And the eyes weren't smiling . . .

And On The Left . . .

I had an SUV pass me yesterday. That in itself isn’t very notable. It seems most SUV drivers feel they can do most anything with their oversized 4-wheel drive, big tired vehicles, even when the roads are slick with snow and ice. The roads yesterday were slick with snow and ice and the SUV was one of those larger ones and had big tires. I’m guessing it was also in 4-wheel drive. The notable part about it passing me was that I was at a stop sign and it passed me going sideways in the lane that is usually reserved for oncoming traffic. No one was there and the SUV managed to clear the intersection and got hung up on one of the larger snow banks across the street. It bottomed out. The snow bank was holding the SUV up and all four of the big tires were off the ground. Still spinning. The driver was going to have to dig the snow out from under the vehicle. The driver was okay but I didn’t offer to help with the shovelling. I figured that, for at least a little while, we’d all be safer on the road.

Ho Ho Humbug

There’s a radio station in town that’s been playing Christmas music since Halloween. It’s the one that plays oldies the rest of the year and it’s one of the stations I listen to a lot. But not since Halloween. There are some nice Christmas songs but there aren’t that many of them. I think it takes about an hour to go through the entire list of Christmas songs, even with commercials. The next hour they play the same songs over as performed by a different artist. They have another group lined up for the next hour and the next and they’ve been doing this since Halloween. I haven’t stayed with the station long enough to hear The Messiah as performed by Alvin and the Chipmunks but I’m sure it’s in there somewhere. I just don’t want to hear it. I want my oldies back but I have to wait until January. It’s going to be a long Holiday season.

Just so you know, and I don’t know what criteria they used, but the Number One all time Christmas song is Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer as performed by Gene Autry.

Oh Boy.

But Does It Have A Second Rinse?

There was a commercial on TV this morning from an appliance manufacturer who wanted to show how tough their washing machines were. They lined up two rows of washers, put up some ramps and ran a pick-up truck over the top of them. I’m not sure what this has to do with the clothes washing capabilities of the machines but none of them buckled or bent. They are tough washing machines, the kind someone would buy when they are looking for something special to run a pick-up over. There’s no need to go out in the woods to find tree stumps or fallen logs to blast over. We don’t have to search city streets for the perfect pot hole to give us bounce in our drive, we can just line up washing machines, grab a couple of ramps and have at in the back yard. Excitement and thrills without having to leave home. I started thinking of the possibilities and wondering how the washers would hold up to an overloaded minivan when I noticed the tag line scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen, “Do Not Attempt At Home.” Darn.

The Next Call Is For . . .

Candidates for public office are getting fairly intense these last days before the election. Besides all the commercials on TV and the leaflets left on our door they’ve started doing robo-calls. A computer dials the next phone number on the list and a taped voice tells why an opponent ranks with the scum of the earth or why the campaign generating the call is promoting someone who could be the next messiah. It’s getting old.

I hang up on robo-calls but I’ve been able to tell which campaigns are more desperate. They’ve started calling my fax machine and this is causing some anxiety in the household. The fax (I call her Fanny) has been close enough to the computer monitor to read the web pages of the political doings and has heard the TV news. Fanny is one of the ‘undecideds’ and the robo-calls aren’t really helping. Should she vote against the guy who hates kittens or for the guy who wants to turn Lake Superior into a water park to increase tourism? Not needing to breathe, Fanny has no opinions about coal burning electrical plants but she does worry about the quality of electricity from wind farms (“Yeah,” shy wrote on a note she pushed through the delivery tray, “you humans can breathe better with wind power electricity but will there really be enough to fire my circuits?”) And so it goes. I can’t wait for Election Day to be over. The political commercials will be done and Fanny can go back to work as a fax machine instead of concerned (almost) part of the electorate.

The Other Side of Delivery

My grandson arrived about a week ago. He’s cute, although in coming years he probably won’t want to be described that way. Kate’s doing well and Owen seems to be okay but he’s going to struggle with the affliction of all new dads – loosing the baby weight he put on during the pregnancy. It doesn’t seem fair. For everything else they go through, women loose a lot of weight they put on during the pregnancy just by doing the delivery. We guys put on weight, too. We do sympathy eating. The wife has a craving for something and we dig in as well. They want ice cream, we bring an extra bowl to share the experience. I could go on with food groups but you get the idea. They scarf something down and we do too then they deliver and we have something the size of a basketball hanging over our belts. It’s not a pretty sight and no one compliments us on our glow.

A Different Way To Go

There seem to be a lot of exercise places around now. I don’t go to any of them but I keep seeing different ones whose offerings seem to go a bit past what the local YMCA does. There’s one that caught my eye called La Fitness. I assumed it was from a French exercise conglomerate that was trying to help us be healthy with a Continental flair. Being French, I thought they’d also have some specialty courses you could sign up for that would be unique to their culture. They could teach us things like how to eat a bushel full of croissants without developing carpel tunnel or how to hold our hands and arms up in surrender for hours without strain or muscle fatigue. They would have a class on how to hold our faces in a look of perpetual sneer without having facial tics. And, I thought, they’d have a class on balance and agility for folks who worked their way through multiple bottles of wine with dinner.

I was thinking about other courses they could offer when Chris told me it was actually called LA Fitness, a health spa thing out of Los Angeles that was hyping the idea that if we went in and sweated up we could all look firm and tan and twenty years younger. That won’t help me. Sweating isn’t on my list of things to do, firm lost out to gravity a long time ago, I try to stay out of the sun and twenty years backwards wouldn’t be much of an improvement.

I was a little bummed that it wasn’t the French thing. I was actually thinking about the croissant course

How I Never Learned The Four Step

There’s a new product on the shelf at our local grocery store. Goat Milk. It says so right on the side of the carton in big letters so no one can claim confusion when they try it later for breakfast and wonder why their cereal tastes funny. Goat milk isn’t like the stuff you get from cows. It tastes, well, goaty. I know. I used to have a goat when I was a kid (no pun intended) on the farm. And I had to milk it.

I got a goat because I thought they looked kind of neat with their floppy ears and small beard. My goat, though, had no interest in being a pet. It wanted to be a free range farm animal and although it had recently weaned a kid it had no interest in being milked.

Milking cows was fairly easy by comparison. You bring them into the barn, lock their heads between two sturdy staves and feed them some corn to keep them occupied while you grab a bucket and stool had have at it. Most cows you can milk in minutes.

Goats don’t work that way. For a reason I never understood you have to lift them onto a platform several feet off the ground. It was supposed to keep them calm while you milked them. It didn’t calm mine. It made her want to dance. The Irish River Dance people had nothing on my goat. She never left the platform but she had a four-step routine that made it hard to squeeze a teat and hit a bucket with a stream of milk. I mostly managed to lather the stage for her next number, which was often wilder than the initial warm-up she performed and by the end of her set I was exhausted.

I didn’t have much luck with the goat and never got enough milk from her to develop a taste for it. All I remember is that it tasted goaty. Somewhere, though, someone has learned to dance with a goat well enough to fill cartons with goat milk. They’re selling it at the local store. I’m going to pass on it.

Playing Tag

A while ago I wrote about the Powerball lottery. Twice a week I buy a ticket with two numbers. They’re numbers Pat picked out using some mystical numerology consisting of immigration dates, birthdays, etc. She thought these would be better than the Quick Picks I used to get every once in a while. So far they haven’t been and I’ve been doing some thinking about that. It occurred to me I’m taking the wrong approach to keep this fun. I’ve adjusted my thinking.

With most lotteries you get numbers and hope it matches up with the winning numbers. That works well on a Quick Pick where a ticket holder’s numbers are chosen at random. Our numbers, though, are the same every time and I’ve realized we’re on the other side of the game. The Power Ball has to hit us. It hasn’t. Now it’s like playing a game of tag and, so far, I’m not It.