(A non-political look at the week just passed.)
The few days I spent in Denver last month saved my sanity but left me homesick for the Front Range. People joke about “it’s a dry heat,” but it was ten degrees warmer there than it has been here in New Hampshire and I was far more comfortable.
The other thing people say is “In six months, we’ll be wishing …” Well, maybe you will, but I have no objection to cold weather. I don’t like icy footing and deep snow, but cold is far easier to overcome than heat.
When I lived in Farmington, I learned that you don’t dare complain about winter among the Yankees, because the response is, “Wal, ya live in Maine.” Which is a great response to complaints about cold, but nobody moves to New England — Maine or New Hampshire or any of it — in order to perish in muggy heat.
However, I got a huge kick out of this Arlo & Janis, with a special salute to Jimmy Johnson for naming the concerned neighbor “Ashlee,” pegging her in just the right age cohort.
(Yes, okay: I’m slipping into Andy Rooney mode.)
I had a moment of awareness the first time I saw a checkout clerk with the name tag “Farrah” and realized kids named after Charlie’s most famous angel were now old enough to have jobs, but, lordy, that was decades ago.
However, while that is old man ranting, I feel justified in laughing over the mother who called me to complain that we had misspelled her daughter’s name in a story.
We had, in fact, spelled it precisely as the person who sent the release spelled it, but it was a made-up variation of Catherine with enough extraneous letters to make a Welshman blanch.
And it’s not an old man thing. I was only 41 when this exchange made me laugh.
The other chuckle in this cartoon is that, while I sometimes bristle when a bag-person at the grocery store asks me if I need help out to the car, I have to take into consideration that the kid is probably just looking for a chance to take five.
Hey, I was young once. How about if I dodder around pretending I can’t find the car so we can extend your self-declared break?
Rhymes With Orange reminds me of all the good ideas that never happened back in my corporate days, but it also raises another factor about being my age, which is that, whether I acknowledge being old or not, I will never see the back of my kitchen appliances again.
My mother — now 93 — provides a good example to me, as she always has. She was not yet 80 when I was visiting and a nickel fell off the counter onto the floor. She looked at it for a moment and shrugged, saying it would have to wait until she swept the floor, because she no longer picked up anything less than a quarter.
I’ll still bend over to pick up a nickel — well, maybe a dime –but whatever is behind the stove will be left to my heirs or possibly some archaeologists. It’s not that I’m too stiff.
I just have a limited number of damns to give anymore.
Meanwhile, this Bug Martini got a laff because, as an old man, I could complain about all the noise next door, but, in fact, I enjoy living next door to a 10-unit apartment complex that is home to about 15 or 16 kids. The noise is constant, but it’s joyful.
Still, they are mostly girls and, yes, they squeal as if they were being murdered. And it’s not just when they play particular games. It is apparently something that comes over them any time they’re outdoors.
Fortunately, the two eldest girls are middle-school aged, and it’s not clear if they’re picking up some pocket change by watching over this herd of little ones or if they’re just at that “everybody do it my way” big sister stage, but they seem to keep a lid on things, bless their hearts.
Still, I had a bat in the apartment last night and I suspect he was attracted to the area by the sounds from next door.
In today’s Strange Brew, John Deering offers a reminder of a time the old man did clamp down on annoying noise. There was a period of some months when I lived with my granddaughters and helped get them off to the bus each morning.
I forbade them to watch “Curious George” during breakfast because the damn show is about 75% fake monkey noise, and I couldn’t take it. I think the scriptwriters just handed a puppy a squeaky bone and transcribed the results.
The alternatives were “Clifford,” which was stupid but stupid at a bearable sound level, and “Martha Speaks,” which I actually kind of enjoyed.
“Serious George,” meanwhile, looks to me like “Sunrise Semester” with squeaking.
Worst of both worlds!
Juxtaposition of the Brainiacs
Mark Parisi offers a gag guaranteed to go over the heads of a very large number of readers, but, since it stars little Woodstock, they’ll love it anyway. And there are strips where the geeks would be delightedly explaining what it actually says, but I don’t think this is one of them.
I think it’s just a funny gag. In fact, I’m sure it is.
Meanwhile, Edison Lee asks the important question, “What do Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama and Edison Lee all have in common?”
The answer being that they all assume that other people also want to think and ponder and come up with answers.
Much like Thomas Builds-the-Fire
Man ‘o man – you hit the nail on this head today Mike. In two weeks I turn 65. Been enduring the indignities (and head scratching) of applying for Medicare, picking out a Part D (decided to not go with Medicare Advantage) and a Medigap Supplement Plan. (So, I have a BA, MPA and JD … it took me a week of on and off study to figure all this stuff out!) In any event, this blog post of the life of an old fart made me laugh today. Thanks!