This year, like every year, we had a heartwarming Costanza Christmas Tree Decorating Experience. Cindy’s favorite characters on Seinfeld are Mr. and Mrs. Costanza, George’s Parents. They’re yellers. Each has the patience of a light switch and the grace of a jackal. At the slightest friction, they holler. Whether in a restaurant, funeral home, business office, or at a Christmas party; they uncork their pipes and let ‘er rip. For some reason, Christmastime summons our family’s inner Costanza. The following really happened, more or less.

Cindy Costanza: I sure will be glad when the economy turns around and we can afford to buy a NICE Christmas tree.

Tim Costanza: What? You don’t LIKE our tree? That tree saved us THIRTY DOLLARS. WHAT’S WRONG WITH OUR TREE?

Cindy Costanza: You want to know what’s wrong with it? I’LL TELL YOU WHAT’S WRONG WITH IT! THRER’S A BIG HOLE IN ONE SIDE AND IT’S TOO SPARSE. A Christmas Tree should be plump and full and with a nice shape.

Tim Costanza : Says you. I like mine SLENDER, without any EXTRA BAGGAGE.

Corey Costanza: Ma, my friends and I did the best we could without walking the entire State Forest.

Tim Costanza: That’s right, Cindy. How many other teenagers went out in the RAIN AND WIND and chopped down their family’s tree? HE’S JUST A KID, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD. You want a plumper tree? YOU TAKE THE AXE AND GO FIND ONE.

Corey Costanza:  At least this tree doesn’t need holes drilled in the trunk and branches transplanted like last year’s.

Tim Costanza: Watch it, son. That tree also saved us THIRTY DOLLARS. How many other men could even THINK of sprucing their fir?

Cindy Costanza: How many other men would be so CHEAP?

Corey Costanza: Ma, this is supposed to be a happy time. How about we decorate the tree?

Cindy Costanza: If we MUST live with this HIDEOUS tree, then we’ll have to lay the decorations on heavy. But that’ll be hard because THERE ARE NO BRANCHES. And besides Connor isn’t here. Tree decorating should be a family activity.

Tim Costanza: CONNOR IS NEVER HERE. WE DECORATE WITHOUT HIM!

Cindy Costanza: WE CAN’T DECORATE IF WE DON’T HAVE ANY LIGHTS. Remember, we threw out last year’s BECAUSE YOU COULDN’T UNTANGLE THEM. A real man doesn’t let a string of lights beat him.

Tim Costanza: THATS IT! I’LL HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH LIGHTS! YOU WANT LIGHTS, YOU BUY LIGHTS AND YOU PUT THEM ON. I’M NOT TOUCHING ANOTHER LIGHT!

[The next evening]

Cindy Costanza: I went to every store in the county and all the white lights were sold out so I had to buy colored ones, the kind that blink.

Tim Costanza: How much do I have invested in lights? Counting gas it’s got to be at least THIRTY DOLLARS.

Corey Costanza: Ma, I like colored lights better than white. White are boring.

 [An hour later]

Cindy Costanza: Those lights sure do blink, and there’re a lot of purple ones. I’m not sure I like the lights.

Tim Costanza: You bought the lights, YOU LIKE THE LIGHTS. They light up the room like a USED CAR LOT.

Cindy Costanza: YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT I LIKE. I’ve decided – I DON’T LIKE THE LIGHTS. But I’m not going out to buy more so we’ll leave them on this year then give them to the boys when they go away to college. Hear me now: Next year WE’RE BUYING NEW LIGHTS. WHITE ONES.

Tim Costanza: GREAT! ANOTHER THIRTY DOLLARS WASTED! Do you think we can put the decorations on now?

Corey Costanza: Dad, wait. We have to put water in the tree stand first, right? I’ll get a pitcher.

Tim Costanza: I filled the stand last night, Corey, but go ahead and top it off.

[Ten minutes later]

Corey Costanza: The tree sure was thirsty, dad. I used a whole pitcher, and it’s still not full. I’ll get more.

Cindy Costanza: OH MY GOD, TIM, THERE’S WATER RUNNING EVERYWHERE. ITS SOAKED THE TREE BLANKET AND IS RUSHING TOWARD THE BASEBOARDS. COREY, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

Corey Costanza: Unh, I must have missed the bowl. It was hard to see under the branch.

Tim Costanza: COREY, GO GET TOWELS, FAST. IF THAT WATER MAKES IT TO THE BASEBOARDS, THEY’LL SWELL AND WARP, THEN WE’LL HAVE TO BUY NEW ONES. THAT’LL COST WAY MORE THAN THIRTY DOLLARS!

Cindy Costanza: AIEEEE! HELP! I’M MOPPING WITH MY SHIRT AS FAST AS I CAN BUT I CAN’T HOLD IT. SHE’S BREAKING UP…. SHE’S BREAKING UP!

Tim Costanza: FOR CRIPE’S SAKE – IT’S A FLOOD! COREY WHERE ARE THOSE TOWELS! CINDY, WHAT’S BREAKING UP?

Cindy Costanza: MY LAST NERVE – AIEEE!

Three days later the floor and walls would be dry and the final ornament would be hung (by Connor-his sole contribution. Smart lad.) The ornament boxes, crates, and lugs would all be shoved into the Avalanche Closet, anxiously waiting to tumble out again in a few weeks, refilled, and shoehorned back in. The flashing tree is garish to be sure but you get used to it; and I rotated it just right so that the big hole shows only if you’re sitting in the adjacent chair – Cindy’s favorite reading spot. Cindy’s frayed nerve healed (sort of) just in time to herd us all on a congestion-packed foray to the mall. Yesss, the real Costanzas would be proud.

“What are you talk-hak-kaf-ing about,” I replied. “I can’t smell a thing. And I can’t believe your hyper-sensitive nose can either. Hey, don’t run away when I’m trying to have a conversation with you.”

“I’m not running away. I’m standing right here, five feet from your face. You might be able to see me if the smoke wasn’t so thick.”

“Well, a small puff happened to escape when I put in a log just now. Probably clear –hak- up in a few –kaf- minutes.”

Cindy didn’t think so and went around throwing open every door and window in the place.

“You’re letting all the warm air out!” I cried. “And the arctic air in. You’re defeating the whole purpose of the wood stove!”

“Right now I wouldn’t care if a blizzard blew through as long as it brought some fresh air with it. This place smells like an ashtray.”

At that point I knew I had a problem. My gal is warm-blooded if ever a gal was. Any temperature below 74 sends her into a shiver. Which really gripes me because winters here in the northwest get cold. And to maintain 74-degrees in our house takes tremendous energy. Energy costs money, which, by my nature, I am generally opposed to spending.

As a last-ditch effort I tried the old martyr ploy. “You, know,” I said, “if you can’t take a little smoke, maybe we shouldn’t use the wood stove at all. Heck, the old ranch house I grew up in didn’t even have a heater, nor insulation. In the winter, we just put on an extra pair of socks. Yeah it was cold, but we were tough. You get used to icicles and numbness after a while.”

She didn’t flinch and countered, “The house I grew up in had a heater and my parents weren’t too cheap to use it. Our house here, it has a heater too – hot water tubes in the floor that cost us a bundle to put in. The thermostat over there on the wall? It works. And I’m not afraid to crank it up!”

So much for that. She had me over a barrel. “Oh, all right,” I said. “I think I know why the stove is smoking. I noticed the other day that  I can’t see daylight through the pipe’s rain cap any more. Maybe it’s plugged a little. Probably time I cleaned it.”

I didn’t bother telling her that a properly maintained chimney should be cleaned yearly. Nor did I reminder her of my buddy, Ole VanStruedel, who, like me, neglected to clean his wood stove pipe one year. A layer of creosote, which is combustible, built up in it. He came home one day to a pile of smoldering ash where his house used to be. Chimney fire. But worse than Ole, I’d neglected to clean our stovepipe each of the past five years.

“You?” Cindy asked. “You’re going to climb up our steep roof? Hon, that’s dangerous. Why don’t you call a chimney sweep?”

Yes! The martyr points were rolling in.

“Ohhh no,” I said in a tone intended to elicit maximum guilt, “that would cost money and we’re in this recession. No, I’ll just rig a ladder and do it myself.”

I held firm to her crying and blubbering about how I might fall off and break my back and not be able to work or throw the baseball to our sons any more. Women can be such worry warts.

Saturday morning I walked onto the deck and looked up the 12 and 12 pitched roof at the stovepipe. (12 and 12 pitch equals 45-degrees. To convert, you take the inverse tangent of the quotient. Tan^-1(12/12) = 45-degrees. Cool.) I’ve done some roofing in my day, but never anything over 5 and 12 (22-degrees). You can walk reasonably safely on a 5 and 12 roof but at the end of the day your ankles hurt. At 6 and 12, walking gets dicey. At 10 and 12, you crawl, all the while praying there are no rogue patches of sawdust or other lubricants on the surface. If you slip on a 10 and 12 roof you might be able to stop yourself before tumbling over the edge, but probably not. And at 12 and 12, you’re a water drop on a tilted, red-hot skillet.

The pipe exited the roof near the peak, three stories above ground level. But, should a highly improbable fall occur, I wouldn’t plummet the entire three stories. The deck, about half-way down, would stop me. Broken arms, maybe a leg, at the worst. The risk was acceptable so the question became how to rig a ladder.

After a good deal of head scratching, I devised the perfect plan. I have some 6-foot-long, 2×12 ramps I use to load motorcycles and quads into pick up trucks. They have 2×4 cleats, kind of like ladder rungs  nailed at about 15-inch spacing on the down side. Laid upside down on the roof, they would make a perfect ladder.

The next problem was how to secure the low end of my make-shift ladder to the roof. I didn’t trust the rain gutter to hold it and I didn’t’ want to pound nails through the shingles, so I had to get creative. As luck would have it, the stove pipe is located directly between two dormers. I was able to rig a 2×4 cross-brace between them which acted as a base on which my ladder rig would bear. Of course I used screws into the trim, not nails. Nails can pull out.

After about an hour I had my ramp in place. Unfortunately, it reached a good two-feet shy of the pipe. The pipe projects up about five-feet vertically, so if I were to stand on the top rung of my ramp, not only would I have to lean considerably to even touch the pipe, with the slope factored in, I’d still be a foot too low to really get at the rain cap. This meant I needed to rig up a second ramp.

But there was a slight problem. My first ramp pointed directly at the pipe so if I were to continue with the second, it, being 6-feet long, would crash into the pipe. A dumb person might think, just cut the 2^nd ramp to fit.  Pshaw. No respectable shade-tree carpenter cuts a perfectly good ramp. No, I would instead rig an offset.

Down came the first ramp and to the garage I went. Half-an-hour later I emerged, smiling, carrying the first ramp with an offset 2×4 projecting 12-inches sideways from the top rung. The second ramp would bear on this and extend 3-feet past the pipe. Of course, being a structural engineer, I made sure the offset was plenty strong. And I also braced the bottom of the first ramp to the dormer to keep it from slipping sideways from the applied moment (a torquing force) resulting from my weight on the offset. How would a non-engineer ever know to do that?  I mused. A guy could get hurt if he didn’t know what he was doing.

Another half-hour later I had the rig on the roof, ready to go. Carefully, slowly, I crept up onto the lower ramp. Checking my jugular vein, I was relieved that the earthquake I thought I’d felt was only my heart. In a crawling attitude, I inched my way up. After one rung it became apparent that my 20-year-old ramp was warped. Badly. As I eased forward, it teetered alarmingly under my weight. I fought back visions of myself tumbling, the contents of my tool belt spraying over the countryside, down the roof.

I performed a quick statics calculation concerning friction and stability of a platform resting on a 45-degree-angled plane. At what angle would the platform become unstable and launch backward? Why did my 175 pounds feel like it was poised to fling into space in violation of gravity? How high would I bounce when I hit the deck?

I heard a door open and then footsteps. Gaaa, my wife! Suddenly, shrieking and crying filled the air.

“What in the heck are you doing?” She asked calmly, shielding the sun with a hand.

“Oh, not much,” I said, striving valiantly to conceal my mounting terror. “Just on my way up the roof to clean the rain cap.”

“Oh. What’s with all the shrieking and crying? You could lose your balance.”

“That? Shucks… just crowing about how exhilarating it is to be on top of the world!”

“Unh, okay. But be careful, hunh? The boys still need someone to throw BP to them, ha ha. And also, you wouldn’t want to encourage those birds up there.”

I craned my neck upward. A couple of dark shapes plied circles in the sky directly over me. Buzzards! Cripes! “Yeah, ha ha. Don’t worry – I’m good.”

End of Part 1.

I’m an engineer, so by rights am allowed certain dorky indulgences. Two examples include my pocket protector – a mid-80’s model, white plastic, the blue ad logo long since worn away, with staples and tape holding it together. And my 1st generation Blackberry – the kind that is actually black and looks like a block of wood. I wear mine strapped to my belt on my right side because I’m left handed. My Blackberry is a kind of security blanket since my wife won’t allow me to wear my calculator that way any more.

I was at my 13-year-old son’s ballgame the other day. It was hot and I’d been dutifully drinking water. Around the 3^rd inning nature called, so to the port-a-potty I went. As I approached the lime green Ace In the Hole, located just out of play behind 1^st base, I was only half watching where I was going because my son was at bat and the other half of my attention was on him. I absently reached for the door and pulled. It had a little catch in the mechanism so I yanked harder and the door popped open. A piercing shriek followed by a loud, “JERK!” startled me. The door was ripped from my hand by the red-faced woman sitting inside. Somehow I’d not noticed that the “Occupied” icon was displayed.

“Sorry,” I blurted. A few moments later my son struck out and the door opened. The woman exited, took two steps and then squared to face me. “You know,” she seethed, “you really should pay attention to the Occupied icon before barging into one of these things. It’s bad enough for a woman to have to use one in the first place let alone being intruded upon by some lecher. I’d probably cuff you one if I weren’t married to you.”

“Gee, I said I was sorry, hon. By the way, Corey struck out.”

“Great,” she grumped and stomped off.

I stepped into the unit and was immediately intrigued by the sudden temperature gain. Outside it was 90-degrees and breezy. Inside it had to be 100-plus with not a wisp of air movement. I turned to the left toward the urinal as my ever-thinking technical mind processed thermodynamic theory in regard to this phenomenon. I unbuckled, trying my best not to let certain septic odors interrupt my absorbing train of thought.

It was then that disaster struck.

I began executing my mission when suddenly I felt a slight shifting of my belt and then a lightening of weight from my right hip. And then I heard a plastic-on-plastic collision followed by a liquidy kerplunk. Snapping my attention toward the sounds, I watched in horror as my Blackberry disappeared beneath the surface of the bluish-brown fluid in the hole.

I instinctively clamped down on my pee valve which closed with a mighty clang, or so it felt. I then silently cursed my wife. In her haste to rebuke me for an innocent gaffe, she had left the lid up. (I could go into a lengthy grouse on the topic of men vs. women and toilet seats but that might dilute the story at hand.) My Blackberry belt clasp apparently did not have a tight enough grip on my belt and had slipped through. The rig fell from my hip, bounced on the rim and caromed through the opening, perfectly obeying Newton’s Laws. I then cursed my left-handedness. Had I been right-handed my Blackberry would have been strapped to my left side and would have fallen benignly to the floor rather than into the turd tub.

Not one to panic, I paused for some analysis. There are two phases of port-a-potty use conditions, I thought. Phase 1 shall be called the pre-buildup phase. This is when the unit has been primed with blue solution but has not received sufficient deposits to constitute a buildup. Phase 2 shall be called the growing-mound phase. This occurs when an ample number of solid deposits have displaced and absorbed the initial blue solution. Phase 2 is characterized by a pyramidal-shaped heap; invariably the pinnacle being created by someone with dysentery.

The conditions in my case favored phase 1, with indications that phase 2 was not far behind. The question, of course, was should I fish or cut bait? Had it been phase 2, the answer would have been obvious: fish. Presumably, my Blackberry would have been perched on top of the pile and I could have gingerly plucked it free. A little wiping and all would have been fine. But, alas, I was jinxed with a phase 1.

How deep to the bottom? I bent over to take a closer look. Unfortunately, the evil liquor was so obscured with flotsam that my vision could not penetrate its depths.

It was then that a second disaster struck.

With no warning whatsoever my shirt pocket suddenly lightened. My hand instinctively groped for my falling pocket protector. I grasped air as my 25-year-old treasure and the pens and pencils it contained deftly made a perfect swish through the hoop and landed, plop, in the murky juice.

I’m not sure whether I felt more sorry for myself or the youngster who unsuspectingly opened the door at that moment and witnessed a grown man, sweating like a Phoenix brick layer, his pants down, bent over and reaching into a place where even youngsters know never to tread. Apparently I had failed to lock the door.

Had it been just the Blackberry I probably would have let it lie. But that pocket protector had been with me since grad school – through two marriages, two kids, three or four businesses – that kind of sentimental value doesn’t come along every day and it certainly can’t be purchased at the Sprint Store. So plunge I did and was lucky enough to grab both items in the first attempt. It turns out the liquid was only about three-inches deep. The kid at the door blanched, slammed it back shut, and ran away fearing for his life.

It’s now a few weeks later and I have a new Blackberry. I’m not sure whether the blue solution or something else did in the original. No matter, I was due for a new one anyway I suppose. I am happy to report  that my pocket protector is still proudly adorning my shirt pocket every day. I cleaned and sanitized it, of course. It’s been through so much, well, let me put it this way, neither Timex (It takes a licking…) nor Samsonite (gorilla-proof) have a thing on this future family heirloom. It is my dork badge, my good luck charm, my Ace In the Hole if you will.