The Ricker's garden has a technically advanced watering system.

I know this, because I installed it. Beneath the dirt, rocks, plants and grass, thousands of feet of drip hose and spaghetti hose lay burred, exactly three inches below the surface, while hundreds of drip heads and micro sprinklers are spread throughout the yard.

At the back of the house, he has two timers, each set to water the plants along one side of the house. You see, the Ricker's garden is so large that it requires two separate drip systems, either of which would rival the public works plumbing of a small town. In addition to the timers, each of the drip heads and micro sprinklers are perfectly calibrated to use the perfect amount of water. The sprinklers don't overspray. I know this, because I also calibrated all of this.

I spent an entire summer installing these drip lines, running them underground and underneath the decks, perfectly placing the hose so that only a few inches, if that, is visible. Every pot--more than 100--has at least one drip head; some have two or three. I even made dozens of wire "clips," or bent coat hangers that hold the drip head in the exact center of the pot.

The Ricker's goal was to replace his manual watering system, which involved hauling buckets of water around the entire house. The system worked (and still works) perfectly, though after just one summer, the Ricker decided that he preferred his old manual method to his advanced hydrological delivery system. So there I was, the very next summer, hauling buckets of water, two by two, to every pot around the house, watering plants despite the drip head in the center of each pot.

The Ricker likes the sandwich meat.

Thanksgiving at the Ricker's house comes with a few traditions of its own. First, it is understood that the majority of Christmas lights go up on Thursday and Friday. Second, the Ricker makes gravy from the giblets and feeds the turkey's organs to the cats. Third, dinner is served late, at his regular dinner time (the Ricker doesn't like to get off schedule). And finally, no one eats the sandwich meat.

What is the sandwich meat? It is those perfect, large slices of breast meat. The sandwich meat is all white and juicy. If anyone tries to eat the sandwich meat (even guests), the Ricker explains that he likes to save all the sandwich meat. Everyone eats the small, scrappy breast pieces and the dark meat. The sandwich meat stays on the plate, taunting you, until the Ricker puts it in a ziplock in the fridge.

What I've never understood is why the Ricker saves the sandwich meat, even though I've never seen him make a turkey sandwich. Why can't we enjoy the sandwich meat when it is fresh and hot, instead of reheating it the next day? And why does he insist on calling it "sandwich meat" even though he never makes sandwiches out of it?

The Ricker likes to save money while redecorating.

Usually he accomplishes this by adopting a style as it is on its way out, so he can get discounts. He held on to his 70s hippy/macrame look well into the early 1990s, when he adopted the Southwestern motif. His recent update to the black and purple spaceship look came well after the sleek lines of the 1980s popularized this look, but he tried to modernize the look by upgrading to stainless steel appliances (again, well after the start and peak of the trend, though he was closer on this one).

I'm sure the Ricker realized that stainless steel appliances are expensive. Besides, why replace a perfectly good refrigerator, dishwasher and oven (even though the oven is going on its fourth decade). Therefore, the Ricker fell back to his old tried-and-true renovation tools: velcro, spray paint and super glue. From a scrap yard, he bought cheap sheets of raw metal. I don't think he bought steel; it has to be something cheaper than that. He cut the metal into shape and velcroed it to the refrigerator. He did the same with the dishwasher and oven, although he used super glue on the oven.

Despite his careful planning, there was one problem: the black control pad on the dishwasher didn't match his new, sleek look. However, he simply spray painted a piece of cardboard silver and taped it into place on the top, using velcro on the bottom to keep the flap closed. He's very proud of his "remodel," but I know for a fact that Mrs. Ricker hates it. I think she wanted new appliances.

The Ricker likes a good scam.

Whether it's free car washes, free meals or free hotel rooms, the Ricker likes free things. He once told me he landscaped his first house in Denver using the "Midnight Nursery," which meant he dug up other people's landscaping in the middle of the night.

He stays at a certain hotel chain two or three times per year. I think he paid for a room once back in 1998, but he has been accruing free rooms for nearly 10 years by finding something wrong every trip.

However, I think he just pulled off his ultimate travel scam. He convinced a hotel/casino in New Mexico to put him and Mrs. Ricker up for three nights, including meals, a round of golf, a spa treatment and tickets to a B.B. King concert by telling the resort that he was planning on writing a travel article on his experience. Never mind that he has no professional writing experience, or that he has no contacts at newspapers or magazines, or that reputable magazines don't accept freelance articles where the writer was comped. I have no clue how he pulled this off, but he even pulled the state's office of tourism into his article on leaving the country in the land of enchantment (i.e., the shithole known as New Mexico).

(Side note: The whole plot was a surprise for Mrs. Ricker's birthday in May. She HATES surprises for her birthday, especially those that involve travel that she doesn't know about. Why the Ricker continues to surprise her every year, I don't know. And why she doesn't just expect to be surprised every year, I don't know. He really only has two or three tricks.)

The Ricker and Mrs. Ricker drove to New Mexico, with the Ricker telling her that they were leaving the country. Of course, not until they had arrived at the resort did he tell her what he meant: they were on an Indian reservation! It's not in the country! But it is in the country! Get it? The Ricker met with the resort's tourism director and communications director, and explained that while he didn't have any actual leads on publishing his article, he was confident he could sell it to a newspaper travel section. They liked his pitch so much that the resort even threw in some gambling money so my parents could pull some slots. If that's not buying a favorable story, I don't know what is. He even told them that some of his early poetry had been published in the New Yorker. When he told me that, I laughed. I mean, he showed me all of his old poetry, and some of it was pretty good, but don't you think he would have told me about this New Yorker thing earlier?

The Ricker enjoyed the property for three days, playing golf, going to the casino and visiting the pool (he needs his nightly hot tub, after all). Mrs. Ricker received a spa treatment, and they ate at all the resort's restaurants. On the last night of their stay, they saw B.B. King in the resort's auditorium.

This trip was three months ago, and I haven't heard the Ricker mention his article since. Let's say it together: S-C-A-M.

The Ricker has poor eyesight.

Maybe it's because he's old. Or maybe it's because he walks around in a dim house. Or maybe it's because he spent too much time staring at bright light bulbs as a kid (which would explain his aversion to light in his later years). Maybe it's because he wore rose-colored prescription sunglasses in the 1980s and 1990s, long before the harmful effects of rose-colored prescription glasses were known.

Because of his sight, the Ricker has developed some peculiar habits. Though he has a TV in nearly every room, he watches television mainly in two rooms: the living room and the bedroom. In the living room, he watches sports and other shows where he doesn't need to "see" the content, as he can barely see the TV, glasses or not.

When he wants to watch a movie or the news, he watches in the bedroom, where the TV is about three feet away. Once, he had some friends over for dinner and a movie; he made them watch the movie in the bedroom (which has no chairs) while he was laying in bed, because he was too lazy (or maybe just too inconsiderate) to go into the living room and wear his glasses, so everyone could sit.

The Ricker likes his house (and other's houses) dark.

Behind velcro, I think the Ricker's favorite invention is the dimmer switch, which he has installed on every possible light in the house. He even splices dimmers into lamps that have switches on the plugs. He dims the kitchen lights and the bathroom lights, which may explain his preference for raw steaks and mustache grooming. He calls this dimness "atmosphere."

No room can ever have enough atmosphere for the Ricker. He is infamous for unscrewing light bulbs in restaurants, or asking the waiter or manager to dim the lights to accommodate him. He complains that if they keep the restaurant bright, he'll leave and go elsewhere--and he has. This is one of the reasons I'm sure that waiters or chefs took some "creative liberties" in serving or preparing my food. He's also dimmed lights at friend's houses and cocktail parties. And don't leave him alone in a house with no dimmers. The Ricker just runs to the hardware store to buy dimmers and install them for you (as he did in my condo in Arizona).

The Ricker uses other lights to create this atmosphere at his house. In addition to the volume of Christmas lights (which are up from mid-November until early January), he keeps some permanent decorative lights up all year. The Ricker was an early adopter of the chili pepper lights, which stayed up all year all over the house, hung around doorways, on his fake cacti and on a 17-foot dead, dried century plant shoot. He also held on to his beloved chili pepper lights too long, though he finally replaced the old strands (which were probably a fire hazard anyway) with new strings of purple twinkle lights. When the purple lights started burning out due to constant (nightly) usage, he joined the 21st century with some small, round globe lights.

In fact, just the other day, the Ricker emailed me pictures of the globe lights reflecting on the window, as the sun was setting. Notice the light is also dimmed. This is a perfect Ricker trifecta of ambiance, and I received six different pictures showing the exact same thing from different angles.

The Ricker liked to give "life lectures."

He could also be surprised, as well. Once, in 1999, I borrowed his car (the '92; he didn't have the '99 yet because he never buys new cars) to pick up my then girlfriend (and current wife) from the airport. We had dated for about two months, but I had been home for the summer for one of those months, and she was flying up to visit. As I pulled out of Mo-town, I remembered that I needed to make an important purchase: condoms. Being from such a small town, there was no way I would buy condoms at a local store, so I stopped at a gas station on the way to the airport. I was a few minutes late to pick up my girlfriend, but I think she understood. We went to dinner and went home, and she slept in the guest suite upstairs, with its stair case right next to the Ricker's room.

Early the next morning, the Ricker backed out his car and I hopped in, as I was working for his company that summer (and he wouldn't even give me the day off). He reached down to readjust the seat, and found a foil-like strip. Pulling it up to examine, he asked what it was, and I immediately grabbed it and hid it in my room. When I got back in the car, he asked me, "was that a prophylactic?" Before I could answer, the Ricker launched into a 45 minute lecture. He wasn't angry at all. Instead, he offered a "life lecture" on his experience in the 1960s, when he was young and got his younger girlfriend pregnant, then decided to marry her. They were incompatible and the marriage ended shortly after it began--though the Ricker raised my brother. For 45 minutes, I did not say a word; I just listened to the Ricker and his life lesson.

I didn't tell my girlfriend about that incident right away (at least not while she was staying at the house). She would have been mortified. Oh well, Mrs. Ricker heard me sneak up to the guest room that first night, anyway.

The Ricker keeps his nails short.

But he clips them all over the house. A very frequent Sunday image was the Ricker walking through the living room, cutting his nails as he walked to the door. Once outside, he would sit on the front deck and go after his toenails (well, the eight nails that actually grew). He would also give his heals a good rub-down with some sandpaper and a foot paddle.

Unfortunately, his grooming patterns also extended to other places; namely, my bedroom. When the Ricker would say goodnight, he would come downstairs in his boxers (always shirtless) and sit on the edge of my bed to talk to me. While he was talking, the Ricker would pick and pull pieces of dead skin off his heals and feet . . . and drop them on my floor, into my blue shag carpeting. To this day, there is nothing grosser than someone picking skin off his feet and dropping right beside my bed, where I might step in it in the morning.

The Ricker hates fat people.

I was reminded of this when I watched Little Miss Sunshine last week. In the movie, which I highly recommend, the father explains to his 8-year-old daughter that ice cream is fattening and that beauty queens probably didn't eat ice cream. The daughter is devastated, but through some careful manipulation by the rest of the family, she regains her appetite and finishes off the scoop.

I've received the same lecture from the Ricker, only he was meaner than Greg Kinnear's character. When walking around malls, the Ricker would actually point out fat people--usually loudly enough that the person heard him. It was embarrassing, but the Ricker didn't care. He didn't want a fat family. I'm actually surprised that my sister doesn't have some sort of eating disorder.

However, that's not to say that we emerged completely normal. I'm still nervous about eating sweets, which has been very difficult to overcome considering we live a few blocks from Magnolia Bakery, which has all the bomb frostings and the best cupcakes I've ever had. I count how many cookies I eat and stay under the suggested serving size. I can't eat a full scoop of ice cream without feeling guilty. I'm even scared of doughnuts, which is funny considering my brother owns a doughnut shop (is this his form of rebellion?). I calculate total fat grams and percentage of calories from fat based on nutritional labels. In fact, the Ricker used to set up quizzes for me by laying out boxes and cans of food. If the percentage of calories from fat was greater than 30%, I wasn't allowed to eat it. I grew up with low-fat or fat-free everything: soda, butter, sour cream, chips, ice cream. Now, I can't even eat a full-fat item (like a latte with whole milk) because the flavor is off. Maybe I'm the one with an eating disorder.

Thanks, Ricker, for my disorder: obesophobia.