Archive for the 'Childhood' Category

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Get Weird and Win!

Published on March 25, 2009 in Advertising, Baby Boomer, Birthdays, Blogging, Cars, Childhood, Dogs, Education, Empty Nesters, Entertainment, Family, Food, Health, Holy Shit! Lookit This!, Ireland, kentucky, M & Ms, Money, Politics, Random, Research, Shopping, Technology and Writing. 19 Comments Tags: comment game, marilyn monroe, prize, teesforall.com.

commentgame
The Junk Drawer Blog is goofing off somewhere this week, but she left an assignment for her commenters. She stole a comment game from Comedy Plus.

The Junk Drawer Blog is fun, but whoooo boy, her commenters are just so vanilla, so white bread, so unimaginative.

Here’s how SHE explained the Comment Game.

It’s very simple. I start the game off by listing two words or phrases, like waffles or pancakes, and you pick the one you like better. You can explain why if you like.

She started with Twitter or Facebook. Nice start, but OMG, her commenters responded with choices like:

Mac or PC
Coffee or Tea
Boxers or Briefs
Peanut Butter or Jelly

I. am. NOT. kidding. And it goes on for over 100 comments.

I played too, here were my choice:

Po or Laa Laa – which the next person said they didn’t have a clue about. Dur, Hello Google? So I came back with…
Clarabelle or Crusty – which the next poster didn’t know, but chose Clarabelle because it was a nice name! OMG, puh-leeze! My final entry, before I decided to hijack this idea was…
Simon Cowell or Simon & Shuster. The next commenter chose Simon Cowell because she hadn’t heard of “the other one.”

LISTEN UP. Here’s the deal. I am taking over this idea.

There is a big prize involved.

A wonderful Marilyn Monroe shirt from the wonderful people at TeesForAll.com. I wanted a gift certificate from TeaseForMe.com, but haven’t heard back. TeesforAll.com is not doing this because they like me, they want to sell you some Tee shirts. Surprise. Surprise. Surprise. They have a really cool Stones shirt, and some other Boomer targeted stuff.

WIN THIS SHIRT

No, it doesn’t have to be the Marilyn Monroe baby-doll with pink stripes, unless you want it. And then I want a picture of you in it.

HERE’S HOW WE’RE GONNA PLAY:

It’s kind of like the The Junk Drawer Blog contest, BUT, the combinations need to be weird, arcane, tricky, smart, obscure, clever, whatever. (Like my examples! )

AND: you must explain why you chose the word you did, to avoid miscellaneous fakery.

After a while, I’ll close the comments and then we will vote on the best combination. Finalists may be contacted to provide a full and complete explanation of their word combinations so you can’t fake it easily.

Got it? Good.

Here is my combination, you take it from here:

Sky King or Enola Gay?

My Old Irish Tail

Published on March 18, 2009 in Childhood, Entertainment and Ireland. 0 Comments

Francesco wrote today…

Few cultures have as rich of a literary tradition as the Irish. And few literary traditions are as steeped in abject sadness, soul-crushing squalor and pub-related fatalities as that of the Irish autobiography. Yet each year we continue to be enthralled by books from authors that by all accounts should not have lived past birth. In honor of these fine men and women I present, via Francesco, the following template to help you pen your own award-winning Irish memoir, Mad Libs style. For example:

(gerund)
(vegetable)
(town’s sole economic lifeline)
(dearest childhood possession)
(body part of which there is only one).
(complete surname)
(chemical element for water)
(choose a gender)
(proper noun)
(verb)
(entrance other than door)
(woman’s name other than “Mom”)
(inanimate object)
(gimp extremity)
(colorful Gaelic phrase for “open cutlery drawer”).
(double-digit number)
(imagine the worst job possible for a woman, then imagine it occurring inside an underground factory).
(oh hell, you decide)
(medical term for “the sniffles”)

Now go visit Francesco and see where to plug your Mad Libs…

I Can’t Find Me Legs: A Tale of Growing Up Poor, Catholic and Eventually Blind in Ireland
By Going Like Sixty
It was day three of the Blessed Feast of the Prolonged Consumption and Father O’Hurley had just finished flogging me in the abbey. I put on the clothes my dear, defeated mother had fashioned me from discarded radishes and quickly ran past the abandoned Corvettes—only to learn that my dog had been sold to help pay for the removal of my wee brother’s sphincter.

These were tough times for the McSixty clan. A blight had destroyed all the Hydrogen, and we had just burned the last of the females in the house to stay warm. Still, we had faith in our M & M’s that He would be merciful and soon run the lot of us in our sleep.

Soon after I arrived home my father stumbled in through the coal chute, reeking of whiskey and Princess Diana. “Damn the cursed English!” he yelled at our pet drawer before his faulty elbow gave out and he crashed face first into the bolloxed knife tray.

With my father now dead, it was up to my mother to raise me and my69 siblings, which she did by getting a job in anus smelling establishment. Unfortunately, a few hours later while walking back from the prostitute cannery she was struck from behind, both sides and above from dog turds. She eventually died from phlegmengitus.

Twenty years later I moved to America.

Having Lead in Your Pencil

Published on February 15, 2009 in Childhood, Education, Family and Writing. 6 Comments

Of course you recognize this from the baby boomer at The Junk Drawer.

I wonder how young you can be and not recognize this? is this another bygone of the Baby Boomer era? Do they still have pencil sharpeners in schools? (BTW: it’s a picture of the blades of a pencil sharpener.) If they do have pencil sharpeners are they electric or are they the crank kind?

If they do have the sharpeners do they have multiple holes like the one above? Baby Boomers will remember fat kindergarten pencils? Harumph, at least I’m not a bad parent and saddled my struggling child with a skinny pencil.

Obviously we have both been through kindergarten and we had both used those fat little pencils to learn to write – but for some reason when it came to teaching our daughter we had forgotten about them.

I hated emptying the pencil sharpener in school. It’s not the wood shavings that make such a mess, it’s the graphite lead that just. got. everywhere. Because you removed the body exposing the blades the black junk always got on my hands, and usually on my face – usually on my nose! Of course, I would walk around with a black smudge on my face like it was Ash Wednesday until the teacher would notice.

Preschoolers are getting Blackberries and the good Pastor Josh is forgetting about fat pencils.

My husband, the gear head, loves the concept of this gadget. My take? Getting my preschooler to write with a big fat pencil is hard enough. I can’t imagine him doing so on a teeny keyboard.

I think we have a pencil in the house – fat or otherwise. We have a whole crapload of pens – always two rooms away from the phone when needed. We have a crapload of pencils in the golf cart.

How’s that for a random post with no point? Where can I buy a blog sharpener?
!–adsense–>

Above Ground Pool Whirlpool Maker Needed – Apply Within

Published on July 17, 2008 in Childhood, Entertainment, Family, Shopping and Violent Acres Comments. 13 Comments Tags: above ground pools, tramps.

A couple posts back I reprinted a quote from Vicious Victoria, or whatever she calls herself, about above ground pools and tramps representing white trash. I mean tramps, the kind you jump on trampolines.

If you have kids 8 – 14 years old, an above ground pool is a GREAT way to spend your money. I don’t feel the same about trampolines. Trampolines just don’t have the long lasting entertainment value. After a dozen jumps what’s left? Do you want a half dozen kids in your back yard on a tramp? Two seem to be the max at one time, so the others are pretty much bored, or arguing over who goes next.

I realize a kid 8 – 14 can dive in a pool and break a neck, but adults have been known to dive into 4 foot pools too. *ahem* me. So there are safety hazards.

But having the kids gather in our yard to swim, with limitations on the numbers, is better than having our kids at somebody else’s house doing whatever.

Plus: getting a teenage girl to babysit on Saturday and/or Sunday for hours while we played golf was a piece of cake. Back in the day, baking to a crispy golden brown in the real sun was the only way to get a tan. No chemicals, no tanning beds. It took hours of laborious laying around for days. It was hot work too. Being able to roll off the deck into a pool every few minutes made the teenage girls living next door very happy to babysit for us.

I actually enjoyed cleaning the pool too.

When it was time to clean the pool, I would tell the kids to make a whirlpool by everybody running in the same direction along the circumference of the pool. When four or six kids start running they can get that water into a nice whirlpool. Then we made a game out of jumping out one at a time so the whirlpool wasn’t slowed down.

How does that help cleaning the pool? All the hair, yes, girls with long hair exposed to massive amounts of chlorine for hours everyday, lose a lot of hair, and other debris – leaves, underwater toys, and beer bottles would be swept to the middle of the pool.

After the raging whirlpool was calm, I would ease myself in with the long hose and carefully vacuum a relatively small area!

No kids. Just me. Usually about 7 or 8 p.m. Then it was adult swim. Or adult float-around-on-air-mattresses, catching a smooch as we floated by each other.

I bet our kids were in the best shape of their lives during this period too. Literally hours splashing around ended with the total aerobic whirlpool exercise. They still stayed up until all hours during the summer, but they seemed to be much more mellow after swimming all day.

Don’t think those POOLS INSTALLED FOR JUST $499 have been lost on us.

If I just had somebody to jump in and make a whirlpool for me daily!

Well Blog This: Baby Screws Up Birthday; Sleep Lab Doesn’t Arrest Me; I’m Retired

Published on July 9, 2008 in Childhood, Health and Research. 0 Comments Tags: baby, geezer rebellion, magnum, retired.

Those clever kids, just when you think you got things under control they get borned before you’re ready. My colleague commented how weird it was to pick their baby’s birthday. (C – section because of Mom’s health) The birthday they chose was July 23.
Riiiiiiiiiight. She’s probably delivering about now. He called and said they went for regular appointment, and the baby was ready to enter the world – right then. I think this is about a month before her due date, so she had eaten lunch, not anticipating that her new baby would interfere. They admitted her and let the lunch digest before the operation.
WELCOME TO THE WORLD new little baby that I can’t remember the first name of!
[We Salute You Little Miss Early Arrival]

Security Let Me Sleep This Time
1000% improvement over the last attempt at sleeping over. Really nice person who treated my like a person. Lo and behold. I have sleep apnea. Which I knew, having used a CPAP for 17 years. The doc requested the paperwork from the lab where I had the study done and all she got was one lousy document saying I had missed an appointment.
So in order to get me under more pressure, she sent me on a sleepover.
I’m not bragging or anything… but I had an average of 70 apneas per hour.
YES!

And my legs were almost broken too! (Well restless legs, that is)

I am retired.
After 17,000 miles on new tires, I wore them babies down to the nubbins. Like I told the service guy, you don’t buy a hemi to not squeal the tires once in a while (OK, a lot!)