About the Author - 2026

A riveting topic

Here at the Just a Smidge Substack, we like to start the new year off with a little meet and greet, since we continue to gain new readership each and every year. The Just a Smidge family of readers grew by leaps and bounds in 2025. A big thanks to all three of you for joining us! Let’s get to know each other, shall we?

Hi. I’m Marc Schmatjen, aka Smidge, and I’m the lone staff writer and pool guy here at Just a Smidge. Based on how much money I make writing this column, it would be highly inaccurate to call this one of my jobs, so let’s just go with “hobby.”

I am a fifty-three-year-old husband of one, father of three, and current legal guardian of a Labrador retriever and a goldfish. We affectionately refer to our boys as Son Number One, Two, and Three. Number Three is a senior in high school, so he’s still here at the house, being loud and eating everything in sight.

We have successfully relocated the other two to college, where they are no doubt loud and eat everything in sight, but we don’t have to be involved. The state says we have to keep Number Three here until he’s allowed to go to college, so we continue to shush him a lot and make near daily trips to the grocery store.

My wife is an amazing woman who teaches math to teenage high school kids, and, since we have teenagers ourselves whom I have spent a considerable amount of time with, I am constantly amazed that she is able to maintain her sanity. (I am using “sanity” on a relative scale here. She’s human, after all.)

Anyway, enough about my wife and kids. Let’s talk more about me. Here are twenty other things that you should probably know about me, in no particular order:

1) I would be at my ideal weight if I were eight inches taller.

2) My grandfather killed General Patton’s dog. That is the single most historically significant thing anyone in my family has done.

3) Walking out into bright sunlight makes me sneeze. I am one of only an estimated seven people in the world with this disorder. We have a club. I inherited this trait from my grandmother, whose husband once killed General George Patton’s dog.

4) I am distantly related to U.S. president Grover Cleveland on my maternal grandmother’s side, whose husband (my grandmother’s, not Grover Cleveland’s) - I believe I may have mentioned this - killed General George S. Patton’s beloved English bull terrier, Willie.

5) Dave Barry is my humor column hero, and I hope to be as cool as him someday, although his grandfather wasn’t connected in any way to General Patton’s dog, as far as I know, so I’ve got that going for me.

6) Toilet paper should come off the top of the roll. I’m not stating that as a personal preference, but simply as a fact.

7) I scoffed at the idea of “electronic mail” when I first learned about it in college. If I had invested $100 in anything even remotely related to the “world-wide web” that day instead of scoffing, I would own my own island right now.

8) We have three boys under twenty-two with driver’s licenses. Eighty-five percent of our take-home income goes to insurance companies.

9) I have in my backyard a Traeger smoker, a stainless-steel gas grill, and as of this Christmas, a Blackstone grill. So, the other fifteen percent of our income goes toward artisanal hardwood pellets, propane, and the butcher shop. I regret nothing.

10) My three favorite flavors are burnt pepperoni, slightly burnt bacon, and well-toasted sesame seeds. Basically, if it has caught on fire, I want to eat it. Except for my s’more marshmallows. Those should only be browned.

11) I was in great shape once. I swam 100,000 yards in one week when I was in high school. (That’s 57 miles, for you English majors). I could not swim more than 57 yards today without needing a flotation device, an oxygen tank, and a defibrillator. See number 12.

12) I love chocolate and bacon. See number 1.

13) Even though I used to be an engineer, I constantly get my left and right mixed up. This makes driving directions with my wife fun.

14) As a recovering engineer, I know there are only 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

15) My favorite joke of all time is: A guy walks into the psychiatrist’s office wearing nothing but underwear made out of Saran wrap. The doctor takes one look at him and says, “Well, I can clearly see you’re nuts.”

16) I have published one of these columns every week since 2008, along with a handful of children’s books, and I only really type with three of my ten fingers, which makes this whole thing pretty impressive, if you think about it.

17) I like most foods (see number 11), but I have a deep, abiding hatred for cantaloupe. If bacon is a 10, cantaloupe is a negative 3000.

18) I misrepresented the issue in Number 13 regarding my mixing up left and right. It does not make driving directions with my wife what you would call “fun.”

19) My absolute favorite thing that has ever happened on this earth – and that includes my marriage and the birth of my children – was when the Oregon State Highway Division tried to disintegrate a dead whale with a half-ton of dynamite in 1970. I wasn’t around yet, but thankfully they had video cameras back then. (Just Google “Oregon Exploding Whale.”)

20) I hope to one day be in charge of detonating something as large as a dead whale, but so far, no one has let me.

There you have it, folks. You now know everything you need to know about me. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming next week.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Now, let’s hear from our paid subscribers, whom I would trust to detonate anything – especially cantaloupe…