Life is Too Complicated

A salesman came to my door today. He thinks I need an alarm system. The product and installation is totally free. He went through a 20 minute spiel about how wonderful the product is and why I would benefit from it. It also comes with the alarm that you wear around your neck, in case you fall and can’t get up. I told him that I keep my cell phone in my pocket and it would be just as easy to dial 911. He asked, "Don’t you think your safety is worth it? " I said, "I don’t know, how much does the stupid thing cost a month?"
He said, "It’s less than a dollar a day." I turned down his wonderful offer, but I enjoyed chatting with the nice young man.

All I need is one more thing around here to program. You have to program the coffeepot so the coffee is ready when you get up. I gave up on that one because I don’t get up the same time every day and the manufacturer has the coffeepot programmed to automatically go off in two hours. Why do they get to decide when to turn my coffeepot off? I wish they had kept their sticky little fingers off of it. I know how to turn the coffeepot off all by myself.

While we’re in the kitchen let me tell you about my toaster. I bought the cheapest one I could find because I don’t care about cooking bagels and those light, dark and medium settings and all that other technical stuff some of them come with. That is the slowest toaster this side of the Rockies. It takes three minutes to toast a slice of toast and there is no pop up button so you can rush it along. You just have to stand there and twiddle your thumbs until it decides it is good and ready.
I paid $6.99 at Wal-Mart for that toaster. I had to learn to put the toast down before I start anything else. Why pay $25.00 for a toaster when you can buy one at Wal-Mart for $6.99. I like that toaster.

All the clocks have to be programmed twice a year. The DVR on the TV has to be programmed. You have to program all those numbers into your telephone. You just about need some kind of engineering degree to live in your house. Do you ever get pills that you need a crowbar and a jackhammer to get the lid off of the bottle? The last time I went to the doctor and he was writing a prescription for something I told him to be sure and tell the pharmacy that I need easy to open lids because I don’t want to hire a mechanic to open my pill bottles. He looked at me funny, but I guess he really did it because I got a really easy to open bottle.

Wordless Wednesday

The Duck Story

My life is extremely dull so I don’t have anything to blog about and I sometimes wonder why I even do it. So with that said I will blog about the most exciting thing in my life at the moment. This is a picture of my front yard. These two ducks come and visit me every morning. I think they come from Randall park which is a couple miles away as the duck flies. They must wing it over here. I never see them in anybody’s yard, but mine. I thought it was because my yard is so full of weeds and wild morning glory and dandelions. It has now been sprayed and the weeds are gone, but the ducks are still coming. They peck around in the grass for awhile and then they waddle across the street to the sidewalk and waddle up the sidewalk, and if one stops to peck at something the other one stops and waits for him. Just like a cute little couple. They cross the intersection and continue on up the sidewalk.
When they get out of sight I go back to counting the flowers in the wallpaper.

It's Just a Test

Does history really repeat itself? It sure makes you wonder. Remember December 7th 1941? The general public didn’t have a clue there was any danger to Hawaii when Japan attacked. Now, 68 years later, we have North Korea talking about testing some missiles by shooting toward Hawaii.

Bewildered Bewitched and Beyond

I withdraw the Salute to the Newspaper

You cannot teach an old dog new tricks, and you cannot teach the local newspaper new tricks either. I thought having the Sunday paper discontinued would not be a big unheard of operation. I was so wrong. As you can see from my previous blogs I had quite a time making them understand what I wanted. I thought they finally understood what I meant, but apparently not because they left a paper for me today. I checked my calendar and it really is Sunday. Cora left a comment on my blog that it might happen.
Cora, you were right. What gave you the first clue?

Let me be the first to tell you, I will not call and remind them again. It’s as if they are telling me, "You have been taking a Sunday paper from us for 63 years and you are not about to stop now." Okay. If you say so, but I paid in advance and I didn’t pay for the Sunday paper. If I called they would discontinue the entire paper.
Now let me see, they must think I only want the Sunday paper and will stop it Monday through Saturday.
In that case they will hear from me again.

Way Back When

Back on the farm in 1939 nobody had any money. We got by on our good looks.
Us kids attended a little one-room schoolhouse, which we reached by walking a mile and a half. We wore out a lot of shoe leather. We didn’t have a lot of excitement going on. Until one day my older brother decided to defy the teacher by not coming in from recess when she rang the bell. He and his friend just stood out there looking stupid until she went out and spoke rather harshly to them. The little brats finally waltzed in with big chips on their shoulders and when she decided to punish them by making them sit in one of the corners, they sassed her.

That kind of action called for a butt whooping. She proceeded to perform the necessary punishment, but they soon over-powered her and took off out the door. School went on as usual, but I was highly intrigued by the thought of what was waiting for my brother when he got home. If he thought Mrs. Moser was going to whip his butt, I wonder just what he thought our daddy was going to do when he found out. I couldn’t wait to get home that night to see what happened because I was going to be the carrier of the glad tidings in case he had not heard. My brother and I were not the best of friends and I thought he had it coming.

I guess the thought of what was going to happen to him had crossed his mind as well because he didn’t go home. It seems that they had decided to live on their own. Yep, they were going to live on their own. Summer was coming and they could just live in the creeks and have fun all day and when they got hungry they could raid somebody’s garden. They reckoned they could live that way all summer. Daddy had the sheriff and all the neighbors on the lookout for them.

They pulled it off pretty well for about three days. They would be in a field traveling farther away and when they saw a car on the road they would hide on the ground. About the third day they were so hungry for some real food they couldn’t stand it any more and turned themselves in at a farmhouse. The farmer gave them something to eat and called the sheriff.

Thank God, teachers are no longer expected to use that kind of punishment on a kid. And from some of the stories I’ve heard, some teacher’s went overboard with the punishment. It’s a good thing it was stopped. Look what happened to this student in China.

Salute to the Newpaper

Salute to the Newspaper Personnel
They finally got it right

Newspaper Saga

This is June 17 and the 4th day in a row that the Newspaper people have my delivery service screwed up. This is how I reacted this morning when the paper carrier walked by and didn’t leave a paper. Monday through Saturday, Monday through Saturday, Monday through Saturday. How many thousand times do I need to say it.

Total Frustration

I haven’t blogged about this for a long time, but it’s time to complain again. This time I am not complaining about the late arrival of the paper. The Newspaper raised the cost of the paper and since I have nobody to pass my cost of living on to, I have to use some other way to compensate. So I called the newspaper office and asked what the cost would be if I just cut out the Sunday paper and she quoted the price to me. It would be exactly what I had been paying, so I told her to have the Sunday paper discontinued and deliver it Monday through Saturday. She told me she set it up that way. I wrote the instructions on the statement to discontinue the Sunday paper and payment is for Monday through Saturday, to go into effect June 8th.

On Sunday, June the 14th, they left a newspaper for me. On Monday, June 15th, I called their office and told them that I had received a Sunday paper and it was supposed to have been discontinued and I would only be getting the paper Monday through Saturday and to please let the carrier know. She said she would take care of it. On Tuesday, June 16, I did not receive a paper. I called their office and explained, as slowly as I could, that I no longer want the Sunday paper, but I want the paper Monday through Saturday. She said, "It says here that you want to receive it, Friday through Sunday, and that is why you didn’t get a paper today". I am still shaking my head over that one. Who takes a paper Friday through Sunday? I guess they make up excuses like that to cover their butts. I told her again that I want the paper Monday through Saturday and I would like to receive today’s paper. She told me it would be delivered right away. Right away, in my book, means within an hour. So I tried to cool my heels, but two hours later I still did not have a paper so I called the office again.

This time I asked," How many hours is it was going to take to drive over here with a newspaper"? He explained to the grouchy old lady that they only have one delivery person until 7 and the other one has several other errands to do as well as delivering missing papers. The paper finally arrived at 10:30. He rang my doorbell and I had a few choice words ready for him, but when I opened the door, there stood an old man, at least as old as me, anyway his hair was even whiter. He handed me the paper and I smiled sweetly and said, "Thank you".

End of story.

Innocent Until Proven Guilty

Proof that Men Have Better Friends
A woman didn't come home one night. The next morning she told her husband that she had slept over at a friend's house. The man called his wife's 10 best friends. None of them knew anything about it.
A man didn't come home one night. The next morning he told his wife that he had slept over at a friend's house. The woman called her husband's 10 best friends. Eight confirmed that he had slept over, and two said he was still there.

Born too Soon

I was born 50 years too soon. The news has reported that a ten-year-old girl is in trouble with the law because she was caught fighting with her sister. How about that!! I have an older brother that would be still be doing time for attempted manslaughter if they had such a law back then. I have another one, just younger than me, that would have been serving right along with him. He once chased me with an ax and I saved my life by reaching the outhouse. Thank goodness it had a lock on the door. Saved by the outhouse. I can’t say enough for outhouses.
The older brother once chased me all over the farm with a live rattlesnake. He said it was a rattlesnake and I didn’t waste any extra time arguing the point with him. He finally became so exhausted he gave up. With all that experience it’s no wonder that I won every foot race I ever ran.
Another time he tried to drown me by holding my head under the spout of the pump and pumping water on me. I have a little sister that can probably tell some very similar stories of her own.

A Cute Kid

This was last year. It didn't take him long to
find a pretty girl to talk to.

The little red head is now 3 so watch out girls !!


His name is Jesse(he looks like he could be related to Reba McIntyre)

His mother is Brandi and his Great Grandma is my
sister, Carol.
They are Okies and his mother calls us Washies.

The Long Road Home

While living in Colorado during the depression era, we lived in a town called Center. We only lived there one winter. The house was two-stories with a couple rooms upstairs, which we didn’t use. We were only planning to be there through the winter and would be taking off toward Oklahoma when our ship came in. There were two bedrooms, but the entire family slept in the same bedroom. Two beds, one for parents and one for kids. Every night in the middle of the night the bedroom door to the other bedroom would come creeping open. I slept through the door opening episodes, but I always heard plenty about it the next day. Our aunt was visiting and when she heard about it, she pulled and tugged on the dresser until she got it parked in front of the door that always came open in the night. She made a statement that if the door came open that night she would eat her hat. By golly, she didn’t have to eat her hat, but it angered the ghost. They began to make noise every night. It was a hair raising, ear splitting creepy noise that petrified everybody. Nobody would go upstairs and investigate to see what the noise could possible be coming from. Our ship never came in and we never found the source of the noisemaker, but it didn’t take us long to vacate the place. As soon as we could afford a tank of gas. We headed back to the hills of Oklahoma

Nothing Much

Two old men and a boy fishing
This was taken somewhere between here and Oklahoma
I'm pretty sure it wasn't taken in Oklahoma.

What an assortment of mail I receive. Everybody seems to be desperate to make more money these days. Just received my notice from the daily Newspaper and they jumped the rate’s up. I called and found out that I can discontinue the Sunday paper and pay the same as I have been paying. I can live without the Sunday paper. I may even cancel the Monday through Saturday. You can see the entire thing on the evening news.
I don’t know how I got on everybody’s mailing list. Two or more catalogs every week and I seldom order anything. Sometimes they even threaten me with a warning that this will be the last catalog I will receive if I do not place an order. They are just bluffing because I haven’t missed one yet. There is no shortage of ads for everything from A to Z.
I just paid off a credit card. I mean in full. That is a beautiful feeling. They are the jerks that were rude to me. One time I made my payment so early that they applied it to the past month instead of the month coming up. Then they charged me a $39.00 for a late payment because they had applied the payment to the wrong month. I blogged about it at the time. They did credit the $39.00 back to me, but they were rude so I doubled up my payments and got the sucker paid off. I don’t do business with people that are rude to me. Guess I showed them.
Nothing exciting going on. Just another boring Saturday.
Till next time

Another Day

I ventured out today and visited the Wal-Mart. I went at 8 AM in order to avoid the rush in case there was one. I hate grocery shopping. The ad’s come out on Wednesday and every store has a bargain item or two. These stores are scattered all over town. Gas is coming up again, so it’s hardly worth driving all over town trying to find a bargain. May as well spend it all in the same store and save your gas. I hate coupons even more. Why can’t they just put it on sale and forget those senseless coupons. There must be some sound reasoning there somewhere, but I fail to see what it is. How many of you love rebates? Isn’t that just the most fun thing in the world to go to all that trouble and then maybe you’ll get it and maybe you won’t. I finally bought a few petunia plants to put in the pot on the patio. I am so glad to get back to normal life again after that bout with the ailing knee. I don’t have another doctor appointment until the end of September. As you can see there is nothing going in my life I’m just trying out for the Most Boring Person Award.
Till next time.

Dog Days and Random Pictures

These cousins were meeting each other for the first time.

(I think they must be about 3rd cousins)

My Nephew, Daryl and his dog, Buddy.
Buddy and others


Buddy and more legs

This is a picture of my Granddog, Sadie. We just had a smiling lesson. She loves to sit in my lap. She still thinks she’s is a baby and likes to be rocked.
She is part Pomeranian and as restless as a leaf in a breeze. I have a lot of Granddogs. I think everybody in the family has a dog or two.