OK, I blew it on the Acuvue contact lens $30 rebate offer. But the good folks at National All Brands rebate did send me back my 12 contact lens box tops. And let me tell you, there is nothing that fires my jets more than opening a big envelope from El Paso, Texas, that I'm not expecting and finding inside it a dozen mangled box tops.

Just for the record, I am the one who mangled the box tops, not the rebate minions. You'll sooner find a tasteful skirt on Paris Hilton than you will sharp scissors in my office.

In any case, never have so many people wasted so much time for so little money.

As far as I can tell, the big winner -- and I use that term very loosely -- was the United States Postal Service. They haven't lucked out like this since their lawyers used a cease and desist letter to convince the rock band, the Postal Service, to promote good old-fashioned mail and perform at a conference of USPS executives in exchange for the use of the name.

Just for the record, some of the members of the band, the Postal Service, are also in the band, Death Cab for Cutie. It's a myth, however, that Postal Service changed its name to Death Cab for Cutie because USPS attorneys demanded that. You can bet that if a group of lawyers got together in a room and tried to come up with a name for a rock band, it sure wouldn't be Death Cab for Cutie.

So far the U.S. Postal service has made $5.29 -- $3.64 from me when I mailed the box tops to the rebate center, including the cardboard mailer, and $1.65 from National All Brands when they sent them back. Then, of course, there is all the labor ... and there was a lot on my end.

It all began in early February, when I opened my new, six-month supply of contact lenses and there was a rebate form. I would get $30 if I sent in the 12 box tops, a copy of my eye exam invoice, and the receipt for the lenses. Now $30 doesn't go as far as it used to: To wit, it represents about two-thirds of a tank of gas for my car, or a Diet Coke, mac and cheese, and some completely inedible coleslaw at the restaurant at the Delta terminal at JFK. I don't mean to malign the coleslaw, but I was so hungry when I ordered it I was practically delirious. And still I couldn't finish it. First of all, it was hot like sauerkraut instead of cold like coleslaw; second, it was made with enough vinegar to clean a skyscraper's worth of windows.

But $30 for box tops? I'm in. So, I cut apart all 12 boxes, put the contact lenses in 12 carefully labeled sandwich bags, photocopied the receipt for the lenses and my eye exam, bought a mailer at the post office, and sent the package to Texas. Altogether, the process took about an hour.

The problem? I didn't read the fine print -- though, in all fairness, it was simply because I was inept, not because I couldn't read the tiny letters with my new contact lenses. It seems that I was supposed to have purchased my new lenses within 90 days of my eye exam. Nope. I wasn't even close. And so the good folks at National All Brands invited me to resubmit my corrected order -- which I would be happy to do, except for the fact that I haven't mastered the art of going back in time so I could purchase those 12 boxes of lenses within 90 days of my eye exam. Details, I know.

Still, it was a pleasant surprise to get those mangled box tops back. It wasn't quite the same as $30. But it's always nice to get mail.

(This column originally appeared inthe Burlington Free Press on April 6, 2008.)

Here is one way to have a baby: Go to the hospital and then get sent home because your labor seems to be in such an early stage. Encourage your husband (or boyfriend or partner) to take a nap. Then retreat to the bathroom, watch your water break, and in 10 minutes deliver a beautiful baby girl. When you have swaddled your baby in your arms, wake your husband and return to the hospital.

This is, more or less, how 20-year-old Gemma McSheffrey had her baby, Paige, last month in England. Oh, wait. I did leave out one small part of the story. After her water broke in the bathroom, she screamed bloody murder for her boyfriend, 19-year-old Antony Probets, but he had fallen into a deep slumber in the bedroom at the far end of the corridor and didn't hear her. In all fairness to Probets, when he did wake up -- and this is a quote from the new mom -- "He ran around like a headless chicken ringing the ambulance."

It was over 14 years ago that my wife gave birth to our daughter was born, but this is pretty much how my wife's labor went, too, except that her labor lasted 22 hours instead of 10 minutes. Details, I know. But also just like McSheffrey and Probets, we went to Fletcher Allen Health Care earlier than they wanted, about 10 o'clock in the evening, and so they suggested we head home for a while. Since we live almost an hour from the hospital, and since women in my wife's family historically have labors the length of a sitcom, we thought we should remain close by and merely retreated to a motel on Williston Road. There my wife seriously contemplated delivering the baby in the bathroom -- or, since it seemed easier at the time, vomiting up every single one of her internal organs. Hoping to induce labor, we had dined on Mexican food that evening.

We returned to the hospital about 4 in the morning, and this time they said we could stick around. We figured our baby would arrive before breakfast. Instead, she emerged just after dinner.

I should note that if our daughter had been born the night before, when we first arrived at Fletcher Allen, she would not have gone through life sharing the same birthday as her grandfather. Clearly this is something she wanted, which explains why she didn't arrive until it was not merely the next day in Vermont, but was in fact the next day on every corner of the globe.

Birth is, of course, a messy business. A messy but beautiful business. I can't imagine sleeping through the birth of my daughter. OK, I can -- but I would have missed something spectacular and I would have been in the doghouse for ... well, forever. As I recall, about 5 in the morning I forgot that I was not supposed to drink coffee while my wife was in labor. Coffee breath in those hours was a capital offense. In any case, I had a little java to ensure I remained vertical.

"You find this so boring you need coffee?" my wife asked me. "My labor makes you SLEEPY?" Trust me, if I had dozed off I would not have been writing what purports to be a humor column for the last 16 years.

Still, the beauty of birth far outweighs the pain and the exhaustion and the mess. At least I think it does. I'm not the business end of the equation, so I probably shouldn't weigh in on pain, exhaustion and mess. Moreover, I always got a little queasy when the labor and delivery room nurses would chortle happily about bloody show.

My point? My heart goes out to Probets for sleeping through the arrival of baby Paige. He missed something amazing. I'd wager his atonement is going to involve sleeping late a lot for the next decade and a half -- though it will be his wife, Gemma, getting all that shut-eye this time, not him, because he will be in the kitchen making her breakfast in bed.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on Sunday, April 13, 2008.)

A few years ago I expressed my concern that telephones were creeping into hotel bathrooms. I honestly didn't think that the telephone-toilet tandem might be the end of Western Civilization, but this was still a level of multitasking that I found a little disturbing -- and I am pretty rabid when it comes to multitasking. If I could answer e-mails while sleeping, I would. Recently when I asked a hotel concierge about BMs (bathroom multitaskers), he said the phones were there in the event someone slipped in the tub.

Yeah, right. That's why the telephones are side by side with the toilet paper. Personally, I'd have to have blood gushing from my eyeballs like a fire hose before I would crawl across the bathroom tile and touch a telephone next to a toilet.

In any case, I was mistaken: We might have reached a point in which Western Civilization is indeed in jeopardy, and it really did begin, in my opinion, with the telephone by the toilet. I am referring to the way men are now making serious business deals and having important conversations while staring at the wall above the urinal as they are ... you know. Because of such technologies as the Jabra wireless headset, men are now free to multitask in the men's room. Women, for all I know, are doing the same things inside ladies' room stalls, but I have not been inside a ladies' room since my daughter was 5, and that was back in the Mesozoic period when cell phones were massive, ungainly things at least the size of a Twinkie two-pack. But I can certainly speak for men. And some men are multitasking where no man has gone before.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that we should be slowing down and doing one thing -- such as No. 1 -- at a time. The world has changed, and we need to be multitasking to survive. But I almost murdered a man at an airport bathroom urinal last month. He had a bladder the size of a camel's, and he was (apparently) trying to close energy credit deals. I wanted to tap him on the shoulder and say, "I have two syllables for you, buddy: En. Ron." I know a lot about that industry now.

I shudder to think of where this trend is going. It's not merely the reality that we are now punctuating business deals with the whoosh of a toilet flush instead of a good old-fashioned handshake; it's not even the fact that I wouldn't want to shake most of those people's hands. It's my sense that we are multitasking so much that we are losing those last moments when we are doing nothing but thinking. Reflecting. Contemplating.

It wasn't all that long ago that when we were alone in our automobiles, we were incommunicado. No one could call us, and we could call no one. We might listen to the radio or audio books or music (8-track tapes, then cassette tapes, then compact discs), but we might also be motoring along in silence, with the opportunity to allow our thoughts to wander. New ideas would have the chance to germinate and put down roots. No more. It's my own fault, but because there is now the option to use a hands-free phone in the car, I will, and the car is no longer a sanctuary for thought. It's a conference room.

And now bathrooms have been commandeered, too -- though I hasten to add, I will never succumb. Good heavens, I'm so uptight that my wife and daughter still have no idea that I ever do anything in the bathroom other than bathe.

Still, I fear it's a losing battle. It's only a matter of time before the bathroom replaces the boardroom, and absolutely nothing is sacred.

(This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on April 20, 2008.)

Next Sunday afternoon, roughly 1,500 people will be walking the streets of Burlington. That's more people than live in 147 of Vermont's 253 towns and gores. It would be as if every single person who lived in my village, Lincoln (1,254 residents), Goshen (226 people), Avril (8) and Buel's Gore (12) decided to march en masse through the streets. And you don't have to be a meteorologist to know that the odds are good the sky will be blue ... or, at least, that it won't snow.

After all, it never snows on the annual COTS Walk. At least it hasn't yet, and next Sunday will be the 19th time that people with homes have walked in support of those who don't. It is a spectacular cause, a walk-a-thon to raise money for the Committee on Temporary Shelter, and more years than not the weather has cooperated. It's a three-mile walk through the city that begins and ends at Battery Park, and passes the COTS 36-bed shelter for adults, the day station that's open 9-to-5, the family shelters (sadly, there is the need for two), and the buildings (again, plural) where COTS has single-room-occupancy apartments. These aren't the landmarks we usually think of when we conjure the Queen City in our minds, but they are testimonies both to the reality that there are homeless among us, and there are people who are trying to find them shelter. Last May, the COTS Walk raised $175,460.

And once again this year, there will also be free Ben & Jerry's ice cream awaiting the walkers when they finish the circuit. (One year there was free cheese. Vermonters like cheese, but after a three-mile walk in the sun, we do prefer ice cream.)

The COTS Walk is always filled with groups from churches and synagogues, Realtors, and students. Lots of students, especially from Rice Memorial High School and Burlington High School. Dan Hagan, a 29-year-old history and economics teacher at BHS and the coordinator of the school's COTS Walk volunteers, expects at least 80 BHS students to be part of the walk a week from today.

"We have the whole spectrum of students participating," Hagan said. "We'll have kids who come from tremendous affluence walking side by side with recent refugees who have lost almost everything." Last year, BHS students raised $5,000 for COTS.

Hagan has been coordinating the school's connection with the COTS Walk since he left a high-powered (and even higher-salaried) job as a Washington, D.C.-based management consultant in 2002 to teach at his high school alma mater. He said the kids don't participate in the walk for the Ben & Jerry's -- though he did admit that the year COTS had cheese instead of ice cream, "there was a minor rebellion among the do-gooders." He said they're involved because "they have pride in their school and their city, and they have a sense of the social mission."

These are students like Travis Connolly, a sophomore at BHS who is assisting Hagan coordinate the school's efforts by logging in the walker's names and information on spreadsheets, and will be walking next Sunday as well. "My family has close friends who are struggling," he explained. "And I've seen people go through hard times, so I wanted to help."

Hagan believes that a lot of the students have Connolly's commitment. "Some of the (pledge) envelopes I get back have one check from the walker's parents. But others are completely ratty and filled with dollar bills and change and lots of small checks. These are kids who worked hard and were really dedicated."

There is still plenty of time to sign up for the COTS Walk, get your pledges, and earn your ice cream (no cheese, they promise). Simply visit www.cotsonline.org or call 864-7402.

(This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on April 27, 2008.)