Lost

Recent conversation with hubby.
He: "Do we have anymore jelly?" (I make my own jam and jelly and had made a new batch a few days ealier.)
Me: "Yes."
He: "Where might I find it?"
Me: "In the white pantry." (That's the only place it's ever been kept in this house.) He had already looked in the white pantry to no avail. But here's the thing.



You have to move the jug of coffee.
Conversation this morning with hubby.
He: "Where's the New Mexico cup?" I thought he was asking me where in New Mexico this year's version of The America's Cup was to be held. Then, I realized he was talking about his current favorite cup for morning coffee.


I grew up in New Mexico, but I actually bought this cup at a garage sale in Duluth. Go figure.

Me: "It's in the cupboard."
He told me he had looked everywhere for the cup. In the dishwasher, in the car, in the cupboard, and it wasn't anywhere. He was actually having to drink his coffee from some lame blue mug. So I went to the cupboard where the New Mexico cup is kept.



Now that he knows there is another side to the cup, I am hopeful that we will be able to avoid this kind of trauma in the future. Nobody needs that first thing in the morning.

Day Tripper

How can you not love that song? Oh, yeah, it's 12:30 AM and I'm awake again. Stupid DST. I'm aware I've referred to it as DSL in my comments. What can I say, I'm sleep deprived.

So I just learned a few weeks ago, after 20+ years of marriage, that my husband hates the Beatles. He isn't borderline, he doesn't find them mildly annoying. He HATES them. I don't know how it is that I remained unaware of this. I mean, really, had I known before the nuptials, this could have been a deal breaker. I've been trying to figure how it could be that a child of the sixties could feel this way.

I'm thinking maybe he had a crush on a girl and "She Loves You" was tops, but she didn't return the feeling, so he associated the rejection with John and Paul. Or maybe he realized that money "Can't Buy Me Love," and resented them for pointing that out. Perhaps he was confused, thinking "Born in the U.S.A" was "Back in the U.S.S.R." (Jeff, I know there is a whole post on the discrepancies here, please don't hate me.) But I have to say, a husband whose wife has a blog should, at the very least, appreciate "Paperback Writer."

Daylight Stupid Time

I've had a bad week. My sleep is messed up. My daylight is messed up. It doesn't matter whether we turn the clock back or ahead, it messes me up. My circadian rhythm is out of sync with the universe. I was about to blame it on that moron Benjamin Franklin (who wanted the turkey to be our national emblem), but then I did some research and found that it wasn't him.

Apparently, it was some British bloke who liked to ride early in the morning and got to thinking everyone should ride that early, and that they were missing the best part of the day by sleeping. Also, he liked to play golf and didn't like cutting it short at the end of the day. Pardon moi, if you have nothing to do but ride and play golf, I'm thinking you can do it whatever time of day at all. Unless you're napping in the middle because you didn't get enough sleep at the top or bottom.

I lived in Arizona for several years. Arizona does not indulge the DST. They don't perish. Their sleep is not messed up. And I think they have an insight that the rest of the country may not. And that is this. God decided how many hours of daylight to put on the earth. That is non-negotiable. If you live in Alaska and have 24 hours of sun part of the year and 24 hours of black part of the year, does the time on the clock matter? Who gets to decide when you ride and when you play golf? If you live in Minnesota, you're going to have three hours of light in December and 16 hours of light in July. My kids hated going to bed at eight o'clock when there were still hours of daylight left. Which means that I should let them stay up until ten and wake up at four-thirty when the stupid crow starts squawking?

Aarrgghh. That is my 1:30 AM rant because I can't sleep! I'm sure I'll make it up with my one more hour in the morning. Or one hour less. Fall back . . . spring ahead . . . wait, what?

What a Turkey

This post is prompted by Mooselet, whose blog I enjoy, particularly on Saturdays when she posts yummy photos of hunky guys. She lives in Australia, and pointed out in a recent post that Aussies actually eat their national emblem (kangaroo). Which prompted comments regarding our national emblem and the fact that Ben Franklin wanted it to be the turkey.

We live about as north of town as we can get and still be in town. It's almost like living in the country, with everything we need just a few minutes away. Here is the view from our back yard. Basically South Fork.



About a half mile down the road we have this.



It was summer, he was hot. A little further down the road lives a large flock of turkeys. (Are groups of turkeys called flocks?) Hang on, I can figure it out. Jeff's June 6 post featured this web site http://www.buckyogi.com/groupnames/groupnames.html. I see that a group of turkeys is called a rafter, although the reasoning escapes me. Anyway, our rafter of turkeys mostly lives on the north side of the road, but they like this yard, so they cross every once in awhile.



When this many turkeys decide to cross the road, it can take quite some time. I have seen cars backed up for half a mile waiting for the parade to pass. And believe me, you don't want to hit one. They are large and can do considerable damage to an automobile. Which prompted our city fathers to erect this sign.



Which led my visiting sister to ask the following: "Why is there a sign with a picture of a deer leaping onto the back of a turkey?"

I got nothin'.

Don't Ask

You know how sometimes a random thought will pop into your head, which leads to other random thoughts and pretty soon you are wondering why in the heck you're thinking about whatever? That happened to me a couple of nights ago. We had hamburgers for supper, and my husband can't eat hamburgers without baked beans. I have a small pot that I use to cook the beans. When I was unloading the dishwasher and putting the pot away, it occurred to me (randomly) that if I kicked off, hubby wouldn't even know where to find the pot to cook his beans. Next random thought was that my daughter would know, but she's going to college in the fall, so there would be no woman around to help him with the cooking of the beans situation. Random thought number three was about an "Everybody Loves Raymond" episode in which the women were choosing second wives for their husbands in the event of their demise.



This is a bad idea, which led me to thinking about questions women ask men that should remain unasked. Here is a short list.

1. If I died, would you remarry? Now, I don't want my husband to be unhappy, and if remarrying would make him happy, he should do it. I just don't want to know the details while I'm still around. And I sure as heck don't want to know who would replace me (Jennifer Love Hewitt).

2. What's wrong? I learned a long time ago that this is not a question to ask a guy. Apparently, it implies that he is not acting the way he should be acting, which is quite insulting. So even if he looks like this and is slamming doors, just be quiet.



3. What are you thinking about? He may not even be aware of his thoughts. The dangerous thing about this query is that you might get an answer. And he quite possibly could have been thinking about something that bores you to tears and now you have to spend the next thirty minutes listening to, say, a blow by blow of every drive and putt from his last eighteen holes of golf. That's okay with me, because I like golf, but I'm betting a lot of ladies don't want to pay a penny for those thoughts. I'm just saying.

4. What do you want for dinner? He doesn't care as long as it's hot and tasty.

5. Does this make me look fat? Men hate this question. There is no right answer. They don't even know what you mean by "fat." Do I look like the Goodyear blimp? Can you tell I'm experiencing monthly bloat? Can you see the holiday pounds I haven't lost yet? I can honestly say that I have never asked my husband if I look fat, and there is a very good reason (aside from the fact that men hate it). Cuz I own a mirror.