Crumpets Continued: Top 10 Garage Battles

Crumpets Continued: Top 10 Garage Battles

Whilst so many are off on adventures drinking life to the lees, I am at home re-learning that we eat as a family and dinner is dependent on the daily family schedule.

Garage Battle #1: Despite the hierarchy of birth order, upon absence from the garage for four years, said benefit is withdrawn and proffered to the younger sibling, kicking the eldest to the curb. ‘Tis only the natural order.

Garage Battle #2: In addition to the cardinal rule that family that lives together eats together, removing one’s self from the table is only acceptable after one has been properly “excused.”

Garage Battle #3:
Jessica: “May I be excused please?”
Mom: “Yes you may.”
Dad: “So, Jessica, tell us about your day.”

Garage Battle #4: The one, perhaps only, comforting fact to return home and find one’s childhood dog senile, deaf, and nearly blind from old age is that one no longer must administer Valium during thunderstorms.

Garage Battle #5: In avoidance of having to give the four-year-update to all and sundry house phone caller, one begins to take the model of simply not answering the phone. However, this involves a creepy tip-toeing down the stairs (I’m sure latent from some childhood phobia that people on the answering machine can “hear” you creaking around) and awkward neck crane to hear the answering machine to make sure it is not an emergency call.

Garage Battle #6: Making my dad’s lunch bag for work on his nightshift is like leaving out cookies, milk, and carrots for Santa. I fill the lunchbox, the lunchbox re-appears in the morning, most contents are eaten, some are not. Eerily just like Santa.

Garage Battle #7: Apparently, to some high school Soffee-short-wearing types, “going to the gym” means sitting on a leg extension machine reading a magazine for 10 minutes, most decidedly not doing leg extensions. The one hands-free machine is nothing more than a hot commodity resting chair that just happens to have a weight pulley system attached.

Garage Battle #8: Nothing like getting ready to pull out of a parking lot across town 30 minutes from home and suddenly someone is banging on your trunk and filling your driver side window with the endearing face of . . . your little sister. Knoxville is, surprisingly, a small world, where missing your sister and her friends having lunch at the exact same restaurant you did is a narrow escape.

Garage Battle #9: Stamped mail sitting by the countertop on the way out the door is ready to be mailed. Notice it, whether it is yours or not.

Garage Battle #10: Walking to the post office is, on the whole, an uneventful jaunt quite conducive to contemplation, neighborhood garden perusal, and substantial 40-minute exercise there and back. Except for Jacksboro Pike. . .the only “major” road separating my neighborhood from the rest of Fountain City civilization that has a sidewalk. What is so strange about someone walking on the side of the road, I cannot comprehend. But I am tired of the jeerings, revving engines, and speeding cars ruining my sidewalk postal contemplation. Especially ones that notice I’m wearing a red T-shirt and spontaneous blare “Lady in Red.” Yet I remain un-deterred. I am determined to make Jacksboro Pike sidewalk as busy with pedestrians as the Tube juncture of Oxford Circus, London. Such is my quest and community contribution to Knoxville to which I remain dedicated in active community and family membership for the next two years at least.

Missed Item this week: My 2 a.m. fourth meal.

DISCLAIMER: I love my family. We are very close, and I greatly appreciate their accommodation free of charge, my three square meals a day, the stocked pantry and all other amenities thereunto.

The Crumpet Collection: Failed Quizzes, Four Years in Review

Top 10 Failed Quizzes: Four Years in Review

Only in college is it acceptable to make use of studious time to fail a quiz or two for the sake of extra-textual “learning.” For in learning to “fail,” well, there is a memorable lesson in itself.

Failed Quiz #1: When one agrees to being uprooted in the middle of the night for a drive to Wild Bill’s under the pretense of it being a “country bar” only to be thrown into one’s first encounter with hip hop and the rapper scene, that 8 a.m. exam arrives all too soon.

Failed Quiz #2: Attempting to uphold the ethics of underage-non-drinking is not always rewarded when one attempts to shoot Sprite from miniature bathroom cups only to nearly drown on carbonation overload.

Failed Quiz #3: Police speed-watcher officers often lie in wait on the onramps lining I-75 in south Georgia during Spring Break season to nab speeding spring speed breakers. As a driver it helps to be watching for them rather than craned away from the wheel for a photo op from a camera in the backseat. However, if timed appropriately, such a photo can also be evidence of actual speed if the speedometer gets clipped in the photo.

Failed Quiz #4: When sabotaging a car in the middle of the night for a birthday, bring a towel to wipe off the dew to lengthen the lifespan of stewed-upon-for-weeks witticisms such as “Will you light my (birthday) candle?”

Failed Quiz #5: After deliberating among six people, three computers, two Skype connections, and a few speaker phone calls over which country is cheapest and safest to get to for a week, one should, at 3 a.m., always be sure to purchase airline tickets only once. Two confirmation e-mails (and a failed reading quiz) later is a heart-stopping way to greet the light of day.

Failed Quiz #6: Enter a sketch basement bar with a $20 cover for “all you can drink” is a bad, bad mindset for the brain. “Getting one’s money’s worth” keeps paying for itself 16 hours later after horribly bumpy airplane landings and a seven hour drive home.

Failed Quiz #7: Grace Kelley night sounds superb in theory as a way to celebrate momentous achievements, but after everyone has Googled to see exactly what “Grace Kelley” attire means, acquires it, and then goes out for cheap drinks (in Rome), “overdressed” is the word of the evening.

Failed Quiz #8: What the pretty frat boys with pastel pants and bowties don’t tell you about Steeplechase on rainy, tornado-watch days is to drive a vehicle with hardcore 4-wheel drive. Toyota Corollas aren’t exactly “mudding” material, though, for that matter, neither are pearls and white dresses and pastel pants.

Failed Quiz #9: The best stroke of brilliance for a headline often comes at 3 or 4 a.m. post-Carrier dance party in a mostly-desolate office to the tune of “Zombie,” “My spoon’s too big,” “Big Pimpin,’” “Banana Phone” or other various YouTube background streamings. Many a quiz has been failed in pursuit of getting the campus newspaper on the racks at a reasonable hour Thursday morning.

Failed Quiz #10: Friends have to look out for each other when gentleman callers request an audience with a roommate outside at 2 a.m., which is how the covert non-smoker smokescreen was developed as a way for concerned friends to chaperone such meetings under the ruse of “smoking” study utensils. From afar, those white BIC pens could pass for cigs, surely.

Most missed failing that, unfortunately I deem only appropriate for college, is rapping like a gangsta with some shades and da bling to “Pop Lock and Drop It.” Those are the best kind of “study breaks”-turned-failed-quiz.

While reading quizzes are important, may the college student in us all slip on those rapper shades every so often in the big bad adult world.



As a bonus track, below I have listed the top soundtracks to accompany the various “failings” and orchestrations over the past few years for JHo and friends:

“Boots with the Fur” (also known as Low) Flo-Rida
“It’s Tricky” – Run-D.M.C.
“Don’t Stop Believin’” --Journey
“You’re So Vain” –Carly Simon
“Total Eclipse of the Heart” –Bonnie Tyler
“Touch You Once” (also known as “If You Leave” –Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark
“I’ll Make a Man out of You” –Mulan

Stay tuned for the Crumpet Collection’s continuation into life back at the homestead. This will be an interesting year.

Peace out Brussels sprouts, yo.