Stuff I'm Thankful for

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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?