I didn’t have to herd cats. My shirt had as many buttons as buttonholes and there were more hills than pills in my life. Those three things are wins in my book. Life is made up of small victories. Here are more. My pillow hadn’t had a restless night and my socks matched. No one had unleashed the flying monkeys. I dropped something on the kitchen floor and it didn’t … [Read more...]
You conquered the grind, now clang the grad gong
Angry hailstones the size of bowling balls had battered my poor car. That was not on my to-do list. OK, the hailstones weren’t quite that large, but that’s what I told my insurance company. That’s not true, either. I haven’t called them. I did call my health insurance company because they denied a $3,000 bill from the clinic because I’d had the right test done at the wrong … [Read more...]
I can’t deal with cards even with an automatic shuffler
Hasenpfeffer, euchre, hucklybuck, sheepshead and pepper. Are they personal injury attorneys? Nope. Card games. Hasenpfeffer (pfeffer) is also a rabbit stew. Hucklybuck is sometimes called hucklebuck. Euchre, shouldn’t be mistaken for Bob Uecker, the Milwaukee Brewers broadcaster who played the announcer Harry Doyle in the movie “Major League” and said things like, “Heywood … [Read more...]
Don’t even think about texting while bungee jumping
He hadn’t run amok. He’d bungeed amok. The historical society hosted a program on ghost towns. Most of the settlements had been tiny and failed because the railroad didn’t come their way, the people didn’t arrive as expected or the residents forgot where they’d put the village. Some of the names were Bancroft, Bath, Buckeye, Crayon Park, Dorwart, Knatvold, Lerdal and Sigsbee. … [Read more...]
The wind brings uninvited gusts to my place
The trees gossiped in the wind. “It’s a nice day, except for the wind,” says everybody capable of putting eight words together. I’ve been picking up sticks in the yard. Great crop this year. I’ve picked rocks, too. It’s a spring habit. What do you call a boomerang that won’t come back? A stick. The wind finds branches or limbs with weaknesses, rips them free and deposits … [Read more...]
Good tires and air — gifts that keep on giving
Who hasn’t had a flat tire? Other than those people who don’t drive a car, truck, bicycle, lawn mower, tractor, motorhome, airplane, tire swing or submarine. I threw in the submarine to see if you were paying attention. I was in an airplane that blew a tire when landing at the Denver airport. On the subject of airplanes, a different flight had been delayed, canceled, took … [Read more...]
The case of the purloined 3/8-inch combination wrench
I’ve never wrestled with a grizzly bear with an impacted tooth or tangled with a mountain lion that had just lost his job in the biotech industry, but I have been the victim of a fly-by pooping by a gang of ruthless gulls and had a run-in with a Canada goose. I called the honker a “wawa,” which is a Native American name for a Canada goose. The gander took exception to that and … [Read more...]
It wasn’t a morel mushroom cloud
That’s no way for the weather to make friends. A tornado hit my hometown on December 15. When I was a kid, we joked about a terrible explosion in town. The wind blew up the street. The tornado was no joke. It was frightening. I remember another frightening day in that fair city. Life was like it is today — considered by some to be the worst time ever. I was a young boy with … [Read more...]
Do Camel cigarettes have one hump or two?
“What will it be?” “It will be OK,” I assured the server. It turned out she wasn’t inquiring about my nasty hangnail. She wanted me to order. I thought about saying, “I want a rubber band sandwich and make it snappy,” but she had a stern look, which indicated I should forgo any further attempts at jocularity. I’d just talked to a fellow who was about to turn 93. People had … [Read more...]
Haute cuisine on a horse opera
I gave a collection of Gunsmoke TV show DVDs to a friend going through a rough patch. A rough patch is how I describe things I don’t want to describe. It’s the opposite of a bonanza, so it doesn’t have any of the Cartwright family in it. I’m not sure how I came to possess those Gunsmoke videos. Probably at a friends of the public library book sale. Gunsmoke was a weekly … [Read more...]