Being a telemarketer is not a job I would ever consider doing.
For one thing I don’t take rejection very well and for the other part, I couldn’t deal with folks who act the way I sometimes do when answering a call from one of these poor souls.
I really feel for these people and I realize that they are only doing what they are being paid to do, but there ought to be a better way.
Nothing annoys me more than someone trying to sell me something that I don’t need at a price I can’t afford at a time when I am not in the mood to listen to a sales pitch.
Sometimes it annoys me so much that I am downright mean to them.
Last week the phone rang and I answered it without checking the caller ID. It was “one-of-those-calls” and I was trapped into either listening to the sales call, hanging up, or being rude to the caller. I decided to do all three at once.
“Hi, could I speak to Mrs. Foster please,” said the chipper voice of the telemarketer lady.
“This is Mrs. Foster,” I said.
She continued in that same cheerful voice, ” Hi Mrs. Foster how are you doing today?”
“Well, actually I don’t feel ve…”
Suddenly, I was interrupted in mid-whine. “My name is Linda and I wanted to let you know that you’ve been pre-approved for a credit card wit…”
“You didn’t really want to know, did you?” I interrupted her right back.
” Know what?” she asked sounding puzzled.
” How I am. You just asked how I am doing and I was trying to tell you… That’s what’s wrong with the world today. People just say things out of habit and they really don’t care.”
” Oh, I’m sorry”, she apologized, “I wanted to offer you our credit card and…”
“See, there you did it again,” I snapped.
“Uh, did what?”
“You said you were sorry, but you’re not really sorry. That’s just something else that people say and don’t mea…”
“Would you like me to call you back when you’re feeling better, Mrs. Foster,” she asked.
“No, No, go ahead on. You’ve already gotten me out of my sick bed now,” I said in my most whiny of voices.
“Ma’am,” she continued in a slightly annoyed voice, “are you interested in the credit card?”
“How should I know. You haven’t told me about it yet,” I answered.
She began explaining about credit limits, finance charges, activation fees and I set the phone down and went to the bathroom. When I came back she was still droning on about how the monthly payments could be as little or as much as I wanted to pay.
I set the phone down again and went to the kitchen and made a sandwich and got a cup of coffee. This time when I returned, she was winding down the sales pitch.
“Mrs Foster, you’ll have to agree with me that this is one of the best credit packages around right now and our interest rate is very low compared to oth…”
“Miss..uh Linda? Would you hold for a moment while I think it over,” I asked.
“Certainly,” she answered “I’ll get your information when you’re ready.”
I put the phone down again and went to the kitchen and cooked supper. I have no idea how long she held the phone before she realized I wasn’t coming back.
I would hate being a telemarketer. People can be so mean to them sometimes. Actually I felt a little bit guilty for the way I handled the call, but she was trying to sell me something that I didn’t want at a price I couldn’t afford at a time when I least wanted to listen to her sales pitch…
Tags: credit cards, sales pitch, telemarketer, telephone
My father called me Leona. I called him collect a couple of times after I got older but he refused to accept the charges.
The way the story goes, he left the house one morning several months before I was born. He told my mother that he was going to the store for a pack of cigarettes. He didn’t come back for eight years.
The day he finally returned, I answered the door and there stood a strange man with familiar eyes and hair the color of mine. He asked if my mother was home. She came to the door and introduced us.
Mother: “This is Leeuna, your daughter. Leeuna, this is your father.”
Father: “Hi Leona”
Me: “??”
Mother: “Did you finally get your cigarettes?”
Father: “Yeah, but I smoked ‘em already. Can I come home?”
Mother: “Let me check. Um…oops…sorry. No! You don’t live here anymore.”
Me: “??! Did he just call me Le-o-na!”
Not long after that my sisters and I learned to spell the word divorce when our mother decided it was time she got one, and our lives continued as usual. Four females in a house with pink bedspreads and ruffles.
So I was basically raised with no male influence in my life whatsoever. I grew up with the attitude that like shoes in the shower, men were totally unnecessary, except in certain circumstances like for example if you need to remove the lid from a jar of relish or if you need to move a piano.
That kind of upbringing might account a little bit for my being married four times. Then again it could simply be that my ex-husbands were all total douche bags. Whatever.
I saw my father a few times after I got older. Sometimes at the grocery store, once in the hospital after he had been beaten severely by one of his drinking buddies and once at the funeral home when my grandmother (his mother) died. I felt like I had stumbled into the wrong family gathering: he shook my hand, called me “Leona” and thanked me for coming. I later received a thank-you card in the mail from his family.
Then there was that time he died and I didn’t go to his funeral. I was busy. I had to stay home that day and remove the lint from the clothes dryer. Or maybe I had an appointment that day to have the dog’s teeth bleached. I really don’t remember. I just know something came up.
Whoever said that blood is thicker than water obviously didn’t come from the same gene pool as my father. He thought of blood only as something that stained one’s shirt and sometimes caused one to require stitches. DNA meant “Do Not Ask…me what my youngest daughter’s name is because I do not know.”
Not that I’m bitter.
I realize that the name Leeuna is a hard name to pronounce, especially for those who aren’t familiar with foreign languages and gibberish and for fathers who have been chronically absent. Actually it’s just two simple little names linked together: Lee and Una, pronounced Lee-you-na.
Someone once commented that it sounded Hawaiian. Actually I think it is Native American, probably Cherokee. Loosely translated it means “Baby-Ugly-Like-Possum”. Had my father been present for the event he would never have called me Leona which is probably French for “whats-her-name”.
Any male with a healthy sperm count can be a father. It takes little to no effort and in some cases only a few seconds to father a child. However, it takes a real man to be a dad.
So for all you Real Men out there who are Dads and who know your children so well you can even pronounce their names correctly, I salute you and I wish you all a Happy Father’s Dad’s Day.
For all you dead-beat sperm-donor type fathers out there, might I suggest a voyage across shark infested waters in a boat with no bottom.
Not that I’m bitter.
Tags: cigarettes, divorce, fathers day, sperm donor
We buy stuff with money that we don’t have. We promise to pay for it with money that we may never get. By the time we get our stuff paid for, it’s broken. Then we go out and buy more stuff. That is the definition of the word credit.
Today I would like to discuss the history of credit and how it all came about.
Credit has been around for centuries. It started with the early cave man. Ugg wanted a fancy stone club like the one his neighbor Ogg had. He believed it would make him a better hunter. After all, he worked as hard as Ogg did and he deserved a nice club. Besides that, he had more children. So off Ugg went, down to the local Stoneware Store and bought one on credit. He promised to pay for it in three easy installments of two dinosaurs per month for the following three months.
Ugg used the club to kill dinosaurs which he gave to the Stoneware Store for two months. By the third month he and his family had starved to death and the store owner came and took back the club, his cave, and his one surviving child. This was all legal since the credit application had been written and signed in stone. That’s why people stopped paying for stuff with dinosaurs and began using those shiny chunks of rock called “gold nuggets”.
When it was discovered that the shiny rocks were valuable, everyone began digging them out of the caves. Incidentally, this is the way “house cleaning” was discovered.
After a while and much digging by everyone from all over the continent, the shiny rocks kept getting harder and harder to find. It was also difficult to flash your wealth around because the sacks of rocks were so heavy. This is why Quasimodo became known as “The Hunchback”. He was the richest man of his time, but his back had become terribly bowed over from carrying all these sacks of shiny rocks around. Even though being weighted down with riches sounds like a good thing, it really can become a hazard, so people began using paper.
The paper was easier to carry. It wasn’t bulky, which made it easier for Robin Hood to rob the rich and give the money to the poor. The paper money was undetectable when Robin Hood stuffed the millions he stole inside his tights. Folks just thought he had huge thighs. However, all the kings men as well as the poor began manufacturing their own money. They cut pieces of paper from the Wall Street Journal and Sears & Roebuck catalogues. Soon everybody had so much paper it became worthless. Robin Hood stopped robbing people since his tights were now full of money which nobody wanted. This caused him to waddle like a duck whenever he tried to walk, and that is how the term “tight wad” came about.
By now the government decided to take over control of all the money. They called it Internal Revenue. They began to make the money out of green paper only. They put pictures of dead presidents on the front and a picture of a building on the back. They also wrote a lot of numbers and Latin words on it. They decided to call it “cash” which comes from the Latin word “munie” meaning “the root of all evil”.
Thousands of years later man was still using this green paper, but it was slowly becoming worthless. Unless you had a sack full of this paper you couldn’t buy anything. And carrying around sacks of this stuff made it difficult to use public transport. Besides, the airlines kept losing it. It also takes a long long time to acquire a sack of this paper stuff called cash, so that is why we now buy things on credit.
Now instead of having sacks of paper we use little square plastic cards to buy stuff with money that we don’t have. We promise to pay for it with money that we may never get. When we get it paid for we will go out and buy more stuff because the stuff we have now will be broken.
And that, Dear Children, is how the term plastic money came about. And that is the reason we now live in a world of debt, politics, and collective ignorance. It’s so easy a cave man can do it.
Tags: credit cards, money, politics, robin hood
pleze s'kuze the dirt on my noze. I just hid my snak bone in the flower bed!
My name is Shadow and I am the DOG. Most of you know me as The Black Lab, the owner of the people named Leeuna and Hubby. Since my mommy, (she calls herself “mommy” when she talks to me…snicker, bwahahahha, snort..how dumb is that?!) anyway she is tired so I thought I would help her out and write the column for her this week.
I hope I don’t make too many mistakes but I am typing this real fast, using both paws so I can get it done before she catches me at her computer. Geesh! It’ll be the same old thing like when I ate her boots. She’ll get that wrinkle between her eyes that reminds me of a little Shar Pei I once knew. She’ll tug at her hair and make it string down over her eyes like that Shih Tzu’s hair over at the trailer park.
Anyway, I really wanted to clear some things up. Mommy has been telling some pretty tall tales on me lately and I think I should take my turn here. First off, it wasn’t my fault that she broke her ribs that day at the river. I can’t help it if she is so clumsy she falls over on level ground. Actually, and this is between us, she is so clumsy she couldn’t stand upright in a phone booth. You should have seen her the day she walked into that ladder. Knocked herself flat down…and I was in the house minding my own business. Well actually I was chewing on the TV remote but we don’t need to bring that up.
Now. Everyone who has ever seen me knows that I am the Elvis of the K-9 World. I’m so good looking I can’t stand myself. My hair is shiny black and I have big brown eyes that could melt the heart of even the coldest poodle who ever lived. I can even curl my lip over my teeth the way Elvis did. Wanna see me do it?
Thankyouverymuch.
Anyway, imagine my shock and horror when my people brought this little fuzz ball thing into the house and told me it was a “puppy”. Ha! It looks more like a gerbil. I thought it was a new chew toy, but it started jumping on me and I realized this thing was alive. So now, I — The King , the Elvis of dogdom – have been banished to the OUTDOORS.
Yeah, I know. I’m still reeling from the shock myself. They bought me an Igloo to sleep in and told me that I would have fun playing in the fenced-in yard. Well, alright. The sound you aren’t hearing right now is the sound of one paw not clapping. Imagine them tossing a dog like me out of his own bedroom. And I have missed the last two episodes of my favorite TV show “Animal Cops“.
My people still come outside and play with me all the time. We play “fetch”, “rip-that-shirt” and “knock-down” and frankly I’m enjoying the out doors a lot, but don’t tell them. I like to put on my sad face and make them feel guilty. It gets me extra dog bones.
Well, I gotta run now. The German Shepherd who lives next door has scheduled a singing this evening. Of course I’ll be doing my famous “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog” song. The whole neighborhood loves us. They yell, and throw their shoes, and fire shots in the air. Its a real happenin’.
I hope you enjoyed the column and if she doesn’t find out about me messin’ around on her computer I might write another one soon. In the mean time I’m outta here.
Yeah, Elvis has left the building.
Thankyouverymuch.
***
Tags: dogs, Elvis, exercising with pets, German Shepherd, hound dog, Lab, Shih tzu
You know you’re getting older when the funniest thing about falling down is watching it happen to someone else. I’ve always heard that we’re only as old as we feel. If that is the case, then most days I’m a fossil.
According to recent reports, our generation of seniors is getting younger. As stated by the experts, “the new forty is now age fifty-five”. I wish I had come across this information a few years ago. If I had, I would still be in my thirties.
I decided to do my own research on the cause and effect of ageing. I began by conducting a public opinion poll on growing older. Actually I asked a few people on the street if they were old people. The first one hit me with her purse, another one asked if I had a dollar I could spare, and two people said “yes, we’re old geezers, what’s it to you!” The majority of the folks I questioned told me to mind my own business. In light of the results from this back-breaking research, I came to the conclusion that old people are mean. (Now, before you get mad and start throwing things at me, remember that sticks and stones will break my bones…)
The results are all in, and I have concluded that the number one cause of ageing is time. I don’t have anything against time. Time is important. In fact I wish I had more of it. However, the fact remains that while time heals all wounds, it eventually kills us.
Time is said to be the best teacher as well, although none of its students ever live to graduate. I’ve learned a few things over the years. Important things like, if you give a man a deer steak you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to hunt deer for himself, he will not do a lick of work from September through February, and when four cars reach an intersection at the same time, the driver pointing the gun goes first.
After these two startling revelations, I began to ask more questions, hoping to gain that additional wisdom and knowledge which is supposed to come with age. Perhaps you too have pondered on some of the following questions, the most intriguing one being, ” Where do people go on vacation if they work all year at a vacation resort? Do they go to an industrial park?” Or perhaps you’ve wondered why we ignore our doctor’s advice, yet we plan our weekends around the weather reports from Meteorologists.
Another question begs to be answered. Did Al Gore really invent the Internet? Is that where the word, algorithm, came from…?
Ignorance is not a virtue and the only thing that improves with age is hindsight. Politics is like the weather, everybody talks about it but nobody does anything. If you want to see a cheerful giver, ask someone for their opinion. And if you look closely, those who give advice so freely usually have the IQ of a door knob.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we were born with all the knowledge and wisdom of someone who has lived to be 100 years old. By the time we got around to the really big mistakes, we’d be too old to make them.
We never get too old to learn something new. In fact, I learned a new lesson just this morning. My dog knocked me down. I landed flat of my back on the hardwood floor. I immediately wrote down the following discovery in my list of things I’ve learned…
The older you get the harder you fall.
I don’t know a lot about quantum physics except the part where I don’t believe a word of it. I don’t think time travel is possible. It’s kind of like eating ten pounds of chocolate at one sitting — fun to think about but physically impossible.
But it seems that the script writers responsible for today’s television shows have become so open-minded their brains have fallen out. Apparently the year 2009 is so unempressive that the writers have decided to return to a more exciting era in order to find an interesting plot and some decent songs for their sound track.
Take my favorite show “Lost” for instance. The survivors of the plane that crashed on the island have traveled through time, back to 1977. And then there’s the show “Life On Mars” where the guy gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1972. Then there’s “Journeyman” a show about a guy who travels back and forth in time several times a day. Talk about jet lag!
Lord-hep-us-all. If we watch enough television, we almost start to believe that things like this can happen. I thought I saw Abraham Lincoln the other day and I totally freaked. But then I realized it was Bruce Shauver, our very own hometown Abe Lincoln look-alike.
If I could go back in time and live my life over, I would immediately hang myself from the nearest rafter. Hey, I’ve already been there, done that and I wouldn’t do it again for all the cheese in Wisconsin.
I enjoy being old. Really. I like the fact that I have an excuse to be forgetful. And I don’t worry like I did when I was younger. I used to worry about everything. Now I no longer sweat the small stuff like zits, bad hair days and bad boyfriends, a high GPA and high-dollar handbags.
Being young is difficult. When we’re young we tend to hurry a lot. We’re always chasing the dream of a better job, the bigger house, the cooler clothes, the faster car, more friends on My Space.
Then we begin raising a family which is one of the hardest jobs we’ll ever have. We spend a third or more of our lives changing diapers, wiping little noses, patching up skinned knees and elbows and breaking up fights between siblings. Our main goal in life at this point is to raise the kids to adulthood without them killing one another.
For the first few years of our kids’ lives nobody can understand a word they say because they learned to talk in a threatening tone, with their teeth tightly clenched. By the time they’re eighteen we have TMJ.
We shed a tear and sigh in relief when they’re grown and we no longer need to start each conversation with “Put the knife down and we can talk,” and our family meetings no longer have to be mediated by a sheriff’s deputy.
Our lives are lived in three phases. We tend to spend the first twenty years trying to find ourselves, figure out who we really are and why we are here in the first place. The years between twenty and forty are spent getting acquainted with the person we’ve become. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to like this person we call “self”. We learn to forgive ourselves for our past mistakes, make amends for those mistakes and try to not repeat them. We also spend a lot of time looking for our car keys and trying to remember what day it is.
When we finally reach senior-hood we don’t really care what people think of us. We realize that not many people do a lot of “thinking of us” anyway. This is the period in our lives when we can kick back, relax and enjoy the empty nest. Why on earth would we ever want to travel back in time?
Especially since we can now go wherever we want to go, whenever we want to go and do whatever we want to do…provided we can remember where we put the car keys.
I came to a decision recently; I’ts time I quit smoking. Cigarette smoking is an ugly disgusting habit that will eventually kill me and one that I’ve enjoyed for years.
Have you ever thought about how totally ridiculous the act of smoking a cigarette is and how it actually serves no purpose other than giving us an excuse to play with matches?
When you really think about it, smoking cigarettes is the silliest thing ever invented. I wonder how it all started in the first place. Who ever dreamed up the idea of sucking smoke into the lungs, and actually enjoying it?
Perhaps a long, long time ago Ogg and Ugg were sitting outside their caves. Perhaps they were playing with the fire they had just recently discovered when all of a sudden Ogg picked up a burning stick and sucked some smoke into his lungs. He rolled around on the ground coughing and gagging. When he was finally able to speak he probably turned to Ugg and said something like, “Man, you gotta try this. It’s even more fun than sniffing glue.”
Of course glue hadn’t been invented yet so neither one of them knew what Ogg was talking about, but still it made Ugg want to try the smoke from the burning stick.
Soon both cave men were coughing, gagging and unable to breathe. Since they couldn’t talk they crawled back to their caves and threw up.
The next day they told all the others about the fun they had with this thing they referred to as “smoking”.
Pretty soon all of the cave people were sucking on burning sticks, rolling around coughing and gagging. And “smoking” soon became a favorite pastime.
Not long after that the Marlborough Man was invented and the rest is cigarette history.
Who would have believed that one day far in the future, men would spend their hard earned money on something that they could light on fire and inhale the smoke as it burned up.
Quiting a bad habit is a lot easier to talk about than it is to actually do. The cigarette habit isn’t something that you can just stop doing like when you quit biting your nails and making fun of lawyers. Smoking is an addiction, much like eating chocolate or blaming our problems on Global Warming.
I’ve tried to stop smoking for the past twenty-five years and I’ve failed miserably. All one hundred and four times.
I’ve tried the patch, the nicotine gum, nicotine lozenges, sheer will power, medication, hypnotism, exorcism…no wait that was for something else….
Anyway, everything I’ve tried so far has been to no avail. So now I am trying another approach. One that uses the common sense method.
When I first began sneaking cigarettes (actually, I stole them from my sister but I’m too ashamed to admit it) at the age of 13, I started out smoking only a couple of cigarettes a day. As I got older the amount of smokes per day increased to the current more-than-a-pack-a-day habit that I have today. Yeah, I’ve come a long way, baby.
So I have decided to digress. I am slowly going backward by cutting back on the number of cigarettes that I smoke each day until I no longer need the nicotine. Chances are that I may wake up one morning and forget to smoke at all.
If that doesn’t work I will make an appointment with my doctor and see if she has something I can use to kill myself.
I suppose it could have been worse. Ogg and Ugg could have decided that they could poke themselves in the eyeball, making it burn and water and be temporarily blinded. They could have passed this down to us as a fun pastime. If they had, we might all be running around acting like the Three Stooges….
Which is almost as silly as smoking cigarettes.
humor-blogs doesn’t smoke, although the Stooges hang out there.
Tags: cigarettes, Marlborough Man, quit smoking
(Letters From My Readers)
“If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”
~Anatole France~
Hello again, Dear Readers:
First of all, let me say that I appreciate all of you who read my column regularly.
Secondly, I would like to be serious here for just a moment. Now stop looking at me that way…I can be serious sometimes…sort of.
The number one most rewarding thing about writing a weekly humor column is all those letters and comments I get each week from my readers. I cherish all three of them. Even the one that said, “Leeuna, you are mentally unstable and we feel that you should be institutionalized.”
In light of this, I decided I would dedicate this column to answering a few of the questions I have been asked recently by some very intelligent readers, who incidentally have excellent taste in the type of literature they choose to read. (If you’re reading this, you know who you are.)
Last week a letter poured in from a reader who asked me for some advice on marriage.
Now, I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject of matrimony, however I have said “I do” on four different occasions so I do know more about it than most people, like…say…perhaps those of you who (unlike me) have never heard the phrase “Get your stuff and get out, you worthless moron!”
The question I was asked this week was:
“What is your formula for a lasting marriage?”
To which I first replied:
“What is that?”
After giving it a little more thought, I came up with the following advice for my readers, and you are free to quote me on this:
“The key to a lasting marriage is to never go to bed angry at one another…instead, you should sleep on the couch until your spouse apologizes and buys you jewelry or golf clubs, depending on your gender.”
You’re welcome and I am glad I could help.
Another reader asked the following question:
“Dear Leeuna,
How do you get mustard stains out of a white linen table cloth?”
The letter was signed: Furious Fran
Dear Aunt Fran,
You can’t. I’ll buy you another one when I get paid. Please tell Uncle Zeke I’m sorry for throwing the hot dog at him.
Moving right along, I would also like to add that I will not be opening my own private Smoked Salmon restaurant, as someone recently suggested. For one thing, I am against the smoking of salmon and stuff. I am currently trying to kick the habit myself. (I’m now down to a pack and a half a day.)
I will, however, continue to answer all my letters either in my column or by personal messenger as I receive them. Feel free to write to me concerning anything that might be troubling you at this point. I will do my utmost to give you my free and unbiased opinion and you can heed my advice at your own peril.
Hopefully next week we will be answering the questions that I am asked most often by my readers. These are questions that puzzle all of us from time to time, and it’s high time someone addressed the issues and gave the public some concrete answers. It is something that I know all of you have been wondering about but most of you were too shy to ask:
- If two people get on a bus at the same time and they are both traveling in the same direction, what color is an orange?
- If we can’t see something that isn’t there, then how do we know when something is missing?
- If a butterfly didn’t have wings would it be called a butter walk?
Finally, in closing let me add that this column is not to be taken internally, it is for tropical use only and it is not to be dispensed without a subscription. Do not attempt to operate a motor vehicle while driving, and see your doctor if your condition worsens or symptoms occur. Side effects may include the word “duhhh”.
Tags: advice column, humor column, letters
“Sometimes, there just aren’t enough rocks” Forrest said to Jennie.
Well, Forrest should have sent Jennie to my house where rocks mate and produce offspring faster than my husband and his shiny new lawnmower can get rid of them. Just when I think there is not another rock left on the planet, Hubby finds a brand new family of them hiding in the grass like hornets. Each time I think he has mowed over and slung the last surviving rock into the next county, he discovers a new batch.
The man has never met a lawnmower he couldn’t destroy. So far in the eleven years we’ve been married, he has managed to completely demolish nine lawnmowers of his own and the one he borrowed from our neighbor. With his patronage alone, the owners of Mowers-R-Us have been able to put all six of their kids through college.
Not to mention his contribution to the lumber industry. Our neighborhood resembles a town along the gulf coast during hurricane season. At the first sign of Spring, when mowing season begins, the neighbors immediately begin nailing plywood over their windows. Reports of Hubby’s intent to mow are announced on the six o’clock news. Sometimes they interrupt the regularly scheduled programing for a lawnmower alert.
The local weather forecast goes something like this:
“Expect partly cloudy skies this evening, with a twenty percent chance of rain by morning. Northwest winds 10 mph or less. Temperatures will be in the low to mid sixties and Mr. Hubby will be mowing his lawn this evening. We strongly urge all the folks in that area to be on the alert. At the first sound of a lawnmower, seek shelter in a basement or a closet. Stay tuned to this station in the event of an emergency evacuation.”
These aren’t all little tiny pebbles either; most of them are full grown rocks. And hubby never misses a single one. He manages to hit each rock at least twice. Once on the forward sweep and again on the backward drag. They pepper the house in a musical rhythm reminding me of the intro to ‘Wipe Out’, an old sixties tune. Add in a little fife music and it would sound like a regiment of Revolutionary War soldiers marching through the neighborhood. On the few times I go outside to help him, I wear goggles and a helmet. Listen, I might look dumb walking around in hundred-degree temperatures wearing this garb, but I learned my lesson after the first three trips to the ER for stitches. I still suffer from brain damage.
The county elected to put up a big yellow caution sign near the house with an arrow pointing toward our yard with lights flashing the words: HUBBY MOWING. No one will drive by the house when the caution light is on except the Wells Fargo truck or the Army National Guard, on maneuvers. Terrified parents rush outside and drag their children to safety. The dogs cower under the front porch and the cattle kneel in the fields in an attempt to dodge the sparks and the rocks flying from beneath the wheels of the roaring machine pushed by a madman with no shirt at a speed of thirty-five miles per hour.
When it’s finally safe to go outside again, I walk around the house and survey the carnage. I count the broken windows and the holes in the siding. The house looks like the aftermath of a drive-by shooting, or like it’s been attacked by Zorro with an AK47 instead of a sword. I point out the shattered panes in the bay window. Hubby shrugs and reminds me that the window needed replacing anyway…after all it’s three month old. I just smile and nod. He assures me he will pick up a replacement window on his way to get a new lawnmower.
I heave a sigh already wishing that mowing season was over, although it’s just begun. Then I remember the leaf blower he bought last winter. I run to the garage and read the operating instructions on the box. It reads: Precaución: Motor de gran alcance. Utilice el cuidado extremo al trabajar en un área que contenga rocas.
Well, kiss my burrito! I can’t read Spanish! Nor French nor German. But I’m betting a brand new Snapper self-propelled mower-mulcher that if I could have found any English on the box it would have said: Warning. High velocity. Use with extreme caution in rocky areas?
Maybe I should phone the manufacturer. Maybe I’d better warn the neighbors. I have a headache. Did I mention I suffer from brain damage…
Tags: lawnmowers, leaf blowers, spring
I call them Morning Glory People, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Actually, they’re more like poison ivy in a blackberry thicket. I can’t stand these people, all chirruping around like chipmunks at a nut farm.
Though, in all fairness to them, I’m really just envious…
These dawn breakers wake up so early they make the roosters in the neighborhood look like Lunesta freaks. They hop out of bed and into the shower and then into their clothes, all in one swift motion. And they do it all without yawning even once, nor stubbing a single toe on the closet door. Neither do they fall face-first over their husband’s hunting boots lying in the hallway. In ten minutes tops they have the beds made, Martha Stewart style, and they have a huge breakfast on the table that makes Denny’s look like a hot dog stand. Five minutes later they’re dancing out the door like Dorothy on her way to see the Wizard.
Me? The clock alarms for thirty minutes, the sun rises higher in the sky, the garbage man cometh, and the dog has given up and tinkled in the corner by the time I finally roll over and open one eye. I drag myself out of bed looking like the female version of Kramer. On my good mornings I might have on one slipper, and my robe may accidently be right side out. Trying not to stretch anything except my endurance, I walk into the wall and bang my elbows on the door frame on the way to the kitchen. After my morning trip over the ottoman, I get up off the floor and rub my flattened nose back into a point, then I’m ready for my first cup of coffee.
I always make the coffee at night because pouring a cup is about all I can manage in the mornings. Sometimes it’s so strong it will leap out of the pot and into my cup all by itself. I’ve thought about applying for a patent on my coffee. It could be mixed into chicken feed and sold to the chicken farmers. After about a week of eating this special food, the hens would become so nervous they would lay scrambled eggs. Hey, it’d be a great time saver. Well…I thought it was a good idea… After a few cups of the stuff, I can thread a sewing machine while it’s running, so why wouldn’t it work for the hens?
When I was out in the work force, I always got out of bed one hour earlier than was necessary just so I would have some extra time to stumble around, and not talk to anyone or have a single thought. If you really want to get my Victoria’s Secrets in a knot, just ask me a question early in the morning.
We have a rule in my house. Unless you are dying or the house is on fire, do not speak to me until I have had my coffee. I am incapable of speech or thought for at least thirty minutes, two cups of bitter coffee and a cigarette. (Yep. I still smoke! It’s my house, my coffee cup full of ashes and my bathrobe covered with burn holes… Besides, without this wheeze, no one would recognize my voice on the phone.)
My best friend is a morning glory. I think if I went to her house at five o’clock in the morning, (which ain’t never gonna happen) she would have already had her shower, her face would be made up and every hair would be in place. The beds would be made and she would have done twenty-seven loads of laundry, dusted, vacuumed, washed the windows and rearranged the garbage and be sitting on the back porch watching the sunrise while sipping her coffee.
Hubby once toyed with the idea of buying a small farm, complete with cows, pigs and chickens.
“Wouldn’t it be great being a farmer’s wife?” he asked. “I can just picture us milking the cows, slopping the hogs and gathering fresh eggs early in the morning.”
“How early?” I squealed.
“Way before sunrise” he answered, a twinkle in his eye.
After he broke open an ammonia capsule, waved it under my nose and brought me to, he told me he was just kidding.
What a relief! I don’t milk anything except the jar of Coffe Mate that early.
Tags: coffee, coffee mate, lunesta, sleeping pills
