This afternoon, I stepped outside to make a phone call. Not because I needed to have a private conversation. I was the only one home. I went outside, because AT&T can’t find a way to provide a wireless signal that reaches into my house. I couldn’t live in a more central, busy part of town, by the way.

When I came back in, there was 50 lbs of Basset Hound in my chair. I knew I could walk over, yell at her to get down, and it would take her a full, sad 30 seconds to climb out. Or I could try to drag her dead weight out of the chair by her collar. That wouldn’t have been good for either of us.

Then, I had a stroke of genius. I shut the door and hit the doorbell. She ran to the door barking at the perceived visitor, even though she had just seen me shut the door.

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I don’t know why this is the case, but it’s certainly true.

If you break glass on the floor, you can make many passes over the same area with the broom. You can then get down on hands and knees and eye every square inch of space to make sure you haven’t missed any. You can make another pass with a damp rag to get tiny tiny pieces that you might have missed.

No matter what, after a day or so passes, you will find a big giant piece, at least an inch long, sitting right in the middle of the floor where someone is likely to step.

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I guess I’ll fess up and admit that I’ve been blog cheating on you guys, but so far, I’ve only been doing it a little bit. I’ve got two new blogs up, and neither of them is really meant to shed any insight on my life, or even to entertain. So if you’re a regular reader here, you won’t be interested. But still.

The MyTechPurse blog is a technical commentary inteded for the non-technical reader.

My blog at Concordbusinessserviesllc.com is also technical, but it gets super-geeky.

The idea is that to some extent, the two play off of each other. For example, if the TechPurse blog talks about something that small businesses should have on their website, a reader can pass along a related link to the Concord blog. The Concord blog would go into details about how to implement and have code samples that could be copied and pasted into their developers’ projects.

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Thursday afternoon of last week, I was set to take V to his gymnastics class. He was stir crazy, so we left early, taking his bike to the park to ride around for a bit before class.

We did our thing, loaded his bike back into the car, and started to pull out. There were some other families coming from the sidewalk to the parking lot, and a couple of kids climbing into the mini van parked next to us, so I looked around very carefully, and started to back up very very slowly. I’ll note that my vision was especially good, as the top and windows were down on the Jeep.

As we started to back out, some loud mother came around behind me, give my Jeep the “talk to the hand” gesture, and started shouting.

“STOP, STOP, STOP.”

“EVERYBODY GET HOLD OF YOUR CHILDREN. WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN.”

She then stopped another car trying to leave the lot, and directed me to back out in front of that car, screaming instructions all the while.

Vanya was concerned by the shouting. “What’s the matter, Papa.”

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Willie Lyles, Parkinson’s, star receiver makes himself ineligible with some violation that we don’t understand, probation because of a years-ago violation recruiting a player who LSU refused to take because of said violation, and oh yeah, I heard something about a fight at a bar.

That probably adds up to the worst August in memory, although it could be a lot worse. Miami’s bad month will plague the program for the next decade. Our messes will be mostly forgotten in a week plus two days.

A quick video to remind us of why we pull for the guys wearing purple and gold.

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We all know that you should wash your hands after using the toilet. Unsaid, but equally well understood is the fact that there are some places where it’s just fine not to wash your hands after you use the toilet. Let this serve as my attempt to quantify when and when it is not okay.

Not surprisingly, the specific rules differ depending on whether you’ve gone #1 or #2. (Let’s face it, when you go #2, there’s just the thinnest, flimsiest piece of material in the world between your hand and poop.)

It’s okay to NOT wash your hands, no matter which number you’ve gone when…

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Last time I wrote about our trip to upstate New York, I concluded by saying that I had more videos, pictures, and stories. You may have seen the pictures, and videos are here (although the best of them are embedded in this post). That just leaves us with stories to tell.

That just leaves us with stories, and one story is important for context before we get to the video.

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Theskinnyonbenny family had one long, full day to be tourists in Washington D.C this summer. We did the normal wandering around of governmental buildings and monuments.

Vanya started the day tired and whiny. I would complain that it was hotter than hell, except that I’m posting this from Louisiana in August, where the devil himself won’t visit a house that has the air conditioning turned off.

After we walked around for a while, we stopped at this little store to load up with cold drinks. Vanya did some little favor for the cashier, and the man gave him a big, fake hundred dollar bill. While we were sitting outside and drinking from our plastic bottles, Vanya went back in and did him some other nicety, and he came back with two more over-sized fake bills.

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