Just about to step out the door to commence my travels for the Christmas season when I realized it was our first official Christmas here at the Lab. Thought I’d pop in to wish you and yours a good one and that we’d be back shortly with even more content for your amusement.

Merry Christmas!!!!!

Okay, I don’t actually hate my dad, it’s just that he’s like a character from a movie or a novel. As an old school prairie dweller, knowledge of farm living was far more of a priority for him and his generation than was “book learnin”. It is with that thought in mind that I give to you the mystery of Neal Andersol.

When I was just a lad of 6 or 7 my dad got in a huge argument with his brother and called him Neal Andersol. That, of course, isn’t my uncle’s name. So it got me to thinking… who is this Neal Andersol guy and what did he do to my dad to upset him so much that his name would come up in dad’s worst moments?

My dad seemed to have a lot of friends and I never recalled meeting anyone named Neal but of course it would stand to reason that if dad hated him, I would probably never get to meet him. Also, when you are 7 years old, your world is a little limited. I tried not to give it another thought and for years it was never an issue… until my early adulthood.

I was trying to convince my dad that, much like most other testosterone filled young males, it would be a great idea to buy a musclecar and soup it up and race it. That’s when it happened. That’s when my dad said, “Use your brains, you’re not a Neal Andersol!”

Needless to say I was quite shocked but I knew if ever there was chance to solve the mystery, now was the time. I thought I might not get an answer but I gulped and politely said to my dad, ” Dad, who is this Neal Andersol guy and what did he do to you that was so awful?”

To my amazement, he said ” It’s not a guy- it’s those half ape people who lived in caves millions of years ago and ate dinosaurs!”.

In a daze, I said blankly, “Dad, I think you mean ne-an-dra-thals.”

He replied, ” Yeah that’s what I said, those really stupid nealandersols.”

I stated, ” So basically you are just telling me that anyone who isn’t using their brains is acting like a caveman?”

He replied, “That’s right, my son. Man used to be Neal Andersols but we evolved and now we have brains and we are Homer Sabians”.

P.S. If there actually is a Neal Andersol and you are reading this, please accept this apology on behalf of my dad and myself.

My wife has three cats. I’ve never seen the need for cats.

My wife makes cat toys. Knitted fish filled with pillow stuffing and catnip to be precise. I complain about having to always vacuum the catnip out of the carpet.

My wife asked me to put a classified ad on our intranet at work to help her sell her catfish cat toys. I said sure, what the hell, how painful could this be?

Enter from stage left, an older woman Designguy recognizes immediately as Char from HR (Charlene). She enters smiling and before reaching his desk, tilts her head and speaking in almost a cooing voice:

“I never knew you were a cat person.”

“I’m not,” Designguy says, “my wife is, I can’t stand the little buggers. They crap and puke all over the place and that’s only when they’re not peeing on my clothes.”

Having called Designguy minutes earlier to arrange this visit with the intent to purchase his wife’s homemade, arregate (meaning striped, don’t worry, the missus had to explain it to me too), stuffed cat toys she stops, horrified, confused and staring, either unsure of what she just heard or what to do next.

Sensing a lack of humour on the subject and the possibility of a loss of sale, Designguy immediately tells Char that he was kidding and quickly relates a short cat-based anecdote his wife had shared with him days ago in which she felt her cats were behaving cutely.

Char smiles, all is right in her world once again, she continues towards Designguy’s desk to inspect the merchandise.

After a few questions regarding the toy’s construction and purpose for making them, she feels assured that they were made by someone who did so for the love of cats and not the love of money. She is then, only too happy to part with her hard earned dollars but not before subjecting Designguy to 20 minutes of cute, warm and fuzzy cat stories of her own.

Designguy hears about how many cats Char has, what make and model the cats are, followed by how each came to be in her and her husband’s life. She moves from one story to the next, not even stopping to catch a breath. Stephen, Designguy’s cubicle roomie peers over the top of his computer, unseen by Char and quietly laughs while pointing at Designguy. Char has not noticed Designguy’s lack of attention as she herself, seems to be transfixed, staring past Designguy re-living playful moments she has had with her cats as her stories continue to unfold.

Anecdote after anecdote of wild escapades and crazy shenanigans her cats have had at bedtime, at lunchtime, in the park, with balls of yarn, with another cats and the occasional dog fill the air.

“You can go now,” Designguy thinks to himself “I have your money.”

But no, the stories continued…

It was about 7 or 8 years ago that , much like the past 20 years, I went home to my dad’s for Christmas. At that time he was semi retired and was farming part time and running his garage part time.

It was about dusk Christmas day when we finished exchanging our pathetically predictable gifts of socks and aftershave. Dad suggested we go for a walk. We headed across the yard to the garage, the snow crunching under our feet. The beautiful winter sky was about 10 minutes from melting away to become a field of stars. When I opened the door to his 40X60 garage, a thin stream of light shined through a back window forcing me to squint to recognize the shape of anything.

There, parked in the back corner, I could barely make out a red convertible. 5 years earlier, Dad and I had restored a strawberry red 60’s American land yacht classic convertible, but we were finished that project so it seemed unusual that it should be parked here instead of the storage shed. As my eyes became adjusted to the darkness I noticed the hood was off; and the engine was out, suspended from a cherry picker. Why would dad take the engine out of our convertible in the middle of winter? I yelled for dad to turn on the lights but he was ignoring me. The closer I got the more something seemed wrong. The grill was different from ours and the headlights seemed to be in the wrong position. It was then that my dad turned the shoplights on full and I struggled to regain my focus in the huge contrast from dark to light. It was a red ragtop all right but it was a DIFFERENT one! It was a bit rough but she was another 60’s classic Ford.

My dad shouted out MERRY CHRISTMAS, SON! I started doing back flips, jumping up and down and hugging my dad and going around the car again and again. I couldn’t stop talking about all the things we were going to do to fix her up and what a surprise this was and how great it would be for my dad and I to restore this car and that’s when he said, “Geez would you shut up already, it belongs to a customer and I’m doing an engine job on it!”

I hate my dad.

“Ma’am,… have you ever stopped to consider that Armageddon may not be a bad thing?” And with that opening line my wife let two very well groomed middle-aged men into our house. She asked them to come in and to be quick about it, not fearing that they held some vital piece of information regarding the end of days which she was not privy to but simply because we have three cats and even though it was -17 degrees Celcius outside, the cats are stupid enough to attempt escape through any open door.

I was in the process of heading down into our crawl space, not to escape these apocalyptic harbingers but to retrieve an old glove which I had wanted to show my wife. She was about to go Christmas shopping and I had just given her my wish list and was trying to clear-up some confusion as to the type of glove I had hoped Santa would bring me this year. Little did either of us know that apparently this year, when they tell you there are only a certain number of days left they ain’t talkin’ about shopping days.

I can’t stand door-to-door solicitors. I hate them even more than I hate telephone solicitors. In fact, if I was to state my number one regret about recently becoming a homeowner, it would be that I have a front door. Proudly displaying a welcome mat which reads “Go Away” and then later rewiring my doorbell to deliver a small shock to anyone using it has not been a deterrent to those wishing to sell me cookies, magazines, their political opinion and now apparently a vision of the future which undoubtedly was revealed to them as an epiphany while sitting on the crapper and pushing so hard they saw stars.

Now my wife, well,… she’s different. She likes to play with them; as a cat would a mouse. It doesn’t even matter if you meant to speak to us or not. I have seen her on the phone, pretending to speak Chinese to a caller who had the misfortune of reaching us by mistake. She does her best to keep them on the line as long as she can, reveling in the confusion and frustration she believes she is causing them. I have seen her go toe-to-toe with political candidates, grilling them on every issue she feels they are wrong about and these are the candidates that she intends to vote for! When the candidates whom she has no intention of voting for stop by, she engages them in an even longer debate not in the hopes of getting her thoughts across but more in an attempt to waste their time so they run out of it and hopefully stop at fewer houses for the evening.

So as she let two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse into our house, I paused on the stairwell and wondered if I should stay to watch the show - this certainly had the potential of being one of her best performances. Knowing that she usually lets her prey get off a few opening remarks, I decided I had time to run to the basement, retrieve the glove I was after and make it back to the front door for the second act. At best, I was downstairs two minutes and when I returned, to my chagrin our guests had left and my wife was getting ready to go shopping. “What happened I said? Where did they go?”

“They told me they wanted to speak to me about the coming of Armageddon and I said - oh,… you’re here to talk to me about the upcoming election then?”

I laughed as we will be going to the polls soon and a party many deem as right-winged radicals are poised for a win and those in opposition to this party fear what life will be like under their leadership. “So what did they say to that?” I asked.

“Nothing! They didn’t get it!” she says, “They just stared at me blankly, so I wasn’t about to waste any more of my time on them and told them to get the hell out of my house!”

Oddly, I wish she had at least let them have their say. I find myself mildly interested in knowing how Armageddon - which I believe is generally regarded by the majority of the world as a bad thing - has been so poorly promoted all these many years. I sort of hope they’ll stop by again for a chat but doubt they will as I am sure their time is short and they can’t afford to waste any more of it speaking to my wife.