I Should Have Stopped At Fourteen

Oh no! It's 4:50 AM and there is a tiny piece of music running repeating through my head from some movie or teleBision show and I can't seem to remember what it goes to .... I wasn't even trying for anything.

I am going to name this condition "I'll Hum In Error A Show Tune"

I have it narrowed down to one in about 3,247 movies.

(Pause as I dig through my DVD's for the answer after being unable to find it on iTunes)

Its from the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire, chapter 19 on my DVD. Its the alternating merged practice scenes where it switches back and forth rapidly between Eric and Harold working with their trainers, and then the music ends just as Harold runs through the finish line and Mr Sam Mussabini clicks his stopwatch.

(An hour later) I actuaLLy figured it out several minutes ago, but then I had to spend time finding a pair of double A batteries for the Blu Ray player remote control device, to confirm it and figure out eXactly how far into the movie the scene was located.

I probably should not have watched this movie 20+ times. I should have stopped at 14.

A Puzzling Christmas Present

My children liked puzzles and so every year I would try to find them slightly more difficult puzzles to push their minds.

One year I was groc shopping and saw a can of diced tomatoes, and I thought, "Hmm, I wonder if they could do it?" - and sure enough they were able to reassemble a tomato, weLL, the 93 percent of the tomato that actuaLLy made it into the single can.

NeXt year's puzzle took them a little bit longer - I mixed two cans of diced tomatoes.

Pineapple, Size Seven, Please

Pineapple Plantation News: Several weeks ago I discovered a new pineapple plant growing from the side near the base of my oldest pineapple plant, the one I harvested a fruit from in August. Today I discovered a second plant growing from the other side, so now the size of my plantation is 7 plants! I am going to definitely repot this trio into a larger container. 

The Lost McRib

[Day Two of McRib Hunting Season]

I decide to do an eXperiment with a McRib sandwich. I don't like the giant pieces of white onion that come with the sandwich, so I decide to swap them with diced purple onions from my own kitchen.

I take my diced purple onions to McDonalds and order a McRib with no onions, but I teLL them that I want the usual pickes.

The process of getting a speciaLLy made McRib with less on it takes over twice as long as usual. But I survive.

I open it up at my table and the onions are stiLL on it like normal, BUT the pickles are not on the sandwich.

So I take it back to the ordering counter and eXplain the situation to my clerk. She takes it back to the kitchen area and eXplains what needs to be done. The tiny short chef appears confused and starts to walk away from me, but then someone says something to her and she throws my incorrect McRib sandwich in the TRASH can! My heart stops and sinks at the tragic loss.

So they give me the new improved pickled sandwich, this time a little faster than before. I get to my table and open it up - yes, the pickles are there, two of them, no onions, BUT this time there is only a tiny amount of BBQ sauce.

So I return the sandwich to the ordering counter and beg them to not throw away my precious McRib this time, but only add some BBQ sauce. So about 5 people gather around a dipping vat as my meat is twirled in a BBQ bath. One person twirling my meat while four watch. Five - if you include me. The sides of the BBQ bath are transparent so I can see it rotated about six times.

Yea! I finaLLy get my McRib to the table so I can put the purple onions on it. The only problem is they put so much sauce on the sandwich that probably 1/3 of my tiny onions ran away with the eXcessive sauce.

Badder luck neXt time.

Future Experiment: Jalapeño Peppers on a McRib

The Hunt for Something I Read in October

I should probably stop playing Sudoku.

I just woke up from a dream where I am solving Sudoku puzzles verbaLLy, but I am a different person, Michael Weatherly, the actor from the teleBision show NCIS who is the character named Anthony DiNozzo. So I am DiNozzo doing Sudoku instead of fighting military crime, and I am arguing with someone about whether I should help my enemies with their Sudoku problems, and I am against helping them.

Suddenly I am no longer DiNozzo, but now I am the tiny old cranky funny lady from the spin-off series, NCIS: Los Angeles, an actress named Linda Hunt who plays Henrietta Lange. And Henrietta, (the new now me), must have been the one that DiNozzo was arguing with about Sudoku, because she says, "Well, I always help my enemies with their Sudoku puzzles!", and takes a sip from her cup of tea.

Then I woke up.

The worst part of this is that I woke up and my left shoulder stiLL hurts.

And I wasn't even playing Sudoku right before I feLL asleep, I had been studying about bone marrow transplants. So this is the only logical eXplanation I have to offer: don't study bone marrow transplants before taking a nap.

So I grab the telephone book and turn to the M section.

I walk by my wife in the livingroom and she asks, "Who are you caLLing?"

I say, "McDonalds"

She questions, "Why, did they do something wrong?!?!?"

"No, I'm caLLing to get you a job there."

She laughs and says, "NO! You can have a job there!"

I caLL McDonalds and ask them if their store in my town is currently seLLing McRibs. But it is noisy on his end and I have to repeat my question. I said, "Did you say 'Yes'?" and he responds, "Yes", and I echo his yes message.

And my wife just a few feet away asks, "Do they have McRibs?"

I say, "Honey, I said yes twice."

Now I wonder if my wife wiLL faLL back asleep and have dreams about McRibs. I s'ppose that is better than her dreaming about Tony DiNozzo.

Now I am hungry.

(several minutes later)

My wife walks into the kitchen.

I ask her, "WiLL you go to McDonalds and get me a McRib?"

She laughs and says, "You want ME to go to McDonalds and get you a McRib?"

I answer, "No, I want two of them. No french fries."

She walks away from me and says, "Does the back of my head (hair) look okay where I slept on it?"

Without looking I say, "It looks fine."

She responds with a snort, "You didn't even look!"

So she backs up to me and I lightly run my fingers through her hair, s'pposedly making an (hah!) improvement. I make positive affirmations similar to when I am teLLing Cooper how good a dog he is.

She responds, "I'm not Cooper!!!" and begins to laugh but then starts coughing and not so much laughing. So my humor delayed getting my McRibs by a few moments.

She puts on her jacket, "So, two McRibs, no fries, no drink? ... Sorry, Cooper, you don't get anything since you didn't eat your breakfast."

I respond "Yes" and she is out the door.


We eat.

A half hour passes by.

My wife is antagonizing Cooper trying to take away his dog biscuit, its a game they often play.

My wife says that she is leaving to go shop at a store named Maurice's. She asks me if there is anything she can get me while she is gone.

I respond, "Could you get me another McRib?"

She responds with a shocked voice, imagine an unusually loud whisper, "Are you kidding me?!?!?"

I say, "Yes."

Goodnight

December 14th, 2012

I must sleep now,
there is too much sadness today,
things private and public.

The Insanity of Albert Ine-stine

Albert Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So I tried flipping a coin and for the longest time (17,453 tries) I got just heads and tails. But then the 17,454th time it landed on it's side and stayed there.

I published the first paragraph in Facebook and I wonder how many of my friends think I reaLLy flipped a coin 17,454 times. Of course the people who reaLLy know me would have realized that I would have built a huge bank of multiple coin flipping machines or robots and then I would have used video surveillence with optical scanning, looking for something besides heads or tails, aLL of it completely automated with a reporting system that sent me an email complete with the photo of the coin on its side.

And then the winning robot would have informed the other robots that they could stop. Then the losing robots would give their coins to the winning robot, after examining the photographic evidence. And that is basicaLLy how the Roman Empire got started.

Very Pretty

What the kids are saying: It is what it is

What history teachers have been saying: It was what it was

What Australians are saying: Wallabies will always be wallabies

I was having a conversation with my wife about how the word 'pretty' is used quite heavily in our part of the world to mean 'very'. She said that she doesn't hardly ever use the word very. Then she rattled off several eXamples of pretty as very.

... pretty stupid ...
... pretty dumb ...
... pretty long ...

My favorite?

... pretty ugly ...

T: "Can you take $94.11 away from $191.52?"
E: "Yes."


I woke up from a veRy vivid dream that left me in a state of eXtreme agitation. In the dream I had a kitchen drawer that was a couple inches high, but because it was the top drawer there was a higher internal dimension, so there was a larger cooking pan trapped in the drawer that I couldn't get out. So now I reaLLy need to go back to sleep to figure out how to tear the cabinet apart to rescue this trapped pan. I just hope nothing bad has happened to the pan since then, because it was yesterday morning that I had this dream, not today. It would be terrible to go back to the dream to find out that someone else had solved the problem and then not showed me how, or worse yet left me with a kitchen drawer to repair. I have better things to do in my dreams than repair other people's destruction of my kitchen drawers.

Pie Are Shared, Cornbread Are Square

My favorite attorney sent this joke to me in Facebook:

Not sure why, but I saw this joke and thought of you..

After a minor mathematical error on a routine report, a worker's boss tried to belittle him in front of his peers. 

Angrily she asked, "If you had 4 Apple Pies and I asked for one, how many would you have left?" 

Quickly he replied, "If it was you who asked, I'd still have 4."

My Responses: Lovely. Absolutely wonder-fuLL. Pie are squared, not pie are shared. [Now I have an {un}eXplained desire to drive aLL the way to To-n-To to get a fried cherry pie, why?]

Glossory For Non-Locals: To-n-To is an abbreviation for the convenience store chain Toot-N-Totum, my local spot for fried cherry pies, cappuccino, and diesel.

My Synthetic Sound World

I have been adding new sound toys to my life lately. I have had a Yamaha keyboard for quite sometime, but I haven't been playing it. But I got a Korg Kaossilator Pro synthesizer and fed the Yamaha into it, and use my Bose NR headphones. Then I found two fabulous iPad apps that emulate real Korg devices, the MS-20 monophonic analog synthesizer and the Electribe synthesizer. So now I am making lotza strange sounds and having fun. The two iPad apps were 10 and 15 dollars, and the Kaossilator plus cables and tax was around 500 dollars.

Driving Miss Crazy

My most recent Facebook Status (and almost totaLLy untrue story)

I came to a stop at a 4 way intersection with 3 other vehicles at nearly the same moment. I had wanted to go straight but aLL three other vehicles simultaneously turned right, so I did too. It just felt like the right thing to do.

From my favorite attorney: Steer pressure?

My Response: You are 50 percent correct. The other 50 is peer stress-ure.