This requires some background: back for their 50th wedding anniversary my parents went over to the Old Country so my Dad could get into the church records and research some things he couldn’t do by remote control through cousins. This gave my wife and I some concern to say the least mostly because of it being such a long time cooped up in an airplane. And with mother being less than stable in the best of situations ------- something we worried about quite a bit.
Now all this was pre 9/11 when you could actually go with someone basically to the gate at the airport and everything so we did. And before they boarded for the first leg to Islip and from there to Slovakia I asked the one attendant if I could talk to one of the crew. No problem! So I let her know the rough situation and asked her to pass word on to a member of the overseas crew. She did and they did well enough that a member of that crew called me from Slovakia to let me know everything was fine.
How did I describe the situation? “One of the last times my Dad was in an airplane the Japanese shot him down and the last time mother was on in airplane was never. I thought someone should know.”
Well, one of the few things I managed to rescue was this paper tube that had been mailed to Dad sometime in the 80s. The name on it rung a bell but I couldn’t quite place it and my brother kept checking his watch so I snagged it and went. Today I got to open it and I found three enlargements of three different pictures - the plane Dad was in, the battle damage, and the huge cloud of dust on the edge of a fair sized Chinese village where it crashed. I remember the story: “The pilot gave us the chance to bail out but there was no way I was getting out of even a broken bomber with nothing but a giant hanky to hold on to”. The pilot, he, and another of the crew rode it in. He knew there were pictures (one of the other planes used a bomb/gun camera or something to document everything) but I never knew he had tracked them down let alone gotten good prints. This is all pre-internet when stuff like that was hard to do! I may just have them framed as big as they are but I already got a Hell of a laugh seeing them and having the memory. Good memories of when we were dysfunctional but still a fairly happy family. Making me a fairly happy Mumper.
So the pre-highjack question of the week is: “One of the last times my Dad was in an airplane the Japanese shot him down and the last time mother was in an airplane was never. I thought you should know.”
What is one of the most creative descriptions you have come up with and why?
OK - I wasn’t consciously working on this, but I just used one.
One of my dogs is Bernese Mountain Dog, also affectionately known as a Swissie. Swissies will lick anything for hours. They’ve been known to lick holes through walls, or floors. It’s just a breed trait, for some unknown reason. Our dog likes to sit next to one of us, and if we don’t stop him, he will lick us for hours too. My daughter was telling me that, “Ohhhh, it just means that he loves us.” Maybe it does. The kids let him do it. I think they feel sorry for him. My daughter wanted to know why I stopped him when he tried to do it to me.
I just told my daughter that, “If I don’t stop him, he’ll just keep licking me until I feel like I’ve got an extra layer of slime on my arm, like a frog.”*
He’s a great dog, but, ugh.
*Which is true by the way, and not a great feeling. Just imagine a thick layer of dog saliva on your arm. Yuck.
I shall cogitate on the OP question - it’s too early to come up with a real answer right now.
I did have a thought this morning as I was showering - one of the advantages of being married is having someone who can look at something you can’t see without major contortions or multiple mirrors. What’s your choice otherwise? Ask a neighbor? A coworker? Go to the doctor just to make sure that thing you felt but can’t see is not cancer?
Actually, since the first is the OP, you were fourth response, which makes me the Fifth [del] of Bethoven[/del] of vodka, which I apparently need to buy. Sunny, there wasn’t enough to taste it, just enough to say there was some in there. Ruble, can you take a pic of them & post it? Awesome find!
Great story, ruble! I’d also love to see the pics if you can post them somewhere.
Most of my descriptions are used for the idiot motorists I have to put up with on the trip to and from my mum’s place. It’s a 70 mile drive each way, using three motorways (two of them are the largest and busiest in the country) so that’s plenty of opportunities for it. I think my last best one was driving home in the dark and having “some braindead idiot right up my chuff with enough lights to rival a north sea oil rig with a lighthouse on top”. Said vehicle was inches away from the back of my car with headllights, side lights and fog lamps all blazing…and the headlights were on full beam as well. Granted, that section of the motorway has no lights, but even that is no excuse for driving a car so well-illuminated it could act as a beacon in a shipping lane. Pleased, I was not.
In other news, today I moved back to my old desk (I haven’t sat here for 14 months) as my secondment has one week to go and I thought it would be much more useful for my replacement to sit by the team manager. So I’m back in my favourite old seat and it’s two weeks until I go on holiday too so today is looking quite good.
Best one I remember using wasn’t my own, unfortunately. Stole it from Douglas Adams.
Many years ago, between my time in high school and college, I spent a year playing slacker up in Juneau, Alaska. Ended up working at this chain department store called Fred Meyer’s, and one day a customer came in asking for the senior manager. I said “the guy you’re probably looking for is [XXX]”, and she asked what he looked like.
“His face is the color of an apple and the texture of an orange,” I replied.
Her face lit up. “That’s the guy, and that’s a perfect description!”
I’m sure I’ve come up with an original effort at some point but I just can’t remember anything offhand.
Good Mornin’ Y’all! Up and caffeinatin’. YAWN ‘Tis 61 Amruukin out and cloudy with a predicted high of 85 and mostly N.O.S. for the day though we could get a stray tstorm. Then again, we pretty much always have a chance of a stray tstorm durin’ Spring, Summer, and Fall. I need to do some cave spiffin’ today as well as boil up chikin to make chikin sallit. I promised to do chikin sallit sammiches for the Wednesday Lenten supper over to the church house. The reason I said I’d do so, I attribute to a momentary lapse in sanity. Oh, I can now type on pdf forms. I figured out my problem. Go Me!
Ruble great OP! What a find! Add me to the list of those who’d like to see the pictures if it’s possible to post 'em. I don’t know if this counts as a creative description or not, but one of my favorite things to say on a really bad day is, “If it ain’t one thing it’s sump’n worse.”
Now I need more caffeine and rumbly tummy demands sustenance. Then I suppose I should purtify a bit and get on with cave spiffin’ and chikin boilin’. Tell me that does not sound like a fun time!
Oh yeah, remembered something else I wanted to throw in. Kind of in line with рубль’s story in the OP.
My father died in October 2012, and he had been estranged from the entire family for a good 20 years before that. In the interim he’d married (and divorced) a second time; his second wife actually went out of her way to contact my sister and me when he finally passed. She mentioned at the time that he’d left a few boxes of his mother’s possessions behind when they split up, and we finally managed to get them off of her about a month ago just before she and her current husband packed up and moved permanently to Florida.
So my sister now has several paintings we’re pretty sure Grandma did, an old family Bible, reams of genealogical paperwork copied from Grandma’s brother’s collection, bags of mid- to late twentieth-century costume jewelry, a motley collection of silverware (some of which is most assuredly early nineteenth century), and a few silver plate and sterling items.
We’re in contact with our cousins on that side of the family to see what they’d like out of the whole shebang, but tragically enough their mother (Dad’s sister) died a week or so ago so we have to put dividing up the treasures on the back burner.
Great story ruble. I’ve got a lot of pictures in a large box from my dad’s time in the service in WWII (nothing glamorous, he led convoys through what is now Iran to bring lend-lease supplies to the Russians). Need to get them organized one of these days.
I have one ‘go-to’ line that I use whenever I encounter something going slow (driver, stoplight, elevator). I proclaim it to be the “slowest ‘____’ in Western Christendom”
Except when I was in Greece…then it was the slowest elevator in Eastern Christendom.
I will try but it may be a couple weeks. Have made a note of the request using the Dead Tree Option (wrote it on paper) so I don’t forget.
22nd bomb squadron; at that time I believe they were 25s as well. He didn’t actually move into the inside of the planes until sometime in 44 and I am told after that one he felt the jungle and behind Jap lines was a helluva lot safer!
No matter what, don’t think what he did wasn’t glorious at times. One of my uncles on mothers side of the family was “worse” - he didn’t even join the military; he was merchant marines shuttling things to Russia for good pay and all that. Not a lot to be amazed about compared to combat, right? Until we found out he had been torpedoed at least twice and stayed in even though he could have been released to something cushy after that. Sometimes when you get into the details there is a lot of glamour hidden there somewhere.
I got a decent nights sleep, I slept from 3 to 11:30, so I don’t feel so blurfy today.
It’s a cloudy 53 degrees outside, supposed to go up into the mid 70s.
The dog scared the UPS man this morning. I guess he didn’t know we have a dog. He always brings our packages to the back porch. I saw his head go by the kitchen window and I jumped up to get the package, but by the time I got to the door he saw the dog and did a quick 180. The dog never even noticed him. Poor man.
Cool story** Ruble**.
At this point I have nothing to add.
I have to start taxes soon too. I kind of forgot about them and then I realized the countdown has begun.
Flytrap if my cat had opposable thumbs I think he would be too dumb to use them. Metal Mouse - when I was a pet sitter I watched a few greyhounds. They are nice and pretty lazy, except they do need a good run every day. You also will need a good fence and never trust them off leash in an unenclosed area.
I need to catch up with my nieces sometime today, see how they are doing.
Sah-son can attach my antenna to the TV and stick it to the window so I can get local channels.
I’ll probably make meat balls for dinner, but I need to eat something for breakfast now.
18th. Howdy all. Tis Moanday and me and Lucky Louie are at irk. I am trying to organize my office and do a little filing and cleaning. I also would like to see the photo’s Ruble.
My go to line these days is “you can’t go fishing in a watermelon patch” or “you can’t take a shower in a parakeet cage”. These lines are from an old song I heard on the radio and mean you just can’t do that or please someone.
almost forgot blurf
In an effort to safe energy all the lights in my building have sensors and if one is still long enough the lights go out and you must wave your arms around to make them come back on so I am now in the dark.
