Supposedly, these headlines were actually printed...
MAN KILLS SELF BEFORE SHOOTING WIFE AND DAUGHTER
(It took the editor two or three readings before he realized that what he was reading was impossible.)
PANDA MATING FAILS: Veterinarian Takes Over
(What a guy!)
MINERS REFUSE TO WORK AFTER DEATH
JUVENILE COURT TO TRY SHOOTING DEFENDANT
COLD WAVE LINKED TO TEMPERATURE
(Who wudda thought?!)
RED TAPE HOLDS UP NEW BRIDGE
(Wonder if they tried duct tape?)
MAN STRUCK BY LIGHTNING: Faces Battery Charge
(He probably IS the battery charge. It must have been a shocking experience. His new nickname is Sparky. Etc, etc…)
ASTRONAUT TAKES BALME FOR GAS IN SPACECRAFT
(It was the freeze-dried chili and refried beans.)
HOSPITALS ARE SUED BY SEVEN FOOT DOCTORS
(Boy, are they tall!)
TYPHOON RIPS THROUGHT CEMETERY: Hundreds Dead
(Did I read that right? Are they serious?)
Have a safe and sane Black Friday everyone.
Thanks for stopping by...
Friday, November 27, 2009
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Saturday, October 24, 2009
THE PEACH PIT MYSTERY
This was written back in August. I am feeling that it is time to get back to my blog – at least a little more frequently than I have been. Most of my projects are completed. I have put together 3 manuscripts about my dad. Today would have been his 98th birthday. I have finished most of my Christmas gift projects. It is still a little too warm during the day to crochet large items (I have 2 blankets to finish for my grandchildren… nothing fancy, just warm covers for their northeast winters). I am also in the process of really cleaning out a lot of my unnecessary “stuff” (I foresee another blog subject).
THE PEACH PIT MYSTERY
Once upon a time, in a place and time not far from where I am sitting, there lives a friendly pup named Ramona. Sometimes she is called Bella, sometimes Bubba Puppy – depending on how smartly or un-smartly (not a word, but I don’t want to use the word ‘dumb’) she behaves. The obedience trainer warned me, “You will always have a two year old living with you.” And… we do.
Ramona (a.k.a. Bella, a.k.a. Bubba Puppy) is very much attached to my son Chris. When he leaves for work, she mopes. When he comes home, she is that two-year-old that the trainer warned us about. Luckily, Chris has a good handle on her. While he is gone, I must be the nurturing mother figure of a two-year-old… oh, that was such a naughty dog!! Oh, what a good puppy… etc, etc. To say the least, I am NOT her favorite person unless I am the only one home and it’s mealtime. She has a built in alarm that tells here when it’s time to eat. I don’t know HOW she knows when it is THAT time.
She has a fairly large back yard (by California standards) in which to run free. She is sometimes a barker. She will let the passers-by know without a doubt that this is HER territory. She is a herding breed (Border Collie mix) and she is protecting her herd. However, if they stop and chat with her, she will lick them to death. She really does love attention. The yards in this neighborhood are all bordered with fences. There is an access gate in our back fence where Ramona stands and watches the highway of human life. As darkness falls, she stands on our deck and is mesmerized by the car lights going by. Later in the evening she chats with the other canines within ear-shot (hers, not ours). She is let outside just before out bedtime with hopes that there will be no need to get up during the night for a trip outside.
The neighbor to our north has a yard full of trees. Every summer the peach tree (in the back corner) bears its juicy fruit. Many, many people walking along the street at the back of our yard stop and climb the neighbor’s fence to pick the fruit in the tree (yesterday a couple of peach thieves broke that fence). If Ramona is out, she barks at them. Bubba loves the fruit… Bella doesn’t know right from wrong with many things – especially peaches.
Since it has been peach time, I have been waking to painfully stepping on a peach pit on my way to the kitchen… or stumbling over a broken pit in the living room or in the sunroom. Every morning it is something to do with peach pits – at least one, sometimes more. One morning I heard her trying to chew on it in the hallway where the bedrooms are (crunch, crunch). Just the sound hurt my teeth and jaw.
Now these wake up calls are usually before 6 a.m. My normal rise and shine time is between 7 and 7:30. But since these peach pit mysteries began, I am not sleeping at all well. (This time has changed as I am up by 6 a.m. these days to get my son to work... our second car ceased operating in September.)
Where, in the name of all that is Ramona, is she getting these pits?? This has really stumped us. Have the squirrels that constantly antagonize Ramona been stashing these pits for the winter, and Ramona found their stash? It just had to be the frickin’ squirrels. They have been trying to get back at us ever since we had THEIR tree taken down before it fell down.
Then, one morning, about 5 a.m., I heard something strange… I couldn’t place the noise. But when I turned the hall light on, you guessed it, another peach pit!!!
This pit lay in a pool of saliva (a large pool of saliva). AH HA!!! That dumb Bubba Puppy is eating any peach she can find before coming in at bedtime. In the middle of the night she regurgitates the pit and VOILA! I step on the pit and incur the pain of the pit. OK… so now we know the source. I will take care of that. We have a 30 foot lead line left over from her training. Before Chris left for work this morning, he attached that lead line to the bottom rail of our deck stair railing. That was at 7:30 a.m. At 8:30 a.m. I heard her out there barking at a guy on a bicycle. Now… how could she be at the back gate?? The lead line is not that long. OH BUBBA PUPPY!! I stepped out onto the deck. There at the door was an uneaten peach – for me? And there was Bubba with about 6 inches of the lead line hanging from her collar. Darn dog had chewed through the line and set herself free. And, in the process, had found another peach.
The peach was thrown away and, of course, Ramona moped away the rest of the day on the cool kitchen floor. I hope that tree dies this winter. And then the city decided to beautify the easement that runs across the back property of us and many of our neighbors (perhaps another blog subject?).
Thanks for stopping by... hope your days is just grand.
THE PEACH PIT MYSTERY
Once upon a time, in a place and time not far from where I am sitting, there lives a friendly pup named Ramona. Sometimes she is called Bella, sometimes Bubba Puppy – depending on how smartly or un-smartly (not a word, but I don’t want to use the word ‘dumb’) she behaves. The obedience trainer warned me, “You will always have a two year old living with you.” And… we do.
Ramona (a.k.a. Bella, a.k.a. Bubba Puppy) is very much attached to my son Chris. When he leaves for work, she mopes. When he comes home, she is that two-year-old that the trainer warned us about. Luckily, Chris has a good handle on her. While he is gone, I must be the nurturing mother figure of a two-year-old… oh, that was such a naughty dog!! Oh, what a good puppy… etc, etc. To say the least, I am NOT her favorite person unless I am the only one home and it’s mealtime. She has a built in alarm that tells here when it’s time to eat. I don’t know HOW she knows when it is THAT time.
She has a fairly large back yard (by California standards) in which to run free. She is sometimes a barker. She will let the passers-by know without a doubt that this is HER territory. She is a herding breed (Border Collie mix) and she is protecting her herd. However, if they stop and chat with her, she will lick them to death. She really does love attention. The yards in this neighborhood are all bordered with fences. There is an access gate in our back fence where Ramona stands and watches the highway of human life. As darkness falls, she stands on our deck and is mesmerized by the car lights going by. Later in the evening she chats with the other canines within ear-shot (hers, not ours). She is let outside just before out bedtime with hopes that there will be no need to get up during the night for a trip outside.
The neighbor to our north has a yard full of trees. Every summer the peach tree (in the back corner) bears its juicy fruit. Many, many people walking along the street at the back of our yard stop and climb the neighbor’s fence to pick the fruit in the tree (yesterday a couple of peach thieves broke that fence). If Ramona is out, she barks at them. Bubba loves the fruit… Bella doesn’t know right from wrong with many things – especially peaches.
Since it has been peach time, I have been waking to painfully stepping on a peach pit on my way to the kitchen… or stumbling over a broken pit in the living room or in the sunroom. Every morning it is something to do with peach pits – at least one, sometimes more. One morning I heard her trying to chew on it in the hallway where the bedrooms are (crunch, crunch). Just the sound hurt my teeth and jaw.
Now these wake up calls are usually before 6 a.m. My normal rise and shine time is between 7 and 7:30. But since these peach pit mysteries began, I am not sleeping at all well. (This time has changed as I am up by 6 a.m. these days to get my son to work... our second car ceased operating in September.)
Where, in the name of all that is Ramona, is she getting these pits?? This has really stumped us. Have the squirrels that constantly antagonize Ramona been stashing these pits for the winter, and Ramona found their stash? It just had to be the frickin’ squirrels. They have been trying to get back at us ever since we had THEIR tree taken down before it fell down.
Then, one morning, about 5 a.m., I heard something strange… I couldn’t place the noise. But when I turned the hall light on, you guessed it, another peach pit!!!
This pit lay in a pool of saliva (a large pool of saliva). AH HA!!! That dumb Bubba Puppy is eating any peach she can find before coming in at bedtime. In the middle of the night she regurgitates the pit and VOILA! I step on the pit and incur the pain of the pit. OK… so now we know the source. I will take care of that. We have a 30 foot lead line left over from her training. Before Chris left for work this morning, he attached that lead line to the bottom rail of our deck stair railing. That was at 7:30 a.m. At 8:30 a.m. I heard her out there barking at a guy on a bicycle. Now… how could she be at the back gate?? The lead line is not that long. OH BUBBA PUPPY!! I stepped out onto the deck. There at the door was an uneaten peach – for me? And there was Bubba with about 6 inches of the lead line hanging from her collar. Darn dog had chewed through the line and set herself free. And, in the process, had found another peach.
The peach was thrown away and, of course, Ramona moped away the rest of the day on the cool kitchen floor. I hope that tree dies this winter. And then the city decided to beautify the easement that runs across the back property of us and many of our neighbors (perhaps another blog subject?).
Thanks for stopping by... hope your days is just grand.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Some disjointed thoughts on a SEPTEMBER SONG
When I saw Jamie’s prompt, I said to myself, “Self, just what are we going to write about this?”
Happy Labor Day. May you be able to rest on your vocational laurels for these 24 hours. It’s a shame that our holidays are no longer what they used to be. I would LOVE to hear that WalMart closed its doors for 24 hours straight – or that any and all other stores did the same for that matter. I have a lot of respect for those small operations that actually do respect our formerly time-honored tradition of actually taking a holiday from work.
So, if it’s Labor Day, it must be September. Being from New England, this IS my time of year. This is the color and smells and glory of another year dying into winter.
People say that because I live in California, we don’t experience the seasons. I say this is not quite correct. Our daily temperatures drop from what can be a suffocating 100* to being a bone chilling 50*. At night, we do have frost and freezing temps. Perhaps we don’t have snow here, but I can travel less than an hour to see it, walk in it, make a snowball and throw it at something or someone. Our summer does melt into an autumn-like melancholy and then into the winter doldrums. I do get cabin fever.
It was then I remembered a wonderful series that was aired on PBS a while ago. Victor Borge was a very accomplished Danish pianist and quite adeptly mingled humor into his concerts. This is my contribution to September Song for 2009.
Did I mention that my thoughts would be a bit scattered?
Happy Labor Day. May you be able to rest on your vocational laurels for these 24 hours. It’s a shame that our holidays are no longer what they used to be. I would LOVE to hear that WalMart closed its doors for 24 hours straight – or that any and all other stores did the same for that matter. I have a lot of respect for those small operations that actually do respect our formerly time-honored tradition of actually taking a holiday from work.So, if it’s Labor Day, it must be September. Being from New England, this IS my time of year. This is the color and smells and glory of another year dying into winter.
People say that because I live in California, we don’t experience the seasons. I say this is not quite correct. Our daily temperatures drop from what can be a suffocating 100* to being a bone chilling 50*. At night, we do have frost and freezing temps. Perhaps we don’t have snow here, but I can travel less than an hour to see it, walk in it, make a snowball and throw it at something or someone. Our summer does melt into an autumn-like melancholy and then into the winter doldrums. I do get cabin fever.
And, each year I wonder to myself if it is time to write my September Song. I must consider that putting together a very loose family history does have to take place as a start to this song. Have I finally reached that point in my life where it’s all downhill from here. Well, rationally, I know that happened a few years ago. But am I really going to accept that fact? I try not to stare my own mortality in the face often.
I got to this point in my posting and thought, I don’t want to write about my mortality. I know it’s there… not too much I can do about that.
It was then I remembered a wonderful series that was aired on PBS a while ago. Victor Borge was a very accomplished Danish pianist and quite adeptly mingled humor into his concerts. This is my contribution to September Song for 2009.
I hope you enjoy a little smile with these two talented muscians. To see more September Song contributions visit TAKE THIS TUNE.
Thanks for stopping by...
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
And it's September 2009
I certainly hope that September brings ALL of us better times than August has.For those who are ill or suffering from life's not so nice turns in the highway, may you find peace and hope and strength... sprinkled with a little laughing and a lot of smiles.
For those who are about to build and ark and float away, may you have warm sunny days with very little humidity.
For those people finding the dry heat opressive and energy-zapping, may you have cooler days with a few rain showers thrown in for good measure.
For those having found themselves at a good place in time, may you journey continue along this path.
Peace and blessings to all my blogging community and friends.
Thanks for stopping by :o)
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