Can you hear me now?

I received a phone call today on my cell phone.

Me: Hello?

Woman: Hi.

Me: Hi.

Woman: Hold on a minute. Honey, take the phone.

Man: Hello?

Me: Hi.

Man (in a deep voice): Where are you located?

At this point I needed to stop and assess my world view. There are a lot of answers to a question like "Where are you located?" My first instinct would be to say, "The guest room, folding laundry." Two problems with this answer: one, "Where are you located?" makes it sound like a more specific location is being inquired about. Second, he didn't ask me what I was doing.

So I thought some more. Perhaps I should say, "I am located in the center bedroom on the southern side of my house, a room which we refer to as the guest room"? I began to suspect that he *knew* where I was located and was testing me in some way. He wanted to know if I was honest, wanted to know if I was the kind to play cat and mouse games. But no, not me. Not with strangers. I learned my lesson that time I ended up running down the streets of Las Vegas, taking instructions from a creepy disembodied voice coming from my cell phone while a cabal of criminals tried to take their ill-gotten gains back from me. Or maybe that was a movie I saw, I forget.

Man (impatient): I am located on [some streets not near your neighborhood*].

Me: I think -- Yes. I think you have the wrong number.

Man: Is this Half Price Pots?

Me: No, it is not.

Man: You dialed the wrong number.

Woman (shrieking): Honey, I dialed the same number as last time!

*Click*

Me: Good-bye.

* They were, in fact, calling from Bellevue, Washington. They had put the wrong area code in.

This sucks

I read today that Tennyson McCarty from the Maze was found dead last week.

I saw Jim and Tennyson do their act last year at a leadership event we had back east. I loved the show and was really impressed with Jim and Tennyson, both their skills as illusionists and their passion to follow Jesus.

If you're the praying kind, please be praying for Tennyson's family and friends.

Here's a site where you can leave condolences or remembrances for Tennyson's family and friends.

An American Washerman in Korea

My luggage and I parted ways on the Road to Korea. Perhaps because my luggage had never seen the foggy streets of San Francisco, or perhaps it had heard us lovingly describe our favorite restaurants in the most beautiful city in the world.

In any case, I left my bag in San Francisco.

Which meant that my wardrobe for the first four days of my stay in Korea consisted of: two pairs of socks and underclothes, two shirts and one pair of pants.

However, the (admittedly posh) dorm room that ten friends and I shared had a washing machine. It was in Korean, yes, but an intrepid adventurer never lets the lack of language persuade him from his determined course.

So, I decided one night to experiment by washing a pair of socks, a pair of boxers (or "box tops" as my daughter A calls them) and a shirt. Having lived in Asia I strongly suspected that the washer was also a dryer, but worst case scenario I would have one dry but dirty set of clothes and one wet but clean set. And either way I would still have dry and dirty pants, if that can be considered a plus.

The washer accepted the proferred clothing, locked its door, and immediately began to wash my clothes. The timer set itself to two and a half hours, which caused a great deal of speculation among my roommates. What could it possibly be doing for two and a half hours? Why did it need possession of my clothing from midnight to mid-morning?

We found out at two-thirty in the morning when the washer let loose with a melodious, doorbell-like chime to announce my clothing not only clean, but warm and dry. Hooray! There was much rejoicing!

Okay, it was only me rejoicing. But I think my roommates were suitably impressed by my potential as an Asian launderer.

The next night I decided it was time to take it to the next level. I would wash both shirts, both pair of socks, one pair of boxers and my pants. If all worked well I would be clean and my clothing would be clean as well. If things went poorly, I would still have... a pair of boxers. And a sweatshirt. Oh, and my sneakers.

The first sign of disaster looming was when I offered my clothing, the washer accepted it and locked its door and set its timer for one and a half hours. Adam Rapelje, our Room Captain, pointed this out to me. He mentioned that this did not appear to be a good omen. I concurred. However, I figured that if this meant--as I suspected--that the washer was not interested in pulling double duty as a dryer tonight, then I could still hang the clothes up at one thirty and they would be dry by morning.

So I hung them up at one-thirty when the doorbell-like-chime woke me (I was sleeping in the kitchen/laundry room). I woke again at five and felt for the clothes. Water could still be wrung from them. They were absolutely soaked. I needed them by seven, when Krista and I were due to meet. I got out of bed (or "off of floor" if you are a stickler for accuracy) and pushed all my clothes into the washer, hoping to make it a dryer.

After a lot of button-pressing and knob turning and Korean-deciphering, I managed to get the dryer turned on. The door lock snapped into place and the drum began to turn. My clothes were drying!

And they kept drying. When I tried to get them out at six fifty-five, I couldn't. The LED on the dryer kept saying "HOT" whenever I tried to open it. Which I could only assume meant that it was too hot to open. Which meant that my worst case scenario of wearing clean but sopping wet clothing had now become wearing a dirty pair of boxers and a sweatshirt. Which didn't seem like much of an option.

Krista arrived and wondered if I had just woken up. "No, this is what I'm wearing," I announced. One of the guys ran down to the housing office to see if someone could read Korean.

And yes, someone could. But not much English. He pressed a cunning sequence of buttons and the door lock snapped open. He looked into the window and could see the clothes in there, and figured that I wanted to wash them. He started to press the code in to lock my clothes into the washer for another two and a half hours, but I zipped up behind him, snatched the clothes out and thanked him profusely.

My baggage came later that day, now that I had learned that I didn't need it, now that I was proficient and self-sufficient.

Next time you're in Korea, let me know if you need help with the washer.

Burn Baby Burn

I worked quite a bit in the yard and garage today, and since the kids were out with their Grandparents and Krista was off exercising, it was time for every Matt to do what was right in his own eyes. Which means, "It's never too early for a Tina's Burrito." So at about ten a.m. I slapped a red hot beef burrito in the microwave, punched in 2:00 and went out to get a bit of work done for a few minutes to return to a perfectly cooked Tina's Burrito, the Friend of the Common Man.

I got caught up in my puttering, though, so I was gone a bit longer than two minutes. And when I came back in from the garage I was met by noxious yellow smoke billowing out of the microwave. The microwave was counting down still from 3:27, which I assume means that I had pressed 20:00 instead of 2:00 and had been cooking my burrito for nearly seventeen minutes.

I quickly turned off the microwave, opened the door, gagged on the putrid smoke, opened all the windows downstairs and set up fans to blow all the smoke outside. I had to go outside because I was choking on the nasty yellow cloud that had once been a tasty burrito. The house looked like it was exhaling after a nice, long drag on a cigarette.

My next thought, of course, was to get pictures for the blog, because you guys are my only friends. So, submitted for your approval, the still-smoking husk of my morning snack:



I picked up the burrito to do away with it and discovered it weighed about half an ounce (apparently I had inhaled the rest of the burrito). So I cut it open and got a look at the inside. It was basically a charcoal briquette.



Which reminds me of a strange movie from my youth, and my favorite quote from said movie, "MOM! DAD! It's evil! Don't touch it!" That was a weird movie. It alters the way you look at severly burnt food. It was a fantasy, a dark comedy (I guess... I was like ten last time I saw it) with a tragic ending.

Unlike the Great Burrito fiasco of '07 which ended happily. Krista came home and laughed about the smoke which she could smell from the driveway. I hacked and coughed for a while but seem to have escaped any sort of poisoning.

And there was one more Tina's burrito in the freezer, which I ate as soon as I had cleaned out the microwave.

BLOGGER GONE CRAZY

Hmmm. I just looked at the two posts below and somethin has gone wonky. The most recent post has lost all of its line breaks when it published. And the first post has lost some of the linebreaks and also several paragraphs.

I'm just going to leave it for now and see if it magically gets all better.

Or maybe my computer has a virus. Wouldn't that be nice! I could make it soup and wrap it up on a blanket on the couch. We could watch some movies it would like. Maybe "War Games" or "Short Circuit." I have been hoping we could become better friends. This might be our chance.

Out of Print

You might remember my first story "published" on the internet. It was called "Samaritan" and it was the story of a guy who picked up a woman on the side of the road who needed a lift back to her car. And of course things go horribly wrong.

Well, the site that published it is now gone. That's right. So you can no longer see "Samaritan" on the web. I'M OUT OF PRINT!

It's bound to happen. I just never thought it would happen so soon. *sniff*