Flashback Friday #217

Hey! That's MY Magazine!




Welcome to another post of trivial minutia. Have you ever purchased reading material, gotten half way through it, and lose/misplace it, never to see it again? Frustrating, isn't it?

I wish that had happened in this situation. I would only be able to blame only myself. As it is, I know exactly what happened to my reading material and exactly who took it. It was Miss Hubbabubba.

In Flashback Friday #213, I told of the first of three things that turned me totally against her. This story tells of the second. While in her cloister, er, study hall, we were to remain silent. It didn't matter what you did, as long as it was silent. Dissect road kill? Sure, as long as you did it silently.

But I digress. Seeing that I knew of this hardship period in my school day, I came prepared. While at the store with Mom the previous night, I picked up the newest issue of "MAD Magazine". This particular issue has a spoof of "The Muppet Movie" in it. Anyone that knows me well, knows that I love the Muppets.
Anyway, I was sitting silently reading this magazine when someone snatched it from my hands. There way a triumphant "AHA!!!!" as it was snatched. I turned and blurted "Hey, That's MY magazine!" I then realized that Miss Hubbabubba was the snatcher.

"This is one of those magazines that's not supposed to be at school", she bellowed. There had been a rash of sightings of "National Lampoon" throughout the school. The teachers were alerted to be on the lookout for them. If you've never read them, they can be rather racy. I explained to her that there was nothing at all wrong with MAD and that she should give it back.

She wouldn't be moved. Away my magazine went. Later in the day, I saw her and asked if I could have my magazine back. She said "That was a really funny magazine, but you're not getting it back. In fact, I threw it away." Great, just great. I didn't even get to the Muppet spoof.

At a later date, I'll expound on the third event that sent me over the edge and put her on "My list" forever.

Since this is December 22, 2012, I'm Assuming the Mayans Were Wrong

There were many people concerned because the Mayan calendar ends on December 21, 2012. The end of the world was predicted by many (probably some of the same people that prophesied about Y2K). Then there were a couple of things that happened to strengthen the apocalyptic threat.

First, Dick Clark died in April. Without Dick Clark, can we usher in a new year? Secondly, Hostess filed for bankruptcy protection. Hostess makes Twinkies, the only food that could survive an apocalypse.

All that worrying and hand-wrnging has come to naught. I'll bet this is why the Mayan calendar ended at December 12,2012:

Flashback Friday #216

Building A Garage


Hello. It's good to see you here on this Friday (can you believe that I got this post out on time?). Today my discussion rests upon a garage that Dad was planning to build. We had plenty of land, so why not build a garage/workshop on it?

What's the first thing you need to do? Um, Digging a hole for the foundation would be nice. Do you think I was going to volunteer to dig it? Idon'tthinkso! That's the nice think about having lots of friends. Dad knew someone that not only had a backhoe, but also was skilled in using it. That just happened to be Uncle Phil (Aunt Shelly's husband).

Uncle Phil drove his backhoe over and began digging. If we had lived far away, he would have put the backhoe on a trailer and brought it over. Since we only lived about three miles away, he felt like driving it. He was making good time until he hit an obstacle. He had run into our "basement home" that we had lived in for a year before we purchased the adjoining property (and house) we currently abode (this is where I lived when I had my teeth ripped out). Once we bought the new property, we abandoned the basement home and moved into the house. We filled the basement home up with trash and buried it.

Anyway, Uncle Phil's claw had snagged an old freezer that we had tossed. He asked if he could have it for scrap metal and Dad said he could. Now that he knew he was traversing a "mine field", he was a little more careful.

Once the footer hole was dug, cad called the local concrete company to come out and pour concrete. He made sure he took the day off so he would be there to make sure nothing went wrong. Perhaps he should have gone to work instead.

When the truck got there, Dad motioned it into place and the concrete came pouring out. I had just gotten home from school when the truck began. Dad grabbed a shovel to smooth out the top of the foundation. It was difficult to do from up top, so Dad took off his socks and shoes, rolled up his pants legs and hopped into the wet concrete. He was smoothing it out for about five minutes and he jumped out and ran over to the garden hose. He sprayed his legs off just as fast as he could. He didn't realize that there was a type of acid that was in the concrete to help it cure. It burned his legs something terrible.

Well, by the time he got patched up and was able to put weigh on his feet again, the concrete had hardened enough to make smoothing out the top impossible. He got the foundation laid, but never finished that garage.

I Can Totally Relate!

Just What Have You Been Doing?

Things have really been busy around her this month. Recently, "The Boy" had the lead role in our church's Christmas musical "In a Galilee Far, Far Away". He was Commander James T. Church of the starship Emmanuel.

Here's the rest of the bridge crew:

Navigator Polo

                                                                      Robot

                                                  Communications Officer Sparky

Information Tech Info (the resident Vulcan)

                                           Security officer Zip (the resident Klingon)

And Chief Engineer Otto (who I must add did a great James Doohan impersonation)

The kids were fantastic. the props were out-of-this-world (no pun intended). "The Girl" got to play one of the animals at the manger scene. At the Sunday morning performance, she tried and wandered from the manger to the friendly lap of her dad, "The Woodsman"

We also had a Middle School band Christmas concert. Here's "The Boy" playing the marimbas:

Once the 6TH grade band finished, "The Girl was finished too. Since she no longer could watch her brother, she found other ways of entertaining herself.

Last night we did our annual Christmas cantata. We've been practicing for months. Our director was a wreck. She kept saying "Christmas has snuck up on me this year." She even cut a song from the list, which we would belt out at different times during lulls in practice. At the end of the cantata, when the thanks yous were being said, we belted it out again. On a related note, my wife watches the directors youngest a couple times a week and once they were watching a Veggie Tales movie with said song in it. Her eyes got big and she exclaimed "That's the song my mommy doesn't like!" ROFL

Flashback Friday #215

Non-Canine Pets


A warm welcome to all who have ventured this way.

I Have written about the dogs I had when I was growing up. I've also written extensively about a certain dog named Peanut. I think the only other pet that I've discussed was my guinea pig named Whooper. There were a few more, but not enough to do separate posts on each one.

After Whooper passed, I talked Mom into getting another guinea pig. I had the cage, water bottle & food already. There was no reason not to use them. I think she agreed because she didn't want me to catch another rat (see the guinea pig link above for more info). We went to The Westerville Mall and bought another one at Petland. I remember that it cost $4. I picked one out that was the spitting image of Whooper and named it Whooper Jr. (creative bugger, wasn't I?). Like his predecessor, I trained him to squeal whenever I would holler out "Whooper!".

Alas, he also passed and Mom said that we were buying no more. Luckily, Dad had a friend that was moving and looking for a home for his son's guinea pig. This one looked nothing like either of my Whoopers. They were both dark brown while this one was all white. He had been called snowball, so I continued to call him that. Once he passed, Mom made sure the cage left so there would be no more rodents in the house (at least domesticated anyway, we had mice galore).

Seeing that we had mice, perhaps that's how a cat came to adopt us. You don't own a cat, it owns you. This cat found a hole that it could squeeze into the basement through (we had a dirt basement and Dad was always going to finish it with cement blocks). It made it's way upstairs and hid in my walk-in closet. Since everybody in the house had stuff stashed in my closet, the cat went unnoticed. At least it did until the sounds of several tiny mews emanated from the closet.

Upon closer inspection, I discovered a litter of five kittens. I'm sure momma didn't have to venture far for food seeing the mice problem that we had. My folks allowed them to stay for a while, but then found a home for all of them down the street with a crazy cat lady. I think she must have had at least three dozen cats.

The only other non-canine pet that I haven't spoken of is the tank of Sea-Monkeys that I had. I bought them through an ad in a comic book. They had grown to a good size when an accident befell me and them. When I hurt my ankle skating , I was on crutches for a while. One day while hobbling across my room, the tank was knocked over and my Sea-Monkeys perished.

Flashback Friday #214

My Girlfriend's New Neighbors


Hello. Good to see you again.

When I was dating Toni, she had a family move next to her. This was the typical family with two parents (Mom & Dad) and two kids (a daughter one year younger than Toni and a son that was 2 1/2 years younger). I talked to them a few times when I saw them out, but I didn't see them a lot. I found out why.

These folks have moved from Columbus. Nothing too odd there. However, the parents had to take their son to Columbus frequently because he had a job there. This is a kid in middle school that had a job in Columbus that his parents drove him to. What was I missing here?

I found out what that job was one day. Toni & I were outside hitting a softball around and he asked Toni if she'd like to see his collection. He had found out from his sister that Toni was a baseball fan, so he thought that she might be interested in what he collected. We went into his house and she led us to his room. It was too cool.

His room looked like a wing of the baseball hall of fame. He had a shelf filled with autographed baseballs. By his door, he has a barrel filled with autographed bats. Autographed pictures of players were on his wall. How did he get all this stuff? Getting autographs is easy when you're the bat boy for the Columbus Clippers.

He was the bat boy for the visiting team. Some of the players (that later became major leaguers) that he had the privilege of meeting and getting autographs from included Don Mattingly of the Clippers, Cal Ripkin Jr. of the Rochester Redwings,Wade Boggs of the Pawtucket Red Sox, and Howard Johnson of the Tidewater Tides. How's that for dropping some names?