Monthly Archives: July 2015

Trouble in Texas

Leave a reply

Geezuz!  We’re invading Texas?  What for?  I know there’s lots of oil there.  And we do like to launch a nice invasion of anyplace we suspect might have more than their fair share of that stuff.   But I don’t think those Texans are hoarding it for themselves.  Then again there are all those pipelines that end up in Texas.  I never thought about it before,  but I really don’t know where all that oil goes.  Do you?  Maybe  the people of Texas know something we don’t and are afraid to speak up.  And then Texans seem to really like their guns.  I bet they are lying around all over the place.   There’s a good chance we could supply the entire US army with something to shoot with if we could sneak into Texas and make a  gun-grab.  That would have to provide some relief for an over-extended military budget.  Maybe that’s what Obama is thinking.  Then we could save some army money and spend it more wisely on an invasion of North Dakota.  There’s a shit load of oil up there.  It all works the same.  Take a look for yourself.

images-2                               images-1

Texas Oil                                                           North Dakota Oil

Texas Home Gun Cabinet

Texas Home Gun Cabinet

So Texas has oil and guns.  And lots of Walmarts.  I bet you didn’t know this, but the army is at this very moment connecting all the Walmarts in Texas with underground tunnels.  This information was top secret until just recently.  My guess is someone finally picked up on something Edward Snowden said when he let all those cats out of the bag.  But no one seems to know how long this has been going on, so don’t be surprised if an army guy pops out of the ground and snatches your guns.  Too bad if they tunnel smack dab into the side of an oil well.  All those tunnels would suddenly be full of men in camouflage treading oil.  What a hoot!

I guess they have a bunch of longhorn steers in Texas.  I almost forgot about that.  Maybe that’s what Obama is after.  I bet he is trying to corner the beef market by shipping all our cattle to Kenya.  Wait though.  Do Muslims eat beef?

Oh, thank God!  I just found out we should only be sort of slightly worried about any of this.  It’s not like its a for sure, 100% deal.  Ted Cruz went and checked everything out for us.  Till I studied up a little I wasn’t all that familiar with him, but for your information he is some kind of super Texas patriot that goes around making sure everything is on the up and up government wise.  He really knows how to do all that serious fact checking stuff.  Not only did he make a phone call to some hot shots at the pentagon and make all of them pinky-swear there is no kind of military take-over of Texas going on, but he has been traveling state wide this week assuring constituents they can count on him to stop this fascist maneuvering in its tracks.  No one is going to pull a fast one on Ted Cruz, let me tell you.  And its not just political stumping he’s doing.  He’s done some stomping too, like stomping his foot all around on the ground to make sure no one is doing some sneaky tunneling shit right underneath him.  Every Texan should be thanking the blessed Lord they have a wise man like Ted Cruz watching after them.  Ted has done the research and he is almost pretty sure he has saved Texas once again.  Like he says though, you never know.  To a typical Texan these seem to be logical concerns, so naturally Ted Cruz couldn’t agree more.  Nothing is certain, that’s for sure.  All this government interference just might propel him to finally push for what all of Texas seems to frantically desire- secession from the union.   I say let’s all do everything we can to help out.  It’s just the right thing to do.

Pickeling

Leave a reply

You know what I think is a really good idea?  Home pickling.  Until recently I  had never given it much thought.  But I ran across a little article about pickling in my AARP Magazine.  I think it was last month’s issue, but I can’t say that for sure.  Sometimes our mail and magazines tend to pile up on our dinning room table.  I try and make it a point to move the newer stuff towards the bottom of the stack, so I have a shot at reading things in chronological order.  I used to be  pretty good at this sort of thing.  “Stock rotation” is what we called it back in the day I was actually working in a pharmacy.  It has always been an important part  of pharmacy protocol.  As you might suspect, management tends to frown on a $1,200.00 expired drug loss incurred because someone simply forgot to place a new bottle of medication in back of the old.  In general It’s a good idea to pay attention to all aspects of pharmacy stock control.

Example of Poor Stock Control

Example of Poor Pharmacy Stock Control

Anyway, now I am thinking I might start doing some pickling, because I really like pickles.  I have a bad habit of snacking late at night, and am constantly in search of something tasty that won’t contribute to my slowly expanding waistline that is mostly the result of my slowly expanding role as resident sofa spud.  The neat thing about pickles is they are like a crunchy solid wrapped around a refreshing liquid.  And the real clincher is your basic dill spear provides you with zero calories.  Nutritionally I am not sure what other benefits they provide, but I could give a shit.  It’s my late night snack, not my post work-out replenishment.  And they’re so versatile.  You can layer on a narrow slice of American cheese, and top it off with some cream cheese and then wrap a piece of bacon around the whole thing.  That’s the best way I’ve found to keep things from shifting around.  Then you don’t have to mess around using a toothpick to hold all the stuff in place.  I never know what to do with those damn tooth picks.  Sometimes when I’m at a party at someone else house I just drop them on the floor when no one is looking.  So remember.  With zero calories, a pickle just might be the thing for you next time you’re in a low-cal snacking mood.  I have a feeling I’m on to something here.  I’m pretty pumped.  I guess you can pickle almost anything.  At least that’s what my neighbor says.  He’s been doing it for quite awhile.  He even gave me some snapshots of some stuff he’s done.  I thought I’d share them with you here.  I’m not sure if I will ever be as good at pickling as my neighbor is though.


asian style pickles in kep market cambodiaUnknown-1Unknown

Above-PORTENT OF PICKLING POSSIBILITIES

I hate plunging blindly into anything new.  I have those pickling instructions in my AARP article, but come on.  Who knows how old and senile the author is.  Whoever it is probably forgot a step or two.   I usually try and consult with an expert if I can before moving forward in these situations.   For my pickling experience, I know I have the perfect advisor.  It’s my sister-in-law Kim.  She keeps bragging on how much she pickles, so I intend to find out if she’s full of shit, like her husband is.  But Kim strikes me as a helpful, sincere person.  Take the Dave Matthews concert we were at in DesMoines a few weeks ago.  At intermission she was sitting in a women’s rest room stall minding her own business when a guy started urinating on her foot.  I don’t know how the guy even got into the women’s rest room, but there he was, in the stall next to Kim, urinating on her foot.  I suppose he worked himself into a bladder clenching frenzy and didn’t think he could wait for his conventionalI  turn at a mens urinal, so he barged in with his girl friend in desperation.   In his defense, rest room lines during intermission at a Dave Matthews concert can be a real shit-storm.  But apparently the situation was so desperate the guy couldn’t wait for his girl friend to get off the toilet, so he thought the drainage grate he spotted on the floor would do in a pinch.  Naturally the stream of  urine ricocheted off of the floor grate, under the stall partition,  and onto Kim’s foot.  No one would make that kind of shit up, right?  At first Kim was incensed.  The guy bolted out of the stall, and Kim did likewise, with the intension of giving the culprit a bitch slapping piece of her mind.  She even had her cell phone ready and took a quick picture of the guy so she could show it to authorities.   I downloaded it here Spooky Clown Holding a Bloody Knifeso you could see what the guy looks like in case you ever run into him at a concert you are attending.  But it only took a quick glance at the perpetrator for her to reanalyze her strategy.  She seemed to think she could live with a little urine on her foot, but not so sure she would survive a couple of the things this particular concert attendee said he had in mind for her.  In the end Kim came to the conclusion he was just your average guy out there having a little fun. That’s what I like about Kim.   She’s just one of those people that can’t help being nice.  It’s that kind of thoughtfulness and quick thinking that makes me feel pretty confident she can help me with my pickles.

So my wife bought me some mason jars and next time we make a trip to Kim’s I’m taking them along and will have her show me what to do.  By then I’m pretty sure she would have showered up enough I won’t have any big health concerns.

 

 

 

Speed Talkers

Leave a reply

I know you think I complain a lot.  Maybe you’re right.  But this time I know I have a legitimate gripe, and I’ve just about had it.  I had to deal with another speed-talker during a phone conversation and It was all I could do to keep from throwing my phone against the wall.  And then stomping the shit out of it.  And flushing it down the toilet.  I know you’ve had an encounter with one of these people too.  They talk so fast you can’t understand but every fourth word.  It’s not like talking to one of those guys you’re stuck with because your phone call somehow got sidetracked to India.  If you’re talking to an East Indian, you can’t ask to speak to someone who speaks English.  Your call got sent all the way to India, and so the next person and the next person after that, will be no kind of an improvement for you.  They’re all Indian.  You just have to make the best of it.  I’ve seen a lot in my day, but I am still baffled by the complexity, yet paradoxical simplicity, of telephone technology.  I remember when I was little, a long distance call was something my parents had to budget for.  A phone call from where I lived in Wyoming to my grandparents in Iowa was so pricey it was done only on special occasions, like Christmas and Easter.  I know my 96 year old mother realizes phone technology now is light years ahead of what was available 50 years ago, but I think she still reflexively hangs up immediately if there is the slightest indication her call travelled all the way to India.

To get around exorbitant phone bills, one slick trick parents in the 50’s and’ 60’s taught all their kids was the old bogus collect phone call on Ma Bell.  You know it, if you’re still alive.  The phone you used looked like this:

.

 

Or this

 

You drove a few hundred miles to college and your parents wanted to make sure you arrived safely so they insisted you call them collect when you got to school and of course they would not accept the charges when you made that phone call but the whole thing worked as planned because that way the call was free and resulted in the cleverly intended signal that you were safely at school although you were probably really at a bar with the gang and the real test of whether you would make it to school safely or not was going to occur about 2 hours later when you got behind the steering wheel and drove the final 12 blocks to school.

But I’m talking about speed-talkers.  I had to call my cable company the other day, and that’s how I ran into my speed-talking woman.  And this is not a gender specific phenomena.  It can just as likely happen with a guy.  I want to be absolutely clear about that because I have a couple of  overly sensitive women in my family that get nose-bleeds every time they feel I am somehow denigrating their sex.   I had to make my cable company phone call because of a glitch during one of their supposedly “simple” set up procedures for my new cable boxes.  Yes, that’s right.  Plural.  My cable company is going straight digital, so recently they informed me I will very shortly need a cable box for any television set I intend on using if I currently use their service.  Believe me I have started to seriously contemplate those last 3 words.  The thought of installing a dish is suddenly becoming a more appealing one.  Frankly I’m fed up with my cable company’s attitude, which basically is I should  be perfectly  happy bending over and taking whatever new charge they come up with up my ass.  My TV reception isn’t that great anyway.  I am constantly seeing pixillated video on the two channels I absolutely deem to be a total necessity- ESPN and ESPN2.  All my other channels are great.  Those cable jokers are mind-dicking me, I know it and I am getting sick of it.  During my  HD upgrade I got some nice movie channels, but I hardly watch them.  I don’t give a shit about those.  I want a clear, defined picture on my ESPN channels.  And Fox Sports.  And Big 10 Network.  And all my basic network channels if there is any kind of major sporting event going on there.  Except I guess I don’t care so much about soccer.  My cable company can just go ahead and pixilate that.

One of our TV’s is an old 15 inch cathode tube TV.  It works just fine.  It’s not HD but I don’t care.  More specifically, my wife doesn’t seem to care.  That TV is in the den/craft/art/ironing room and she’s the one who mostly watches that TV.  But I still have to have one of those shitty cable mini boxes for it.  Jesus I’m not a total asshole.  I’m not going to deprive my wife of the small comfort of watching that piece of shit TV.  But during the set up process for that TV, I couldn’t quite complete the last step that was required on my computer screen.  My new set up was working as the computer instructions indicated, but the last step of clicking the “submit”  button did nothing.  I really didn’t care at that point.  My TV was working in its new digital format so I was perfectly happy.  But for 5 days afterward I kept getting emails from the cable company douchebags asking me to activate my mini boxes.  All my mini boxes are as active as active can be, but  because I could not complete that final step for whatever reason, I had to make my phone call and clear things up.  Ordinarily I wouldn’t go into this much detail over something so trivial.  But I thought you might want to know about it in case this happens to you.  That’s how I operate.

I called my cable company, and after 15 minutes on hold I explained what happened, making the points in the above paragraph, and told the cable person all I really wanted was to let their company know things were working fine and to please have them discontinue the emails.  That’s when the speed talking began.

ST (speed talker):– Soyouculled  andeverblingwhatwasok?  ME– What?  Sorry I didn’t understand you.  ST- Isbluckok?  Whatyoumeedto completegoringtofliz your computer?  ME– I’m sorry again.  I’m kind of hard of hearing.  Not real bad, but I need you to slow down and enunciate.  ST-  shotthesmorgasboardandflixfirst screen on firthcomputer.  Didyouseezthat?  Me– I hope I’m not interrupting you in mid-sentence, but goddamn it I can hardly understand a word you’re saying.  ST (slightly irritated now)–  Blathtofungomunch on computer.  Justlet menow if snizzelworks aftagrontmibuckle.   ME (really irritated)– Look.  I don’t want to waste your time, and I certainly don’t want to waste mine.  I am really sorry’ but not only can I not understand you, it seems you have shit for brains because you insist on sneezdorkylizingmuchglimppernog.  How does that feel?  ST-  What?   ME– Hopefully now you get my point.  JUST   TELL   YOUR  BOSS   TO   STOP   SENDING   THESE   FUCKING    E-MAILS!     GOODBYE!