Mondays Missives

• I love the new single serve Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Yes I said love- I would marry them if it were legal. My next thought was going to be I would eat them every day if that wouldn't be bad for me then I realized nothing that good can be bad.



• The only reason I ever tried the show Arrested Development was hearing so many comics and other sitcoms reference it by comparing people to the show- "Don't worry you'll find someone, you're just like Arrested Development- you take off kind of slow and a little hard to know how to take at first but, after people get to know you you're really smart and funny..."



• Just noticed mac and cheese shows up as a stored label in my tag bar, I must have talked about it before.



• I told you I love the stuff.
• I had a girlfriend once who was strikingly pretty with a little makeup on but, nearly gruesome looking without.
• I had another girlfriend who was also very pretty as long she went without makeup but, if she got painted up a bit- yikes.



• Another celebrity it kind of bothers me to think of: Steve Irwin, man that was sad. The only time rays attack is when something comes over it (it stays low mostly so any threat will be from above) he had to know better. Or was the problem he should have known better?



• A cute flashback I had today: one of my nephews mom had to look for something in his backpack one day and when she picked it up cash came cascading out of it- it looked like he had robbed a bank (as I recall there was 88 dollars in this 3-4th graders backpack). She asked where it came from, "My lunch money." came the sullen answer. "What have you been doing for lunch?" came the angry reply. "Eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinking a milk with the poor kids." he answered.



• I really bothers me when characters in movies act out of character for the real people they are portraying especially in forums I'm familiar with- having a soldier do something a soldier would never do or a medical person mispronounce something.



• I know of 2 different cases where the subject of a medically oriented tv show was used by hospital staff to treat patients they were having trouble diagnosing because the physician happened to watch a certain episode.


• I used to work with a girl about 10 years ago who ate pizza every night for dinner. It may sound mean but, I've often wondered what she looks like these days.


• A couple of the jobs I've had in my life I couldn't believe I got paid to do them. Everyone should be that lucky at least once.



• I'm having trouble nailing down exactly what constitutes a wasted or a successful life.

Never Give Up-Improvise!

Things I Don't Understand About Us

• Liberals love Jon Stewarts show and conservatives love Stephen Colbert's when there's not a nickels worth of difference between the two politically- they're both liberal/libertarian-esqe shills although, Stewarts show seems a little more well produced and I find it generally funnier.



• Cigarette smoking.


• How people can live to adulthood and say,"_____ could never happen to me!"








• People getting tattoos for the fads sake (esp. barbed wire,thorn vines and tribals)








• People literally killing each other bum rushing a Walmart to buy a bunch of junk they don't need with money they don't have regardless of what a deal they're getting.








• Folks living in a thirty thousand dollar shack with a hundred thousand dollars plus worth of new cars out front.








• I stopped once in August to help an extremely fat woman on the side of the road with car trouble. She had two children with her and told me she'd been standing there for 2 hours, all three looked like they were about to have a heat stroke. I got their car fixed. She cried. A couple of days later two extremely pretty women were broke down within two miles of the same place. I happened to stop within a few minutes of their breakdown. I looked under the hood and saw a broken hose. I called home to let them know I'd be a little late and before I could get back from my car with a knife to cut it down to good hose two different vehicles containing males stopped and started jockeying for their attention and trying to figure out was wrong with the car. One genius said,"I bet it's the battery!" while getting in the hotter ones face and while oddly, I thought trying to stand between me and her. I left it to them.








• People who can believe whatever they want to believe in spite of evidence to the contrary.







• When people get up in arms over plans to kill animals due to overpopulation that is hurting their own species and endangering humans. Hundreds of people are killed every year by misadventures with animals on the roads alone and billions of dollars of damage is caused. I think they have a vision of these animals growing old surrounded by a loving family as they fade away and go to deer heaven or whatever. They actually starve or freeze to death or die of dehydration if a coyote doesn't rip their guts out. An overpopulation also causes these thing to happen in an unnatural cycle so they aren't dying of natural causes anyway technically.







• Nope, not a deer hunter.







• There are still a lot of larger cities in this country that are very proud of their animal shelters spending easily upwards of a million dollars on their facilities construction and a hundred thousand dollars plus per year maintenance where a woman who is being brutalized in her home by a family member can't get shelter.







• That one makes me sick to my stomach.







• People who equate animals with people at any level, for any reason.







• How some people can never seem to let go.






• How some people can never seem to try to hold on.






• Why people won't support their local, independent businesses when you know they are going to emptily mourn there passing when they go under.






• People with extremist views.






• People who won't get passionate about anything.






• Why the last time I cleaned out my cabinet that the phone books which I have used exactly twice in the past 10 years (both unsuccessfully) have accumulated had 11 different ones, keep coming. Also, when I survey friends- to a person, they report never using them and often report dropping them directly in the trash.





• How there was ever a time we wore leisure suits.




• How anybody could buy anything they found out about through an unsolicited email- especially medicines.


• How people in a position of power engaging in any type of abuse from mass executions committed by hundreds of soldiers during war or a police officer on the street assaulting someone are not stopped at some point by the thought this could be me.


• How anyone could ever cheat an elderly person out of anything.
• Why so many people even bother getting married.





• How people will read this and I think I hate and am otherwise prejudiced about these people, places, things, thoughts and ideologies etc.- I said, I don't understand them.

Missives

• When people have been in the US long enough to have lost most of their accent it comes back if you get them laughing and and on a roll conversationally. I talked to a lady the other day from Ireland who has been here for nearly 40 years but, you would never know when you first meet her she hadn't lived here all her life. By the time we parted ways she sounded like a Leprechaun.



• As a hospice nurse I've been the only person present at the time of too many peoples deaths. No family, no friends.



• My last patient had only a velour pantsuit, a paperback Bible and a picture of a long forgotten family to her name at the time of her death. Seemed sad but, really it wouldn't have made a difference if the closet to that dingy inner city nursing home she died in was full of gold bars. She's dead.


• I had French Onion soup for breakfast. It's funny to me how it has become associated with tony, high class foods. Nothing I think would scream peasant to people a couple of hundred years ago like eating onion soup.


• It's a boiled onion.


• Freedom soup?


• My 17 month old said,"Thanks" when I handed him a breakfast bar this morning.


• Had dinner at a place last night for probably the 100th time. It was the first time though I realized the name translates into Two Big Peppers in English.


• My childrens great grandfather had a stroke recently. God, it was sad to see him that way. He was a Navy Diver during WWII and just always the epitome of tough and vibrant throughout his life. At age 75 I remember him cutting his thumb severely when installing a window while remodeling his house. His wife fussed at him to go to the hospital and get it sewed up- it was pretty bad. His response? "If I go to the hospital and let them put stitches in this thing it will be sore for a week and I'll never get finished with this project!" He wrapped it in electrical tape and drove on.


• Does it matter at all how people remember us?


• Is that the only thing that matters?

Some Flowers For You

Because I was thinking of you and knew you'd need a day brightener by now when I scheduled this picture 3 months ago.

Ghost Elephant Ears

This picture has been scheduled for months. I assumed some greenery might be now nice by now.

Fridays Dispatch

• Been staying in motels often lately and have been spending way too much time watching television- some thoughts: there has been an explosion of "Judge ______" shows since I've last watched tv, I landed on one, changed the channel in disgust landing on another- this happened 4 times including a Spanish language show. Good grief.


• Still love Jerry Springer, mostly because he's honest about his scumbagality.


• Maury Povich had an episode titled DNA tests prove who the baby daddy is (or something similar)- the same basic concept as the first I watched years ago and also a couple of weeks ago.
• There's a show Prison Break where the plot is basically: a young man convinced of his brothers innocence of a crime he was imprisoned for sets about freeing him by getting himself jailed so they can break out- it's entering its fourth season. With friends and family like that...


• The Cash Cab out of New York City show on The Discovery Channel is pretty cool. I watched two full episodes, I only missed two questions and one Video Challenge.


• There is a whole lot of air time wasted on ridiculous shows purporting to be scientifically oriented where they look for ghosts and also communicate with the dead. Ridiculous.


• Every movie on Lifetime still seems to end with some poor goob being sewed into the sheets, soaked with the gasoline then a match cascading toward the bed...


• If it says Stormchaser somewhere in the title- I'm down.


• I've known people personally from episodes of Cops (good guys and bad)


• Channel 13 should still be PBS wherever I am.


• Don't know why it meant so much but, it was interesting to watch WGBH actually in Boston when I was there a few years ago.


• I love 30 Rock.


• I don't do anything to try to keep up with celebrity gossip, don't care when they die and don't really have any favorite celebrities even but, every time I see or hear anything about Heath Ledger I stop dead in my tracks and feel sad, don't know why- there are plenty of died way too young people to go around in Hollywood.


• People will believe anything if its presented well enough and in a British accent.
• Kathy Lee Gifford looks different- older or surgically altered? Her guest the other day rolled her eyes at her.


• One of the few times I was physically ill from watching a tv show was an episode of Cops where the police dressed up as street dealers and sold pot to people in 5-10 dollar amounts and had the nerve (ignorance?) to talk about how it would keep the streets safer.
• There is a show called The Steve Wilkos Show. Every time I accidentally tune into it there's some big bald headed guy snarling at someone dead in their face, "You make me sick, I hope you burn in hell! Stand up, you don't deserve to sit on my show!" He then yanks the chair away and throws it across the stage- every time.
• The murderer of John Walshes son has been found I saw on the news. Supposedly Ottis Toole confessed and had info. only the murderer could know. Toole was Henry Lee Lucas' boyfriend.
• On one station I saw an ad for their lineup I forget the time period - there were four back to back different Judge _____ shows


• I Asked a taxi driver in Fort Worth if he'd heard of Cash Cab and then joked saying he should start a Texas version, he said it would never work,"Think about it this way, New York is the Big Apple- Fort Worth is Cowtown. We laughed.


• It made more sense in person, I guess you had to be there.