Quickies!

Generation Gap

To the pimply faced teenager driving the car beside me at the stop light today.

• Yes, I had my stereo cranked up while I was singing in the car.
• Yes I was singing along with “Muskrat Love” by America.
• No, I don’t give a rats ass whether you think I looked stupid.

Just for educational purposes, when I was your age (well a little older) that song was banned by a whole slew of radio stations for being too suggestive.  We didn’t have rap songs that used an explicit reference to sex in every other line, so this was our way of pushing the parental envelope.

To sum it up, I don’t care if your car can bounce up and down to the beat of your music.  Don’t laugh at me for enjoying music from  my 16 year old Kenwood stereo on my commute home.  (Do note that my stereo is your age and still working)

Thank you.

P.S.   Sometimes I sing along with Faith Hill, Gloria Estefan and Cher while they’re playing too.  Get over it.

Increasing Your Vocabulary

I just learned a new word.

“Lethologica” describes not remembering a word you want.”

This happens to me all the… all the…

Crap.

That Time of the Year

After a few weeks, Christmas Music morphs from being entertaining to being a thistle ball that’s stuck in your mind.  Despite that, I really like the cover rendition that Megan Nicole Flores did of the Eartha Kitt classic Santa Baby.

You Have to Keep Things in Perspective

I stopped by the grocery store today to pick up a few things.  I had poor timing.  You see, we’re expecting a cold snap tonight and there’s a possibility of some ice or snow.  In North Carolina, the potential of ice and/or snow brings on a frenzy of buying for milk and bread.  No one wants to get snowed in without staples.  When I got to the store, the shelves were bare of both items.  Fortunately, neither one of them were on my shopping list.

While I was standing in line surrounded by shoppers pushing carts filled with four or five gallons of milk and just as many loaves of bread, I noticed that one guy in front of me had a cart filled with five cases of beer and a half dozen bottles of wine.  The line was moving slowly and eventually I couldn’t resist anymore.

“Excuse me,” I said.  “I don’t mean to pry, but I’m curious.  everyone else has carts filled with milk and bread, but yours is filled with beer.  Aren’t you worried about running out of the important stuff if the weather gets bad?

He looked at me for a few seconds and then smiled as he said, “Sure, but if I’m going to be stuck in the house for three days, I want to make sure that I have something there that I like to drink.”

He had a point.  I got out of line and added two cases of Mountain Dew to my cart.

Northern Girls

We had our first cold snap of the fall last week.  It was short-lived, but for three days the temperature dropped into the thirties at night and stayed in the fifties during the day.  One evening, in the middle of the cold spell, Linda put down the book she had been reading, walked over to my chair, knelt down, looked up at me with doe eyes and said, “How would you like to take me to Dairy Queen for an ice cream cone?”

It was thirty-four degrees outside and my wife wanted an ice cream cone.  I guess that proves that you can take the girl out of the north, but you can’t take the north out of the girl.

She got a vanilla/chocolate twist.  I’m a little more boring.  I settled for straight vanilla.

Starships (are meant to fly)

I follow Jeffrey A. Carver’s blog, Pushing A Snake Up A Hill, and on a recent post he featured a video from Vimeo based on the hip hop song Starships by Nicki Minaj.  That was the PG-13 version that has MOST of the…mmm…more explicit lyrics modified enough to prevent a parent’s head from exploding.  Unfortunately, the video is no longer on Vimeo.  However, it is on you tube.  This version is a bit more explicit though, so be warned.

Anyway, this is absolutely the coolest music video I’ve seen in years.  My thanks to Jeffrey Carver for posting it on his blog and, more importantly, to bironic for making it.  I only wish that I could figure out some way to hook it into my books so that it could play in the background during key scenes.   Hmmm, I might have to work on that.

For now, crank up the volume and rock to…. Starships (are meant to fly)

Klingon lap dog

Is it my imagination, or do pug puppies look a little like a Klingon?

Justice Prevails

So, a few days ago Ashlyn, my two year old granddaughter, found my son’s debit card.  He spent a fair amount time chasing her around the house and trying to convince her to give it back without damaging it.  Every time he got close she’d swipe it on something and say “Buy it.”

Yesterday he sent his mother an email with photos of Ashlyn riding her new three wheeler.  In the email he described how she had learned to go pretty fast with it and had already had her first fender bender.  Apparently she ran full speed into the car bumper while riding in the driveway.  When she hit she said “Crash!” and then laughed.

I remember hoping when both of our kids were little that fairness would prevail and they would get children just like themselves.  It appears that one of the strings that holds the universe together is connected to a huge sphere of justice.  Good luck when she hits the teenage years.   He he he.  🙂

Read the Labels

Since our cat Jasmine passed away, our other cat Kallie has been quiet and not eating well.  I think she’s suffering from a variation of Stockhom Syndrome.  Linda was worried that she wasn’t eating enough.  While trolling around the pet store she saw a liquid cat food additive that was supposed to help with the food taste.  As a perk, it also helped with hair balls.  She got a container.

A few nights later, when I got up for one of my nocturnal wanderings through the refrigerator, I decided to have a 3 AM salad.  Did I mention that the food additive had to be refrigerated after opening?  I made the salad and looked around for a salad dressing.  Did I mention that I wasn’t wearing my glasses?  I saw the food additive container on the shelf, poured some on my salad, sat down at the table and ate.

In the morning, Linda asked, “What’s that in the sink?”

“My salad,” I answered.

“Why is some of it chewed?”

“That’s what I spit out after I put my glasses on and read the salad dressing label.”

“Why’d you want to read the label on the salad dressing?”

“I liked it; it tasted unique and I wanted to see what kind it was.”

“So why’d it end up in the sink?”

“It wasn’t salad dressing.”

Oh well, at least I don’t have to worry about hair balls.

Negative Calories

Ayumi, a sweet girl from Japan, was our last exchange student.  One day, shortly after she arrived, I was in the kitchen eating a doughnut and drinking a diet Pepsi.  She gave me an odd look and asked, “Why do you drink a diet drink but also eat doughnut?”

“Well,” I replied.  “In the United States we’ve discovered how to put negative calories in our diet drinks.  When we drink one while we are eating something sweet or fattening, the negative calories cancel out the positive calories and we don’t gain weight.”

She tilted her head slightly, looked at me for a few seconds and then answered with. “You are not drinking enough diet Pepsi.”

Aging Well

Sometime later, Ayumi and I were looking at a few of our old photo albums.  As we went from page to page, eventually we found a photo of me when I was about six months old.  At that age I didn’t have much hair and I was pretty chubby.

“This is me when I was a baby,” I said.

Ayumi looked at me, looked at the photo and then looked back at me before saying, “Hmmm, not change very much.”