Leap Year
Leap Day
Take a Flying Leap
I’ve heard talk of the first two from the TV about February 29th (Today – unless I am seriously mistaken).
The third I hear from several people each day. Today is nothing special in that regard. While the third is more personal, the first two are more interesting.
Fiction Saturday
“I want my husband dead.”
“Well, why don’t we just get to the point.”
I don’t mind flying. I even kind of like it. It’s the crashing and burning part that I’m not too keen on. That’s why I almost cringed when I saw the well dressed Redhead come through my office door. I could see she favored her right leg. One look and I could tell that she felt the same way about flying as me – from firsthand experience.
She wore long gloves that matched her tailored suit – a dark green, like shadows in a forest, but I could see burn scars by her elbows. There were reddish scars on the right side of her neck too, but her face sure wasn’t scarred, far from it.
“My name is Ginger Cream and I need your help,” she announced. She didn’t believe in long introductions.
“Please, come in,” I said. “And tell me again what you said you want. I’m not sure I heard it right.”
WELL, WE CERTAINLY GOT OUR BUTTS KICKED LAST NIGHT. We got pummeled by our first real winter snowfall of the season. There was another storm back in mid-January, but we were down in Texas for that one.
We were heading home from church yesterday when this thing blew through. It was truly nasty driving on the city streets, and on the Interstate it turned into a 50 car pileup. We got home safely, even though Dawn’s windshield wipers decided that it was a good time to commit suicide.
By the time the storm had moved on to the East we were looking at a pretty snowy world. Parts of Terre Haute got 4.5 inches of the stuff. We got about 2 – 3 inches topped off with a nice glaze of freezing rain. Such fun.
I WENT TO SEE MY DOCTOR the other day. This particular doctor is a Nutritionist. He has a bunch of letters after his name, but I don’t recall the letters “M” and “D” being among them. But he’s a nice guy.
One of my other doctors sent me to see this doctor last autumn. He was all over my case about how I needed to lose weight. I couldn’t very well argue with him about that. I’ve been hearing that same complaint since I was six years old. That was during the Korean War. (For those of you with public school educations – look it up in a book called an Encyclopedia.)
IT SEEMS THAT EVERY DAY THERE IS A NEW INVENTION OR DISCOVERY that changes the world. I recently saw that scientists have discovered proof of “Gravitational Waves” that were mathematically theorized by Albert Einstein decades ago.
While that may rattle the tea cups of the scientific world, it really doesn’t impact our daily lives. Gravitational Waves are something on a Cosmic scale that may, at some date in the future, affect how or where people live. But, so far, it doesn’t alter what I’m having for lunch today.
A WHILE BACK I WENT FOR COFFEE. Okay, that fits just about any day, I admit. On most of those days I can count on seeing at least one or more of the Fans of the Little Brown Bean slumped in their pew. The Chapel of St. Arbucks has a faithful congregation. There are those interlopers who get their coffee and leave, but I tend to ignore them. The regulars are known as “The Usual Suspects.
On the day I have in mind, a couple of days after the New Hampshire Primary, I stumbled through the door to find five of The Usual Suspects already there.
ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS I DO EACH MORNING is to turn on the TV and go to the Classic Movie Channel. I do this most days at about 7:30 AM. They tend to start a movie at 7:00 AM, so I miss the beginnings of a lot of movies. It’s kind of like being hung up at the refreshment counter behind somebody with the decision making powers of a squirrel.
YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW DEPENDENT WE ARE? Last Friday afternoon about 2:20 PM I was down at St. Arbucks typing away when my cell phone hummed and told me that I was getting a text message from my wife, the lovely and tech savvy, Dawn.
She was at home working on the Sunday sermon when, as fast as an auctioneer with a small bladder, both the internet and the land-line phone went out. Nothing. Nada. Zip.
SOME PEOPLE ARE NEVER HAPPY. For example – the State of Utah. The legislature there has passed a bill that authorizes the use of a firing squad for executions. They have done this because there have been problems with the “lethal injection” method of offing the bad guys.
WITH MY COFFEE IN THE MORNING I can handle basic communications – grunts, murmurs, and wheezes. That’s about it. I cannot deal with the intricacies of conversation with freakin’ looneys. It was things like that which contributed to my decision to leave San Francisco.
Most mornings the other worshipers at St. Arbucks can be described as a rather genial bunch who my wife calls the “Playgroup.” I think of them as “The Usual Suspects.” Our conversations are, on most days, about Sports, Movies and TV, etc, etc, anything but politics. If someone tries to bring up political topics I will pipe in with, “How about those Cubbies?” That usually gets us back onto less volatile subjects.
The other day we were sorely tested. I was sorely tested.
A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO my wife, the lovely and thought provoking, Dawn, posted a question on Facebook that made a lot of people stop and think.
She asked for, “Songs / musical pieces that bring your to tears or grab you and won’t let go.”
That was not as easy a request as I first thought.
IT’S NOT THAT I’M NOT A ROMANTIC – I am. I blame it all on the vagaries of the calendar. Is it my fault that Valentine’s Day fell on a Sunday this year? I was perfectly satisfied with the old calendar, but back in 1582 the powers that were in Europe decided that changes had to be made – and came up with the Gregorian Calendar. I was not consulted. Some people really took umbrage with the change. Turkey held out in a significant snit until 1927. Booking a hotel room in Ankara must have been a real crapshoot.
Only marginally better was the British Empire (including the American Colonies) which clung to the older Julian Calendar until 1752. Seeing that France jumped onboard in 1582 I can speculate that the French and Indian War may have been nothing more than a severe scheduling conflict.
However…
PROOF HAS ARRIVED. Baseball Season is here. What is this proof?
The Super Bowl is over! And, strictly from a dietary point of view – I’m glad.
Let me explain.
When there is a football game on TV we find ourselves either napping away the afternoon or reaching for another slice of pizza. Not a lot of calories being burned in relation to the culinary intake.
THE EVER CURIOUS GNOME THAT I AM, it is a common thing for me to go out looking for stupidity. True, I produce enough of my own, but some days you just can’t have enough. Stupidity is like potato chips.
Using that simile – I recently bumped into a story out of England that might qualify for a car load of Pringles.
“An organization for the deaf is holding a major festival in England this summer. It’s scheduled for July, in a town called Eggington. But the police there are fighting against it, and trying to get its license revoked . . . because they’re worried it’ll be too LOUD.”
I repeat, for latecomers – this event is a festival for the DEAF. But because there is to be music at the festival, the locals are concerned that it might get out of hand.
I HAD TO GO TO THE BANK TODAY. Not everything is done by direct deposit. I get my monthly pension check from the Pacific Gas & Electric Company (rent the movie “Erin Brockovich”), and my wife gets paid with an honest to God paper check. So, once a month or so I toddle off to the bank. It was as I was driving away from the bank that a random molecule of memory bubbled to the surface. This all went down a couple of years before I retired. Let me explain.
EVERY MORNING, RAIN OR SHINE, winter or summer, when I go out for my morning coffee at St. Arbucks, the Barista asks me, “How are you today?” I usually reply with a perfunctory, “Fine,” then slouch away to find a corner to huddle in. There has to be a better way to start my initial human interactions each day.
Maybe I should answer the Barista’s question with something other than just that plain old white bread, “Fine.”
Let me think. Hmmmm…?
I WAS WANDERING THROUGH WAL-MART the other day and I was surprised at the number of people in there who looked like Hell warmed over. I’m not talking about the choice of clothing, if you could call it that, but their faces and the look in their eyes.
There is a line from an old Steppenwolf song about a man walking around, “With tombstones in his eyes,” and that’s what I was seeing in the aisles at Wal-Mart.
I FEEL LIKE I’M BEING SUCKER PUNCHED. It is early February , barely 1/3 of the way through winter, and the temperature is approaching 60 degrees. It’s like somebody is holding up a shiny object to get my attention while their other hand is curled into a fist and closing in on my blind side.
I’m not naming names or pointing in any specific direction, but, while this kind of weather in January is not unheard of, it has been a while since I’ve noticed it. Maybe it happens more frequently than I’m thinking and I’m just preoccupied with other stuff and don’t pick up on it.
I AM A BIG FAN OF WARM WEATHER. This time of year “Warm Weather” is anything above 32 degrees
Fahrenheit. If we were in July I would have to advance that number to 75 degrees–ish. But, we are where we are on the calendar and there is nothing I can do except play the hand I’ve been dealt.
Following that very short train of logic along the track I have to admit that, in contrast to the temperatures a week or so ago, today is almost beach weather. Today it is about 35F. Ten days ago it was 4F. It was so cold that I had ideas freeze in mid-air when I spoke them aloud. Not always a pretty sight.
Boy, there is a real hoo-haw going on about whether or not kids should be immunized against a number of diseases.
Down the Hall on Your Left 