Slightly Off the Mark

It can be nice to sit in our house and let the summer breeze blow past. Or, to get even more breeze, we could open the windows.

My house leaks like a Washington insider. Over the years we’ve stuffed cracks and other openings with anything we could find: towels, sandbags, small cars, door to door salesmen, whatever. A nice breeze isn’t what you want come November.

We don’t know exactly how old the place is, but Fred Markey carved the date 1879 into a garage wall. Is that when he was born? When he built the house? Or when he got cabin fever and went crazy with a knife?

(Note: I've learned he was 16 years old at the time. Who wasn't doing a little mischief at 16?)

The walls once held blown in insulation, but over time it settled, or possibly got carried off by mice. Now we have the annual, depressing, tradition called “winterizing”.

Okay, well, not so bad so far.

Winterizing reminds me that winter’s coming. Winter comes every year, usually in the fall. It’s like it’s seasonal, or something.

Hm … maybe that 1879 carving commemorated the winter they found Fred Markey frozen to the outhouse seat. It would be embarrassing to be frozen to indoor plumbing, so we winterize, starting with storm windows. Traditionally they’re installed just before an unusual warm front comes through, forcing you to decide whether to take them back down to let warm air in, or just curse the fates.

I also put plastic up on the inside of the windows. You put double sided tape around each window, then place the plastic on it, then curse and flounder as the tape falls off. Then you put the plastic on again and use a hair drier, which tightens it up so wrinkles don’t show. NOTE: This does not work on skin.

You can also use spray foam insulation and caulk, to seal cracks. The main purpose of these substances is to form permanent crusts on clothing. They’re also fairly effective at removing skin.

At some point, the furnace has to be started for the season. This is always a time of great interest in my house: I’m interested to know if it will start. I have hot water radiators, and the water is heated by a boiler. Me waving a match over a pilot light to start a boiler is akin to Wiley Coyote opening the latest package from Acme Co. You know something is going to happen; you just don’t know if the result will be ashes and singed hair, or a flattened body against the wall.

But I seriously considered doing none of that this year.

It's because of putting on the air conditioner cover. Not on myself. The polyvinyl cover has a couple of elastic strings attached to it. The instructions say to wrap the strings around the cover, hook them over the air conditioner, and voila—instant winterization.

Until the first time the wind blows.

Then you need duct tape. Rolls and rolls of duct tape.

This year I put the cover over the air conditioner, then waved for a truck to back in. I’d ordered a dump truck load of duct tape. They dumped it right into my driveway, and other than the dozen or so rolls that rolled down the hill out back (should have seen that coming), I was set.

I taped the cover to the conditioner. I taped the cover to the window. I taped the cover to the wall, the conditioner to the window, the wall to the conditioner, and I finished by taping the tape to the tape. There was now no sign of the green plastic cover. I might as well have skipped it and just made a duct-cover.

By then the sun had set on my duct tape paradise, so I did some winterizing inside, such as replacing the door-to-door salesmen in the cracks. The next morning we had some errands to run, so I pulled on my coat, walked out the door, and stepped on the air conditioner cover.

I took this picture while standing on my air conditioner cover. That is not normal.

Some of the tape was still on the cover.

Some of the tape was still on the wall.

But they were no longer connected to each other.

I said something then that I rarely say in public, and would be best off not repeating here. Then I stumbled back inside and collapsed on the couch, where my wife took in my red face and the steam coming from my ears, and tried to decide whether to dial 911.

And that’s why I’m considering giving up on the whole winterizing thing. What, I can’t build a fire in the bathtub and hover over it all winter? It probably worked for Fred Markey.

By the way, I’ve got some used duct tape for sale … cheap.

 Halloween is the scary holiday, timed perfectly to arrive just before the two scariest spots on the calendar: winter, and elections.

It's hardly surprising, then, that one popular Halloween mask is that of the politician. One year I dressed up as Hillary Clinton, stopped all the other trick-or-treaters, and collected 28% of their candy. The bra was kind of binding, though. The problem is, half the people don't recognize political figures, and the other half get too scared.

"What costumes? We just finished some barbecue ribs."

My main criteria for choosing a Halloween costume was always warmth. In northern Indiana, it's not unheard of for Halloween decorations to be under a layer of snow by the end of October. Any Hoosier parent will tell you the main challenge in designing a costume is incorporating a winter coat and snow boots. Dressing as an astronaut is very popular.

As for me, I stopped going out on Halloween when I got old enough to buy candy at the store, turn off the porch light, and sack out on the couch in a diabetic coma. Preferably while watching a really awful Godzilla movie.

The last time I dressed up for the holiday Emily and I went to a Zombie Walk, costumed as ... well, you know. On a whim I walked into a grocery store and asked if they had any bran. The clerk said, "Last year you were way scarier as Dick Cheney".

"Brains--huh. Nothing there."

We always tried to do costumes on the cheap because, well--I'm cheap. So we scrounged around the house, looking for something that could be worn over insulated long underwear. For instance, my adopted brother Martin once gave me a bag of hand-me-down clothes. We don't have the same fashion sense, what with me being a white small town boy and him a black guy from Fort Wayne, which is a big city by my standards.

Most of the clothes did class me up, a little. But I also found a uniquely loud puffy shirt, and a pair of oversized parachute pants that button all the way down the side. No, I never saw him wear them in public--I suspect he was messing with me.

That gave me two choices: Go to Halloween as a stereotypical 70s disco black guy, or a clown. I'll never be politically correct, but you can guess which one I did NOT go as.

A rare photo of me outside in November.

Another choice was something my mother bought for me years ago, back when she (correctly) assumed I needed to get more fit. It's this silver foil costume designed to hold in body heat, like a personal portable sauna. I used it once on the treadmill and lost twelve pounds in thirty minutes. I could have gone as a zombie without needing makeup, if I could walk in a straight line, which I couldn't. Still, a little silver makeup, an aluminum foil hat, and: tah-dah! I'm a space alien.

If I ever trick-or-treat again I'll choose that outfit. Any candy I eat will sweat out of me by the time I make it home. Besides, I'm bound to stay warm no matter how cold it gets outside. Since my one and only goal from October through March is to stay warm, I could celebrate Halloween for months to come, even as political campaigning leaves me cold.

And if that doesn't work, I still have Hillary's bra.

Remember: When you don't read our books, the Wicked Witch melts. You don't want to clean that up.

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SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

I love January! Said no one, ever.

Okay, some people actually do love winter, which just goes to show you: Northern Indiana needs better mental health screening. I used to take part in winter activities, but I was young then, and young people just haven’t learned that being miserable isn’t an adventure.

When I was a kid, I loved sledding, snowball fights, and not having to pay the utility bills. Well, I liked them … I never did warm up all that much to winter. Then, one day when I was about fourteen, I came in from building a snow block fort to discover my hands and toes had themselves become snow blocks. My cheeks had taken on a white, Frosty-like sheen.

My face cheeks. Get your mind out of my insulated underwear.

Thawing out involved a process not unlike being stabbed with a thousand white-hot pins and needles, and from that time on I couldn’t stay in cold weather for long before the affected parts started to feel like they’d been shotgunned full of rock salt. It took all the fun out of it.

Today, my favorite wintertime activities involve a book and a cup of hot chocolate. So January does have an advantage: I can catch up on my reading. But that doesn’t really make up for the gas bill.