Possumblog

Jack Bauer Update!

I have no idea. Last night was full of distractions--first of all, Mike the Aging Hippie ^TM called right after supper to let me know he'd once again been forced to change jobs. He's found himself at a big corporate place out in the 'burbs, so I predict it won't be long before they wonder what on earth they've done. Also found out he's gone and gotten himself a new Suzuki of the insanely fast variety. He's now become one of those silly young kids out drag racing on John Rogers Drive every night. Best I can tell, he would be the oldest guy in the group by a good twenty years, as well as the the most pigmentally-challenged. He has a way of standing out, that's for sure.

In the middle of that, Oldest would not hush her incessant yelling from the bedroom upstairs that she needed help with something, and the kids kept wandering through the kitchen while I was trying to talk, and Reba kept telling them in her loud outdoor voice to be quiet because I was on the phone, and then later in the conversation, Rebecca brought me one of Catherine's little porcelain dolls whose leg had been accidentally broken. Probably owed money to someone.

Add to this that our downstairs furnace doesn't work right (still, after several years) and I got the bright idea that it must be the thermostat. So I was going to go to the hardware store and get a cheapy one to test the thing, so after I got through talking to Mike, Etc., it was only a few minutes to showtime, and then I found out Oldest had managed to wait (yet again) to not do her homework until the last minute and needed a piece of posterboard while I was going to be out anyway. Jumped in the car and zoomed down to Marvin's and found that even the cheap old knob on the wall is just about as expensive as one of the nice thermostats, so I got a better one, then zipped over to CVS to pick up some paper, and got home JUST IN TIME for the show to start.

My plan? Put the television on the counter, and while I was ironing a shirt and a pair of pants for Jonathan--it seems that today he is supposed to give a demonstation of an Olympic sport, and he had been assigned figure skating, and rather than dress him up in spangles and bows, I figured his dark blue shirt and black pants would do for a costume, except they were wrinkled and needed to be ironed, thus my need to use the ironing board--anyway, while doing that, I would watch Jack blast away at bad guys. Or so I hoped.

The moment I started, the phone rang--it was for Reba. I went back to my ironing and wondering why no one in CTU will stand up to the chubby little hobbit in their midst, and then Reba came down and started excitedly talking about the food for the anniversary dinner. It had been her brother on the phone, and so she had to recite their entire conversation three times, and sometime in there Crazy First Lady Jean Smart got dressed and told Nixon he was evil (duh) and there was a whole lot of bad-guy-on-bad-guy hole shooting, and then Jack went and got some guy who was the guy who originally sold the nerve gas, and we're probably going to have the wrapped asparagus, and the roast beef rolls, and the cheese centerpiece, and with the spiral sliced ham, which is good hot or cold, that should be plenty, and Susan is going to have the flowers and the tablecloths all ready, and so then Crazy First Lady Jean Smart gets in the limo with the Russkies, and poor crazed Rudy starts screaming and being all girly and pouty and throws Gray Haired Boss in the holding cell, even though we all know that anyone can just walk out of any of those CTU holding cells if they have a toothpick, and speaking of toothpicks, the cheese and fruit centerpiece really would take the place of one of the flower arrangements since it is so tall, and DERN this shirt's sleeves are so wrinkled that I'm ironing new wrinkles into the bottom of the sleeve.

Reba finally went back upstairs, and after much more ironing, I finally had enough and put that stuff away and figured I'd start on the thermostat. Somewhere in there, Jack was running and shooting, and there were more black helicopters, and I got right in the middle of taking the thermostat off the wall when Rebecca came down and said that Ashley and Mommy were having trouble with the computer because the printer was printing out the wrong things or something equally improbably, and so after a second or twelve of doing a Ralph Kramden slow-burn, I calmly told her that I couldn't come right now because I was right in the middle of tearing apart the entire downstairs in an attempt to get the furnace working so Rebecca's mommy would quit complaining about it always being cold downstairs, and that I would be upstairs in about five minutes after I put everything back the way it was before and deal with the thermostat later.

Rudy finally got fed up with everyone hiding stuff from him and talking on cell phones to people across the room, so he instituted a Protocol 23, Martinet Micromanagement Plot Device, where everyone sends him everything so he can ignore it and try to get back his key card from Courtney Love's boyfriend.

Got upstairs during the scenes from next week, which include Jack shouting, and Brokenose Girl looking longingly at him, and found out that the computer was no longer broken or not working or whatever it was doing, meaning that I had really no reason to have been stopped from my thermostat changing-out in the first place, and probably could have finished it with no trouble.

SO, I suppose I'll just have to watch next week, because I have no idea if this week's show was really any good or not.

Posted by Terry Oglesby at February 21, 2006 09:38 AM