I need to get a new ceiling fan in my room, the one has have has three speeds: high (a bit more than medium), medium (pretty average), and don’t-move-at-all-but-make-a-weird-humming-noise (doesn’t move too much air around the room); it also has “off”, a great feature that really was worth the extra $200 for when you want to stop the fan, but don’t want to go to the trouble of turning off the breaker, getting a ladder, unhooking the fan, and turning on the breaker again. Maybe I’ll get one of those fancy-shmancy ceiling fans with a wireless remote…
Engel, very good early post–you captured the spirit of these threads very well (IMHO at least), and October, you also posted a fine post.
I had a French dip sandwich for lunch, with garlic an jus, skinny French fries (my favorite) and a micro brew root beer. Yum.
At the Tacoma Zoo at Pt. Defiance, the only thing between me and the snow leopards was a sheet of glass and one of the snow leopards with pacing back and forth right at the glass, so that was pretty exciting. But I wouldn’t have tried to pet her even if the glass wasn’t there because I have at least as much common sense as the Swiss.
I had “The Saggy Baggy Elephant” too! Was yours cut out (“die cut” if you’re in the know) October? Mine was. The whole book was in the shape of the S.B. Elephant standing there holding up his sags. I can see it now. Even though it isn’t currently right in front of me. It’s a curse, having a ghostly book hovering before your eyes. It makes driving way hard.
See Engle, it’s not so hard. The taking part of the MMP fun. But that’s supposed to be a “calm” skunk. It’s a little game I like to play. I put in (on purpose!) mis-spelled words here and there in my posts, and you (YOU!) get to figure out what the heck I mean. That’s me, Mr. Fun.
Not Mr. Funn. That would be Mel Brooks in Silent Movie. But you knew that.
If you ever blow a fuse in the night lightingtool, you can just jam a penny in the old fuse socket. That way you save all the money on new fuses and then you get extra money when you collect your fire insurance. You just have to practice your “innocent face” and the line “Penny? What penny?”
Or you could:
A) Be a big wuss and just buy a whack of fuses at the hardware store
or
2. live on the edge and not have any fuses gambling that they will NEVER break.
Pizza AND milk tanook’? Good for you. Lots of dairy there. (Nutrition’s not so hairy, if you eat your dairy!) Good for the growing bun in the oven, lots of dairy. (So ice cream is medicinal!)
-Rue. (Mr. Fun)
No, mine was not cut out, but it would have been a lot cooler if it was <<takes a hit off a doobie, Matthew McConnaghey style>>. It was one of those little (rectangular books) with the golden foil binding.
I’m glad to hear of the medicinal effects of ice cream. That means the sundae I made myself was therapeutic in more ways than merely satisfying a craving. (Strawberry ice cream in a waffle bowl with fresh blueberries and a banana topped with whipped cream and jimmies!)
Ice cream does make the little one do the cha cha in my belly though! Always nice to feel him dance… then I know all is well in there 
Cha cha nothing - the poor kid is trying to find a warm spot. Sheesh, Mom, dumping all that cold down around his warm little home!! You should be ashamed!!
yeah, I’m jealous - I want ice cream too
Oh, goats! Goaty-goaty-goaty-goats! Cute little goats to eat the weeds the horses wouldn’t and who like to sneak up behind you in the summer when you wear shorts and lick the backs of your knees ever so lightly. And when you turn to see what was causing this agony of tickling, there would be one of the goats looking up at with a mischievous gleam in the one eye she pointed up at you as she continues to lick the salt off. You could almost call her expression “puckish”.
Goats, whose favorite game was having you push against their horns. You could grab one in each hand and push, or just lean against the top of their heads. They would push back, but ever so gently. Goats love this game.
When my sister, (the one I call Autumn, for the purposes of this board) was a baby, she was intolerant of cow’s milk. She’s still intolerant of cow’s milk but she’s no longer the baby. When I want to get her goat (Hah! I kill me!), I remind her of that fact. She gets all pouty. Anyway, the point of all of that is that Mom would buy goats’ milk from one of the local farmers for the baby (we didn’t have our own goats yet). This milk was shunned by the rest of us as if it were poison, and was usually kept in specific container for ease of recognition. (Y’all see where this is going, right?)
One morning, I got up and poured myself a big bowl of Lucky Charms ™, a special treat, as mom rarely let us have sugary cereal of any sort. I poured milk over it from the green pitcher, the pitcher that always had the cow’s milk in it, and dug in.
Something was wrong, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. The didn’t taste off, exactly, but it definitely didn’t taste the way it should.
Right about here, my mom walks out, so I say, “Mom, does this taste funny to you? I think the milk’s gone off.”
I know, you saw this coming a mile off, but I just had no clue. That one time, the green pitcher was clean and the other wasn’t, so she just put the goat’s milk in the green pitcher.
My mom, being a mom, ate that bowl of cereal, and I got another. (I wasn’t really being a brat; she doesn’t mind goat’s milk. It’s not like I made her eat the burnt toast.)
And I had a smoked turkey Waldorf salad for lunch. I was feeling virtuous today.
Is it wrong that I keep thinking that “Saggy Baggy Elephant” is an excellent euphemism for male genitalia? At least when flaccid…
Well, Parallax, I’ll never be able to look at that book the same way again… :eek:
Parallax, thanks for ruining one of my favorite children’s stories! Like I’m ever going to be able to read it again without that image in my head!
Sorry. I’ll shut up now. 
I didn’t mean to sound like I was picking at you - actually, I thought what you said was funny. And when I see the book again, I’ll probably dissolve into giggles - so dignified for a woman my age!
Ditto, Parallax. No real harm done–it’s not like I read that story very often.
Or that the image is all that upsetting!
Mother to virginal daughter before daughter leaves for honeymoon, “Remember dear, you can point, or you can laugh. But you can’t point and laugh.”
my first visit to the zoo, the goats ate my clothes. i was not a happy toddler. i had to walk around the zoo, and home with holes in my clothes.
i think having a goat or sheep when you have a lawn makes perfect sense. i would prefer a suffolk sheep. the white house had sheep that cut the lawn for a bit.
during my home improvement vacation week i had a friend replace the ceiling fan with a lovely “looks like a pearl” light fixture. the ceiling fan had frozen in a rather frightening incident many years ago. i kept it around because the light part worked. then about 4 months ago i realized that i could take the blades off… duh! that made things much better and less dusty.
there is one ceiling fan left in the house, i try not to walk directly under it. the ceiling fan replaced the chandelier that was struck during a sudden summer storm. i’m betting there is a lot of pent-up enegry there and one day the fan will attack.
the multitudes of fans throughout the house are safely caged behind plastic or metal. as they should be.
i had a chicken cheese steak and fries for lunch.
i have not read “saggy baggy elephant.”
Enegry! The answer to the “words that end in -gry” question.
I have not been fond of petting zoos since I was a kid and a pony sneezed on me. Pony sneezes are not nice. I guess they’re better than elephant sneezes. Or skunk sneezes. I like regular zoos, though, because you can keep out of animal-sneeze range. But I’d be awfully nervous in that Zurich zoo that October went to. I’d bring an umbrella.
I had a bologna, cheddar and tomato sandwich for lunch. With chips, but they were inferior chips–the smashed up ones from the bottom of the bag.
Okay, I’m tired of zoos and I’ve already said I have nothing to say about goats. I have a ceiling fan (finally) but no real story to tell about it. So I’m going to tell you about my window blinds. They are in the same room as the ceiling fan–my bedroom–so there is a connection (I’m big on connections, no just changing the subject, there must be a nexis).
Anyway, I got my tax return and I ordered beautiful wooden blinds for my bedroom. Then they sat in the box for a few weeks while I got up the gumption to try to put them up. It should be noted that I grew up in a house where the heel of a shoe made a dandy hammer, a butter knife doubled as a screwdriver and an old nutcracker did the work of a pair of pliers. Home repair was not a big issue in my house. Then I lived in apartments most of my adult life. So this past year of having my own house has been my introduction to do-it-yourself. I pride myself on being a competent person, I believe I can read directions and figure out how to do things. I have successfully put together bookcases, a TV stand and a dresser (albeit from kits), and I own actual tools. To put up the blinds, all I had to do was screw eight long screws–very long screws–into the window frame, four on one side, four on the other, to hold up two brackets. Here’s what I found out:
With the exception of alcohol and sex, I can’t do anything straight.
I knew I couldn’t cut straight, I can’t use a scissors to save my life, a handsaw is right out and don’t ask what happened the only time I tried to use a power saw. I can’t tear cloth straight. When I ride a bike or skate, I have a distinct tendency to wobble. If use a straight edge to draw a line, the straight edge had a nick in it, or, at best, the line itself is straight, but slanted so it doesn’t really count. I knew all this, what I didn’t know was that I can’t drill straight. And because my pilot hole wasn’t straight, the screw wouldn’t go in straight and then it would got stuck. Did I mention that these were very long screws? And because they came with the blinds I thought I had to use them in order to insure that the blinds did not come crashing down in the night (things that crash down always do it at night). An hour and a half after I started, dripping wet from sweat, almost crying from the humilation of not being able to get eight screws into a wooden window frame, I got one blind up. After resting, I convinced myself to give the next window a try. One stuck screw later, I’m back in tears and never want to see another tool as long as I live.
A few weeks later, a co-worker came over (and put up my ceiling fan–I know better than to mess with anything electric) and he took one look at the screws and said they were crap and too long and that he had some that would work and 15 minutes later the second blind was hung. For this and the ceiling fan, I paid him twenty bucks and a beer. I’ve decided I don’t have to be competent at everything, and a handy man is good to have.*
*I know, a hard man is even better, but at least I got the blinds up.
Feeding goats can’t be nearly as much fun as feeding kangaroos. This is because, although kangaroos aren’t exactly smart, I think they’ve got the edge on goats. This means that they know when they’re no longer hungry. Its lots of fun watching the people rather than the 'roos. Seeing how long it takes then to give up trying to feed the things, and then seeing how long it takes them to think, "Hey this is just puffed wheat. It’s probably even made by Kellogg’s anyway… Munch, munch…
Hey! I thought of you, Rue, today as I was shopping. Wandering about Restoration Hardware I found myself in the fireplace section and would you believe they had a million boxes of It’s Jake! fireplace matches? They don’t seem to carry them on their website, which is especially tragic because the box is nifty. It’s got a whole fifties children’s book illustration theme going with a perky little dog and It’s Jake! in big letters. But I don’t have a fireplace and really shouldn’t be allowed near matches after that little incident with the living room rug, so after making the sales lady nervous (matches oughten to make people giggle, I could just hear her thinking), I reluctantly put the box back on the shelf. So they’re still there if you want to pick some up. Just keep them away from the kids, goats and human children-types alike.
I vote you get a goat, a pygmy nanny goat wouldn’t be any bigger than a dog, ya know. And how many dogs you know can provide yummy milk straight from the tap? They’re wonderful creatures, Abraham Lincoln bought a couple for his son and they spent hours playing with them, right there on the White House lawns! So there’s a history, in fact you could say it’s your duty as a father and a patriot to buy a goat. Or a kangaroo.
Were those “It’s Jake!” matches the strike anywhere kind or do you have to use the striking strip on the box BadBaby? Safety matches? Bah! Those are for little girls!
Last summer I ran out of my Ohio Blue Tips (made in Ohio! with blue tips!) and had to get a new box of the good strike anywhere matches. I looked all over, high and low, hither and yon. I searched for the strike anywhere matches! But to no avail. I couldn’t find Ohio Blue Tip mayches anywhere. For a very good reason. They stopped making them. (I actually did a web search to find this sad news out.) Can you believe it? The pinacle of kitchen match technology and they stopped making them? But the company got bought out and the new match people (Diamond) make a strike anywhere match. But a not as good match. Ity doesn’t have the blue tip of the Blue Tips. It’s red. Gah. (I also had to e-mail the Diamond company to find out where the heck I could get their matches. As it turned out, it was a hardware store near me. So I stocked up.)
And I have a really small dog, so even the pygmy goats would be bigger than her.
When the 'roos are full, can’t you just stuff their pouches with the extra 'roo fodder Dog? That’s what they’re for, right? A handy pocket for snacks on the go?
When I was putting the fan up in my room I was halfway into the project and I needed 11 of these one screws. I only had one. Man, I was mad! One screw to do the work of 11? No, I don’t think so. But there was a 1-888 number (like 1-800 numbers, only newer and glossier) to call and bitch at the fan people about the missing 10 screws. Only they needed the model number and the serial number and when you bought the fan and what color pants you’re wearing and all sorts of stuff like that. Well, I didn’t know all that stuff, so I went looking through the book they gave me with the fan. Hey! Lookit there! A picture of my fan! With an arrow pointing to the underside… where the screws go… and it… said… “Your extra 10 screws are stuck in the fan here on the bottom where they go so the fan part won’t jiggle around and get broke in transit. Stupid.”
So as it turned out, I had all 11 of my screws. (I only needed 10, but one was a bonus screw in case you drop one and lose it or something.)
chair saying how she could take her blades off reminded me of that. Since they were the screws that held the blades on and all. And one of the little goats tried to eat one of my buttons, but I swatted her away and told her to knock that off and she did. So I didn’t have to walk around the zoo with my tummy sticking out of my shirt. That was good.
-Rue. (skippish)