I hate derogatory words and the word dumb is just one of those words. It actually means someone who is temporarily unable to speak, but most people use it to refer to someone who lacks any bit of intelligence. Well, unfortunately, it refers to me too well and for 2 reasons. One, because I broke down and ordered my son some drums again. He knows that after 3 days of lobbying I will break down. Two, because when he brought me the Amazon page for a mini drum set, I didn’t pay attention. After I ordered them my wife asked me how miniature they were so I looked them up. They were 8 inches by six inches. Do you think the word dumb is maybe too flattering?
Jun 24 - 30
The nice thing about being on vacation with other family members and friends is how wonderful the kids act around them. “Your kids are so delightful “, they say to us.
And around other people they are. I just wonder if they have been watching spy TV shows or they have been taken over by extraterrestrials?
Jun 17 - 23
It seems I am suffering from a new condition that psychologists have only now brought to light. It is called "Password Dementia”. It is a condition that allows you only to remember your very old passwords but none of the current ones. As you know this can be devastating to leading a normal life. As the servers at work ask me to authorize something I have to run back in the office and hope I wrote the new password down somewhere. When the different sites allow me to reset my password, they always come back and say I used that one already and I am turned down. In this new world, it is hard to open your car door without a password. I am sure that soon you won’t be able to use the restroom without a password. So my solution is to give all of you my password so that I always have someone to turn to. If only I could remember it...
Did you see the article in the Bee this morning about the statistics of older people? Well, yours truly prepared an 82-page document in 1978 when I was with the State Health Dept. Mind you I had a lot of people telling me what to do, but back then we didn’t have excel spreadsheets so all 20 spreadsheets were done manually. Fortunately, no one checked my math, and that is probably why I went back into the restaurant business in 1978.
Jun 10 - 16
Electrolysis and Condensation. Separately, these two words have fascinating definitions, together they define a catastrophic mess. There is nothing like walking into your kitchen and seeing a puddle on the table and floor, and then looking up and seeing water dripping from a large bubble in the ceiling. We had to immediately rip down the ceiling to see what it was, and I wish I knew this was a leaking condensation line but coincidentally this was right under a water heater upstairs. So I go up and rip out the wall in my daughter’s bedroom thinking that is the water line to the water heater. When I see it is the condensation line, I think of every possible alternative other than going up into the attic on a hot semi-summer day. So I go under the house with a compressor and a shop vac to blow and suck out the condensation line. Of course to no avail, because I had heard of electrolysis but I had never in my long life experienced it. So finally, I get the ladder to go up to the attic and there is the biggest hole in a pipe I had ever seen and I felt so dumb, and hot. The moral to the story is, if this happens to you, just put a large potted plant there on the kitchen table.