All posts filed under: Humor

The unfortunate members of my household provide entertainment – along with the rest of the world.

Hamish the Corgi Achieves Master Craftsdog Status

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Press Release: With the intuitive senses of a nascent master of his craft, Hamish eyed the 107th Annual Strawberry festival at the Church of the Good Shepherd at the corner of Jewett and Summit Avenues. A cluster of younger people with their kids and older folks sat in the shade trees sharing strawberry desserts, music, and good fellowship. I could see that he thought it looked promising and he was considering a performance for the Festival attendees. He didn’t commit to it and we walked on. How fortuitous that we did so. Although perhaps it wasn’t luck but a deeper sensitivity in Hamish’s newly proved mastery. Diagonally across the intersection, the Darwin Martin house was having a red-carpet affair: valet parking, bejeweled and well-dressed middle agers climbing from luxury autos, and hors d’oeuvres and cocktails inside what is itself an architectural master piece. Hamish walked to the groomed corner lawn of the Martin House Complex and stopped. He cast his glance uphill to the Strawberry Festival, clearly within sight and scent. His ears swiveled backward, …

The snow shovel taunts me.

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The solstice was just a few days ago and I spent most of it among a pinkening crowd on the beach in Ocean City, New Jersey. Yesterday, back in humid and hot Buffalo, the sun gleamed high and bright and long as I mulched the front garden and putzed in the back. I slumped over my grilled cheese and salad dinner last night all sun roasted and dehydrated. My chair position gives me a command view of the back yard and vegetable garden and I like to gaze out there in the evening light, especially after a day of garden toil. Everything looks so promising at this time of year. I glanced at the garage doors and my eyes snagged on something shining yellow and glowing through the window. It was the snow shovel. It is dangling from a hook in the back of the garage and should be invisible for the summer. It isn’t your turn, I thought at it. I can wait, it told me.

A vexing loss in the spousal competition.

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I’m not saying that the WideEyedSpouse and I compete against each other. That would be a gross exaggeration. However, it is nice to get a win every now and again, to be better at something, like say, concocting the best dill pickle or power shifting in the powerful Mach 5 (the demon on wheels, my Mini Cooper S). Of course the decision as to who is better at any given event is subject to in-house debate. Data proofs and examples are required during the win-lose negotiations. We may query the dogs for their perspective. The judges, Spouse and I, are not impartial. It has happened that I determined myself the winner regardless of the Spouse’s contrary findings. It’s all in good fun. Mostly. Yesterday an external judge gave the Spouse a win that will haunt me for decades. We have had exactly the same number of Olympic recurve-style archery lessons. Six. At them, we stand side by side at the range and are coached as we shoot. We have almost exactly the same gear, except …

Saturday morning along some Buffalo roadways.

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Hamish the Corgi supervised the assembly of the new Weber Smokey Mountain Smoker last night. Miss Tibbit broke the packing material down into pieces small enough to fit into the recycling bin. They waited at home today while their WideEyedHumans drove out to Adventures in Heat in the suburbs for hardwood charcoal and some black cherry and apple wood chunks. The world between the house and the shop teemed with life. Two security guards in Buffalo Central Library lamented the arrest of a regular patron. He was caught with 20 grains or grams of something.  That’ll get him 20 years in prison, one guard said. A Princess (her license plate told us so) in an elderly Nissan Altima hocked a wad of gum into the shrubs in the Tim Horton’s Coffee drive through. Across the street jets lifted off at the airport, taking people somewhere else. For once, on this rainy Saturday morning, I didn’t feel the wanderlust. A few miles down the road, a Dad opened the rear door of a limousine and helped …

This situation is intolerable.

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I could fix it in ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Or at least improve on it. Make it less distressing. A classic, careworn Mercedes 380SL convertible moved onto my street last month. The rear driver’s window panel is out on the driver’s side and has been during the whole of my acquaintance with the car. The owner’s cleverly expedient fix, a pink and orange beach towel shoved in the gap, pains me. This morning there were three beach towels shoved in the hole and draped over the entire area. Evidently one towel was insufficient to combat the near inch of rain we had in the night. As the lightening crackled and the downpour thundered on the roof of my house, I worried about the Mercedes. I fretted for it as it crouched under a tree in the street. Every time it rains, even a little, that Mercedes ages faster. Yes, it is already over the hill and running on fumes as any good old Mercedes will do for decades. But I am overcome with wonderment that a person …

10 Reasons Miss Tibbit The Useless Little Black Dog May Not Lick My Face

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10. Miss Tibbit is a dog and has aromatic dog mouth. 9.  She licks the floor. 8. She licks the sidewalk. Oh, why? Because it has on it flavorful substances like gum, bird crap, spit. 7. Miss Tibbit bathes herself and her pal Hamish the Corgi with her tongue. I don’t want that on me. 6. Miss Tibbit enjoys cat litter snackies. She eats the crumbs from the basement floor. You know how it works: the cat jumps out with litter stuck to his feet. The litter scatters. Tibbit cleans that up. Two strikes – basement floor and cat litter. 5. Two days ago I yanked a rotting baby bird carcass out of her mouth by its little feet. It was mostly down her throat already so I had to have a good, strong grip on those curled up bird toes. 4. Miss Tibbit has sticky spit. 3. She sniffs the cat’s butt, and I can’t be sure she does it from a sanitary distance. 2.  She licks her own wet nose. And finally, the …

The garden is poised for action.

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Cherry, cosmonaut, and garden peach tomatoes. Hot peppers. Sweet peppers. Leeks. Easter egg radishes and French breakfast radishes. The WideEyedHousehold is doubtful about a breakfast of radishes. Lettuces. Carrots. Borage. Grapes. Sunflowers and two pear trees. And oh, blue coco pole beans, whatever they are, time will tell.

Too many socks.

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It was a problem. Gym socks. Knee socks. Hiking socks. Fuzzy winter socks. Socks more normally called stockings. Blue, pink, white, black, nude, brown, and striped socks. Hand knit. Silk. Cotton. Socks. Simply. Too. Many. Socks. The bureau drawer was a stew of tangled toes. Then, one cold spring day in the not too distant past, a miracle. A solution. We trolled through the estate sale remnants of a family’s life in Tonawanda, New York. The memories of nearly a century were laid on tables, stacked on shelves, piled in heaps for eager crowds to paw through. For a WideEyed person it is an overwhelming experience to witness a lifetime of personal items. Sad. Interesting. Somehow the stuff was too infused by another’s life for me to form a connection. The WideEyedSpouse and I fought the crowds and made it from the attics and into the basement. And there it was: abandoned among basement junk, shoved against a brick wall, hung around with faux fur vests for sale. It squatted on its turned legs with …

I would pick you to be on my zombie apocalypse team.

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In 1976, I went to full time school for the first time. I know this because I counted back on my fingers, there’s no memory of it. 1976 recollections are solely and exclusively about being on the Junior Every Women’s Club float in the Bicentennial Parade. There was a cooler filled with soda tucked behind a prop on the float. And I had unrestricted access. From 1976 to 1988, I was subjected to team oriented sports games: dodgeball, kickball, softball, basketball, tag, kick the can, volleyball, baseball, an occasional wretched tag-football, maybe a soccer, badminton, or tennis here and there. During the ritualized team picking, I watched the sky, heard the birds, found interesting rocks, wondered why some kids’ shoes got grass-stained and some did not, felt the texture of the weedy athletic fields under my legs as I patiently sat, observed the knobby knees of the other kids clustered in the pick-me corral, and now that I think about, made a start on the WideEyedLife. Friends, I was last picked every time, and least played …

One year and three months in the bathroom.

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The WideEyedHousehold spent the last fifteen months without a bathroom door, shower, sink, or toilet more or less sequentially. This embarrassingly long duration of inconvenience was, of course, the fault of unadulterated laziness and winter ennui. In recent days we bootstrapped ourselves into finishing the job. More than one year ago, the WideEyedSpouse got to picking at the paint peeling off the 104 year subway tiles (see: 6 Days in the Bathroom). He peeled up the cheap sticky tiles and cleaned pink mold from the antique hexagon tiles on the floor. He stripped spray paint from the tiles around the radiator. I stripped nine to fifteen coats of paint from the woodwork, primed, and repainted. I scraped and sanded the ceilings and walls, primed and repainted. We replaced the tub faucet and shower surround. I bought a new beveled mirror for the old medicine cabinet. I broke it. I bought another one and some glass for the shelves inside because I thought that would look nice. It does. We found a 100 year old Empire …