Love Punch & Other Collected Columns. Rob Hiaasen

homeowners experience between a house with power and a house without due to a storm, or whatever. In my house in winter, it always feels like the power is out.

      I must be saving a lot of dough and energy, which are fine, upstanding goals.

      Still, one is alarmed when the family Labrador—a breed genetically crafted for frigid temps—himself dons one of my old fleece jackets from Land’s End. He’s trying to tell us something. He’s trying to tell us that, unless we can compromise on ye olde thermostat, we have mere weeks to live.

      I’m not going to say thermostat wars are a gender thing, but I am going to say thermostat wars are a gender thing.

      The weaker sex (“males”) are generally more ursine and carry more body weight and hot air in general. One would think we wouldn’t mind it a little frosty in the home. Not so. We want lots of heat to sweat even more.

      The stronger sex (“females”) are generally more feline and carry less body weight and wear socks to bed during heat waves. One would think they need it toasty in winter. Not so. I don’t know why.

      All the others (“others”) must look at us and wonder, how do the sexes survive especially in winter?

      We don’t want to scuffle with Delaware because we were taught never to pick on someone smaller than us. And by “we,” I do mean “we”—just in case Delaware grew a lot last year and can now beat me up.

      But the new year brought news of Delaware’s first tourism branding campaign. The news caught our attention because Delaware isn’t known for embarking on marketing adventures. When you’re tagged “The First State,” where do you go from there?

      Turns out the folks who run Delaware (a Native American word meaning, roughly, “He Who Does Not Stop While Passing Through to Manhattan, which was Kind of Stolen from Us”) got to studying their state’s image. Essentially, what they found was their image can be broken down into two germane categories:

      1 Bland image.

      2 No image.

      So, they’ve come up with the slogan “Delaware: Endless Discoveries”—and they’re not talking about 1-95 tolls. Apparently, there’s endless things to see and do in Delaware. Who knew?

      Me, I’d hit the Bethany Beach angle hard.

      I’m not an Ocean City guy. I’m a Bethany Beach guy, always have been. And try as I might and do, I can’t will Bethany Beach to be in Maryland. Sure, I pretend I’m still in Maryland when I visit Bethany.

      But Delaware rightfully claims Bethany Beach, which is an endless discovery in itself and which should be in Maryland.

      It’s estimated some 45 percent of people who join a gym in January quit by February.

      Finally, there’s help for these people.

      Introducing the imaginary gym!

      Just imagine shedding those unsightly holiday pounds in a matter of imaginary months. Imagine what your imaginary friends will say! Am I imagining things or does he look 20 years younger?

      Here’s what you get with your annual imaginary gym membership:

      Imaginary treadmills, free weights, weight machines, ellipticals, recumbent stationary bikes.

      Sound mentally exhausting?

      You bet.

      But if you sign up today, you will also receive imaginary very attractive people in Under Armour working out next to you. During our open enrollment period, these imaginary very attractive people will compliment you on how you look 20 years younger.

      So, why be one of the 45 percent who quit real gyms in abject shame? Join an imaginary gym and just imagine how good you’ll look and feel in the new year.

      Remember, “No imaginary pain—no imaginary gain!”

      P.S. I just received an email from Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. encouraging customers during this cold spell to set their thermostats to 68 degrees or lower.

      Don’t talk to me about lower.

      Talking about the Sunday scaries on Mother’s Day

      May 13, 2018

      Sundays were born rough.

      Someone called them the “Sunday scaries,” which is perfect. Others just call them the Sunday blues—that diagnosis-defying, fog-like funk that comes in on tiger feet. If you know someone who is wild about Mondays, you can bet they get the Sunday scaries. Mondays are rescue missions.

      So, today, another Sunday, another Mother’s Day.

      I can’t pick up the phone to call my mother anymore. Poor, selfish me. But Sunday was our day to talk on the phone. She was in Florida; me in Maryland, as was our chronic geography.

      We had this running joke on Sundays. “You must have read my mind because I was thinking of you,” she would say. I’d say something back along those lines. We weren’t mind-readers. We were having the Sunday scaries.

      The world brims with lousy talkers and lousier listeners. My mother was neither.

      Like a neutral biographer, she stowed the chapters of my life in all their messy hope. She logged my job changes, relationship changes, address changes, mood changes, hair color changes—her youngest getting gray at 28?! Well, dear, it looks good on you, she would say.

      Why do fibs from mothers sound like Valentines? And because youngest children prefer the camera stay on them, I’d lament my gray-then-white hair through the decades.

      If she ever got tired of my whining, she never let on. Took some nerve to complain about hair color to a woman in a wheelchair who needed help in the bathroom. Even then she listened.

      I’d like to think she taught me to listen, but I have a long way to go on that front. Without her knowing, she did teach me how to ask questions. Hers were personal but somehow never prying—at least they didn’t feel that way after I left home. In middle and high school, I wanted no part of her questions.

      Because of her, I came to believe the only questions worth asking are personal. What a gift for someone to lay low in silence just to hear your answer. It’s how people begin to trust one another. It’s how people fall in love, you know. Might be how we stay in love.

      If you’re lucky, you don’t wait too damn long to grow up and appreciate your parents. (She would not have used damn and would have questioned my use of it. So, in her honor, a redo.)

      If you’re lucky, you don’t wait too long to grow up and appreciate your parents.

      So, she and I talked on the phone Sundays about personal things. As the years ticked off, our conversations dwindled. Then what happened—along with every awful thing that happens with an aging parent—is our talks ended. Too tiring, too much, too hard by the end.

      Before that, though, in all those years of talking and listening on those scary Sundays, she was there.

      In our make-believe meeting of the minds, I would call, and she would know exactly when I’d be calling. I’d wait to hear that opening invitation, that most personal of questions:

      “How are you, son?”

      ‘Momisms’—The A List

      May 10, 2015

      We asked around the room here at The Capital for any “Momisms”—sayings, advice, directives popularized on the home front by Moms.

      You know what we mean—chestnut chants that are embedded in our DNA only to be passed on to unsuspecting generations. There are regional, cultural and generational differences among Momisms, but the spirit sure feels universal.

      Here are a few favorites:

      “Put