All posts filed under: Humor

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

Debating Obedience and Disempowerment with Dogs

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“Miss Tibbit,” I addressed her hindquarters as she strained away from me with all the power in her small frame. “Miss Tibbit,” I repeated and shortened her leash during a brief lull in the pulling. Her head snapped when she hit the end of her lead sooner than expected. She gave me a dark look that clearly said, What do think you’re doing? I reeled her in and asked her to sit by my foot. She refused. Flatly. “Miss Tibbit, do you know what obedience means?” She glanced at me from the corner of her dark eye. No. She was not being truthful. She watched a squirrel in the tree above us. She heaved at the leash in dog rampant, front paws flailing toward a submissive Golden Retriever across the street. Over her shoulder between choking gasps and yips she said, But I do know what disempowerment means! I gasped. The audacity. Disempowerment indeed! I asked Hamish to join us. He was illicitly rolling in a moldering worm and finished up before coming over. He, …

You have all that gray hair, but your face looks so young.

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Once again I was minding my own business in a public place – brain elsewhere because I had just delivered a research paper while feeling ever-so-queasy from a little too much wine and a few too many Elvis sightings the evening before. I was in a city far from home – not Vegas but the other Elvis city. I am never completely aimless or preoccupied when I’m in a strange city, because that’s just not good business, but I was sort of slumping along in my smarty-pants suit heading back to the conference center after a respite from the noise and hot air of too many brains talking too much. A youngish man, 31 years old as it turns out, swooped in beside me, his pencil behind his ear, notebook at his side. He matched his pace to mine and looked at me. Since I wanted to be able to describe him to the police after he ran off with my purse, I looked back at him. I’m a naturally friendly person, and maybe nefarious people …

Dental hygiene at what cost?

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The husband contributes a guest essay while the WideEyed…Wife travels for work. I am the husband of the beautiful and talented author of the wideeyedfunk blog you are slowly falling in love with one week at a time.  I am your guest author this week as the wifey is off doing her big-brained, intellectual work in another one of the 50 States. When I am not absent mindedly looking for the ketchup or awesomely rewiring our light fixtures in a drunken stupor I am allowed to go outside and play with the public at large. You can see some stuff out there if you open your eyes and look around. Sometimes you see good things and sometimes you see things you wished you hadn’t, but there is always something. Here’s an example of the latter: This past weekend I was sitting in the car waiting for the spouse to come out of a store.  I was passing the time with my iPhone watching a movie on Netflix and marveling, as I often do, at the wonders of modern …

Dear Other Drivers, You Don’t Own the Road. Sincerely, Me.

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You don’t own the road.  I know it is so hard to believe and so profoundly, deeply unfair, but you don’t own the length of road between where you are now and where you want to be. I don’t mean where you want to be in 1.2 seconds because, ok, you might arguably have rights to that space. I am saying you don’t own the whole path from A to B. You also don’t own all of the lanes when you are going around a curve that actually requires you to steer. You don’t own the entire street, even for the few moments you are stopped in the middle of it to send off a quick text. Therefore, you don’t need to have fits when someone else, namely Me, goes around you, merges into a lane you have claimed, makes a turn several hundred feet in front of you, takes an exit you were thinking of using, or stops for a red light that you intended to run. Because you don’t own the road, it …

You say that like beer would somehow impair my ability to be awesome.

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Actually, I didn’t say it like that at all. It was a simple query about the wisdom of the action being taken. We were having a rainy and cold Saturday evening. The husband was fussing with the 1920s ceiling light we found at Buffalo Reuse last weekend. It was tucked up in a back room of that cavernous, dark, and very, very grungy retail outlet for parts yanked out of “green” demolition projects. Stacks of tiles torn from bathroom walls (the husband is still fighting an infected cut from one of those), old toilets (I mean used toilets, really really used toilets), doors, windows, tin ceiling chunks, and other house bits are piled next to only slightly worn tanks of corrosive fluid. Anyway, the husband had just discovered that with careful use of Bon Ami he could remove the filth crust of nearly 100 years to make the molded milky glass of the light gleam like new. All that remained was to replace the dangerously inept 1970s era rewiring with new, legal, and safe wiring and …

Chips Weren’t Meant to Be Baked

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I just ate a thin piece of ranch flavored cardboard. Oh. Wait. I’m looking at the bag I pulled it from and I see the problem. It’s a bag of BAKED potato chips. BAKED. Friends, let me say to you: chips were not meant to be baked.  I know. We eat too much fat. We eat too much salt. We eat too many chips. And by “we”, I mean “I”, but I am not alone because some food scientist/dietician fool decided to bake chips. And some management fool decided that this was marketable. And what is truly remarkable is that taste testing fools told them this resulted in edible, even maybe good snacking. They lied. I am at the least a third generation chip snacker. I know chips. Grandpa always had a bag of chips at his house. Those chips were always open, the top of the bag carefully rolled and clothes-pinned. They were always tucked up high – on the top shelf above the cereal, the crackers, the unused old dried soup packets. We kids …

Why Muscle Cars Will Never Die

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Last Monday I was stepping smart through the Deep with my new long-handled shovel gripped in my left hand. The tempered steel blade shaft was clanking, not incidentally, against my wedding ring. I was fretting about the strength of the theoretical argument I just finished writing and my feet may have been moving but my mind wasn’t there. A cap wearing, middle aged, rangy man with about three days of whiskers caught my eye. He gave my shovel a significant look and said “Hey now, as soon as you’re done burying your old man, you give me a call.” He used all of his teeth in a smile. I stumbled, yanked out of my thoughts. What? Heh? I replayed the last minute in my head. My eyes got wide as I figured it out and I started hooting and laughing, because I am that cool. “Oh, you know I will,” I told him. It was an easy promise as I hadn’t really ever planned to dig my husband’s grave. I paid for the shovel and headed …

6 Days in the Bathroom with Dental Probes and a Razor Blade

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I promise you, it is safe to read on. This isn’t about mental health. It isn’t about a hostage situation. It has nothing, whatsoever, to do with home veterinary surgery. It is about antique tiles and latex paint, achieving their disunion, and bothering with old things. Once upon a time, Buffalo was the center of the universe and Olmsted’s parks were filled with flowering vines, nannies and prams, horses and bicycles. In this 1912 world of hope and money, Mr. and Mrs. Butler built my house. Its rooms were airy, the windows numerous. The bathroom gleamed with state of the art, antiseptic white subway tiles and tiny hexagonal floor tiles. Let’s imagine it was a joy to clean – for the woman who lived in the attic room, whose own toilet was in the basement. Mr. Butler died fairly young in 1920. He spent only 10 years shaving in front of the shiny, new bathroom mirror. Catherine, his widow, sold the house within two years. As I picked latex paint from grout lines among the …

The Pugrador Retreagle: A New Boutique Breed

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Miss Tibbit came from the Buffalo Animal Shelter last summer, joining a Pembroke Welsh Corgi and a surly cat in her new home. Miss Tibbit is a Pugrador Retreagle of the Toy Sporting Hound group. If you’ve not heard of this new boutique breed (mutt), these dogs result from a cross between a Labrador Retriever and a Pug crossed with a Beagle (the Puggle). Let me take you through some of the interesting show-dog career ending traits Miss Tibbit exhibits. She will assume the role of the breed standard. The Pugrador Retreagle is a toothy, ungainly, opinionated dog of uncommonly sweet nature. The breed is stoutly, solidly built in the torso with a deep chest balanced forward on outward angled spindly front legs. The hindquarters are narrow with lean haunches and skinny rear limbs. The tailed is thick, arched, and prehensile with a bendy joint halfway along and white tufts on the feathering. The Pugrador Retreagle’s gait alternates between a sidewinding, crabwalking trot and toe prancing.  The coat is short, dense, and soft, with a …

Santa Lives in Buffalo, Strapped to a Railing

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Last March Santa looked forlorn strapped to the fifth floor balcony of an apartment building near the Canisius College Metro station. His cherry red suit was faded to a soft tea rose pink. His pink cheeks had bleached to vampire whiteness. Traffic soot embedded into his beard, hair, and the rim of fluffy white on his hat gave them an ultra-real dimensionality that shouldn’t be possible on his round plastic body.  Now a year later, Santa still rigidly dangles that hundred or more feet off  the ground. But between last March and today he had his weeks of glory, and the true brilliance of the apartment owner shined into the December nights.  We assumed that Balcony Santa was collateral damage in someone’s busy life. You know what I mean – wreaths that were perky in December but flap forlornly in February’s gusts, the spindly Christmas tree carcass that appears on the curb in April, and one of my favorites – Rudolph standing in an unkempt front garden with late summer purple coneflowers bobbing around him. …