for my partner in crime blogdom

here’s to you!

You’re reading this post? Bless you!

 I’ve been wondering, after taking to saying “bless you” after I hear someone burp, why these blessings are traditionally reserved for sneezes.  Yes, it’s true that you’re spewing saliva and billions of germs into the air, but does that really require a blessing?  Come to think of it, as the wet-faced receiver of the saliva and germs, the person near the sneezer should be the one to hear “bless you”, and that blessing should come from the sneezer himself.  After all, that’s how I met my wife.  Sorry again, dear, I didn’t know you were there.

Whether you believe that blessings have any effect or not, I figure it does no harm, and if it does indeed help, why don’t we bestow these gifts for more serious things?  Tripped and skinned your elbow?  Bless you!  Heart attack?  Bless you!  Really bad haircut?  Bless you!  My rationale behind saying “bless you” after hearing a burp is that, if the person is so gassy they couldn’t even wait to get out of earshot, I do believe they could use some help.  And since there’s no government-ordered limit on blessings (not since the rationing during the Great Dust-in-the-Nose Pandemic of ‘37), I figure I may as well be the one to give it to them.

umbrellas…friend, or foe?

this evening, i courageously left my home, ready to face the misery that is wallyworld.

it was only drizzlin’ here, but by the time I got there, it was storm central. i pulled up in the parkin’ lot, and realized somethin’ needed to be done to get me into the store, at least partially non-soaked.

so, I put the car in park, and decided to climb over the seat to retrieve my umbrella. yeah, i know, umbrellas are for wusses, but i was goin’ for it anyway. so, i climbed over the seat, and then the next seat, (don’tcha wish ya had a camera for that scene!) and finally found the (wuss-like) umbrella. then, i climbed back over the seat, and the next seat, and made a run for it.

after almost lockin’ my keys in the car, (but that’s neither here nor there, and irrelevant to the story… or not…but green day was on cd, and they ROCK!)

i made a run for it, and got inside with only wet hair, arms, legs, and other inadvertently exposed body parts.
in less than 5 minutes or so, i had completed my foray into the wilds of wallyworld, and bravely (oh, ok…i was hurryin’ cuz i wanted a beer… (what? shoppin’ makes me thirsty!)… made a run for the car.

which maybe would have worked out fine, except that an unknown “award winning” driver (ok, they probably didn’t actually get an award, but i would have awarded them an award for dumbass moronity, had i been there to award same) showed up and parked next to my car…really really close to my car… when i was inside.

so, i try valiantly to get into my car without

a) hittin’ the car on the side of me, with either my umbrella or myself.
b) hittin’ my car with anything. duh!!!
c) gettin’ any more soaked than i already am.

i succeeded on a and b.

i would have possibly succeeded on c, had it not been for the aforementioned dumbass moron who parked so freakin’ close.

so, anyway, i climb into the car, whilst it’s pourin’ down rain, and try (you know what’s comin’, don’t ya?) to close the umbrella.

HA!! yeah, right…

the damn thing wouldn’t close at first, then when it had me almost convinced it was gonna work with me, here, it decided it’d rather be hung up on the door. it was more successful in it’s attempt at sabotage than i was at gettin high and dry.

so, it’s still rainin’, and me and the umbrella from hell are fightin’ over who’s boss, and i’m cursin’ like a sailor (not that i’ve ever heard a real sailor curse, so i’m just guessin’, here, but i’m fairly confident that i could have competed – tonite, at least…) and then….i’m in!

ok, so the umbrella’s bent, and i’m drippin from head to toe, and the inside of my car is wet, but hey… i was in, and the umbrella was on the floor, in the subservient position in which it was meant to be.

but i was still wet, so i guess maybe it turned out to be a draw, after all.

on the other hand, I’m here, writin’ this, and the “umbrella from hell” is still sittin’ outside.

so who won this battle, huh?!?

I’m lending out my Rolling Eye of Shame™

You know, being a human being, I tend to focus on my own miseries and inconvenient revelations of wrongdoin–I mean surprise parties–but today I’d like to focus on the pain endured by my long-suffering wife.  And before you say anything, you smart-mouthed makers of comments, no, she’s not suffering because of me this time.

After quite a long time, she finally got to see her parents and her sister when they arrived from Australia to visit us.  Fine and dandy, good to see them, stuff them on the top bunk, and la-dee-da.  Everything was fine.  Well, mostly.  See, one reason we moved here was because some of her relatives also live nearby.  We figured we could rely on them for things like babysitting and fresh donuts.  That was before we realized that they were mostly a bunch of self-centered, money-hungry jerks.  They always expect her to visit them, without ever visiting us.  They don’t keep her informed about family goings-on, even to the point of not telling her when her uncle died.  They only want us to go to their homes to “show off” their stuff.  And they’ve never, not even once, supplied us with fresh donuts.  This is the sort of people we’re dealing with.

So now her parents are here, and her sister is here, and they’re getting to spend lots of quality time together.  Well, actually, they’re not, because those same jerks are constantly trying to get her parents to eat at this person’s house and sleep at that person’s house and spend the day with someone else.  It’s like they’re purposely trying to keep them away from my wife, who waited five years to see them and for our kids to see their grandparents.  But I’m also pretty ticked off at her parents.  After making plans to spend the day with them and even getting off of work early to do so, she arrived to find them just about to leave with one of those “Others” (kind of like in “Lost”, malicious and not-very-fashionably-dressed, but with less snappy dialogue).  Now, they knew she was coming home early to take them out and see some sights, but they were leaving anyway.  When my wife got (understandably) angry, she didn’t want to go along with them.  Later they called her to fuss her!  They acted like she was the one to act selfish and mean-spirited.  Talk about getting Poked.

I just hope she knows that, despite the numerous times she herself has poked me in the eye, and the way more numerous times she herself has not supplied me with fresh donuts, I’m always on her side, by her side, and occasionally a thorn in her side.  But like the thorn, I’m difficult to get rid of once I’m there.  And also like a thorn I can unfortunately lead to infection and gangrene, but that’s another story.