Be The Pigeon

OK all you female types who accidentally stumbled on this rugged, handsome, one-of-a-kind blog.  I'm gonna give you a tip for Christmas: the perfect gift for him.  As I was penning my Sweet Nothings entry, Amy came down to the office crying. "What's wrong, Amy?" "I need your claw thing." "Why do you need my claw thing?" "Because I accidentally dropped Mom's earring down the drain." {lots of crying, followed by dad saying something insenstive, yet witty, to his eldest daughter} Enter "the tool". {dun dun dun} I should clarify something before continuing.  The PERFECT gift would be an Acura TL.   Let's not mix signals here, afterall. But the next most perfect gift (for under $10) would be a  flexible grabber  (about $5 on google).  Seriously, if you don't have one at your house, you NEED to go shopping.  Buy 3 of them.  The kids will have fun grabbing one another's skin on Christmas morning.  What could be more fu...

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...

I had to wait a few days to make this post. Last Saturday we had one of the annual highlights of our year. Each year, friends of ours organize a Christmas party (adults only) for 30-40 folks. It's always lots of fun, primarily because of who gets invited. In most social groups, there's usually one or two people that are the proverbial "life of the party." Well, in ours, there's a few guys who could probably make some of the gals wet their pants laughing. It just comes naturally. Each year at this Christmas party, we participate in a white-elephant gift exchange. If you've not been fortunate enough to participate in such an exchange, everyone brings a $5-or-less gift, new or used, nice or ugly, and puts it into the pile. Many of the gifts are wrapped in very appealing paper, but veterans have learned to avoid those presents at all costs; they always conceal something you're sure to wish you'd left in the pile. As people select gifts, we all g...