Mar 23

Speaking of The General…

A friend of mine runs a library. He had a friend called The General. The two of them are known for making a pyramid out of vodka bottles roughly 8′ x 8′ x 8′.

Anyway, one day my friend asked The General to pick him up at work. The General declined, saying, “Where I come from we call it a liberry, and we don’t go there.”

Mar 13

The General

My friend B shot this pic somewhere in the KC area:

Mar 09

Yiddish curse

“May you inherit a hotel of a hundred rooms, and may you be found dead in every one of them.”

Mar 03

You can’t say that here

A couple of years ago I went on vacation and instead of going floating and camping, I went to the hospital and was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. While I was in the hospital undergoing treatments you couldn’t use on people in Guantanamo, Heather stayed with me almost the entire time. After I had been there a few hours I received a visit from my pastor and his wife. I’m not Catholic, but my hospital was, and as such there was a crucifix above my bed.

As we were all the parents of at least one teenager, and Pastor and I either are or were youth leaders, the conversation soon turned to teens and some of the temptations they face. Mrs. Pastor said something about why so many teenage girls were drawn into being sexually active.

“You can’t say that word with Jesus watching you!” Pastor exclaimed, crossing himself in mock indignation to his wife.

“That will be ten thousand Hail Marys!”

Mar 01

Quotable: Scene 24

“…and the music that we play
are the oldies of today
and we think those kids are strange….”

Feb 24

Dish soap

We have four bottles of dish soap.

I’m not hoarding, I wasn’t stocking up for the snonami, and we don’t have individual dish soap preferences. It simply comes down to this: doing the dishes is our daughters’ job. They don’t like to do dishes. Heck, I don’t like to do dishes, either–that’s why I had kids.

But running out of dish soap is their favorite excuse for not doing the dishes. It’s my least favorite because it is the only true reason for not getting them done. If I come home and the dishes aren’t done, but there’s no dish soap, what am I going to do? Go back out and go to the store after driving for the last 90 minutes? No, no I’m not.

So the dishes don’t get done that day. It’s doubtful I will remember the next day either, and by the time I remember we are buried. Then I have to saddle someone with the awful chore of digging us back out.

So the solution is to just buy Dawn every time I go to the store.

Feb 21

‘the Marital We’

My friend Kaleb, another logophile, coined this phrase. It describes the phenomena when a wife addresses her husband with a sentence beginning with, “We need to…,” and by this statement what she means is, “You need to….”

Feb 17

Addiction

There is a vendor truck in Kansas City called Gyro Express. They don’t make my most favorite gyros, but they are amazing. However, they come with this incredible chili sauce. It tastes so good, but every time I eat it I get super sick.

“You ever have an addiction that you know is bad for you, but you can’t stop?” I asked Mike.

“I used to. You know what cured me of that?”

“No.”

“Diabetes!”

Feb 14

Victory

A couple of months ago at work one of the secretaries brought a Chinese user down for some assistance with her laptop on the wifi network. The laptop had an English keyboard, but the OS was entirely Chinese.

“Ni hao,” I said, almost entirely exhausting the Chinese I learned at my old job.

“Oh, you speak Chinese!”

“Nope, I just know how to say hello.”

I spent about five minutes trying to figure out what to click, tried issuing English keyboard shortcuts, and finally went the slow point-and-click way through the My Network Places, which I could recognize by its icon.  Five minutes later, we were online.

The user thrust both arms into the air and yelled, “WICTOREEEEEEEE!”

Feb 07

Overheard: 37 year old male

“I feel like I just made out with a habanero!”