Everyone else is doing it so why should I not blame everything on the heat? (Even though in my case it is a lie.....my beloved house has A/C and, if a bead of sweat should ever have the nerve to develop on my brow, I can rip off my sleep shirt.....which has become my live-in shirt......and plop myself into the pool. However, I feel the need to blame something for the fact that my blabbity bloggyness has diminished to a paltry trickle.
I just checked my notes and found a few items which, at the time, I felt were worthy of noting........today they hardly elicited a twitch of the lip, but, hell, what do I know? Maybe someone out there will be amused or enraged or inspired to rant. I feel I should show that I have good intentions if nothing else.
At least I have graduated from writing ideas on tiny scraps of paper and tucking them in various corners of the table or under the laptop or in my shoe........no use following Sarah Palin's brilliant ploy of writing things on my hand.......unfortunately, unless used at once, such notes wash off. Consequently I have created a Blog Draft file where I can store fragments of ideas. Now, I have something new to worry about......the day my fumble-fingers accidentally hit the Publish button instead of the Save and I post a mess of garbage that only I can interpret or translate. Anyway, my darlings, consider this the Tapas of Blogdom........a menu with no real nourishment but with lots of teasing appetizers.
When I am really desperate I can always toss out a few favorite quotes.
This is a gem by one of my favorite bloggers......Pearl at
Pearl why you little......
"You see, while not as old as I hope to become, I am no longer as young as I was." Oh,my...... Yeah!
Then there is one that stuck in my mind after I forgot who thought it up. Sorry I cannot give credit but I acknowledge their brilliance.
"There is no one in the world who needs a mink coat other than a Mink.
And one of my favorites from a Murphy's Law Calendar some years back......this seems to be particularly poignant and true the older one gets.
"Nothing matters very much and hardly anything matters at all."
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And now I am going to follow my beloved cousin Ken's advice and confess to an escapade of a few years back which always makes me laugh and beam with pride even now as one of the weirdest stunts I ever pulled off. I have a funny feeling that I already blogged about this, but I have no intention of reading back through hundreds of these things to find it.......even though I must confess that sometimes I do enjoy reading some of my old blogs........I wonder if any of you other bloggers have the same strange experience.....sometimes when I read an old blog I do not recognize it as MINE! I swear with all humility that I find myself giggling over the words and wishing I could write like that. OY.....I am afraid to pursue that thought so I will just leave it at that.
This subject, by the way, is sort of timely since I just recently babbled of my experiences at getting my Driver's License renewed and this tells of the first time I had to come up with a brilliant solution to fooling the public.
Anyway, a number of years back when I first began to have real problems with my left eye, my Drivers' License was about to expire and I doubted if I could read the eye chart with the bad eye so extreme measures were called for. (at that time I did not know that they would give you a license,albeit grudgingly, with just one good eye. I made several tours of the premises of the DMV casually pretending to be there for some worthy purpose while having dastardly intentions. When I discovered that all of the eye charts which were on display at many locations contained the same series of letters I had one of my flashes of genius. If I could somehow capture the details of one set of the charts and could memorize them it didn't matter to which window they sent me.....there was hope after all. (Incidentally this was way before the era of digital cameras and especially cameras in telephones so I did not feel as if I could march in and just shoot 3 or 4 photos with my old flash camera. Instead I did a bit of research and slunk off with a plan.
I returned on a Sunday morning when the office was closed and the parking lot nearly empty with my best pair of binoculars and a notebook. I marched up to the door that had a huge mail slot about 18 inches of the ground, got down on my knees. shoved the binoculars thru the slot and zeroed in on the closest set of eye charts whereupon I proceeded to copy them into my notebook. When I finished I did a little dance of triumph, totally confounding a young couple and their offspring who had parked near me in the lot in order to go to a restaurant across the street......I think they were already confounded by the binoculars in the mail slot maneuver......the dance was just icing on the cake. They put their arms protectively around the kids as I passed by and watched me with grave suspicion till I got I my car and drove away. I should care ???!!! I had the secret of driving life in my notebook.
Once home I got out some poster board and made several sets of the charts and hung them tastefully around the house including places like the bathrooms. Then I realized I was only part way to heaven.........there were 3 charts in the set.....each chart had 5 lines.....they used mostly the same letters, but in different sequences. Consequently, it was my task to memorize 25 letters in at least 3 different combinations and be able to know which of the 3 charts had which sequences. OY. This was no assignment for nerds or sissies.
What could I do with
CPEZD
ZBTDF
TPEOL
FTPEO
DZFTP
so I could remember them in 3 different combinations? Obviously mnemonics was the answer.....the sillier, the better. So the first set of charts above became :
Can People Eat Zero Donuts
Zero Boys Tell Da' Facts
Tall People Eat Out Lots
Few Tent People Eat Out
Does Ziggy Fail To Pee
And it was also necessary to know which of 3 charts I was going to be looking at since they were labelled "A". "B" and "C" and the examiner would ask you to read the third line on chart "B". So I made a mnemonic of the first letters of each chart.
Chart A: Count on Ziggy To F*** Diane.
Within a month I could recite all the lines in all the charts perfectly. When the time came I performed flawlessly and passed the eye test and did NOT have to take the driving test to get a 4 year renewal. Oh frabjous day. The kicker was that I discovered that my bad eye was still able to actually read the chart, perhaps with the help of my exercise, so I was not really endangering any lives or committing some sort of fraud. In my most recent encounter with the DMV this was no longer possible and I really did not want to commit fraud, hence my noble struggle with passing the driving test while more than half blind.
Actually, I feel this recent accomplishment outshines the earlier one, but I still have a fondness for the memory of that Sunday with the binoculars and the mail slot. Am I a problem solver or what????
The New Yorker covers: September 26, 2011
2 hours ago
