Clothes for a wedding

Boyd is a friend of long standing, and recently he told me that he was headed back to Denver where his daughter Nea lives to attend the wedding of Boyd’s grandson. He went on to explain that his daughter has very specific ideas of what Boyd should wear at the ceremony -- he shouldn’t look like he was for the boids.














The clothes should be neat and clean -- no spots or stains -- and she even had specific instructions regarding colors.
















Would I do him a favor and take some photographs to be sent back to said daughter. Sure, of course, anything for a friend.













Then I, with my peculiar sense of humor, suggested that I “spot” or “stain” a couple of pics using Photoshop. “No, no, my daughter doesn’t have that kind of sense of humor.” (Boyd does). Then I asked if I could use this for a posting to my blog, and he said sure. Could I”stain” one or two just for fun? “Go right ahead.”









So Saturday he and his wardrobe posed for me, and you get to see the results.











Humor (other than spots and stains):

Do you recognize any of these?

Mom's Dictionary --
DUMWAITER: One who asks if the kids would care to order dessert.

FEEDBACK: The inevitable result when your baby doesn't appreciate the strained carrots.

FULL NAME: What you call your child when you're mad at him.

GRANDPARENTS; The people who think your children are wonderful even though they're sure you not raising them right.

HERESAY; What toddlers do when anyone mutters a dirty word.

INDEPENDENT; What we want our children to be as long as they do everything we say.

OW: The first word spoken by children with older siblings.

PUDDLE; A small body of water that draws other small bodies wearing dry shoes into it.

SHOW OFF;; A child who is more talented than yours.

STERILIZE; What you do to your first baby's pacifier by boiling it and to your last baby's pacifier by blowing on it.

TOP BUNK; Where you should never put a child wearing Superman pajamas.

TWO MINUTE WARNING; When the baby's face turns red and she begins to make those familiar grunting noises.

VERBAL; Able to whine in words.

WHODUNIT; None of the kids that live in your house.

Tid bits

Weather or not:
The daily paper gives us the weather for the next several days. Yesterday’s issue predicted 73 degrees for Mountain View (where I live), and 76 degrees for Sunnyvale, which is over my back fence. I asked Eric if I jumped over the fence, would it be 3 degrees warmer? “Of course,” he replied.

In addition, I have emailed to me the weather forecast from Accuweather, an online service which claims to have better forecasting techniques. It’s interesting to compare the paper with the email. The paper also gives me the previous day’s high, so I can check. The online forecast was 71 for Mountain View, which this morning's paper confirmed. Usually they are 2 to 4 degrees apart, and when they are 7 to 8 degrees apart, I start to wonder. Lately, when that disparity occurs, the actual high is somewhere in the middle.

***

From today’s Entertainment section touting the movie “Night at the museum - Battle at the Smithsonian”.
“Definitely funny -- if you’re 9.”

Today’s humor is inspired by a remark made by LynnM:

A young couple went out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. After looking over the menu, they ordered the Chicken Surprise. A short while later they were brought a big bowl with a lid on it. The wife started to reach for the lid when all of a sudden the lid raised on its own, two eyes peeked out, and then slammed down again. The wife screamed and shoved the bowl toward the husband saying, “Aahhhck. That scared me. YOU try it.” So the husband reached for the lid, but before he could touch it, the lid again raised up, two eyes peeked out, and then slammed down again. “Wow! That’s strange,” said the husband, and he called the waiter over and explained what had happened. The waiter asked what they had ordered, and when he was told the Chicken Surprise, he said, “Oh, so sorry. I bring you Peking Duck.”

(I told that joke to the owner of a Chinese restaurant, who looked at me blankly for a moment, and when realization hit, just burst out laughing.)

See you on Monday.

Household tip

These are loaf locks. Very handy, and as you can see, quite patriotic. Okay, I deliberately chosh those three colors for this photo.











If you are think "loaf" as in "loaf of bread", you are absolutely right.

But these clips are useful in other applications. How about clipping closed the lips of that tiresome individual who will not cease talking!











But I use them to close packages of shredded potatoes and grated cheese, and ...

frozen peas, and ...

even fresh fruit.

I'll bet you could come up with even more uses.

A bit of sadness

If you enjoy classical music, you may know who Jon Nakamatsu is. Concert pianist, winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 1997. Teacher of German at Mountain View High School. But it is doubtful that you know who Marina Derryberry was. She was his teacher since he was 6 years old, and she died recently after a lengthy illness.

But I wondered why the name Derryberry was familiar to me. Not anyone I knew. And then it hit me. Amalie had taught speech to one or more of the Derryberry children, and Am used to tell me about her speech students.

The following is from the Mercury News article by Richard Scheinin:

Jon Nakamatsu, the San Jose-raised concert pianist, lost a dear friend earlier this month. Marina Derryberry, his teacher since he was 6 years old, died after a lengthy illness that had left her bedridden.

"I had such a rock in her," reflects Nakamatsu, now 40, who held her hand as she slipped away May 5 at O'Connor Hospital at age 73. "Her whole focus, always, was for me to become an independent musician. But just knowing that that strength was there was such a comfort."

Well, I live in Mountain View, and Am was a speech teacher. Interesting the connections we make.

* * *

In the not-good-news department, my big scooter has disappeared. The one that, in yesterday’s post, I called the Kidilac. Yesterday evening I went out to pick up the mail, and where the scooter should have been was a big empty space. I’ve made a police report, but I don’t expect to see it again. What is strange, though, is that whoever took it, did not take the charger. Eventually it will run out of power.


Humor time:

A true story: Eight and a half months very pregnant with twins, the lady was used to getting nervous glances from strangers. But she never realized just how imposing she was until her husband took her out to dinner at a new restaurant. The hostess sat them at a table, took a long look at her stomach, and asked, "Would you like me to get you a high chair, just in case?"

***

SPECIAL POEM FOR SENIOR CITIZENS

A row of bottles on my shelf
Caused me to analyze myself.
One yellow pill I have to pop
Goes to my heart so it won’t stop.
A little white one that I take
Goes to my hands so they won’t shake.
The blue ones that I use a lot
Tell me I’m happy when I’m not.
The purple pill goes to my brain
And tells me that I have no pain.


The capsules tell me not to wheeze
Or cough or choke or even sneeze.
The red ones, smallest of them all,
Go to my blood so I won’t fall.
The orange ones, very big and bright,
Prevent my leg cramps in the night.
Such an array of brilliant pills
Helping to cure all kinds of ills…
But what I’d really like to know
Is what tells each one where to go!

Necessity is the mother of invention

The other day when I went grocery shopping I noticed that they had the small round watermelons on sale. You know, they’re about the size of a bowling ball, but without the handy holes found in the bowling ball. I was using the bigger scooter, fondly known as the Kidilac, and it has a big basket on the back. I managed to wrestle a melon into the basket, and when I got to the checkout counter, I was able to reach around and get everything out, except the melon. I told the clerk that it was back there. She said she would get it, and she did.

She had packed all my groceries, except the melon, into one bag. The round ball was on its own in my basket, so that when I came home, it was easy to lift out the bag. However, I had trouble with the watermelon. When I tried to lift it out, it slipped away, and started rolling down the driveway.


I got into one of the small scooters, caught up with the runaway, and managed to get onto the floor of the scooter. Then I rode the scooter onto the elevator that takes me up to the back porch, and managed to roll the melon onto the porch.







Now this was the question: How was I going to get that bowling ba ... er, melon into the house and up onto the counter? I went into the house looking for a solution, and found a bucket.












Now, how was I going to get the melon into the bucket?








Aha! I put the bucket on the elevator, and lowered the elevator so that the top of the bucket was even with the floor of the porch.

















Then I simply rolled the melon into the bucket! The bucket has a handle, so the rest was easy.






Here’s the cut melon. Beautiful, and seedless, too.
Delicious!






Humor:
These great questions and answers are from the days when the "Hollywood Squares" game show responses were spontaneous and clever, not scripted and (often) dull. Peter Marshall was the host asking the questions.

Q. Do female frogs croak?
A. Paul Lynde: If you hold their little heads under water long enough.

Q. If you're going to make a parachute jump, at least how high should you be?
A. Charley Weaver: Three days of steady drinking should do it.

Q. True or False: a pea can last as long as 5,000 years.
A. George Gobel: Boy, it sure seems that way sometimes.

Q. You've been having trouble going to sleep. Are you probably a man or a woman?
A. Don Knotts: That's what's been keeping me awake.

Q. Which of your five senses tends to diminish as you get older?
A. Charley Weaver: My sense of decency.

Q. Charley, you've just decided to grow strawberries. Are you going to get any during the first year?
A. Charley Weaver: Of course not, I'm too busy growing strawberries.

Q. If you were pregnant for two years, what would you give birth to?
A. Paul Lynde: Whatever it is, it would never be afraid of the dark.

Q. Back in the old days, when Great Grandpa put horseradish on his head, what was he trying to do?
A. George Gobel: Get it in his mouth.

Q. Jackie Gleason recently revealed that he firmly believes in them and has actually seen them on at least two occasions. What are they?
A. Charley Weaver: His feet.

PROCRASTINATION

A columnist in the local paper (Patty Fisher in the San Jose Mercury) wrote, “I’ve been planning to write this column about procrastination for weeks, but something always seemed to get in the way.” And “I’m intimately familiar with the consequences of putting off until tomorrow what I could have done today.”

The phrases I learned were “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after tomorrow.’
And, “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you should have done yesterday.”

She goes on: “Why do I lie in bed on weekends instead of jumping up and doing my to-do list? Because I still hear my father chastising me for wasting the morning. Now that I’m in charge of my time, I revel in the right to waste it.”

I, too, would like to sleep in some mornings. But Eric comes at set times to make my bed, and other chores, and if he makes the bed with me in it, it makes the bed kinda lumpy.

The following video isn’t really humor, but certainly very touching:

“Take your time”

As you may have gathered by now, my birds move faster than I do. And Pepper’s wings are clipped. I race snails.

The phrase first started in 1991 when Am and I took a trip to New Zealand and Australia. We were on a bus tour in New Zealand, when we made our first stop. A museum of some kind, as best I remember. The driver had told us how much time we had, which I duly noted. About five minutes before time was up, I started back to the bus. Being the speed demon that I am, others on the tour went past me, so that buy the time I reached the entrance to the building, I was the last one out.

The bus was perhaps a hundred yards away, and when the driver saw me, he yelled, “Take your time!” And I yelled back, “ Take your time is top speed for me.”

Now it often happens that my doorbell rings, and I hollar, “I’m coming!” And the person calls back, “Take your time!” Well, you know what I say when I finally open the door”!

* * *

Saturday evening a friend and I went to hear the Carmina Burana concert, and it was just great! Funny incident there. One of the ushers said that my wife could help me (with whatever it was), and I said my wife had passed away last November. The usher had mistaken my friend for my wife. I said the person with me was an old friend, and my friend took exception, saying she was a "long time friend". Well, she is younger than I -- by 3 months.

More fun:

Tech Support: "What does the screen say now."
Person: "It says, 'Hit ENTER when ready'."
Tech Support: "Well?"
Person: "How do I know when it's ready?"