Why are apples, walnuts, and celery considered diet food but
Waldorf salad is not?
Along the same lines, why is pumpkin pie not touted as an essential source of fiber and vitamin C?
Why does it take me six tries and three days’ worth of
newspaper to get a fire started?
Why does HE seem to be able to set fires effortlessly? 1
Why does some knucklehead revving a motorcycle on the other
side of town cause Babyface to frantically crawl under the bedsheets with me
and crouch there with all 90 lbs. of her vibrating like a furry hootchy-cootchy
dancer? Reminding her that she is a police
dog, for God’s sake, has no effect whatsoever.
Why do I never seem to have an equal number of clean bras
and step-ins? The count varies,
too. Some weeks I have more bras, some
weeks more step-ins. This should not be.
Why, if by some miracle I find two socks of the same color
in the clean laundry, don’t they match? At
present there are four bachelor black socks lying on the shelf waiting for four
different black sock mates. Someone could make a fortune with a Tinder
app for socks.
While we’re on the topic of lingerie, why would the cat
rather sleep in my underwear drawer than anywhere else? 2
Why do people wait until it’s the middle of the night and
pissing down sleet to set their houses on fire? 3
And again – while we’re on the topic – why is it when the
Red Cross dispatcher wakes me at 0400, the DAT 4 captain doesn’t
call to tell me I’m not needed until I have started the coffee pot, gotten
dressed, and located my keys? I can
either go back to bed and try to asleep for two more hours, or throw in the
towel, pour myself a cup of coffee and crack open a book. 5
Why can I never find something until after I’ve purchased
its replacement? Not little cheap things,
either. Foxtail brushes, several of
them, and how do you lose an iced-tea maker in a 1500 square-foot, two-bedroom
house? The kitchen remodel provided lots
more cupboard space, but still.
This also applies to magazines. I have Cook’s All Time Best Chocolate Recipes for 2015 lurking in the shadows somewhere
waiting for me to break down and buy another copy for $9.95, no less. I won’t, damn it. Even if there is a triple-chocolate mousse
pie on the cover.
1 Perhaps I don’t want to examine that one
too closely.
2 Perhaps I don’t want to examine that one
too closely, either. He may have a paw
in the bra/step-in discrepancy.
3 I’ve been told by the training officer at
one of the local FDs that it’s related to household income and creative heating
solutions so I should be more understanding.
4 Disaster Assistance Team. It could be worse; I could be the DAT captain.
After all he’s the poor sod standing out in the sleet with the
firefighters.
5 I don’t get up at 0600, someone else
does. I lie there and listen to him crash into things in the dark and wonder
how, when he was the guard officer at Naval
Weapons Station Seal Beach,
he racked up 68 confirmed “kills,” a kill being defined as getting close enough
to the guard to tap him on the back before being seen.
The realization that
you were patrolling five thousand acres of ammunition bunkers full of God knows
what, by yourself, in the dark, and armed with an assault rifle made chiefly of
plastic and two clips that by standing orders had to be kept in the magazine
pouch until you had a visual on a bad guy (this was fifteen years before 9/11),
should be enough to keep you on the qui
vive, but to the best of my knowledge there were few sentries he didn’t “kill”
at least once.
One night he managed
to leap undetected into the back of the guard truck as it drove past his hiding place, slide
the rear window open, and put his hand on the guard’s shoulder, causing a sudden
cardiac reaction in an otherwise-healthy 19 year old Marine who, thankfully, managed
to bring the vehicle to a stop without crashing it into one of the
aforementioned ammunition bunkers.
10 comments:
Okay - in order. Combine foods = calories. Pumpkin pie always need whipped cream at breakfast (yum!). Starting fires is boy thing especially if you are trained to put them out, have a fireman dad or have emergency training. You have given up the talent to start a fire if you know how to put them out. Babyface may be born a Police Dog but she has not had extensive training so let her quake under the covers. Socks are taken by trolls. Reserve Cat likes to sleep on soft, comfy things that smell like you.
Step-ins and bras are also taken by trolls. The missing kitchen items are in the 5th dimension which comes and goes. Like my Gingher scissors I can find on Tuesdays but not on Wednesdays.
Oh, my he looks comfy, full of tummy and ready for a nap on mum's things. Mum's stuff is always the best. Our big old barn cat used to curl up and purr in the kid's sock drawer as the kid was hers, not the other way around.
Fire making is for guides, scouts, and people raised by old Brits who relied on coal fires for heating. Maybe he has a better instinct for which wood is dry? Check that he's not grabbing the only dry wood off the top of the stack.
In my house, it's cats and the other half who can't remember where things go so puts then 'somewhere' and then forgets where 'somewhere' is. Could be the top shelf in the garage, or like my new earrings, in a bag underneath stuff on the workbench.
Baby was raised by adults who didn't make loud, unpredictable noises at all hours of the day and night. Our vet recommended a regular Benadryl for our 50lb dog who suffered through thunderstorms. I recommend either Willy Nelson or Leonard Cohen, both of whom put all the critters in the house to sleep in under 15 minutes. Underwear gets sucked out of the washing machine, never to be seen again until a sewer clogs up blocks away.
It's this kind of odd, inconvenient, and silly, our family does it 'this' way, that makes a family, though.
My parents used to have an Old English Sheep Dog (think Nana, in Peter Pan) who would nose through the dirty laundry and pull out all of my dad's clothing to make a nest. (The odds, of course, of an OESD fitting in a dresser drawer are fairly slim.)
I am always amazed at the number of "flavours" plain white and plain black socks come in. We had a woman move out of one of the apartments at the homeless shelter where I volunteer who had apparently been stuffing odd white socks into a trash bags and then moved out and left the bag behind. There must have boon over 100 white socks in there, and NONE of them matched. The Squire has a couple of unmatched black socks, but he wears them around the house. I'd kill him if he tried to get out on Sunday with those ratty things!
I collect old sewing patterns and have a number for stuffed animals and cushions. The recommended stuffing from the days before polyfilla was Cut up nylon stockings or socks. Couple of giraffes and a teddy bear = problem solved. Of course, I'm really thinking 100 socks + 100 rocks = decent defensive weapons for a homeless woman or layers of socks for warmth.
I used to buy the girls when they were little socks in co-ordinating colours of the same patterns so if they lost one, they still had a sort of pair to match whatever other gaudy stuff they were wearing. The way things wander off, perhaps my undies are having a more adventurous life than I am.
Waldorf salad is one of the finest inventions of humankind and should be eaten at every opportunity possible, preferably in the fall, made with fresh apples. Socks are magically separated in the washer and/or dryer and sent through a wormhole to a planet on the other side of the galaxy. The natives are quite happy to get them. There's a reason you call Babyface, BABY face. She's a big furry baby, and quite right to be frightened of motorcycles, as no good ever comes from them except for Highway Patrol. Missing kitchen items fall under the same guidelines as socks, but they go to a different planet altogether. You're on your own for the underwear issues.
I haven't caught him at it, but I suspect the cat is cross-dressing.
I have long been of the opinion that socks go off into the Hose-Zone, which is why it is so important that the hole get patched as quickly as possible.
The Squire puts things "on the workbench", which is an old First Nations expression which is something very similar to the above mentioned hose-zone, except that occasionally they will resurface. He looks amazed, and says, "Oh, so THAT'S where that was", puts the object back down and promptly misplaces it again.
In re: celery, I recently tried a chicken, celery and green olive salad from the website Kalyn's Kitchen. Quite good if you've got an entire head of celery to eat up and are tired of Waldorf salad. Speaking of which, have you tried it made with pecans instead of walnuts?
Sounds good - I'll have to try it. I normally only buy celery to make soup, and then we have everything but the leaves to dispose of. I have fixed a celery side dish by cutting the stalks into bite sized pieces, and covering them with equal parts cream or top milk and a good grated cheese, and then baking until the celery is tender.
My sister was the world's *worst* cook. (We called her Lucretia behind her back.) She didn't like pecans and would use the pecan pie recipe, but make it with walnuts instead. Gack!
Post a Comment