Remotely in control

NOTHING CAN be fixed after 8 o’clock in the evening. I’ve tried. TVs, computers, all those miracles of modern life that seem to go haywire incessantly. My wife, Posh, is our IT person, and if she happens to be away, or on her second glass of wine, Lord, help us all -- as a family and as a nation.

“You do not touch the buttons,” Posh scolds the little guy.

“I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did,” she says.

Here’s our latest fiasco. The little guy hit a button on one of the remotes -- we have 47 -- and the TV screen turned bright blue, the same flash you see before you die.

To my mind, a TV should not be so temperamental that when one curious 5-year-old fiddles with the buttons, it conks out completely. But that’s what happened. Now, we sit on the front porch, drinking root beer floats and have to simply imagine Andruw Jones striking out.

It’s not a bad way to spend a summer evening. Root beer floats are probably the best warm weather beverage of all time, and I almost always drink them to excess. I like the little buzz they give you and those gloppy last few gulps.

Besides, the blue screen we’re left with on the TV is better than most of the shows we end up watching. Swear to God, the other night we watched a reality show where David Hasselhoff was a judge. You call that reality?

“What do you want to do now, Dad?” the little guy asks.

“Let’s just drink our root beer and avoid your mother,” I say.

“OK,” says the little guy, who is in “mother jail” anyway, that place you go when you get on a mom’s bad side. He’s spent the entire summer in and out of mother jail.

Inside, Posh refuses to honor the 8 p.m. rule, so she’s trying to fix the darned TV. Resetting. Reprogramming. Rethinking her entire life.

“Just wait till morning,” I call out to her. “I’ll fix it then.”

“He shouldn’t be touching the remote,” she says again.

She’s right. And I shouldn’t be a Cubs fan, and chickens shouldn’t have their eggs snatched rudely out from under them, and that upper part of Michigan -- the Upper Peninsula -- shouldn’t belong to Michigan. It should be part of Wisconsin, and everybody knows that. When you start itemizing all the things in life that shouldn’t be, you can make yourself a little crazy.

“Dad?”

“Huh?

“What do you want to do now?”

Nothing. I’m good at nothing. I want to sit on this porch and do nothing all night, the way we used to as kids. I can’t even remember the last time I just did nothing.

Besides, I’m exhausted by all the preparation we’ve undertaken for the cousins from Chicago, two of whom are making a rare visit. The cousins are coming! The cousins are coming! It’s like hosting two popes.

Posh and I have been furiously scrubbing, the boy mowed the lawn (Yesssss!), the little girl cleaned her room, I mean really cleaned it. Never have I seen this level of commitment around our house. Heck, I wish the cousins were coming every day.

Our goal, I suppose, is to have them step into the house and have it feel like home. No funny smells, which is a stretch for us. Ever notice how other homes have their own aroma? Some smell like dachshunds, some smell like bacon grease. You can’t smell it in your own home, but others can.

While they’re here, we’re determined to give the cousins the entire Southern California experience. Right from the airport, we thought we’d sit in traffic for about 90 minutes. When they tire of that, we’ll go get overcharged at a local amusement park.

But on Saturday -- ahhhh, Saturday -- we want to take them to the beach . . . Manhattan probably, where all the moms look like Maria Sharapova.

The cousins will boogie board for hours, then Auntie Posh will take them to dinner at Wahoo’s Fish Taco. Fine by me. Dollar for dollar, it might be L.A.’s finest restaurant.

Later, if the cousins are in the mood for a romantic comedy, they can all watch Auntie Posh reject my earnest proclamations of love. She is Monroe to my Miller (Barney). I spent several recent evenings pinging pebbles off her bedroom window and making the sound of a hopelessly lovesick moose.

Too desperate? No kidding. I get so darned tongue-tied around her that I’ve resorted to animal sounds. What next? If the moose call doesn’t work, I’m going to stand on the sidewalk and rub two credit cards together.

When that doesn’t work, it’s just over.

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Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com. For more columns, see latimes.com/erskine.