YES, I AM STILL HERE looking out the window on Main Street, and thinking about useful ways to dispose of that rumored Economic Stimulus money disguised as a debit card.
The first thing that came to mind was that I needed to hire an engineer from China to show me how to fold the camp chair since it was made in that infernal country.
The camp chair came in a variety of pleasing colors. And it was fairly easy to take out of the cover. Well, I lied about easy. In order to get the chair out of the cover I had to resort to some scissors.
But after that it was fairly easy to get the chair out, and easy to unfold. And it was a comfortable chair, but after a few days I needed to fold it closed.
I tried and tried, but I could NEVER get the chair to fold.
I pushed the arms inward, but the chair didn’t fold. I bearhugged it real tight but wouldn’t fold. No matter what I did it wouldn’t fold. I even did what my wife used to do — I glared at it real hard.
At this point my blood pressure might have been up just a teensy bit.
I raised the chair over my head and slammed it to the ground. That didn’t work although several pieces broke off.
I took it out to the street and drove over it several times.
Unfortunately, the last time something under my buggy grabbed aholt of the chair and I drug it around the block several times before it turned aloose. There were lots of sparks, I’ve been told.
“Mr. Graves, please return your piece of junk back to your own yard when you’re through showing off,” one disapproving matron sniffed because she was just sure I’d drive off and leave it in front of her place.
I still need someone who can write in Chinese.
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DAT SMELL SO GOOD. I didn’t get a lot of comments about pain, so let’s try one about smell.
Sitting out on my patio, one evening this past weekend, I realized I smelled a neighbor getting ready to grill. It was the smell of charcoal lighter splashed upon briquets and carefully lit.
What do you like to smell? Rain on a hot asphalt street? The smell of resin when you drive down a road in the deep woods?
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ANIMAL CRACKERS. A few years ago the Nashville City Council adopted a law banning ‘pit bull breeds’ of dogs from the city. And every now and then someone challenges that law, saying that it is the treatment or training given by the dog’s owner that makes a dog mean or dangerous.
Maybe, maybe not. But attacks upon humans by pit bull breeds are overwhelmingly more frequent than any other breed according to my own research over several years.
In the daily newspapers last week there was an account of a toddler who managed to get out of a fenced backyard and wander down the street where it was attacked and killed by a pit bull breed dog. This was in the small town of Quinlan, Texas, and the child was one month shy of two years old. Don’t know if the dog was just running loose.
According to the articles I’ve read, a pit bull can be a gentle loving pet until one day for no reason it suddenly becomes a pit bull.
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HEARD FROM. (And this should be another Animal Crackers revelation) Neighbor David Rauls sent a video of some of his own backyard crows trying to get to some peanuts he had placed under a plate which was was rigged to a lever. The plan was to teach the crows to stomp on the lever and thereby gain access to the peanuts.
But David says that after about three months of him trying to train the crows — or the crows trying to train him — he came to the opinion that the crows weren’t smart enough to figger a way to get to the peanuts.
The crows don’t have that much trouble getting to his tomatoes, David says ruefully.
He also notes that the crows apparently would rather go to my patio where they don’t have to perform a human’s tricks in order to get peanuts
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THAT BOOM. My aerobics buddy Shalla Pack (spouse of my Official Bluebird Advisor, Mark Pack) says that she was an eyewitness to that Big Boom event on a Sunday night at the tail end of May. Shalla says that the meteor had a long sparkly trail and then came the earthshaking boom.
She’s the first person I’ve talked with who actually saw what caused the boom.
I wrote about this in my column of the first week of June.
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THINGS I LEARNED from opening (and believing) anonymous emails: In Shakespeare’s time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened making the bed firmer to sleep on. Hence the phrase ….. ‘Goodnight. Sleep tight.’
I was under the impression that it was because tight and night rhymed with “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
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A MILESTONE. On Monday, July 13, Wilton Clements Graves will be 99 years old. Mom, I hope I have your good genes.
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HE SAID: “What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.” St. Augustine of Hippo, theologian
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SHE SAID: “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’” Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady
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SWEET DREAMS, Baby
