2014 Layne Family Christmas Letter

 

The shopping is done, the presents wrapped and under the tree, and the cookies and bourbon for Santa placed carefully on the fireplace hearth.  All that’s left now are the looks of disappointment on the children’s faces when they awake to realize their Christmas dreams were over-anticipated and  undercapitalized.

Having survived the longest winter on record, it’s hard to believe we’re right back where we started last year, raking snow along with leaves and playing pond hockey before Thanksgiving. 

Living in Illinois is a challenge ill-suited for most.  Not so much because our state is run by corrupt politicians with no moral compass who are bereft of any shred of integrity and would gladly drive the state into financial ruin for their own selfish gain, but because this is where our children live.

The teen years are without question the most vulgar stage of human development save zygote, and why the wealthy send their children to boarding school.  To wit, Amanda is determined to find the dark cloud in every silver lining, and Ally wants to fight with anything that looks at her funny, including furniture.  It’s gotten so bad K & M would have moved if not for the likelihood that the girls might track them down and press charges.

 

Given the daily melodrama, K & M have learned to appreciate Taffy all the more.  Unburdened by human sentimentality, dogs have a litter, eat the stillborn and infirm, and then forget about the rest as soon as they’re weaned.  No wonder dogs are so carefree. 

 

Speaking of Taffy, unfazed by her eight inch, eleven pound stature, she has taken to stalking and attacking the herd of deer that empty our bird feeders at night.  Apparently convinced she’s a fully grown timber wolf, we last saw her disappearing into the night attached to the leg of an unaware buck.  

Just when K & M thought parenthood couldn’t get more thankless, Amanda began high school, much to her dismay as a lowly freshman.  Nowadays, high schools exist mainly as a place for society to store its teenagers until they’re old enough to be tried as adults.  Disappointed over the discontinuation of her nightly turn-down service, Amanda posted a scathing one-star review of her domestic accommodations on Yelp, rating the guest services as poor, the housekeeping and laundry inefficient and slow, and the concierge subpar.  She has threatened to take her business to the Four Seasons if service doesn’t drastically improve.  Against her better judgment, Karen routinely caves in to Amanda’s demands out of sympathy over her honors and AP teachers working her like a Chinese coal miner on seven day shifts.

Middle school has appealed to Ally so far.  How she has again managed to earn straight A’s in spite of belonging to concert and honor band, yearbook, chorus, earning a spot on the 6th/7th grade basketball team, and continuing to play travel softball is a puzzle.  K & M are pretty sure she’s using her lunch money to buy performance enhancing drugs.  Given her hectic schedule, she enjoys taking time to “chill” which she usually does on the toilet – iPod in one hand and iPad on her lap – like a technologically adept 60 year old man.  K & M have considered installing a fax line and Wi-Fi hotspot in the bathroom so she can be more productive on the job. 

As the girls get older and more informed of politics, family rule has sadly evolved from a dictatorship to a democracy whereby each person has a voice.  Because we are a two party system with equal membership in each, important family decisions are often deadlocked in an unbreakable stalemate with neither side willing to yield or compromise.  Such was the fate of Karen’s carefully planned summer vacation to Gettysburg which devolved into four days at Cedar Point in Ohio where Karen and Amanda ate funnel cakes and shopped while Ally and Mark rode every coaster in the park.  Mark still can’t turn his head to the left and Karen throws up just looking at the photo album.

In April, Mark dove back into self-employment with all the familial support of a Middle East military campaign.  Freed from the shackles of servitude, Mark now spends most of his time driving the girls places, walking Taffy, and unclogging toilets.  In a case of ultimate irony, Mark spent as much money restoring the lawn in September as he saved in weekly maintenance fees by killing it with Roundup in June.

 

 

  

In other football news, after a promising preseason, the Bears were decimated by injuries and forced to field a team consisting of a mediocre punter, three high school soccer players, the guy who drives the injury cart, and Jay Cutler’s mom.  The Illini proved once and for all why they deserve to be counted among the elite D-3 schools, winning just enough games to save their incompetent coach his job and get invited to an April 17 bowl game.

 

Though oft overshadowed by materialism and greed, it would seem the true purpose of Christmas is to remind mankind of what it means to be Christian, which according to American satirist Ambrose Bierce is “One who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.”  Amen to that.

Merry Christmas to All, and to All Good Grief,

Karen, Mark, Amanda, Ally, and Taffy

 

 

Floats Like a Butterfly, Stings Like a Giant Hornet

I don’t know about you, but the most disturbing news I’ve heard recently – other than that Kanye and Kim have reproduced – concerns the attack of the giant Asian hornets.

 

As reported last December by Michael Caldwell in The Allegiant, these cartoonishly large insects, which can grow to the size of Air Force One, have recently attacked over 1,600 people in the Shaanxi province of China, resulting in 41 confirmed deaths. 
 

The Asian Giant Hornet, or vespa mandarinia, is the largest species of wasp in the world.  Known for their aggression, they prey mostly on honeybees, but also eat wasps and other hornets, Praying Mantises (or is it Manti?), and beetles, typically of the Volkswagen variety.  These formidable creatures can grow to be two inches long, thick as a human thumb, and feature a wide orange-yellow head, large eyes, and distinct yellow-orange/brownish-black bands on its body.

 

Though indigenous to Eastern Asia, they are most commonly found in the mountains of Japan – the very same mountains which brought us the likes of Godzilla, Rodan, Gamera, and the Sobijin -- twin fairies whose shrill song not only summoned Mothra, but inspired Yoko Ono to record her own cat-like voice.

Unlike the poorly dubbed Japanese horror films of the 1950’s, however, these monsters are real. 
 

Armed with a stinger the size of a javelin, Asian Giant Hornet venom packs a complex punch featuring eight different chemicals which can cause breathing complications, skin degeneration, and anaphylaxis, not to mention full body paralysis just from seeing one fly past. As an added bonus, their venom is laced with pheromones which incite the rest of the colony to attack and sting the same victim multiple times.

Does it hurt?  Depends if you consider the sensation of a red-hot eight-penny finishing nail piercing your flesh painful.  And while the pain from the sting of a yellow jacket last about four minutes, the pain of an Asian Giant Hornet sting last about four hours and is often accompanied by intense swelling and never ending nightmares.

No worries.  See one coming, and you’ll just run away, right?

Think again.

Though not nearly as fast as the other Super Hornet – that being the F/A-18 carrier-based tactical fighter employed by the US Navy – these equally lethal war birds can achieve an astounding top speed of 25 mph and have been known to travel 60 miles in pursuit of prey. So unless you’re Usain Bolt, better come up with another plan.

Amazingly, the Asian Giant Hornet is considered a delicacy in many Asian cultures, proving once and for all that the term “delicacy” is contextual, and that people deprived of McDonald’s will eat just about anything.  As a result of hungry hordes of Asians streaming out into the jungles in search of this gruesome and deadly snack, the hornets have migrated into more populous areas, adapting themselves to urban life. Thanks a lot, hungry Asians!

If you’re like me, you’re probably asking yourself, “But why should I worry about some mutant insect killing folks halfway around the world?”  Because as recent as July, 2012, at least one of these deadly invaders was spotted in Arlington Heights, Illinois, with additional sightings in 19 other US states.  Nineteen!  We’re talking nearly half of the contiguous 48! 

The Midwest is renowned as a bastion of the ordinary, commonplace, and dull – not some modern day Mysterious Island.  And while these hornets are not the first menace sent by Asia to plague my native state of Illinois, they are certainly the most terrifying. 

I remember when our biggest worry around here was Zebra Mussels clogging the water intakes of our nuclear power plants.  Then came their Asian long-horned beetles which preyed upon and eventually decimated our Ash tree population. 

 

And though I don’t recall reading of Asian Carp leaping from the water and latching onto the throats of passersby, they do seem to be giving the folks at our Department of Natural Resources headaches.  These hornets, however, can not only fly, but seem to hate humans, attacking in swarms with the relentlessness of a personal injury attorney.

They say Asia will one day rule the world.  Is this how it happens?  Wearing down our national resolve one debilitating pestilence at a time?

The only good news to come out of the article is that destruction of the hornet’s natural habitat by humans may result in their extinction. Thank goodness!  This is one Asian export that needs to be returned to sender.  As Winston Churchill stated, “…we shall fight on the beaches… we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills…”

I, for one, intend to be prepared.  Look for me in my yard next summer.  I'll be the guy mowing the lawn in a beekeeper's suit holding a flamethrower.

 

 



 

Million Dollar Morons

My kids are weird.  Whereas most children their age spend their uncommitted time engaged in such useful pursuits as texting, playing video games, or listening to music, mine watch television.  Which doesn’t seem so weird unless you consider what they’re watching. 

 

Normal kids between roughly six and fourteen years of age tend to gravitate toward the panoply of programming offered by Disney and Nickelodeon – your typical mindless drivel which appeals to the automobile restricted segment of the kid population and includes such favorites as Austin and Ally, iCarly, and Big Time Rush.

 

Conversely, I routinely find my two daughters raptly engaged in the various reality-based programs featured on the Food Network and HGTV.  As a concerned parent, I want to know what my children are watching.  After all, I don’t want them exposed to unhealthy, age-inappropriate ideas concerning home décor, or worse, have them begin making food choices ill-suited to my wife’s culinary skills.  As a consequence, I often find myself watching these shows along with them. 

The cooking programs aren’t of great concern in that my daughters have such blasé, unadventurous palettes that they are disinclined to sample any dish which doesn’t contain their two favorite ingredients – peanut butter and jelly.  And while many of the home improvement and real estate oriented programs are benign, I do have concerns about certain of the HGTV offerings such as Million Dollar Rooms, Amazing Water Homes, and Extreme Homes. 

 

Each of these tends to feature an insanely wealthy couple searching for their own personal Shangri-La.  Less intriguing to me than the bizarre dwellings, however, are the equally odd couples who own or want to buy them.  The duos often feature a troll of a man who has used his extraordinary wealth to attract a much younger woman way out of his league on the attractiveness scale.  For the most part, the women have the intellect of an eggplant and are doing all they can to spend their much older husband’s fortune before he dies and the prenuptial agreement kicks in.

 

 

These men will do almost anything to keep their partners happy because they know they have no other shot at an intimate relationship with a woman of equal caliber or such a high social security number.  As a result, they get towed around by the nose, looking as clever as cardboard, while their women commiserate with the real estate agent over the insufficient size of the indoor pool, the ill-conceived heliport, and the awkward position of the afternoon sun as it strikes the life-size statue of Zeus. 

 

It’s no wonder these unlikely bedfellows are attracted to homes matching their quirks in that most of the featured dwellings seem to have been designed by eccentric lunatics with no budgetary constraints and certainly no sense of proportion or style.  Can we truly consider a person sane who is desirous of living on an island, has enough money to buy Guam, but instead chooses to build his dream home on a flat patch of dirt in Oklahoma City which he then surrounds with a moat?

Enough is enough!  I’m left with no choice but to insist that my kids start watching SpongeBob, Finneas and Ferb, or Alien Surf Girls – anything that won’t warp their suggestible minds and distort their expectations of normalcy.  In the meantime, I’m off to catch the new episode of Dog with a Blog.  Pets are so brilliant these days!

 

Are You Ready to Get Sweaty?

A Health Club Survival Guide

In this era of Obamacare and rising healthcare costs, many employers are offering employees discounted health club memberships as a proactive means to reduce claims for preventable illnesses.  As a result, record numbers of folks are flocking to gyms after a long time away, or perhaps for the first time ever. 

If you are one of the multitude who have resisted taking that first step due to fear of the unknown, what follows is a primer to aid you in acclimating to the modern fitness world and thus assimilate yourself into the social milieu of health club regulars.



photo courtesy lifed.com

A health club is like no other place on Earth or in space.  It’s an intergalactic amalgamation of body types, nationalities, ages, insecurities, and neuroses rarely assembled in one location at the same time, all boldly displayed on a noisy, sweaty stage for all to see and enjoy.  Here are some of the different archetypal characters you can expect to encounter on your first visit.

Meatheads: Every club has a few – both male and female – with muscle mass in inverse proportion to brains.  They tend to be fixtures at their favored club, not unlike a squat rack, weight bench, or building support column.  Often you will hear them before you see them owing to their obnoxious vocalizations, which are not necessarily a consequence of their efforts or their desperate need for attention, but because grunting is the sole means by which they communicate.  The reason meatheads are so massively endowed is they spend all day, every day working out.  This is not a result of their commitment to fitness, but in most cases because they’re too dumb to find the exit, arriving by special bus in the morning and placed out at the curb by staff when the club closes at night.  Although they appear large and fearsome, don’t be intimidated as they are slow witted and easy to fool.  (Think of the fully grown mountain troll from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.)  If you find their presence uncomfortable, just say loudly enough for one to hear, “Somebody left some performance enhancing drugs on a bench in the locker room,” and they will scurry after each other like rogue Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons, not to return before you complete your workout due to the long odds against them finding their way back from the locker room. 
 

Athletes: These are the hopelessly young and fit persons who have no business working out, but because of their one dimensional, sports-focused, health-consumed lives, have no other interests or hobbies and therefore no place else to go.  You don’t have to worry about them.  They will not approach you because they hate you, repulsed as they are by your imperfect body and lack of willpower.  Usually found in groups of two or more owing to their inability to socialize with non-athletes, athletes would just as soon kill themselves as live to 35 if it meant an end to running marathons, competing in triathalons, and consuming flavorless, high protein, scientifically engineered food substitutes. Nor should you let them make you feel inferior.  While they are more fit and conditioned than you could ever hope to become, at 50 you will still be able to move about on your own accord, whereas they will be confined to walkers and/or wheelchairs as a result of their artificial knees and hips and surgically fused vertebrae.

Non-Athletes: These are your scrawny, clueless, pointy-headed males mostly of third world origin who have never seen fitness equipment let alone used it.  This is not their fault.  In their countries, exercise is the unfortunate byproduct of manual labors like hand digging tunnels, assembling massive stone temples using crude, prehistoric tools, and walking in circles chained to a large, spoked wheel.  You will see them wandering around aimlessly, dressed in loafers, black socks, and jeans, poking and tugging at various apparati as they attempt to ascribe some purpose to each.  After several hours of exploration and emboldened by their incorrect interpretation of a particular device’s function, they will fire off several jerky, awkward reps, often facing the wrong direction with their feet in the handholds.  WARNING!  Stay away from these people for they are extremely dangerous.  It is likely that at some point during a workout, one of them will become entangled in a cable and get flung across the room, wiping out everyone in their path before becoming impaled on one of their countrymen’s bullet-shaped heads.

The Morbidly Obese: These people are only at the club as a condition of further employment by their companies or by court order.  Because they resent having to be there and are without hope of losing enough weight to avoid burial in a piano crate, they are typically in a foul mood.  You most often find them watching the Food Network while trudging mournfully on a T.V. equipped treadmill at the slowest possible speed.  After ten or fifteen minutes of Cupcake Wars, they will waddle exhausted and famished to a quiet corner of the club and fall asleep in an expanding pool of their own perspiration and/or vomit.  A word of advice: do not befriend these folks unless you enjoy testifying at coroner’s inquests.

photo courtesy newsroom.uni.edu

Prom Queens: It’s rare to encounter one of these expensively coiffed, silicone enhanced beauties in the club’s main venue as they typically prefer to attend group classes comprised primarily of women older and less attractive than themselves.  The prom queen’s purpose is not so much to sweat, which could prove disastrous to her makeup and hair, but to show off her sculpted body and $500 Dolce & Gabbana thong leotard in an effort to motivate and inspire the rest of the class by providing an ideal to which the others might aspire.  Make no mistake: the prom queen did not acquire her Victoria’s Secret body by working out, but instead at the hands of her skilled personal surgeon.  Pity her, ladies, for while most of you will return home to your husbands, children, and/or pets, all she has to look forward to at home is her bald, round-bellied, cigar-puffing sugar daddy awaiting his daily sponge bath.

Creepy Old Dudes: A warning for men: while in the club’s locker room, look straight ahead, and make eye contact with no one, especially kindly old men who attempt to draw you into conversation.  I’m speaking particularly about guys typically of European descent who are on the downhill side of seventy and confine their fitness activities to the locker room where they enjoy hanging out with other men their age discussing horse racing, their medical conditions, and Florida.  When I say “hanging,” I mean literally in that these congresses typically occur in the nude with the participants clustered around the ring leader’s locker, some sitting, others standing with one foot up on the bench, their dangling junk scraping the shoulders of their cohorts while they argue the merits of Marco Island versus St. Pete’s.

So there you have it.  You are now fully equipped to embark upon your personal adventure into fitness.  Best of luck, Godspeed, and if you stop to chat with me in the locker room, please be wearing pants.