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The Wisdom of Age

September 13, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Don’t think I’m claiming it. Still looking for it here. (Found the age part, still looking for the Wisdom.)

I hear people say, “Ahhh, if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.” Patooty.

Like the time facing a plate of smelly shrimp and eating them anyway and spending the weekend on a different kind of chair while recovering? That’s one no-brainer change. Speeding through the school zone was bad the first time. Why repeat it? Leave the house for your own wedding ten minutes before the scheduled start? Not the best way to start a new life-chapter. I’d change that.

Wouldn’t change a thing? Patooty-tooty.

Lots of things could be better if we knew then what we know now. The trouble is, if someone told us back then, we wouldn’t have believed it. Life’s best lessons are those learned the hardest.

I loved watching the little grandbabies the other night. Small enough to stay out of trouble, but big enough to cry tears that roll down beautiful cheeks to land on the back of your hand. I wanted to save them in a jar so as to never forget the moment. No one is happy when Mom and Dad leave. It takes time to get over it.

I’m still learning that, too. I picked up several great lessons from the babies. I also discovered some lessons have already been learned. I do possess patience, despite what you may have thought. Tears aren’t forever either. (About two minutes and a set of car keys work wonders…)

Bookstores offer a lot of perspectives on things. Especially for owners on Monday mornings when the clouds promise raindrops that could be saved in jars.

Your change could add up to profits from the past! Try Careers for History Buffs and Others who Profit from the Past by Blythe Camenson:

Say it ain’t so, Joe!

September 9, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Some things you just don’t want to hear. The kid pleading with Shoeless Joe Jackson to deny that he took money to throw the 1919 World Series.

He said it weren’t so, over and over. Said it in a court of law and anyplace else someone might hear. A jury found him innocent. He did deny that a kid ever said such a thing to him. The story persists, mostly among old-timey baseball fans. You whippersnappers are saying, HEY! Isn’t Say it ain’t so a song by Weezer? To which we reply, HEY! Isn’t Weezer an old guy with allergies so bad he can’t blow the germs off the corndog he just dropped in the dirt?

Food Network Magazine reports that 25% of chefs they surveyed admitted to cooking something that had been dropped on the floor. I worked in a bicycle shop that was kept so clean I might have eaten off the floor. Restaurant floors? I don’t think so. I’d never heard of the five second rule until I owned a restaurant (supposedly, if a dropped item was picked up before five seconds passed, it was still clean. Germs being pretty slow and all). I’ve seen people blowing on their dropped item, using that sterilizing exhale technique, but it’s not for me.

I didn’t even let my restaurant employees JOKE about a five second rule. A good reputation is earned over time but lost in an instant. (Sort of like paychecks at the Cherokee Casino.) The price of something dropped isn’t worth the cost of goodwill lost. It applies to more than just restaurants and dropped food. Speaking of Goodwill, that’s where they should drop off that that creepy plastic-headed royal racing around in the Burger King commercials, Talk about a dying ad campaign. Would you like flies with that?

I’d like to hear the ad agency exec pitching some of the ideas that get made into commercials. “It’s going to be great! We’ll have a giant yellow bumblebee with dark menacing eyes and a Spanish accent. He’s wingless, sort of, and kinda hovers around stoked up on mometasone furoate monohydrate. You’re gonna LOVE it!”

The voice? Say it ain’t Antonio…

Get in the ad men mood (no Weezer though):

Raining Cats and… WHAT?

September 8, 2010 / / 0 Comments

A slight drizzle is falling. I’m looking out through the window, sitting at the desk, dripping. Naturally, when I raced (now that’s a stretch…) from the car to the door, it was Gulf coast water (sans tar-balls) carried all the way across Texas and southern Oklahoma to be dashed down upon my head.

A regular gully-washer, as they say. They – being the ones who presumably live near gullies. We don’t run onto gullies much anymore. Pretty much gone the way of the gulch and other things that cowboys used to burp around the campfire.

Needless to say, it was raining cats and dogs this morning.

We were lucky, I guess. As I look out, the parking lot is free of domestic animals (feral ones too, presumably), so they survived the downpour and ran off to play. It might have been worse. According to some scamp writing for Wikipedia, there have been numerous “rains” of more than just H2O.

Fishies:
Singapore, February 22, 1861; Olneyville, Rhode Island, May 15, 1900; Bhanwad, Jamnagar, India, Oct 24, 2009; Lajamanu, Northern Territory, Australia, February 25 and 26, 2010; Marksville, Louisiana, October 23, 1947.
Frogs and toads
Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, June 2009; Rákóczifalva, Hungary, 18-20 June 2010 (two times).
Others
An unidentified animal (thought to be a cow) fell in California ripped to tiny pieces on August 1, 1869; a similar incident was reported in Olympian Springs, Bath County, Kentucky in 1876; Jellyfish fell from the sky in Bath, England, in 1894; Worms dropped from the sky in Jennings, Louisiana, on July 11, 2007. Spiders fell from the sky in Salta Province, Argentina on April 6, 2007.

Oooooooo…now wouldn’t THAT be a way to start the morning? A downpour of spiders?

I’m happy to be sitting here dripping!

Try the reign of the library cat, Dewey by Vicki Myron:

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