Be The Pigeon

Apparently my fun with flashing lights wasn't enough last week in Portland. No sooner had I checked into my hotel in southern Cal tonight than the hotel fire alarm started going off. At first, the staff came on the PA and said to ignore it a couple times. Then they changed their minds and told us to evacuate the building. Hmphhhh. I'm tired. So a couple hundred people filed down the stairs (I was on the top floor), but at least it was still 70 degrees outside. Let's all be glad there was no actual fire, because the Fire Dept didn't actually roll up for about 20 minutes. Not sure on that one, but seems a little odd. I can't really trash firemen, though, cuz they're off limits. :-) Every few minutes, the staff told us to move further away from the hotel, perhaps just to keep us all interested. When the FD finally did arrive, the guys jumped out with their full gear and SCBA tanks and went inside. Funny. I decided I needed a drink and so went down into t...

There's some things in life that are just worth celebrating.  For me, it's new sponge day.  Come on, you've all experienced it.  You go along doing dishes with an ever more disgusting sponge as your tool, only subconsciously realizing that you're probably just moving the grime around.  Then one day, the sponge fairy comes to visit, and presto.  You now have a nice, clean sponge in its place.  At our house, that happens pretty regularly (thanks, Jo).   Jolayne was kidding me recently that she can very often hear me whenever she breaks out a new sponge.  Usually, she's somewhere down the hall when she hears, "O, I love new sponge day!"  And no, I'm not embellishing there.   (And there's the proof that I do a large amount of dishes at our house!) So let's celebrate the little things in life and all give three cheers for new sponge day.  Next time you're in the dog house, you might just bring home a new sponge.  It could do wonders for your pro...

It's been a couple weeks since I've come up with anything witty enough to be publicly shared. Even now, no wit is to be found between my ears. But I have to share something anyway. Tonight, however, I was walking around Portland when I stumbled on a Macaroni Grill. Yum, I thought, so I doubled back and went in. After ordering, I was settling into the page-turning USAA magazine (it's a freeby from my insurance company; just shows how pathetic I've become). I'd cleverly thought to bring along for some 8/5x11 dinner companionship when the waitress mentioned something going on directly across the street, directly across from my window. Some guy apparently had another guy in a sleeper hold, with a good 15-20 people standing by watching. Apparently, in Portland, that's a perfectly acceptable behavior. From my vantage point, it seemed like one of the onlookers was a security guard. Also, apparently, interdiction wasn't part of his job. A few minutes later...

I'm on my way home right now from a visit with Grandma in the middle of nowhere, CA. (That's about 3 hrs north of Sacramento and an hour from the nearest puddle-jumper airport). Took Misha with me this year since Amy got to do it last year, and we dug for things to do in the mighty town of Mt. Shasta. Frankly, that's a tall task to accomplish, but if you ask Misha, I did it pretty well. She wanted to go back over and over to the fish hatchery, after all. I'll tell her story in another post. Grandma is moving to an assisted living place in Phoenix, in a couple of weeks, and so most of the visit was taken up with moving furniture and packing stuff. Grandma appears to have gotten over the first emotional blow with a move like this, and she's now unloading junk like there's no tomorrow (pun intended). She's very matter-of-fact about the whole thing, which is refreshing. Grandma bequeathed her nice china set to us, which was very nice of her. We thus spen...