Here's lookin' atcha!

rose vase embedded upside down in black table

i-toilet

anxiety

dark tuesday

autumn rain

Not so Pretty in Pink-O

hometown in rearview mirror

splotch splotch splotch

this one was nothing but fun!

happy stripes

w-eye-de open

Word Play

fun with word tweaking:

The Million Dollar Baby -> The Billion Dollar Maybe

The King's Speech -> The King's Peach

Bewitched -> We Bitched

Two and a Half Men -> Moo in a Calf Pen

The Talking Heads -> The Walking Keds

Mary Had Little Lamb -> Larry Had a Little Ma'am

Castles in the Air -> Tassels in My Hair

Green Eggs and Ham -> Queen Legs and Spam

Three Men and a Baby -> He Wrens and a Gay Bee

Watched Water

This one is about the kitchen faucet. I drink a lot of water, so I always keep a large bottle at hand, about 2 quarts. That frees me from having to run for a refill every half hour or so.

But filling the bottle can be quite trying owing to my impatience. Actually, filling the bottle only takes about 20 to 25 seconds. Yet that amount of time can be an eternity if you merely wait for the bottle to get full. To rein in my own impatience, I have come up with a little trick that makes the time fly by.

It’s quite simple: When I begin filling the bottle, I start to count from 20 down to 0. However, there’s one catch. Rather than counting down as fast as I can, I count slowly, perhaps only one number every three seconds.

Before I know it, the bottle is full. I rarely get past the number 12, and I find myself tempted to speed up my counting as fast as I can. But that is a no-no. As my mother always told me, watched water boils slowest.

China

I just saw a report where China has enacted a one-dog-per-family law. The local authorities have already started taking away any extra dogs from families with more than one. What a horrible thing to do to such a wonderful creature, and what a horrible choice to force a family to make. I could accept such a law if it allowed families that already have more than one dog to keep their dogs, and applying the law to families who are considering getting a dog for the first time or a new dog if their last one has passed away. Please join me in praying that as many of these taken-away dogs find a new and good home as soon as possible. The only other alternative the authorities have is to put down these poor dogs. That is a sad, sad thought.

Don’t Call Me Hannibal

Of all the things to obsess about, the one thing surfing my gray matter lately is liver, and, specifically, calf liver. This happens about every two years. The craving shows up out of nowhere like an unwanted guest. I say unwanted because I hate to cook it. That’s such a messy job and the outcome never meets my expectations.

But a few months ago, I discovered that a Greek restaurant in my neighborhood serves calf liver. So when the craving popped up its head this time, I just went to the restaurant. The liver is wonderful, and cooked with onions (like it should be). Since then, I have been back two more times. Slowly, my craving is ebbing. I think one more time will kill it off for awhile. In the meantime, I will watch “Silence of the Lambs” at least once a week!

dog-eyed

couple of quick drawings

A Summer Dream

The cars passing through the snow
Whisper zisch! zisch! zisch!
Into the ear of the cow-faced woman
In my head, an unpretty yet pleasant face
That would fit in at the local supermarket.
She interprets the sounds of the snow
Into a message I can understand:
It’s not the zisch! that counts;
It’s the silence that swallows everything else,
The occasional beep of a horn,
Surely an annoyed late-comer to work,
The whining police car,
The skidding of brakes found too late,
All of it sipped away
through the snow’s long straws,
crowding in, crowding out everything but itself
and the cow-faced woman in my head,
her lips the color of a glass of chilled merlot.

Cosmic Porcelain Prank

One of my favorite events of travelling with first-time visitors to Italy is when they go into their hotel bathroom and come out with a puzzled look on their face. With somewhat hesitation, they ask, “What’s that thing beside the commode?”

The answer to this question is easy: “It’s a bidet.”

But that just dodges the issue, so they have to ask, “What is it for?”

Now that is a delicate issue. There’s hardly any polite way to answer that question except maybe to say, “To wash your…” and let them fill in the blank themselves.

A second later, their brain does just that and a big smile spreads across their face, as if they have suddenly been let in on one of the secrets of the universe.

The bidet always leads to a lot of other questions to which I never know the answer, such as, “Where did they come from?” “Who invented them?” “Can you get them in pink?”

Whatever, the final effect is that the person always seem to now enjoy being in on such a delightful secret. The subject comes up again and again during the trip, always with a big smile on their face, a smile that someone gives away that they indeed tried the thing out in a private moment.

Nasal throw rugs

Several years ago, I had a colleague who was known for one highly distracting characteristic: long nasal hairs. Those hairs sometimes stretched halfway down to his upper lip. I always asked myself why his wife didn’t do something about it. But that may have been a lot to ask for. Rumor had it that she didn’t have much to do with him because he was a chronic womanizer. She simply let him provide her with a nice house and life, and let him do whatever else he wanted as long as he kept up his end of the financial bargain.

When we had staff meetings, I often had trouble concentrating on what our boss was saying because of those long hairs. I had a barely suppressible urge to jump across the table, pull out a pair of nasal hair clippers, and go to work. Of course, I simply had to tolerate the situation.

Instead, my mind busied itself with all the things someone could make out of those hairs. For example, a sweater for his wife’s Chihuahua. Or a pair of net stockings for her. The fellow was nearing fifty and sported clearly salt-and-pepper hair, including those nose hairs. That opened the option of sorting the hairs into piles of white only and black only bunches, and weaving together white stockings for Monday and black stockings for Tuesday, or the opposite. It didn’t matter as long as the hairs got used for a good purpose.

The hairs were also so numerous and dense that they could have been used to make even larger items such as salt-and-pepper throw rugs for the bathroom, or Holstein-patterned living room curtains, or polka dot men’s underwear, even though I suspect they might have been rather scratchy.

Even though I haven’t seen the fellow for 9 or 10 years, I often think about those hairs. They were simply too real and too good (or bad?) to forget. In the depths of winter, I even wonder whether those hairs might have made wool-warm socks. I should have asked the fellow to save up a couple of bags for me to weave together.