It's Monday and This Is a Post (maybe with boobies, but don't count on it)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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The LORD is my primary health care provider; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down with Nyquil: he leadeth me to Kleenex with lotion for my sore nose.
He restoreth my nasal passages: he leadeth me in the paths of healthfulness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of mucous, I will fear no snot: for thou art with
me; thy chicken soup and thy ibuprofen they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my chest with
Vicks Vap-O-Rub; my cup of orange juice runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of
the LORD for ever.

Guess what? No, go ahead and guess. Really.

Nope. We’ve got colds. Actually by “we” I mean “they”. They have colds. Me? Not so much. I’m as hale and hearty as you’d figure someone of my constitutional fortitude would be. Actually, a little better.

It started with Soupo picking up something at school. (I guess he’s practicing for the Prom. Ha! “Picking up something”, “Prom”… oh man!) Then he passed it off to Katcha who lateraled it to the Little Woman. I skipped the whole thing. It seemed like the way to go, and I’m standing by my decision.

The good news is, it’s a short little bug. Soupo’s already on the mend and Katcha’s much better now, thank you. The Little Woman started late, so she has a ways to go, but it’s not too bad. So there’s that.

Other than our brush with un-wellness, we’re doing pretty good. Just the usual. Nothing special. Nope. Nothing to get excited about. Just the same thing. Day in, day out. (Get up, have a shower, check my e-mail, get the boys up, feed them, get one of them to school (preferably the older one, but some days you just take what you can get), do stuff around the house, check the Dope, lunch, pick whichever kid up from school that I left there, dinner, TV, bed. But last week I got to go grocery shopping. Whee. They have “country style scarpple” at the store I frequent. (No Zap, it ain’t Jungle Jim’s, but I do go there as a special treat.) I’m still looking for the ritzier “big city style scrapple”.)

I think I need a vacation before I do someone grievous bodily harm.

I want to go to England. I blame a book.

A Friend suggested I read some of Bill Bryson’s stuff. So I did. I started with Mother Tonguewhich got me to want to speak actual English. But this seemed too hard. So I read Notes From A Small Countryand now I want to go to England. Not just England, but Scotland too. Not Wales though. No good reason for not wanting to go to Wales actually, but it just doesn’t call to me. No pull, no allure. But England and Scotland? Yeah, sure. As long as I get to ride a train.

That was a big deal in the book. Ol’ Bill rode trains all over the country (busses too, but busses? Big deal.) and now I want to too. I want to go to London and the Lake district (Is that what it’s called? “Lake district”? I want to go, but I don’t want to actually learn anything.) and the Yorkshire Dales and Edinburgh and Inverness (so I can say I was “In Verness”). I don’t know what all I’d do there, but it’s just a little country (even with Scotland thrown in). I could probably see everything in a couple of weeks.

Of course this need to see England will probably fade pretty soon. I got a whole whack of Bryson’s books (because they’re from the library and it’s free, so why not get books by the whack?) and the next one is about Australia. So I’ll probably want to go there next.

As long as I don’t get a cold. That would suck.
-Rue.

Oh yeah. Some of you are, no doubt, still looking for boobies. I pity you. Here ya go anyway. Just because I care.

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Save your pennies and see Australia, Rue. The G’Dopers there would love ya.
Have a happy Monday!

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I’d stick with England, it’s more economical. Sure, it’s an expensive place, but it should be cheaper and quicker to get there. Plus it’s such a small place that you can pretty much just hike or bicycle about. Not big and scary like Australia. And not so many wild beasties like wombats and dingoes and echinea and baryonxes wandering around, although you may venture onto a random apothecarist and then where would you be.

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Hiya Rue.

I hope you consider Western Australia!! I’ts the best place in the world IMHO :smiley: not that I’m biased at all :slight_smile:

And Ice Wolf’s right… we’d love to have ya here where ever you went :slight_smile:

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Be careful, Rue - I smell a conspiracy! (Or maybe it’s the popcorn from the cubicle next to mine…)

I think them Australians are plotting to kidnap you! They’re talking all nice and welcoming and all that, but I have secret information that they just want to use you in a breeding program. They want to lead the world in Rue production! No, really - I’m serious!! Their women all want you and their men all want to be you.

Or maybe they’re just being friendly and I’m completely wrong about the conspiracy.

Hope you continue to avoid your fambly’s germs. You need to give Soupo a stern talking-to about bringing unfriendly microbes into the house. Straighten him out now or he’ll never learn!! And make sure Katcha learns this too - otherwise, before you know it, you’ll have two of them bringing all kinds of nasties back with them, and then where will you be?? Rotten kids. You feed them and clothe them and give them cool toys and what do they do?? They make you sick! Well this has GOT to stop. Nip it in the bud, I say! Nip it in the bud!

Or run away to Australia and let the Little Woman deal with the boys. :smiley:

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I tried to go to the boobie site but all I could find was a titmouse.

England without learning… yuum.

Look for that book - London on $575 dollars a day.

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Bill Bryson is great. I was going to offer to send you my collection of his books, Ruebut if you found them at the library, that’s cheaper for me. Same price for you, of course.

I’ve never been to England. Not even on my way to France. I flew straight there. Now, if you ever want to feel like visiting France, I suggest Peter Mayle’s books. If they don’t convince you, then you clearly don’t want to participate in a marathon where most contestants walk because there’s a wine tasting booth ever quarter mile.

Me personally, I would trust the Aussies, but that’s only because they were so nice as to let me offer me admission to University of Queensland. I couldn’t go because my grandmother got sick. But I still want to go, and that Bryson book only confirms it. Even though he makes things seem so deadly down there.

Anyway, great reinterpretation of the psalm. As I work in a medical facility, may I share it with some of our staff. I won’t tell them where you live, I swear (this should be an easy promise to keep since I don’t know where you live).

Happy Monday!

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Now I’m torn. England or Australia? Hmmm…

On one hand, Australia has better hats. Then again there’s the whole echinea situation. (But isn’t it supposed to keep you healthy if you drink echinea tea? Or am I thinking of something else?) But once again there’s the Captive Rue Breeding Program (assuming that’s not just a misconception). That would definitely sway things into Austalia’s camp.

Maybe I should just tour all the English speaking countries… No, no I don’t think that would work out. There’s Canada to think about. Not that it would be all that bad, but come on! It’s Canada. (I joke. I plan on one day visiting our Neighbors to the North. One day. Eventually. Probably.)

The other down side to the Grand English Speking Tour would be… well… here. I’d have to go to California and Nebraska. Maybe I should re-think this.
-Rue.

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That’s echinacea, Rue. And that’s what I thought it said at first, too.

“What? Fear of echinacea? Are there rogue plants wandering the countryside, raping and pillaging wherever they go? Oh…echinea? Never heard of it…”

:::runs off to google echinea:::

Hey wait. It is the same thing. What? There are rogue plants? I’m so confused. (And scared of the bottle of echinacea in my medicine cabinet. What if it’s planning a coup!??)

Hey Rue, if you want to go somewhere that is “English-speking” but difficult to understand, come to South Carolina. We used to have subtitles on PBS here because some of the dialects are so hard to understand. :smiley:

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okay, I meant echidna. Just cool looking critters. And I intentional misspelled it; didn’t think it would cause so much confusion (I did want double takes, I didn’t intend for people to make Google tea)

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I can’t think of a sparkling and witty reply, so I won’t make one.

But I can tell you that you don’t want city-style scrapple. Trust me on this one.

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Can I own up to being the Friend who recommended the Bryson? Is that okay in etiquette protocol? I don’t know much about etiquette as regards the propriety of saying “Hey! That’s me!”. I guess it’s okay because it is me. It’s not like someone else saying “Hey! That’s you!”. That would be different. But it’s just me. I don’t mind being identified as the Friend. That’s a nice way to be known. Friend-with-a-capital-F.

Did you get Notes From A Big Country too? Because that one’s all about America. That’d get you confused. Or, it could lead to instant gratification (which, I am sure you will agree, is a good thing in small doses… and in big doses too sometimes). You could be reading it and say “Hey, I really want to go to that place! Oh wait, I’m there! Hurrah!” and then you’d be happy for the rest of the day.

Oh, and just so’s you know, our friend Bill gets it wrong in some places. He says you can look out of the window in Windsor and see Reading. That’s just plain not true. It’s too far. Maybe he looked out of the window, saw someplace and mistook it for Reading. But it wasn’t Reading. I only know about that 'cause it’s local-like. Maybe he made up things all around the country. That would be cunning if he did. Who would know? You’d have to go to all the places he went too. Or know a lot of places. We’re not a big country (we’re a small island, as Mr Bryson so helpfully points out (and that part isn’t made-up)) but you’d be hard-pressed to know all the places he writes about.

Notes from a Big Country isn’t written in the same format as Notes from a Small Island. It’s a collection of columns he wrote for a UK newspaper (The Daily Mail, which is an appallingly rabid Conservative (note the big C which means the political party, not the state of mind, although I guess it is the state of mind too)) rag. Some are about America, some are about life in general. I like them (the columns, not the rabid rag).

Also, did you see the nice Pratchett connection in the Australian book - The Lost Continent and The Last Continent? I don’t know which book came first but I doubt it’s intentional since the only thing they have in common is that they’re about Australia.

So anyway yeah. Come to England. Stay at my house. We’ll go on the train and talk of many things.

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nice boobies.

14

did ya get the bryson book with the bear on the frount? the appa. trail is a lot closer to home.

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(.) (.)

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Francesca, “Notes from a Big Country” is called “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” in the States. (Why do they do this? They had such a nice little theme going. Do they think us dumb Americans won’t get it?) And rocking chair, the one with the bear on the front is called “A Walk in the Woods”. It’s the one that really made Bryson famous in his homeland.

And Francesca, I think you are well within your rights to say you were the friend. Because with friends who introduce you to Bill Bryson, who needs the dopey kid at the bookstore?

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Sometimes it takes a while longer for a synapse to fire than others. At least for me. You may be different. And you probably are, come to think of it. Most people are different. It makes them easier to spot in a crowd and they have to sell all different kinds of clothes at the stores.

But this is a case of slow firing synapses. Or maybe just one slow synapse and it held everyone else up. It’s hard to say.

But… bristlesage said he (she? I’m sorry, I just don’t know.)was going to share my psalm with people at work. (You just never know about people, as shown by Pamela Andreson and jade nose rings. (These are two different f’r’instances, not one in two parts. I don’t know if Pam even has a jade nosering.))I think this is really swell. But later in the day yesterday I got to thinking. What if they send it on to someone else? Like an e-mail. And then that person sent it on and that person did too.

It could become standard glurge. (That’s right, isn’t it? Glurge is just like spam only amongst friends? Or does it have to be uplifting or something? Are there rules to glurge?)

Then one day someone gets it and I see it and then innocently say “I wrote that one time” and then they beat me up thinking I just churn out the glurge that clogs up their e-mail when it was really just a preface (foreword?) to a post I made on the Very Best Message Board Ever. (You never know when Cecil is around, so it never hurts to suck up a little.)

Shibb, I knew what an echidna was. (It also known as the spiney anteater, but why it would want to eat spiny ants in beyond me. It’s a montreme (yeah, it only has one treme, how sad) like the platypus. That means it’s a mammal and it lays eggs. And I just call them a platypus rather than a duckbilled platypus, because I don’t really think you need to differentiate between types of platypussesii seeing how there’s only the one kind. And Echidna was, in some mythology, the mother of all monsters. Like Pandora’s Box, only completely different. Probably Greek or Roman, but I don’t know which one. It wasn’t on the test.) And I figured that was what you were talking about.

Only, when I made my tea joke my twin shortcomings reared their ugly heads. I couldn’t figure how to spell it and I was too lazy to look it up. So I just cut and pasted your spelling. It still didn’t look right, but you used it, so how bad could it be?

And of course Puddin’ is the Friend I was talking about. She told me about Bryson. I just didn’t want to say and make people all jealous. Maybe I do want everyone to be jealous, but I also wanted some Mystery. So I didn’t come right out and say. But she knew who she was, so there’s that.

And so far, the Bryson books I have are:
Mother Tongue (read)
Notes From a Small Country (read)
In A Sunburned Land (reading) (And this is the one about Australia. Did they change the name of this one too, or are there two?)
and
The Lost Continent (This one’s about America. At least my copy is.)

When I got through these I was going to ask my friendly local library for A Walk in the Woods and I’m a Stranger Here Myself. That’s my plan anyway.
-Rue.

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Come to Australia, I go to UQ, I’ll be your friend! :cool: :stuck_out_tongue:

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A couple of things should turn things in favour of the Sceptered Isle.

Firstly we have infinitely better hats. Aussies only have the one hat with corks on it. We have: Busbys; bowlers, top hats, flat caps, deerstalkers, trilby’s (no corks), panamas, bobby’s helmets, crowns (well not all of us), and them hats that your mum wears to weddings.

Secondly they cull Rues in Australia (or so I have heard).

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I juz geddanoid thatcha call 'straya an Englishspeegun country. That’s all. :slight_smile: