Funny Things That Didn't Happen to Me Today

Nothing funny happened to me today.  It's not that it was a boring day or anything.  It was a normal Sunday in Lent at St. John's Roman Catholic Church, which meant that I was up in front of the congregation during two masses, singing my lungs out in both English and Latin.  But that doesn't help me, as a humor writer.  When things go completely right, and nothing unusual happens, it's a disaster.

I sang all the hymns and responses right.  I came in at the correct times and didn't misread any of the words in the Responsorial Psalm.  I still can't get used to the new/old version of the Nicene Creed that was imposed on us a while back, but that doesn't matter because everybody is reciting it at once and I just mumble along.  Nobody cares if I get it right or not, least of all me.

I got the second half of a huge load of laundry done today, too.  Now THAT'S something to write about.  I hate doing laundry.  It's not that it's hard.  It isn't.  There is a laundry room in the basement of our building and it's really easy to lug a laundry bag full of dirty clothes down there.  It's just that I hate doing it.  Really.  I'd rather clean the bathroom than do the laundry; it's that bad.

This must stem from my childhood, when I would often watch my mother spending half a day washing our clothes in an old ringer washing machine, then hanging them outside to dry.  It was a holiday in our house when Mom finally got an automatic washer, after almost everyone else in town already had one.  Our family was always behind the rest of the world when it came to mechanical devices.  We could say we were letting others test them out first, but that would be a lie.  We just didn't have the money most of the time.

Another reason was that my Dad was always looking for bargains, and he was convinced that all his friends were as honest as he was.  It didn't take anyone long to learn that if he had an old piece of junk for sale he just had to look up my Dad and make a sales pitch.  As a result, we had a procession of impossible cars, TV sets and what have you.  Once in a while, Dad would come up with something good, like that great stereo console that looked fine, sounded even better and lasted for years.  That was an exception to the rule, though, which stated that anything in our house that originated with one of Dad's acquaintances would end up being a piece of crap.

Most of our TV sets were the kind that worked best if we could get our little brother to stand nearby with his arms out, like he was making a semaphore signal, acting as a human aerial.  Little Brother was not eager to perform this service for more than about 5 seconds, if we could get him to do it at all.  Bribing him didn't work, because we didn't have anything he wanted.  We just had to be content with a lousy picture or take turns doing the human aerial bit ourselves.

Gee, I got all this out of my hatred of doing laundry!  How's that for inspiration?

Happy Vernal Equinox!

NATURAL CAR WASH

GRASS IS WHITE?
 

After the craziest winter in the memories of everybody in North America, we finally come to the First Day of Spring.  All of us have been wondering when spring will come.  Well, it's finally here -- at least astronomically, which is better than nothing.  It wasn't warm outside, but at least we weren't turning into Ice Zombies minutes after stepping out the door, and that's an improvement.

In the spirit of the day, I offer this little poem:

Spring is here, or so they say,

So we must not despair.

And we can just ignore the wind

As well as the nippy air

There are no flowers blooming bright

No lovely, perfumed trees.

But happy day!  There is no snow!

Let's keep it that way, please!

Hey!  I'm a humor writer, not a poet!  (Everyone's a critic!)

SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO

Along the Kitty Trail

I love my cat, Harmony.  She's funny and cute and she loves me.  She's also very smart and very mischievous.  I think she secretly laughs at me a lot.  Anyway, she loves to play tricks on me.

Lately, she has been amusing herself by pulling gloves off the top of my dresser and putting them in the bathtub.

Yesterday, she outdid herself.  I came home to find a neatly set out trail of gloves (and one scrunchie), stretching from the dresser, which is in the back of my living room, to a cardboard box that was sitting in the vestibule.  If you don't believe me, here is the evidence.  I promise you, I did not touch any of the items on the floor until AFTER I took the pictures.  This is all Harmony's doing.

 

 

 

 

Shakespeare and Coffee

(I wrote this earlier today.)

I must be bored right now, because I am reading the quotes on my Shakespearean Insults coffee mug.  I bought this a few years ago in The Strand bookstore, near Union Square in Manhattan.  In my defense, I also bought a Shakespearean Love Quotes mug, but it’s at home right now and I can’t get at it.

The average person’s vocabulary of insults is woeful.  To help remedy this situation, here are some suggestions for creative insults that could be used by people of various professions.  The Bard of Avon was quite a wordsmith, and he knew how to make quite a zing with them.  No, I don’t know which plays these came from.  I’m reading them off a coffee mug, for Pete’s sake!

Butcher:  “Mountain of mad flesh.”

Dentist:  “Veriest varlet that ever chewed with a tooth.”

Dermatologist:  “Thou art a boil, a plague sore.”

Exterminator: “Beetle-headed, flap-ear’d knave.”

Farmer: “Elvish-mark’d abortive, rooting hog.”

Fashion Designer:  “The soul of this man is in his clothes.”

High School Biology Teacher:  “Poisonous bunch-back’d toad.”

Neurologist:  “Light of brain.”

Otolaryngologist:  “Not so much brain as ear wax.”

Psychologist:  “Anointed sovereign of sighs and groans.”

Schoolteacher:  “O gull, o dolt, as ignorant as dirt.”

Zookeeper:  “Bolting-hutch of beastliness.”

I will gladly accept any thanks for sharing these, after I finish my coffee.

 

The Reluctant Homemaker

My Mom and my Grandma made valiant attempts to domesticate me when I was a kid back in the 50s and early 60s.  They were worried because I was a tomboy.  I was not above playing with dolls.  Some of my best toys were dolls.  But I also had baseball bats, tennis rackets and cap guns.  BB guns were forbidden in our house, or I probably would have acquired one of those, too.*  When we played Cowboys, I had to be either Annie Oakley or Marshall Dillon.  I was not going to be some sissy girl who sat around waiting to be rescued.  I was tall for my age, so I made a good western hero(ine) … well, passable for a kid, anyway.

I never wanted to be a boy.  Being a girl was cool.  I just wanted the option of being able to do all the things that boys did, and I wasn’t about to get stuck in a gender role.  June Cleaver was not my role model.

In other words, I was okay with learning how to cook, sew, iron clothes and clean a house like all the other girls, but I wasn’t going to let all that interfere with playing baseball in the park, and I was really pissed that nobody ever made my little brother help with the housework.  He got off scot-free, the little twerp.  All he ever had to do was mow the lawn, and he got paid for that.  The only benefit my sister and I received for washing dishes was not being yelled at.  You can’t save up for a new bicycle with that.

                                                                    

One thing I never learned was how to change a flat tire on a car.  My mother, who was petite and feminine, could change a tire like a veteran mechanic.  You just never know.

Okay, so, like everyone who lives long enough, I grew up and grew older and I am now in my 60s.  My childhood domestic training has come in handy all these years, just because I have never been rich enough to hire someone else to do the freakin’ work.  In self-defense, I have learned to make housework as quick and as painless as possible, with the aid of the following labor-saving devices:

A Swiffer Wet Jet Mop

A Swiffer Sweeper

Swiffer Dusters

(Do you see a pattern here?)

Mr. Clean Magic Erasers

Lysol or Clorox Wipes

Cleanser

A funny looking thingy on a pole that I use to clean the bathtub

A toilet brush

A plunger

I have no rugs on my floor because I hate vacuuming, even though I have a perfectly good full-sized Dust Devil vacuum cleaner sitting in a closet.  I also have a cat.  Cats and rugs do not mix well, for reasons I won’t go into here.

The catch in all this is that I have to keep buying refills for the Swiffer, Mr. Clean, Lysol and Clorox stuff.  What’s a little expense, though, if it means less time spent trying to be a freakin’ domestic goddess and failing at it because I don’t care enough to really get down and scrub.

Grandma, please stop turning in your grave.  I turned out okay.  Really, I did.

                                                                                                                                       

*And I would have shot my eye out.  In addition to being a tomboy, I was a klutz.

Springing Forward is for Pole Jumpers!

It’s Sunday morning, March 9, 2014.  Two things are special about today:

1.      It’s the First Sunday of Lent

2.       It’s this year’s Daylight Savings Time spring forward, lose an hour changeover day.

Two things that nobody looks forward to have punched us in the face at the same time.  It wouldn’t be so bad, except that I have a weekend job as a church singer and I have to sing an 8:45 AM mass every Sunday.

Of course, I made sure to set my alarm clock ahead.  I was not going to mistake the time.

But I forgot to set the alarm.

I wake up at 8:08.  It takes my groggy brain several seconds to realize that I only have about 20 minutes to get dressed, feed the cat, take my morning meds and get out of the house.

I am not a morning person.  I hate mornings.  It all started when I was born at 8:04 on a February morning.  I was forcibly evicted from a nice, warm, soft place into a cold room, held upside down by a doctor and slapped on the rear to make me cry, just so they’d know I was alive.  I never got over it.

(I wonder how many of those annoying, cheerful, energetic morning people were born in the evening.)

Do I make it to church on time?  Yes.  Just barely, but yes.  I didn’t know I had it in me to move so fast.  It just goes to show what you can accomplish when faced with an emergency, such as the prospect of being embarrassed in front of a church full of people, the organist and, worst of all, the priest, not to mention the disruption of a 2,000 year old liturgical tradition.

Fast forward to Monday morning, March 10.  This time the alarm is set, and it goes off right on time.  My body is not set, though.  It still thinks it’s an hour earlier than it really is and it’ll be damned if it’s going to get out of bed.  My brain finally prevails, and my body reluctantly gets on its feet.  It spends the next hour and a half dragging around, ignoring all signals from the brain, which is trying to tell it to get its butt moving.  I still manage to get out of the house in time to get to work early, but don’t ask me how.

I have come to the conclusion that Daylight Savings Time was invented by The Devil in order to confuse humanity, throw us into disarray and torment us.  How else can you explain it?