On The 3.5th Day Before Christmas My Uncle Said To Me

Online chat between Ernest and His Niece M


Niece M - is excited there is only 4 days until Christmas :)!!!

Uncle E - Isn't it closer to 3.5 days?

Niece M - I know!! But if I did it that way I would have to change it like every hour and I just dont think I am willing to do that :) So I will stick to the rounded number! :)

Uncle E - I agree you should stick with "rounded numbers" anD my answer is mUCh more 'round', just look: 4 versus 3.5 - see how straight the '4' looks? How many round parts ->ZERO!!! Now look at my numero: 3.5 - its got all kindza roundies, two on the 3, the "." is completely round and the "five" - has one, so that is 2+1+1 equals "four" - notice how I spelled out MY four so that it would be rounded, it has 4 roundie parts. And to think I have a minor in math. My surely dead-by-now-cause-he-was-ancient-back-then first college calculus professor is probably rolling over in his grave right now.

Niece M - haha i dont even know what to say to that!!!

Oh, Christmas Two-ree

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At the morning meeting a few days ago the supervisor of one of the maintenance groups said, "later today we'll be flipping a coin to see whether the plant Christmas tree gets installed downtown at the main corporate office OR stays here at the plant"

...... so when the meeting was almost over a few minutes later, there was the usual question by the meeting leader for any other items. I raised my hand and taking a cue from King Solomon, said,

"I think we should just cut the Christmas tree in half and keep the smaller ^top portion that still looks
(a few people now begin to giggle)
like a Christmas tree and let the folks downtown have the goofy looking _bottom portion
(more people smiling, giggling even harder, just barely contained)

THEN someone on the west side of the room immediately speaks up and says, "all in favor of Ernie's idea, raise your right hand!" and of course the entire room shot their hands in the air with laughter and said "aye".


Invention Link: The Next Invention in My Blog

I Name and Rename Two Teenage Girls at the Groc Store

Groc store shopping is one of my favorite things. The chemist in me loves to discover new things to cook and to taste, that Martha S side of me. I also enjoy my subset of friends, mainly women, who work there. My Groc Store Group. I never know who is going to be there; the mystery of which miss or missus I might meet that day.

About a month ago I was visiting two of my young teenage feminine friends, groc store checkers, a quiet one and a never very quiet one, short and tall respectfully. I suddenly gave them male sounding nicknames without warning. 'P???' and 'R?p???'. Little did I realize that they would actually begin calling themselves that. (The '?'s are hiding the real letters – just wait, there's more, and a reason for the mystery)

The Sunday before Thanksgiving my mother was in town and we made a quick trip to the store and I was hoping that I wouldn't run into these girls, because, I told my mother, I had given them nick names AND my fifty year old brain had forgot what the names were! I did say "Hi" to at least 14 people I knew during our short groc visit, which is about 1/10 of 1 percent of the 14,302 population of Borger. Luckily, 'P???' and 'R?p???' were not there.

The next visit to the store a few days later I saw the short, quiet, very tired 'P???' when I first came in and said "Hi" and a little more, briefly to her as she was busy checking out a customer. Then I heard the tall-not-so-quiet 'R?p???' a few aisles away, so I unsuccessfully tried to sneak up on her. Just as soon as I said "Hi", she said, "Did you see 'Pete' when you came in the store? She's working down there" -> pointing west. Ah, I suddenly remembered, 'Pete' and 'Repeat'.

So earlier today driving home from yet another groc store visit I decided to rename them, only I haven't told them just yet. I will have to catch together some time to make my proclamation. I decided to go with something a little more feminine and Italian sounding, so I chose 'Pita' and 'Repita'. (I have no idea if 'pita' is an Italian word. It just needs to sound Italian.)

Marked for Life

I am sitting on an I-beam 30 stories above much lower, Lower Manhattan in the midst of a cage of buildings rising around me in my early 30's eating my lunchtime poultry based deli sandwich. My fellow steel worker and best friend Mark and I are enjoying the spring day, watching bits of my flaky chicken leave my fingers as I declare with flair, "Fly, My Little Bits of Chicken®, fly!" in a wicked witch voice from The Wizard of Oz. We watch the flaky bird bits reach their floating version of terminal velocity.

I suddenly become curious of Mark's ethnic origins and heritage. He answers, "My parents were a dangerous combination of Mohawk Indians (well known for their balance and working high steel) and hippies. They tried very hard to be 100% of each and that's why I ended up with such a weird name"

I questioned, "Well, 'Mark' doesn't sound very weird or very Indian to me". He filled in by saying that Mark was only a piece of his middle name. On the way to the hospital to be born, they didn't make it in time so his father pulled the car over to a roadside park. So immediately after he was born, his father looked around to see what object to name his son after, and hence the name 'Historical Marker'.

I replied, "That is weird, even for hippies, and yet follows an Indian tradition."

"I do think I fared better than my sister Tab though"

"I don't think that sounds very Indian or weird"

"Its because it is just the first piece of my twin sister's middle name, 'Picnic Table'"

The Evolution of My Old and New Pen(cil) Names

The Old

Dr. Seuss was the pen name of Theodor Seuss Geisel, a beloved American cartoonist and writer. A pen name is something you can hide behind if you wish to publish anonymously or in his case, semi-anonymously. My first pen name was a play on the single word 'anonymous' busted apart into 'A. Nona Mousse', which I thought was interesting considering it had a feminine middle part and there was someone in my department at work with the same rare name as one of the three pieces. And when I wanted to attribute a quote at the bottom of my e-mails to one of my children, I would use 'A. Nona Mousse Jr'. Only that made it even more confusing as I would not distinguish between the two children, they both had the same pen name.

The New

One day at work I wanted a new name to go with a silly piece of Seuss-like poetry, and I created the pen name "Dr Suez", and I thought, hmm, that's cool. That has slowly changed through the following path of evolution:

Dr Suez
Dr Sue Sez - another feminine name?
Dr Soo Sez - no, already have one feminine pen name, lets sound a little more Oriental, which I am not, adds a bit of con^fu_sion.
Dr Sioux Sez - Oh! Lets go with a piece of my Dakota heritage even though I am not Indian, at least I don't think so, and surely not Sioux. No reference to the Johnny Cash song, that was 'A Boy Named Sue'
Dr Sioux Says - ah, yes, I like that, it sounds like a sentence, Dr Sioux is making a proclamation.......

(Do you shun vowel e-vol-u-tion? You do?!?!?)

Squirrel Assassins

I have evidence that squirrels are trying to kill my dog.

a) I have no nut trees on my property.

b) Whole pecans are showing up in my back yard right under the "Squirrel Monorail" furnished by utility companies.

c) Squirrels sit on the SquirMono and see their deadly adversary (Cooper) jumping up and down barking and snarling and have watched his behavior to learn that he is a true omnivore - one squirrel told the others at an emergency local squirrel session, "I've seen him, he tries to eat basketballs and empty coffee cans and hippos - he must be 'elimi-nut-ed', do I see a show of tails wagging in agreement?",

A flurry of furry fans the meeting room,

"do I have a volunteer assassin?"

--silence--

"what a bunch of chickens"; exclaims the leader, "guess we'll have to get outside help for this job"

Photo Notes: The second photograph, of the squirrel with the nut in his mouth, was taken right by the backyard gate that is in the first photograph. There was no editing or "Photo-Shop-ing" of the photographs except for cropping. The second photograph was taken several weeks after I wrote the original story.

Yesterday’s MISTS-ery and Assassination Explained (It was just me messing around)

When I was younger I proved that the advertising slogan for the margarine product

" Everything's Better With Blue Bonnet On It! ™"

was not true.

a) Babies – Proof: 17 mad mothers at a day care center at the end of the day

b) Iced Tea – Proof: Numerous disgruntled customers at the restaurant that I only worked at for 3 hours mainly to do this experiment

c) The brakes on my sister's bicycle – Proof: The mysteriously dented fender of our car and dented forehead of sister. Don't tell anyone in my family about this.

Yesterday I finally got my MISTS (Make It Seem Time Stopped) machine to work. So if the day seemed kinda goofy for 7 minutes at 3:15 PM, it was just me. I also pushed the "Repeat" button, so today's tomorrow will seem like yesterday from now on, but only for 7 minutes which will feel actually like nothing really happened at all again.

Someone yesterday asked me 'what is the largest thing you've ever had thrown at you?'

Answer: Four E's - Once I was falling off from a building in Shattuck Oklahoma during a roofing job at approximately age 21, so for several milliseconds, 'The Entire Earth Except for Ernest'.

This is the most important question that someone asked me the other day: Why does your dog not like it when you blow on his face but wants to stick his nose out the window when traveling in the car?

Answer: Your dog obviously prefers carbon monoxide, diesel fumes, and ozone in preference to what on earth must be wrong with your mouth.

Second most important question: How important does a person need to be before their death is considered an assassination instead of a regular murder?

Answer: The main clues are A) notice that there are 2 "ass", and not just one, embedded in the word from which you can draw your own conclusion and then B) "nation" at the end which means that the death has to affect the entire country. Oh, I almost forgot C) the "I" in the middle is for conspiracy theorists who think that "I" might know what really happened or more importantly who didn't really die but just wanted to secretly sneak out of the country with lotza money and sit on a beach somewhere, quietly soaking up the rays and eating giant shrimp.

(Now I hope no one important, "A.A.", dies immediately after "I" post this, and then the whole nation gets the notion that I was in on it, especially if it seems to occur at 3:16 PM CST. Now, where did I put my emergency suitcase, tub of Blue Bonnet and fake beard?)

Invention Link: The Next Invention in My Blog

My German Slept-herd

I have trained my dog to do something very useful. Herd sleep. Sheep? No, sleep. I gave him a verbal request to get my wife out of bed to make us breakfast. This is more proof that he has learned the word 'bacon'. He not only went by himself and made his usual request "noises", but got his "nose" in on the action too, getting up on the bed trying to push my wife out of bed. I had been sick for several days with no end in sight, so I needed the pampering and he came to my, or rather, our rescue on cue. The wifey came through the living room grinning and asking, "Did you tell him to come get me out of bed ?!?!? I've never had him do that before. He was up there pushing me out of bed".

Now, I would only ever ask my dog to do something that I would do myself. I asked him to get my wife out of bed to make us breakfast. Licking her on the face was his idea, and it obviously worked.