It is time once more for

• No one notices or cares if you have hair growing in odd places as you grow older.

• You can scratch any itch, even if it involves rather interesting locations, without comment. You can do it anytime, anywhere, and with any amount of gusto and no one will say a word.

• When the weather is miserable, you can lay around inside the house all day without guilt.

• You never get in trouble for rubbing against other people. You can even put your head in their lap and no one will complain.

• You can always be excited to see the people you love. Even if you last saw them only two minutes ago, it is perfectly acceptable to go wild when you see them again.

Time once again for

• The 90 year old gentleman that was visiting at the nursing home. He just came to visit since it meant so much to his late wife when she was there when people came to visit. From what the staff said, he visits at least once a week and asks who hasn’t had visitors to make sure he visits them. And he has been doing it for years now. (And a spry gent he was, too. He still drives truck to Omaha (~400 miles) and back at least twice a week because, as he put it, “… sitting in the house doing nothing would kill me.”)

• The young mother with a little one in a stroller and a toddler in hand who stopped to ask the elderly gentleman carrying a bag of groceries as he wobbled down the sidewalk if he needed a hand. As busy as she was, she still thought of the needs of others and offered to help.

• The young man who pushed and talked to his young brother on the swing set for the entire two hours I was walking in the park. From the bits of conversation I overheard, he was home on leave after boot camp and had missed his little brother and vice verse.

• The squirrel that likes to sit in front of the parlor window at the nursing home and entertain one and all with his (or her) amusing antics. Much better entertainment than TV. (Technically not a person, but an honorary one for the nonce.)

• The lady of indeterminate age who was trying desperately to voice command train her Basset Hound in the park. (Our previous dog was a Basset and they are notorious for not listening.) This one didn’t listen or obey, but the lady remained calm and was so obviously loving to her dog that you couldn’t help but root for her. Maybe she’ll get lucky some year.

Time to get back to the ailing computer that is trying to give up the ghost tonight. I hope it will survive!

Once more the muse of odd things is sitting on my keyboard, threatening me with total giddiness unless I a complete a Friday High Five post. Given my undying fear of things giddy, the fact that my first meeting started at 7:30am and the last finished at 8:40pm, that today was the day we moved Mom from the hospital to the nursing home, and other oddities, here is a completely lame

• Exhumation orders. I see about four of these a year asking that a body can be exhumed from the city cemetery. One doesn’t want to look too closely since some actually list the reason they want to exhume. Reasons like “I want to sell the plot to XYZ for a lot of money. The north 40 pasture is good enough for dad.” It’s even worse when you know the applicant and recognize the reason as truthful. The only interesting ones come from the coroner every 5 years or so. 

• Cemetery deeds. Do you really want to know who is planning on being buried where? Do you really care?

• Columbarium deeds. See above. Not only that, some days there are 50+ to be signed after the council meeting. Columbarium spaces are a hot commodity.

• FAA Airport Funding Acceptances. Three hundred pages of boilerplate requiring your notarized signature 27 times throughout the document. And you get to sign just as many times when certifying the project has been completed.

• Old Hire Fire Pension Fund Board Notes. This board only meets when one of the beneficiaries dies and we need to assign survivors rights. The board consists of one beneficiary, the city clerk, and the mayor. Last I checked , there were less than 8 beneficiaries and survivors in the plan. I have to hold  a meeting next week to assign the survivors benefits to the widow of the beneficiary who was sitting on the board. So it will be the city clerk and myself. Pretty much guarantees any passing vote will be unanimous.

Hopefully, a better five will present itself later. Off to the land of nod.

Time once more for Friday High Five hosted by Angela.  

• Spending hours discussing who is sweet on whom or who is sleeping with whom does not inspire that tittering interest it once did.

• You prefer music that doesn’t sound like a bull moose playing the accordion while a herd of elk are being strangled in the background. Dead and dying rabbits, OK, but the tortured elk are just a bit too much.

• Your friends say “Huh? What’d you say?” a lot unless you speak up. Which leads to the classic faux pas of screaming loudly into sudden silence: “So how’s the rash on that certain part of your male anatomy doing?” Suddenly everyone has perfect hearing (or so it seems).

• You think longingly of bed after only 18 hours of hard labor. Getting off work, hitting the party and then just going straight to work for another day without sleep seems more than a bit like visiting Hades.

• You have lost all fear of public speaking, no matter how small, large, friendly, or angry the audience. (You figure that by now you have already embarrassed yourself in every way possible. The challenge now is finding creative new ways of attaining embarrassment. After the time you drunkenly recited the Beer Prayer, nude, from the second story balcony, to an audience of thousands, everything else is simply anti-climatic.)

For those who don’t know the Beer Prayer:

The Beer Prayer

(This version from Ted Guhl)


Now head on over linky at Angela‘s and read on.

Once again it is time for Friday High Five courtesy of Angela.

• The idiot who persists in calling here showing the (illegal) fake caller id of  1-558-4 so I can’t file a report with the FCC. Never anyone on the other end and they never leave a message either. Another telemarketeer gone bad.

• The lady with three dogs who wanted to shirk poop patrol in the park today. We (the city) dispense poop cleanup bags for free in several locations in the park and yet this dipstick let her dogs poop and started to walk off. It *was* kind of amusing to watch her face when I asked if she hadn’t forgot something. She started to huff no rather indignantly and then recognized me; suddenly she decided to perform poop patrol. {*grin*} I didn’t have the heart to let on that I meant the glove she had dropped on the ground.

• The young gentleman who answered his mothers phone and promised to give her the message that yes I would indeed once more read at the elementary school as part of Monday’s Read Across America, the celebration of Dr. Seuss’ birthday. Today, more than a week later, his mom called to see what happened and why I wasn’t reading this year. Fortunately, all will end well and I’ll be there Monday. (Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) is a fellow alumni of Dartmouth College and someone I actually met in the flesh while in college. I love reading Dr. Seuss to a class of kids!)

• The person walking in front of me at Wally World last night with pants riding so low that all were involuntarily exposed to her nether regions. I really didn’t need to know what style (thong) and color (bright red) of underwear she was wearing. I was deeply afraid that she would turn around and face me and that I would learn that she had piercings in a rather private area. They were *that* low. I just wanted to buy my milk and leave without being scared forever by that sight. This would have been much preferable:

• The person who decided that early in the morning was a good time to park in the alley behind the house and carry on a loud conversation with himself while the radio blared. I suspect it was my nearly deaf neighbor, so maybe I can forgive this transgression. But it sure sounded and felt a bit like this:

So what’s on your list for today?