Category Archives: Humor

Swimming Lessons in a Pool Full of Tears

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Tonight Abby had swimming lessons, but as we left Evelyn just lost it.  She cried and cried and cried.  Tears streamed down her face that we would leave without her.  We could have been going to Hell [Michigan] and she’d have wanted to come with us.  Of course somewhere in Nebraska she’d throw an equally intense fit because she was still in the car.  She’s become quite the drama queen.  I’m praying the God sends a miracle our direction to cause her quaint little happy-all-of-the-time attitude to come back.

Pulling into the parking lot at the recreation center I realized that about 25% more people wanted to recreate than could park in the parking lot.  No amount of patience that I could have or have supernaturally given to me was going to free up enough parking spots for me to fit in and get Abby to her lesson in time.  So I parked around the side of the park on a side street and we walked to the pool.  I think we cleared the quarter mile in about 6 minutes which was good given that Abby is so short and I’m so slow for being in the near prone coding position I sit in all day.  [my legal team would like me to state that I don’t actually sit in the prone positionwhile coding lest I be released from contracts for being lazy]

Abby’s swimming lesson went well.  She didn’t panic when the teacher instructed her to rest on her back (while being supported by the instructor’s arms).  She didn’t panic when the teacher tied a lead weight to her middle and dropped her into the deep end.  Abby was well behaved. [My legal department wants me to tell you that no weights were tied to Abby and the deep end of the kiddy pool is only 4 feet deep at most]

Of course the teenaged girl who was doing the group lessons appeared to be maybe fifteen or sixteen years in age if I’m generous.  Its hard for me in my nearly-thirty state to just look at a teenaged person and say, “That person is [some number] years old.”  My ability to judge ages for people on the whole is weaker now, but the teenagers throw me for a huge loop.  I’m even finding some early 20 year olds hard to distinguish from teenagers.  It is as if there’s some conspiracy to make me feel very old now.  It won’t work, I’ll get plastic surgery and face lifts until I’m 45 and then I’ll just let it all go.

I’m hoping to bring the camera to Wednesday’s lesson.  That way you can see pictures of this instructor with Abby and tell me that she isn’t barely older than Abby 😉

Compost

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At our local mega-giant-club-store-where-you-buy-in-quantities-that-would-feed-third-world-countries they had a compost bin for a price I couldn’t pass up.  I bought the bin because I hate throwing away so much food.  We throw out so much stuff wrapped in plastic trash bags that could be recycled that I’m embarrased to be involved in the process.  So along with recycling glass, plastic, paper and metal products I’m also recycling some of our food waste.  That food will go into the compost bin, get eaten up by bacteria, and according to the line drawing that came with the instructions, will come out as small lines of garden goodness.

We’ll till the compost into our dirt and then our dirt will be happy.  Happy dirt for happy worms that will be eaten by happy birds.  I’m hoping the happy birds will then drop happy bird droppings on our car instead of the sad or solum droppings that they now drop periodically.  Because that would make me happy.   Not as happy as, say, not having the droppings hit my car at all, but better than sad droppings.  That’s why you should compost, too.

What environmentally friendly/fiendly things do you participate in?  Not “earth day” which is just a joke, but real things that you feel emotionally involved in like driving a Hummer or a Prius?

My Clever Wife

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Jessica is clever.  She’s got it in for a contestant on American Idol.  She can’t stand the Sanjaya fellow.  He’s Hawaiian, which would normally be a plus, but he’s like the Hawaiian version of Michael Jackson, which is a major minus.  Wait, he’s not like Michael Jackson in the dancing department, he’s like Michael Jackson in the weirdness department.  He doesn’t even sing as well as Micheal Jackson (the 12 year old Michael Jackson, not the one who is in the media now periodically for doing strange things like converting to Islam, touching little boys in naughty ways, and of course having almost as much plastic surgery as the now gone Anna Nicole Smith [whose body was probably no where near deteriorating at the time of her burial]).  Sanjaya just gets Jessica’s dander up, and she’s allergic to dander.

So Jessica’s scheme is to call in next week from our phones and vote for the second stinkiest performer (probably that Phil guy) who is male.  15 votes for Phil is 15 votes that can’t go to Sanjaya.  Of course once Jessica votes Sanjaya off of the island, she’ll be after Phil.  And Phil – you don’t want her after you like that, I’ve seen her game face and she’ll take you out.

Oh, and I predict here and now that Melinda will take the American Idol competition no matter how good Chris Sligh is.

There are Times I Wish I Lived in Indiana…

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Just so I could participate in local culture there.  Local culture romance that is.  Sweet googly-moogly, why don’t they have a restaurant in Colorado?  Whitecastle is having a reservation only Valentines Dinner (details here).  Of course you’ll still have to put up with the jerks honking at the drive-through, but its still an interesting concept.

You can read why I’m so fascinated by Whitecastle here, here, here and here.

Paying Out of Pocket

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Have you noticed that we ‘pay out of pocket’ for some things?  I’d like to challenge the readers of this blog to consider paying out of other clothing items’ parts.  For example paying out of sleeve, paying out of hat or maybe paying out of the delicates.  There is so much opportunity here for creativity – because frankly in our modern mostly cashless first world society we’re all paying out of the plastic wether its debited out of our bank account or added to the already limitless [wink, wink – nudge, nudge] amount of debt that we can get into with store specific credit lines, airline specific credit cards or worse: gas cards.

I for one am going to pay out of pant leg patch next time just to see how that feels.

Librariers or Book Borders

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I just accidentally typed Libraries and instead typed librariers.  Librariers are clearly the things preventing me from getting my books back on time.  To put this in perspective last year I spent more money on late book fees at the library than I did video rental fees.  Scary.  I think that the Librarians see me coming and fear for their books and other patrons because they know that my family returns books so slowly that some authors have probably written and published new children’s books in between our picking up their previous 16 page special and when we’ll eventually return it.  Librariers exist because goofy patrons like us forget that we can renew the books online… if we remembered we had them.

And that’s why we can’t have nice things.

We Missed the Apprentice Season Premier

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And boy are we sad.  We were really hoping to catch the sappy intro wherein the Hair Flair Scare gets greeted by his super-model wife and child who has more hair than him and then he tells us about how the apprentice is going to finally be selected from a group of cannibals who have no qualms eating their opponents for breakfast, lunch and dinner [and if Taco Bell sponsors it again, “fourth meal”].  Can you believe we missed that?

I would have loved to have seen the opponents get briefly introed as successful business people, brilliant students and quadrillionaires.  Which leads me to my next point: why doesn’t Donald Trumpt do an ‘Apprentless’ show where people compete to work in the mail room.  Normal people.  People like you and I?  What?  You don’t want to filter through Donald Trump’s email?  Me neither, but it would be a good candidate for the Discover channel’s Dirty Jobs show 🙂

Ford & Bush

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So the New York Times headline declared that after the private family funeral a memorial for Ford would be “in Rotunda” (of course the online edition has different text so I can’t link to it).  Of course I can only wonder how different the foreign policy would be between the Ford administration and the nation of Rotunda and the Bush administration and the nation of Rotunda.  I hadn’t even heard of that country before.  I’d heard of Rwanda, but since some of those African countries come and go like satellites in the night sky, why should I worry about them other than they’re obviously kind enough to host a funeral for one of our nation’s presidents.  Some might even call him our best president – but I don’t know those people and President Ford unfortunately didn’t influence my life as much as Regan or the Bushes or Clinton because he was president while I was an infant.  But don’t get me wrong, it was a lovely infancy as far as I can remember.

President Bush might be more inclined to seek incredible influence on Rotunda because I think he believes that countries we dont’ influence are influencing other countries we don’t influence with iPods and other such nonsense.  Its probably for the best because given that more and more of the American population is becoming rotund, controlling a puppet government in Rotunda only makes sense.  Of course the biggest problem with the name Rotunda is that if its anywhere near Ethiopia it won’t fit in with all of the Ethiopian jokes I learned as a kid.  Speaking of which… what’s the fastest thing in the African desert?  An Ethiopian with a meal voucher.  What’s the slowest thing in the African desert? A Rotund person doing anything.