I'm not a plumber, but I'll take a look...

Author's note: Your regular 'Random Act of Thursday' will not be seen today. Instead we bring you the following heartwarming tale of home maintenance.

I hate the smell of sewage in the morning. Smells like…failure.

Lori called me yesterday to tell me that the dishwasher had backwashed and flooded the sink cabinet with its leavings, thanks to some previously inept plumbing work. I touched the hose from the dishwasher to the disposal, which promptly fell off the disposal into my hand. I tapped the sink trap, which promptly dropped from the disposer and out of the wall.

We’ve been fighting with a minor clog for a while now, but I couldn’t figure out how one side of the sink would work just fine, and the other did its best to attract mosquito larvae by standing for long periods of time. I tried fixing this myself yesterday, and finally broke down and called the plumber when my 'Junior Plumber Fix-It Kit' snake couldn’t get past the resistance in the drain.

This is not the first time we’ve had to call a plumber for this sink - click here for last year’s saga.

Forty feet of professional drain snake later, the sink was draining, swirling away all Coreolus-like, and all was well with the world. I managed to scrub the stink of failure (and sewage) from my hands, cough up $175 for his time, and went to sleep thinking we were groovy.

Cut to this morning, nice hot shower, refreshing, new day has dawned, and the like. However, when I opened the shower curtain, I saw the lake where once was our bathroom floor. The water going down the shower drain was forcing its way back up through both toilets and running over the wax rings. Sixty feet of larger scale professional drain snake from the street (and $200) later, we can once again flush with minimal trepidation. Ah, the joys of home ownership.

Can’t you just hear Wagner playing in the background?

Movie Mania Monday - That's all part of the experience, honey

Ah, the holiday season is upon us. After cleaning up the yard, enduring the hell that is WalMart, and putting up the tree this weekend, I sit here writing as Lori bakes a vast variety of Christmas cookies. The house smells delicious.

However, as you read this, it's Monday morning, and time for this week's contest. Remember the rules. First person to guess correctly the original source of the quote wins a prize - no movie characters quoting other movies. No Googling or asking Jeeves, either you know the quote or you don't. The prize is a Major Award and consists of the people's ovation and fame forever (and the title of Iron Quote-Guesser). Voici la quote de la semaine:

You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory.

Allez guessing!!! And go back and guess on last week's quote, still outstanding!

Fun Fact Friday - What a time to be alive!

As a 'northern boy' the fruits of Southern labor weren't a common experience. Grits, biscuits and gravy, chicken-fried anything, custard pies, all foreign to me as a child. In fact, I was 30 years old before I ever had my first Moon Pie.

The experience still lingers, though, having bought an entire box at the Cracker Barrel. It was like a s'more, but I didn't get sticky. Yeah, I'm weird that way, and that's precisely why I don't eat s'mores.

I get the impression that southern grandmothers everywhere make homemade moon pies just to pass the time while their chess, custard and pecan pies are cooling on the windowsill. However, the idea of a manufactured, packaged Moon Pie began in 1917 at the Chattanooga Bakery in Tennessee.

Earl Mitchell Sr. is credited by the bakery with the original concept. Mitchell’s story, according to their historians, indicates that when asking coal miners what they'd like for a snack, they requested something solid, filling, and 'big as the moon'.


Upon his return to the bakery, Earl noticed some of the workers dipping graham cookies into marshmallow and laying them on the window sill to harden. So they added another cookie and a generous coating of chocolate and sent them back for the workers to try. In fact, they sent MoonPie® samples around with their other salespeople, too. The response they got back was so enormous that the MoonPie® became a regular item for the bakery.

By the late 1950's, the MoonPie® had grown in popularity, so much that the bakery did not have the resources available to produce anything else.


So popular has this food icon become, several years ago Mobile, AL officials were contemplating ways to incorporate the oversized sandwich cookie into New Year's celebrations. Hey, why not?

A cousin to this beauty is the Scooter Pie, and apparently, even though it's the bastardized northern version of the original, I never had one of these, either. Now it looks like they're only available through novelty food sites, while I can just run over to my corner Marathon station and have my choice of all the Moon Pie flavors.


As some post-writing research, I think I need to run out and get the other flavors to compare, since I've only had chocolate so far. (Call me a traditionalist.) They also make banana, vanilla and orange. And apparently, since "RC Cola and a MoonPie®" seems to be a theme, I might need to get me one of them, as well. I only ever see the triple-deckers, but I've had the original and they also make 'mini' Moon Pies. I don't see the point of that.


If you live in the American southeast, you should also be watching your state and county fairs for the batter-dipped, deep-fried Moon Pie. Because how could that be a bad idea?


Finally, as if reading my posts doesn't kill your productivity already, check out the official Moon Pie website for some games! Fun for the whole family!

Random Acts of Thursday - Now with More Random!

I saw something earlier this week that triggered a potentially cherished but previously forgotten childhood memory.

Before I was the Nerdy Fat Guy, I was a nerdy fat kid, so not much has changed, apparently. Several of my friends were also poster children for the National Fudge and Bacon Coalition, despite our running around like mad fat fools much of the time, riding our bikes wherever we wanted to go. Of course, there was also a lot of time spent on lower impact activities, like Hot Wheels and Legos and other things that allowed us to remain stationary, thus reducing chafing.

The other day, I suddenly remembered that we had a club. A gang. Our own chubby wolf pack.

And just how cool were we? Our club name was The Wrenches.

All manner of predatory beasts, fast cars and wicked cool '70's television to choose from, and we called ourselves The Wrenches. I remember us drawing up a logo and everything. Believe it or not, it was a wrench.

Yep, we oozed cool originality.

Our club never actually did anything other than the same things we did before we organized. We didn't have a rule book or charter or matching jackets, because the Seventies were lean times for all of our families. Seldom were hand-me-downs going to match across families.

And now here I am, 25 or 30 years later, still friends with one of my fellow Wrenches. He's still nerdy, too, but I'm the only fat one.

Speaking of fat, how great are mashed potatoes and gravy? I made gravy last night with the beef roast drippings, and it was nearly everything I hoped it would be, with sour cream mashed potatoes. Always reminds me of my grandmother, whose pot roast is still unequalled, 18 years after she passed away. (And I just shuddered with delight to think about making gravy bread as a kid. Really, does anyone wonder why I'm plus-sized?)

And now, today's quiz (segue implied):

The following movie characters have two things in common, once based on actions, the other based on a mutual co-star. Name one.

~ Roy Neary, willing alien abductee

~ Randy Parker, fussy eater

Either answer will suffice, thank you very much.

And be sure to participate in Ask the Nerdy Fat Guy, by clicking the icon in the upper right of my page. Tell your friends! Tell your family! Tell strange people in the elevator!

And go have some mashed potatoes. You know the fat kid inside you wants some.

You can't always be a winner in Vegas

I'm old. I'm 38 going on 83. I complain. I grouse. I drive slowly. I suddenly enjoy Barry Manilow music. I forget things, like the things I want to write for you, oh dear reader.

I wanted to tell you about our mini-vacation last weekend, a beautiful time in Nevada. But it just kept deteriorating into a full-blown old-man rant about unrelated and generally unimportant things, so this is the third draft.

To sum up, first, the Bad (so you'll end on a high note, like the French resistance!):

No free rental car upgrade. Skippy would have gladly charged me 50% more for a slightly larger car, but really, I'm not going to pay more for something I don't want to drive, when I'm already getting something I don't want to drive. The exception here is if the only car they had in my class was a PT Cruiser, I do have my limits. His response to me became the title.

No hotel reservation when we arrived at the hotel around midnight.

A nearly two-hour adventure in the hotel's only open restaurant in order to get our food. He comped us, apologized profusely, but when I haven't eaten in ten hours I don't really care. Bring me my bacon and eggs. If necessary, I'll cook it myself.

DFW is a monstrous airport, just allowing them to put connecting gates further apart, I suppose. It's an impressive feat of engineering, but how can you enjoy it when you have 20 minutes to travel to another time zone in the airport?

And really, can't we join hands across America to stop people from bringing their yippy dogs and screaming children on planes? I understand that children need to get places, too, I really do. But is it really a good idea to take them on the latest flight you can possibly find? Overtired children plus overtired me will get me banned from an airline some day, I'm sure of it.

Funny how travel takes everything out of you. As nice as the core of our trip was, seeing the strip and the mountains and everything between, the periphery of a trip can really take its toll. In fact, I know this is a lousy post, but hey, they can't all be winners.

The Good:

Believe it or not, my Ford Focus. The Ford Focus with the bad wheel bearing and jangling rattle in the door. Of course, I could have taken the Rondo, but we already know how I feel about that. Truth be told, though, if I were an economy car kind of guy, and wheel bearing aside, it was a zippy little car. Not much for offroading in the desert, but zippy nevertheless. I'd actually give this car a B, for what it was.

Had a nice Thanksgiving dinner at my boss' house with his family and friends, phenomenal wine that I could never afford myself and pumpkin pie. Mmmm, pie.

Had a great drive out to Red Rock Canyon, though we failed to see any of the wild burros they claimed were roaming the land. Because Friday was their busiest day of the year, filled with people avoiding the mall, they let us use Friday's receipt for admission again on Saturday. We went back in the morning, when the crowds were gone, and it was still stunning that something so wild could be so close to civilization. That just doesn't exist here in Florida.

Drove the strip, still quite the experience, we even drove past the 'civilized' areas and on to the cliched wedding chapels and motor lodges. It's important to have perspective.

Had some great Mexican food, first thing we've had that rivalled Jalisco's that didn't come from a truck by the side of the road. Though I love me some truck tacos.

Even though it was just a long weekend trip, we got to look at houses. There's some surprisingly affordable new construction out there.

And the best part of any vacation, returning home and sleeping in my own bed, with my own pillow, nestled against my sweetie.

Dreaming of luxe rental cars, posh new houses and wild burros.