Category Archives: People are weird

Cleanhoggin

The COVID pandemic brought one unexpected but appreciated change to our lives at home. When you’re not out among your fellowman as often or as closely, you might quickly drift into a less frequent bathing regimen. You’re more on a self-sniff schedule in setting those bathing parameters, with a little help from your partner.

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Jello Theory in a Dream

I had a dream.

I was sitting down to eat lunch in a cafeteria with a little boy, and on our trays we each had a square of green jello with cottage cheese in it (I know—nasty stuff). For some reason hidden deeply in my twisted brain, I decided to tell the boy about where green jello came from.

“Did you know green jello comes from squeezing the heads of Presidents? If they’re really smart, you get more of those chunks. But presidents are busy people, so you just don’t get green jello every day.”

The boy carefully thought about this for awhile. Then he said, “Where does red jello come from?”

“Oh, that comes from the tears of the damned. There’s a factory in Indianapolis, but nobody can live within a mile of it because of the screams of the damned. Only deaf people can work there.”

I have no idea why I remembered this in such detail when I woke up, but I figured others might be interested in the latest developments in jello theory.

All Decked Out

For years I’ve been patching our deck by swapping out surface boards as they rotted. The original builders hadn’t used treated boards, and the previous owners hadn’t painted it, either. So it had slowly deteriorated. I put in treated 2x6s, so it was increasingly sturdy. But I stepped right through it on an old but sound-looking board in the fall, and then the lower structure started to give way as some of the joist ends rotted. All winter I kept thinking about what it would be like if a moose walked onto it and broke a leg. So we made plans to get it replaced in spring.

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