tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78409558271031865452024-03-12T22:36:20.087-04:00Richard Thuss: Musings from the FROGFinding myself in words.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger36125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-82167277778465405502012-04-23T09:54:00.004-04:002012-04-23T09:56:18.312-04:00I Want The Mouse SwaggerI always thought that yogurt was for women. I’m sure that statement is sexist in some form or another, but let’s face it, the stuff isn’t really palatable unless you fill it with something that makes the yogurt taste go away.
Women eat it because they want to be healthy and look good. Men don’t have that problem. When they look in the mirror, they see George Clooney or Brad Pit and then fool them selves into thinking they already look good.
But I’m rethinking this yogurt thing, and that’s because of the mouse swagger.
I read yesterday about a study where they fed mice different diets with and without yogurt.
It seems that the male mice that ate the diet with yogurt developed more luxurious and shiny hair. But it wasn’t the shiny hair that grabbed my attention; it was the other characteristics that started me thinking about slurping down a little fermented milk.
You see the mice that ate the yogurt developed a swagger. They sort of strutted their stuff around the cages, and it turned out that their stuff had grown a little. That swagger apparently appealed to the female mice because they stopped exercising in their squirrel cages and did a joint exercise routine with the males.
I told my wife that she better look out; I’m going to buy some vanilla flavored yogurt at the store later today.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-79654608959636598022011-03-26T17:56:00.000-04:002011-03-26T17:58:35.018-04:00The End Of The World: (Humor)When you look at the TV and read the news, you can see that there is a prevailing theory that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. That phrase is one that my father often used, and it is difficult, at times of late to argue for a more positive destination.<br /><br />Now you have to understand that, according to my wife, I’ve always been a negative ninny. In my retirement she has patiently tried to train me not to see the world through a set of glasses where fire and brimstone flicker bright along the edges, but to visualize an image of flower filled meadows surrounding me as I plod through the fields of life, all the while emphasizing that I should concentrate on smelling the roses, so to speak<br />.<br />Her patience has been amazing, especially considering that I grew up with the concept in my head that God created the world just to get even with me when I wasn’t looking.<br /><br />It’s sort of weird perspective when you think about it, since I often painted myself as a victim whose importance is second only to God, and then I picture God as a “Gotcha” type of deity who just got tired of creating universes and decided to concentrate instead on picking on me<br />. <br />One by one my wife has exorcised those demons from my head with the patience of a saint. I’m her project in this life, and she figures if she can succeed with me, then she has earned a first class seat to her next incarnation. It’s in a place where I’m hoping she envisions me as her “boy toy.”<br />I had almost climbed out of that self dug hole until I opened up the paper today and found out that the world is going to end on May 21st.<br /><br />Now I know that the end of the world has been predicted every few years, and often by the same predictor, but this time the guy says he has it right. Eight weeks from now a few people are going to be whisked off this earth to rapture, and the rest of us are in for some pretty hard times.<br /><br />I don’t want to sound like I’m whining after all my wife’s hard work, but what really ticks me off about this upcoming event is that I’m never going to get to see the last Harry Potter movie. It’s been a long time since I read the book and I’ve forgotten who wins.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-3594285981290605882011-01-12T16:57:00.000-05:002011-01-12T16:59:44.935-05:00A Bird's Way Of Saying ThanksMy middle daughter bought a toy for her first child that makes noises, plays a set of short tunes or says a few encouraging words when it is touched, moved, or any of the buttons on it are pushed. It is designed to encourage a baby from a few months old to a year old to reach out and grab it and get a verbal reward in the form of a short jingle of music or a few positive words such as “good job” or “thanks.”<br />.<br />She used it for her first two children and offered it last week to her older sister who now has a four month old.<br /><br />The unit is pretty touchy, and it will start speaking or making noise, at times, without any intentional input. It cannot be turned off without removing the batteries, and that fact made my oldest daughter say ”no thanks” when I took it to her in New York the other day.<br /><br />The unit was therefore stuffed back into the bag, and it provided my wife and I more than a few smiles as we travelled on our three hundred mile journey home. Without warning it would start emitting some musical sound or a few words when we hit a big bump or sometimes without any seeming cause.<br /> <br />Whenever the window was opened to pay a toll, the air rushing into the back of our Jeep set it off, and I received a few strange looks from toll takers at my choice of music or the mumbled words that came from the back of the car where no one was seated.<br /><br />When we got home last night I set the bag on the floor of our laundry room, planning to return it to my other daughter within a few days.<br /><br />This morning’s routine of starting the coffee, walking down to get the newspaper, finish making the coffee, then read the newspaper was 3/4ths complete when I realized that the bird feeder on the back deck had not been filled for four days. <br /><br />I wanted nothing more than to sit down with that cup of java, so it took the guilt trip of imagining a starving bird to get me to go out to the laundry room, grab the container of bird seed and run outside without my jacket on and load up the feeder.<br /><br />When I came back inside my feet were covered with snow so I stamped my shoes on the doormat, and as soon as I finished stamping the toy said but one word: “Thank You.”<br /><br />You can imagine my first look, then my laughter and I walked back to grab my coffee. And then the “Thank You” reminded me there was also no water in the birdbath so I filled a pitcher and did that task while fully expecting another “thank you” when I came back in and stamped my feet.<br /> <br />Nothing happened until I got back into the kitchen, and then I heard in a rising crescendo “Ta Da Da Da.”<br /> <br />I figured it was the birds’ way of saying thanks<br />(True story)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-88072798803980001602011-01-08T09:18:00.000-05:002011-01-08T09:19:20.728-05:00I'm No Longer A FatherThis morning I got up all happy and jolly. A new coating of snow was on the ground, fresh coffee was brewing, and then "whack" I read in the newspaper that I am no longer a dad. <br /><br />I went to bed last night the father of three grown daughters and woke up this morning learning that I am no longer a father according to the US government: I am either "parent 1 or parent 2.<br /><br />This is due to the fact that the State Department has decided to make passports gender neutral by changing the words mother and father to parent one or parent two.<br /><br />Now I'm sitting here this morning, shaking because I'm afraid one of my daughters is going to call, and I won't know how to answer: Do I say " Hi this is parent 1," or "Hi this is parent 2?" <br /><br />You see my wife is out of town, and we have not been able to discuss our ranking in this parent 1 or parent 2 situation. If she demands the parent 1 designation does that make me a lesser partner? And if I take it, will she feel that fifty years of progress in women's rights has just been thrown out the window?<br /><br />The state department designations, by indicating a numerical order, imply that one came before the other, and for the life of me I can't remember which one of us came first during each of those three encounters.<br /><br />Now I don't mind being a parent, but I always sort of like to be called dad. <br /><br />I'm going to miss that.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-52659672033796269152011-01-05T17:51:00.000-05:002011-01-05T17:53:17.893-05:00It's January, and I want Something NewMy wife should never leave me home alone with the checkbook in January. <br /><br />There is something about the first few weeks of the year that causes my wants and my needs to diverge greatly, and that divergence is an outright danger to the funds in our bank account.<br /><br />In retirement you have to wisely budget the expenditures of the funds remaining unless you want to end up sitting on one of your children's doorsteps yelling, "remember me?" or asking the Salvation Army to friend you on Facebook.<br /><br /> I am embarrassed to admit it (well not really) but impulse control, for me, during this winter month is usually accomplished only when I look at my wife and realize I don't want her to lead a pauper’s life if I wink out early.<br /> <br />When my wife is around the sanity part of my personality, which is the smallest part, similar in size to an electron, rises up and slays my insanity demon, which is about the size of the current universe. I then usually make it to the end of the month when the huge, unpaid Christmas bills come in and writing those checks mostly cures my illness because the term "insufficient funds" looms in my future if I dare write another check.<br /><br />When she is away, however, I am left to run amok. I start daydreaming about new cars, about buying a kit airplane and starting to fly again, and I begin my relentless search for the motorcycle that I just have to have to make my life complete. Foolishness realized does not mean foolishness conquered, and I've discovered that age and wisdom are inversely proportional in the male half of my lineage.<br /><br />Well my wife is away. She's spending a few days watching my new granddaughter, and I'm here alone. Boy that new BMW motorcycle looks good. And the price isn't bad: It only costs as much as my first house. <br /><br />I sort of feel like the little half man half fly caught in the spider's web in the movie "The Fly."<br /><br />"Help me. Please"Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-89558517865099324862010-12-23T13:04:00.001-05:002010-12-23T13:04:45.595-05:00Christmas MagicI usually try to embed a little humor in my posts and then surround it with an observation about the absurd behavior of someone who is on this wonderful journey we call life. Often that fool is me. (Microsoft word wants to change that last word to “I” but I prefer to use “me” because I’m writing this and not Bill Gates)<br /><br />I do realize that my observations about life usually come from a fertile mind where the word fertile has the same meaning implied as when we say that mushrooms are grown in fertile soil<br />.<br />I have wracked my few hundred still functioning brain cells for the past few days to come up with a piece about Christmas, but I have failed. And I’ve failed mostly because Christmas has always been a time when I revert to a small child both in my mind and my actions. And a small child’s mind is fixated on the magic of Christmas, and not the foibles of the more senior set.<br /><br />Some would say using the term magic with Christmas is over used, and they would remind me that only a limited percentage of the world’s population celebrates the holiday, and that many millions of them are starving and lonely during this season. While that knowledge tempers my euphoria during this time of year, it does not extinguish it because there are still a billion people or more that for a few days a year can feel and act like a child again. <br /><br />Since our thoughts have power. (After all they move our arms and legs don’t they?) I have always believed that conscious thoughts are the controller of the universe. And to me that means that the billions of thoughts over the past hundred years about a man in a red suit delivering presents on Christmas eve has certainly changed the world.<br /> <br />If we really do create our reality with our thoughts then a few positive muses about Santa by each of us can’t help but improve the state of the world even further.<br /><br />I’m getting excited about that round, jolly guy that all of us created visiting me in a few nights and so are my grandchildren. Not just for the toys I’ll play with on Christmas morning, but for the wonder of it all. <br /><br />And it might even snow.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-58698618556810754992010-12-07T15:00:00.000-05:002010-12-07T15:02:40.497-05:00The Inventor Of FrictionSome of you who read this article will think that I am crazy, which is a fact that anyone who has read any of my previous writings already knew, so don’t feel alone. But this morning I started wondering about the person who invented friction. <br /><br />Notice that I did not say “the man who invented friction,” and that’s because I’m gender neutral in my thinking even when it comes to deities. And in this case, friction is such an interesting phenomenon that I might place on the female side of the deity discussion during one of those, “Is God a he or a she,” arguments.<br /><br />The reason for my sudden interest in friction is that as I was walking down to get the newspaper this morning, the wind almost knocked me over on my keister.<br /> <br />It’s only early December here in northern Virginia: a fact that’s pretty much true everywhere on this planet. But the point I am trying to make is that the thermal input from the sun has decided to take an early vacation in the south, and all the hot air from Washington must be blowing east.<br /><br />The bitter cold, strong, gusty wind reacquainted me with how friction between the air and my face results in massive shivers running down my body, while my nose starts acting like a slowly leaking faucet. <br /><br />At first I wasn’t really thinking about “who invented what” because the stones in my driveway and my shoes had agreed that when they get rubbed together, friction would be high: Which is a similar deal that many men try to negotiate with their wives.<br /> <br />The gusts dispersed all of the dry leaves and left a wet, thick, under-layer of fall tree droppings plastered to the ground. <br /><br />Wet leaves, freezing temperatures, and a brisk gust of wind were combined. For a moment I was dancing with the same flare that convinced my wife to quit taking dancing lessons with me a few years ago, but with skill that I’m personally convinced would have qualified me for Dancing with the Stars. <br /><br />Fortunately I remained upright, and I slid along until gravel replaced the leaves under my feet.<br /><br />I think adrenalin rushes like that clear my brain for more expansive thinking: You know the big picture stuff like the creation of the universe, quantum physics, and whether my next step was going to result in one of my bones being broken, and if the crutches I threw out last year should have been stored in the basement a little longer.<br /><br />If you’re wondering why I put the inventor of friction on the female side, it’s because whoever invented friction has a sense of humor. And I can tell you that when that last gust of cold wind hit me as I ran into the house, I wasn’t laughing.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-54880906465241580342010-11-29T18:19:00.000-05:002010-11-29T18:20:17.779-05:00Protecting The Ones Who Kill UsI read an article this morning about the results from a meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna. It seems that they rejected restrictions on the overfishing of bluefin tuna and swordfish, but instead adopted new protections for sharks. <br /><br />Now, I'm completely for the protection of all marine animals, but I just wonder why the commission for the Conservation of Tuna decided to protect sharks instead of tuna. <br /><br />It makes me think that the Atlantic tuna need a better PR team because the group chartered to protect them just sold out to the shark lobby. Those tuna guys and gals who were swimming in the ocean this morning all woke up to find that the people they have been paying to prevent their extinction, instead granted protection to a group of predators that just might decide to eat them for dinner. That's not what you would call a good investment of their limited fish dollars.<br /><br /> The sharks must have given a pretty good pitch to the delegates. Something like: "If youse guys don't give me protection, I'm a gonna eat your firstborn for lunch," And the tuna delegation probably made the mistake of sending Charlie the Tuna as their rep, who is a pretty nerdy looking guy with a very unimposing presentation style. <br /><br />Think of it. Who would you side with if you were on the commission: Some fat, blue-colored fish who wears glasses or the second cousin once removed of Jaws?<br /><br />I have no doubt that swordfish will learn the lesson of this convention pretty quickly, and within a few weeks we will start hearing about swordfish attacks along the coasts. Just a couple or three gorings ought to do the trick to get the delegates attention and pretty soon the swordfish will move up on the protected species list. <br /><br />As for the tuna, they just need to add a little more mercury to their diets because if they can't get our attention by chewing on is or goring us, they can try poisoning us to death. Maybe then, all of us will become convinced to do what is right. And that, of course, is to stop the over fishing of our oceans.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-66799994105788074882010-11-25T15:18:00.000-05:002010-11-25T15:20:06.851-05:00An Irreverent View Of The Pat-downThe US Government and the transportation security administration have really missed the ball (no pun intended) in this controversy over the enhanced pat down or full body image scan at airports.<br /> <br />Now the point they have missed is that most people don’t like to be poked or prodded or seen in the nude unless it’s by someone of our choice. And for some of us, to be seen in the nude we like the lighting to be on the dim side and our partner to have taken off their glasses.<br /><br />For those people that don’t like to be groped at all, they will have to go to the full body scanner, and the real problem with this device is that it shows how we really look. With all the great technology in digital imaging we could just modify the software of this device so that every man’s image looked like George Clooney without clothes and every woman looked like Julia Roberts wearing Victoria Secret’s best We could then be given a copy of those images as we left the booth as a souvenir from our trip.<br /> <br />For those that don’t like the full body scan idea, there is a real easy set of fixes for this problem. First we need to be able to choose the person that is going to grope us. When we get to the airport we should be given a full color brochure of the candidates and their sexual preferences. That way we could choose the person who fit our profile of someone we would like to be groped by.<br /> <br />The second point is that women don’t generally like to be handled unless the atmosphere is right, so the TSA needs to install candle lit booths with a gentle smell of lavender in the air. And they need to make sure that at least one of the pat-down experts looks like Brad Pitt or Prince Andrew. <br /><br />For men, the booth should just have a couple of beers in it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-59496162513558997172010-11-17T22:01:00.000-05:002010-11-17T22:03:09.410-05:00What's Right? It Could Just Be Your Point Of ViewKjar and Blake did not know each other. They were born into different worlds with a multitude of different experiences, and they spoke different languages. A great many things separated them, but tonight they both had the same objective and that was to capture an animal that they desperately needed for the collection in their zoos.<br /><br />Although they were located continents apart, each one was hiding alone in a small, forested area, which at it's border opened into a wide-open plain covered in lush green grasses as far as the eye could see. Their four member support teams were each dozing in vehicles about a mile away and waiting for a signal that the capture had been successful or had failed. Nestled in at the edge of the forest was the habitat for their prey.<br /><br />Neither one wanted an adult. Both had captured a mated pair in the past and in both cases the male kept fighting and resisting captivity until it weakened itself and died. The female, soon after it's mate's death, succumbed either to loneliness or disease. <br /><br />This time they were after one of the young. Having recently captured a young male several years old, both of them were after a female because they hoped that raising the two young ones together might eventually result in the first babies born in their zoos.<br /><br />The preparation had taken years but the execution of their plan would be swift. The parents, if they were around, would be quickly anesthetized and the young female taken before they awoke.<br /><br />For both Kjar and Blake, everything went exactly as planned, and before sunrise they were back in their vehicles and heading home.<br /><br />Blake never heard the screeching of the mother Rhesus monkey when she awoke and found her baby was gone. And Kjar, well she was already past the orbit of Jupiter when Mrs. Persing discovered that her daughter Sarah had been abducted. <br /><br />Both the zoo in Bejing and the zoo on the third planet of Aldebaran now had their prize.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-36619067246321107012010-11-07T15:24:00.000-05:002010-11-07T15:25:23.233-05:00Being JudgmentalI'm usually not judgmental, but something that happened yesterday spoiled my chance of beating my two-day record of non-judgementalism. That's a shame because if I had beaten that record, then I was going to take my wife out to dinner for a celebration where we could critique the chef. Now I have to start again.<br /><br />What caused me to fail in my record setting was an observation I made about a group of workmen who were replacing the gutters on my home.<br /><br />I recently had this epiphany that I was no longer young, which came from accidentally looking into a mirror. That insight forced me into the realization that cleaning gutters while hanging on a ladder thirty feet in the air was one of those joys in life that I needed to leave behind. <br /><br />All that was required In order for me to say sayonara to that twice yearly chore of scooping up rotten leaves, worms and polluted water with my bare hands was to have my current gutters replaced with a type that was guaranteed not to clog. The gutter salesman informed me that I also needed an amount of money that exceeded four years of tuition when I went to college, but telling that part of the story fits much better into my complaining habit than my judgmental habit.<br /><br />When the installers showed up yesterday morning, I was not surprised that the primary language they spoke and the primary language I spoke was different. Virginia is a border state, in that it borders other states. And like all of them, our state has a large population of people who sometime in the past two decades did not appreciate the idyllic lifestyle south of the U.S. border, and they moved north hoping for a better life. <br /><br />I have learned over time that not speaking English very well does not prove anything about a person’s citizenship because Nancy Pelosi speaks in a language I do not understand, and I think she's a citizen, Isn't she?<br /><br />Anyway, as soon as the workers and I communicated well enough to agree that I lived where I said I lived, they went to work and I went back into the warm house for another cup of coffee. The temperature was close to freezing, and watching them work with bare metal with ungloved hands for just a few minutes was enough to start my teeth chattering. <br /><br />When their boss stopped by an hour later to have a look, the three installers were hustling around at full speed on the top of my roof, pulling off the old gutter, installing the new gutter and running up and down the thirty-foot ladders at half the speed of light.<br /><br />After the boss’s ground survey from a distance was complete, he left and they must have felt pressured because they speeded up their work pace to twice warp speed and finished the job within another two hours. I got up on the ladder and checked it a few places and they had done quality work. <br /><br />It was at that moment that my record for not being judgmental was doomed. <br />You see, I don’t know if those three men are citizens or not. If they are not, then I wish they were because in my lifetime I’ve noticed that people who work as hard as these men did make good citizens. <br /> <br />Now I know it' s not nice to be judgmental, but if I was opening a business, the not speaking of good English might be one of my requirements for hiring. And with the way I fracture theUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-15901659649052834522010-11-05T18:15:00.000-04:002010-11-05T18:17:55.985-04:00Doggie Paddling To Stay AfloatAbout fifteen years ago my wife and I left our house to go to a doctor’s appointment, leaving our seventeen and fourteen year old daughters at home. It was early wintertime, and a deep layer of accumulated rainwater had fully submerged the protective cover over our in-ground swimming pool. The water layer above the cover was almost three feet deep in one area of the pool, and a few days of subfreezing weather had created an ice layer about an inch thick over the entire surface.<br /><br />We always used the fenced in area around the pool as the wintertime dog run, especially at night, and so when our beautiful collie made it known he had to go out, one of my daughters let him into the enclosed yard. <br /><br />A short time later she called to him to come back into the house and discovered that he had fallen into the pool, broken through the ice and was doing a self taught doggie paddle in the middle of the ice laden pool. The cover, most of it, which was underwater except for the edges, prevented him from paddling to an area where my daughters might have been able to help him get out.<br /><br /> It was the era before cell phones, and my wife and I had not yet arrived at the doctors, so they called the police, and an officer arrived in about ten minutes. He was not inclined to jump into the frigid water, and he could not reach the dog. His solution was to toss our patio furniture in to the pool one piece at a time, apparently with the hope that somehow the dog would grab hold of one of the chairs, and he could then pull our collie closer to the side.<br /><br />By the time the officer exhausted the furniture supply, my daughters had managed to contact my wife and I, and we were on the way home.<br /><br />When we reached the house, the dog had been in the freezing water for, at <br />Least, an hour and he was tiring quickly. The policeman was poking at him with a long handled pool skimmer, and when my wife rushed toward him, he responded, "He needs to work with me here." <br /><br />This episode came back to me the other night as I was listening to the aftermath of Tuesday's election. Each side of the political spectrum was responding toward the other side by saying "They need to work with me here," and then they would throw their version of a verbal lawn chair at their opponents and in doing so hit all of those Americans who are doggie paddling just to stay afloat. <br /><br />As soon as I saw the dog in the middle of the pool that night, I jumped into the water and eventually lifted him out. My hope is that every one of these politicians that were elected both in 2008 and this week jump in feet first to the task because if we all get tired and stop paddling, they are going to drown too.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-88783563354707059442010-10-28T21:02:00.000-04:002010-10-28T21:03:04.365-04:00GremlinsI'm sort of glad that I am not running for political office. And it's not for the obvious reason that I am easily corruptible when it comes to perks like free donuts during congressional hearings. <br /><br />It's because I believe in Gremlins. When I see how Delaware's senatorial candidate has gotten pummeled by the press for dabbling in witchcraft when she was in college, I can easily visualize how they would treat me for believing in Gremlins, especially since I am no longer young and good looking. Not that I ever was good looking, but you can see my point.<br /><br />Now to get back to my story about Gremlins: Yesterday the Gremlins were active in my household. They seem to have a sixth sense of knowing when I am in a bad mood, and it is on those days they flock to my house looking for any opportunity to bring my mood down a notch or two from miserable.<br /><br />I am a whiz at buying and selling stocks. I can lose money with the best of them, and anyone that wants to make a killing in market just needs to do the exact opposite of what I do. When the market opened yesterday my latest trade was shown to be as dumb as the rest of them, and so the day started off with me in a bad mood and my wife handing me a book on how to be happy. <br /><br />Now you really need to be in a good mood, maybe even a happy mood in order to read a book about being happy, so I decided to do some work in the garage instead. Sucking the remnants of a billion dead bugs, and spiders into a vacuum cleaner seemed to fit my mood better that reading a book written by a man that was obviously happy because he was making a fortune selling a million books about being happy.<br /><br />As soon as I opened the garage door a Gremlin ran into the house. I couldn't actually see it, I'm not that crazy, but my keen sense of inductive reasoning traced the next series of events back to that moment. <br /><br />Within a few minutes of the garage door being opened, an army of stink bugs was marching across my driveway. My defense against that army was to close the garage door, and when I pushed the close button, Gremlin number one went into action.<br /><br />It is hard to describe the behavior of the automatic door closer, but if I had let it continue to run, within a few minutes my house would have been shaken loose from the foundation and then started hopping down the driveway.<br /><br />The problem was that the door seemed to be confused as to whether it wanted to be open or closed, and it was changing its mind about five times a second. <br />The physics of the situation was beautiful. The vibrational-wave was self-reinforcing, and it's amplitude kept building over time. I finally got the door to calm down and close by disconnecting a wire from the unit's safety feature. <br /><br />Some of you will question my assertion that this frenetic behavior was caused by a Gremlin, but by the time I made it back upstairs to search for that happiness book, the little sucker had also trashed my internet service as well as a computer. <br /><br />Fast-forward until this morning. No sign of the invisible Gremlin, Internet service back up, hosed computer un-hosed, and garage door, well that thing was still making it's own version of a metal tsunami when I turned it on so I called the manufacturer. <br /><br />The customer service rep didn't seem very interested in how my day was yesterday, and she interrupted my brilliant but wordy description of all the trouble shooting I had done. "Hook back up the wire you disconnected," she told me.<br /><br />I proceeded to restate that I had tried that approach a dozen times to no avail. "Hook back up the wire," was the singular response.<br /><br />Gremlins have a hearty laugh when they make a fool out of you, and I could hear that sarcastic chuckle coming through the phone after I told the woman it now worked perfectly.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-89409155871027490772010-10-25T17:55:00.000-04:002010-10-25T17:56:42.069-04:00I'm Taking Cash From IranThis morning's paper had an article about the leader of Afghanistan taking satchels full of cash from Iran. It was money which he said he was using to keep his presidential office running. <br /><br />At just a million dollars at a time, he intoned that it's not like it is big money. And he was quick to explain that the U.S. Government also supplies him with a few large bags full of dollars every time he needs a candy bar from the vending machines in the presidential palace.<br /><br />My guess is that our Government was forced into a quid pro quo after they learned about this unique re-use of Iranian shopping bags, and the state department has probably been been doing a ten to one match. We include free coupons in our shopping bags for an extra hundred percent off any future weapon system of the Afghan president's choice.<br /><br />Like the fool that I am, I got angry for a few moments, but then the genius inside me kicked in.<br /><br />I went upstairs and got an old satchel out of my closet, and I filled it with money. Well actually I wrapped a few one dollar bills around all the monopoly money I could find in my kids old toy box, and I then put a picture of the seal of Iran on the outside of a Wal Mart shopping bag<br /><br />I then sent the White house a letter with a picture of me holding the bag and informing them that I wanted to offer them an equal opportunity to bribe me.<br /><br /> I just told them Iran had given me a hundred grand. I didn't want to appear greedy.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-7246695261230986032010-10-21T17:34:00.001-04:002010-10-21T17:37:21.878-04:00Making Decisions: Splitting The UniverseI've always had a hard time making decisions. I hid that fact pretty well in my work life, showing confidence and bravado while my brain was fighting the "should I, or shouldn't I" battle. <br /><br />The weeping and moaning of my employees who were effected negatively by my decisions, and the holier than thou attitudes of some of those people who were effected positively by my decisions did little to help in this daily mental battle. That was especially true since some of those weeping I liked, and some of those gloating I did not.<br /><br />Now the real problem with making decisions is that they are important, and not just because of the obvious reasons, like weeping and moaning employees or unlikeable gloaters. They are important because we may split the universe in two every time we make a decision.<br /><br />I read this while I was growing up, and I am sure it is the real cause for my slowness in making crucial decisions.<br /><br />You see, some physicists believe that in this crazy quantum world of probabilities that when we make a decision between two options that another universe pops into existence where another you has decided to do the opposite. <br /><br />Decide to get married to the woman of your dreams, "bam," immediately another universe forms where you have decided to let her go, and because of that decision the other you winds up living alone and desperate for the rest of their life. Decide to invest in that speculative stock, "poof," there is universe in which you are rich and a parallel one where you are dirt poor.<br /><br />This forming of other universes I have found to be a pretty heavy responsibility. Think of it: every time you see a homeless person there is another guy who looks like him drinking fancy wines in a New York sushi restaurant. <br /><br />I'm sure you can understand why I am becoming much more indecisive as I get older. It's because I have gotten to live in the Universe where I've made all the right decisions: And I keep thinking about all those other me's who have not.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-17506742496238387742010-10-01T16:02:00.002-04:002010-10-01T16:04:47.102-04:00My Mistress Is A Tree<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi74POlS1aSYnylUAv3FYPGFwK7ZK0NkvkHUNfD75AioFmljQo9Tu4Ql2Mig89V1R4cun9quLXgej8OLzXkP3wYHHXzTm8FJyU0b7xgLsCTGsY6-bjRcsrHU6uECA__RCVvaveKLNzHArI/s1600/Walnut.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi74POlS1aSYnylUAv3FYPGFwK7ZK0NkvkHUNfD75AioFmljQo9Tu4Ql2Mig89V1R4cun9quLXgej8OLzXkP3wYHHXzTm8FJyU0b7xgLsCTGsY6-bjRcsrHU6uECA__RCVvaveKLNzHArI/s320/Walnut.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5523170855200546274" /></a><br />I know this is a strange thing to admit, but I am a lover of trees. My wife is okay with me sharing my affections with these beautiful deciduous and coniferous friends, and she never seems to be threatened if I sneak out at night for a walk in the woods with my other love.<br /><br />I do not fit into the category of a tree hugger, although I have been known to wrap my arms around a few of them when no one is looking, In fact a few dozen years ago my neighbors were about to summon the local arbor police when they saw me out in my back yard beating a few trees with a baseball bat. Lest you too think I am crazy, I read that if a tree is dying, then sometimes you can beat the outside bark with a bat, which apparently stimulates the tree to suck up more water and sometimes they recover. The beaten trees actually leafed out for several more years before they finally succumbed to the fact that I had dumped three feet of soil over their roots. I apologized to them when I realized the error of my ways, but by that time they were in no mood to listen.<br /><br />This love affair with another life form began forty years ago when an old landlord gave me a dirt covered slice off of a tree he had cut down a few years earlier. "Try making something from this" he suggested, and my first thought was a fire. Up until that time I had done some wood-working using pine boards purchased from a lumberyard, but there is little connection to a tree when you sort through lengths of precut, planed lumber in the back corner of the 1970's version of a Home Depot<br /><br />This gift of an outside slice from a two hundred year old walnut tree was different. And since the "try... this" suggestion was issued as a challenge by a man who thought he was superior to everyone, I started the process of proving to him that I had some skills in the art of crafting something useful from a tree. <br /><br />I will admit to more than a little of second guessing my personal wisdom in having accepted this challenge as I scraped the mud, spiders, and several years of other barnyard crud from the surface of this wooden slab. But it was in that endeavor where I fell in love once again just a few months after I married my wife.<br /><br /> In just a few hours of cleaning, hand planing, and then sanding, I had uncovered the incredible beauty hidden inside a walnut tree. Hand rubbed boiled linseed oil took it's natural inner beauty to the level of a goddess when exposed to the warm muted light of a late afternoon sun.<br /><br />Love can be described as the feeling you get when your physical and emotional senses become saturated, and as I stared at the swirling grain of the heartwood in that tree, perfection interrupted several times by an intense black color where the cells had been seared from a decades earlier lightning strike, there is no doubt I was once again in love.<br /><br />For more than a dozen years I maintained this clandestine relationship, and every year I would sneak down to the basement workshop sometime in October to craft a piece of furniture for my wife's Christmas present. Coffee table, butler's table, corner cabinet, bell cabinet, wall sconces, cabinets in a plant room: all were hand crafted from the wood of walnut trees. I made a curio cabinet using oak one year, and whenever I look at it I always wonder why I strayed. <br /><br />My first love, my wife, has never turned on me even though I have given her many reasons to do so, but my other love, after ten years together, exposed a side of her I never knew, and I became hyper-allergic to her poison. Fine cut shavings and dust from a walnut tree can kill a horse, but my reaction was different, I became intensely angry whenever she was cut in my presence, her poison somehow affecting my central nervous system.<br /><br />My wife put an end to this affair when she realized what was happening, and for several decades I stayed away, momentarily tempted when a fine furniture catalog would arrive at our door with some exquisitely crafted piece made from solid walnut. <br /><br />Every few years i would sneak down to the basement and craft something, but the first time I forgot to wear a mask my walnut goddess's venom would penetrate my skin and cause a severe neurological reaction. I know I needed to end the relationship, so I switched to using cherry for some furniture pieces: A nice wood, in fact a beautiful wood but one that when I look at her, she elicits feelings of friendship and not love. <br /><br />I have remained on the straight and narrow for many years now, but several months ago I stopped in a new store that opened up in a warehouse a few miles from home. Local Woods was the name of the store, and I should have turned and walked away, but I did not. There in the front of the store stood my old love, majestic in her raw state, waiting for the sculptor to bring out all the beauty from within. <br /><br />These boards in the photo below are now in my garage, calling to me everyday. And as each day passes, I am drawn tighter into her poison laden web.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-91797528026608473122010-09-28T10:55:00.000-04:002010-09-28T10:56:30.760-04:00Thank You, But I Want MoreToward the end of each month I look at how much money is left in our checking account and then decide how much my wife and I can afford to give to charity. I know giving to others should be first on my list of payments each month, but somehow my other creditors don’t see it that way.<br />Each day as the month progresses I cull through the mailings we receive from a half dozen legitimate charities and a few questionable ones, and I put a stack of candidates-for-giving on my desk. I could never satisfy all of the charities in the stack unless I distributed five dollars to each, but I rotate through the list as the months go by. <br />There are a number of worthwhile charities that spend far too much on their mailings. Each month they send me more than a few additional requests for help, and those requests come independent of whether I gave to them last month or not. I have several times been tempted to stop giving to those charities that fill my recycling bins, but then I realize the post office would surely go broke without them and I grit my teeth and add another inch of paper to the stack.<br />There is another practice of charities, however, that makes me want to scream, and that is the practice of sending thank-you letters for your contribution. The letter starts with how the charity could not do its wondrous works without generous, kind, deity-like people such as myself, and then the letter quickly transitions to an appeal for more bucks. Most tell you how much to give in order to keep your deity-like status.<br />Now I know how hard it is to run a charity, but first of all they need to stop wasting money by sending thank-you notes. The work they do is thank-you enough. Second, if they do want to keep saying thanks, then they need to stop asking for more money at the end of the letter. It really is an attempt to make you feel guilty that you did not give enough and they would like more. Thank you notes should be for gratitude, not for greed. And when you ask for more from someone that has just given you something, then I qualify that as greed.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-40754244379748346852010-09-25T15:13:00.001-04:002010-09-25T15:15:33.759-04:00A Gift We Couldn't RefuseOver the past several years, northern Virginia has played an unwelcome host to a small ugly critter affectionately named the stinkbug. They have expanded into many states since they were brought into Pennsylvania in a shipping container in 2003 where it appears that they were included as a free sample from China.<br /><br />It's been rumored that China's party leaders were upset at all the publicity the Japanese were getting for their beetles, and that they wanted their share of the U.S. Market for obnoxious bugs.<br /><br />A few years ago the Japanese had most of the market share in our backyard, but this year the Chinese bug has just about wiped out any competition. My guess is that WalMart has rolled back their prices considerably on this Chinese product.<br /><br />They are actually a very clever little import. Since they have no natural predators, they multiply rapidly and then attack a lot of crops but they particularly love sucking the juice out of apples. Apple juice used be one of the major agricultural products here in northern Virginia until the Chinese pretty much wiped out the business with cheap juice imports a half dozen years ago.<br /><br />You have to give it to the Chinese, this was a very clever way to get rid of the rest of the competition, especially since they did it with a bug that emits a foul odor when it is scared or squashed. Sort of the ultimate example of "screw you, stronger message later."<br /><br />This morning I read that our local milk producers are worried because their cows are being fed corn infested with these bugs and they may start producing milk that smells like stinky feet.<br /><br />When I read that article, besides putting my bowl of Cheerios aside, and then running to another bowl where I made gagging noises for a while, I started seriously thinking about what we could provide back to China as a free gift in one of our shipping containers.<br /><br />Considering the imbalance of trade, my guess is that we have about two billion of their containers coming in to this country and just one or two of ours going out each year, so it has to be something that that is pretty potent and smells bad.<br /><br />I'm pretty much through the list of the members of congress and Senators, and there are more than enough candidates on both sides of the aisle for the next few years of shipments, especially since a few of them will be looking for work after November.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-48901253238396121122010-09-25T14:30:00.001-04:002010-09-25T14:30:51.732-04:00Killing Mother EarthEach day in the newspaper I read one or two articles about how humans are killing the planet. Too much carbon being emitted, too much pollution of the water supply, and too many people eating the animals and fish causing the extinction of a large number of species. <br /><br />The scenarios of the effects of human action always end with a scorched, polluted planet, which is termed a dead planet because it is devoid of human life. The articles always finish with some form of plea that we should do something to save the planet.<br /><br />Now I am not going to get into the issue of man made global warming, simply because it is a polarized issue with both smart and incredibly stupid people on both sides of that discussion. I worked several years of my life with people investigating that phenomena, and I learned that very smart people close their ears when they sense someone is questioning their findings, and that very dumb people open their mouths when the same event occurs. <br /><br />What I will say is that we are experiencing climate change and that statement is irrefutable, simply because climate change has occurred since this planet first started cooling off nearly four billion years ago. And I feel that most people would agree that the current trend in climate change generally makes it more difficult for an expanding human population to survive.<br /><br />It is obvious that all the rhetoric about killing the earth over the past thirty years or so has done very little to change the way the people of the world live their lives, and in this case, to a large degree, I include myself.<br /><br />I have wondered why this is true, and I have come to what some will feel is a very bizarre conclusion. You see, I think we have adopted the wrong perspective and therefore misrepresented the real truth in this issue. By doing so it has given us a reason to do nothing or essentially nothing.<br /><br />This issue is always couched in a statement that we are killing the planet. We have declared ourselves at the top of the food chain on this planet and we have also declared ourselves as the ultimate controller of the fate of the earth. It is a very egocentric view, and by having that perspective we form the opinion that when the Earth gets broken then we can fix it: If not today, then tomorrow.<br /><br />I would like to suggest that the real food chain in the universe continues upward, and the level above us, and not below us is the earth. We don't control it. It has ultimate control of us. Now those of you who believe in the concept of Gaia will say "right on" and continue reading, and those of you that limit the concept of life to DNA based organisms will be sorely tempted to hit the back button on your web browser, but hear me out. <br /><br />If you change your perspective of the pecking order in the universe, you can no longer say, "humans are going to kill the earth, because we are not. The Earth did just fine in regulating itself before us, and it will do just fine after we are long gone. It will be here until the sun turns into a red giant and consumes the Earth four billion years from now. <br /><br />So I suggest we all change our way of thinking about this problem and admit that, the earth is really going to kill us all if we don't change our approach.<br /><br />What should we do? I think we need to change the dialog from how do we stop climate change to how do we live with climate change. Embedded in that change of perspective, I think will come the realization of what we have to do to keep the Earth from killing us.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-5374977384340918642010-02-26T11:02:00.000-05:002010-02-26T11:03:33.872-05:00Ants Swarming In My HeadThe human mind is a wondrous thing, but it seems that far too often the voices we hear in our heads are more against us than for us. One author has labeled those thoughts of negativity as “ANTS” or Automatic Negative Thoughts, and I like that imagery because these little stealers of my life just keep coming no matter how much I try to shoo them away. ANTS emanate from a primitive section of our brains, and those that study the brain have humorously referred to their voice as “The Itty Bitty Shitty Committee.”<br />I think these ANTS, just like real ants, need three things to survive: a place to live, food, and a way to reproduce. Since these little critters make their home in my head, I cannot literally destroy that home without undesirable consequences, and therefore I’m left with the dilemma of finding a way to take away their food, and in a way, take away their chance for having sex. <br />I should have said reproduce, but writers know that if you use the word sex once or twice in an article more people will read it to the end. <br />We writers like books for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that sometimes by reading we find an answer to a question that has plagued us for a long time. In this case I found a way to kill these little life suckers.<br />Every time I begin to think one of these negative thoughts, I now yell in my mind the word “Cancel,” and I imagine stepping on the thing, so that I stop its reproductive cycle.<br />Yesterday was one of those days when the critters were swarming, and several times I let them take control. But as I worked through the day, I got better and better in getting rid of them. I don’t know yet if I’ve killed their queen, but I do know I’ve got them on the run.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-13497029379798271502010-02-23T16:17:00.000-05:002010-02-23T16:19:00.022-05:00Paying For The Person Behind MeI do a lot of long distance motorcycle riding with an old college friend. Since both of us reach the age of Medicare this year, the term old means that the I’ve known him a long time, and so has the earth. Being old friends, we watch out for each other when we ride. I keep scanning the roadside for a Starbucks for him and he keeps scanning the road for telltale signs of a Dunkin Donuts for me. I prefer their coffee, and of course with good coffee you have to have a donut. <br />We watch out and take care of each other in many other ways, and one of them happens when we pull up to a tollbooth. When you’re fully encased from head to toe in a motorcycle riding-suit with leather gloves, it is a challenge to get the money out of your pocket to pay the toll. It’s a process that takes a few minutes, which includes: get the bike stable, take off your gloves, find the ticket, find the money in one of your pockets, unzip it, pay the toll, cram the change and receipt in the pocket, zip it up, put the gloves back on, put it in gear and get moving. <br />That process makes anyone sitting in a car behind you start to play the national anthem on their horn. When there are two of us in line, an entire symphony is playing before both of us get moving. <br />After the first trip together we just started paying for the one behind. This makes the total process much faster, and the people behind you in line usually don’t give you the finger when they speed by. <br />I really started thinking about this today when I read about the new, proposed health care legislation. The proposal includes a provision that delays implementing one of the ways to pay for the bill until 2018. It’s sort of like me saying to the toll taker, “The guy behind me is going to pay.”<br />I don’t treat my friends that way. And let’s be honest, each one of us that enjoy the freedom of being an American in one-way or another are friends. In this case we are passing the costs on not only to our friends but also to our children. <br />No one should be comfortable with this concept. I hope that whatever happens in the health care debate that our leaders decide that we need to implement a pay as you go policy. And then maybe in the future, we can even start to pay for the person behind.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-41183433455370396912010-02-18T11:22:00.000-05:002010-02-18T11:23:04.500-05:00Winning The LotteryI’m mad: ranting, raving, flaming mad. I just checked my lottery ticket and I did not win. Now this outcome is no different from every other week in the past twenty-five years, but this time I just knew things were going to change. This time I was going to win<br />You know how you get this feeling that the stars are finally aligning in your favor? The feeling that the days of bad luck are over, and easy street is the place where you are going to spend the rest of your life? You know that feeling? Well don’t despair, I didn’t either until the day before yesterday.<br />On Monday I bought four lottery tickets: two for the Mega Millions, and two for the Powerball. I stopped buying lottery tickets several months ago when I looked at my retirement investments and figured that my four-dollar a week gambling addiction was going to break me if I did not get a handle on it soon.<br />The lottery powers to be must have sensed my departure, because they came up with a new way to pull me back. They added the Powerball to their mile long list of lotteries you can put your cash into and buy a few moments of hope. <br />I was good, really good, because I resisted the temptation of instant wealth for over two weeks. And for those cynics among you, it wasn’t just because the snow kept me from getting out my driveway and down to the corner store. I could have walked those three miles through four-foot drifts if I had wanted to.<br />Anyway, after I bought the tickets I stuffed them in my wallet and went home. I needed to get something out of the basement, and as I was walking by the mound of accumulations my wife and I should have thrown away years ago, there on the top of one of the smaller peaks was this little book titled The Good Luck Book.<br />I turned it over and there on the back cover the first words were, “Want to win the lottery? Sprinkle nutmeg over your lottery tickets.”<br />Now my wife already thinks I’m a nutcase, so she said very little when I took out the two tickets and started grating fresh nutmeg all over them. <br />Yesterday I dusted the Mega Millions ticket off and checked to see if I won. With not one of the numbers matching, I figured that the Powerball ticket might need a little more seasoning.<br />This morning I checked the Powerball. When I told my wife we didn’t win, she suggested I use paprika the next time.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-76610754979564416752010-02-14T17:55:00.001-05:002010-02-14T17:57:09.326-05:00Drinking beer for better health.I read today that drinking beer improves the strength of our bones, and reduces a man’s chance of prostate cancer. I’m interested in having strong bones and not getting cancer, so I figured this was something I needed to look into.<br />The research is showing that one of the compounds in beer blocks the estrogen in the male body by binding to its receptor. <br />Now I always knew I had estrogen in my body, and I knew that because Arnold Schwarzenegger made us all aware of that problem when he started calling a few male members of the species “girly men.” But before this, I never thought I could do much about it. <br />Now I learn that all those guys sitting in the bar each night are really doing it for their health. You can tell that their bones are getting stronger, because if I carried the weight that most of them are carrying, my knees would buckle. <br />Next time you see one of these guys on the beach wearing a speedo, you need to think differently about them. They are just taking care of their health.<br />But now I’m conflicted. You see I never really liked beer. I was told when I was young that it was an acquired taste, and that meant that you had to drink a lot of it to like it, but I never liked it well enough to drink a lot of it. <br />Now I am ready to try again. But the only beer I have in the house are a few bottles in the garage refrigerator that I bought for a holiday party during Bush’s first term. <br />I opened one to taste it.<br /> I think I am going to wait until tomorrow to improve my health.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-79801648527570619572010-02-10T09:46:00.001-05:002010-02-10T09:48:31.255-05:00Surviving the snow? Marry Well.My father believed a real man must be able to do anything, well almost anything. He didn’t think I should be able to build a nuclear power plant, which I actually could, but he sure believed I should be able to build a house, build a tractor, fix a car, and repair anything else that broke.<br />And he also believed that when things got tough, it was a man’s job to figure out what to do to protect his wife and family. He taught my brother and I the art of jury-rigging, that ancient magic of using pieces of things that do not naturally belong together to fix something that is broken. The repaired article always looks a little funny, funny both in the laughing sense and the peculiar sense, but it functions until you can buy a replacement<br />This concept of figuring out a solution to a problem using only what you have available to you has been a centerpiece of my life, and it applies not only to things but also to situations, including snowstorms.<br />This past weekend one of those test situations came up in the form of a thirty-two inch snowfall that shortly after it started took out the electric to our house, which means we had no heat or water. <br />About an hour before the electric went out my wife started to fill the bathtub. “What are you doing?” was the question from the man who was supposed to know everything. <br />“Saving water to use for the toilets if the power goes out” was my wife’s answer. <br />“We won’t lose power,” was my know-it-all reply, and I shut off the water when the tub was half full.<br />“Sure glad I filled the tub,” she said as the power went out. <br />The next morning we were snowed in, with at least two days before the snowplows would get to our road. The only heat we had was from a small gas fireplace in the family room and the know-it-all member of this husband and wife team had changed gas companies the previous day and they never filled the tanks. That left us with just a few gallons of the stuff to wait out the effects of the storm. <br />I went into engineer mode: Calculating the number of usable gallons in the tank; the number of BTU’s per gallon, searching with a flashlight to find the BTU rating of the fireplace, and then combining it all to figure out how many hours of heat we had remaining. <br />My wife just quietly went to work putting up sheets and blankets over all the doors from our family room and kitchen to isolate the one room with heat from the rest of the house. When she was finished she made window sealers out of towels to keep the small amount of heat we were generating from easily escaping out the windows. <br />She then filled some pans with snow and put them in our refrigerator to slow the rise in temperature of all the food we had stored, and then quietly moved some of the things into the freezing garage.<br />While she was doing all of this I was trying to design a sled that I could build in the basement so that I could drag a four hundred pound propane tank on the other side of our house to replace the one that was about to give out. <br />As I said, my father taught me that a man should be resourceful in times of crisis, but he also taught me one other important thing: Marry well.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7840955827103186545.post-84053168062827558992010-01-06T16:43:00.001-05:002010-01-06T16:45:32.994-05:00Earth Like PlanetsThe folks at NASA announced this week that they have discovered five new and unusual planets orbiting stars a few thousand light years away. They’re close neighbors according to the article, but they are probably not conducive to life as we know it. And it’s a hard thing to decide if that’s a good thing or bad.<br />The real prize is the search for an Earth-like planet, one that orbits a distant star within the habitable zone. And that means a place where liquid water can exist to support beings that may or may not look like us.<br />I’m really glad that NASA is doing this research, and my joy is not just for the obvious reasons, like hoping that my alter ego on that planet is rich. <br />My real reason for liking this research is selfish and I’ll admit it, because you see that before the discovery of an Earthlike planet is announced to the public, NASA must first tell the president and congress. <br />The way I see it is that as soon as congress gets word that there’s another civilization out there, that they will all rush to go on a fact finding trip to see if the residents of that planet will buy Georgia peanuts, or a GM car. <br />Think of it: Every congress person and Senator quickly leaving on a set of spaceships heading to another star system. <br />I sure hope they find one of those planets fast.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1