Gentle Humor Daily

Quite Moving Stuff Around on the Internet

2012-02-06T22:16:00.001-08:00

Why do they keep moving things around on the internet? Google is the worst. I love Google, but right now they are acting like some neurotic housewife who keeps rearranging the furniture. You come home from a hard day’s work and all you want to do is sling off your shoes and sink into your favorite chair, except it’s not there anymore.

Figuratively speaking, of course. I post this blog in a few places, and one is on Blogger, which is Google’s blog host site thingy. So just now I went to log in to Blogger and couldn’t find it even though I searched high and low – I looked under the beds, behind the sofa, in the kitchen cabinets. It wasn’t there. Figuratively speaking.

When I log into my Google account, I usually just click on “Account Settings” and that gets me to Blogger. But when I did that tonight, this page came up that looked totally different. I had to look all through it for the word “Blogger” and couldn’t find it. “Now where did Google hide my Blogger?” I asked myself, out loud, because I sit and talk to myself all day and night. Sometimes I get hoarse from all that jabbering.

I started clicking on other things in a logical fashion – I clicked on Sites because my blog is on a “site” but that revealed one website I’ve been to a while ago – not sure how it got there or what I’m supposed to do with it. It’s like when your husband takes a kitchen utensil and puts it in the wrong drawer – you look everywhere and finally find, the whole time cursing and wondering what possessed him to put it there in the first place since you’d never automatically go there – it always turns out to be the last place you would think to look.

I kept hunting for Blogger, determined to give it the same f effort I would devote to finding a missing earring or some other treasure. I clicked a tab I hadn’t noticed before that said “More” and it dropped down a whole list of things like a watch thief opening his coat to show you his loot and things roll down from the lining revealing a plethora of watches pinned to the linings. “Aha” I said, out loud, when I saw the word “Blogs.” I clicked on that and got…..nothing. “Holy crap,” I grumbled. “Where in the h…e….double hockey sticks did Google hide my frigging blog?”

This is the way I talk to myself when I get frustrated – like a crazy woman wringing her hands, desperate to find relief when none is in site. Then I noticed a link called Reader and clicked it. A whole accordian of articles popped up, one after the other about oddball stuff like stick figure cartoon drawings talking to each other in such a sophisticated humorous way that I couldn’t get the jokes at all. There were other articles and recipes and advertisements. All hiding under that one link right on my own Google site like beetles under a rock.

But no Blogger. Finally when I saw a link that said, “Even more.” I got a little excited because there really wasn’t anywhere else at all to hide Blogger except there. When I clicked the link I came to a whole nother long page full of text and icons. Holding my breath, I scrolled down, and there, buried under a pile of dirty clothes, was Blogger. Phew – I was so glad I found it and so freaking irritated with Google for hiding it there. Good freaking grief. Would you computer people just get things arranged somehow and then LEAVE IT ALONE. JUST LEAVE IT ALONE! For a little while, anyway, or else you will send me completely over the edge, and I don’t have far to go. .

Too Funny to Be Embarrassed

2012-01-30T22:34:00.001-08:00

I was in Home Depot the other day buying paint, and while the guy was mixing it I went to the restroom. I had my little dog with me because she’s like a loaf of marble rye tucked under my arm almost everywhere I go like a fur handbag.

Anyway, about the time I went into the door, the phone rang and it was my husband returning my call, and since I couldn’t wait and I didn’t want to play phone tag with him, I told him the reason for the call as I rushed into the stall. Usually I can continue holding the dog and go to the bathroom too – don’t ask me how, just trust me. But since I had the cell phone in the other hand, I had to put the dog down.

My husband did what he does better than anything in the world. He started a fight. “What do you mean you want granite for the countertop? What happened to laminate?”

“My cousin Nancy says we should get a piece of scrap granite and use that.”

“I’m about sick of your cousin Nancy. That will cost $100 a square foot.”

“Not if we have John install it.”

“This is getting me all distressed.”

“You’re never anything but distressed.”

Right then I heard a scream two stalls down, followed by, “You’re a little dog, holy shit you scared the crap out of me. I thought you were some kind of rodent.”

I burst out laughing because it had not occurred to me that the dog would wander several stalls down and that there would be someone else in the bathroom, no doubt listening intently to me calling my husband names, and then totally off guard, look down and see a small black furry creature pop under the stall that immediately jumped up on her legs wanting to get pet because that’s what the dog does best in the whole wide world, and this woman with her pants hanging down around her knees – I couldn’t help but laugh – I’m laughing right now all over again.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. I heard my husband’s voice in the cell phone say, “Well that’s a first.”

“Not you,” I snapped.

“It’s sure a cute little dog,” the woman in the stall said. “But he gave me quite a fright.”

“It’s a girl,” I said.

“Who’s a girl?” my husband asked.

“I’ll call you back,” I said and hung up.

I finished my mission, called the dog, and ran out of the bathroom before the other woman could see me, although I don’t know what good that would do if she came across me in the aisle with that dog tucked under my arm. She would have probably guessed it was me. Luckily my paint was done and I could bolt without running into her.

Embarrassing as they are, I love those crazy times when there’s a confluence of circumstances that give me a few deep belly laughs. I should have sought that woman out and thanked her.

Don't Wanna See No Naked Man

2012-01-18T22:30:00.001-08:00

Men do not look good naked – at least not to women. We don’t mind a nice looking guy in a pair of shorts – except if they are short-shorts, which look almost as bad as a naked man. A guy in a speedo is the worst. This may be an acquired taste for some women, but the rest of us would rather look at a pile of vomit full of maggots than a man in a speedo.

Unlike a woman, who will incite a veritable stampede of men if she simply takes off her shirt, a man must have other qualities besides a nice body in order to attract a women. He is forced to demonstrate his manly prowess by opening stubborn jar lids.

In the animal kingdom, males have to work very, very hard to attract a mate. They’ve got to butt antlers with other males with the force of a sledge hammer wielded by Arnold Swarzennager, or make their feathers stand up like they’ve stuck their beak into an electrical outlet.

The human male species, most of which lack either feathers or antlers, have to resort to other rituals. They will offer to carry things for you to show how strong they are. They will buy you dinner to show that they have money. They’ll try to show up in a cool car or put some smell-um in their hair.

You wanna know what’s really funny, though? I use Word for Mac to write, and then copy and paste it over into the blog, and Word is constantly underlining words because I am not the most accurate typist in the world. Hence as I write a blog it looks like some nasty English teacher has just graded it. You know, the spinster kind of English teacher with a bun pulled so tight in the back it’s making her eyes look Oriental except you can barely see them because she’s wearing those little half glasses that she peers over them in a condescending way, her mouth pulled into a tight line surrounded by wrinkles like rays from a pale, flat sun?

At this very moment, this blog is full of those red lines. I will run spell check and it will find most of them, but there will still be some stubborn words remaining that I’ll have to Google in order to look them up on an online dictionary or – better still – change them to something else that I know I can spell.

Amongst the typos and the perfectly normal words that look like they are spelled correctly but Word, the bitch, underlines them anyway because she’s a spinster and hasn’t been mated for a long, long time, Word let me get away with the word smell-um. It just did it again. Is smell-um seriously a real word? Some programmer put that into the list of acceptable words that Word would not slash with red just to show you how utterly stupid and incompetent you are? Really?

I’m going to have to take this matter to Google and see if smell-um is, in fact, a bona fide word in the English language because frankly I don’t mind telling you that I would be shocked – SHOCKED – if it in fact is a real word. Be right back.

OMG, the Urban Dictionary says it IS a real word, although they don’t hyphenate it. Here’s what they said:
smellum

Smell-um (smael-um) -a fragrance, often used in personal care products that are applied to one's person.

1. Ulysses Everett McGill from O Brother, Where Art Though: “I like the smell of my hair treatment; ... as soon as we get ourselves cleaned up and we get a little smellum - Dapper Dan Hair Tonic - in our hair...”

2. Calvin Klein's Obsession is a nice little smellum.

Well, I have learned something tonight – that Word likes smell-um but not smellum. Go figure. Speaking of figures, I like a man in some low-slung jeans and barefoot without a shirt if he doesn’t sling them too low like those stupid Abercrombie and Fitch guys. I do NOT want to see the top of a man’s hairless pubic area because someone must have waxed the hair away - those pants are so low - which seems sissy. I look away when I walk past the store in the mall. It’s the antithesis of attracting a mate, in my mind. Worse than a naked man, and it’s hard to get much worse than that.

The Dieter's Song Accolades

2012-01-09T22:03:00.001-08:00

I’m a little shy about marketing myself. Members of my writing group and a couple of my friends know I write this blog, but I’m not emailing people and pestering them to read my new posts.

But I did send The Dieter’s Song” to my writer’s group and some of my friends who I thought would commiserate with it. The response has been great! Debz says, “As I sit here my stomach still churning from the Tempeh and veggies I had for dinner, I think this little ditty was the best antacid anyone could offer! Suzanne...you are a genius!”

I am going to take that as a compliment.

Sunny said, “Sweetheart you are hysterically funny!!! Loved it and shared it!”

And this from Gloria, “Oh Suzanne, this is so funny!

I mean: da da da da da da da friggin’ funny!”

Kelli says, “Love! Love it so much Suz. Very cute and cleaver:)” I especially like that Kelli thinks I’m cleaver – which is a new word defined as clever person with cleavage.

And finally from Donna, “Unbelievable...and to think you're hiding behind a solar panel...somehow you MUST write more!!! :} thanks for the laugh today. I've been working my butt off with a slew of exercise tapes and have lost nothing. Now I can at least laugh when I get on the scale tomorrow. :}”

There are a couple of things about Donna’s comment I want to address. (1) by “hiding behind a solar panel” she means that I have not been writing as much because I’m working such long hours. You, my loyal fans, will be happy to hear that I’ve decided to write at least something amusing every day (except Sunday).

(2) I am not at all sure what those brackets Donna is using mean. They don’t look like smiley faces. They’re actually a little unnerving – like something that could sneak up on you in the night. Something sinister with evil intent. Some kind of heathen thing. (Heathen is a great word – I saw it on a rerun of the Big Bang Theory tonight and decided, “I’m going to get that word in my blog post tonight some how or the other.” And sure enough, I managed to do just that. It is so satisfying to achieve a goal.)

Because of the great response, I am elated and feel quite bold and I’ve decided, just for today, to be shamelessly self-promoting. This urge may not hit very often, so take advantage of it now! Feel free to refer me to your friends and have them send flattering comments as well. This is a limited time offer – don’t let this opportunity slip away. Comment TODAY!

Reason to Celebrate

2012-01-08T14:23:00.001-08:00

We have reason to celebrate, albeit a small reason. I had set a goal to write a blog post every day, and I was doing great until about post number 320. Then I started working full time (meaning way over 40 hours a week) at a solar company, and I was “too tired” to write. That is both the reason and the excuse for why my writing stopped soon after I started working.

I was exhausted each day and would come home and work at night on my computer trying to set systems in place that would “save time” and make the company “more efficient.” So exhaustion was the reason the blogs stopped. The excuse is that developing new systems is not fun – you encounter computer glitches all day, the project starts running way over budget, things don’t work like they’re supposed to – even after 4,000 tweaks. In other words, the humor gets sucked out of your life like an elephant sucking up a peanut.

Which leads me to the question – why do elephants like peanuts? Maybe it’s the salt. Or maybe they like that crunchy shell, because that peanut completely disappears – they don’t spit out the shell, not any elephant I’ve ever seen. I’m going to ask Google.

I’m back, and glad I took the time to answer this very burning question, which leads to another question, which is, why do we call them “burning” questions? Is it the same reason that whenever my son gets money, it “burns” a hole in his pocket?

I could ask Google that as well, but I’ll save it for another day because I know you’re “burning” to know the answer to the question, “Why do elephants like peanuts?” The answer, according to “Denny” at Yahoo! Answers, is: “Because African elephants risk their lives in dark caves for halite (NaCl) for their daily diet. Now circus elephants love peanuts because they're rich in halite mineral, and they're abundant.”

My English teachers would say, “What’s abundant, the elephants or the peanuts?” even though they knew exactly which one you’re talking about. In fact, they would have passed out a worksheet with this whole answer on it for us to “circle the mistakes” because it is fraught with errors and, might I add, needlessly aggravating. For instance, you are probably scratching your head and saying, “What in the rabbit-assed hell is halite?”

No wait, that’s what my dad would have said. He had all these unusual sayings that seemed to be made up but fit the circumstances so you never questioned what he was talking about.

As to the answer, why couldn’t the jerk (Denny) just tell us, because you and I don’t know what halite is, and we don’t have time to Google it. But no, this is all he said. I knew from high school chemistry that NaCl is sodium chloride, better known to us lay persons as “table salt.” So the answer, apparently, is because elephants need salt and a peanut has it. The imbecile (that’s a great word by the way, and one I don’t get to use nearly enough) went on to say that peanuts originated in Africa, which at least is interesting. I did Google halite and Wikipedia says: ”Halite, commonly known as rock salt, is the mineral form of sodium chloride (NaCl)."

Which leads us (finally) to today’s topic, ie why do we have reason to celebrate? Because I had time and humor enough over the last year to write a few blogs, and I have reached 365! Which is the goal I set, even though it took me about 800 days to do it instead of one year. Break out the champagne! Hmmm, I wonder why we “break out” the champagne. Is it because we...aw heck, let’s just clink those glasses and celebrate!

The Dieter's Song

2012-01-06T23:59:00.001-08:00

If you are like me, totally lacking in will power, then you’ve probably already fallen off the Dieter’s New Year’s Resolution wagon.

I made up a song to help us both climb back on and ride that thing the distance – or at least until the end of January, which I think is a pretty good success rate for an impossible New Year’s Resolution.

This song is sung to the tune of the “59th Street Bridge Song” better known as “Feeling Groovy” by Simon and Garfunkle. If you’re not ancient, you may not know the song, so here’s a link to listen (excuse the commercial at the first – it’s short): www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBQxG0Z72qM&feature=related

59th Attempted Diet Song

Slow down, you’re eatin' too fast
You gotta make that salad last
Just pickin' at the chicken bones
Lustin’ for more cause
I’m so hungry
Ba da da da da,da da friggin’ hungry.

Hello French toast
Whip cream flowin’
Can’t eat you - my belly’s growin'
Not one single bite for me
Do it do do do I’m so hungry
Ba da da da da,da da friggin’ hungry.

Got no cheese or booze,
No licorice or wheat
I'm starving and grumpy and feeling so weak
Let the morning scales drop all these pounds off of me...
Diet, I hate you,
I’m so hungry
Ba da da da da,da da friggin’ hungry.

Bible Bingo

2012-01-05T22:04:00.001-08:00

Last night I won seventy-five bucks playing Bingo. They also let you pick an additional goofy little prize – last night they had a couple of glow sticks, a back scratcher, Pop Rocks, a candy necklace – some really cool stuff. And they had a Bible. A Bible. In the bar as a prize for gambling. It was a white Bible in a plastic wrapper about the size of a regular 6” x 9” paperback book.

I did not need another Bible, but the Catholic guilt in me launched a monologue in my head that I could hear even above the pounding music. The guilt said, “You can’t choose exploding candy over a Bible, how could you even think that. Pick it up right now and get it out of this den of iniquity.”

I heaved my shoulders back and said to myself, “Look, I don’t need another Bible and I really, really want those Pop Rocks.”

“If you don’t choose the best gift of all, every one who wins Bingo is going to come over here and make fun of the Bible. You HAVE to take it.”

This argument went on for an inordinate amount of time, but as you may well have guessed, guilt won out and I sheepishly grabbed the Bible and sulked back to the table.

“Oh my gosh,” Laurie said. “She picked the Bible!” Laurie and Olivia burst out laughing as if that was the funniest thing they’d ever witnessed. Olivia grabbed it and looked at the label on the back. “This thing was published in China, the most atheistic country in the world. So you won a Bible published in a godless country in a bar drinking beer and gambling.”

She prized open the plastic wrap. “Is it written in Chinese,” I asked.

“No it’s in English, but the words are microscopic,” Olivia said. The words were as small as the directions on a medicine bottle. “Nobody could read this.”

They kept laughing and making Bible-in-the-bar jokes until the guy came around with more Bingo cards. We bought cards and spread them out, dobbing the free space and getting prepared for the next game. Laurie put her hand on the Bible and said, “For good luck.” Olivia and I put our hands on top of her’s, and then started giggling because of the irony of that – asking the Lord to help us gamble successfully.

Turns out Olivia ended up winning on one of my Bingo cards, and we got 50 more dollars. Since it was my card officially, I was the winner, so I split the prize with them because by that time I’d have enough alcohol to make me magnanimous. We made Olivia go up and get the prize money, and she picked out the Pop Rocks. There were three little bags in the package so I ended up with my exploding candy after all. It was Karma – or whatever the equal to that is in the Bible. I think I made the right choice.

Reading Health Magazines Is Scarey

2012-01-04T23:39:00.001-08:00

I was in a building permit office today waiting for a plans review – which is very similar to waiting at the doctor’s office and strikingly similar to waiting for a nurse to call you to get a colonoscopy or mammogram – you’re at the plan reviewer’s mercy, holding your breath that (s)he will accept the plans you’ve drawn and not ream you out with the words: “Looks like this is going to require engineering.” Because if (s)he says that, you’re immediately behind schedule by two+ weeks AND it’s going to cost you a whole ton more money that you didn’t budget into your solar system contract. Money will fly out the door like sun rays from the sun.

Since there is always a wait at these permit offices, they try to help you pass the hours with a few months’ old magazines. I picked up Shape magazine and within seconds found out I was at risk for glaucoma, skin cancer, and stroke – all for just being the victim of genetics.

Did you know that if you’re a woman who wears glasses, glaucoma risk rises – especially if it runs in your family (thanks to my grandfather who I affectionately called Pops).

Also if I wear sunscreen I’m more at risk for sunburn – why? Because I may artificially think that I can stay out longer, or maybe I’m not slathering on enough or often enough, or maybe it’s because I got up on the wrong side of the bed – scientists aren’t sure and even if they were, they will change their minds in a few years and everything they preached today will seem ridiculous a decade from now.

I could have a stroke for any number of very good reasons, many of which I can’t do anything about, such as having a parent whose had a stroke. Eating everything in site, including shoe leather and bugs, doesn’t help my case either. I’m just kidding about the shoe leather part, har har.

But now I must digress from this intriguing topic to let you all know, each and every one of you, that I just won $75 playing Bingo! I went out with a couple of girlfriends to Renner’s bar in Multnomah where they play Bingo on Wednesday nights. I went kicking and screaming - the place has been a little uncouth in the past with drunken bar maids slurring out the numbers and trying to be stand up comedians between calling numbers with no success whatsoever, but they have new management and it’s not as raunchy as before. Yes, there were a couple of comments about the Bingo “balls” but who can resist going there if you’re the guy calling Bingo. It was quite fun, all the more so because of winning and the beer and the cinnamon whiskey and the Jello shots with whipped cream.

Whoo-wee! I must elaborate more tomorrow – the bed is calling so loud my ears are ringing.

Hanging On to Christmas

2012-01-03T23:01:00.000-08:00

It’s January 3rd and my neighbor still has a gajillion (I counted) Christmas lights up in her front yard. It’s lit up like a stadium over there.

I like them, but I was taught that it’s white trashy to have your Christmas lights on after New Year’s. You can leave them up all year round if you want (but that’s technically white trashy too), but if you turn them on Before Thanksgiving or After New Years, then, as Jeff Foxworthy says, “You might be a redneck.”

On the way home from the movie tonight (I saw, “We Bought a Zoo!” which was wonderful if you happen to like heart warming, feel good types of movies – I know this is not everyone’s cup of tea. Don’t get me started about blood and guts in movies. Why? Because I’m already off track with tonight’s subject and surely you don’t want me going even further afield? I didn’t think so.

On the way home from the aforementioned movie, I observed that about every 5th house still had their Christmas lights up. That equates to roughly 20% of the population in my neck of the woods being white trash, which seems much lower than the national average as seen on TV. My vision of the outside world as seen on TV may be skewed because the shows my husband gravitates to have names such as “Swamp People” and “Storage Wars.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with people making an honest living killing alligators and rummaging through other people’s abandoned storage units, but can you imagine the Rockerfellers or Kennedy’s engaged in these activities? I can just see one of these high-brows showing up boatside amongst the assorted crooked-toothed, scraggly-haired, cuss word slingin’, rifle-totin’ “stars” of one of those shows where they track down animals and shoot ‘em for their pelts right on TV.

“Oh, sorry there Mr. Rocketfeller, sir, but you jist steeped in a pile a gator shit right there.”

“Oh drat the luck, I will have to have my valet, James, sanitize them when we get back to our hotel suite.”

Judging from my TV, about 98% of the US population is white trash, and the other 2% are simply foul-mouthed, with beeps making up a good 70% of the dialogue. I bet they all still have their Christmas lights up.

Well, this is enough facts and figures for one evening. I have beat this dead horse senseless, and so I will ride him off into the sunset, where my path will be illuminated with the warmth of Christmas lights looking like Santa’s runway all up and down the January street.

The Interview

2011-12-10T10:57:00.001-08:00

Last night my company had an interview with a non-profit organization, and we were so anxious to be awarded the work that we arrived a few minutes early to make a good impression.

We could hear an interview going on in the large office, but we couldn’t see it because of a partition.

We were greeted by a middle aged woman wearing a knobby tan ski cap with tassels hanging down the sides, ending just above her ample bosom, which gravity was pulling down like a boy ringing a giant church bell. The bright, multi-colored shirt she was wearing looked like it had come from the 70% off racks at a discount store. She had dark brown freckles on pale ale skin, and when we approached she kept her face level with the computer screen but raised her eyes to look at us and say, “Can I help you?”

“We’re here for the interview,” the company owner whispered. “We’re a few minutes early, do you have a bathroom?”

“Sure do,” she said, and hoomphed herself up from her chair, “I’ll show you where it is.”

“I’ll go too,” I said, thinking I could check my hair and see if I had any of that black stuff you get in the corner of your eyes if you wear mascara.

When the receptionist was finally on her feet, she was stooped over like little pine tree in a snowstorm. She put one foot deliberately in front of another, like a hospital patient inching down a long hallway with an IV pole.

She rounded the corner of her desk and started heading toward the aisle where the interview voices were coming from.

“Oh crap,” I hissed.

“I’m not going,” my boss whispered.

We stood there watching the receptionist progress along until she was beside where the interview was happening, muttering and not realizing we weren’t behind her.

“Oh my gosh, that poor woman,” I said. “I’ll go.”

I scurried toward her – this aisle was a good forty feet long and she had covered most of it. I kept my eyes straight ahead as I passed the interview table, noticing in my peripheral vision that there were at least five people – not counting the three from the other company with their backs to me – who saw me whisking by.

The receptionist stopped and turned to speak to me and saw that I was hustling to catch up. “Lord, honey,” she said in a voice oblivious that business was being conducted a few feet away, “I didn’t know you wasn’t behind me, I’ve been talking to myself the whole way.”.

She led me through a closed door, down a stretch of hallway, around a couple of corners and through another door or two. Finally she said, “Here it is!” - proud she’d accomplished this important mission.

I ducked into the door and started asking myself important questions in preparation for the interview, such as: “What were you thinking, you idiot? Why did you ask to go to the bathroom, you didn’t need to go to the bathroom? You looked like an idiot out there and now you have to walk past that table. There’s no escaping this blunder." Then I looked at myself in the mirror and found 9,000 flaws. “Oh my gosh, how are you going to go back out there looking like that and walk past table?”

I decided to skip the interview and stay in the bathroom. Seeing the impracticality of this, I figured I’d wait until I thought the other company would be gone.

When I thought it was safe, I crept out the door and turned to the right and encountered a network of cubicles and hallways - and freaking got lost. I’d been preoccupied with being an idiot so didn’t notice the hallways running in all different directions. I wandered around for an eternity until I finally discovered the main door that led to the other room.

When I got to the table, my company’s interview was already in progress. That threw me so off kilter that I could barely look anyone in the eye as the boss hurriedly introduced me. When it came my turn to speak, I started saying my rehearsed words, got a frog in my throat, cleared it two or three times, stuttered, stuttered some more, got a few things out before my brain fizzled on me.

No one asked me any questions.

I spent the whole evening and restless night worrying that I had blown our chances. I kept saying, “Why didn’t you make a joke like, ‘That’s really a journey to your bathroom - I felt like I was on some reality show and had been dropped in a maze.’ They would have chuckled and loved you forever. Why? Why? Why?

The next day, at 1:38 in the afternoon, we got a call saying we’d been awarded the contract. We must have been the very lowest bidder!

Hot Lips Nachos

2011-12-01T23:20:00.001-08:00

I had nachos for dinner tonight and got way too liberal with the hot sauce and jalapeno peppers. Law have mercy! My lips were burning like someone was lighting them with a match. And yet I could not stop eating, so the flame barely had half a second to calm down before I put some more fire in my mouth.

I suffered through a rather large plate of nachos, and it never got any easier. Each bite was as hot as the last, and just as painful, and yet it was not a deterrent to me stuffing myself.

The weird thing is that once it got past my lips and into my mouth, which was also burning like asphalt on the equator, and then headed to my throat, it didn’t burn anymore. All the way down the chute to my stomach, I didn’t feel a thing.

This makes sense, when you think about it. Your lips and mouth are like two Buckingham Palace guards – they’re not going to let anything in that would do you any harm. If those guys can take the red-hot fire of spicy food, then they must figure that your cast iron stomach should do just fine.

I’ve popped things in my mouth and discovered that they were too freaking hot – as in like they’ve come out of an oven in Hades. When that happens I don’t spit it out, I simply make a big “O” with my mouth and say, “Hot! Hot! Hot!” and fan it a few times with my hand. And then I swallow the blistering tidbit so it quits burning - once it gets past a point, I can’t feel it anymore.

This is a wonder of biological engineering - a miracle of the human body.

On the other hand, some things go in your mouth all nice and easy-like, for instance the beans I had for lunch today, and then later they raise a ruckus in your digestive system like two Tasmanian devils wrestling in the belly of a tornado.

But I am not going to let this deteriorate into a discussion about flaming bottoms and lighting matches to see if they can ignite a blow torches when a person passes gas, and so forth.

Why can I NOT seem to get past bathroom humor?

When I went with my writer’s group to a retreat a few weeks ago, I got the “Humor” award, and the one line summary of me was, “Wait, wait – I have to go to the bathroom.” That pretty much sums me up – I don’t want to miss anything, hence the “wait, wait,” but the bathroom is always close by – either in my writing, in my talking, or when I’m rushing for it because of some extremely spicy food I had no business eating.

Okay, speaking of the toilet I have to tell a story, but it will need to wait until tomorrow because it’s too long for tonight when the bed is calling and my eyelids are as heavy as a full bladder. See, I just can’t get away from bodily functions……

Stuff I'm Thankful for

2011-11-29T22:52:00.001-08:00

We just got through with Thanksgiving and I forgot to mention things I’m thankful for. Since this is supposed to be humorous, I’m obliged to be silly.

First, I’m thankful that I can end sentences with infinitives and no one seems to mind. In college composition classes you would have had to write: “These are the things for which I am thankful,” because it isn’t proper English to say, “These are the things I’m thankful for.” But when you’re writing a humor blog, you can do anything you want, even going so far as to split infinitives – which used to make the nuns at my grade school mad as toothless beavers. Here’s an example of a split infinitive if you don’t know what I’m talking about: “I needed to briskly go to the bathroom or I was going to whiz my britches, and yet there was a line as long as the Baltimore tunnel.”

In this example, briskly is an adverb and it should not come between the infinitive “to” and the verb, “go.” You can get away with it in your own blog where there’s not a nun around to slap your hand with a ruler, and for that I am thankful.

I’m thankful that Thanksgiving is over, because now all those premature Christmas decorations all over the stores and on people’s houses are no longer illegitimate. As far as I’m concerned, they are justified the day after Thanksgiving but not before – I get sick of harping at me to buy for Christmas. I’m going to put it off until the last minute no matter how early the commercials start because that’s who I am and I’m not changing, so those early commercials and decorations irritate me. They make me feel more like a procrastinator than usual.

I’m thankful for gas stations that fill you up without making you get out of the car. We just went to Seattle and in Washington you have to pump your own gas. I used to not mind when I lived in Tennessee, but now that I’ve been spoiled, it’s a nuisance – I always get gas on my shoes when I have to pump my own. At least one drop leaks out of the nozzle before I can whip it back into place. So I’m thankful Oregon charges the same for our gas and I don’t have to get out in the freezing rain to fill ‘er up.

Another thing I’m thankful for is that I put up some of my outside lights last night when it was dry, because right now it’s raining like a cow pissin’ on a flat rock.

I’m thankful for the above saying, which was handed down to me from my dad.

I’m especially thankful that I didn’t gain much more than five pounds during the gorge-fest I had on Thanksgiving Day - and every 2 waking hours since with all the leftovers.

Finally, I’m thankful for you, my faithful readers, who put up with my foolishness and come back for more. You are the best fans I can ever think of, and that you continue to boldly go down that path of humor with me, even when sometimes I’m about as funny as a cockroach in a Rueben sandwich, makes me as thankful as I was when I took notice of that cockroach as my mouth was traveling toward that thick sandwich and somehow I spied a leg between layers of corned beef. I’m really thankful that I did not take a bite and later discover half a cockroach, if you catch my drift.

And now I bet you’re thankful I’m not going to expose you to any more disgusting stories – at least not tonight.

JHappiness

2011-11-28T23:27:00.001-08:00

This is dedicated to happiness - what is it, where do you get it, how much does it cost, why is mine on backorder, and when is it going to get in?

What is it? That’s easy. It’s feeling good while, at the same time, not feeling guilty. Guilt is a big deterrent to happiness, especially if you’ve been raised religious. A lot of stuff that should make you happy can also make you guilty – like you could steal something and have it, and you think you’re happy that you got it, but then you feel guilty about stealing it – unless you’re a heathen. I am only talking about religion so I can type the word “heathen.” What a great word. It sounds like a trouble-maker, doesn’t it? I like words with sounds that evoke their meaning.

Moving right along, where do you get happiness? In simple things, like winning the lottery. Show me someone who’s won a couple million bucks and I’ll show you one happy honcho.

How much does happiness cost? They say you can’t buy it, and I believe that’s true, because I’ve never seen it in a store – not in a bottle or can or box. If you find some, buy it and send it to me.

Why is my happiness on backorder? Ha, ha, that’s funny, since I just said you can’t buy happiness. But seriously, a lot of the time happiness seems to hinge on some upcoming thing, like, “I’ll sure be happy when I get this blog written tonight.” So while I’m writing, I’m anticipating that feeling of accomplishment and those soft sheets I get to climb into when this is posted.

When is happiness going to get in? Ha ha, another funny comment. I’m full of them – it just delights me, makes me happy as a mule eating briars. I once tutored this high school kid who was perpetually miserable. He wanted to spend the whole hour complaining about his mom, his classmates, his teachers. Once I got so fed up that I bitch slapped him. Not really, I wanted to, but instead I drew a world and a face looking at it with a frown. I said, “This is how you see the world.” Then I erased the little frown line and made it into a smile. “But you could also see the world this way. The world itself doesn’t change. It’s just how you look at it.”

The kid bitch slapped ME and never came back. Not really, I just love saying “bitch slapped.” I’m laughing right now after typing it. It’s a blessing to be easily amused. But in all seriousness, if you’re waiting for happiness to show up on your doorstep looking like a winning lottery ticket wrapped in chocolate, you’re going to have a whole lot of dull hours in your life. Happiness can come knocking every minute of the day, all you have to do is give it a toehold by looking for amusement in your everyday life even when you feel like wearing a frown.

Christmas Is Like NASCAR

2011-11-23T02:02:00.001-08:00

Christmas reminds me of NASCAR. It passes by and then it comes around again – over and over. Lately it’s been coming around faster than ever.

In fact, it arrived in Portland, OR around Halloween. I remember a few years ago when people griped about the department stores putting Christmas decorations out before Thanksgiving. We didn’t know how good we had it. Now they are putting things out before Halloween. Red and green decorations and snowy white angels on shelves next to orange ceramic pumpkins and ugly witches is disconcerting.

Even worse than that is the Christmas programs already starting on TV. Used to be – and I’m talking a couple of years ago - you could at least get through Thanksgiving before Santa and Rudolf started showing their red noses on TV. Already they’re running Santa movies - for the last two weeks - and it’s the day before Thanksgiving.

What’s this world coming to?
Trick or treaters in Santa costumes?
Give Trick or Treaters those swirly Christmas candies that get gooey and stick together because they’re for “decoration” and nobody eats them?
Sell pumpkins as Christmas ornaments?
Get rid of the turkey and have a Christmas ham for Thanksgiving?

When I was a kid it seemed like Christmas took forever to get here. That’s because it was considered white trash to put anything Christmassy out until after Thanksgiving. People already have Christmas lights on their houses – I drove by one a couple days ago with lights all over their outside tree and a lighted reindeer in the yard. Years ago we would have shunned them into keeping that stuff in the attic until the proper designated time. Now you just shake your head and wonder what the heck’s the hurry.

This is why Christmas feels like NASCAR to me – it lasts 4 months by the time you see things in the store in October and it’s still in the stores in January on the clearance aisles, there’s not a lot of time in between like there used to be – it just keeps whipping back around. About the time you get all those decorations into the attic in late February when football season is over and you can get your husband off the remote control, you get a short lull and then that Christmas “car” is back again.

I love Christmas, I really do. But there’s an old saying, “Familiarity breeds contempt,” and I’m feeling mighty contemptuous thinking about all those TV commercials I’m going to be watching the next few weeks. They’re almost as bad as mud-slinging political ads for being annoying and repetitive – kindof like the only NASCAR race I went to...

Bathroom Blues

2011-11-14T21:50:00.001-08:00

I am here at the beach with my writer’s group – 8 ladies total, and there’s a big problem. The bathroom is right off the living area.

After careful planning, all eight women were assigned the food we were supposed to bring, and all eight of us worried that we might run out and starve to death, even though we have six cars here and the store is a quarter mile away. Each one of us brought a few extra things, mainly in the potato chip, cookie, candy, and pastry food groups.

These are the exact foods I find it impossible to resist. You add lemon drop martinis and red wine to the equation, and that is one lethal mixture, especially with the chili we had for dinner last night.

There are two problems with the bathroom being right next to the living area. The first is that, when you combine alcohol with all the food a perpetually hungry person such as myself, can shovel in before bedtime, you are looking at scientific chemical reactions that occur all through the night, some of which interfere with sleep itself. In the morning these chemical reactions produce certain byproducts that are explosive in nature. When the bathroom is in the center of the house where everyone else hangs out, they gonna hear you, even if you’ve got the fan on and in some cases, the sink water running.

If this weren’t bad enough, the number 2 problem, as it were, is that these scientific chemical reactions, and their explosive byproducts are unpleasant to additional senses besides hearing. To illusrate what I’m saying, one time someone entered the bathroom after me, a skinny, uneducated, uncouth young man, and rushed out gasping a few seconds later, rubbing his eyes like a child who just woke up from a nap. He exclaimed so everyone could hear, “It’s not so much the smell as the burning of the eyes.”

If the bathroom is located near the living area, a scented candle of a few sprays of Glade is not going to prevent the entire living are from smelling like a latrine at a boy scout camp deep in Arkansas backcountry. In a house shared by people you know, you can’t pretend some stranger was in the bathroom before you – some sickly old woman with parasites and diverticulitis who just walked out the door when you were walking in.

You’d think a person like me, prone to these types of problems, would cut down on the eating in order to avoid the embarrassment. But when there is all this food around, I have no control.

So sorry, ladies, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do – I apologize in advance for what’s going to happen tomorrow morning. Now pass me those potato chips.

The Demise of Decoulatage

2011-11-08T22:58:00.001-08:00

I am so happy with the new fashions coming out. They don’t show cleavage! I noticed it at church on Sunday – on their way back from Communion, none of the old folks forced me to look at their wrinkly, saggy boobs.

Then today while I was waiting at the permit office (I was picking up a solar permit in case you’re curious), they had an InStyle magazine and it had pictures of women in scarves and high-necked t-shirts – even Victorian lace all the way up to their chins. It was all I could do to keep from shouting, “HALLELUIA” right there in the Land Use and Planning waiting area.

I wrote a blog around this time last year about going to a party and having to see all the “hip” moms revealing their cleavage – and at their age that ended up being about six inches lower on their chests than it was before they became moms.

When there’s cleavage staring at you, your eyes don’t want to look, you beg them not to look, you turn you head away and talk to the woman out of the side of your face to avoid looking, but it’s just like someone saying, “don’t look now, but….” What do you do immediately? You look.

And then you regret it, because older cleavage is over-suntanned and thus splotchy and rough looking. This is due to the fact that older “hip” women worship the sun, possibly because in their minds they think a tan makes them look athletic and wealthy, when in reality they look old and weathered.

Young cleavage is just as disturbing, but for other reasons, mainly because these young girls do not need to be enticing boys or men in any way. The guys are lusting after them already and imagining what they could do with those bodies if they just had half the chance. Revealing huge portions of the objects of their lust just makes things worse. It’s a mother’s nightmare, I can tell you that.

What’s funny is that I listen to Blue Collar Radio (the one set up by Jeff Foxworthy and his blue collar cronies), and many of the male comedians actually make fun of cleavage. They talk about old cleavage as if it could singe their eyeballs. They tell parents not to let their daughters leave the house like that. If these guys are making fun of seeing women’s boobs, then who are the women showing them off to?

So if other women don’t want to see cleavage – not any women I know – and men are making jokes about it, you gotta wonder how this fashion fad came about.

Me personally, I don’t give a flying rip who came up with it, I’m just ecstatic it’s on its way out. Not that I’m thrilled about Victorian foo-foo lace scratching my throat – I’m not going to wear it. Talk about the pendulum swinging in the total opposite direction. I am keeping my fingers crossed that cleavage will soon be gone for good.

The Miracle of My Dog's Teeth Cleaning

2011-11-07T22:30:00.001-08:00

I got my dog’s teeth cleaned!!!!!!!!!

You may be saying to yourself, “So fricking what?” And I can understand how you might not be as thrilled about this as I am. You may very well live a much more exciting live than I do, and have exotic adventures and lots of important friends you meet at wonderful places for hilarious fun. Getting a dog’s teeth cleaned may be at the very bottom of your list of interesting ways to spend your time.

However, it may pique your interest to know that I got my dog’s teeth clean without anesthesia.

“So fricking what” you ask. Is that all you know how to say? If you’d quit interrupting I’ll explain.

Have you ever heard of “bad breath in dogs?” It’s a medical condition brought about because dogs will eat anything – the more dead, the better. Woo-wee! But they also get bad breath because they won’t brush their teeth. They lack digits to hold the toothbrush, but even if they had hands, they would not use them for brushing their teeth, they’d use them to lift other dogs’ tails for easier sniffing. Or to reach up on your dining room table and grab the Thanksgiving turkey by the leg and fly off down the hallway with it to their lair.

Furthermore, they will fight your attempts to brush their teeth for them. They would prefer that you take that doggie toothbrush and shove it up your….. I know this because my dog has given me that “you know where you can shove that toothbrush” looks every time I’ve tried to brush her teeth.

Over time, the stuff on a dog’s teeth, called tartar, hardens and bonds to its pearly whites like brown cement. Around her in Portland, OR vets charge you $350 to chisel that stuff off, and they want to put the dog under general anesthesia to do it because that’s the only way a dog will put up with it.

But a few days ago I discovered a place that cleans teeth without putting the dog to sleep. Apparently they accomplish this by laying the dog in their lap as they sit on the floor. The secret is getting you out of the room and putting a towel over the dog.

Don’t ask me how it works, but when that dog was done in one hour, she had white teeth and I had an extra $200 in my pocket. I highly recommend this for your dog or cat – Apollo Pet Care did my dog’s teeth – 1-800-285-6204. They are in Washington and Oregon.

This is not a shameless commercial but a recommendation for people who, in my opinion, granted me a miracle. Now I don’t have to worry and fret about this any more.

And you’re wrong to assume I have a boring life. I got her teeth done on Friday just before we left town, and it was the highlight of my weekend – three days which included going up to Seattle and watching the Ducks beat the Huskies at the last game ever to be played in the Huskies old stadium before they tear it down, going out for Sushi at Umi’s, watching U Dub’s crew team glide through misty water under the salmon glow of early morning, eating an amazing lava cake at the Tap House Grill, walking around Bellevue before sunrise, and staying with our dear friends for two nights at the Oakwood (great deal there, by the way on a 2 bedroom condo) – none of these things came even CLOSE to how exhilarated I was about finally getting that dog’s teeth cleaned. It’s something I will cherish always.

Testicular Terror (or Tumor Humor)

2011-11-04T00:59:00.001-07:00

I was at a loss for words, so I decided to get inspiration from today’s headlines. After looking as some pretty miserable accounts of murders, floods, famines, and so forth I stumbled across a CNN video entitled “Testicular Tumor with a spooky face.” Jackpot!

I waited for five hours while the video loaded to give Intel time to run their commercial. I love the internet but I’m getting sick of the commercials. You know how on TV they make you wait to get to see your show? It starts, then the commercial then about 2 minutes of show, then 3 minutes of commercials – mostly drugs for men who no longer have the ability to get it up or just drugs in general – then three more minutes of show and 4 minutes of drugs, etc.

The internet is getting to be that way, too, and I loathe it. I attempt to go to a website, and when it doesn’t pop up right away I know it’s because some stupid commercial or flashy thing on the page that took forever to load and is most likely going to drive me insane while I’m looking around the site. It’s not worth it – I will move on to a new site like a Japanese obstacle course contestant hopping from one slippery rock to another so he doesn’t fall into a vat of brown slime.

Which is what these internet commercials feel like – some unpleasant disappointment behind Door Number 2. You know you’re picked the wrong site when that white screen stares at you like an albino owl in a spotlight.

But I have wandered off track and should mosey back to civilization and talk about that testicular tumor. In my frustration with the CNN website taking so long to load – I could have showered, blow dried my hair and given myself a pedicure before the circular thingy quit spinning. Finally I got to see the face in the tumor and it was as touted – spooky. It was somewhere in what I assume was a man’s testicle – on the inside because they were looking at it using an ultrasound. The mouth of the face was gaping open and it had one big round sad eye with the white showing all around. Don’t know what that white was, but being that it was a testicle I can only imagine.

I got to see this face in fits and starts since the video loaded for 2 minutes and then showed 8 seconds of video. There was a woman newsperson who was narrating the story, and she’d say 2 or 3 words, like “left testicle” and “testicle positioned” and “into the testicle” before the thing would start loading again.

So I went to YouTube thinking CNN was too freaking slow, and I couldn’t fine the video – even though the woman said it went viral. But when I typed in testicular searching for it, there came up a whole slew of vey graphic images showing live human testicles with the titles being “Testicular self-exam.” The picture for that one showed a guy holding up and pressing his penis against his abdomen so that you could see his hairy scrotum whether you wanted to or not. Which I can assure you I did not.

Fortunately, I have finished this and no longer have to talk about testicles, which is not really my favorite topic of sparkling conversation. Here’s the link in case you simply must see this tumor for yourself. http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2011/11/03/pkg-moos-testicular-tumor-face.cnn Settle in with a cup of coffee and a newspaper or something to keep you busy while you wait for the commercials to play out. It’s worth it I suppose.

Rain and Heroes

2011-11-02T22:40:00.001-07:00

It is raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock outside.

That’s one of my dad’s old sayings, and it seems to fit. I can hear the rain rapping on the skylight like a million pygmy fists. This dog of mine won’t go out in it to relieve herself before bedtime, so around 3:45 a.m. she’ll start whining to go out because she can’t hold it anymore. And then she’ll come back in soaking wet and smelling like wet Fritos and furry musk, and she’ll start licking her paws like a cat because she doesn’t like her feet wet.

And I’m supposed to go back to sleep after all of that?

Which is just nuts. I mean, licking her wet feet. That’s like telling a kid, “Shut up that crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!” If a dog’s foot is already wet, how does a wet licking help the situation?

This is one of the many mysteries I like to ponder during the day. Like how come, after decades upon decades of typing, I still can’t type without a typo every fourth word? If practice makes perfect, then I should be the world’s #1 typist. In fact, I probably get more practice than most, because I have to backspace constantly and retype my mistakes, so I’m typing twice as much as what shows up on the page. And yet the typos are pretty consistent no matter how many hours I live on the computer each day.

That rain is making it hard for me to concentrate. This is the kind of rain my daughter would run out in and stand there with her face looking up at the sky. She’s always liked weather anomalies. Sleet, hail, snow, and crashing rain lure her out to the back patio every time. She can’t resist. Like a moth to a bug zapper.

We went to a function tonight at the request of our stockbroker to see a Medal of Honor recipient. He was in his seventies and fought in the Vietnam War. Gosh what a funny man he was. I had consented to go to this out of a sense of duty, but I had no intention of being anything but bored by the whole affair, except for the offering of free food.

This guy, who’s name I’ll add later when I get up and look it up in the book they gave us, was so humble and so witty. He got the Medal of Honor – the highest honor in the country, for flying wounded out of a ground attack and delivering ammunition when he came back for more wounded. He did it with another guy – both of them volunteering and getting shot at. He went through four different helicopters – when one got shot up he’d trade it for another. He saved over 70 lives that day.

He said he went to the White House for the Medal ceremony, and he was wearing a hat – some kind of uniform hat – and one of the aids told him it was not appropriate. “This isn’t the first inappropriate thing I’ve done, and it sure won’t be the last.” He kept the hat on, and President Bush said, “Nice hat,” when he hung the Medal on him.

He also got about forty-eleven other medals, but the one that made him most proud was the Good Conduct Medal. He pointed at the Medal of Honor and said, “This one I just happened to get after a day’s work – the Good Conduct Medal took me a whole year to earn.”

I came out of that presentation a lot happier than I went in. I don’t know how men do it – go to war and fight and then come home and go about their business as if they hadn’t witnessed horrors you and I can’t even imagine. I’m pretty stoked to have had the honor of meeting this man, whose name is – let me get up, I’ll be right back – here we go, whose name is Bruce Crandall.

The moderator asked him if he got scared while all this was going on – he flew in and out of the war zone 22 times that day. He said he was too busy to be scared. He just knew if he didn’t help those guys, they didn’t stand a chance.

This funny, fearless man who saved so many lives and stood up for his hat at the White House – he’s now my new hero and inspiration.

Dear Diary

2011-11-02T01:01:00.001-07:00

This blog is starting to sound like a Dear Diary, as in:

Dear Diary,

Today I made a fool of myself going to church. It was a holy day and I needed to go to the early Mass because I knew I was going to a movie during the late Mass time. I went to see The Rum Diaries. It got really bad reviews but it was lol funny in lots of places and I was very glad I went. I recommend it, and that doesn’t have anything to do with the main actor being so utterly nice to look at.

But this blog is not about Johnny Depp. Mass started at 7:30 a.m. and I was running a tad late as usual. There was a thick soupy fog that caused everyone to drive at 8 mph. These Oregon drivers are absurd. We drive in rain and fog all the time – it’s OREGON! – but they drive like four-foot-tall great grandmothers whenever it is not clear and dry. Look at one of them next time. They’re hunched over the steering wheel as if leaning forward is going to help part the fog and they’ll be able to see. Their extraordinary caution made me even later, and I felt really bad about wanting to curse them on the way to Mass.

When I got there, I slowly opened the door hoping to creep in unnoticed. I looked into the church and saw the entire assembly of that morning’s churchgoers staring straight at me. Granted it was only about 40 blue haired elderly ladies, but it was embarrassing. The priest had moved the altar to the other side of the church so that every one of them was facing toward me – knowing I was late and not liking it.

I gasped and backed out the door, wondering whether to just get back in my car and go home or tough it out. I chose the ladder and climbed into the balcony.

Not really, it just seemed like a good idea to say ladder than latter. Bet you didn’t even catch that.

I walked outside the church, all the way around to the other side when everyone was, and slowly opened the door. The priest was looking straight at me from 20 feet away, but I refused to make eye contact as I slithered into the first empty pew. I pledged (not for the first time) to do better from here on out.

And, Dear Diary, I saw something interesting on the way home from church. Toilet paper in the road, like someone had thrown it – two rolls. It brought back some fine memories of tossing toilet paper rolls into tall trees and watching them cascade down like a comet with a long, long tail. It’s not something you see much anymore – a person’s yard and trees completely covered in toilet paper like it snowed on their property overnight. I hope it’s not a dying tradition. It’s always fun to see it on someone else’s lawn.

Seems like there were other excitements, but they’ll have to carry over to tomorrow. Dear Diary, aren’t you glad you have me to keep you entertained?

Happy Halloween

2011-10-31T23:09:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween!

I have just come home from traipsing my old neighborhood with my friend, Laurie. We have a tradition of walking the dogs and sneaking up to houses where they’ve left candy on the porch and helping ourselves to treats.

I know, this doesn’t sound very grown up. I never really cottoned to the idea of growing up. Candy tastes so much sweeter when you’ve quietly crept up on someone’s porch and fished through their bowl of treats looking for M&M’s with peanuts or Almond Joys. Knowing that any second they could swing the front door open with a giant swoosh and make you feel like an idiot made it all the better as your ran through the dew-soaked grass out to the anominity of the street.

Tonight we had the added pleasure of stopping by one house in which the two adult men occupants had decorated the yard with giant spider webs, tombstones, skulls, haystacks, about 40 candles in glass jars, a video shining on the side of the house with really spooky things, and a fog machine. They also had adult treats – Jello shooters and lemon drops.

I wonder if the inventor of Jello ever thought that one day someone would add vodka instead of water to the Jello mix?

Anyway these things gave us antifreeze to wander the streets, enjoying people’s carved pumpkins and Halloween decorations. At one place there

was a bowl on the porch, but you had to go down a longish driveway, up several steps, and across the porch. There was a big picture window that the homeowner could look out and see you.

I hesitated – it was a daunting obstacle course just to get a piece of candy. I really did NOT want to be confronted by some grown-up

“I’m going for it,” Laurie said.

I followed her – I couldn’t stay behind. I’m supposed to be the brave one. So I shuffled up behind her. We tiptoed up the stairs and crouched and crept across the porch until we reached the bowl, which was up on a pedestal. I was looking through the candy, deciding what to pick when all of a sudden there is a huge crash at the glass door directly behind me. A ferocious 500 pound dog had flung itself against the door and barked so loud it rattled the boards on the porch. I never saw the dog because I took off running the second I heard that massive THUMP he made on the glass, but in my mind he was as big and vicious as Stephen King’s Cujo.

It was wonderful! What a great time we had. We stopped back by the lemon drop house to take in a little more Halloween ambiance, and then walked back home under the clear sky splashed with sparkling stars and a sliver moon to light our way, pockets full of sneaked candy to show for our labors. I hope all of you found a little adventure tonight – it’s good for the soul. I will leave you with this cool Halloween card. Enjoy!

Greatest Halloween Card Ever ... Click Here

Bad Wine and Spotted Dick

2011-10-30T23:22:00.001-07:00

This blog post is going to be a recap of interesting things that happened today. For one, I went to church and the priest had some wine he was getting ready to bless for communion when he stopped cold and said, “There’s something wrong with the wine.” He turned to the choir director, “Can you give us some music while we get this taken care of?”

The pianist started playing a song and one of the altar guys took the wine and headed back to the room behind the altar. The priest stood there looking over the congregation, and I wondered, “What could be wrong with the wine? Maybe it turned to vinegar and he took that little drink and nearly gagged. Or maybe it had a fly doing the backstroke in there. Or maybe there was green mold floating on top. Or maybe it had a tarantula in it. That last one was far fetched there aren’t any tarantulas around here, but there was quite a bit of time to kill so I had to get creative.

This is the same priest I wrote about last week – the one that I won the raffle for him to come and bless my house. I have not set that up yet because I still haven’t decided on the correct protocol – do I have him for lunch, etc. or just have him do a slam, bam, thank you ma’am type of blessing and send him on his way. After today’s events I’m glad I’ve been indecisive, because now when he comes I can ask him what happened to the wine.

The altar guy eventually brought new wine out and the service continued, but it was quite unusual.

Another odd thing that happened was that I got behind the zebra car on the freeway. What are the chances of that? There’s this white car that parks a few blocks from my house and someone has painted stripes on it to look like a zebra. On the trunk they’ve mounted a tail. My daughter and I have seen it parked, and we always say, “Look at that zebra car. Who would paint their car like a zebra?”

So today I went down the ramp and got on the freeway, and this zebra car was exactly in front of me. I watched that zebra tail – complete with a realistic black tuft at the end – for several miles, twitching in the wind. I got so excited I texted my daughter, “That zebra car is in front of me on the freeway.” She immediately texted back, “Are you texting while you’re driving?” I didn’t answer her.

This evening my cousin Nancy from Memphis called and started telling me a funny story about an older man she was visiting – the husband of an elderly friend of hers who had passed away. Each time she visited him in the nursing home she’d ask him questions. He’d say, “Now why are you doing this?” She’d tell him it was because he’d lived an interesting life and she wanted to record his story. Finally he asked her again and she gave him the same answer. He looked at her for a couple of minutes and said, “You know, I’ve had an operation.”

Nancy and I both burst out laughing when she told me this. “He thought you were hitting on him,” I said, “and he wanted to make sure you knew he couldn’t make any little Nancy babies.”

“And then there was the time I was at the grocery store,” Nancy said. She was on a roll. “There was this attractive older woman walking down the aisle and I was behind her for a good ways. Finally she stopped at the same place I was going to stop. I was right beside her, and I reached for a can of Spotted Dick.”

“Spotted WHAT?” I said.

“Spotted Dick. I picked up the can and said to the woman, just to make conversation because she was right beside me, “Have you ever had any of this?

“The woman looked puzzled and said, ‘Why, I don’t believe I have.’ She turned away quickly and scurried down the aisle.”

“She thought you were hitting on her, too! My gosh, Nancy, do you just stalk old folks so you can hit on them – it doesn’t matter if they’re male or female? Can you imagine that poor old woman, knowing someone is following her down the aisles. She finally stops thinking the stalker will pass, and instead the crazy woman tries to make a pass at her with a can of Spotted Dick?”

We laughed until we couldn’t breathe.

“What the heck is Spotted Dick anyway?” I asked, wiping the tears from my eyes.

“It’s sponge cake in a can,” Nancy said, and we laughed all over again at the absurdity of that.

“Who puts sponge cake in a can? And then names it Spotted Dick? Oh my gosh!”

Anyway, as you can see, this has been a most interesting day. And I was fretting because I didn’t know what to write about….

Excavating the Empty Nest

2011-10-30T01:06:00.001-07:00

I finished shoveling out my daughter’s room today. It was part two of the cleaning - I got about halfway done a few days after she left for college but after a few hours I just closed the door. It was like that TV show where people hoard things and won’t throw them away. She not only kept every single item she’s ever claimed as hers since she was an infant – such as seashells, pretty rocks, pieces of Barbies (they didn’t seem to survive with all their limbs intact for very long), she also kept ever candy wrapper and potato chip bag she snuck into her room and ate late at night, wadding up the evidence and tossing it under the bed.

I found two portable phones that have been lost for years under there.

Her room hasn’t been really clean in years. Sure, we’d change the sheets and dust and vacuum – but she’d simply take everything that was in the middle of the floor and piled on top of her dresser and toss them under the bed and into the closet. It would appear to be clean for a day or two, and then it looked like Hoarders again.

I used to “help” my kids clean their rooms every few weeks – usually before we had a party. They threw clothes, toys, and school work in the floor and cleared out enough of a path to walk through. It would take hours to get those rooms clean.

First we’d pull out all the dirty clothes, some of which had been used stuffed into the closet still wet and muddy to better cultivate mold and mildew and the odors they cause. Then we’d put away all the books that were piled on the floor beside the bed, away from the door so your couldn’t see them. Then we’d arrange the stuffed animals and large toys back on the shelves. That all went pretty fast.

The worst was those little odds and ends left on the floor – things that didn’t really have a specific place, such as the toys they got for free from McDonalds or those little things they’d win at arcades when they cashed in their tickets.

They hated to throw away anything – it all had some wonderful function or memory tied to it, but by the time I’d gotten through all the garbage and junk up until that point, I was ready to be done. I did not want to sort that little stuff. Somehow they had manage to wander out of the room to get something to eat and hadn’t come back.

I finally created a new bin for the McDonald’s toys and little stuff. Some were never even opened. One of these days they’ll be worth a fortune, I’m sure.

Kindof like those Beanie Babies. My son’s friend, Dylan, was obsessed with them. Every time a new one came out, which was about three times a day, he’d get his dad to drive them to the mall so they could buy it. They bought tag protectors to keep the tags from getting crumpled, because that made their “investment” more valuable.

I used to say, “How can something that they are selling to every kid in the universe and a whole lot of their parents be an investment? Something has to be rare before it’s valuable. They’re selling millions of these.” They wouldn’t listen because they kept hearing on the commercials (made by the company selling the Beanie Babies) that they were collector’s items.

Those Beanie Babies are in two duffle bags in my son’s room. They never really played with them, although they’d dump them on the floor and pick them up one at a time to admire them and talk about how valuable they were, like Midas counting his gold. They also threw a substantial amount of money away on Pokemon cards for the same reason.

Today when I was cleaning my daughter’s room, lots of good memories flooded into my head, so I guess it was worth it – at least I can open the door now. I will be one happy mother if I never make another memory of cleaning their rooms. If I en, and I am so thankful that I won’t have to add any new memories of cleaning her room again. I can’t even imagine what her dorm room looks like, and thank goodness I don’t have to.

My Dog's Frito Feet

2011-10-29T02:08:00.001-07:00

My dog’s feet smell like Fritos. She’s lying beside me as I type on my laptop on the sofa, and she just changed positions. The smell of Fritos wafted into the air like some doggish incense.

My family thinks the dog’s feet smell pleasant, whereas our personal human feet are disgusting, especially when they’ve been in sweaty tennis shoes. Perhaps that’s the problem. If we did not wear synthetic footwear for hours on end, would we have pleasant smelling feet too?

This is for future pondering because we want to focus on the dog’s feet right now and ask the question, how on earth did a dog’s feet come to smell like a corn chip?

A corn chip is made of corn and salt all smashed down together, baked until it has that perfect crunch, and sealed in a bag that is impossible for humans to penetrate without a sharp object or very strong teeth. It used to be that you’d get a guy to open a jar for you, mostly so he’d feel like he had some degree of worth in this world, but now you have to find a guy to get into a bag of chips. Sometimes, if there’s no guy handy, I’ve had to tear at these bags with my teeth like some savage jackal-like creature, over and over, getting a small bit of bag each time, spitting it out and tearing some more until I excavate a hole big enough to plunge my fist through.

So the grains and salts and other things that go into a corn chip – the chemical composition as it were – and the baking which alters, or at least dehydrates the chemicals – and the packaging which protects the baked chip until the year 4010 because air doesn’t have teeth to penetrate the seal – how in the universe can THAT smell like my dog’s feet?

My dog’s feet always smell like Fritos except just after a bath, at which time she runs outside and tries to roll in anything to cover up the good smell of doggie shampoo with something more friendly to the canine nose such as a dead rodent In advanced stages of decay. Within a day, the Frito feet are back – all four of them. The rest of the dog may be foul, but those feet are pleasant.

It’s a mystery someone needs to solve, because there is something very, very sick about smelling a dog’s feet and craving Fritos with cream cheese.

If you’ve never tried it, take a normal Frito – not the big ones – and scrape it through a container of Philadelphia cream cheese. It’s quite tasty. Don’t go in too deep or the Frito will break off. BEWARE – you will go through a whole container of cream cheese pretty quick and become a big fat lard because you won’t have the willpower to stop eating them, they’re that good.

Back to the subject, which is, why does my dog have Frito feet? If you know the answer, please don’t hesitate to send it to me via a package containing Fritos. I’m running low.

The Paradox of Paradoxes, Part 2

2011-10-27T23:12:00.001-07:00

This article continues the rambling I started yesterday about paradoxes.

On Sunday I was wishing for two things, that I would get my luck back and win a raffle for the first time in a coon’s age, and that I’d win a pie, preferably a tasty pie like peach or blackberry or strawberry rhubarb.

Lo and behold, the first raffle number called was mine! I broke my long dry spell of no raffle prizes. I could just taste that flaky piecrust. Then they announced my prize.

A visit from the priest to bless my house.

Lord have mercy.

(a) My husband is an atheist. Not an agnostic/on the fence kind of believer who’s just not sure. He is absolutely positive there is no God and people like me are simply deceiving ourselves and not right in the head.

(2) I’m a Catholic who likes to go to church on Sunday because I feel good about it, but I arrive a little late and don’t hang around after Mass glad-handing with the parishioners. I slip in and slip out like a thief. That’s not to say I haven’t given back, because I spent years teaching Sunday school and serving on assorted committees. But I’ve never even met this new priest and I HIGHLY suspect he doesn’t appreciate that he’s ten minutes into the service when the side door creaks open and I slink in and duck into the first empty pew.

So when my raffle number was called, the priest came over and shook my hand. “Call the office and we’ll get this scheduled,” he said.

Get what scheduled? Will he just come over and stand on the doorstep with me holding the door open, hand firmly on the door knob, unsure whether to invite him in and not knowing what to do with him if he says yes. Should I have him over for dinner? Lunch? Dessert? Coffee? Cocktails?

My husband loves to cook and invite people over, but when I told him about my prize he said, “I don’t need to be here for that.” He doesn’t want to get into a religious discussion with anyone under any circumstances. For me, it’s not even that the man is a priest, it’s more that he’s a perfect stranger.

On the other hand, I believe things don’t happen by coincidence. I won that raffle for a reason. My quandary is more, “What kind of hospitality do I extend to this gentleman coming to bless my house?” rather than, “Holy moly, what the heck am I going to talk about?”

The last time I talked to a priest was at a party. I’d just come back from Italy and started blabbering about the Vatican. “It was beautiful but kindof creepy the way they had all those old Popes in coffins all over the place and there was that embalmed Pope in a glass coffin that gave me the eevy jeevies. What’s up with that?”

The priest excused himself immediately and went to talk with a hunchbacked old woman who, apparently, afforded better opportunity for sparkling conversation than the likes of me.

As you can see, talking to priests is not my forte, hence my shyness about how to handle this visit to my home, though Lord knows this place could use a blessing, and a good cleaning, for that matter. Which is another stumbling block – I’d have to clean. Maybe I could have him come just before Thanksgiving, when I’m going to have to buckle down and get the vacuum out anyway.

Oh well, there are many considerations for me to consider, so I’ll close this long dissertation on raffles, paradoxes and priests. I will leave you with one final paradox, apropos to these most recent events: Be careful what you wish for because it may come true.

The Paradox of Paradoxes

2011-10-26T23:41:00.001-07:00

’ve had an exhausting day of trying to set up meetings. Granted it’s easier with email than making a bunch of phone calls, but still it just takes forever.

Come to think of it, it seems like everything takes forever but then how come nothing lasts forever. Quite the paradox. Here’s some other paradoxes for you, but first, we need to define paradox for our illiterate readers. Only you know if you fit in that category and I’m not here to judge. I’m here to define this in simple terms even you can understand:

A paradox is two things that don’t make sense – that are illogical. To remember it, think of para like a “pair a” things that don’t add up. Here are some samples of para – doxes like I promised in the last paragraph:

You can save money by spending it.

Youth is wasted on the young.

I can resist anything but temptation.

Nobody goes to that restaurant, it's too crowded.

Don't go near the water until you've learned to swim.

If you fall down and break your leg, don’t come running to me.

That’s enough paradoxes.

That last sentence was not a paradox, by the way.

Neither was that one.

So I was talking about things lasting forever. This topic has dragged on for quite some time, and perhaps you might say that it, in fact, has lasted forever.

That might be true except that I am about to bring it to an abrupt halt wiith one story that might illustrate several key points.

I was in church on Sunday and they were having this stewardship fair so they wanted us to go over to coffee and donuts and visit the various tables to learn about volunteer opportunities. Each table you went to and talked with someone, they gave you a raffle ticket. The prize was a pie. I collected as many as I could. I didn’t even care what kind of pie it was. I like all pies except apple, which I will eat with abandon but only if another pie isn’t handy.

About a year ago I quit winning raffles. Prior to that I could not lose. If there were raffle tickets given out, I won, even if I had a torn raffle ticket with shoe prints all over it that I picked up off a greasy floor.

And then, just like someone had turned off the luck faucet, I went into a dry spell where I didn’t win any raffles.

You might think, “How many raffles is this woman exposed to?” And I would say, “Who wants to know?” Then you’d say, “What’s it to you?” and I’d say, “It’s none of your freaking business,” and you’d say, “I’m damn well making it my business,” and I’d say, “Well you can damn well try and see how far that gets you,” and then you would lunge at my throat with your long, yellow fingernails and try to strangle me, and I’d take off running – in a zigzag pattern so you couldn’t shoot me, and you’d jump in your car and try to run me down, and I’d duck around a corner and find myself in a dark alley with a brick wall at the end and no way out, then you’d turn the corner and I’d be spotlighted as you bore down on the accelerator, and then I’d scream and we’d break for commercial..

Yes, I suppose some things do last forever, like this article, which is……..TO BE CONTINUED.

Aging Gracelessly

2011-10-25T22:53:00.001-07:00

As we age, our bodies go through changes. Some are good – like when I was pregnant and my hair got thick – and some are bad – like aches and pains and wrinkles.

But there’s one change I’ve recently encountered that is working out just fine. For some crazy, inexplicable reason, I no longer fart – I burp instead.

Please do not think I’m trying to be crude. I’m just relating the simple facts. I used to pass gas on a fairly consistent basis, i.e. whenever I was awake. I could pass gas on demand, something I used to punctuate social interactions such as:

My brother: “How do you like my haircut?”

Me: “Pffffffft.”

Or:

My brother: “What did you think of my speech?”

Me: “Pfffffff ffffff ffffff fffff ffffft.”

As welcome as this communication tool was, it sometimes became a problem. Being gassy by nature was bad enough, but when I ate legumes, which was every chance I got, it became nearly unbearable for my loved ones to be on the same street with me. I have emptied cars full of people when legume-propelled emissions accidently erupted without warning, completely out of my control.

I’ll admit I enjoyed, to some extent, the leverage these incidents afforded me. Such as:

My brother: “I’m not moving.”

Me: “You better or I’ll fart.”

Recently, however, I have been burping, rather loudly, from the very depths of my internal areas. These things are audible from three rooms away, but they lack the persuasive qualities of gas. On the other hand, they don’t cause me nearly as much misery, especially after eating legumes, so I am not complaining. This is one thing Mother Nature got right.

The Boomerang Backpack

2011-10-25T22:08:00.001-07:00

When my son was in high school, I got a call from someone who said, “Do you have a son named Chris?”

“Yes,” I said slowly, worried that he was either injured, or more likely, in trouble.

“Does he have a backpack?”

“Yeah,” I said, even more slowly. “Why?”

“I found it in a ditch and thought he might like it back.”

“In a ditch? Where?”

“On Arnold Street.”

Arnold Street - the deserted road near our house? How did that happen?

“Well, sure, he’d like it back, I’ll come right over and get it.”

A few minutes later I’m looking at this threadbare backpack with odds and ends of junk in it. Someone must have stolen it and swiped the good stuff before they threw it out the window.

When Chris got home later, I held the backpack up and said, “Look what I found.”

His mouth dropped open and his eyes got wide. “Where the heck did that come from?”

“Somebody discovered it on Arnold Street in a ditch.”

“Oh my gosh,” he said.

“When did you lose it? Was it stolen or what?”

“Uh, no. It’s just a piece of junk. I wasn’t using it anymore.”

“Then how did it get in the ditch?”

“Uh, well, I threw it out the window.”

“You WHAT!?”

“I didn’t need it anymore and it was just cluttering up my car, so I tossed it out the window.”

“You don’t just toss something out the window. Why didn’t you bring it home and throw it in the garbage?”

“I don’t know. What kind of person picks up a ratty old backpack in a ditch?”

“What kind of person THROWS a backpack in a ditch?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t need it anymore. Are there any cookies left?”

“You know better than to litter, for crying out loud. Some stranger has to call me because my son throws a backpack out the window.” I paused to show my utter dismay about the situation. “They’re on the counter.”

And that was the end of the whole incredible incident. It turned out to be a mini-commentary on what happens to kids when they get to be teenagers. You hound your children for years and years, trying to teach them to be good citizens, and they turn into teenagers and get a car and end up throwing everything you’ve taught them out the window like an old backpack.

If you’re lucky, as a parent, some of it will start to come back to them when they leave those teen years behind – and they’re not trying to be the exact opposite of that good little boy or girl that you worked so hard to mold. And hopefully, those life lessons will come back around and start to make sense - just like that old backpack. (Well, I don’t know if the backpack made sense, but it seemed like a profound way to end this, don’t you agree?)

Even Idiots Get Miracles Sometimes

2011-10-23T23:47:00.001-07:00

I was desperate the other day and made a pact with God. I said I’d write for one half hour a day. It was better than selling my soul to the devil, and I actually enjoy writing, but I’m just so (cue the violin) crazy busy.

That was in the morning. I went to work and slogged through the pile in my inbox that just keeps growing even as I get things done. I kept thinking, “I’ve got to leave here by 3:45 at the latest to get to the permit office on time.”

Obstacles and phone calls and crises distracted me until it was 4:20 – on a Friday night with horrendous rush hour traffic. I snatched up my Mac and rushed out the door, cursing myself for waiting so long.

I started praying that the traffic would part like the Red Sea and I could somehow get all the way across town in time.

The good Lord did his best to get people out of my way, but it was still slow going. I developed a headache, and escalated the nasty tongue lashing about what a stupid idiot I was for not leaving earlier and what the hell was I thinking – I know traffic is much worse on Friday afternoon, I don’t know why, maybe everyone’s headed out of town or going out to dinner, but it’s always like that and I know that good and well and what the eff was I thinking and why can’t I ever get anywhere on freaking time????

I was blessed to compress a journey that should have taken an hour into exactly 39 minutes – it was 4:59 when I pulled into the permit office parking lot, grabbed my purse, slammed the car door, and breathlessly dashed to the counter and said, “I need to pick up a permit.”

The lady behind the counter said, “We close for permits at 4:30 – didn’t they tell you that when they called to say the permit was ready?”

I buried my head in my hands, partly because I had that splitting headache, and partly because I couldn’t believe I had driven like a maniac and I couldn’t believe I had waited so long to leave the office, and knowing my crew needed that permit on Monday and the permit office was closed Monday and what in the name of everything holy was I going to do? I stayed there with my head buried in my hands running all this through my mind like a drowning person sees their life before their eyes until finally I let out a huge sigh and looked up at the lady. She looked at me like I was the most pitiful human being on the face of the planet. She said, “Let’s just look at this for a second and see.”

She proceeded to click on the computer and look at the paperwork and click some more and look some more and click and look, and said, “Do you know if you owe any money on this?” I handed her the check and she printed out the permit.
I learned a lesson that day about faith, hope, and love. I saw all of them compressed in that little bit of time. I was praying like a maniac every time I came up on the bumper of a slow moving car; every time I could see a bunch of those red lights on the freeway which meant that the cars in front of me were slowing down or stopping; every time I came to a red light. I knew that I would not make it, even my GPS said there wasn’t enough time, but I also knew that God has the ability to make things happen when it doesn’t really seem like it’s possible. So I had faith that he would somehow get me there. I also hoped it would happen, and I hoped that I wouldn’t get turned away by some technicality.

But when I got there and realized I was too late, that I wasn’t going to get that permit, even though I walked in the door with a full 30 seconds to spare, it ended up being love that softened the clerk into giving me that permit even though she wasn’t supposed to – to have mercy on my wretched, headached soul and rationalize to herself, “this poor woman, do I really have the heart to send her home and make her come back?”

When I walked out and got in my car I started crying. I don’t know if they were tears of joy or just incredible tears of relief but it was just this magnificent release of overwhelming emotion and the feeling of God’s hand resting on my shoulder and realizing he’d done me a humongous favor and it’s still hard to believe that God and that woman had compassion for an idiot like me.

The Magnificient Spit

2011-10-22T01:13:00.001-07:00

Today I was behind a car waiting at a stoplight, and I noticed it was a single guy in the driver’s seat with his arm on the back of the passenger seat. Why I observed this I don’t know, but just at that second I saw two white masses, side by side, come sailing out of the passenger window, fly over the grassy strip on the side of the road, and hit a bush a good fifteen feet away.

It could only have been spit or lugies propelled by a slingshot mouth that could launch a sputnik. I was utterly amazed. You just don’t see freaks of nature like this every day. In fact, I’ve never seen a lugie hurled that far.

That’s probably why he had his arm on the passenger seat – to hold him steady.
My daughter won a watermelon spitting contest in kindergarten. I was quite the proud little momma. She beat everyone by several feet. That child’s mouth was lethal – even to this day you should never EVER get near her teeth if she’s mad at you. You risk coming away with a missing hunk of forearm. But even she could not have launched spit that far.

What was so amazing is that he was so accurate. He had the opening of a window to get through, and you might not think that’s difficult but it is. Not that I’ve ever spit out the passenger side – I’m not brave enough for that and besides I don’t spit. Never have except if a bug flies in my mouth or something. But on occasion I will eat an apple and find myself holding a sticky core and nowhere to put it. I start thinking about the little birdies or rodents that would be delighted to munch on that core, and why should I deprive them?

But you can’t throw it out the driver’s door, not in the US anyway – maybe in England. You’d end up with the core in the road, and then some little furry thing would get squashed flatter than a tortilla. So I have to throw them out the passenger door. And I have to thrust really really hard or else it will land in the road and then – out of guilt – I’d have to turn around and go back to move the apple lest I worry all day about some little sweet gift of nature getting it’s eyeballs popped out when it was it by a diesel truck as it tried to pull the apple out of the road.

So I cock my elbow and bring the hand holding the apple all the way in front of my face to get more leverage, and then I fling the arm toward the passenger window as hard as I can.

Nine times out of ten it hits the inside door and leaves a wet, mushy spot before landing on the passenger seat and rolling onto the floor, going front to back on the hairy carpet like some golf course lawn mower, leaving a trail of apple juice over every fuzzy inch.

This is why I was so amazed that the guy got those lugies out the window today. And that they flew so far. It really was truly amazing. Wish you could have seen it.

Beware the Ides of March Part 2

2011-10-09T23:04:00.001-07:00

First I feel a little guilty about disparaging George Clooney’s movie last night. But not guilty enough that I’m going to keep quiet because I’ve been thinking more about it. The movie was called Ides of March, about a good politician with good ideas who would probably have done very good things for the country except that he made a mistake and in order to cover that mistake up, he had to compromise his values or else lose the election.

That part was pretty good, because you often wonder if politicians start out being slimeballs, but this movie shows you they can be regular people wanting to save the world but then they have this fatal flaw (generally located between their legs) that causes their downfall or at least becomes their main focus in life – not the ideals they went into politics for in the first place.

That part was eye opening and gave me a more sympathetic perspective on the life of politicians. But there was a part of the plot that just didn’t add up, and it distracted from everything. In fact, it made it the whole movie seem ludicrous.

But I can’t talk about it or it will spoil the movie if you decide to go see it. But I will say this. It was like someone said, “We need to show that this politician was a good guy but people forced him to compromise against his will because if he didn’t, his mistake would be exposed and he’d lose the election and then he wouldn’t be able to do all the good things he set out to do when he first got into politics. So what could that be? Think. Think really hard. What is something a politician could do that would put him in a compromised position. Come on, we’ve got to think of something. Mmmm, how about a good looking intern?”

That’s how it seemed like the plot got put together. And it just didn’t add up. You can have great actors and great filming and wonderful settings and love interests, but if the story seems contrived, the whole thing crumbles.
Enough of that movie – it was irritating but I have to get on with my life. I’m changing the subject.

Better still, I’m going to bed. Besides, I have the TV on in the background and I can’t concentrate. The remote is too far away, and I’m trying to focus but I’ve re-typed things because I kept getting distracted. And now there’s another Cialis commercial on and I can’t take it anymore. I’m sick of erectile dysfunction. I HAVE to get up and turn off that TV. When historians look back on these days and try to analyze why television went extinct, they will trace it to the outlandish proliferation of ED commercials. Someone needs to warn the Networks – a “Beware the Ides of March” soothsayer should tell them that they are running off people like me with those commercials. I can’t take it anymore. I’m getting up, turning the confounded thing off and going to bed. Goodnight.

Beware the Ides of March

2011-10-08T23:26:00.001-07:00

We just got home from the movie, “The Ides of March.” For those of you who didn’t take Latin somewhere along the line, the “Ides” is the 15th of the month. When Julius Ceaser was out walking around Rome, a soothsayer (or sightseer) said to him, “Beware the Ides of March.”

And beware he should have, because on the Ides of March he got stabbed 23 times, led by an esteemed group of his colleagues and his good friend Brutus to whom he said these famous words, “E tu Brute?” which, roughly translated, means, “What the %$*@?”

George Clooney decided to make a film about this for modern times – about political betrayal and so forth – and by giving it this old Latin name he was evoking the similarities between ancient Rome and modern America.
Or maybe he was just trying to make a buck with a movie he hoped would draw in ticket buyers such as myself. You never know about the motivations of Hollywood. The movie seemed like an obvious remake of Bill Clinton’s dalliance with an intern and how he had such noble ideas but he let his little head do the thinking and ended up committing political suicide.

I, for one, didn’t need to watch a fake politician do all the sordid stuff these people do to get elected. I think everyone on earth, even bush people in Africa, knows that politics turns people into back scratching, blackmailing extortionists. I don’t know why I have to spend my Saturday night watching a predictable movie play out the same old story.

Every leading character in this movie either compromised their integrity, blackmailed someone, played dirty tricks, lied, betrayed their friends, or had sex with someone they shouldn’t have. It was business as usual for stereotypical politicians cynically depicted as visionaries without the backbone to do the right thing if it means they will lose the election.

Not much different that what old Julius Caesar was up to a couple thousand years ago. He should have stayed home, and I should have too.

A Drive to the Airport

2011-10-07T23:38:00.001-07:00

I took my coworker and her husband to the airport this morning. I hadn’t met her husband yet, and I wanted to make a good impression. My little dog was coming with me in the car, and she often smells like a goat. The beast rolls in everything. She cannot go outside without flopping on her back and wiggling from side to side, all four legs in the air, grinding herself into some foul smelling dead something. I’ve seen her roll on a squished earthworm – any creature that has departed this world she will hunt down and have her back smeared into it in nanoseconds. She has to do it quick because I’ll see her through the window and yell at her to stop. She pretends she can’t hear me long enough to get coated in a stench, then jumps up and looks at me like, “You talkin’ to me?”

So this morning I gave her a couple of squirts of some cheap flowery smelling stuff my daughter had bought. My husband is allergic to scents so I don’t have my own perfumes.

When I squirted that dog with a fine mist of smell, she was so insulted. She took off running like I’d poured hot water on her and tried to rub it off on the walls. She nosed down into the carpet and walked along like she was trying to shovel something, pressing one side of her face and shoulder then the other into the rug in a pitiful attempt to try and scrape the scent off.

I’m not sure why a dog can’t stand to smell good. Not this one, anyway. If I let her outside after a bath, she streaks to the grass and starts rolling just to get the smell of dirt on her. She comes back in with half the back yard clinging to her long wet hair. You can’t comb it off, it’s woven in and half the time it’s sticky – why I don’t know. But as she walks through the house it drops all over the floor like autumn leaves in a windstorm. It looks like someone’s scattered brown and green confetti over every floor in the house.

There are laws of physics that state: a 10 pound, 12 inch high dog with long black hair can collect 30 times the squared surface area of its body in yard debris consisting of tiny sticks, brown grass from last week’s mowing, and those little maple helicopters. Double the formula if the place where the dog rolls is under a sappy fir tree like the ones covering our back yard.

So this morning this dog that normally smells like a goat because it’s not practical to give her a bath every five minutes - this dog smelled like a cheap tramp. When we got in the car, the whole place filled with the sweet smell of a bouquet of sickly sweet flowers. I discovered I didn’t have any gum and I hadn’t brushed my teeth for fear of being late. Then I put on some “unscented” lotion that added an acrid element to the mix.

When my passengers got in the car, the husband who I just met immediately rolled down his window, even though it was raining. The dog, loving the fresh air, jumped into the backseat to sit on his lap, coating his jeans in that perfumed goat smell that probably lingered throughout their whole 15 hour flight to Brazil.

I’m not so sure I made a good impression.

The Middleman Mentality in America Part 2

2011-10-06T23:04:00.001-07:00

What’s this got to do with middlemen? Back in the day, you could go to a “doctor” and he’d do what he could for you and send you home. Now there is no such thing as just a plain doctor. You go to your (insert whatever you call the person you go to for stuff – like your gynecologist or internist or proctologist), and then s/he refers you to someone else – usually a drug company to get some antibiotic or cough syrup, or to another doctor, called a specialist because he doesn’t know anything about the human body except that one special part – be it the brain or kidneys or intestines. Don’t even ask him about that wart on your big toe – he doesn’t know what to do about it except to refer you to a toe specialist.

What’s the connection? The person you call “doctor” is a middleman for the drug companies and specialists, and the drug companies are the middleman between you and staying healthy in the first place.

Where did all these middle people come from? I just heard on the TV that in the last hundred or so years, the population of the world went from 1 billion to almost 7 billion. All those people have to have jobs – and since all the regular jobs were filled, then we in America created all these middlemen jobs to keep these people busy and off the streets.

A hundred years ago, your town had one doctor and all the drugs he had were in a little black back that opened at the top. I always liked those bags. No zippers. I don’t know how they kept them closed, but in the movies the doc just pulled the two handles apart and took out a little clear bottle with a cork in it, and that cured anything from hoof and mouth disease to tapeworm.

Today, these middlemen are everywhere. You can’t call anyone directly if they have a business, you have to go through a receptionist. You can’t buy a new car from a salesperson, you have to go through the guy who makes you feel like your breaking his company but he’s going to – against his better judgment – give you a fantastic deal and an outrageous trade-in allowance on your beater if you’ll sign right now. You have to get a wedding planner to coordinate your wedding, and a realtor to help you buy a house. These positions give all those extra people something to do.

I’m not saying I’m against drug companies, or doctors, or anything else in particular. But it rankles when I think of drug companies inventing these cures for things that could easily be fixed with a little lifestyle change. The commercials should be like, “If you are losing bone density, get up right now, RIGHT NOW I SAID, and get some exercise, you big fat lard. You do NOT need this pill I’m pushing. And you do not need to hound your doctor into prescribing it to you.”

But that would be stupid for the drug companies to do. So it appears middlemen are here to stay, for better or for worse. Otherwise the unemployment rate would soar and Obama (yo mama) would never get that jobs bill passed.

The Middleman Mentality in America

2011-10-05T23:42:00.000-07:00

I just saw a commercial on TV that showed a close-up of a big leg, broken and mending in a lumpy grey cast that looked like it had been globbed on by a kindergartner.

I could comment on the shoddy workmanship of orthopedic practioners, but let’s move forward to the purpose of this article – the reason for that commercial.

It was an alert to people with osteoporosis that they could sue their doctors if they had broken various bones since starting drugs prescribed by their doctors to prevent osteoporosis.

I promise not to use any more big words after this next couple of osteoporosises, because they are too hard to type. If you don’t know what osteoporosis is, come out of your wilderness cave and turn on the TV. There you will learn, among other things, that it is impossible to get or maintain an erection in America. You will also find out that several drugs - developed by good, honest drug companies - have been prescribed to help prevent osteoporosis – drugs whose very purpose was to make things all better in the “O-word” area of people’s lives – and now we come to find out that these selfsame drugs had in fact been causing the very symptom – THE VERY SYMPTOM – that they have been relentlously tauting as a cure on TV, in magazines, and everywhere else visible to the human eye – yes, these drugs that were meant to prevent broken bones caused by the O-word actually CAUSE broken bones.

You might be wondering, what kind of a person can produce the run-on sentence in the last paragraph and get away with it. But we’re not here to talk about grammer for crying out loud (or spelling either, for that matter), we’re here to talk about something I’m sure I’ll remember if I reread what I just wrote.

Yes, we’re here to talk about the middleman mentality in America. What do commercials about drug companies being sued have to do with that? Something, you can bet your bottom dollar on that.

It’s just this. The big-O can be helped by weight-bearing exercise and a healthy diet rich in calcium and Vitamin D. Healthy diet refers to foods in the non-potato chip/non-pork-rind family. Weight-bearing means getting off the couch and bearing your weight around the block a few times, as well as using your arms to lift some weight – like your chocolate-smeared, bawling toddler with the diaper sagging to his ankles, and so forth. Many, many Americans refuse to exercise, preferring to sit in the comfort of their home and watch people on TV very much like themselves who waddle around and scream obscenities at their friends and loved ones all day long.

This is where the drug companies come in – the middlemen in the health care industry. They create drugs for all the billions of Americans in the aforementioned paragraph so they won’t HAVE to exercise or give up the foods they love, such as beer and cigarettes. Instead they can take a pill.

In the case of the O-word, the pill is supposed to help prevent broken bones. So if you’ve got a bone that broke because you took a drug to keep that was supposed to keep it from breaking – a perfectly good bone that might not have broken, left to its own devices, for years and years – then you have the right to sue the #*)@! out of the drug company, according to these commercials.

To be continued….if I don’t forget

Lamenting the Foulness of Life

2011-09-20T00:04:00.001-07:00

My dog’s stomach is growling. She had a bunch o’ rib bones and now I can expect puddles of barbecued barf in my bed tonight. Disgusting, huh?

This dog weighs ten pounds and is by my side night and day. She’s laying snugged up next to me on the couch while I type, right in the path of the 140º heat blowing out of my laptop. It’s like someone strapped a heating pad to my leg.

I generally like heat – love those seat warmers. My cousin always wants to drive my car when we go somewhere and all winter I’ve got my seat warmer on. He’ll be sitting there in the driver’s seat, talking about his latest BM.

“Boys, you should have seen what came out of me this morning.” He says boys no matter what the gender of his audience is. “Black as coal and all of 12 inches, coiled up like a cobra, part of it floating like it was ready to strike.”

“I do NOT need to hear about this,” I say.

“It was remarkable,” he’ll say. “Never seen anything like it. I got a picture of it here on my phone – take a look, you won’t believe it. Here, see? Why is it so friggin’ hot? My nuts are roastin’!”

He says it every time we’re in the car – like the seat has launched some sneak attack against his scrotum.

Worse than his stories are when my dog barfs in the car while she’s sitting on my lap. I hear this little burbing noise and a nano-second later she heaves and there’s a puddle the size of a spilled glass of milk on my thigh – slimy and the color of whatever nauseating thing she ate out in our woods. Sometimes it grass in a clear slime like some kind of Tai pad lemongrass soup. Others it’s brown and lumpy.

The worse part is that you can’t do anything about it. I’ll be on the freeway going 65 mph when she Ralphs on me. First the sound, and I try to get her off my lap but I’m never fast enough. Just about the time I get my hands on her waist and snatch her up, I feel the warmth on my thigh, then the wetness. Anyone who’s had a baby knows what that feeling is like. That baby’s happy and coochie cooing one minute, and the next minute you’ve got this foul ooze traveling south down your silk blouse.

At least the dog barf doesn’t smell so bad. You talk about smells, I went into the ladies bathroom at the permit office the other day. Oh my gosh! Women’s bathrooms after they’ve had their morning coffee are worse than paper factories. Woo-whee! Brings tears to the eyes.

I don’t know what’s made me write about these things. Oh yeah, it was that dog’s growling belly. It’s my lament of the unwelcome bodily functions I encounter daily.

What's with Democrats?

2011-09-12T21:07:00.001-07:00

What’s Up with Democrats?

In my last blog I trashed Republicans. That was pretty easy to do because they have gotten so ridiculous. Their only reason for being in office, apparently, is to get Obama out of office - even if it means destroying these entire United States.

But for this to be a bi-partisan blog so as not to alienate half the country, I am obliged to also take a poke at Democrats. That’s pretty easy too.

Democrats believe that everyone deserves help – even the lowlifes who get pregnant to increase their welfare stipend. Actually, I’m not sure if that goes on anymore – surely even the most fertile dimwit knows that a child costs more in the long run than you’ll ever get from the government. But just in case there are people still doing this for a living, I believe the Democrats should at least ask them to give something in return for the handout.

Once you start giving people money for nothing, how many are going to want to go back to scrubbing toilets or plucking chickens? I say give these able-bodied people money, but only in exchange for useful work. Make the welfare moms work in day cares so they can get a belly full of children. Make them work in grocery stores so they can see how obnoxious the people getting food stamps can be. Let them deal with those very heavy, loud mouthed mothers in checkout lines with their carts are full of cigarettes and fried potato products, arrogant and entitled, chips on their shoulders – trying to sneak stuff by and arguing indignantly when they get caught.

These are the people the Democrats insist that American taxpayers help. We taxpayers don’t mind helping those people who are temporarily down and out, we are sympathetic to the man trying to support his family after he’s had a job yanked out from under him, but we’re sick of those who milk us because they’re lazy and no account. They’re almost as bad as rich Republicans who milk us because they’ve figured out how to avoid paying even one penny in taxes.

Democrats want better health care for everyone. You want healthy people, make them get off their lard bottoms and walk somewhere else besides to the refrigerator. Make food stamp people weigh in, or prove they’re buying vegetables for their children instead of Twinkies. Give them books on healthy living and test them once a week before they get our tax dollars. Force them to be healthy in exchange for their money so they won’t need doctors for diabetes for them and their innocent offspring.

Democrats want to help anyone without accountability so that people get lazy – and Republicans want to help themselves get richer so that people get bitter. Doesn’t anyone see this except me?

What's with Republicans?

2011-09-08T23:33:00.001-07:00

What’s with Republicans?

I know I should not talk about politics. It’s a total waste of time - you can’t convert anyone – you’re either preaching to the choir or talking to a brick wall.

Nonetheless, I have to ask, what is freaking up with Republicans? The ones I know are either wealthy and don’t want the government to take any of their money, or they’re dirt poor and fiercely prejudiced – they resent everyone who isn’t like them.

It’s funny to listen to the fat cat Republicans fretting about taxes. The ones I know have two houses, drive Lexus’s, send their kids to private schools, take several vacations a year to Hawaii and Mexico, and so forth.

Yet they get very angry when anyone talks about raising taxes. They don’t want riff-raff sucking away all their hard earned money. I can almost understand these guys – at least they’re sensible. They’re trying to protect what they’ve earned.

It’s the poor Republicans I don’t get. They resent everyone and feel they’re better than the rest of the poor because they have more than 50 percent of their teeth. They are perfectly contented to send their kids to crumbling schools and packed classrooms because they think education is a waste of time – it never got them anywhere. They’re not worried about the condition of roads because their beaters bounce about the same whether the road’s paved or potholed.

As long as they’ve got beer after a sweaty day at work, and something fresh to complain about, they’re pretty satisfied. They don’t want to help anyone else because no one else deserves it, dammit.

If the rich Republicans paid fair taxes, then the poor Republicans could have better schools, roads, parks, libraries, police protection, early education for their children, health care, etc. But the rich ones want to stay rich – they have enough money to buy all these things - and the poor ones think these things are a waste. The poor wear their lack of ambition like a badge of honor.

These two groups have nothing in common, but they rely on each other to fight the battle against those who want a to raise the standards for everyone. When Republicans control things, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. I don’t get why poor Republicans are so hell-bent on being worse off. And rich Republicans have no remorse about hoarding their wealth and living the good life when they could share some of their blessings and make life better for everyone.

This is what dictators and wicked kings do. But in a country where people are free to choose, we ought to have better sense. However, the poor will spite their own selves rather than help those they hate, and the rich, knowing this, will egg the poor on and rile them up about illegal aliens or welfare or whatever it is they despise at this point in history. Then the rich laugh all the way to the bank. This, my friends, is why I don’t get Republicans.

Happy as a Clam

2011-09-08T00:11:00.001-07:00

I am a crazy person. I’m crazy for doing what I did, and even crazier for telling you about it. But I said I’d write a blog tonight after a long, long absence and I’ve procrastinated until it’s late and I’m tired and woe is me. This story I can do quick.

My husband bought a bunch of clams last Saturday for a seafood feed at our friends’ vacation house. He cooked most of them, but decided to cull out some to take home the next day.

When we got back, he found a broken clam and decided all the clams could be bad, so he chucked them in the garbage.

I was livid. He should have just cooked them all at our friends’. He should not have bought them in the first place because there was way too much food already and we couldn’t’ plow through it all (though I tried). He should have been more careful bringing them home. These are all things I made sure he clearly understood after he tossed those clams.

But those weren’t the reasons I was so irritated. I was P.O.’d because I knew good and well that I’d think about those clams in the garbage can, dying a slow miserable death as the heat got to them, wondering what they were thinking in their little clam brains as the life oozed out of them like the yellow goo leaching out of a festering boil, and knowing that they were calling, in their tiny clam voices, “Somebody please help us.”

I knew I’d lose sleep, and I knew I’d remember it with remorse all the days of my life and into the very grave. This is what made me mad as a hornet, fit to be tied, and angry as a skunk tangled in briars.

I went out to that filthy, slimy garbage can and fished out those clams, one by one, amid the coffee grounds, corn husks, and used feminine hygiene products, and put them into a bowl in the refrigerator because, according to Google, that’s how you keep clams alive. I would drive them to the beach two hours away, by golly, and put them back in the bay.

This morning I talked my daughter into going with me and we headed to Netarts. We waded into the ice-cold Oregon bay, full of squishy mud, seaweed, and pointy rocks, and I gave those poor clams back to the clear brown sea. I don’t know how many survived the ordeal in the cooler and refrigerator, and I don’t know what will happen to them or whether they will be able to make a home where I left them, or if the seagulls and crabs will feast on them when the tide goes out, but I do know I will sleep tonight because they aren’t in my garbage can screaming in voices that I would have heard all night long in my dreams.

And if that trip to the beach makes me a crazy woman, I’d rather be crazy than wrestling nightmares for the next six hours.

BTW, it’s good to be back to my blog. You could say I’m, well, uh, happy as a clam. Snicker, snicker.

Stuff I'm Thankful For

2010-11-29T22:21:00.001-08:00

At Thanksgiving dinner we were requested by our hostess to say something we were thankful about. I said I was thankful I got to go skiing earlier in the day, and to my credit I did NOT say I was thankful that I got to do something fun with my family rather than spending days cleaning, shopping, cooking and then cleaning just as much again after everyone went home.

My gynecologist turned me on to skiing on Thanksgiving. He was looking at me through the stirrups, making idol chitchat about how he and his sons have been going to the mountain for years because there are no crowds and no lift lines. When they go home, his wife has a big turkey feast waiting for them.

I wonder what it would be like to be the wife of a gynecologist? Just think about it.

Since he told me that about skiing, I’ve made it my life’s goal to get invited out for Thanksgiving rather than spending it in the kitchen slaving. I’ve been able to do it for the last two years, and with any luck, I can keep this tradition going.

But scamming Thanksgiving dinner is not the subject of today’s blog. Nope, getting out of cooking and cleaning is wonderful, but I want to devote this space to some of the things I’m thankful for. Let me share my little list.

I’m thankful that my kids no longer rely on me to drive them around. Oh Lord am I thankful for that.
I’m thankful that, in spite of how much they appear to bumble, the politicians I voted for are trying hard to make life better for me personally and for others who don’t have my gifts and advantages.

Speaking of those others, I’m thankful I live in a country that wants to take care of our poor even when some of them seem to be taking advantage. I would hate to live in a third world country where the poor line the streets like wax paper and no one pays any attention to them. If I didn’t have to pay taxes, that would be great, but as long as there are poor and disadvantaged, I love knowing our poor aren’t nearly as poor as the poor in the rest of the world.

When you get right down to it, I’m actually thankful I pay taxes, because I like public schools and roads, nice public buildings and museums, subsidized clinics where suffering people can find some relief, public housing for people who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. I hate that there are lazy people who take advantage of my taxes (shame on you), but I’m very happy that children born to poor families get the opportunity to be educated in spite of their circumstances.

I’m thankful for my dog who is excited when I walk in the door even if I’ve just gone out to the mailbox.

I’m thankful for TV. Yes there are so many awful programs (Jerry Springer to name a few), but I like finding free movies to watch so I can float away from reality like a soapy bubble blown out of a plastic wand. I’m especially thankful for The Big Bang Theory.
I’m thankful for laptops and comforters and chocolate chips and sunny days.

Now I’m going to give YOU something to be thankful about. I’m going to end this sentimental romp down Pollyanna lane and jump into something I’m very, very thankful for. A warm bed piled high with heirloom quilts my grandma patched together. Now that right there is definitely something to be thankful for.

Floating in an Italian Alley

2010-11-17T23:38:00.001-08:00

My daughter and I went to Europe a couple of years ago. We had a fantastic time, mostly because my daughter’s red hair attracted attention and won us special favors and kindnesses. Even in France, where there is a reputation of impatience with Americans, we were treated well. My daughter also knew enough French to talk to the waiters. They were aken by her. One waiter flirted openly and gave her his phone number – right in front of me. He asked if he could come to America to see her.

The most memorable experience, however, was in Italy. Italian men practically shoved themselves at her. Unlike in France where people on the streets were in a hurry and did not seem inclined to notice us, the Italian men leisurely gawked at us when we walked by. Sometimes we’d be in those cobbled alleyways with only a few people around, and the waiters would be standing outside smoking. All Italian waiters smoke. They’d see us coming from far away and stared the whole time we walked toward them, looking us up and down openly and unabashedly as we passed.

I’d like to take a second to look up the word “unabashedly” because by anyone’s standards that’s a doozie. Doozie is another word I’d like to look up. It was popular back in the day, but I don’t hear people using it much anymore. Either of these words would be well worth a side trip to Funk and Wagnall, but I’d like to get on with my story so that will have to wait.

When the men eyeballed us (and by “us” I mean my daughter), I’d say under my breath, “Don’t look at them. I don’t want them following us around like stray dogs.”

They were a fine looking bunch of specimens and that is the truth. Italian men are a delicious feast for the eyes. Slurp. But I’d read in the touristy books that it was not a good idea to encourage them. The books warned of men grab women’s bottoms in public. I don’t think I would have been too offended if I was the destination of some wandering Italian hand, but I sure didn’t want one of these guys groping my baby girl.

So we both kept our eyes facing forward and picked up our pace when we’d see the smoking Italians leaning against the outside café walls, drinking us in like we were Chianti.

Once, however, we were walking down an alley in the sultry, dusky evening, and a young Italian man was walking toward us. He had on a long-sleeve white shirt with the cuffs rolled up, and long, dark pants that swished as he walked. He was tall and exceedingly good-looking, and he had not taken his eyes off of us the entire time he swaggered toward us. As usual I whispered, “Just stare straight ahead.”

He smiled brightly at us when he was about twenty feet away and my daughter must have smiled back because he stopped, and in that exaggerated Italian way you see Italian men act in movies, he grabbed his heart with both hands and said, i“Ahhhh, she smile at me! She breakin’ my heart!”

We both giggled and said, “Buon giorno.” He stood still and watched us walk by, still clutching his heart, grinning with luminescent white teeth. He made us feel like we were beautiful and exotic and like we were eye candy right back at him.

One day when I’m in a nursing home drooling cream of wheat, I hope I still remember this man and his flamboyant compliment to two worn out Americans tromping down the street on exhausted legs after another hot, humid day of roaming around Rome trying to snatch every sight in three fast days, and how he made us feel like we were walking on air.

Why Credit Cards Are Evil

2010-11-08T01:10:00.001-08:00

I recently got a bundle of blank checks from my credit card company. They send them every other day, it seems like, with exciting headings that say, “CONSOLIDATE YOUR OTHER DEBTS AND SAVE! LOW INTEREST!”

I usually tear them up because I know they’re EVIL, but yesterday I was curious just how evil they were. Let me tell you, folks, they are very, VERY evil.

I got out my 20x magnifying glass and started reading the fine print. It said, “Yo, sucka, if you decide to use these checks, you will owe us: (1) an arm, (2) a leg, (3) your first-born child, (4) your sister’s first-born child, and (5) everything else.” Trust me, these credit card companies are not after your best interests. They want your interest, and anything else they can get.

You may have heard the old saying, “If you do (blank), we’ll slap you with a fine.” This statement could, indeed, apply to the credit card companies. “If you use one of these checks, we’ll slap you with charges and interest fees so high you’ll have to climb to the top of Mt. Everest to find them.”

For example, I have two credit cards. One I use because it pays cash back bonuses. When I looked at the checks they sent (and I’m doing this from memory because I’ve already torn them up), it said I could consolidate all my other, higher interest debts into this one payment at a low interest rate. Sounds great. But here’s the catch. They wanted a fee of $10 or 5% of the value of the check, whichever was highest. Hummmm, $10 isn’t bad. I can afford that. Besides, that 5% would require me to think, or worse, remember 7th grade math.

Maybe I’m one of those people who spent 7th grade writing notes to my girlfriends or I was the boy who kept dropping pencils so he could look up girls’ skirts and didn’t have the time or inclination to pay a whole lot of attention to those lessons on percentages. What good was it going to do me? I’d never use it anyway. Maybe I’m one of those Scarlett O’Hara types and will think about it tomorrow, after the money is in my hand.

Whatever the case, these are the kinds of people the credit card companies are BANKING on, and I mean that literally. They are making masses of money on these checks, and I’ll tell you how.

In the first place, why would a smart human use these checks? They wouldn’t. But there are plenty of followers of Sarah Palin who would use these checks, and they’d use them without doing the math because they didn’t graduate from high school, or if they did, it was a GED, or by the skin of their teeth or whatever. OR they have an addiction. But whatever their background, the reason these people would use these checks is because they’re desperate for cash RIGHT NOW. If they are only desperate for $200 in cash, they’ll be okay, because they’ll only pay the $10 fee. However, if they are desperate for, say, $10,000 in cash because Guido is going to break their legs and or put their feet in a bucket of cement, or both, then they think, “Here’s how I can get that 10,000 bucks right now and it will be AT ONLY FOUR PERCENT INTEREST for SIX WHOLE MONTHS!”

So what’s the big deal? If you multiply $10,000 by .05 (Sarah, FYI that’s the way you calculate 5 percent), you get $500. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS! They will charge you $500 to write that check. Flat fee. No negotiating.
Immediately you owe the credit card company $10,500. And they’ll start charging their 4% or whatever interest rate on that from day one. Or they’ll give you 3 months of zero interest and then start charging a huge interest rate from then on. Either way, you’re out $500. Just think of the big screen TV you could buy for your trailer with that money if the credit card people didn’t have it.

Even though this money is touted for the use of consolidating debt, I called the credit card company and they said it could be used for anything. “Just write the check to yourself and deposit it in your bank.”

Even followers of Sarah Palin must realize that this is a scam. Do not allow yourself to be a victim of white trash politics AND credit card robbery. It’s just too tragic.

I Lost My Website

2010-11-03T22:50:00.001-07:00

I lost my website! I looked under the beds, in the closets, in the back yard (in case my dog dragged it outside), behind the refrigerator, in the attic, behind my son’s ears, under both sofas, under all the sofa cushions (which was a lucrative place to look), in my car, in my daughter’s lair (generally a no-man’s land), and everywhere else but I couldn’t find it.
Then I realized that a company whose name could be pronounced Yey-Who (which is defined as a country bumpkin – and by sheer coincidence is the only word I can think of right now that rhymes with pumpkin), this company had allowed my domain name to expire. If you don’t know what a domain name is, consider yourself lucky. You are oblivious to websites and the internet. Why is this good? I don’t know, I’m blathering.
Alright, alright I’ll tell you what a domain name is. It’s the name where you reach a website or blog, such as kissmyfoot.com. The www part in front of that stands for World Wide Web – not to be confused with SLW, Simply Local Web. This web actually doesn’t really exist. I just made it up. As a matter of fact, there isn’t any other Web – world wide or otherwise – so you can get away with simply typing kissmypatootie.com without the www. You sure as heck don’t need the extra http colon forward-slash forward-slash in front of the web address, as in this example: http://www.pullmyfinger.com. Typing that to get to a website just shows that you are a rube amateur when it comes to the internet.
EXCEPT when you’re going to an FTP site. This stands for Foot Toe Pie. Ha Ha. It really stands for File Transfer Protocol, which is a fancy phrase website designers use to describe how they get stuff off their home computer (like sticky buggers) onto the World Wide Web for everyone else to partake of. But you don’t need to know anything about that because you are not a website designer.
Which leads me to why I lost my website. This certain web company I mentioned earlier whose name rhymes with BaBoo had my domain name, but they kept raising the price every year. Well, I raised a stink, so to speak, when they automatically renewed my domain name at an even higher price. I could have sworn I’d cancelled my service with them, but there was no documentation etc. etc. so I paid - but swore it would be the last time. I cancelled reordering my domain name from them, but it was about 11 months ago, and a person like me can forget a lot of stuff in 11 months, believe you me.
Since I had cancelled, when the year was up, this company didn’t warn me my domain name was going to be cancelled, and somehow I neglected to put a tickler on my calendar to remind myself. A tickler, if you don’t know, is a feather device that tickles you silly when something is coming up. It especially loves the armpits and behind the knees – it would get the bottoms of your feet if it could reach. You’ll do anything to make it stop because you’re just about to wet your pants.
So my domain name expired, unbeknownst to me, and since I’ve been working so many hours and haven’t blogged in a coon’s age and then some, I didn’t notice until one of my loving fans (and neighbor) expressed his extreme disappointment that I haven’t been filling pages of nonsense and that my website now was an advertisement from the Web company to buy frivolous stuff of no use to anyone on this, or any other, planet.
So I’m happy to say that I got my domain name – gentlehumor.com – and my website back. And the web company was nice about it all – very helpful. I hold no grudge against them except for the skyrocketing raise in prices of previous years but, hey, they’re trying to make a living too, just like the rest of us. They just believe it should be a very GOOD living.
So you, oh loyal and faithful readers, can expect many more words out of me. I can’t claim they’ll be sensible, honest, or even amusing, but, just like beans around the campfire during a cattle drive, there’ll be plenty of ‘em.

Everything Comes Out in the End

2010-10-18T23:28:00.001-07:00

I had to go by a customer’s house to deliver some paperwork. I parked down on the street because the last time I went to this customer’s house I blocked the driveway when the Mrs. came home. I had my dog with me because she tags along everywhere – she’s a little black nine-pound mop and pretty portable.

This customer has a beautiful yard with that thick, unnatural grass that looks better than a golf course. Flowers were everywhere. The homeowners had their door open and I could hear the clanking of utensils on kitchenware – they were either eating or preparing dinner. I thought I could see the Mrs. through the giant picture window setting the formal dining room table.

I didn’t want to leave the dog in the car because she barks her fool head off, so I let her out. I figured it would be safe because I’d seen her a couple of hours earlier doing a doggie do-do and she usually only does one a day.

She jumped out of the car and ran up the driveway so that she was in the middle of the yard right in front of the picture window. She hunched over and I knew this was not going to be a wee-wee. She strained for an eternity and then dropped a Tootsie Roll right in the middle of that beautiful yard. I was SO embarrassed.

I walked all the way back to the car, got a baggie, and tromped over to the place she went so I could clean it up. Of course I couldn’t find it, so I had to pace back and forth in front of that picture window in a searching grid until I finally found it.

I scurried back to the car and placed the bagged-up turd on the street where I wouldn’t miss it, then started back up the long driveway. The dog had moved closer to the house when I saw her hunched over again. She had to go for a record-breaking third time in one day.

I turned around and went back to the car for another baggie, then made my way up the driveway to the latest atrocity on the customer’s lawn, cleaned it up, then walked all the way down the driveway again. I never knew if the homeowner was watching or not, but I was SO embarrassed.

I don’t know why a dog has to hunch over at the worst possible times. It’s uncanny how they have such amazing timing. You can be with a dog all day long, let it out several times, see it actually go, and then when you’re at a nice place the dog manages to reach deep into its own bowels and produce a calling card on the nice people’s well-groomed lawn. It’s pretty remarkable, all things considered. The only worse thing is when your dog starts mounting the leg of the elderly lady next to you and she’s too old and wobbly to shake it off so she starts flailing at it with her purse, which only causes the dog to re-double its efforts. When those dogs get determined, you can’t shake them off either. You just have to ride it out.

I delivered my papers and the homeowner pretended not to have seen me criss-crossing her yard with baggies cleaning up little piles here and there. All things taken into consideration, everything came out well in the end. Just ask my dog.

On the Blogging Homestretch

2010-10-17T23:46:00.001-07:00

I have written 326 blogs. My goal was 365, and I have been slacking lately because I’ve been busy and tired. But I’m jumping back on the horse and I’m going to make it to the finish line. And by that I mean, I’m going to get up right this minute and get myself a fistful of chocolate chips because I’ll need strength to proceed with this 327th blog tonight.

The reason is that I went with my husband on a 9 mile hike today. I am give out, as they say in the south. Worn to a frazzle. I feel like I’ve been rode hard and put away wet. I’ve been dragged under something, I can’t remember what but there’s a saying that would definitely describe the throbbing in my thighs and the burning in my feet.

The hike was lovely, we just didn’t realize it was going to be so long. We thought it would be 4.5 miles total, which was doable. Turned out it was double. We also didn’t realize that it would be a steady incline without a break all the way to Ramona Falls. My husband was grunting and moaning like a constipated bear. He is not inclined toward inclines, you might say.

Boy those chocolate chips are good, but typing about them has brought about a major annoyance with my Word for Mac program. Oh, and BTW, I got a new MacBook Pro. I really like it except there isn’t a delete button. There is, but it only deletes backwards. There’s no way to delete forwards, which comes in handy and my deletion method of choice. Other than that I really like this laptop.

But the Word thing is annoying because sometimes when I start typing a word, some person’s name comes up and, as luck would have it, the name is some annoying individual that I served on a committee with years ago who I’d rather forget. In the case of the chocolate chips, a certain individual named “Chip ______” popped up. This person was universally despised by everyone on the high school snowboard team I was in charge of because he was the chairman of the board - a power junkie who thought he was cool and who made flippant decisions in the “because I said so” vein that annoyed me like someone coughing non-stop in a movie. Even though it has been four years since I’ve had to deal with this individual, thinking about him makes me want to pass gas.

Because of the way Word makes his name come up when I type chocolate chip (there it went again), I have to either stop talking about chocolate chips so I don’t remember him, or else go around passing gas like a bulldog. If you know how to turn those little pop-up window things off, please, PLEASE let me know.

What’s that I hear. My bed is calling me. “I’M COMING, JUST A SECOND.” I guess I’d better go now.

I have written 326 blogs. My goal was 365, and I have been slacking lately because I’ve been busy and tired. But I’m jumping back on the horse and I’m going to make it to the finish line. And by that I mean, I’m going to get up right this minute and get myself a fistful of chocolate chips because I’ll need strength to proceed with this 327th blog tonight.

The reason is that I went with my husband on a 9 mile hike today. I am give out, as they say in the south. Worn to a frazzle. I feel like I’ve been rode hard and put away wet. I’ve been dragged under something, I can’t remember what but there’s a saying that would definitely describe the throbbing in my thighs and the burning in my feet.

The hike was lovely, we just didn’t realize it was going to be so long. We thought it would be 4.5 miles total, which was doable. Turned out it was double. We also didn’t realize that it would be a steady incline without a break all the way to Ramona Falls. My husband was grunting and moaning like a constipated bear. He is not inclined toward inclines, you might say.

Boy those chocolate chips are good, but typing about them has brought about a major annoyance with my Word for Mac program. Oh, and BTW, I got a new MacBook Pro. I really like it except there isn’t a delete button. There is, but it only deletes backwards. There’s no way to delete forwards, which comes in handy and my deletion method of choice. Other than that I really like this laptop.

But the Word thing is annoying because sometimes when I start typing a word, some person’s name comes up and, as luck would have it, the name is some annoying individual that I served on a committee with years ago who I’d rather forget. In the case of the chocolate chips, a certain individual named “Chip ______” popped up. This person was universally despised by everyone on the high school snowboard team I was in charge of because he was the chairman of the board - a power junkie who thought he was cool and who made flippant decisions in the “because I said so” vein that annoyed me like someone coughing non-stop in a movie. Even though it has been four years since I’ve had to deal with this individual, thinking about him makes me want to pass gas.

Because of the way Word makes his name come up when I type chocolate chip (there it went again), I have to either stop talking about chocolate chips so I don’t remember him, or else go around passing gas like a bulldog. If you know how to turn those little pop-up window things off, please, PLEASE let me know.

What’s that I hear. My bed is calling me. “I’M COMING, JUST A SECOND.” I guess I’d better go now.

A Marathon of Biblical Proportions

2010-10-12T22:08:00.001-07:00

Missed me? I have to apologize right now for taking a week-long sabbatical. Don’t you just hate it when work interferes with doing what you want to do, ie write humor? I have found that being physically and mentally exhausted makes me more cranky and less funny. Who would have thought there would be a correlation?

I could use this as a whine and complain session, but you haven’t waited all this time to hear my woes and sorrows. Well, some of you may have. Some people seem to thrive on listening to others complain. They ask questions that keep disgruntled people talking. Questions like, “How have you been?” or “How’s work going?” These innocent prompts often lead to a virtual torrent of miseries of Biblical proportions.

In case you don’t know what Biblical proportions is, I’ll explain. In the Bible, you got your 40 days and 40 nights of rain, you got your turning all the people of whole towns into statues made of salt, you got your locusts covering the earth. These are things that trump every awful thing you could imagine – thusly, this term is used to describe something extraordinarily out of proportion.

I happened to use that saying this past weekend with my neighbor, Sunny. She was one of twenty people who volunteered with me to help at the Portland Marathon. It was raining cats and dogs – it was raining buckets – someone had opened the floodgates in the sky - in other words, it was a rain “of Biblical proportions.”

We were all bundled up with sweatshirts and raingear, hats and gloves. Our job was to give water and “ultima replenisher” to Marathoners and cheer them on to the finish line (we were at mile 25 of the 26 point something race - I could look it up but I don’t have internet right this instant). The whole thing was quite entertaining. First, they lined two big gray plastic garbage cans with a plastic bag and filled them with water from a fire hydrant. Then we dipped pitchers of water into the cans and filled hundreds of plastic cups. In the other can we mixed the Ultima replenisher, which probably tasted like sweetened ocean water. I didn’t try it because I’m not a huge fan of salty sweet liquids. The runners seemed to like it, though.

We’d hold our arms out with the cups and they’d run by and grab them. This would have been great fun if not for the fact that they grabbed the cups from the first couple of people in the line, and the rest of us stood there with one cup for so long the water got warm. I gave out two cups of water. I wasn’t on the line the whole time, though. My T-shirt said, “Area captain.” It had been made for Goliath – a Biblical character who was a giant. Since, as the story goes, David slew Goliath, he wasn’t there, so I got to wear the giant’s t-shirt, which came to my knees and kept getting longer as it got wetter. I walked along policing the line and trying to get people to stand behind the orange cones that were supposed to be the line. The problem was that these people were desperate to give the runners a drink. So they started easing out, and if you stayed behind the cone like you were supposed to, you’d be there all by yourself because everyone else had eased in. Pretty soon the runners were practically elbowing their way through the funnel of people trying to get them to take a cup of water, so I had to beat the crowd back to the cones over and over.

Had it been a sunny, warm day, I think the runners would have partaken of our offerings more. However, cold rain doesn’t seem to make people thirsty. Plus, many of them had on little water bottle packs so they didn’t need water. But that didn’t stop our enthusiasm. The high school students, including my daughter, cheered everyone on with spry and happy salutations that were quite clever. Some people had their names on their bibs (or jerseys), and some of the names were pretty fun – not your usual “Jason and Heather.” Some of them had names like, “Mom of 4” and “Billy Bob McGee.” So the kids were yelling, “Way to go Kokomo Joe,” and “You can do it, Betty Boop.”

We had about 12 tables set up with beverages because we’d gone to a meeting that told us to keep the tables full of water because we’d go through them so fast. We were supposed to stack them as much as 4 high with layers of cardboard in between so we wouldn’t run out. The cardboard got soaked so we had to abandon that after awhile, but we diligently refilled cups until rows upon rows upon rows of filled cups covered every square inch of every table. At the end of the race, we had to pour out many, many cups. This was a case of too much of a good thing. It was a veritable waste of Biblical proportions, but c’est la vie! Which is French and pronounced, “Parley voo Fron-say” and means, “The show’s over. Everyone go back to your homes and families. There’s nothing more to see here. Break it up, now. C’mon, keep moving, that’s right, keep moving.”

It was a good experience all the way around, except for the men whose nipples bled little waterfalls of red on their shirts – red blood all the way to their waists. Someone had warned me I’d see this. It’s caused by 26 point something miles of shirt bouncing and the associated chafing. If I were a man, I’d get me a man-bra in nothing flat. I would not have bleeding nipples, but that’s just me. We used to have a local band around here called Sweaty Nipples. I’ve got a story to tell about that one of these days.

I want to point out to you who have made it this far that I have not complained even though I’ve got plenty to complain about – i.e. lack of sleep etc. etc. but I will not bore you with that no matter how much of a sicko you are and how much you want to know my miseries. Maybe tomorrow, though.

Why I'm No Longer Embarrassed

2010-10-05T21:54:00.000-07:00

The beauty of getting older is that you don’t have to suffer through embarrassment anymore. I remember being in my teens and EVERYTHING embarrassed me. If I walked out of a bathroom with toilet paper clinging to my shoe, it was enough to make me want to commit suicide.
All I ever wanted to do back then was blend in and not make a spectacle of myself. I’d rather skip a class than walk in late. Embarrassment kept me from doing many things I wanted to do.
Now it doesn’t bother me a bit to straggle in late to something. I have been late to golf tournaments and either (1) begged a golf pro to give me a ride out to the hole or (2) run across several fairways trying to catch up with my team. I wave at everyone I pass and don’t think a thing about it except to muse about what they must be thinking.
Certainly it’s better not to get into situations where I’d be late, but now I see that it’s more important to play the game than it is to worry about what people are going to think of me. I know my team would rather have me there – I get lucky and hit a decent shot every now and then. I also know that just about anything can be forgiven if you are very kind to people.
I’m not embarrassed about what I say anymore either. One time I was in a parking lot around Christmas and I was waiting for someone to back up so I could get their space. It was someone really slow, and they eased out, taking an eternity. When they finally got out of the way and I was easing in, a car came out of nowhere and whipped into the space. A trashy woman and her tattooed boyfriend got out – she was driving. I yelled, “Hey, you took my space.” She yelled back, “I got there first.” I yelled, “But I was waiting for it.” And she yelled, “So?” And I yelled back, “You’re nothing but white trash.”
My daughter literally dived into the floorboard of my car. “Oh my gosh, Mom, please tell me you didn’t just yell across the parking lot and call someone white trash in front of all these people.”
“Well, she is,” I said.
My daughter is embarrassed about everything, and she was shocked at this. We had just been to church. “What if someone from church heard you?” she asked. She was stalling for time and didn’t want to get up, even though the white trashy woman had already waddled into the store. Her boyfriend at least had the decency to look sheepish and shrug his shoulders as if he agreed with me but what could he do?
Years ago I would never have confronted that woman, and maybe I’m white trash myself for doing it now, but I just don’t care. If someone I knew had heard me, I would have been mortified, I guess, but I would have made the best of it.
Maybe that’s the difference. Maybe it’s not so much the fear of embarrassment anymore, it’s knowing that, whatever happens, I’ll manage to get through either by being witty or silly or apologetic or whatever the circumstance calls for. Plus I’ve discovered as I’ve gotten older that people don’t pay that much attention to my goings-on. Nobody’s waiting around to see what I might do and pass judgment on it.
If I could give advice to teenagers, I’d say, “Don’t let fear of embarrassment hold you back from anything you want to do.” I’d have a whole ton of other advice, too, if any of them would ever listen, which they won’t. Especially if they’re related to me.

Updates in Case You're Interested

2010-10-04T22:40:00.001-07:00

The police are still getting speeders along the road where I got a ticket last week. They had pulled over two different cars when I went by today. I’ve witnessed them pulling over at least a dozen people just in the short time I pass there each day. As for me, I put my car on cruise control as I approach the area so I don’t accidently exceed the speed limit.

I hate that I have to be careful now. No rolling stops at stop signs, even when there’s not another car for miles. No more sudden U-turns when I’ve missed my street. I tell you, being on the lam (or trying to avoid the Law) is hard work. (In the south we call policemen “the Law.”)

I tell you what’s really hard work, though. It’s working full-time and then going home and having to be a mom. I got to be a stay home mom, and I didn’t know how good I had it. I knew I was lucky, but it wasn’t until I started this full-time job that I realized how hard working moms work.

Of course I had kid crises to deal with all day long, which could wear on your nerves, but I can’t imagine working a stressful job and then coming home and dealing with kids. I have a new respect for working mothers, although I would not have given up those stay-home years for all the gold in China. We used to feel a little inferior to those moms with their briefcases, but now I don’t envy them a bit. They must have been exhausted all the time.

This is off the subject, but my husband went to Costco and got a five-pound bag of Halloween candy. Oh my gosh, it’s all the best stuff, too. Milky Ways and M & M’s and Almond Joys and Hersheys and Resses cups. They’re in little sizes so it’s perfect. I can have a couple of those and feel like I’ve gotten a good dose of chocolate without busting a button. I was thinking about it because there are candy wrappers on my mouse pad. I wonder how long that bag will last. My daughter and her friends will mow through it like a bush hog.

My dog smells like Fritos. Honestly, her feet especially smell just like a bag of Fritos. Sometimes it makes me want to eat Fritos – having that smell around me all day because she’s a lap dog and I take her to work. She whines until I pick her up, and then I feel like I could use a little bag of Fritos to top off my morning.

Good gracious if I don’t turn into a big fat lard, it won’t be because I don’t have the opportunity. My husband also made peanut butter cookies AND a plum tart. I made pumpkin coffeecake to take to work. It’s all good, especially coupled with those little bags of chocolate delights.

Hungry yet? I am, and I’m full. Only in America do we eat for the taste of food even when we’ve stuffed ourselves with cheese enchiladas just a couple of hours ago. Boy, you know what sounds good? M & M’s and Fritos. Excuse me while I go fetch a nibble. I think I’ll head on to bed afterward, I need to get into my elastic waist pajamas and lie on my back. Oh the belly…moan...groan….ooooooohhhhh.

Too Much of a Good Thing

2010-10-03T21:55:00.000-07:00

I talked with my cousin Nancy from Memphis a little while ago. She was telling me how the University of Memphis campus has changed since we were at school there.

“The clearest memory I have of the campus and buildings is the parking lot on the way to Central Towers,” I said.

“How come?” she asked.

“Because that was the place I saw that guy squatted down between two parked cars man-handling himself. That thing was sticking up in the air so long it would have scared a horse.”

“I think I saw that same guy. Did he have red hair?”

“I don’t know, all I saw was about 17 inches of man flesh bobbing up and down.”

“The guy I saw was behind a bush just going at it with that man root.”

“Man root?” I laughed.

“You’ve never heard it called ‘man root’?”

“Never have, but that’s what I’m going to call it from now on.”

“Well,” Nancy said, “you talk about long. When I went to spend some time with my dad in Trinidad one summer while he was in Naval Intelligence, he set me up to stay with this young couple who had a house. The husband worked with him. Anyway, this guy’s wife was this sweet little thing, innocent and really pretty. I liked her a lot, but he was a creep.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. His man root was so big you could see the mass of it in his shorts, like he had some kind of creature in there. It rolled around when he walked. Sometimes the tip would poke out the end of his shorts. I’m not kidding, it was like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

I don’t know why, but talking about this part of a man makes me laugh hysterically. I was nearly bent over double.

“One time we were all sitting in the living room, and his wife was in a chair where she had to twist her head away to see the TV. He took that thing out and was rolling it around in his lap, like he was stroking a pet. It was as big as one of those things kids float around on in a pool – one of those noodles. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. He was unbelievable. Biggest thing I’ve ever seen. Like something that should be in Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”

“What did you do?”

“I couldn’t tell my dad because he would have killed him. And I really liked his wife, so I didn’t want to make any trouble. I was in high school and didn’t know what to do. Luckily I had a girlfriend there and asked if I could stay with her and her family, so I switched places with my dad’s blessing and he never found out.”

We laughed some more about unbelievable sizes and getting out of crazy situations. What’s so odd is that just about every woman I know has a story similar to this. Let me go on record right now, and I think I speak for most women, that those things are not, generally speaking, an appealing sightt to women. Even Tarzan had enough sense to wear a loincloth. Men, please keep those things under lock and key. And I don’t care what you might think, bigger is not better. I would run like I was being chased by a swarm of hornets if something like that tried to cozy up to me. Oooo, gives me the eevy jeevies just thinking about it.

Scary Beavers and Ducks

2010-10-03T00:54:00.001-07:00

What a fantastic day for football in Oregon. Both the Oregon Ducks and the Beavers won their games today. I got to enjoy the Beavers game in person.

I think it is amazing, however, that the two most famous colleges in this state could not come up with more fierce sounding mascots than Ducks and Beavers.

The Oregon State Beavers at least try to make their mascot seem ferocious. On the giant screen on the scoreboards, the cartoon Beaver has a chainsaw. When the other team gets a third down, the Beaver fires up the chainsaw and starts cutting down trees one after the other. He gets a determined look in his eyes.

At least the Beaver can get a little respect because, even though he’s a water dwelling varmint who makes his living gnawing on trees, he’s smart enough to use a piece of equipment to shred his opponents – at least psychologically. Whenever the chainsaw starts, the crowd roars and this, in turn, has a negative effect on the opposing team.

But what about the University of Oregon Duck? What’s he going to do to his adversaries? Quack them into begging for mercy? “Oh please Mr. Duck, please don’t quack at us any more.”

Or perhaps the Duck could slap them around with his webfeet. I’m just not seeing it. A duck does not bring fear and trembling into my heart.

That Duck is nothing to mess with, though. When the team scores, he gets down and does pushups for the number of points scored. He had to do 51 pushups today in the game against Stanford. The crowd counts along to keep him honest. That’s got to be one strong Duck, though he doesn’t go all the way down.

Speaking of going down, I’m taking a PE course and they wanted us to do a physical assessment on the first day. I thought I could do about 30 pushups, but I’ve apparently been doing them wrong because I could only do seven the way the PE teacher wanted them done. She made me go all the way down so that my elbows were at a 90-degree angle. Do you know how hard that is? It’s really, really hard, that’s how hard. Try it if you don’t believe me.

But where was I? Oh yeah, at the game today. We sat down in our seats and were smacked with a waft of BO that hit me like the breath from a garbage-eating dragon. It was really acrid. There was a gentleman sitting upwind of us who was as big as two men. My husband said, “I bet that’s where it’s coming from.” Now this might have been a mean thing to say, and perhaps it wasn’t nice to stereotype, but I think that was precisely where the foul odor was coming from.

“Have you got anything aromatic in your backpack?” I asked. My husband dug around but all he could find was a roll of Life Savers. I rubbed a cherry one just under my nose so I could smell cherry instead of armpit. It worked somewhat.

The day was fun, I got to each a ton of potato chips. I love chips. There can be a table full of exotic foods and I’ll just sit beside the potato chips and gorge on them the whole time. I’ll eat the exotic foods, too, but I’ll continue to graze on the chips all day and night. There’s just something about that salty crunch that I cannot get enough of even when my stomach aches from way too many.

Well, I guess that’s enough excitement for you for one day. I wouldn’t want to over-stimulate you with any more of my incredibly interesting goings-on. I’ve covered Beavers and Ducks, pushups and potato chips. I guess I’m going to have to live with the fact that Oregon’s mascots are jungle predators, but are peaceful little creatures minding their own business that represent the rain we’re famous for and the beautiful outdoors. But tell you what, you don’t want to mess with them, because they might be packing chainsaws – and their bite is worse than their quack. GO OREGON!!!

Life in the Fast Lane

2010-09-30T23:10:00.001-07:00

A snake in the grass gave me a speeding ticket yesterday. It was a sting operation. Three motorcycle cops were literally hiding in the bushes behind a fence just past reduced speed sign. They were lighting up the evening sky catching one innocent speeder after another.

I was totally caught by surprise and unaware that my foot was pressing harder on the gas pedal that it should have been. I was talking on my cell phone (hands-free of course – it’s the law), eating an apple, and trying to dig something out of my briefcase when, to my complete surprise, I saw the flashing blue and red lights behind me. No telling how long he’d been following me.

I figured I could sweet-talk him out of the ticket because that’s worked a time or two before, but he was Mr. Business-Policeman.

“Why, officer,” (spoken with a thick southern accent), “I can’t imagine why you pulled me over.”

“You were doing 52 in a 35,” he said. “License and registration, please.”

“Surely I wasn’t going that fast,” I said like a damsel in distress.

“Don’t call me Shirley. 52’s what I clocked you at,” he said, and walked back to his motorcycle.

I started begging the good Lord to let me off of this ticket, but before I got to the part where I would have starting making promises, he appeared beside my window and handed me a computerized ticket as long as a scroll.

“Here’s your court date,” he said, nodding somewhere toward the middle of the thing. “Everything you need to know is on there.” Then he handed me a business card. A BUSINESS CARD! As if to say, “It was a pleasure doing business with you, if you need anything else, please don’t hesitate to call me!”

I wish I’d had one handy to give back to him. “Here, Mr. Officer, er, I mean, Mr. Thorsen, did I pronounce that right? If you ever feel the urge to give someone a ticket, be sure to call me first.” Or perhaps, “Here’s my card – let’s do lunch sometime, but you’ll have to buy since I’m, umm, $190 poorer since we met just a few minutes ago.”

His card has the lovely seal of the City of Portland, plus his name and badge number and all his contact information. Lovely. I can call him at home at 3:00 a.m. and tell him what I think about his ticket.

Now you’re thinking, “She was speeding, she deserved the ticket. What’s her problem?” Yes, you are thinking that. I can read minds. But admittedly, not always, or I would have read that policeman’s mind when he was thinking, “Here comes another sucker with a lead foot. I’m gonna surpass my quota of tickets today. What idiots. We can’t pull them over fast enough.”

I did deserve the ticket. I was speeding. I’m not contesting that. I’m not even contesting getting caught, although it would have been a lot nicer if I hadn’t been. I’m just marveling about the personal card. I don’t get it. What am I supposed to do with it?

So next time you’re speeding down the road and see those lights in your mirror, fish a business card out and hand it to the policeman and see what he does. I’d do it but I don’t plan to be pulled over again. I can’t afford it, and I can’t even guess what my insurance is going to do...

Attack of the Wiener Dogs

2010-09-28T23:07:00.001-07:00

My girlfriend, Laurie, called and left this message: “I got attacked by a pack of dachshunds.” I pictured a bunch of cute little wiener dogs jumping on her legs, trying to get close enough to lick her. I laughed when I heard the message.

Her supervisor also laughed when Laurie called to say she’d be late for work, and the doctor laughed when she called him to see if she needed to come in because there were several wounds and the bleeding wasn’t stopping.

When I finally got a hold of her, she said she had many wounds, her pants were torn, they practically tore off the end of her little finger, and one managed to bite her in the armpit, probably as she was bending down trying to knock them away with her purse.

Turns out these are forty pound dogs bred to be badger hunters. I was telling my daughter about it. She said, “Why would anyone breed a dog to bite and attack?”

This is, I think, a very good question. Why turn a sweet little wiener dog into an attack beast? I don’t think I’ve seen many badgers here in Portland, and if there were any, wouldn’t it just be easier to shoot the thing if you wanted to get rid of it?

Badgers are nothing to mess with, I can tell you that. They are foul-tempered and vicious. I’ve seen them out hiking a couple of times when I was way out in the middle of nowhere – like in North Dakota. I think it would be extremely rare to be in a situation where you’d come across a badger and need the services of a badger-attacking dog right at that time. A badger will go back in his hole if you just mind your own business. At least that’s what I observed. Keeping a biting dog around for years just in case this contingency came up is like buying an air conditioner in the Arctic – just in case one day got hot.

The doc didn’t stitch Laurie up because it might keep the infection in the wounds, though he said a few of them were certainly deep enough. He made her stand on a pad in his office because she was bleeding on the floor.

Another thing. You have to wonder why a person would breed dogs whose peckers drag the ground every step they take. Those things are like kickstands – getting hung up on cracks in the sidewalk and taking the dog aback. No wonder they want to bite.

I love dachshunds, but these forty-pound bullies are an accident waiting to happen, and my friend happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

This is not a funny story, but I thought I’d share it because it’s unusual. And as a warning that little dogs have the potential to be bloodthirsty killers given the right circumstances. Just ask Laurie.

Miss Misery

2010-09-27T21:54:00.001-07:00

Miss me? I have been working my patootie off! Seriously, I’ve lost 5 pounds. I’m on the “Hard Work Diet.” Very effective.

I think someone is trying to tell me something – like I should be getting away from electronics and getting back to nature or back to bed.

Here’s what’s been going on in my life:

1. No internet again at my job. I did get it up for awhile but then it went down. I wonder if there’s Viagra for wireless connections?

2. I have a tech who is charging me $100 per hour so that he can explain to me the reasons I don’t have internet and he’ll have to come back tomorrow to fix it.

3. My Mac computer at home, the really nice and expensive iMac 24-incher, has dark streaks on it like it’s a worn out Etch-A-Sketch. I tried to rub one off but it’s under the screen. This does not bode well – and they’re growing like a ghost is using my screen to make lines and boxes.

4. The printers at work don’t work. Actually, all of them work except the one everyone wants to use. Everyone blames me.

5. Yesterday I spilled water on my daughter’s cell phone and it started going haywire. She ran through the house screaming, “Where’s the rice?” She buried the phone in a bowl of dry rice and it worked today. The rice absorbs the moisture. This is an old geeks’ tale but it does seem to work – the only thing working electronically around me – probably because it wasn’t mine.

Okay, that’s all except that I brought some work home to print and I got it half done and my toner went out. It’s been saying it would for weeks, but I didn’t believe it. Now that I really need these copies, I can’t get them because Xerox isn’t open at night and I didn’t plan ahead. Those “toner low” signals start about 2 weeks after you put in a new cartridge. How was I supposed to know tonight was the night, after all these months, that the toner actually did need to be replaced?

Yes, I’m as bored as you are about all this technical stuff. And since I must drive across town in the morning and meet that pricey tech at 6:00 a.m., I will bid you goodbye.

Oh, and I just watched Tosh.O again. Such a fun show. That’s what I needed tonight - to see how miserable the rest of the world is. Not that it takes any of my misery away, but you know the saying, “Misery loves Tosh Point Oh!”

Why I Feel So Stupid

2010-09-25T21:55:00.001-07:00

I realize we are in the dark ages when it comes to technology. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING works like it’s supposed to. I have neglected this blog for three days because of technology. That I can write this blog and you can read it because of technology is neither here nor there.

I have been sold technology that does not function, and the techs representing the people who sold it to me don’t know any more about it than I do.

You are thinking I’m about as dumb as a screen door on a submarine. Yes you are. I can feel it. You think, “How could that ditz fall for all these people making all these promises that are apparently all lies just to get her to purchase technology that will not only solve her problem but will make matters worse?”

I feel like someone left a bag full of crap on my front porch and lit it on fire, and I ran out and stomped it out and then realized I’d pounded crap into the ridges in my shoes so deep it would take a sandblaster to get out, and then the doorbell rang again and I ran out and stomped the fire out again, and then the doorbell rang again. Right now I’m sitting here with crap I’ve tracked all through the house because I’m too exhausted to take off my shoes. Figuratively speaking, of course.

I mentioned a couple of days ago that the internet where I work is gone, thanks to a smooth salesman from the phone company that rhymes with PEST. Then I got wireless internet and OH BOY it’s so fast on ONE of my computers. Unfortunately, I’ve got EIGHT computers that need to be on the internet.

I was told the new device would serve eight, and silly me, I believed it. When I could only get a signal on one, I called the tech support people at a company whose name rhymes with PIMP except their name has a “t” on the end. They said, in the first place, it could only provide internet to seven computers at the same time. In the second place, everyone would have to log in and out all the time. I kept saying, “Are you serious? We can’t just turn on our computers and go on the internet?” Nope. We’d have to go through a convoluted process that I kept making her repeat because I just couldn’t believe it. She started getting a little cranky, like not only was I a stupid oaf, but I had no memory and why did my call have to end up with her?

I’m pretty tech savvy about most things. I can set up wireless networks and troubleshoot computers. I know my way around Macs and PC’s. When I talk to these people, I ask all the right questions, specifically, “Now exactly how do I access the printers that are on our wireless network? This wireless internet still lets me access all my printers, right?”

“Oh yes, you’ll still be able to access your printers. No problem!” Well, it’s no problem as long as you don’t use your wireless printer and wireless internet AT THE SAME TIME. One interferes with the other. It is virtually impossible, according to the hour-long conversation with that tech woman, to print something off the internet. Hmmm, that’s not what the salesperson told me, and you’d think he would have known that.

I’m convinced that all salespeople nowadays must first pass courses titled, “Principles of Unethical Salesmanship 101,” “How to Sleep Like a Baby Knowing You’ve Made A Commission on a Product that Will Keep the Customer Awake at Night Worrying About How to Make It Work,” and “How to Speak Very, Very Fast When Going Over the Fine Print,” and let’s not forget, “How to Fool Even Smart, Tech Savvy People, Especially When They Are Desperate for a Solution.”

I would write more, but honestly, I have many, many tech support people to call today. If you don’t hear from me for a few days, you’ll know I’m still on hold while they check something (tech speak for “while I consult the manual that will tell me what ridiculous answer to give this woman so she’ll hang up and leave me the ef alone!”)

Beware of PEST

2010-09-21T22:59:00.001-07:00

This is going to be short and lazy tonight because I’ve had one heck of a day.

It was the best of days and it was the worst of days.

The good part – we got those freaking phones fixed (see the last two blogs full of saucy griping).

The bad part – we lost internet service. By that I mean we no longer have internet at our office, and it was MY FAULT. Kindof.

A telephone company whose name rhymes with PEST called and said they could get us fast internet (we’re in a dead zone and have the slowest internet known to man). I said, “Sign us up!” I authorized them to switch our phones and internet via Fax, then never heard from them again. I kept calling the number they gave me, then finally called a number I found on PEST’s website. “We can’t find any order. I guess it didn’t go through when they discovered that we can’t provide internet there.”

“We can give you cheaper phones, though,” they continued, and I said, “I’ll think about it but I have to make sure my old company can do internet without the phones and I’ll get back with you.” That was about a week and a half ago.

Today we didn’t have internet, so I did all the troubleshooting stuff and then called out internet person. “You are no longer our customer,” he said. “PEST took over your service today.”

So I called PEST and they said, “Oops, we don’t know how that happened but we can’t give you any internet. Too bad, so sad.”

So I called our old company back and they said, “Sure, we can hook it back up but it will take ten to fifteen business days, AND we’ll charge you $99 to hook up the internet plus $45 for each of your phone lines.”

So I called PEST back and said, “You have to get me internet somehow or the other.

Two hours of holding and transferring got me this: “We can set you up on dial-up which will cost $1,050 to set up and you’ll be up and running in two days.”

When your business does everything on the internet, dial-up is not an option. Neither is waiting two to three weeks to get your old, slow internet back - and pay a boatload for it.

Just so you know, I had already called every internet provider in town a few weeks ago trying to get faster internet, and no one had service in our area. We’re like the black hole of internet service. Like no life exists in our little cubbyhole of industrial Portland. We’re a virtual dessert of internet. The Bermuda Triangle of internet.

I tried tears on PEST but their hands were tied. They were very sorry. There was nothing they could do. They were very sad they had stolen our phone lines and internet but there wasn’t anything they could do except try to expedite us getting back to our old service, which, as I mentioned earlier, said it would take an eternity even if we expedited. They wished me a great evening.

So I called Sprint. I can say the word Sprint because I think they are the good guys. They have 4G in our area. They can get us internet in two days. They will not charge us our collective arm and leg to start the service. I guess I didn’t call them before after being told over and over that we had no service from so many other companies and I gave up, plus in the meantime that “PEST Winback Program” guy called me with his empty promises of faster internet.

After 6 hours on the phone, not leaving the office until 8 p.m., a splitting headache, and a burning ear that is still red, I hope the problem is solved. If I can bear the resentment, scorn, dirty looks, sighs of disgust, chagrin of my co-workers, complaints from our customers, and possible firing from my boss, I may survive this fiasco for the next two days until the alleged internet thingy comes from Sprint.

If I had a giant can of RAID I know a big PEST I'd use it on - those lousy internet thieves.

PS PEST claims the guy who sold me my new internet – the company I faxed the order to with the PEST logo on it – was not from PEST but from an aftermarket provider. Yeah, right. It’s like my kids pointing to each other – “he did it!” “No, she did it!” Who can you believe when everyone looks guilty?

Tomorrow Has GOT to Be a Better Day

2010-09-21T00:02:00.001-07:00

Oh my goodness what a day. Things unraveled like the world’s largest ball of yarn being rolled down Mt Everest. Like the hem of a skirt when that one thread gets pulled and all of a sudden the whole hem starts coming loose and hanging down about three-quarters of the way around and the little thread drags on the ground as you walk down the hall. That’s the kind of day it was.

First, the phones rang non-stop. For the most part, each phone call was someone wanting something in the tiniest, most exacting detail, so that the receptionist was tied up and couldn’t get the other calls. The other calls called back which caused more phone calls.

Then the copier ran out of magenta toner and went on strike. It refused to produce even mundane black and white copies, like some diva who wanted everything just so or she wasn’t going to go on stage. No problem, because there was a nice pretty box of magenta toner sitting under the yellow and cyan boxes. I moved those and picked up the magenta. It was so lightweight I thought, “This feels empty.” It was!

I’ve only been at this job for about a month, and how was I to know that the previous person stacked two full toner boxes on one empty one to produce the optical illusion that there was, in fact, plenty of toner and no one should worry their pretty little head about it running out? It looked like we were set for a long time.

Come to find out, the toner had to be ordered online, and that takes a while to be delivered. No one would admit online how long it would take to arrive. One company said it usually ships in two days, but if you continued reading you discovered that it was two days AFTER the 1-2 days it would take to process and the 1-2 days it would take to process some more.

I didn’t let this waste of a morning trying to find toner get me down because I had the phone company trainer coming in the afternoon to teach us how to use the phone system. It is so complicated and no one knows how to program the phones, that we were all pretty excited. But the guy who came was over an hour late for his appointment, and he was determined to explain all kinds of phone programming things to us that we had no interest in learning. This phone has its own website, and there are about 150 pages of options that make absolutely no sense to anyone who is not a technician trained in the operation of the phones, and even this guy was scratching his head with the dumb vacant look of a man looking at an Einstein equation on a blackboard. He cocked his head from side to side like a dog.

I finally said, “We just need the phones to ring and go to one voicemail area, AND we want to change the message to say, “Leave a message after the beep,” instead of saying, “if you want sales, press 108, if you want accounting, press 147, for customer service, press 896, if you want cream with your coffee, press 9432, if you want….” Customers had to listen for about 4 hours in order to leave a message, and then, since no one knew how to operate the phones, the messages just went out to space. This is a very convenient way to do business if your end desire is to lose all your customers, which I’m beginning to suspect was the former manager’s intention, or drive his replacement crazy - how else would you explain that dummy toner box?

The phone tech guy told me the instructions and I wrote them down, but before I could test it he had to leave because by now he was 3 hours late for his next appointment. We tried to record an outgoing message but the phone wouldn’t let us. So we called our phone company and they gave us the same instructions, and were baffled when the message wouldn’t record. Then they promise to call back and did not.

Meantime, I tested the phone by calling it from my cell phone, and I got the long, long message but after waiting for 20 minutes for it to cycle from beginning to end, it said, “That is not a valid mailbox,” and started the whole recording all over again.

I abandoned the phones because it was back to school night for my daughter, and I ended up being a little late. We were supposed to go from class to class and meet the teachers for about 10 minutes. I got on the wrong schedule somehow and was going to the right teachers but at the wrong time. I discovered this when one teacher kept looking at me oddly as he was going over the course (he knows me from my daughter’s track meets). Finally he started saying stuff about this Advanced Algebra class and I thought he was off his rocker. This was supposed to be Calculus, except I was one period off.

There were many more tragedies and mishaps today, but if you’ve stuck with me this far, I’d say you’ve been through enough. Tomorrow HAS to be better or there will be some phone and copier assassinations at work. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Funk and Wagnall Get Their Hackles Up

2010-09-19T20:28:00.001-07:00

At work we have a phone system that none of us can figure out. The phones are so complicated we can barely answer them, much less program them.

I’m the oldest one in the office, and I rely on the young whippersnappers to figure this stuff out. However, they’re pretty happy to ignore the phones altogether and plead ignorance.

I rooted around in the file cabinet until I found a folder labeled, “Phones,” hoping I could read up on the instructions. The manual is bigger than a Funk and Wagnall dictionary. Not really, I just wanted to say the words Funk and Wagnall.

Can you imagine what it would be like to go through life with a name like Funk? When we were kids my dad wouldn’t let us say the word. He thought it was nasty. “I don’t want to hear you saying that nasty word again,” he’d say.

So if my best friend were the daughter of Mr. Funk, I couldn’t introduce her to my dad without getting my mouth washed out with soap.

“Dad, this is my friend, Stacey Funk.”

“I told you NOT to say that word, and now I’m getting the soap. Will you excuse us a minute, Stacey?”

This would have been very awkward. Sure, my dad was quirky, but there were probably other dads around the country who found that word offensive. What would that have been like to have a name that raised dads’ hackles?

BTW, what is a hackle? Spell check must know because it did not underline it. I’m going to ask Funk and Wagnall.

Well, they don’t know because they’re deceased and their progeny sold the encyclopedia and it went out of print in 1997 according to Wikipedia. I did find out that back in the day people used “Funk and Wagnall” to get laughs on such TV shows as Laugh In (“look that up in your Funk and Wagnall”) and Johnny Carson, (Johnny Carson, when he was playing Carnac the Magnificent on The Tonight Show frequently said the answers he was reading with his mind through a sealed envelope had been "hermetically sealed in a mayonnaise jar under Funk & Wagnalls' porch since noon today.")

As interesting as that is, it still doesn’t answer the pressing question: What is a hackle? I’ll have to ask Google again since Funk and Wagnall can’t respond from the grave.

Oh my gosh, you want to hear something nasty, look at these definitions I swiped directly and intact from The Phrase Finder when I looked up hackles: NOUN: 1. Any of the long, slender, often glossy feathers on the neck of a bird, especially a male domestic fowl. 2. hackles The erectile hairs along the back of the neck of an animal, especially of a dog. 3a. A tuft of cock feathers trimming an artificial fishing fly. b. A hackle fly.

Boy, you never know what you’ll find on the internet. A seemingly innocent word being defined with words such as erectile and cock. It’s shocking. What is this world coming to?

Funk and Wagnall are probably rolling over in their graves. And my dad, his hackles would definitely be in an erectile position and he’d be taking soap and washing Google’s mouth out with it.

And still, after all that, I don’t know any more about answering the phones at work than I knew an hour ago when I started this. Why do they build all those features into things if they make the manuals too big to lift out of a file cabinet? The whole thing is one big Funked up mess if you ask me, and I think Wagnall would agree, and so would my dad.

The Windshield and the Bug

2010-09-18T08:38:00.001-07:00

My friend, Mac, has this saying: “Some days you’re the windshield and some days you’re the bug.”

It’s a good quote, I like the sound of it, but I’m not sure what it means. Obviously being the bug is not good. We’ve all seen what a combination of bug and windshield leads to – a Dijon mustard splat.

It’s the windshield part that’s confusing. Let’s analyze this, shall we? A windshield provides a view OF the world with protection FROM the world. It not only doesn’t let in bugs, it doesn’t let in rain, sleet, hail, snow rocks (for the most part) homeless peddlers, apples and other projectiles thrown by adolescent hoodlums, and so forth.

So we could say that windshields are protective views of the world. But what’s that got to do with me? Do I want to be a protective view of the world? Is that a good, or bad, or indifferent thing?

The answer to this question is, I’m afraid, more complex than we have time to explore at this point in our lives. Which is why I’m not sure this is a good saying.

Since Mac reads this blog, I have to somehow make this into something positive or delete it before I post it. If you are reading this right now, you’ll know that I decided my half page investment of writing to this point was worth continuing on rather than starting from scratch. I think many inventions and good things have come from people simply not wanting to start all over, who forge ahead even when they didn’t know where they were going or what they would end up with when they got there.

I wanted to give an example of someone who persevered even while they were lost, so I Googled, “lost celebrities,” and came up “Long Lost Celebrity Twins.” Pretty funny little slideshow – here’s the address: www.nbcbayarea.com/entertainment/celebrity/Celebrities_Who_Look_Alike.html

Where were we, ah, yes, “To be or not to be a windshield, that is the question.” I’m thinking in all cases, it’s definitely better not to be the splatted bug. This is a given, so we can conclude that if the choice is windshield or bug, everyone except suicide bombers and kamikaze pilots would prefer to be the windshield.

However, I guess the question is not whether you want to be a bug or windshield, but rather whether this is a good saying, and this is where I’m having my problem.

There are many sayings that are very clear in their meaning. The one that is pinging my brain over and over right this very minute is: “It’s better to be pissed off than to be pissed on.” This saying makes perfect sense. Sure, you might be angry at any given time, but being angry is a lot better than having someone make water on you. In other words, there are worse things that can happen to you than just being angry, so lighten up and see the silver lining in that cloud, plus you’re annoying all the rest of us with your little anger temper tantrum.

Here’s another one: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” This makes total sense. If you find a guy name Will, he’ll show you where your blog is going, and you won’t be lost just typing mindless words that could be misconstrued along the path like the bread crumbs of little children that get eaten by birds so they get lost until they find a gingerbread house with a mean witch and, uh, or perhaps the saying could mean just keep trying and you’ll get where you want to go.

So Mac, I’m sorry but today I’m neither the windshield nor the bug. I’m finished with this blog post. That’s what I am. I don’t know how I got here exactly, but I knew I’d be here in the end, because Will showed me the way by saying, “Oh piss on it, you’ll get there, just keep typing,” and by golly, he was right.

Hemorrhoidic Flaggers

2010-09-16T22:58:00.001-07:00

I had to go to the post office today. A few blocks from it I saw this big humongous flashing sign that said “CAUTION.”

“Oh no,” I thought. “What mysterious, horrible fate awaits me ‘round yonder bend?” I braced myself for a giant pit in the road or 10-car pile up.

It turned out to be four public employees holding Stop signs at a four-way intersection that already had four stop signs. That huge “Caution” was to alert me that a few yards down the road, humans would be holding stop signs instead of the existing signs that had done the job for years all on their own.

I know I’ve written about this before. There is road construction going on that is causing a detour through this four-way stop. The geniuses responsible for traffic during the construction felt that the detoured motorists could manage the stop themselves and would need the assistance of four full-time employees with benefits to get the job done.

Apparently it is so confusing to the general public that they’ve taken cardboard and taped it to the existing stop signs in an attempt to keep people from stopping when they need to proceed through the intersection.

This is no easy feat, because we drivers know there are stop signs under there. The octagonal sides stick out around the square cardboard. We are all used to stopping there. The man holding a sign that says, “Slow” just confuses the hell out of us. We have been given tickets, very expensive tickets, on more than one occasion for going “slow” at a stop sign without actually making a complete “stop.” How can we trust this man? What are his credentials? We are not sure.

So even though a man is holding a stop sign on a stick and it’s turned to the “slow” side, we can see that it’s shaped like a stop sign, and it’s right beside a real stop sign, albeit tackily covered in scrap cardboard. Therefore, this morning, I approached cautiously (heeding the aforementioned big flashing sign) and when I got to the REAL stop sign, I stopped automatically out of habit.

The man with the sign did not like this one bit. He bent down and looked into my passenger window and signaled me frantically to keep rolling, making his whole arm go round and round, as if I were the one-thousandth person to come to a complete stop already that morning. His impatience with my inability to comprehend the simple directions on his “slow” sign was immensely evident. His eyes were bugging out and he had a look of “you stupid woman” on his face.

I looked all around as if I was afraid someone from the other three stop areas might run into me if I proceeded, and this irritated him to the point that I think he might have given himself hemorrhoids from the strain of trying to get me to proceed through the intersection. There were no cars within a thousand miles of the place, so I’m not sure what the big frigging hurry was, but I was absolutely in the wrong and he wanted to make sure I knew it.

I was secretly getting obscene pleasure from the whole ludicrous thing. These employees have been there for months doing a poor job of what the stop signs are well equipped to do. I’ve seen them stop people when no one was coming, like some control freak with a little power and no way to exercise it except to stop law-abiding citizens or force them not to stop, whatever his whimsy dictates at the time while he tries to make me feel bad because I wasn’t able to run the stop sign fast enough to suit him.

But enough of that. Before I forget, I saw a great show on TV yesterday. It’s called Tosh.0 (pronounced Tosh point oh in case you care). I saw it on Comedy Central. This Tosh guy gets a bunch of videos off of YouTube and then makes fun of them.

For instance, there was a Middle Eastern wedding video and a guy was toying with a pistol and I guess he put it down on a table or handed it to a kid, but somehow the kid, who was about 3 or 4 years old, got the gun and tried to hold it like a real gun. and it’s kindof pointing at the man’s big fat belly and then, oops, the gun fires. You see the flash of yellow flames come out the end, a loud bang, and a big black circle on the man’s white shirt just before he bends down and the camera goes off. Now that’s good entertainment right there. I highly recommend it.

Subway Heat

2010-09-15T22:53:00.001-07:00

My daughter and I got Subway sandwiches tonight. Both of us ordered every vegetable, including those blazing fireballs, the jalapeño peppers.

I love those things, but as soon as I eat one I start coughing violently. The heat burns my throat with such irritation, I can’t even stop coughing long enough to drink cold water.

“Mom, you always do this,” my daughter said with disgust. “You always eat that hot stuff and gag for ten minutes.”

“But I love it so,” I said a few minutes later when I’d stopped.

I had them put the entire assortment of vegetables, oil and vinegar, salt and pepper, mustard, cheese – everything you could think of, and all I could taste were those jalapeños.

“I don’t know why I get all this stuff, all I can taste is the jalapeños,” I said. “And they’re burning my mouth so much it hurts.”

“Why do you do it?” she asked with all the interest of a teenager bored with her mother’s foolish habits but trained to be polite.

“I love them,” I said, like some junkie justifying my habit.

The bad thing about getting ALL the vegetables is that there is no physical way they can fit between two buns. The guy finishes loading the sandwich up and flips the top bun over and it just sticks straight up in the air – it makes an “L” shape. He has to bear down with both hands – hard – to get the top to go halfway over the sandwich. Then he wraps it really quickly so it doesn’t fly open and stuffs it into a plastic sleeve to further insure its stability.

When I try to open the wrap, lettuce springs out like confetti from one of those little pop bottle things you aim at people on New Year’s Eve. Chunks of green pepper and onions cascade to my lap in a veggie waterfall. The liquid ooze of all that vinegar and oil and mustard smushed tomatoes drips out the bottom. If I don’t put a plate under there, and I usually don’t because I’m sitting in front of the TV, my lap looks like somebody tossed a salad on it.

Subway needs to quit carrying those salt and vinegar potato chips. Those things are too good. While the guy was making my sandwiches, I grabbed a bag and scarfed down all 230 calories before he was done. Jared would be so ashamed of me. Man oh man are those things addictive. My mouth was puckered from the salty acid of the vinegar, but it was worth it.

I believe I had better hit the hay right now because, after consuming all of those things so late at night, I’m probably going to have the WORST nightmares. But it was worth it. My my my, the little culinary delights in life make the days bright and the nights a fright, but that’s all right. And so, goodnight.

Witchteria Lane

2010-09-14T22:34:00.001-07:00

I played a really fun game tonight with some girlfriends called Mexican Train. Don’t ask me to explain it because I wasn’t paying much attention. Fortunately we had Susan at our table and she told every one of us what to do so we didn’t have to think a bit.

The evening was fun except for one thing. Patty’s house, where we had it, is on a flag lot down a narrow lane. She had said, “Whatever you do, don’t park in the lane because the neighbor thinks she owns it and she’ll get really mad.”

I had to work late so I rushed over there about an hour late. I hoped I could park in Patty’s driveway and not have to walk all the way from the street, but unfortunately there was no room in her driveway, and nowhere to turn around, so I had to drive the few extra feet up to the neighbor’s driveway to turn around.

I tried to do it quickly, but she was fast. I saw her coming out her door, but I pretended I didn’t see her and continued my getaway. She came right up my car and tapped on the passenger window. I rolled it down and said, “Hi!” all bright and cheery.

“Could you please tell Patty I don’t want any more of you people turning around in my driveway. There have been 5 or 6 cars already.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said, turning on my southern charm. “I’m really late so I know I’ll be the last one.”

“Well, we’re expecting company tonight and I need this lane clear and I don’t want anyone else coming up here.”

Before turning I noticed a ladder next to the hedge, and an extension cord running from the house, across the driveway, to a set of electric pruners lying beside the ladder. Who trims their hedge at 6:45 at night if they’ve got company on the way? I decided not to bring this up because the woman gave me the creeps.

“Well, you can be sure that I’m the last one here because no one is ever as late as I am.”

“Well, you be sure to tell Patty what I said.” Then she looked at me and said, “I think I’d better go over there and tell her myself.”

I could just see this half crazy woman with her black flashing eyes and unnaturally black hair twitching and blinking as she cussed sweet little Patty out in front of all of us. I wasn’t going to let that happen. Not on my watch. For one thing, this group of women would have wadded her up and stuffed into the garbage can. We’re pretty feisty, and I know of couple of them would not have been quiet during the tirade. The police would be called. Someone would go to jail.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I cooed. “Trust me, I have always been the very last one to arrive every single time, and I can guarantee that no one else will come.”

She flashed those black eyes at me and I could see that she thought I was no better than liver bile. I rushed out of her lair before she had a chance to get the hedge trimmers after me.

I found a parking spot a million miles away. I ran across the street carrying my brownies and a bottle of red wine, and when I turned into the lane I saw that the old hag had put that ladder right in the middle of the lane so no one could go on her property.

Now there’s a welcoming sight for her alleged company.

I don’t know why people have to be so cranky. If I hadn’t been so late, maybe I would have climbed out of my car and said, “Well since you don’t want me to turn around in your drive I guess I’ll just leave my car here and have it towed.” Then I could have CALLED her a toad. “Listen up, you old warty toad, get some civility and quit acting like a badger.” But I didn’t. I smiled and told her to enjoy her evening left her to her private fuming. Silence is often the best way to deal with toads.

Key West's Moons

2010-09-13T23:21:00.003-07:00

I wrote about how bad our priest sang yesterday and didn’t sleep a wink. I felt guilty. Tonight I went to a volunteer meeting, and afterward one of the moms came up to me and said, “I saw you sitting way across the church on Sunday. Did you see me gasp when the priest started singing?”

“Oh my gosh,” I said, “Can you believe his voice?”

“It’s horrible,” she said. “I gasped out loud, and I know I had a look of horror on my face. Then I saw you across the church and you were laughing and trying to cover it up.”

“His voice is shocking,” I said. We commiserated a few minutes more about the torture of hearing such a well-spoken man sing like a rooster with his leg being gnawed on by an iguana.

I still feel a little guilty talking about him, but on the other hand, this now appears to be common knowledge and therefore is simply an observation and should not carry with it a stigma of guilt. That’s my theory anyway.

Not to change the subject, but I went to an open house yesterday afternoon and met a nice, older lady who has retired to Naples, Florida, just a few miles from Ft. Myers Beach where I spent a summer with two girlfriends when I was 19. My friend Mary and I decided to drive to Key West in her ancient Opal Cadet, which sounds like some whimsical car. We had cool names for cars back then. Austin Healy. GTO’s, Mustang, T-birds. Good, spicy names.

We were driving on a Florida backroad when we came up on a pickup truck carrying three ruffians. They stood up in the truck, which was going pretty slow, and started making obscene gestures. We hung back, but they were going so slow we would have had to stop for them to get out of sight.

They gave each other a look and pretty soon all three of them had dropped their shorts and started mooning us at practically point blank range. We had nowhere else to look! We slowed down almost to a stop, but so did they.

“Get us out of here, Mary,” I screamed.

“I didn’t drive all the way down here to have to stare at three hairy assholes,” Mary said. She downshifted that little Opal into second and started to pass. They sped up. She shifted into third and we started making headway. It was a straight, narrow road and we would have been doomed if someone had been coming in the other lane, but I don’t think Mary would have slowed down. She would have let the oncoming car run off the road. Her face was red and her knuckles were white on the steering wheel. She had an East Tennessee anger that was boiling like a teakettle.

I started rocking back and forth to help the car’s momentum, coaxing it to go faster. When we were neck and neck with the driver, he turned and gave us a grin that showed all eleven of his stained yellow teeth. These were the kind of guys who would run you in the ditch and laugh as they deflowered your maidenhood.

“Give it some more gas,” I screamed.

“I’ve got it on the floor,” she yelled. I rocked harder. We finally got far enough ahead that we could pull in front of the truck. Simultaneously we threw our hands out the window and let our fingers do the talking.

They didn’t like that and started gaining on us. I rocked faster. Mary started rocking too. “Come on, baby, come on,” we begged.

The chase only lasted a couple of minutes before the farm boys gave up and went back to their cow pies.

What does this have to do with the singing priest? If you figure it out, let me know.

Who's the judge of Judgmental?

2010-09-12T22:56:00.001-07:00

I have written about how tired I am of this current fashion trend of showing vast amounts of cleavage. There are some of you who may think that I’m just jealous. You’re right. I can have a neckline plunge to my waist without any visible valley, much less actual boob-produced cleavage.

Perhaps this is why I get so TIRED of seeing cleavage all the time. And why today at church was a good day, because for some reason I didn’t see any at all. None. Caput. Zip. Nil. Nada.

I can’t tell you how happy this made me. The people with the most cleavage are overweight women, women who’ve had a boob job, and women wearing inhumane brassieres that make boobs look like they’re being squeezed out the top like a couple of squished water balloons I personally find them more distractive than attractive. It’s rare to see just plain natural cleavage from a well-endowed, normal-sized person.

So it was a dull morning in church since I didn’t have cleavage to scoff at. It was probably a good thing, because the priest lectured us about being judgmental of the pastor in Florida who wants to burn the Quran.

This is a tough one for me, because this guy would be perfect to write a humor blog about. I could write something like, “What kind of nincompoop thinks destroying someone’s religious guidelines is going to have any effect on terrorist except to make them angry or justified and – duh – what good is going to come of that?”

This is what I’d write, but now I can’t really do it because the sermon is still fresh in my mind. The thing that bothers me about this kind of live-and-let-live, forgive-and-forget type of attitude is that it completely obliterates any kind of gossip. Where does a person draw the line when talking about people’s foibles?

For instance, if I want to poke fun at someone’s cleavage, that’s my opinion and I’m entitled to it, right? But if I talk about it to someone else, and describe that cleavage as sagging below the waist on a fat woman with a plunging neckline stretched out by 80 pounds of bosom, is this being judgmental and therefore evil?

And if I mention that this same priest, who has such a rich, full, commanding voice, if I say he couldn’t carry a tune in a wheelbarrow, is that also wrong? Because this guy opens his mouth and it’s like an actor paid to sing badly, except worse. His voice is high, then low, then flat – all in about ten words of song. I’ve never actually heard a normal human sing that bad.

I wonder why he can’t hear the caterwauling through the microphone? Can’t he pick up on the poor organist’s attempts to switch her music around to try and keep in harmony with him? Doesn’t he see the grimaces on the congregation’s faces? Can’t he hear the dogs howling in the distance?

So it sounds like from the sermon today I have to be nice, and rolling my eyes toward my daughter and whispering, “He can’t sing” isn’t the thing to do. And yet, if I just report the facts, isn’t that okay? The facts being that I would plug my ears with my fingers when he starts up if it wouldn’t be so obvious. These are the facts, and I’m simply sharing those facts with anyone who cares to listen.

Now I’m feeling guilty about writing this, but again, I have waited too late and it’s bedtime so I can’t possibly start over from scratch. I’m hoping the Good Lord has a sense of humor…and is exceptionally forgiving.

Kiss My Glass

2010-09-11T23:15:00.001-07:00

I won some really pretty wine glasses at a bunko game. There were four in the box and each had a different color and design. I found out where they came from and was thrilled to get another box at a really good price.

I’ve had them a couple of years, and every time I use them I have to wipe them off – they get this little film on them. Why do glasses get a film on them in the first place? They’re stored in a cabinet with glass doors. Does some filmy fog creep in there during the night? Some nasty little vermin spreading a dull cloud over my favorite glasses?

Many’s the time someone has dropped by and I’ve offered them a neighborly glass of wine. I reach for my favorite glasses first because they are front and center and they’re really pretty. Sometimes, if I’m talking over my shoulder or not paying attention, I’ll pull one out and am appalled when I start to pour the wine. If the person doesn’t see the glass, I grab a towel and wipe it clean. If they do see it, I make a joke, “Well, you can tell my husband washed this one. Men, they don’t pay attention to detail. Ha Ha.” Then I scramble to find a “clean” glass.

I just washed these glasses not too long ago, and I noticed that they were fogged up again. Doggone it! I can’t blame those on my husband.

There is something in these glasses – some chemical – that makes them film up like somebody left soap on them and didn’t rinse it off.

Who in the heck makes a product like that? What was that manufacturing plant conversation like?

First day: “Pretty nice set of glasses we designed here, Bob. Ladies are gonna love ‘em. We’ll make a whole bunch of these.”

Third day, “Hmmm, boys, these glasses got a little coating on them like they’re dirty, better wash ‘em before you box ‘em up, there, Steve.”

Fifth day: “You can’t even see through these glasses. How the hell many did we make like this? EIGHTY-TWO BILLION!!!??? What the hell’s the matter with them? Are they fit to drink from?”

Seventh day: “Okay, here’s what you do. Ship ‘em straight to the discount stores. At least we won’t have to take a 100% loss on them. I’d like to know whose brilliant idea it was to make these friggin’ things anyway. What did you say? Oh, shut up, will ya and get these son of a bitches out of my sight.”

I bet it happened just like that and you and I, the innocent consumers, purchased these products in good faith expecting that we’ve gotten a great deal and some real value for our discount store money for a change, and then look what happens.

My daughter is a science whiz – wants to be a physicist of all things – and she says there’s some chemical in the glass that is causing them to oxidize with the air. Since they have to be stored on the planet earth where we are surrounded by AIR, I suppose there’s nothing I can do about it. Unless I move to Mars. But then no one would come visit to offer a glass of wine, so what good would that do me?

The sad thing is it’s taken me two years to figure out that it’s not my husband’s lousy washing that’s causing these ugly glasses, it’s some act of nature. I’m not telling him, though, because then I’d have to apologize for griping about his inability to get a wine glass clean.

I wonder if I can return them to the store for a refund after two years? Probably not. Maybe I’ll donate them to my daughter’s chemistry class so they can experiment on them then throw them into the trash, because now I’m too scared to drink out of ‘em.

Just Like My Momma

2010-09-09T23:51:00.001-07:00

I was listening to a book on tape today and the guy was lamenting that he had become just like his father.

I am happy to say that I’m like my mother in many ways. Like her, I try to see the funny things in life. Lord knows there’s plenty of not-funny stuff to draw my attention away and make me cranky, but I purposefully try to find things that will amuse me whenever I can.

For instance, my son and I happened to be looking at the two giant goldfish we’ve had for about six years. One fish is way bigger, and he’s a bully.

“Watch that big one chase the little one away from the food,” I said.

“Keep watching, he’ll do it in just a minute, he always does.”

“Any second now.”

“He ALWAYS chases the other fish, every time I feed them. Just because you’re watching he refuses to do it.”

Of course the stupid bully fish decided to be on his best behavior to make me look like an idiot. Every time I try to show someone something, it doesn’t happen.

“That fish is just like the dog,” I said. “You tell that dog to do something in front of anyone and she absolutely refuses to do it until the very second the person looks away.”

My son chuckled. Music to my ears – making someone else laugh too.

It’s the little things that make life delightful. My dog was with me in the car today, and I have a bag I put her in and sneak her into places so she won’t have to stay in the hot car. It looks like a ratty old purse, and it’s got some holes in it. Today I was going around to planning bureaus getting permits for the solar company I work for. As I was walking down the hallway I happened to look down at the “purse” and saw a huge wad of black, curly dog hair sticking out. I laughed and turned the purse around so that the hair was hidden. It wouldn’t have been funny if someone else had noticed and kicked me out of the building for having a dog in there with all those, “No Pets Allowed” stickers all over the entrances, but even then I could have gotten some laughs out of it when I told the story to my friends and family. Busted at the City of Portland for having a contraband dog.

Don’t get the impression that I’m always jovial. I’m certainly not. But I’m looking out for opportunities to laugh everywhere I go. There’s a line in the Bible, “Seek and ye shall find.” It makes sense. If you’re looking for trouble, misery, a fight, or mischief, you’re probably going to stumble on to it sooner or later. If you’re looking to be amused, delighted, entertained, or to make someone else laugh, you’ll likely find that as well.

This is what my momma taught me just by watching her – be on the lookout for amusements whenever they present themselves. It makes the bittersweet parts of life a little more sweet and a little less bitter.

Spinning Wheel of Death

2010-09-08T22:17:00.001-07:00

I have a Mac, which means I have the “spinning wheel of death” when Mac wants me to wait for it to do its thang. People with PC’s get an hour glass, but Macs have this little color wheel that rotates, letting you know that the Mac is thinking and you’d better not interrupt if you know what’s good for you.

I learned this the hard way – the same way I learn everything on the computer. I typed out something complex in a table and then got frustrated because the table wouldn’t size the way I wanted it to. So I tugged it with my cursor on one side and then the other. But I went too fast, and the confounded spinning wheel came up. I kept trying to move the table, but it wouldn’t budge. I tried to save the document but the program was frozen like a kid’s tongue stuck to an icy flagpole. It wouldn’t budge, wouldn’t respond. Then it crashed, and my entire document was sucked away like a frog sucking up a fly.

When something won’t work on the computer, I start clicking and trying something else. When that only escalates my aggravation, I click something else. The spinning wheel does not like this. Not one bit. It comes out of nowhere and sits right in the middle of what I’m doing and takes its own sweet time to go away. If I so much as twitch a finger on my mouse, I know what that wheel is going to say, “I told you to BACK OFF, and you wouldn’t listen – you never listen, and I’ve warned you over and over and over again. How does someone get through a dumb thick brain like yours? When you see me, you better start running because if you so much as LOOK at me the wrong way, I’m going to send everything you got right out to space where you’ll never, ever, ever see it again. You hear?”

That wheel is a bee-otch, I can tell you that right now. Sometimes my computer starts running slow for no apparent reason. Maybe it got a little too wild with the PC and it’s got a hangover. Who knows what goes on in my office after I go to bed? There’s a radio right beside the PC, making techno-funk that the PC and Mac can’t resist – they dance and party all through the night – their mice snuggling in the dark shadows. Or they could spend the whole night making fun of the old calculator that only has numbers and not letters. Who knows why these computers run slow for a while for no reason.

When it happens, out pops that spinning wheel, like a rat coming up out of the toilet bowl. This actually happened once to someone I knew. They heard some splashing in the toilet and opened the lid. There was a rat, sometimes referred to as a “sewer rat” thrashing around in the toilet bowel. Apparently it had come from somewhere. I don’t know what they did with it – in this situation, what could you do? Flush the toilet screeching, “Go back where you came from, you swarthy vermin?” Would you throw it a life raft and succumb to your child’s pleas of “Can we keep it mommy, pleeeee-ease? We’ll take really good care of it, honest we will. Can we, can we, can we?”

That’s the point; you don’t know WHAT to do with that spinning wheel any more than you know what to do with that unwelcome varmint in your toilet. If you wait long enough it MIGHT go away without doing any damage. Of course the rodent isn’t going anywhere, and you’ll have to deal with him as best you can. I’d advise you to be nice to him because brutality to a sewer rat might give you bad dreams. It would me.

That spinning wheel and a sewer rat rank at about the same place on my list of unwanted things in my life. I love my Mac, and it’s fast and easy and fun to operate, but I hate that wheel. Always will.

Spell Check Doesn't Like Whoo-hoo

2010-09-07T06:57:00.000-07:00

Whenever I write anything I try to run spell check because with my word processing program, Microsoft Word for Mac, I keep getting curious little green and red underlines on words like “fixin’ to fix dinner” or “fiddy-cent that won’t go away unless I spell check them.

On a recent post I was commenting about your comments and btw, thanks to abnolagrors for this fun comment: "It's such a tickety-boo site. fabulous, very intriguing!!!” This comment alone has two underlines, not to mention the name of the commenter, and I can’t wait to see what spell check is going to say about tickety-boo. Spell check gets very confused with made up words but, being a hard worker and dying to please, it tries with all its might to come up with a plausible suggestion.

For instance, and as I was saying, on that recent post I was excited about reaching 300 blog posts, and I typed the words “whoo-hoo.” (There goes the red underline again). Since I’m noticing these underlines, I just discovered, after all these years – whoo-hoo! – that the red underlines must be misspelled words and the green ones must be grammar or “other” errors, like an accidental extra space around a word, incorrect capitalization or comma usage, or an unsightly poppy seed caught between my words that I don’t notice but everyone else does and spell check wants to tell me because it’s my friend and your best friends will let you know about a poppy seed caught between your words.

Okay the whole poppy seed thing is dumb, but spell check doesn’t think so. It didn’t find any errors at all in that whole rambling, except the “whoo-hoo.” So I ask it, “What’s the matter boy, what is it? Did Timmy fall in a well?” My daughter said this yesterday in the middle of a conversation, and I was amazed. Wasn’t that in an old “Lassie” episode from the last century?

“How do you know about Lassie?” I asked.

“Wasn’t that about a dog with a pointed nose?”

“Yes, but you’ve never seen it, have you?”

“Didn’t that dog have a lot of long hair?”

“Yes, Lassie was a collie.”

“Whatever. What’s for supper?”

Who knows where these kids get their information? I’ll have a carload of girls in the car and an old song comes on the radio and they all start singing along in their loudest voices. The noise is deafening, I can tell you that. But what’s really interesting is how they know the words to the songs I used to sing when I was a kid. I can guarantee you I did NOT know the words to any songs my parents used to know. My dad used to sing blues songs which I had no interest in whatsoever because I was into rock n roll.

Interesting – spell check didn’t underline rock n roll. How does it know that’s a word? “n” is not a word, but spell check isn’t scoffing. Maybe it’s on vacation – down in Tahiti sipping Mai Tai’s and wiggling its toes in the sand, catching some rays.

Whatever the case, I’m going to finish this “whoo-hoo” thing right now so I can move on with my life. I got a red line under “whoo-hoo” and spell check had some suggestions. The first one was “hoo-ha.” I wondered, “How come spell check knows “hoo-ha” but doesn’t know “whoo-hoo?” To me it seems like “whoo-hoo” has been around longer than “hoo-ha.” Perhaps I’m misspelling “whoo-hoo.” Maybe it’s supposed to be “whoo-who.” Nope, spell check doesn’t like that either. I’m going to see what Google says. Be right back.

Hmmm, quite interesting. Google says it’s supposed to be “woo-hoo” because that’s what Homer Simpson was using, but the bank, “WaMu” adopted “whoo-hoo” and trademarked it as their slogan. Since WaMu is now Chase, I guess that didn’t work out too well.

For the record, spell check doesn’t think “woo-hoo” is a word either, but I’m not complaining. Spell check is my friend, and it’s doing the best it can, and Lord knows I ask a lot from it with my made up words, sentence fragments, and bona-fide typos. To me, spell check is fabulous – it’s simply tickety-boo!

Artistic Observations

2010-09-05T23:33:00.001-07:00

So I was going to talk about Art in the Pearl, the annual display of very talented artisans in downtown Portland over Labor Day weekend. Their work is stunning. So creative, so detailed, so expensive. You can tell by looking at the finely crafted wood furniture and cleverly unique artwork that you can’t afford to have any of it in your house if you are like me.

One artist didn’t have prices on any of his work. He had these incredible martini glasses with drops of water on them that looked just like a photograph. He was explaining to people that there were NOT photographs, and that’s why they cost $3,000, because they were hand painted.

Everything we saw was gorgeous and intriguing – artwork to enjoy that would also impress your friends.

Contrast these with the artwork I saw at the Alberta Street fair a couple of weeks ago. Most of that art looked like psychedelics were involved. Bright colors swirled over canvas like a hurricane had passed through the artist’s studio. Most everything I saw was made with “hard” colors – I don’t know how else to describe them. They weren’t normal colors you’d see in anyone’s home. All those reds and yellows and royal blues fighting for real estate on the canvas without a theme was a torment to my eyes. They looked like children had been instructed to use as many colors as they could with no particular intention. The odd thing was that booth after booth had these kinds of paintings, as if the whole street had sent their kids to an “instant street fair” art class.

There were other weird pieces with hateful looking demons or weird creatures painted with blacks and touches of red. Who is going to buy such a thing besides Satan? Would you want to look at that over your mantel? They were totally creepy. If I had one of those things in my house and got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and saw it by the eerie glow of a nightlight, I’d have bad dreams the whole rest of the night.

The main difference between these two approaches to art boiled down to time invested. The artists at the Pearl looked like their work took hours and hours and hours to do. At Alberta Street, there couldn’t have been much more than one hour.

Another difference was price. Most everything at the Pearl appealed to me but was too expensive. Much at Alberta was unappealing but quite affordable.

Anyone very young and/or on drugs is going to take offense at what I’m saying here. They will say it’s a matter of taste, and I should be open to people’s artistic expression, and they’re absolutely right. It is true that my particular taste runs to things that would look good in an average home as opposed to things that look like they’d been drawn by someone in a third-world insane asylum.

But I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, so I will end with the observation that I very much enjoyed looking at the artwork at Alberta and jabbing my husband in the ribs when I saw something particularly eye-wrenching, er, I mean eye-catching. This is one thing I like about Portland. You can find something for everybody around here – from the upper crust to the lowly heel with the fuzzy blue mold.

And if you have a taste for the bizarre – you’re in luck. You can pick up artwork for cheap – in many instances two for one, 35% off today only, or at a “street fair” special. And if you have some pot on you, you could probably get an even better deal than that.

Thanks to My Super...cious Readers!

2010-09-04T08:59:00.001-07:00

We’re going to go downtown to the annual “Art in the Pearl” outdoor art exhibit today. It’s wonderful – lots of very talented artisans and craftspeople displaying their talents. The “Pearl” is a section of town. I think everyone must be juried because everything is so superbly done. If you don’t know what juried means, ask Google. No, wait. I’ll tell you, otherwise you might not come back because that’s the way you are.

If you want to know exactly what way you are, it is this. You are great! No, fantastic! No, you are supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! Don’t know what that means? Or even how to say it? Or whether I spelled it right? Or how many stars there are in the sky? Do I have to explain everything?

It comes from an old Mary Poppins movie, and if you’ve heard it, even once in your life, you will be singing it all day today because it’s the kind of thing that sticks in your brain like the tentacles of an octopus.

According to Wikipedia, that brilliant encyclopedia of unverified information, the word, which has 34 letters, can be broken down as follows: super- "above", cali- "beauty", fragilistic- "delicate", expiali- "to atone", and docious- "educable." This makes very little sense but so do a lot of words in the English language so I’m not going to hold that against it. According to the 1964 Walt Disney film, it is defined as "something to say when you have nothing to say."

Well I have something to say, so that doesn’t apply either. Be that as it may, and albeit, you guys are super...cious because many of you are saying some very nice things about what you’re reading. For instance, Donna T, a member of my writing group, commented, “Too fun!” and “Wonderful, Suzanne, absolutely wonderful!” I am gushing and blushing as I type this – thanks so much, Donna. She just got published in an anthology of inspirational readings for soldiers. Whoo-hoo!

Elussyelalp left this comment yesterday, “It's such a great site. fanciful, acutely fascinating!!!”

Aw shucks.

Linda Kuhlman, another friend in my writer’s group, had this to say, “"Love this, Suzanne! Your wit never ceases to make me chuckle, a welcome diversion from the 'to do' list I stare at every morning. I'm going joggin’ now!" This was in response to me writing about southerner’s droppin’ the “g” on “ing” words. BTW, good for you, Linda! You keep joggin’ and I’ll keep bloggin’!

Another reader said, “Shoes go and come every couple of years in the world of high fashion and they are a seemingly permanent fixture in catalogs from department stores ranging…” I get a few of these – comments that are totally out of context and are, I’m afraid, people who don’t even read my posts but just want to lure me to their sites, or worse, to spam me. I’ve got to tell you, I’m bruised and swollen from all the spamming I get. Like this comment from CLERGYWERWEDO (that’s his/her capitalization, not mine – I’ve got better things to capitalize): “Buy reductil online.” There is no way, in any shape or form, this could be a real response to anything I’ve ever written, so Mr. (or Ms.) CLERGYWERWEDO, take your reductil and shove it up your ASS!

I apologize for that. I know I’ve cursed and been crass in some of these posts, which is bad.

What did you say? I’ve also been very tacky? Well, yes, I guess on occasion I have.

What do you mean, “on occasion my ass – more like all the time?”

Hey! You want a piece of me? YOU WANT A PIECE OF ME????

Sorry, perhaps I’m getting a little too “fanciful” here. I have these conversations in my head all the time – where I have imaginary arguments with snotty people and I come off, in my head, as quite clever and winning the argument and they are left as a pile of smoking rubble or apologizing profusely and begging to be my BFF. This is what happened just now. I imagined that you, my wonderful readers, were criticizing me for being tacky, and I started fighting back and being the tough guy like on that Seinfeld re-run where Elaine gets in a verbal tiff with Mr. Castanza and he immediately escalates it to a physical fight by saying that “you want a piece of me?” line. Pretty funny stuff.

But I know your comments are sincere, and they give me warm and cozy encouragement that I very much appreciate, except for ALL OF YOU SPAMMERS ! I DO NOT NEED MY WEBSITE OPTIMIZED! I DO NOT NEED VIAGRA!

Oops, I got sidetracked on the “Art in the Pearl” topic. Good for me. Something to look forward to tomorrow.

A Look at Brain Food

2010-09-02T22:57:00.001-07:00

First share with me the celebration of my 300th blog! Whoo-hoo! My goal was to write a post a day for one year, and I’m almost there. Break out the champagne!

This seems a good occasion to write about brain food. Why? Because without a brain I couldn’t think up 300 blogs, much less type them up. Granted, some people are able to do many, many things seemingly without a brain, but I’m not that gifted. Therefore I must take care of my brain.

Let us first start out by discussing what brain food is. According to some astrophysicist surgeon of some sort on OPB (Oregon Public Broadcasting), it’s “food that feeds the brain.”

One such food is walnuts. The scientific consensus among the major “brains” in the world for deciding that this is a brain food is that a walnut LOOKS like a brain. You look at any average walnut and the first thing that comes to your mind is, “that thing looks just like a brain.” This is why it’s the number one brain food in my book.

Another stellar brain food is the blueberry. Why? Because blood is blue, and you need blue blood to go up to the brain and check things out, see how all the memories are holding together and so forth, then go back to the heart and tell all the valves to keep pumping, and then back to the brain. Busy, busy busy.

The reason blood is blue is because it doesn’t have any oxygen or something – some doctor tried to explain it to me and I couldn’t get it. I think he was pulling my leg. Which he was. I had a sore ankle. He insisted that the blood is blue in the veins, which makes sense – go ahead, look at a vein – I’ll wait. See, it’s blue. The doc claimed that the blood turns red the second it comes in contact with oxygen, that’s why it always looks red when we get an annoying paper cut.

This is why blueberries are brain food – because they keep that blue blood blue as nature intended. This makes the brain happy.

Another brain food is coffee beans, in the form of espresso. You will notice that people who drink a lot of coffee or espresso are bouncing around, full of energy, and have to go to the bathroom frequently. Because of this, they get a lot of exercise. Exercise is very good for the brain. Nobody wants to be a “fat head.” Drinking caffeine helps prevent this condition. Actually, it’s not the caffeine that makes this a brain food, it’s the exercise. Or something like that – I didn’t finish reading because it got too technical with antioxidants and ribo-thing-a-ma-jigs, and I got bored.

There are many, many more foods that the brain likes – for instance broccoli. It likes flowers and broccoli is made up of flowerettes, or maybe that’s cauflower. Either way, the brain is a sensitive organ that likes to be surrounded by lovely things, such as flowers, and since the brain has no eyes, it can’t tell that broccoli is just a green nub on a stalk. The brain just likes the name.

I notice that I’ve used the words “brain flood” a million times already, so this is a good time to end our discussion of these wonderful, natural additions to our diets that can help that area above our eyeballs function better (I’m trying not to say those words anymore).

Now if you’ll excuse me, the bubbles are escaping from my champagne!

Sayings to Giggle By

2010-09-01T22:13:00.000-07:00

My dad was a character. He was a union electrician whose speech was salted with crude four letter words but a lot of funny sayings. I have to warn you that I’m going to be using some of those four letter words in the next few lines, so if you’re easily offended, better turn tail and run.

One of my favorites was the one my dad used to describe people he didn’t see eye to eye with: “You’re contrary as cat shit under a couch.”

Another one was, “It’s hotter than a half f____ed fox in a forest fire.” Now that’s hot!

He had a good saying for the cold, too: “Colder than a well-digger’s ass in the Klondike.” Brrrrr, that’s mighty cold.

I was a pretty destructive kid, and was known to tear up just about anything pretty quickly. One time I broke a toaster and, fearing repercussions, threw it over the neighbor’s hedge. It hit their dog on the head. Just kidding but it’s funny to picture that toaster falling on a dog – not that I’d want to hurt a poor innocent dog, but if you think of it like a cartoon, it’s pretty funny. After that incident my dad started saying, “You could tear up an anvil.”

If my dad though someone wasn’t playing with a full deck (a little crazy, that is), he’d say, “He’s a half a bubble off of plumb.” If the person was poor, he’d say, “He doesn’t have a pot to piss in.”

Which reminds me of another saying, “He ain’t got enough sense to pour piss out of a boot.” That’s pretty dumb if you think about it.

Another saying I loved was one my friend’s mom used to say: “He’s grinnin’ like a mule eatin’ briars.” This same mom said one of the funniest things I ever heard. When she’d wake my friend up for school, my friend, who I’ll call Murry, would do as she was told and get up, but she’d sit on the edge of the bed with her head hanging down and doze back off. Once her mom came in and said, “Murry, you’d better get up before your pus mats to the bed.”

Oh my gosh, when I heard that story I about wet my pants! What kind of mother says that to her daughter? The best kind, I say, because right now I’m tired from work and yet those words have me giggling, and giggling feels good. So thanks, ma, for that great memory.

I had a friend, Clark Reese, who used to say, “I’d rather be pissed off than pissed on.” Those are words of wisdom if I ever heard any.

I dated a guy named Steve Bingham and he had a saying I liked, “You’re a sweet little lassie with a cute little chassis.” Charming.

When my brother wore underwear with the elastic worn out around the legs, he said he was wearing Apache underwear: “Rides up behind you and wipes you out.”

There were some trashy kids a block over from my house who were pretty entertaining. One of them, Sharon, would say, “I’ll knock the soup out of you,” and “I’ll snatch you bald headed.”

Another saying I liked describes someone without much between the ears: “The lights are on but nobody’s home.”

Here’s some more:

I’m as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

It’s darker than a bat in a cave.

He’s faster than greased lightning.

You made your bed now lay in it.

Speaking of bed (yawn), it’s time to get some shuteye. So I’m going to make like horse manure and hit the trail.

I Admit I'm a Bag Lady

2010-08-31T22:54:00.001-07:00

I can’t leave my dog in my Prius and lock it. I discovered this when I ran into the post office and a couple of minutes later I heard a car alarm going off. It didn’t stop and I was cursing the idiot driver when I went out to the parking lot and saw my car lights flashing.

When I called the dealer about it, he said to bring it in, but apparently the alarm system goes off when the car is locked and something moves inside. I guess there’s a good reason for that, but I can’t figure out what. Suppose you want to leave your teenage daughter in the car because she refused to be seen in the grocery store with you, but you wanted her to be safe. She’d have to sit like a sphinx until you came back. Unfortunately, the repairperson didn’t know how to fix it.

For those of you who are tisk-tisking me for leaving my dog in the car in the first place, let me assure you that I am putting her in no danger. I’ve left her in the car with the motor running, unlocked, and the air conditioner on, when I just dash in to get something somewhere. You can’t tell the car is on - it’s so quiet with that hybrid electric motor.

When I have to go into a store for a while, I take the dog in with me. I made this black bag that I put her in. It looks like a worn out, tacky handbag. That dog has gone into restaurants, amusement parks, movies, bars, and other places I can’t think of right now.

She loves it in there. If I put the bag on the floor, she tries to climb in it – even if we’re not going anywhere. It’s got a wood bottom with a cushy pad so she just lies down and enjoys getting toted around. When I go to the bathroom I hang her on the door hook so the top won’t fold down on her.

She’s a smart little pooch, so we taught her to be quiet in the bag by saying, “No barking.” However, there were some glitches. Once when we first started using it, we were on vacation and found a church on Sunday morning. She was quiet as a, ahem, church mouse until we went to communion. We left her in the pew, and when we were walking down the aisle on the way to the altar, we heard her whimpering. The kids started poking me (as if I hadn’t heard!), and giggling into their hands. The whining got louder. I guess she thought we’d left her. We got communion and raced back to the pew, petting the outside of the bag to calm her down. After that no one left her alone while she was in the bag.

As I type this I realize that you may be thinking, “What kind of nut carries a dog around with them in a bag?” Well, I’m that kind of nut – l’ll admit I’ve always been a little crazy. But if you could see how pitiful that dog looks when you’re getting ready to go out the door and she doesn’t get to go, you’d be bagging her too.

Today I noticed the bag is getting pretty ratty. She’s poked a couple of holes in it, and the sun has faded some of the fine black mesh. It’s trashy, but I haven’t found a replacement and with this much ventilation that looks like a handbag and doesn’t show the dog in it. It helps that it’s black and so is she.

One problem is that I can’t take a purse with me, because the bag is supposed to be my purse. So I have to pack a credit card in my pocket for purchases. It looks pretty stupid, but I haven’t been caught yet. Knock on wood.

Dipped Cones

2010-08-30T23:22:00.001-07:00

I took a notion for a chocolate dipped ice cream cone tonight, so I went by the Dairy Queen. I told her I wanted just a little one. Last time I was there I think the clerk got distracted when she was filling the cone with soft ice cream. It came out looking like the leaning tower of Pisa. It was so tall, when I tried to take a bite the top of it hit the roof of my car.

When I ordered a little cone with not much ice cream, she didn’t understand. I could have explained to her that I really just wanted the chocolate shell around the ice cream, but it seemed more trouble than it was worth so I just repeated I only wanted a little cone.

“We have a child’s cone,” she said.

So I ordered that and when it got there, it was still too big. It was a normal adult sized, sensible cone. I forced myself to eat it all rather than litter up my car with sticky drippings.

Speaking of drippings, I love the way the ice cream melts under the chocolate shell and runs like little rivers out from underneath. On a hot day you’ll spend the whole time trying to dam up those flows with your tongue, turning the cone round and round to try and catch them all.

When I was a kid my brother talked the neighborhood kids into helping him distribute samples by offering to treat us to anything we wanted at Dairy Queen. He got a whole bunch of us together, which ended up being me, my friend Christine, and my friend Carol and her five brothers and sisters, plus his friend, Clark Reese. He got a job delivering answered an ad to deliver free samples of Palmolive liquid soap and a couple of other products. They had to be stuffed into a bag, so he got us in assembly lines, each person stuffing one item and passing the bag to the next person. It was pretty ingenious. We loaded up boxes of these things, and then he drove us around delivering them. I grabbed a handful of bags and ran up one side of the street, and my friend, Clark Reese, covered the other side.

When it was all done, all the helpers walked down to the Dairy Queen and got anything we wanted. Of course most of us ordered banana splits because those were luxury, deluxe, expensive treats that none of us ever got. I don’t know how much my brother made on the deal, but we were all pretty happy with our pay.

I wish I knew how they made those chocolate dipped cones, though. McDonald’s makes them too, and once I asked the person there for only a little ice cream. She said, “What?” as if to say, “Are you crazy? You gonna pay full price and not get a full cone?” I told her I just wanted the chocolate.

“Then I’ll give you your money’s worth,” she said. She dipped the cone several times until it had a real thick coating on it. It was so thick it stayed warm and was creamy and smooth in my mouth. What a feast. Nobody else has ever done it like that for me since.
Makes me think of that rhyme,

I scream

You scream

We all scream

For ice cream

‘Specially when they dip

Chocolate coating all over it.

How to Survive a Bee Attack

2010-08-29T23:01:00.001-07:00

Nothing scares me more than bees except the sound of a bee. Bees have a distinct sound like no other insect.

When I was a kid, I got into a yellow jacket’s nest – the jerks of the bee kingdom that can sting you over and over. Those things are viscous. Most bees sting you because you’re bothering them or whatever, but yellow jackets will attack you for no reason, just for their own entertainment. “Hey guys, watch me make this lady dance.”

When I hear one of those things I used to take off running. It didn’t matter what I’m doing. It was a conditioned response. I know what those bees are capable of, and I know they’re after me and they’re going to have their way with me.

For years I’ve pulled over my car and jumped out when a bee flew in the window. I’ve left my house and peered in the windows trying to see where the thing went. I’ve run into a closet and stayed in there for a long time until I think it’s safe to come out. Swatting at them seemed to make them mad. “Hey, bee-otch, you swinging at me? YOU SWINGING AT ME!!!!!! I don’t put up with that from nobody. You hear me, NOBODY.” And the bee starts diving in and out, trying to hit you in the back, then down by the legs where you can’t reach him. Meanwhile I’m running down the street with arms flailing like someone is peppering me with a b-b gun.

But I discovered a secret that I’m going to share with you now because it’s yellow jacket season and they are incredibly nasty during September. Here’s what you do. Grab a newspaper or some kind of weapon – something spread out. Pine boughs work great. Start hitting toward the bee until you make contact with him. I’m not talking about killing him, because I don’t like to kill stuff, but if you just make contact, he’ll fly away every time.

You see, these guys aren’t so tough when you stand up to them. Their strength lies in triggering your fear with their buzzing sound. Other insects fly around without making all that racket. Bees use it as a form of intimidation. The sound causes humans to freeze up in terror or run like hell. I know a lot of those car wrecks where the driver “lost control of the car” could be traced to a bee flying through the window. I’ve nearly wrecked a car that way on more than one occasion.

Trust me, you stand up to these guys and they’re going to tuck tail and run. But heaven help you if you start flailing around and don’t make contact, because the bee will circle around and attack you in the back. Make sure your weapon is wide enough so you can’t miss.

Of course if the whole family of bees attacks because you’ve stumbled onto their nest, you’re screwed. There are too many of them to swat at. Just run until your lungs give out and hope by then they’ve gotten bored of stinging you over and over.

Oh I have to recommend a movie I’m watching as I write. It’s called “Get Shorty.” This is a movie I’ve watched several times and never get tired of seeing. John Travolta and Rene Russo. Great movie. And no bees!

GPS Means Go Past Streets

2010-08-27T23:39:00.001-07:00

I have a GPS system in my car, which stands for Go Past Streets, at least in my case. It’s very complicated. The little arrow isn’t pointing the right way. If I come to an intersection and, if the blue line indicating the route I should take is off to the right, I turn right. Then I see that the arrow is heading away from the blue line.

This is pretty confusing, and I spend a lot of time making U-turns. I didn’t understand it until today when I was giving someone a ride and he started showing me the features. “The arrow is the direction you’re going right now. See, it’s pointing north.”

“But it feels like I’m going south.”

“Nope, that’s north. See the airport in that green area?”

“Oooooh, I get it. So if it’s pointing north, and the blue line is turning east, then I have to make a left,” I said.

“Well, no you’d be going west then.”

“Oh, so which way is east?”

“It’s where the “3” would be on the clock if your GPS was a clock.”

“Oooooo, I can remember that. I’ll call it “threast!” I was excited after all these months that I could finally understand at least that part of the GPS.

When I first got the car, there was a lady in the dashboard who told me where to go all the time. “Turn right in 500 feet.” She jabbered constantly. I felt like I had a 7-year-old girl in there. “Whatcha doin? Do you want to watch me? Watch me do this? You aren’t watching. Watch me now.” She’d interrupt my favorite songs to tell me stuff even when I didn’t program in a destination. “Go home now?” and “You’re gas is getting low.” It was annoying but I was okay with it until she started getting personal. “Are you wearing THAT today?” and “You need to pluck that wild chin hair.” She took her job a little too seriously.

I had to go with my brother yesterday to drop off his car at a mechanic in Vancouver, a few miles away and neither of us knew how to get there. I told him I’d lead because I had the GPS. We got on the freeway and I guess I got a little ahead in all the traffic, so I was trying to watch my rearview mirror and watch for the exit, too. My GPS showed I was supposed to exit, but there were two ramps, and just as the one I was supposed to take appeared on the screen, the phone rang. To my dismay, the phone screen came on and the map disappeared. Which one should I take?”

It was my brother. “Where are you?” he said.

“I just exited, but I’m on a ramp and I don’t know whether to go right or left because I can’t see the map while I’m on the phone.”

“Oh,” he said. “Then I’ll hang up and call you back.”

I watched the screen anxiously but it stayed on the phone. I guess it wanted to make sure I knew how long I’d talked, to whom I was speaking, and – absolutely essential information – that I had disconnected the call. This last was so important that the disconnect screen stayed up way beyond the disconnect. I’m sure glad that pesky GPS didn’t rush back and interrupt my message that I had disconnected from my brother. This was information I NEEDED to know.

As usual I made the wrong choice because the blue line started twisting around like a pretzel. I had to make another U-turn. I could see that I would have to turn right soon because a little side-screen came up to alert me it was coming, but before I could see what street I was supposed to turn on and how far it would be, the phone rang again.

“Where are you?” my brother asked.

“I was about to find out just when you called.”

When he hung up, I made another u-turn and we both finally made it to the mechanic’s shop, though I don’t know how. I wish whoever made these things would know that I don’t need to have a screen showing the whole time I’m using my Bluetooth phone. Believe it or not, I know I knew who I was talking to – I didn’t need to read it on the screen during the whole conversation. Other than that, I love my GPS – even though it does make me Go Past Streets all the time.

Sweet Smelling Dogs

2010-08-26T22:51:00.001-07:00

I had to give my dog a bath today. I say the word, “bath” and she tucks her tail and heads for the farthest away place in the house. I

Today she walked ahead of me all the way to the laundry room, tail tucked, head hung low, resigned to her fate, buying time with the little parade through the house.

I know why dogs hate baths. They know they’re going to smell good afterwards and this is offensive to them. They want to live up to the name, “foul beast.” They do not want to smell like a French house of ill repute.

The first chance my dog gets after a bath, she finds something extremely stinky to roll in. She digs in deep, feet straight in the air, thrashing from side to side as if she trying to make the smell go further than skin deep. When she gets done, she jumps up and shakes, completely satisfied that she again smells like a dog.

After the bath she runs through the house and rubs her nose and side against all the furniture like some cat on speed. She’ll bend her head down and plow her face along the carpet, switching sides. She’ll get wild and want to snap at our heels or throw a ball in the air. It’s all quite entertaining, although I feel so sorry for her during the bath.

Since she’s so small, I can wash her in a deep sink I have. All wet she looks like a black ferret with long legs. Dogs have a way of looking pitiful anyway, but she looks up at you with those dark brown eyes with the little white sliver moons and it breaks your heart. “Why are you doing this to me, momma? What did I do wrong? Didn’t you tell me I was the best dog in the world? Is this the thanks I get for always greeting you excitedly, even when you’ve just gone to the bathroom?”

Oh, I have a pitiful story to tell about this dog. She’s pretty smart so we have to spell things around her. After awhile she understands the spelled words, too. There are commands I use to tell her what to do, but also to explain what’s going on. She’s pretty good at picking up tricks, too. One thing I’ve been teaching her lately is to, “stay.” She sits for a little but will usually get up and follow me around the corner as soon as I go out of sight.

I have started working full-time (which I hope doesn’t rob me of my sense of humor), and I’ve been taking her to the office with me. She loves it. People coochie-coo her all day and give her scratches, and she can’t wait to go in the morning. Yesterday I had a commitment in the morning, so I didn’t go in the office. She had been following me around all through the house, worried I’d forget to take her with me, and I finally said to her in the living room, “I’m sorry, honey, but you’re going to have to stay here this morning.” She immediately sat down, all pitiful like, because that’s how I tell her she’s not going to get to go somewhere and she understands. Brilliant dog, that one. She quit following at my heels, and I told her I was sorry and rushed off to get dressed. I got my hair dried and came back into the living room about five minutes later and saw the poor thing still sitting there, as if to say, “See, momma, I’ll be good. I did exactly what you told me to do. Please take me with you.” She’d heard that one word in there, “stay” and was being obedient.

Now you’re probably thinking that I need to see a shrink about talking to my dog, and you’re right. But she understands what I’m saying. Furthermore, she doesn’t argue, talk back, put me down, complain, or ask me for money or my car keys. There’s no one else in the house that does that.

Now I have a nice, clean, sweet-smelling dog curled up at my feet, and life is good - as long as she doesn’t start passing gas. Ugh! Her SBD’s live up to their name. Ghastly! (get it, “gas” tley). Humph – my dog thinks it’s funny – she just told me so.

Being Yourself

2010-08-24T22:54:00.001-07:00

When you were a teenager, did a grownup ever say to you, “Just be yourself?” To me this was exactly like them telling you to: “Go look it up in the dictionary.”

How in the name of all that is holy and precious would you find the right spelling of a word in a place that requires you to know how to spell it to find it in the first place? Grownups never had an answer for that, because they, like us, had never actually cracked a dictionary. Why couldn’t they at least give you a hint, like the first three letters, to get you started?

I could have used a hint about being myself as a teenager. When I was busy doing exactly what I wanted to do, like flipping someone with a rubber band, people got mad at me. That’s because I was so good at flipping rubber bands. I could hit someone in the chest with a resounding “smack” at 30 feet. It was a skill that I realized I could not practice on human targets. Same thing with hitting people with snowballs, especially when the snow went down their sweater. People don’t like these talents. So even though “myself” wanted badly to cream others with rubber bands and snowballs, I had to “deny” myself or risk getting a shovel full of snow in the face. Which actually happened to me this last winter.

Let me tell you about it. I’ve got this cranky neighbor who was shoveling snow one day as I was walking my dog up the street. I playfully threw a snowball at him from about eight feet away that hit him in the leg. He happened to have a shovelful of snow ready to sling to the wayside, and instead threw it at me as if to say, “I am the neighborhood jerk and don’t you forget it, so you’d better take your sissy little snowballs on down the road, missy.”

The snow hit me right in the face, and since I wasn’t expecting it and had my mouth open, it went down my throat and clogged my windpipe. I couldn’t breathe. It was actually quite frightening, but I got my throat unclogged eventually. Then I kept gulping in cold air, which caused a whole ton of new coughing. I have to admit I played this up a little once I realized I wasn’t going to die. It was a dirty trick to respond with a whole shovelful of snow to one measly snowball.

He felt terrible, which he should have, and later brought me a very nice bottle of red wine which I thought was penance enough – that and landing in this blog.

I see I have yet again gotten sidetracked from my original subject, which was about being yourself. I don’t think anyone should tell kids that. Tell them to be nice. If they don’t know what nice is, spell it out for them. “Don’t hit people in the chest with rubber bands, even if you are the best rubber band shooter in the whole wide west.” And “Don’t strangle people with snow.”

This makes way more sense than giving kids some vague words that mean absolutely nothing. If you want to know the truth, I still don’t know who myself is, but I know I like the parts of me that are kind and sweet and considerate, so I’m glad that “self” is starting to win out over the self that is ornery, mean, and spiteful. Sometimes.

And one final word. Thanks to my dear friend, Google, I never have to use a dictionary again. Not that I ever did much. A dictionary is like a First Aid kit. It’s good to have around but you never want to have to use it.

Working Means Lunch Breaks

2010-08-24T00:45:00.001-07:00

Oh my gosh I am a working woman now. I’ve been working from home for years, but the last couple of days I’ve gone into the office and I have to admit, it ain’t so bad. Everyone is nice and it’s fun getting out of the house.

Today I had lunch at McDonald’s. Those fries were the best things I’d ever tasted, especially compared to the salads and leftovers I usually have at home. They had the perfect amount of salt. When you work from home, these little differences are a treat. I know if I did it everyday I’d be miserable, but I savored those fries and that fish sandwich today like it was a Henry the 8th spread.

Since I am dog tired, I’m going to filch some humor from emails. Silly, but not as silly as me continuing to type when my head keeps sinking toward the keyboard and I don’t even realize it until it bangs against the space bar and makes a noise.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  If 4 out of 5 people SUFFER from diarrhea....does that mean that one out  of five enjoys it?   *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  Why do croutons come in airtight packages? Aren't they just stale bread  to begin with?   *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ *~*~*

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~If people from Poland are called Poles, then why aren't people from  Holland called Holes?  *~*~*~*~*~*~*~

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  If it's true that we are here to help others, then what exactly are the  others here for? *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*   If Fed Ex and UPS were to merge, would they call it Fed UP? ?   *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  What hair color do they put on the driver's licenses of bald men?   *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  I thought about how mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons  and forks, so I wondered what Chinese mothers use. Toothpicks?   *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*  Why do they put pictures of criminals up in the Post Office?  What are we supposed to do, write to them? Why don't they  just put their pictures on the postage stamps so the mailmen  can look for them while they deliver the mail?  *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Can't eat Beef, Mad cow.... Can't eat chicken . bird flu   Can't eat eggs .. Salmonella   Can't eat pork .. fears that bird flu will infect piggies   Can't eat fish ... heavy metals in the  waters has poisoned their meat   Can't eat fruits and veggies ... insecticides and herbicides   Hmmmmmmmmm!!!!!!!!!!!!! M  M M M M M  M  M  M  M  M   I believe that leaves Chocolate!!!!!!!! Chocolate is a Vegetable ** Chocolate is derived from cocoa beans. Bean = vegetable. ** Sugar is derived from either sugar cane or sugar BEETS. ** Both of them are plants, in the vegetable category.  Thus, chocolate is a vegetable. ** **To go one step further, chocolate candy bars also contain milk,  which is dairy. So candy bars are a health food. ** Chocolate-covered raisins, cherries, orange slices and strawberries all count as fruit, so eat as many as you want. **

Remember - - -

"STRESSED" spelled backward is "DESSERTS"

Rodents and Shutter Island

2010-08-23T01:02:00.001-07:00

I saw the movie Shutter Island late last night with my daughter and her friend. We didn’t get finished with it until almost midnight, and then I could NOT get to sleep. It was pretty creepy and made me think.

I don’t have anything against thinking, per se, I just don’t want to still be doing it at 3 a.m.

The thing is, I know better. If I’m seeing a haunting movie just before bedtime, with dark windows all around and low hanging tree branches scratching against the roof, and the kind of music that makes you feel like someone’s going to jump out of the bushes with a butcher knife, it is not a recipe for relaxation. I’m getting that tingling feeling up my spine right now just thinking about it.

This morning I went to church and then came home and watched the movie again, in the daylight, with my husband, so that I would plenty of time to think about it all day. I figured I would exhaust all my thinking and be able to sleep like a baby tonight.

Let me assure you that you are going to want to watch it twice. My husband got done with it and said, “I don’t know what’s going on – is it this or is it that?”

I’m not going to tell you what the “this” or “that” is, or it will spoil the movie for you. You’ll know what I mean when you get to the end. And if you watch it a second time, you’ll know whether it’s this or that.

Speaking of this or that, I love those KIA commercials with those rodents doing that rap song, “Now you can go with this, or you can go with that.” I think they’re very cool dancing rodents. I wish I could dance like that. I dance the same way I did back in high school. I definitely don’t know how to do those rodent moves or I’d be in the street like they are, singing that song and doin’ those moves.

People reading this must think I do nothing but watch TV and movies. I am not going to deny that the perfect down time for me is watching a mindless movie on TV and eating chocolate chips. I like ‘em one at a time so they can melt and extend the enjoyment. That way I don’t have to eat so many.

If this blog is rambling more than usual, it’s because I’m exhausted. It’s all that movie’s fault, and I am going to go to bed and dream of dancing rodents all night long and wake up feeling like I’ve got some moves, pointing at the dishes in the sink and saying, “Now you can go with this, or you can go with that,” as I point to the dishwasher. Then I’ll point to the oven and say, “Or you can go with this, or you can go with that,” as I point to the microwave. My daughter will roll her eyes at me and tell me to stop, but I don’t care. I know I’ll be cool. And rested. I’m going to hop in bed pronto so morning will come all that much quicker.

My Dog Meets a Segue

2010-08-21T08:40:00.001-07:00

I wrote a few days ago about my dog wee-weeing on me during a trip to the beach because she had a bladder infection. At least I think I did – I’ve told the story so many times maybe I just think I wrote it.

That’s the thing about telling stories – and listening to them, too. If you’re with someone else who has a good, newsy story to tell, you end up having to listen to it over and over every time you run into someone new. Gets old.

The person telling the story soon loses track of who they’ve seen and who they’ve told the story to. I try to avoid repeating stories to people by telling a line or two and then saying, “Have I told you this already?” That way the person can quickly get out of hearing it again. I am considerate in this way. Paradoxically, I can be a bee-otch in so many other ways. It’s a conundrum - I think (does anyone know what conundrum means?)

Some people don’t seem to care if you’ve heard the story a million times before. Once some of them get going with a story it’s like trying to stop a runaway train with a kitten. The train is going to plow straight through and the kitten isn’t going to have much to say about it.

But don’t worry, the kitten will be okay. It will hunker down and grab its little claws into the railroad tie and hang on until the entire train passes – all 2,000 cars. The kitten will walk away unscathed and hope it never ends up on THAT particular railroad track again. But it will, if it’s got an elderly relative who can’t hear well and calls to tell the same stories over and over and the kitten CANNOT get a word in edgewise. The kitten has even gone so far as to lay the phone down and taken a leisurely bubble bath and then come back and picked the phone back up to find that the story still isn’t over yet, and during the kitten’s intermission the elderly relative never noticed the kitten was even gone.

Some might say this is a naughty little kitten to lay the phone down, but I say “No harm, no foul,” in this particular case. Especially since the kitten tried more than once to derail the train and was completely ignored or not heard – the kitten couldn’t tell which.

DISCLAIMER: All kittens appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real kittens, living or dead, is purely coincidental. That goes for elderly relatives, too.

After you’ve told a story a few times it’s like reading a script (and when I say “you” I mean “me” but that would look stupid to say, “After me’ve told a story…”) Okay, okay, okay, I’m grasping at humor, here. Actually, that’s not true, I’m in a very playful, humorous mood right now and I find these little silliness’s quite entertaining. I’m also flicking my finger up and down over my lips and making “blub, blub, blub, blub, blub,” sounds that are annoying my dog. What fun!

Speaking of my dog, that’s what this whole story is about, so I’m glad I’ve come back full circle like a (“ah-hem”) dog chasing its tail. (I can segue with the best of ‘em.)

Speaking of segue…..just kidding.

Although I do love a seque but I always type it using a q. Then it gets underlined in red and I think, “Stupid MS Word doesn’t know that seque is a word yet.” I myself just discovered the word a year or two ago and had to Google it to see how it was spelled. That was fun. Segway. Segweigh. Cegway. Psegway. Google finally said, “Did you mean segue, moron?” And I said, “I don’t know, jerk head, because that doesn’t look anything like the way it should be spelled and you might be MAKING IT UP, you freaking anal crevice.”

Google did NOT like that, and we started wrestling in mouse-to-computer combat. I almost got the upper hand, (get it, my hand on the mouse, yuk, yuk, yuk), but my Mac stepped in and closed Safari and said we both had to go to our rooms for a time-out until we cooled off.

Now we’re all friends again. And besides, there wasn’t much to tell about the dog peeing on me that can’t wait until I see you again.

Laundry Mat Memories

2010-08-19T23:45:00.001-07:00

I’m at the laundry mat right now washing some quilts in those big huge machines. I love those things. They spin around and make these whirring sounds like some kind of cool carnival ride. If you put a plastic action figure in there, it will spin around like it’s being sucked into some vortex – you can see the blur of it through the glass door and imagine how dizzy the guy is getting.

I have some good memories of laundry mats – and some bad ones. The good ones involve being there, running around pushing each other in the wet-clothes rolling carts. We did laps around the washing machines in the middle, taking corners on two wheels, listening to the old folks complain about the “out-of-control kids these days.”

The bad memories involve getting to the laundry mat. For some reason my brother and I were given the responsibility of doing laundry. Like everyone else in our neighborhood, our family had one car, and my dad worked a couple of states away so he only came home about once a month, leaving us without a vehicle. Which was fine since the grocery store, school, church and everything else was within a couple of blocks.

But the laundry mat was about six blocks away, and we had to carry the laundry basket full of clothes – one of us on each side. It’s hard to imagine entrusting us to do the laundry - we just piled everything in the machines, bought those boxes of detergent, and let it rip. I guess colors didn’t run back then.

I kindof liked going to the laundry mat, but my brother was in middle school and it was NOT cool to be carrying a laundry basket piled high with clothes down the street, especially with your little sister. We’d wait until there were no clean clothes anywhere before we went, so the basket had clothes mounded about two feet above it, held in place by a sheet draped over it all and tucked into the sides. It looked like we were carrying a fresh grave.

In those days kids got to go anywhere, day or night. Maybe it was safe in our little East Tennessee town. People didn’t lock their doors, or their cars, and crime was unheard of. Perhaps it was going on in the big cities, but we didn’t hear about it. So my brother and I waited until after dark to make the trip.

We’d carry the basket between us and head down the street. Whenever we saw a car coming in the distance, we’d drop the basket on the sidewalk and fly behind a bush so we wouldn’t be seen. I am laughing as I type this because now I can see that basket from an adult driver’s perspective. What did people think when their headlights shown on a big laundry basket sitting on the sidewalk all by itself? Did they see us dive into the bushes and figure out what we were up to?

My brother was pretty popular in school. Girls called him all the time. His reputation would have been absolutely ruined if any of those cars contained people he knew who would rat him out the next day at school. But we were crafty, and it never happened. When it came time to cross the busy, four-lane street, we lurked in the shadows until it was clear both ways for a good distance, then we’d run like crazy across. Since I was younger, I didn’t run as fast, so the basket would get askew and sometimes tip over. Laundry gushed out onto the center of the street in a ragged trail. We scrambled to get it back into the basket. My brother would dart his head back and forth, not worried about getting run over – that might have been his choice under the circumstances – but worried he’d be seen in the street with his little sister and girly clothes.

Once the clothes were washed, we’d grab the sheets and fold them. We’d take the four corners and fold the sheet in half. Then we take a couple of giant steps toward each other like we were dancing at some fancy ball. We’d connect the corners, I’d pick up the corners at the fold, and we’d step apart, then move back together with the same flouncing steps. It was just silly foolishness to entertain ourselves, and we giggled like idiots. People must have thought we were nuts. Funny how we were so worried about what they thought on the dark street, but we didn’t care a bit what the crowd of people in the laundry mat were thinking.

We loaded up those folded clothes and started the trek back home. Usually there was less traffic, but we’d still have to abandon the basket and take cover several times. I wonder why no one ever stopped to see why a laundry basket full of folded clothes was sitting there. I think if I had been an adult driving, I’d want to investigate. But those were innocent times. Maybe they thought that basket had a darn good reason being there and it was none of their business why. No thugs or gangs or opportunists were cruising around looking to steal people’s clothes.

Somehow we managed to do this chore week after week completely on the sly. We finally got a washing machine and our laundry mat days were over, which didn’t upset either of us one bit.

I see that my blankets have finished spinning in those giant dryers – they look just like the ones we climbed in when we were little. The laundry mat back then was full of people. You had to wait sometimes to get a washer, especially on weekends. We preferred weeknights – less traffic. Since I’ve been here for over an hour, I’ve only seen three people. I’m surprised there are that many - it’s hard to imagine houses and apartments without washers.

So thus ends my walk down memory lane. If you ever see a laundry basket beside the road full of clothes, you’ll probably find some kids in the bushes close by.

The Photographer's Plight

2010-08-19T00:02:00.001-07:00

I get asked to take pictures at events and of groups because people know I have a decent camera and have sold some photo art. I always say yes, but it is not a particularly fun job, and I know you. You’re dying to know why.

So I’ll tell you. Even though people want pictures to remember events, they don’t want their picture taken. When you hold a camera up to your face and start to take someone’s picture, half of them try to duck behind someone else like a child hiding behind its’ mother’s skirt. The elderly, obese, and even crippled will take off running like they’re on the starting line for the 50-yard dash when they see me raise my camera. They will risk broken hips and worse rather than allowing me to take a picture of them.

On the other hand, there are people who have obviously had their pictures taken often who know how to strike a perfect pose. They know which side of their face photographs well, where to put their hands, how to angle their feet, and whether looking slightly down will make their eyes look bigger. These people can sense a camera from across the room and be laughing naturally in every candid shot. The camera “loves” these people. That’s because they don’t treat the cameraperson like s/he’s got the plague.

I try to get everyone in at least one picture, which is hard when they only show me their backsides, or they’re hiding behind bushes. So I have to take “candid” shots. These are a CURSE. The general public is UGLY in a candid shot. The general public is stuffing an entire sausage link in their mouth just as the camera clicks the shot. They are also holding up their arm in such a way that the cottage cheesy divots are accentuated. They are “candidly” looking spiteful at the person beside them, like they intend to stab them after the luncheon. Some of them are even scratching that itch that can’t be scratched in public.

When they catch you taking a candid shot, some people scowl at you. Perhaps they don’t take good pictures and they feel they can compensate by contorting their features, as if saying, “I always turn out ugly in a picture, but if I look like I’m being ugly on purpose, no one will notice that I really am ugly.” Although this makes some kind of sense, it does not help the job of the poor photographer who simply wants to impress people with her talent for making even the hideous among us attractive. We can do this in many cases, thanks to the magic of Photoshop.

Photoshop is the photographer’s best friend. It allows us to turn everyday images into art. For instance, if you hire an artist to paint your portrait, and he includes your double chins, pimples, the wart on your jawbone that has a six-inch wiry hair growing out of it, the gunk in the corner of your eye, and so forth, you’d likely smash the canvas over his head before you smacked him with a dining room chair. He is going to downplay your imperfections if he wants to come out of there alive and with a check in his hand.

A skilled photographer can also “paint” people in a more positive light. For the rest of us, we use Photoshop to make our subjects look their best. I had one guy tell me that the headshot I took of him was the first time he had a decent picture of him in his whole life. Little did he know that I spent about two hours taking him from a Frankenstein into a less-than-a-Frankenstein. It’s amazing how the illusion of having a full set of teeth can improve someone’s looks. Not that he was toothless, but many individual teeth were so tobacco-stained they blended right into his skin, giving people the impression that he came from Mississippi. There were other things that I won’t go into, such as dents and pocks that, once smoothed and blended, made his squinty eyes more becoming.

So here’s what you, the general public, need to do when approached by someone like myself who is simply trying to capture you in the best light. PRACTICE IN FRONT OF A MIRROR. RIGHT NOW. No, not later. NOW! And when I come at you with my camera, you can say, “Oh, Suzanne, I’m so HAPPY to see you are here taking my picture.” And hurry up and swallow that sausage.

Jonathan Does Rodney

2010-08-17T21:20:00.001-07:00

My nephew is here, returning from Alaska where he was working as an entertainer on a cruise ship. He’s learned all kinds of new things, like how to be a ventriloquist. We did not ask him to teach us, although I could tell he really wanted to, because it’s not very funny when there’s no dummy.

Then he started doing Rodney Dangerfield jokes, and he was pretty good. He was grabbing his collar, talking about getting no respect. He was so good, in fact, that I’m going to get some of Rodney’s jokes and post them here. It will serve two purposes. One, it will make you laugh, and two, it will give me extra time to hang out with him, my niece, and my great niece since they are all driving back to California tomorrow at the crack o’ dawn.

Enjoy these.

A girl phoned me the other day and said... Come on over, there's nobody home. I went over. Nobody was home.

I came from a real tough neighborhood. I put my hand in some cement and felt another hand.

I could tell my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.

I drink too much. The last time I gave a urine sample it had an olive in it.

I found there was only one way to look thin, hang out with fat people.

I get no respect. The way my luck is running, if I was a politician I would be honest.

I had plenty of pimples as a kid. One day I fell asleep in the library. When I woke up, a blind man was reading my face.

I have good-looking kids. Thank goodness my wife cheats on me.

I haven't spoken to my wife in years. I didn't want to interrupt her.

I looked up my family tree and found out I was the sap.

I looked up my family tree and found three dogs using it.

I met the surgeon general - he offered me a cigarette.

I remember the time I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof.

I saved a girl from being attacked last night. I controlled myself.

I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous - everyone hasn't met me yet.

I was so ugly my mother used to feed me with a sling shot.

I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.

It's tough to stay married. My wife kisses the dog on the lips, yet she won't drink from my glass.

Life is just a bowl of pits.

I have to agree with him on this last one, but when you can see the humor in that bowl, and you can laugh at it, then live can come up roses in spite of the thorns. Or something like that.

Surf Wars

2010-08-16T23:27:00.001-07:00

My daughter brought two goldfish home from a school giveaway (thanks a ton,, whoever’s brilliant idea that was). One of them has turned into a bully.

The sad part is, I had a goldfish that was several years old and looking like he might not make it much longer when these two new ones arrived. I was SO looking forward to no more tank cleaning, fish feeding, filter buying and dirty fish water siphoning.

Sure enough, Golder died just a few weeks later and I could have been FISH FREE. But no. Because some nitwit decides to give away goldfish as a prize, I got two brand new babies to take his place.

Some of you are probably saying, “What’s the big deal? Make the kids take care of the fish.” That would be fine if I wanted a fish tank that you couldn’t even see the fish in. Around this house, the new wears off real quick. The kids “forget” to feed, water, or clean up after their pets. I do it because I feel sorry for the poor innocent things that are at our complete mercy and will die a horrible death of neglect without me.

I’ve been caring for these two additions for over five years, and I’ve noticed in the last few months that one fish is a total bully. He’s twice as big as the other one, but I just thought he had a hearty appetite. I usually sprinkle the food in and walk away, but I decided to watch them for a few minutes. That big goldfish would open his mouth big enough that a whole pea would fit in there and suck in a big flake. While he was “chewing” it, he swam around tormenting the other fish. Then he would stop and suck in another flake, and then chase the other fish some more.

“You’re a jerk,” I said to the bully. He looked me straight in the eye and spit out the a big, fat flake. If we had been in the old west, we would have squared off in the middle of the street with our fingers twitching over our pistols.

We stared at each other until I finally looked away. He grabbed a new flake and chewed it like a plug of tobacco while he chased the smaller fish around. These two have names but I can’t remember them. Let’s call the big one A-hole and the little one Sweetie Pie. A-hole came over and started snapping at me. That’s what he does when he wants more food. He goes up to the surface and smacks at the water. It makes enough noise to get you to look. When you do, he starts swimming frantically around and doing these aggressive wiggles back and forth toward the glass. It’s very intimidating. You can practically hear him shouting, “Get me some food, bee-otch, or this water won’t be the only thing I’m smackin’!”

But something inside of me snapped when I saw him tormenting poor little Sweetie Pie again. I was fit to be tied. Mad as a hornet. Sittin’ nails. Trouble was, what was I gonna do about it? How could I bully a bully fish?

I decided I needed to show him what it was like to be pushed around. I put my hand in the water and chased HIM. He didn’t like it, not one single bit. Bullies are always such sissies. He swam out of my way, darted here and there trying to execute evasive fish maneuvers between the swim-through rock and the two plastic plants in the 10-gallon tank. I chased him around a little more until I thought he’d learned his lesson. He seemed pretty humbled, but a few minutes later he was nosing into Sweetie Pie. So I chased him again. The third time was the charm. He put two and two together and came up aces. After that he kept his distance.

I wish I could say this story has a happy ending, but alas it didn’t take A-hole long to go back to his old tricks. I chased him once more, and he behaved for a little while, but then he went back to being a bully.

You’re probably thinking, “Why not just flush him?” Oh, I couldn’t do that! But I don’t let him intimidate me anymore. He may push that other fish around, but he’s not going to get away with doing that to me. No sir. When he smacks that water, I don’t come running anymore. Not as fast, anyway.

Hippie vs. Hipster

2010-08-15T23:36:00.001-07:00

We went to the Hawthorne Street fair today. To those of you unfamiliar with Portland, this is an area on the east side where old hippies went to raise their children, and now the children are sporting tats, piercings, pink pony tails, and purple hats.

The thing we noticed the most were the tattoos, and I still don’t get it. I know I’ve written about this before, but today I saw people nearly covered – both arms, legs, necks – everywhere that was showing and Lord only knows what was underneath their clothes.

I thought as I was looking at the parade of tattooed youth, “Doesn’t that hurt?” When I got home, I asked Google for the answer. “Artists create tattoos by injecting ink into a person's skin. To do this, they use an electrically powered tattoo machine that resembles (and sounds like) a dental drill. The machine moves a solid needle up and down to puncture the skin between 50 and 3,000 times per minute. The needle penetrates the skin by about a millimeter and deposits a drop of insoluble ink into the skin with each puncture.” (health.howstuffworks.com/skin-care/beauty/skin-and-lifestyle/tattoo.htm)

To me that sounds more painful than I had imagined. The thought of a dentist-sounding drill made me flinch, much else the pulsating needle.

I can understand the traditional “drunken sailor” doing this. Alcohol kills the pain, and they generally only got one tattoo. That probably sobered them up pretty quick. I can also understand gangsters, thugs, and gang members. They have something to prove to their peers.

What I can’t understand is people using them for a fashion statement – girls especially.

My friend said, “I must be getting old because I have absolutely no desire to get a tat.”

“You’re not old if you call them “tats,” I said.

“I feel pretty old. I remember when we first invented tie-dye, and look – it’s everywhere again.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” I said. “You know you’re getting older when the cool stuff skips a generation and comes back in style.”

Of course this generation looks nothing like we looked in our tie-dye shirts. We were thin, with long, straight, shiny, natural-colored hair. Today I saw the equivalent of tie-dye hair that looked like someone had taken a dull knife to it and then dried it with a blast furnace. There were whole chunks missing off of people’s heads, surrounded by ragged, shaggy, lifeless, crispy hair.

Where we were tanned, healthy, acne-free because we were into nature, hiking, eating healthy fruits and vegetables, and treating our bodies like they were our best friends, many of the people I saw today look liked they’d crawled out from under a rock, and their bodies were their worst enemies. Pierce it! Stab it with needles! Yank the hair out! Pour on harsh chemicals! Remove the color and replace it with clown color! Whack it! Put a big round orb in your earlobe and stretch it three inches! Pad the body with fat! Pierce that tongue so you can’t talk!

Well, I guess I’ve made my point. This generation may be young, but some of the stuff about them doesn’t seem very bright. Except their poor skin and hair, that is. I'd rather be a hippie than a hipster any day.

Dreaming of You

2010-08-14T23:00:00.001-07:00

Every day people talk about the sleep they got or didn’t get. “I couldn’t sleep at all last night.” “I tossed and turned.” “I had such bad dreams.” “I had this great dream about (insert person’s name).”

I remember having dreams about actors and they seemed so real. I’d meet Brad Pitt at a party and he’d find me fascinating. We’d end up going on a walk, holding hands, talking about our future together, maybe even kissing an electrifying kiss, and then I’d wake up and discover the dog licking my face. Talk about a rude awakening.

People who don’t get enough sleep get cranky, but so do the ones who get too much. Waking up before you’re supposed to is a problem because you have to decide if you’re going to go back to sleep or get up and start your day. In my experience, going back to sleep means I’m going to have really weird dreams. They’re always bad - being chased by cannibals and my legs turn to rubber. Or I’m trapped in an elevator and it starts free-falling. Those dreams seem so real that when I wake up, I look around to see if a cannibal is gnawing on my foot.

I’ve noticed when I sleep about six hours I don’t really seem to dream that much, either that or my dreams have become like real life and I’m forgetting them like everything else. Actually, I have always forgotten everything. I forget the list I wrote everything down on so I wouldn’t forget. I’ve always forgotten where I put my shoes, keys, purse, the book I’m reading, the electric bill that’s overdue, my cell phone. How many times have I had to call my cell phone to locate it?

As people get older the world blames memory loss on age, but how do you explain my kids running around, “Mo-om, where are my shoes?” The answer I always gave them was, “When I wear your shoes I always put them in the shoe closet.” They look there, as if I’d actually been wearing their shoes. Of course that’s the last place they’ would put their own shoes.. “Mo-om, they’re not in there - where else did you put them?”

Kids lose backpacks and homework, they leave their lunches at home, and forget their permission slips that are right beside their backpacks. But no one whispers, “Alzheimer’s” when they do it.

They also change the subject every second of the day, which is exactly what I have done here. Hey, STOP whispering, “ADD.”

Back to my dreams. I’ve had some really good ones and tried my best to stay asleep until the happy ending (wink wink). If I wake up, I can’t go back to sleep or even remember the dream. Very frustrating.

All this talk about dreaming makes me realize that I forgot to pay my bill to my web server – Dreamhost. After I get that done, I think I’ll take a little nap.

Hey Brad, I’ll be there in a few minutes. Wait for me!

Fear of Being Afraid

2010-08-13T11:17:00.001-07:00

It took a lot of guts for me to get up on stage last night. I am the bravest coward I know. Once in high school a friend wrote a report and described a person who was afraid of everything. Someone else in the class recognized that she was talking about me. I wasn’t afraid to bitch slap the friend who gave the report, I’ll tell you that.

But seriously, do I use the words “bitch slap” too often? I actually look for places I can insert those words. Like above – I did not bitch slap my friend. I just never spoke to her again. Same thing, but doesn’t sound as funny as bitch slap, in my mind.

So I am afraid of everything. I’m especially afraid I’ve blogged about this topic before, because every time I do something I can’t believe I had enough nerve to do, I want to tell everyone about it. Maybe I want to prove that even though I’m timid and shy and a scaredy-cat, I’m also one brave mother and you better not mess with me.

I wonder if all brave people are cowards inside? If they all feel like they have to prove something to themselves or to others? While I was waiting to go onstage last night all I wanted to do was run. I was terrified. I read that many actors and comics are terrified every time they go onstage – even after years of experience. This was no consolation to me as I was swabbing sweat off my face and hearing the tinkle of the ice cubes every time I held my glass of diet soda.

A lot of people find bravery in alcohol. Not me. If I have to be “on” - like when I’m in an airplane waiting for it to nosedive, I want all my facilities intact so I can push people out of the way and get to the exit. Ha! - as if that would do me any good. Last night I knew I was going to have enough trouble remembering my comedy set once I got onstage, I did NOT want my brain any softer around the edges.

I have done some things my friends can’t believe. Like climbing to the top of Mt. Hood, which was dangerous as all get out, relatively speaking, but maybe they can’t believe that because of the shape I’m in. I like to ski really fast (if, and only if, the slope is perfectly groomed and not too steep). People think that’s dangerous, but it’s more dangerous having a snowboarder hit you from behind. I’m just doing the easier of two fears.

I have been in scary situations that people think I’m making up, but usually it’s because I have no other choice and not from any bravery on my part. Even when I’m doing something brave, my hands are shaking, my voice is shaking - if it shows up at all, and I’ve got “Sissy Girl” written all over me in my body language – fidgeting, crossed arms, shaking leg, slouching – I’ve got ‘em all. When I don’t, it’s because I remembered reading that these were signs of fear and I try to counteract them. Here’s a site that has some signs of fear if you are nodding your head right now and thinking, “hmmm, I do that stuff all the time…” www.ehow.com/how_2383301_read-fear-body-language.html

My biggest fear, however, is that fear itself will cause me to not do something. Like going onstage. I sat there trying to reason with myself that it was stupid to do it, etc. etc. etc. but in the end I knew I had nothing to lose except pride, reputation, a few years of my life from a heart attack, and my mind. Down at the heart of it, though, fear alone was the only reason for me not to go onstage.

I battle that day and night – whether people will like me at a party (they seem to, but I’m ALWAYS afraid they won’t), whether people will read this blog (I have a bunch of site members, but there’s a constant fear that I may lose my sense of humor like it’s going to fall out of a hole in my pocket), whether I will trip going onstage, say something stupid, hurt someone’s feelings, forget an appointment, do something embarrassing – you name it, I’m afraid of it.

But I keep saying to myself, “Just keep on doing it. Just show up. Just try. Just do damage control if you have to.” And sometimes I say, “Just shut the F up,” when my fears are on the verge of derailing me from doing what I want to do.

Right now, for instance, I’m afraid it’s not okay for me to reveal my fears in public. But you know what I’ve got to say to that? Screw it. I’ve got a fricking blog to write and I’ve got to post something and this is already written, for crying out loud. I’m doin’ it!

My First Stand-Up

2010-08-12T12:50:00.001-07:00

I went to an open mike last night to do stand-up comedy with my brother and my niece who’s visiting from LA. Whew, that was crazy. I’d never done stand-up before and I was an absolute wreck.

We signed in and I was fourth on the list - I wanted to go first of us three and get it over with. You can’t imagine what it’s like when the lights go down and you’re watching the first guy and he’s pretty good. The audience wants to laugh. Second guy’s good, too. The emcee is introducing them like they’ve been there and at other clubs before. Third guy’s good. Crap! I was sweating bullets because it was my turn. But the emcee called someone else, then the 5th, 6th, 7th person go and still I don’t hear my name.

It’s like waiting in a big group of fourth graders to be called to be on a kickball team. Your really nervous but really excited, and then the team captains start calling names, and the crowd around you gets smaller and smaller until finally it’s just you standing there and the captain reluctantly calls your name because he thinks you’re no good.

It wasn’t exactly like that because everyone was still in the room, but the initial excitement and fear turned into “hey, what’s going on here.” Then it dawns on me that they assume I have no talent since they don’t recognize my name, so they’re putting me at the end.

The bad comics started to go on, and we had to painfully sit through their struggling routines. We were just on the point of leaving when they called my name.

I had done some rehearsing and memorizing, but when I got up on stage and squinted into the bright lights and saw those 40 or 50 people out there, I was a buffalo in the headlights. My eyes were as big as platters. I grabbed the mike and started talking, and remembered my first joke – AND GOT A LAUGH! Pretty cool. Then I got ANOTHER LAUGH!

Then I forgot the next three jokes. I’m searching my brain and it’s laughing because I think it liked seeing me wandering around on stage without anything to say. Luckily I had a joke to insert in case that happened. “I saw a lot of you with notebooks and writing your joke list on your hands last time I was in here, so I wanted to be a little more discreet. I decided to write them on my chest and then I could just glance down. I flopped these things up on the counter and wrote everything down, but I just went to check what I wrote and I was sagging so much the “O’s” were about six inches long.”

The crowd thought this was hilarious. I was doing hand motions and looking down my shirt. One guy yelled out, “I’ll read it for you,” which got some more laughs.

Then I started on a part about soap in the shower, and I needed to put the mike back on the stand. When I did that for some reason the lights were shining right in my eyes. So I moved the mike stand over, and still the bright lights. “You can’t get away from these lights up here,” I said, and got ANOTHER laugh! Then they turned the lights off and I said, “Perfect” or something, and got another laugh.

But, ah my friend, the laughs were sparse from there on out, because I told a long story that I thought was sensationally amusing, but I think there should have been more jokes and less long drawn out story. You can do that in a 20 minute speech, but we only had five minutes, and the crowd was not interested in the long setup. Still the audience laughed at the end and gave me very warm applause.

My brother got up and told three jokes that I’ve heard a million times but the crowd had not. He’s a professional speaker (www.renewableenergyspeakers.com) who speaks about solar energy, global warming and the environment, so he’s very comfortable in front of an audience. His jokes were very well received, and he ad libbed in between. He got hearty applause and some whistles.

My niece got up and talked about the craziness in LA. She’s pretty good looking so the mostly male audience was eating up every word she said. She graduated from USC in film and acting, and is naturally very funny and knows how to work a crowd, and they were delighted.

We left after the next comic, who was painfully awful. On the car ride home all of us were so excited. We critiqued each other and talked about the lights and how we were surely in the top 10% of the entertainers. My brother said, “Let’s all do that again next week.” I’m not so sure about it – I’d have to write new material, but what the heck, I’m game.

I have to tell one last funny story. There was a woman who got up and her fly was open. She was heavy and not very pretty, so her act was about not getting anyone sex because no one would sleep with her. The jokes were okay but not great because she kept saying the same things. She finally said, “I hope I will get lucky tonight.” My niece yelled out, “Your halfway there – your fly’s open.” That brought down the house – and the comedian made the most of it. All in all a great first standup experience.

A Douse of Reality

2010-08-10T22:13:00.001-07:00

My dog was drinking a lot of water and the vet suspected an infection in her female parts so she asked me to get a urine sample. I’m carrying this Tupperware container around the backyard, stooped over following this little dog around because she’s less than a foot tall, saying, “Go potty, go potty.”

She ignored me, too busy checking out the rib bones scattered all over the backyard. It looks like a cannibal picnic ground. When my husband has ribs, he gives the bones to the dog – it cleans her teeth and makes her like him a lot more. Everyone in this family is always trying to get the dog to hang out with them, but she likes me best. I’m her momma.

Finally she squatted and I pushed the container between her legs and managed to get a few drops. We left the sample at the vet on the way to the beach, where we were going to celebrate her birthday. This has been a tradition – the dog always gets to go to the beach around her birthday. We also have cake and ice cream. We like our pets in this house.

On the way to the beach, which is about an hour and a half drive, we kept giving her lots of water because that’s what Google said to do for a bladder infection. We were almost there when I felt something warm in my lap – the same lap the dog was sitting on.

Two gallons of doggie pee gushed out of that beast and ran between my legs before I had the chance to gasp and grab a towel. Oh my gosh, I can’t tell you what an awful feeling it was. It happened in slow motion – the warm feeling, the curious response (hmmm, wonder why the dog got warm all of a sudden….?), the sensation of warm liquid betwixt my legs, the horror when I realized that the dog had peed on me.

The worst of it was that I didn’t have a change of clothes, nor did I have another driver’s seat to replace the one soaking up all that pee. I was sitting in a pee puddle, as it were.

I had to traipse up and down the streets of Seaside with a huge wet stain between my legs – I couldn’t find anything in the stores except sweatpants that said, “SEASIDE” on the ass, and I wasn’t going to spend good money on something I’d only wear once, even if people were pointing and laughing.

It took me most of the day at the beach to find replacement clothes and clean myself and the car. I wonder if I should even be writing about this. It’s pretty disgusting all things considered. The only consolation is that the dog drank so much water that it was probably mostly just water.

We stopped a whole bunch of times on the way home. The dog got tired of getting in and out of the car. Nobody else wanted her on their lap.

I learned a lesson from the whole thing. I wish I could remember it. I guess it’s just that whenever you feel like life is getting you down or things aren’t going well, just think about me getting peed on in my car and maybe that will cheer you up. The reality is that life sometimes throws pee on your crotch, but I want you to know that you’re not alone, sweetie. You’re not alone.

My Exciting Life

2010-08-09T13:20:00.001-07:00

So much has been going on it’s hard to know what to write about. I am going to have to do this in little bullets to touch on everything.

First, there is a mosquito buzzing around my head. I have swatted him two or three times but he is persistent. He has a do or die attitude.

Second, my stomach is rumbling so loud it’s like an earthquake has set off a tsunami in there. I went to our neighborhood picnic yesterday and, as usual, I sampled everything – twice – and since there was so much food, I think I MAY have over-indulged. The next day after a buffet I’m always starving because I stretch my stomach from the size of a thing the size of a stomach – grapefruit? cantaloupe? – to the size of a hot air balloon. My stomach “thinks” it’s hungry even though it received enough food yesterday to get me through the winter.

I am going to have to stop eating like this. MeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeee – the mosquito just buzzed my head again.

Third, before the gorge fest, I saw South Pacific, the Broadway Across America revival of the original 1949 play, at the Keller Auditorium in Portland. What a fantastic show. See it if you get the chance. Crazy how something over a half a century old is still so funny and so timely today. It won ten Tony Awards back in the day, and 7 in this revival. It won my own personal award for best bang for the buck, too.

Fourth, I went to church yesterday and there was a little girl there with either her grandfather or older father, or older uncle or circus ringmaster or perfect stranger, there really is no way of knowing WHO he was, but let’s assume, for the purposes of this story, that he was a husband – a very thin, pale man about 7 feet tall with sparse hair, thin lips, and a light tan shirt and pants. He looked like an anemic deliveryman from a horror movie, except kindly. Whoever he was, he doted on the child, letting her dance in the aisle. She was between 2 or 3 in a little flowery sundress that flowed out while she twirled. I kept wondering how far she would go – knowing that when you give a child an inch she’s gonna take a mile. Soon she was up to the space between the pews and the altar. He had followed her up there, squatting on his heels at intervals, I guess so he wouldn’t block anyone’s view of her. I can’t squat like that. He was all the way down with his rear end resting on his heels. I could get down that far, but I’d topple over backwards and lay there like a squirming beetle until two stout men hoisted me on my feet.

MeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeee (frickin mosquito)

Of course this little girl kept moving further away and then coming back to make sure it was okay, or for safety, like a duckling swimming out, then in, then further out, then in, then further out still until a big mouth bass jumped up and snatched it underwater. Sorry, my imagination just goes where it will – I give it an inch and you see what happens.

All the while he squatted. Finally she was in front of the priest as he was delivering the sermon, twirling like a ballerina until the microphone cord wrapped him up like a cocoon. Oh wait, it was the child who was twirling, not the priest. It’s hard to keep up with all these pronouns sprinkled everywhere like the sprinkles we put on my dog’s birthday cake.

I glanced at the people in the congregation, and everyone was watching the child with grumpy looks on their faces. No one was amused. We’ve all seen twirling children before. We wanted somersaults and cartwheels. Twirling children are a dime a dozen in a Catholic church.

Finally, the man arose like his legs were springs and scooped up the little girl and took her completely out of the church. I found this interesting, because she wasn’t protesting. Why not just stay there, standing with her or sitting, taking in the service? And then it occurred to me that he didn’t WANT to be there, and was probably being forced by his wife, so he hatched a diabolical scheme to embarrass her to death by squatting in the aisle like a giant albino peasant while the child distracted everyone, including the priest who was too polite to say anything, so that he could have an excuse to leave. The man, not the priest. Try to keep up.

Anyway, he never came back into the church, so I think my theory is right on target, that he was a husband above everything else.

Oh my gosh, I just got a rumbly in my tumbly that is a 7.9 on the Richter scale. On top of that, my husband kept giving the dog ribs he barbecued for the neighborhood picnic, and she’s sitting beside me passing gas that’s making my eyes water. I’m being dive-bombed, asphyxiated, and tsunamied here. My stories are going to have to wait until things settle down. Aughhh - I can’t BREATHE!

MeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeee

The Good Agent

2010-08-07T10:08:00.000-07:00

So I’m doing two posts today to make up for not writing yesterday due to a glass of pinot noir and a lemon drop – a lethal combination.

I was talking in the previous blog about going to the Willamette Writer’s conference, and I wanted to mention a WONDERFUL, WONDERFUL agent named Adam Korn who may be looking at this blog as we speak. A WONDERFUL person. Extraordinarily handsome, too.

Adam, who has an incredibly AWESOME smile listened to my pitch about a science fiction book I wrote about aliens coming to earth and… Wait, you might not know what a pitch is, so I’ll tell you. A pitch is ten minutes you pay twenty-five bucks at a writer’s conference for so that you can try to “sell” or “pitch” you story idea to an agent, publisher, and/or filmmaker who might be interested in your work enough to offer you a multi-million dollar contract that will make you rich and famous.

Did I mention that Adam Korn is the NICEST human being I’ve ever met in my ENTIRE life?

A pitch is like a job interview and the job is doing what you love to do that someone is offering to give you money to do if you have something they think will make them money. You have to make your story sound so intriguing that the agent (et al) wants to read it. If s/he, indeed, finds your writing to be extraordinary, s/he will take you on as a client and then s/he will pitch your work to publishers and Hollywood magnets who like to hang around refrigerators and make movies and give you wheelbarrows full of money so you can quit your day job of being a lawyer and start making REAL money, like John Grisham did.

Landing an agent is tough work. Not only do they have to see marketable potential in your work – so it has to be good - they also have to judge whether you’re in it for the long haul. They don’t want a one-trick wonder who only does one book that takes ten years to write. They want a new book every year for ten years minimum. Let me say this right now. My family has a history of very, very long-lived people. At the rate of ten books every ten years, I could write 100 books, no sweat.

Speaking of speaking, there was this fantastic speaker for lunch named Robert Dugoni who is a best selling author who used to be a lawyer and who is now the new John Grisham. He is living the aforementioned dream, and he’s cute, too. Half-Italian, and anyone who’s been to Italy knows what I’m talking about.

He told this great little story about how we writers get beat down and rejected all the time, and getting published must seem insurmountable. He compared the prospect of getting published to what the giant doors to Mordor probably looked like to Aragorn, (Lord of the Rings), but if we just swing the bat then one of these days we’ll get a hit, but we’ll never get a hit unless we swing the bat. It was an inspiring speech that my sentence above does not give fair due since I’ve taken two analogies and morphed them into a mess, but if you ever get a chance to hear him talk, be sure to go. Here’s his website: www.robertdugoni.com/

One thing he inspired me to do was develop my craft of writing more, and the other agent who didn’t know who (double gasp) Dave Barry was either, told me I need “millions” of followers on my blog to convert this to a book - he inspired me to commit suicide. Ha, ha, just kidding. Writer’s joke. He inspired me to look up everyone I’ve ever known in my existence and tell them about my blog which I have not done. All my site members are people I’ve never met except for Gina, who figured out for me how all you guys are finding my site, especially from France and England. I guess you just click on the RSS feed at the bottom of my gentlehumor.com blog, according to Gina. Par lay vu fransay?

But now, I’m so excited. I’M A CELEBRITY!

Remember a few days ago I wrote about the auction I went to that Gene Simmons from KISS was at? Well, someone just emailed me a link to a video about it and I’M IN IT! I’m the yellow hair on the dance floor just under the second “E” in the Legends banner at the 31st second of the video. I’m on there for three whole seconds! At about second 33 I glance sideways so you can ALMOST SEE MY FACE! This is SOOOOOOOOOO exciting! I’ve been in the paper many times but only a couple of times on TV and never with big celebrities. I’m practically a star myself. Here’s the link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpVpwmljeds. Please take note, Agent Korn, that my platform is growing right before your eyes.

Who Is Erma Bombeck?

2010-08-07T08:23:00.001-07:00

I went to the Willamette Writer’s conference yesterday. Boy what fun! Except for one part, I had a fantastic day. I got to be with my friends from my writing group, all of whom are successfully doing great writing, getting published, getting awards, and getting better looking all the time. It’s true.

The one exception was my “pitch” meeting with an agent who was 14 years old. He was so young his diaper was hanging out of his pants leg. He was so young, he still had a placenta. He was so young, ah heck, you get the picture and I can’t waste time making up lame jokes because I just googled “he was so young” and there aren’t any on the internet I can steal. But this guy, who, in his bio said he handled “humor,” this guy had never heard of (gasp) Erma Bombeck. Oh my gosh. I know there are people from back in the day who the young folks haven’t heard of, but how can you be an agent who promotes authors who write humor without knowing something about humor legends?

I am not going to go off on this guy here. Well, yeah I am. When I was young, of course I knew all the bands/writers/politicians from my time period, but I knew previous ones too, if for no other reason than to make jokes about them. If all I had in my stable of knowledge was what was occurring right this minute or in the last few years, I would have been a pretty dull person. I was pretty, but I was not dull. Well, actually I was cute. That’s what everyone always said, “Suzanne is so cute.” Strangers used to come up and pinch my cheek. “You’re so CUTE” like they’d do to a baby. I’d bite them. If you see someone with a missing index finger, now you know why.

My high school daughter and her friends know the words to all the old songs. It’s crazy. If I drive them somewhere and a song from the 70’s comes on, and they all sing it. “How do you know the words to that song?” I ask, and they ignore me, as usual, so I don’t know how they know, but they do.

So this agent had never heard of the woman who wrote a syndicated humor column read by millions, who wrote several best-selling books, who was a speaker all over the world, who was on TV and at the White House, and who was a champion of women, a household name, and still has such a following that the Erma Bombeck Writer’s Workshop sells out every year. A great resource for humor writers is a website dedicated to her, www.humorwriters.org (where you can register for the Workshop, see a picture of Erma, and learn about her funny life on the YouTube video there). Here are some of her quotes that I snagged off the website in case you don’t bother going there. Never heard of Erma Bombeck…what is this world coming to?

"Insanity is hereditary. You can catch it from your kids."

"My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first one being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint."

"There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child."

"The only reason I would take up jogging is so I could hear heavy breathing again."

"Laughter rises out of tragedy, when you need it the most, and rewards you for your courage."

"In general, my children refused to eat anything that hadn't danced on TV."

"When humor goes, there goes civilization."

"Seize the moment. Think of all those women on the 'Titanic' who waved off the dessert cart."

"Never loan your car to anyone to whom you've given birth."

"The grass is always greener over the septic tank."

"A child needs your love more when he deserves it least."

"There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt."

"It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else."

"If you can laugh at it, you can live with it."

Southern Speaking

2010-08-04T23:49:00.001-07:00

I say, “Hi, how are you,” and in those four words people know that I am from the south. My accent isn’t as bad as it used to be when I first came to Portland. Back then I couldn’t even say “Hi” without people saying, “Where you from?”

The crazy thing is, they’d use a fake Southern accent to say it, like, “You all ain’t from around these parts, are you?”

I didn’t like having a voice everyone recognized. I’d call girlfriends that had toddlers – babies 2 and 3 years old who answered the phone, “He-wo,” and I’d say, “Is your mommy home?” They’d drop the phone on the counter and yell, “MOMMMMMEEEEE, IT’S SUZANNE ON THE PHONE!” 4 words is all it took.

One time I tried to disguise my voice by making it real low, like a gruff old man. “Is your mom home?” The phone slammed down and I heard, “MOMMMMMEEEEEE, THERE’S A MAN ON THE PHONE AND HE SOUNDS LIKE SUZANNE.”

I started trying to figure out what makes southern speech different.

One thing is that Ii’s rambling. Southerners talk as if they’re passing time on the front porch swing sipping sassafras tea with no agenda for the next six months. For instance, normal people might say, “I went to the store at noon.” Southerners would say, “I went down to the super market long about noon or a little bit after or maybe it was a little bit before, it’s hard to recall because it’s been awhile, but anyway the point I’m trying to make right here is that I went down to the grocery store long about noon today.”

Southern talk is lazy. We take shortcuts. Everybody probably knows about dropping the g’s on words ending in “ing.” Southerners are laughin. walkin, talkin, fightin, bitin, chewin and spttin. But we also run words together. Like the rapper who named himself after a half dollar. 50 cent. That’s pronounced fiddy cent. If someone asks you in the south for change for a dollar, you’d say, “Sorry, I’ve only got fiddy cent.” We also say, “Let’s go in nair.” “What chew doin?” and “I’m fixin’ to go outside.”

Southern talk might be lazy, but we add in a bunch of syllables to make up for it. In fact, there is not one 1-syllable word in the southern accent that I know of. I found this out one time when my son had a friend over when they were both about seven or eight. I gave them a couple of choices for drinks with lunch. The friend looked puzzled and whispered something to my son. My son said, “She wants to know if you want milk or water.” The kid said to me, “What was that other choice?’ I said, “What other choice?” He said, “The meal –ulk one.” That was the first time I realized that I had made milk into two syllables. We do that with everything. We say, “Pa-ass the br-ead.”

The fourth thing we do is pronounce our vowels all wrong. Our A’s sound like ay. So the word “made” comes out sounding like mayed. I’s sound like ah. “Ah’m gonna go outside.” Or we’ll add an “r” to it, so that if I’m sleepy I might say, “I’m tarred.” And our e’s sound like a’s. Me sounds like may. My kids used to love to say “me” like that. “Give that toy to may.” “No, you give it to may.” They started out saying it like that to make fun of me, but now they keep saying it out of habit, and I think it’s so cute.

I have given my southern accent a lot of thought and decided that, although it’s not as distinct, I still get asked everywhere I go if I came from the south. I’ve decided that it’s something that makes me stand out. I know I’ve used it to my advantage to get out of traffic tickets and so forth. I have decided that I like it. If you are interested in talking southern, I’ll try to come up with some more lessons. Until then, just say, “Y’all.” People will eat out of your hand.

Almost Close to a Celebrity

2010-08-03T23:54:00.000-07:00

I promised last night to tell you about Gene Simmons.

We were at the Legends golf tournament, hosted by Tommy Thayer, a member of the band, KISS. I don’t know much about the band except they sing that song, “I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night, and Party Ev-er-ry Day,” and they do Dr. Pepper commercials. Tommy Thayer is one heck of a nice guy who has helped raise money for Pacific University for the last 4 years, according to the stuff I just Googled. He gets a bunch of celebrity “legends” together (hence the name) and they come to the dinner/auction on Sunday night and then play golf with athletic supporters to help raise money. They also play with other golfers. Pretty bad, huh? Well, I am getting NO sleep around here and it’s the freaking best I can do.

We went last year to the dinner for the first time and it was scads of fun. All of these musicians got up on stage after dinner and sang some great songs. We decided to go back this year.

Yes, I’m getting to Gene Simmons. He’s the lead singer of KISS, the one with the tongue that could lick his own forehead it’s so long. Personally I think it’s a tongue extension. Who has a tongue that long besides a giraffe? I bet there are lots of Gene Simmons tongue jokes on the internet. I’ll go hunt for one.

Well, the only one I came up with quickly is from some reporter who quipped, “Gene Simmons me a tongue lashing.” Lame, but better than nothing.

Anyway, Gene Simmons also has a TV reality show called Gene Simmons Family Jewels. I watched parts of it a couple of times and he seems like a nice, regular guy. I really like his girffriend/mother-of-his-grown-children, Shannon Tweed, who he’s been with for 25 years.

Here was my little taste of celebrity. Gene Simmons walks into the big outdoor room under a circus tent with Shannon and an entourage, with cameramen in front, on the sides, and behind him and a guy holding a microphone boom thingy. It was like being on the red carpet! One of the ladies I was sitting with said, “That must be awful having all those people following you around all the time,” and I said, “I think all those people represent money in Gene Simmons’ pocket. When nobody’s around, he’ll be a sad/poor guy.”

He walked in slowly because the other celebrities came up to greet him. I didn’t know any of them, but I live a sheltered life. Many of them were star athletes with honors and awards a mile long, but they weren’t Joe Montana so I didn’t recognize their names. There were also music legends, including the drummer from the band, Chicago. Boy was he good!

Gene had on sunglasses even in the darkish tent, and a black shirt, black pants and silver/gray cowboy boots. He would have been your nice, average Mafia guy if it hadn’t been for the cameras. Shannon looked just like she does on TV.

I think the reason KISS has had such a long run of fame and fortune is Gene Simmons’ marketing skills. He was filming the auction as part of a Family Jewel’s episode, and he offered bidders a chance to be seen on the show, which drove prices up. When people were bidding to have him be the celebrity for their team, and only bid $6,500, he bid on himself for $10,000. “This is a fundraiser,” he said, “and I’m here to raise money.” The auctioneer said, “Gene, am I understanding this? You’re bidding $10,000 to play with yourself?” Everyone laughed because we were picturing him, well, never mind.

Someone bid $10,500, and Gene bid $11,000. He kept counter-bidding until he’d driven his own price up to $15,000. I thought about the poor guy who would be writing a check for that in order to play one round of golf and get a cameo on a reality show, but hey, I’m not criticizing – if I’d had a wheelbarrow full of spare money, I’d probably have bid as well.

Gene offered a home cooked meal and evening at his house to 4 couples, each bidding $11,000 each. He and another guy named Doc egged the crowd on to bid higher, throwing in airfare and hotel. I’m sure there were wealthy people there who could afford it, but not at our table.

They ended up raising about $400,000, and I think a good chunk of that came from people willing to bid sky-high to hang out with Gene Simmons.

I didn’t get to meet him, I was busy trying to entertain Ray Kennedy, the celebrity who was assigned to our table and ended up sitting beside me. He was a handful. He had played with the Beach Boys and a ton of other bands – a very talented guy - but he didn’t sit with us much because he was too hyper to sit still.

I don’t know why I needed to take up a whole blog with this – I guess it’s because I don’t get around “stars” and it was a fun experience. All the musicians jammed, and we danced. A couple of women who wanted to be on the show got up on the stage and danced in the background. If they don’t get edited out, you’ll see them on the show. I’ll let you know when it airs. We were a couple of tables away so maybe we’ll be on the show. I’ll let you know if we are. Then I’ll be a celebrity, too. I’ll send you an autograph.

Laughing for Crying Out Loud

2010-07-29T23:37:00.001-07:00

I went to an open mike comedy club last night. OMG! You talk about painful! (MEAN ALERT! I am going to be hateful and mean right now.)

I did not know what to expect, but it certainly wasn’t this. We arrived a little late so maybe the “headliners” had already gone on. There were about eleven more people, and despite the emcee’s bubbling introductions that roused warm welcomes and cheers, these guys did not bring a lot of laughs with them.

It might have helped if there had been a few more people in the crowd. There were about 15 people there, and they had all been or were planning to be onstage. I only saw one guy with a girlfriend there – they left as soon as he bombed onstage.

Coming from me this might sound hypocritical. There have been many, many, MANY of these blogs that I didn’t think were very funny and I’m sure you wholeheartedly agree. However, it was late at night, I was tired, I had eaten a big pile of beans for dinner and my stomach was gurgling PLUS the air was hard to breathe and I had to get the heck out of here or suffocate, so I’ll admit I didn’t put a lot of thought into them.

Some of my blogs have made tears roll down my eyes (although that might have been the beans, too). I had tears last night, but they were not from laughing. It was a crying shame how bad most of those guys were.

You could tell they had the goods to be funny – nice voices or great smiles or a rapport with the audience. Their problems were similar to mine. They didn’t put enough time into preparing.

They came up to the stage carrying notebooks. Oh boy. It’s always nice to see a comic come up on stage and read jokes. After awhile I was hopeful that at least some of these pages contained something that could make me laugh, but alas, ‘twas not to be the case.

The notebooks, I think, were security blankets. The guys glanced at them, pondered, cocked their heads, cocked them to the other side, and then looked up at us like a deer in the headlights because maybe the lighting up there on stage made it so they couldn’t read what they’d written. Whatever the reason, there was nothing on those pages to help these guys in their struggle to be funny.

One guy got up there and said, “Well, I put my name on the list because I’ve never gotten up in front of a crowd and I wanted to see how it felt. Hmmm, feels pretty strange and pretty scary. Hmmm, I guess it would have been, uh, nice if I had prepared something…” He went on like this, rambling about how he should have prepared for five of the longest minutes in recorded history.

Then a guy got up and said, “I had sex last night with an 80 year old woman.” We groaned because he was about 18 and we all started picturing it in spite of ourselves. One poor guy in the audience Ralphed right there in his beer mug. The alleged comedian said, “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.” More groans. If groans had been laughs, his act would have made him a millionaire, especially when he started describing the sponge bath.

Once in their lives someone must have said to them, “You’re a funny guy.” Being funny at a party is not the same as performing comedy onstage, apparently. Funny stand-up guys actually write jokes and memorize them in a logical, funny order. They work at it, and this is where the difference comes in.

Another thing these guys did was say, “uh” every 4th word. “So I…uh….went down to the…uh….corner store and found….uh…..a magazine full of naked….uh….women who were….uh….naked and I….uh…. was….uh….thumbing through it when….uh…..”

The emcee couldn’t take it either. He got up after about 8 people and said, “You know, you see a lot of comics on TV. That’s where all comics want to end up, on TV, and one thing you might want to notice about these comics on TV is that they NEVER have a notebook when they go onstage. Just never see it. Just thought I’d mention that.”

So the very next comic brings his notebook up (he didn’t have enough notice), but the one after him came up empty handed. “Ooooo,” I thought, “maybe this guy is going to be good.” He gets up there and fumbles around with his “uh’s” and “everybody doing okay tonight?” Then he starts contorting his hand around, twisting it this way and that as if he’s trying to find a freckle just below his elbow. Finally he says, “Oh hell, I heard what you said about the notebook and so I wrote my set list on my arm but now I can’t read it.” That got one of the rare laughs of the evening.

Actually, that’s not true, There was an older woman who laughed at everything. You could tell she thought her mission was to help bolster these budding talents. I thought it was very sweet, and I laughed a few times too – but I laughed to keep from crying, as they say.

I have been to funny open mikes, but they should have “closed” this mike. Ha ha. I think anyone who could remember a few simple jokes would be a great hit at this place. For instance, this joke would have brought down the house: What do you call shoes that a frog wears? Open toad shoes. Or what do you call a cow that’s had its calf taken away? De-calf-inated. LOL – I could be a comedian! Maybe you’ll see me up there next week.

the South Bugged Me

2010-07-29T00:54:00.001-07:00

I grew up in the south but I don’t miss it. Actually I miss some of the people – a lot – but I don’t miss the summers. Everybody talks about the heat and the humidity, but the bugs are what did me in.

I’ve been afraid of anything buzzing or crawling all my life. If a bee, just minding his own business, flew too close to me I took off screaming into the house.

The boys knew I hated bugs so they made a point of catching every one they could when I was around. They’d take a big, squirming beetle with all 6 or 20 legs swimming through the air and slowly come right at me. I’d run screaming with that little girl shriek that could break windows in the next block over, The boys would run right behind me with that beetle held out in front of them, clutched between their thumb and index finger like they were tweezers.

That’s how I got to be so fast. None of them could catch me, and just when they were too tired to run any further they’d fling that beetle through the air and I’d feel it bounce against my back. I screamed like the tall actor in the first Home Alone movie. If you’ve never seen that guy scream, you’ve missed out on one of the funniest moments in movie history.

The boys used to catch June bugs in December. Ha ha. These ha ha’s are my version of canned laughter like you hear on sitcoms. They caught them in June, and they were big, green flying beetles about the size of a 747. Somehow they managed to tie a string to the June bug’s back leg, then they’d let it go. It would fly off until it reached the end of the string, and then climb as high as they could and fly in a circle it would go around in a circle as the boy held onto the other end. They would fly in circles as long as anyone cared to keep holding them. I only ever saw this last part because the minute one of them said, “Let’s catch us a June bug,” I warped into the house and cowered behind the screen door.

I knew if my curiosity got the best of me, I’d be running a foot or two in front of a June bug that would end up down my shirt if I stumbled or fell. All I saw was the boys huddled around working with their hands, and then the bug and string flying in a circle.

In the absence of a real bug, boys would pretend to catch one and chase me with it. I could have called their bluff, but if I was wrong, and they had a real bug, I’d be at the mercy of a giant spider they’d fling at me.

It is amazing how boys can sense your every fear, but men can’t sense when you’re angry, irritated, exhausted, or disinterested. That’s why women had to invent headaches.

In the south they also have horseflies that would buzz your head like some miniature kamikaze pilot. They would bump you in the ear or back of the neck to see if you were a fast swatter. If you didn’t swat right away, they knew they could get in there, chomp down on you, and buzz off before you knew you were being attacked. They drew blood and their bites hurt like a son of a gun. Whenever one started dive-bombing my head, I’d grab a limb full of leaves or pine boughs and swish it all around my head. If it hit the big ole horsefly it was stop cold, but it was a deterrent. Sometimes when they came in really close I’d slap my own face with a scratchy pine bough and end up with scratches everywhere, but it was better than getting bit.

They have very, very tiny mosquitoes in East Tennessee with lethal venom. When the sneaky little mosquito got done with you, you had a giant red welt that itched like poison ivy times three.

No, I don’t miss the bugs down there. The boys, either.