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It’s fun being a dad – I get to answer all sorts of questions about life from those little growing minds.

For instance, my grade-schoolers asked about movie ratings. What does PG mean?
My answer: that means the movie is Pretty Good.

What about rated G?
That means it’s a Great movie.

What about R?
That’s a Rotten movie – it’s bad for you.

How about PG-13?
It’s Pretty Good if you’re at least 13 years old.

I still don’t like the discontinuity among the ratings. Why does one have an age associated with it and the others do not? Either they should all have ages, or none. Make it consistent.

Example:

The T there is for Teen, in case you were wondering.

If you’re playing a game of Battleship with younger kids, be sure they know the rules. Otherwise you may end up with this:

Note: for the red peg on the right, he called out “hit, miss, hit, hit” and his brother was confused.

It was about 25-30 degrees below freezing here yesterday, so I tried to make good use of the opportunities.

First: defrost the freezer

We have a standalone freezer in the basement. It holds extra food, which doesn’t stay extra long when there are four growing boys in the house. This freezer has needed defrosting for a few months. The main indicator of that was a dish that I wanted to get out of the freezer but I couldn’t – a thick layer of frost was securing it to the shelf.

But with the temperature outside the house being approximately the same as inside the freezer, I simply moved all the food outside, turned off the freezer, melted the ice, and the freezer was good as new again.

Second: teach the kids the dangers of frozen metal

The younger two boys were joking about licking a lamp post. I thought it would be good for them to see a demonstration, to quell their interest in the subject.

I gave Gamma a wet paper towel and brought them outside to the lamp post. I explained a little bit about what would happen and then I had him touch the post with the paper towel. He was surprised how quickly it stuck, which was the point of the demonstration. Usually you have to wait for things to freeze, and I didn’t want them thinking that about licking a flagpole, or touching any frozen metal with damp skin. It freezes immediately, so don’t think you’ll get away with anything.

I’ll assume they learned their lesson. In case they didn’t, I also warned them that it is very hard to yell for help when your tongue is being held hostage.

As the saying goes, when you have a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.

In my case, I got an angle grinder earlier this year, and now every problem looks like too much metal.

The angle grinder is much more fun than a hammer. The kids like seeing the showers of sparks.

So far, the angle grinder has helped me replace ball joints, brake pads, struts, and shocks. Plus it sharpened my mower blades.

Also note: the angle grinder will take care of a variety of problems with nails too.

I heard someone use the phrase “that took forever” and although it never bothered me before, now it does for some reason.

That reason is that if something really takes forever to complete, then it can’t have completed, therefore the phrase can’t be in the past tense.

Acceptable uses are “taking forever” or “takes forever”, but never “took forever”.

I like to do things, and I like to use the internet to help with instructions. Usually they’re helpful, sometimes they’re not. One gripe that I won’t go into here is that videos are not the answer to everything.

One thing that all my searches have in common though, is that a page from ehow.com will appear in the search results. You can save yourself a lot of time if you just always avoid visiting that website. I have made that mistake enough times that I know better now. And I am passing that knowledge on to you. Learn from my mistakes.

In case you’re wondering what the problem is, I will summarize every eHow page:

How to Fix Your Widget

Step 1: Get your replacement parts
Step 2: Get the broken widget, remove the screws holding it together, and open it up.
Step 3: Remove the bad parts
Step 4: Put in the new parts
Step 5: Close the widget and tighten the screws holding it together.

You’re done!

Lest you think I’m being generic and leaving out details for my example, I’m not. The eHow pages that I’ve read are all like that – they don’t provide any details on the specific procedure I was looking for.

I’m my cases, I’ve usually tried to do the obvious stuff and got stymied by something that was not cooperating and then I look to the internet for tips unique to the particular item.

Other websites are more helpful – Instructables, just about any forum-type site, etc. Those all provide useful details. But eHow and its cousin Wikihow and also Justanswer I have found to be useless.

I don’t remember what responses I had back when I was younger and people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up.

But now that I’m older and know better, let me tell you the answer I’d like to give:

Retired.

Aim high, kids.