I was a instructor for computer training class with senior citizens, and it was amazing. =P There was like 12 people that attend the class.

We put the "Pro" In Procasination!

The American Heritage Dictionary defines "procrastination" as "to put off doing something, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness, to postpone or delay needlessly." There's no picture to illustrate that definition, but if I can find a really flattering picture of my family, I'm going to send it in and see whether they'd consider including it.

We're the type of people who change light bulbs only when we get to where we're stumbling around in the dark. We wait to buy coffee till we're so desperate that we're scrambling to find and consolidate those little packets we've stolen from hotels. Around our house, we pretty much never do anything until it positively, absolutely has to be done and there are no more excuses. Then we wait a couple of weeks after that.

The place on which this takes the greatest toll is the kitchen. Our refrigerator developed some sort of leak, with water slowly dripping down the inside of the back wall and collecting as a big block of ice in the bottom. Then, when the block got too big, water began slowly dripping out the front of the fridge and now collects in a pool underneath it.

This wouldn't be a problem, except for the fact that we installed a click-together "floating wood floor," which is made out of particleboard with a photograph of wood on top of it. When it gets wet, the particleboard swells and twists, totally destroying the look. I find it ironic that the floor isn't really wood, but in our house, at least, it is really floating.

Because of our lifelong devotion to the art of procrastination, we've been living with this problem for over a year. Instead of calling a repairman, I ignore the situation until I notice that water has begun collecting again, and then wait a couple of days until I have enough time to clean it up. As a result, the floor below our fridge is no longer a smooth, shiny, reasonable facsimile of wood, but instead is a twisted, spongy mess.

Of course, that only destroyed half of the kitchen floor. The other half was destroyed by our leaky old dishwasher that long ago gave up any effort to actually clean dishes, and now only makes groaning noises, emits clouds of steam and drips hot soapy water all over the floor. Watch carefully as we put in dirty dishes, close the door and press a button! An hour later, we open the door and our dishes are — voila! — dirtier than they were when they went in. It's like some kind of perverse magic trick.

The dripping from the dishwasher has worked its way under the floating floor to the point where it almost, but not quite, meets the destruction from the fridge.

Any sane person would 1) call a refrigerator repairman, 2) buy a new dishwasher, and 3) install a new floor before our kitchen floor crumbles and we're eating breakfast in the basement laundry room. I've checked everywhere around my house and can't find a single sane person, so we continue on in this way, our kitchen floorboards becoming almost as twisted as our logic.

This continued until one weekend when I was out barbecuing while my wife cleaned the kitchen. Suddenly I heard a huge crash. I ran into the house to find that the top rack of the dishwasher had come loose, one of the rollers snapped clean in two. Broken glasses, virtually all of the glassware we owned, were spread across the floor. My wife looked up at me, about ready to cry.

"That's it!" she cried. "We're getting a new dishwasher! Today!"

That was a month and a half ago. Since then, by relying on the principles of procrastination, we've gotten along using only the bottom shelf of the dishwasher. This is easier than you might think, because, as you might understand by now, we never got around to buying new glasses.

Every time I start to get around to thinking about it, I sit back, have a nice cold coffee-cup of beer and promise myself that we will do something about it.

Next week.

For sure.

A Brain Swarm Leads to a Barn Swarm

Over the last eight months, I've spent most of my spare time out in our garage at the back of our lot. No, I wasn't in trouble (at least not very often), and no, I wasn't out there secretly drinking (at least not all the time). I was working to turn our garage into a home office.

I didn't set out to do anything fancy. I just wanted to put in some French doors, slap up wallboard and maybe install a gas heater. I'd bring home a few 2x4s each weekend, put up a few feet of wall and then knock off with a beer or two. Everything was going along pretty well, both 2x4-wise and beer-wise, until my wife had a friend over to see the project. The friend took one look at the huge old barn door we were pulling off the front of the garage, weighing around 300 pounds, and her eyes went wide.

Why not, she said, use the door inside the garage? She'd seen a picture in a magazine where someone had refinished an old barn door and reused it as a design element inside. My wife immediately agreed.

I stared at them for a moment, then at the huge, old, paint-encrusted, broken-down door I'd been planning to break into pieces and dump. Design element! We didn't need any stinkin' design elements! I had a hammer in my hand, and if had I bugged out my eyes and ran them off, I probably could have ended the conversation right then and there.

I wasn't fast enough. They were already walking around trying to figure out where the door would look best. My wife thought it ought to hang on an overhead track, a perfect door between the front and back rooms. I stood there shaking my head. I never realized there was going to be a front and back room, let alone a door between them.

Deep down, I knew it would do no good to argue. My wife is always looking for stuff other people would discard and trying to save it. That's why we have a coffee table that used to be a workman's chest. It's why we have a flea-bitten dog from the pound. Heck, it's why we're married at all.

My wife spent the next eight weekends out on the driveway, using up can after can of industrial paint stripper, peeling away 80 years worth of hardened paint. Three or four times, she almost gave up — at my suggestion. Finally, after she'd gone through three scrapers, 27 dust masks and enough stripper to remove the paint from the Brooklyn Bridge, it was ready.

She traveled hours to a store that sold barn hardware to get a big metal track so we could hang the 300-pound door from the ceiling, and I spent countless hours out in the garage trying to get the old barn door to hang so it would move across the rails smoothly.

When the big old slab of a door was finally in place, I had to admit, almost proudly, that it looked like a “I was searching for the right word” a design element! I was proud of myself for thinking of it, and almost — almost — forgave my wife for trying to talk me out of it.

The door worked beautifully all winter and served to separate the front room from an unheated storage room in the back. Then, however, the warm spring weather came.

One night last week I was sitting on the couch, aimlessly flipping TV channels, when the phone rang. It was one of my daughters calling from the office.

"Daddy," she said, "we're out in the office. Mommy wants you to come out here. Now!" She hung up before I could tell her I was in the middle of something important. I got off the couch and went outside.

By the time I reached the office, I found my wife and daughter in the middle of the room, pointing and hopping up and down on their toes the way they do when I need to squash a bug. I sighed and looked around for a magazine. As I started to roll up a copy of People, my wife shook her head. A magazine, she said, wasn't gonna do it. I looked over to where she was pointing.

My wife, it turns out, was not the only one attracted to a decaying old barn door. It was covered with a swarm of crawling, falling and flying termites. They were pouring in and out of the cracks so fast it looked like termite Grand Central. I suddenly remembered something important.

It was all her idea.