Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences: The Views of a Guy Who Wants to Know, “What Are Pinewood Derby Cars Made Out Of?”

These mini-essays, originally newspaper columns written for Shaw Media, describe a life of survival: surviving diapers, Pinewood Derby races, and middle school band concerts. Rick Holinger regularly throws his pseudonymous nuclear family under the bus because his children were too young to object, and his wife enjoyed the extra, though paltry, income. No one, however, sacrificed more than the author. Who else would expose his fatherly and husbandly incompetence by revealing in print the time he burned out the front lawn with First Apply Spring Fertilizer? Or wrinkling his wife’s favorite wrinkle-free pants by leaving them untended and cooling in the dryer for five days? Or forgetting to screw in their inboard-outboard’s drain plug before spring launch, thus owning a bathtub rather than boat?It takes a pillage to raze a family. But Holinger survived. Barely. This book tells how.