Family - The Ties That Bind...And Gag! Read Online Free PDF Page B

room gets too hot, as it will, what do you do?”
    “Open a window,” yawned our daughter.
    They listened intently to his “Daddy is not a rich man” speech and dutifully followed him to the meter so they could watch the little dials twirl around. He told them how much we were charged for each little twirl. I used to feel sorry for him as I watched from a distance, his lips forming the word “bankruptcy.”
    Finally, one day, one of them said, “Wait a minute. Are you telling us that the colder it gets outside, the harder the furnace has to work to keep it warm inside? And that every time it clicks on it costs money?”
    My husband nodded excitedly.
    “Then you should have thought of that before you had three children,” he said.
    At times our home has been mistaken for a nuclear power plant, a site of the premiere of a major motion picture, a night baseball game, or Mardi Gras in progress.
    Despite his lectures on how a light switch works, we still have the only “lighthouse” offering a perpetual beacon (or sailors adrift in the Arizona desert.
    I remember the night we arrived home to find thirty-two lights burning. My husband rousted the family out of bed and ordered them to the dining room, where he shuffled through a stack of papers and figures.
    “Did you know,” he asked, ”that it costs each of us $135 a year to take a hot bath and that the washer costs $3.50 a year to operate?"
    “Are you suggesting that we all bathe together in the soak cycle of the washer?” yawned one of the kids.
    “I am suggesting that we all take a good look at what is going on around here. A shower is a lot cheaper and uses less water.” They thanked him for sharing and got up to leave.
    “Sit!” he ordered. “Awaterbed costs $4.35 a year to heat, while an electric blanket costs only $2.20.”
    “Great,” said our son, “why don't we all stand under a hair dryer to keep warm. That only costs $1.75 a year.”
    “For a nickel more,” said another son, “we could use the vacuum sweeper to suck the dirt off.”
    My husband stomped off in defeat.
    “Your father has a point,” I told the kids. “After all, he pays the bills and all he gets back for it is waste. From here on in, we stop and think about how much it costs in electricity before we turn on a single appliance.”
    When my husband came to breakfast, he said, “Where's the coffee?”
    “I made it in the popcorn popper,” said our daughter. “It only costs 40 cents to run, while the electric coffee maker costs $5.40.”
    One son didn't shave because it cost 40 cents a year.
    The other one was late for work because the clock ($1.03) was unplugged, and a strange smell was coming from the freezer because it cost $109.45 a year to keep it plugged in.
    I offered him a piece of solar toast from the window sill, but he just kept walking toward the door.
    It was rather predictable that he would end up talking to himself.
     
    THE FAMILY THAT EATS TOGETHER ... GETS INDIGESTION
    Friday: 7 p.m.
    As Yogi Berra once said, “It was deja vu all over again.” One child was throwing plates on the table like a Greek dancer, and one was standing in front of the refrigerator with both doors parted like the Red Sea, whining, “There's nothing to eat.”
    He was joined by his brother, who said, “You don't know hunger until you're the last kid to leave home. Do you have any idea what I got when all of you left? Every container in the house had a stalk of wheat on it. There were imitation eggs, yogurt cultures multiplying and dividing in the refrigerator like a bad Japanese film, and Civil War milk— blue or gray.”
    “Poor baby,” said his sister. “Tell us again how you drove a car to school at sixteen just to keep the battery charged lor the old folks.”
    “They are so health conscious,” he continued, “they actually bought sugar-free laxatives. Can you believe that! What did they think I was going to do with it? Pour it over ice cream and pig out?”
    “Get out