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Thought for the Day

Today’s Earworm

Today’s Earworm

Musings

  • I disarmed another marital booby trap today by buying jewelry for Mother’s Day, not the reasonably priced sneakers Irish Woman asked for.
    • I don’t have much to live for, but I have more than that.
    • And yes, she’s getting the sneakers too.
  • To Irish Woman, it’s a graduation, complete with religious ceremonies, luncheons, and a graduation party.
    • To me, it’s “Good job this year, kiddo. Next year, high school, and in four years, you graduate. Now go mow something.”
  • My professional life would be a lot easier if I got problem descriptions that were better than the equivalent of “My car’s making a funny noise.”
  • My wife, genius that she is, figured out that if she made a tent over the top of the cool-weather crops out of a fine, white gauze, they would grow better and grow longer.
    • It actually works. We’re still getting lettuce, kale, and peas.
    • She also figured out that she shouldn’t let the fine mesh of the tent stretch out into the tall grass, especially when she’s in a hurry to get the lawn mowed before dark.
    • I described the resulting fine, white mesh wrapped around the blades and drive shafts of the mower as “My Big Fat Greek Wedding meets Lawnmower Man”
  • Driving a U-Haul truck through traffic in a construction zone really does wonders for the value you place in humanity. By the time I had moved a bedrooom’s worth of oak furniture from one storage facility to another, I was ready to embrace our new alien overlords, intent on the immolation of me and everyone else on this dirt ball.

Musings

  • Alternate title – Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the horse race?
  • Maybe it was the crowds, the $15 booze served in commemorative plastic cups, the $30 for a slice of microwaved pizza and a large soda, the crowds, the clouds of cigar smoke, the crowds, the echo of every alcohol-fueled assbag in five counties screaming at the top of his lungs for 8 hours under a half-mile long metal awning, the crowds, the too-damned-perky-for-human-consumption TV news reporter who just loved my Hawaiian shirt and didn’t understand why I didn’t want to be on TV, or maybe, just maybe, it was the crowds. Either way, I’ve about done with anything Derby for a few decades.
  • One thing I can say about Louisville – it’s the only place I’ve ever been that made me yearn for the simple pleasure of being in Killeen, Fayetteville, Tegucigalpa, and other garden spots across the globe.
  • In other news, our day at Churchill Downs was fun for the whole family. That is, if by ‘family’ you mean ‘Everyone who can overlay the insanity of Churchill Downs two days before the Kentucky Derby with memories of being taken there as a child and indulged shamelessly while being taught about parimutuel betting and handicapping horses by your uncle the priest.’ If that’s not your definition, then yeah, it was less than stellar for at least 1/3 of our little clan.
  • One bright spot for the day was spending time with a couple Irish Woman has known for most of her life and I’ve always considered good folks. We even got to have a nice conversations before entering the racetrack and after we walked out. Yes, we shared a box with them, and no, talking coherently was out of the question for the most part.
  • Boo seemed to enjoy himself. He’s still young enough to enjoy the simple pleasures in life, like how pretty a thoroughbred is, the dance music played at a category 2 on the Richter scale, and the strawberry-banana kabobs drizzled with white and dark chocolate that went for what used to be the cost of taking a nice young lady out for dinner and a movie.
  • I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – In any large gathering of the general public in Kentucky, you will see a lot of mutton dressed up as lamb, and a lot of lamb dressed up as a streetwalker.

Today’s Earworm

Darling, they’re playing our song….

Musings

  • I’m not saying it’s been a rough couple of weeks, but tonight when I shut the car off, the little going away message on my radio said, “You OK, bro?”
    • I’m OK, little miniature elf box. I just had to destress by driving down a country road, blasting Elvis Presley alternating with Norwegian metal, all the while screaming out lyrics with the windows down. All is well.
    • Is it bad that you have to mute your phone so you can laugh maniacally after your boss says “Hey, why don’t you take a day off?”?
  • Irish Woman made the ghastly discovery this weekend that she had purchased the wrong tomato plants. Apparently, this is cause to gnash one’s teeth and beat one’s breast. However shall we make spaghetti sauce using Big Boy tomatoes? The horror, the horror, the breakage!
  • I took her out for a lunch date on Monday to cheer her up. Apparently, Tex-Mex makes it all better.
    • Her office building happens to be about a block from mine, so when our in-office schedules coincide, we do wild and crazy things like meet for a lunchtime planning meeting.
    • I flirt by suggesting that the weekend could be best served by buying the boy a half dozen pizzas, making sure he knows to feed the animals, then disappearing for 72 hours to act like boyfriend and girlfriend.
    • Her flirtation involves pressure treated lumber, yard maintenance, and laundry.
    • “The thrill is gone…… The thrill is gone, now, baby!”
  • My trip to Texas to commune with the tribe is exactly what I needed. It even got me to write a short story I hadn’t planned to write.
  • Little black dog is slowly discovering that little white and brown dog is sick of her shit, and is also discovering that little white and brown dog outweighs her and has a longer reach.
    • By the time this is all done, little black dog is going to look like she’s gone to war. Hopefully she learns the old adage, “Don’t start shit, won’t be shit.” quickly.
  • Day after tomorrow, I’m going to be joining a few tens of thousand of my closest drunk friends at Churchill Downs for “Thurby”.
    • 20 years ago, the Friday before the Kentucky Derby, Kentucky Oaks, was the day the locals went to the track.
    • Then it got moved back to Thursday, hence “Thurby”.
    • Now, even that has gotten too popular with the out-of-towners, so the locals go to the track on 502uesday.
    • Pretty soon, all of us sentenced to a life term in the greater Lousville area will go to see horse races and drink overpriced cocktails on March 22nd between the hours of 8:17 AM and 12:25.

New Book from Holly Chism

I was fortunate enough to be a beta reader on this one, and it’s a treat. Holly is releasing the sequels to this in quick succession, but you’ll be eager to get your hands on them no matter how quickly they become available. Definitely recommended.

On Omelets, Eggs, and Statistics

Today is the First of May, which is celebrated by Communists world-wide as a day to celebrate workers and all that Communism brings them. Parades in Moscow’s Red Square, where all of the rhetoric of a peaceful people’s revolution is on display, still happen even 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Please forgive me if I don’t partake. In fact, just pass me by with the opportunity to celebrate that particular cause.

My stance on Communism, Socialism, or whatever you want to call ‘What’s yours is mine, and how dare you object to that?” comes from multiple sources.

It comes from a woman I knew growing up who escaped East Berlin a day or two before the wall went up, but her husband didn’t.

It comes from holding a friend while she cried her eyes out after her cousins were murdered in Tiananmin Square.

It comes from a Ukrainian woman who taught me Russian, whose earliest memory is of hunger and death during the Holodomor.

It comes from my Russian instructor from Moscow who remembers his father being dragged out of their apartment one cold night, and never coming back.

It comes from seeing the monuments to the people killed by Stalin’s purges sprinkled liberally across Russia.

It comes from seeing multipile countries on multiple continents where the exported terror of Communist or Socialist causes brought death, and in some cases, worse than death, to millions of people through war, famine, and a brutality that cannot be imagined unless you’ve seen its aftermath.

It comes from camps, and trains, and basement prisons, and statues to genocidal dictators, and tee shirts emblazoned with the ugly mug of a homophobic mass murderer, and to lonely graves in cold, dark forests filled with the ashes and bodies of enemies of the people.

So, spare me your platitudes about a better, kinder future through common effort and common reward. Go wave your red banner somewhere else. I’ll be here remembering the dark past of your bright future.

Today’s Earworm

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