ourselves in those things to the point of obsession. Genocide, war, rape, violence, racism, preventable disease, infant mortality, starvation, veganism – we can all choose to be oblivious to these problems with humanity (ok, the veganism thing was a joke, so calm down) or we can become so engrossed and ingrained with them that we see evil in the face of every stranger. I think that may be the greatest danger in organized religion is the tendency to group ourselves in the fear of the possibility of the perception of evil.

Today, this morning, I don’t want to write about any of that. What I do want to write about is porn. According to the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, teen pregnancy (at least among white people) is on a very steep decline, teen sexual activity is following the trend and the porn industry is suffering the worst financial straits in nearly a decade. The prediction that the internet would move pornography into mainstream America never materialized. In fact, the increase in pornography on the internet resulted in the unthinkable – sex has become gross.

When I was a kid, a naked picture of someone of the opposite sex was something very rare, and more often than not, very hard to come by. The swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated literally flew off the shelves, or didn’t, based on whether or not you were helping your Mom with grocery shopping. The fact that you were in the grocery store with your Mom in February was more than likely due to the existence of a seashell clad supermodel beside an issue of Redbook than it was out of a real desire to help Mom with groceries.

I became legend in 1987 within a very small circle of friends when I marched into a service station that sold Hustler magazines behind black pieces of plastic behind the counter and purchased said magazine. Much to my dismay, the clerk manning the station that day was also a Sunday School assistant at a church that my Dad occasionally volunteered “End of Times” talks to those that were interested in such things. Most likely due to derelict teenagers buying Hustler magazines, these sessions were very popular and I was very well versed in the prophesies that foretold blood running as high as the hair on a prostitute, or something like that.

All I was really interested in that day was the prostitute, and I was astonished to see that she did have hair, down there. Maybe the Bible was on to something. The poor Sunday School assistant was flaming red as she sold me the forbidden document, and my friends applauded as I left the store. Luckily for me, she was too embarrassed to say anything to anyone and resigned from her post soon after.

My victory soon became a dilemma, as I had no idea what to do with the magazine after I had bought it, after the obvious, of course. I tried to burn it, but as I was to learn many years later in Microscopic Crystal Mineralogy, the pages of such magazines are coated in Kaolinite, a relative of the mineral known as Muscovite, which gives them their glossy finish. It is also what the Romans used in their armor for fire prevention against the Scottish warriors, a small fact you’d think would be passed on within a family with a strong Scottish heritage.

After nearly blowing myself up and catching the kitchen on fire, I realized that I could sell, or flip, the magazines for nearly double what I actually paid for them. Other teenagers were not quite brave enough to risk being recognized by someone they went to church with to march into a convenience market and buy porn. How lucky for me. I found a ready outlet for illegally purchased magazines and learned a valuable lesson in defending myself from fire attack from the Romans.

Many years later, all this added to my ability to recognize two very well known porn actresses in their non-native element at a wine tasting in Los Angeles. I found them to be quite nice, very personable, and nothing like I imagined two people who had such intimate knowledge of one another to be like. They were very polite to me and very articulate, without the least sign of embarrassment over the fact that I had very likely seen them very naked. I, on the other hand, was very embarrassed and made quite the stammering fool of myself, as, really, what do you say in that situation? I think we talked about the tannins and how that 1987 was a very good year for grapes.

A situation, that, thanks to the internet, will likely never happen to my son. The very thing that we feared would cause sexual congress to become as prolific as breathing had the opposite effect. The net inundation of pornography in our society has demeaned the act to the point that it has actually become frightening once again. Guys think they are supposed to have a twelve-inch object of congress that behaves upon command and girls are afraid they will. Sexually transmitted diseases in most countries are on the decline and teenage pregnancies are plummeting in most states in the U.S.

In what I think is the greatest of ironies, the Food Network has supplanted Vivid Entertainment as the most popular base for the male demographic that is most coveted by media, ages sixteen to thirty-five. Following the trend, one of the very actresses that I met in L.A., who used to have the stage name Taylor Rain, has started and hosts a very popular cooking show in the United Kingdom. Her favorite recipe? Pineapple Upside Down Cake.

Go figure.

A Bit of Whimsy – on Teaching

I received the question the other day, a bit out of the blue, a question quite telling, demanding and true. What have you been doing, the question asked, since we kicked your ass out of class? You went to Italy, for two weeks you see, although most of us saw it going on three. But you grew, we assume, in travel and such, mentally while preparing to repay us in stories to munch. Italy was acceptable, to miss all those classes, as we understood you were paying your dues, in your travel across Europe, to make yourself better than you.
But what were you doing, when you got sick, and all those classes piled up and sticked? Into the realm of teachers who didn’t care, and into the craw of the administrative staff who bared – their teeth in anger that one might dare pass, into the valley of those that might not be better than you.
You are sick, you say, with your doctor in tow, needing treatment for wounds we can’t sew? You must be absent, for things not said, as we smell the ground for a lies early tread.
A lie we can’t find, so there must one be, as we continue to account for our life’s work, you see. We can barely believe we matter so little, so we must continue the matter so bitter. Legalities of confidentiality are damned in the foresight, as we search out someone to crucify in the limelight. Our glittering hair and teeth all so shiny, we only render what won’t take flight.
We are used to those spineless and weak, with lots of cash with which to sharpen our teeth. We laugh and make fun of those with an accent, as we spin our chairs and spill, our big gulp cherry sodas that we gulp to fill, the loneliness and irony that so bares our souls, as we bounce on our balls and answer our phones.
Our greatest fear is one who makes us weak; force us to be accountable for what we speak. We know not the rules, not how to help out; our only ability is to shout out. This is your school system, in its deep truth, grinding and hoping you won’t seek out the spooks – of humans, who no longer are, only now existing by the most base of gods.
The god of the understaffed, the perilous and weak, those who cannot find the teeth; to rid the system of those underfed, who feed off the bellies of those students underfed, ignored and without a regular bed.
Those are who we as teachers must fight, and against whom we must, we MUST unite. For they will kill a system just faltering, and for whom hope is just morphing – into something beautiful and bright, which will give EVERY student a chance to take flight. Out of the black and into the light, these students who deserve every such opportunity, to fight.

A Baby’s Take on Abby’s Bar and Grill, Blacksburg, VA

I wasn’t feeling particularly motivated today to do much of anything besides apply for teaching positions and work on essays. The rain and cold had me a bit down in the dumps and Laura was feeling much the same. She has somehow managed to catch up on her work and the desolate weather has her trapped in front of the T.V. So, today, I’ve turned my restaurant review over to my four month old son, Nolan. I must say he’s pretty good at it.

“My mom and dad apparently didn’t want to do anything today but sit in front of their computers, Dad surrounded by a mess of papers, old books and a toy helicopter. Mommy was bored since I slept most of the night and didn’t give her anything to do. I tried yelling for her around four a.m. since I knew she missed me but Dad came instead. Bother. I pretended to go back to sleep pretty quick just in case he nodded off in the rocking chair and dumped me out in the floor. He didn’t dump me out in the floor; instead he sang silly songs to me while I sucked my thumb and kept my eyes shut. My little ruse must have worked, because the next thing that I knew it was morning!

I love mornings, even when it’s raining. This morning I was asleep in all my stuffed animals when Mommy woke me up to ask what we should do. ‘Your Dad has been writing all morning and we need to take him out to eat,’ she said. I knew we were going to the Underground again, since we all love that place, but I wanted to try something different. So, to get her attention, I spit up. This worked and I got a bath, which I love and I got to whisper ‘Abby’s’ in Dad’s ear.

IMG_9823

So, with the rain pouring down, we made the short drive to Abby’s Bar and Grill in Blacksburg. I was a bit cross as I couldn’t take a whole nap in the little time I had in my car seat. It’s tough getting your parents to do what you want, especially when you’re only four months old! It’s a good thing Mom was driving – in the rain and fog Dad drives too fast, in my opinion. I try to tell him so, but I can only yell so loud from the back of his old truck. Mom’s car is much more comfortable.

Abby’s proves to be what I like, a little dark, with lots of lights, license plates and stuff hanging around for me to look at. The waitress tells me I’m cute, which I also like, but then says I’m like being handed a million dollars, or a bomb. I don’t really understand.

IMG_9848

There are obvious regulars, who appreciate my attempts to get my entire hand in my mouth, a talent I am quite proud of and show off whenever I can. It’s a bit of a Dive Bar, so Dad orders a Cheeseburger. He always says the mark of a good bar is their burger and by the way he scarfs it down I’d say it’s pretty good. Mom loves steak sandwiches, and while she can’t finish all hers I can tell she likes it too. The regulars order the special, which is a big giant plate of turkey, potatoes, green beans and gravy with a roll. Man, that looks good. I can tell Dad wishes he had gotten that instead.

IMG_9860IMG_9863

The waitress is quick to hand me compliments and I try to show everyone how happy I am by spitting up all over myself. Mom is worried, but not me. I can tell by how much she ate I’ll have plenty to eat myself in an hour or so! All said and done, I’d say this place is pretty good and I can tell that on a good night, or a day when it isn’t pouring rain, it would be rocking out with customers. We’ll be back!”

The Best Canoe Ever

Once upon a time, back in the olden days when dinosaurs such as the AMC Gremlin, the Chevette, the LUV truck, the original Subaru Brat and other such worthless vehicles populated the earth for a short time, I was married. Shocker, I know. I have since been divorced and remarried, and that original marriage has faded into a distant memory that only once in a great while comes to bear on something that is happening in my life, which, is to say, not very often. My wife often says that it’s as if I was never married before her, as I obviously didn’t learn anything during that ill-fated short marriage, which may be why it was so short and so ill-fated. In actuality, there could not have been two people less suited for one another than she and I. As a matter of fact, I actually even liked her as a person, just not as my wife.

We were married in a land populated by coal mines, meth labs, moonshine stills, food stamps, mullets and Z-28 Camaros, if you could afford one. If you could, that was the epitome of cool, particularly if you had the Camaro and the mullet. Our problem? We married too early. I was a scant twenty years of age, with her just behind me on the calendar. Another problem? I have since learned in the many years since that failed attempt at a relationship that one can indeed be southern, and one can also be a redneck. They often coincide, but they do not necessarily coexist. This poor girl was redneck to the bone, but considered herself to be a gentle southerner. There is nothing scarier than a redneck girl who thinks she is a gentle southerner. There is also nothing more vindictive, punishing, unforgetting or just plain mean than a redneck girl with an agenda.

I’m reminded of all of this as I begrudgingly drag my canoe around the yard in a search for where to store the thing. I have an ancient, by canoe standards, Mad River Explorer that is roughly sixteen feet long. At least, that’s how long it originally was. It has since been folded around rocks, dropped off the roof of cars, chased down the New River during flood stage and suffers from sun fading and gunnel rot. It once proudly wore the Mad River flagship ash gunnels with pride – now it just kind of wears them. It’s a shame, I think, that a boat that I was once so proud of, through a sequence of nearly impossibly steep terrain and home remodeling has become such a nuisance. The problem was that every time I wanted to build a canoe rack a bit more permanent, it was either in the viewshed of Laura’s new office or where we were planning to build something more permanent, such as a sunroom, garage or garden. (So far, the only thing coming to fruition is the garden.)

This is a sad thing to happen to what is essentially a great friend of mine. It was a tandem purchase, bought in the spring of 1995, I think, just when my first marriage was truly falling apart. We felt, like the couple who thinks a child can save their relationship, that a canoe was just the thing. Something we could do together, a hobby we could both enjoy. I envisioned running rapids as I did in the metal atrocity that we called a canoe when I was a kid, she, picnics by the lake. I outfitted it with whitewater gear and relentlessly studied maps of the Gauley River, the Lower New and watched video on running big rapids in South America. She imagined children frolicking between the gunnels with a dog while she sat backwards in the front and I paddled them heroically across a calm lake to a lake to a campsite prepared by others.

Needless to say, I did go on to have my adventures. The canoe followed me to the Everglades, where I slept on raised wooden platforms and shoved cottonmouths back into the water. It channeled me back and forth across to a campsite on St. George’s Island, made the trip to Coya Cosa, helped me buy a Cheeseburger in Paradise (not the original) on a dank Georgia night. I lost her one night on the New and raced madly to intercept her at the Pearisburg Bridge. We paddled on Lake Tahoe, made multiple trips cross country and very carefully ran “Pure Screaming Hell” on the Gauley, still one of my life’s crowning achievements. She took me camping, helped me meet someone new and that, my friends, ultimately led to my divorce.

I didn’t get the order of new girlfriend/ex-wife right. I separated from my wife, but we hadn’t divorced when I met someone who turned out (funny isn’t it) to be a heinous bitch on wheels who very nearly ruined my life. I barely escaped the new someone years later, much wiser, thinner and much more miserable than I had ever been. The canoe followed me – stored in breezeways, in parking garages, under pine trees and on top of my ever-present old Suburban truck as they both painfully rotted in Northern Virginia.

My wife did find out about my new, thinner, younger more glamorous version of her. Although we were indeed separated, at least in spirit, the state of Virginia does not feel kindly about cheating men. Especially when there are pictures and the judge is a blood relative of the wife. Under the advice of a truly worthless lawyer and a truly savvy friend, I abandoned all our bank accounts, pocketed what cash I had, quit my job, concentrated on graduate school and moved into a camping trailer in a summer camp. It was not summer.

So that is how, after a few months of phone tag, I ended up being served my hearing papers by a nice young man pretending to deliver supplies to the camp. I arrived at the courtroom to realize that we were proceeding with the divorce (FINALLY) and dividing our assets (HYSTERICAL). I had no assets. The judge droned on and on, making sure she got every broken down couch, dishwasher, single-wide house trailer and hand knitted quilt that we had ever owned or seen. I couldn’t have cared less. I had a tent, climbing gear, an old truck that nobody else could start and my canoe. At that point, I didn’t want anything else.

Until the matter of an $80,000 student loan came to light. You see, due to a guilty conscious and full knowledge that I would indeed leave her (“her” being my soon to be ex-wife) someday soon, I had insisted that she attend Virginia Tech while I was in graduate school and get her degree. She didn’t want to, that interfered with having babies. I begged, cajoled and pleaded until she finally applied and was accepted to the land of the Hokies. Where she discovered that if you filled out a form, checked the “married” box, you would get a check for all the funds available for you to go to college after your tuition was covered. Only a fool wouldn’t realize that you had to pay that back, with interest. Only a bigger fool wouldn’t have checked into how his soon to be ex-wife was paying her tuition bills.

So the judge, out of the goodness of his heart and after listening to a pretty blond relative explain that she didn’t realize you had to give the money back, saddled me with the bill. I nearly fainted that day, there in the courtroom, over the realization that there was no escape from that bill, no getting away from the reminder that I once made a terrible mistake and married the wrong person. With tear soaked; glaring eyes, she pronounced that she also wanted the canoe.

At this point her dad, who had remained silent, leapt to his feet, slapped his hand on the table and said, “For God’s sake – let him have the canoe!”

As I drag the canoe around searching for a place to get it out of the weather, batting gnats out of my eyes, I recall why I still have this unwieldy, sadly unused piece of plastic and wood. My wonderful wife waves at me from the porch and my little boy gurgles and kicks happily in her arms. This is the best $80,000 canoe ever built.

The Danger in Chickens

I am currently between jobs. Or, as I prefer to put it, between contracts. This is mostly true, as I hope to obtain a teaching contract by this coming Fall which will give me what is considered to be a paying job and/or gainful employment by most of the masses within America. For isn’t that what we are truly measured by? “What do you do?” is a question that I really no longer have a straight answer for. The reality is that I take care of my four month old son while my wife, who has been named “Best Wedding Photographer” in Virginia two years in a row, works her magic with her camera and computer equipment, making beautiful brides more beautiful, and is there such a thing as an ugly bride? I think not, so her job is mostly enjoyable and very rewarding.

So is mine. I feel productive when I’m writing something such as this while little brown eyes grins and coos at me from his favorite perch in my office, which must also include his brown stuffed bunny, roughly the same size as him, his pacifier equipped monkey, which I feel mostly sorry for as he (the stuffed monkey) has a pacifier permanently jammed down his throat, a special little blue blanket constructed of the same material as his Mommy’s robe and assorted colorful plastic toys that also float. (My mind skitters to the line “WE ALL FLOAT” for just a moment and I then toss it aside, for the sun is shining and his bouncy chair also plays music and vibrates. I sometimes wish I had one.)

So we’ve established my job is pretty cool. Long hours are involved, and Nolan gets up really early, but he is still rather attached to his mother for early feedings so I can generally sleep in until seven or so before conjuring up some sort of breakfast. I then take a couple of hours to pretend to hunt for the elusive ginseng while Laura does magic in her office. The reality of the situation is I have no earthly idea what ginseng looks like and wouldn’t if it were chewing on me in the forest. My grandfather was famous for his ability to locate this elusive root, but as I ponder on the past I realize he never seemed to have any and was usually drunk. I wonder at the coincidence.  I’ve tried to teach my dog Axl to help look for it, but he has proven to be most unfit for finding this magical plant. He is wonderful at finding other people’s gardens and trampling about in them while I apologize profusely to angry neighbors. I wonder why he hasn’t been shot. He is also very gifted at locating and eating roadkill. I’ve learned to give him plenty of time to vomit everything up before returning home as to not spoil the rest of the day.

I’m also given tasks to accomplish by my wife. This would be relatively easy were I trained in one specific field or trade. Instead, I’ve been a geologist, an engineer, a writer, a coal miner, a teacher, a cook and a very poor excuse for a carpenter. So while I am quite convinced I can accomplish most any task, my training works against me.

For example, my wife asked for a chicken coop. I assumed chickens were included.  This requires research, extensive research, for there are my childhood preferences, which may or may not be suited to this microclimate, heritage breeds which are preferable to all other breeds, as they are just cooler because Daniel Boone may have eaten one of their great-great-great-great grandfathers or something. Then there are “ornamental” birds which I assume don’t do very much until Christmas, so they are out.

Then there is the matter of the coop, or chicken house. The engineer in me wants it to be able to withstand a small nuclear strike and have a moat. Complete with genetically modified crocodiles (which as an activist, I am totally against) who have a taste for coyote. The geologist in me wants it built with matching, continuous, uniform sedimentary rock types that all strike in the same direction. (In this case, strike means direction, not a work stoppage. The coal miner in me would never allow such a thing) As an environmentally conscious and dedicated human being, I need to make sure all waste is disposed of correctly and redirected back to the coop as a potential emergency backup energy system while abiding by all applicable permits from the Army Corp of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Depeartment of Homeland Security and whatever other Acts Obama has deemed necessary. As a teacher, it needs to be constructed to maximize teacher/student/parent interaction while enhancing SOL’s. As a writer, the coop needs to spin slowly about its three apparent axis’ while simultaneously opening hidden doors to facilitate murders and escapes for the wily chickens so that I may observe and write a  NY Times best seller on the previously unknown escapades of chickens.

I’m so excited I overheat the breast milk stowed away in the fridge for Nolan. He gives me a pitying look while my loving wife berates me for not setting the timer. It’s not my fault I’ve just discovered that there are giant breeds of chickens! Unfortunately, I underestimate both the food costs and their ability to forage for the giant chickens and they don’t survive while I am designing the foundations for the moat. The slope stability calculations are a bitch, too, so I order some ornamental chickens to pass the time and help stimulate my thinking.

I now have ornamental, heritage breed, (new) giants and banty roosters all inhabiting our five acres. My neighbor, a tall man dressed in worn Carhartt pants with lots of tools in them burst into laughter when he gave me the crate with the roosters. I thought he was very generous and thanked him profusely while vowing to find Carhartt pants on line. He must have been a nice fellow, for he was still laughing as he walked away.

My new Carhartt pants made me feel quite the farmer the next morning, hung as they were on my favorite chair. I stood them in the corner while making breakfast, admiring their apparent toughness. My wife rolled her eyes. She never takes me seriously.

After I hammered the pants for an hour or so, I was able to put them on the dog. He was then no longer able to move but I assured him they would break in soon, at which point I would do the honor of wearing them while providing him with all the glory of being the first on the farm to don Carhartt clothing. He did not seem to appreciate what I was doing for him.

I entered the yard to find that the ornamental chickens has eaten the rest of the chickens, all the feed, dug a moat and commandeered a very strategic command central. There was one rooster left, which we located at the very top of the house. He refused to come down. I immediately began a 3-D plan set for a tunneling device to access the far side of the moat. As I excitedly rose to this new challenge, I noticed that the dog was waving his Carhartt pants in surrender while marching very slowly towards the moat. Traitor.