LET'S TALK-----

 

LET’S TALK….

First off, let’s get the Labor Day holiday greeting out of the way. Summer is over, the kids are back in school, traffic is bad in school zones, watch your time and speed carefully. We have one more big holiday to BBQ and stuff ourselves before it’s time for the holiday season. I am already seeing Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations in the stores. Is nothing sacred any longer?

You have to look back at old photos from the early 1900’s and late 1800’s to notice that no one smiled. That’s because they were tired. We didn’t have any so called ‘labor’ saving devices such as we do now. They had to make their own cheese and butter. Ice cream required churning a wooden tub full of ice for hours. You couldn’t just go the store and buy a gallon of it.

Think about it, most of you reading this blog are the last generation to have lived before the advent of social media. I call this era BSM, meaning ‘before social media’. Your parents and grandparents and perhaps you as well had to actually talk to people instead of texting, emailing or Instagram-ing (sp?) them. It was hard to use real words. Some of you may have had to actually turn a crank in the door of your car to roll down a window. Oh, the tragedy of it all.

Your grandparents and surely your great grandparents probably went through the depression and World War II. Food, gasoline, rubber, clothes were all rationed, and their news came via a radio (AM only) and newspapers. And they most likely had to walk 10 miles to school each day, uphill, through the snow all year around. Or so you were told.

Now we get upset if our computer doesn’t load fast enough or we only have one bar on our cell phone.

I actually found some old road maps the other day. Remember those? I’d like to know how many marriages were saved with the advent of GPS in our cars. I bet map rage was the cause of many, many divorces in this country. Think about this….if Moses had GPS he would not have wandered around the desert for 40 years. Notice he did not stop at anytime and ask directions. Men don’t ask for directions, they just put the pedal to the metal and race off in some direction, right or wrong. “I may be lost, but we’re making great time, aren’t we?”

Old people living in the BSM period also had actual photo albums where you could open them up and look at pages upon pages of little Jimmy swimming, diving, fishing, cooking, camping, driving, studying, along with 300 other photos of him from the cradle to his retirement from Pespi Corp. Now in today’s world, the SMG (social media generation) keep their 78,000 photos of little Zenon and Dorthia on their cell phones where you have to wait until they scroll back in time to the event, they wish you to see. So much faster than just flipping the pages of an album marked ‘kids’.  

But look on the bright side, you’ve got the internet, voicemail, robots, artificial intelligence, microwave and URL’s.

What’s not to love?

See you next week…Peary Perry

MURPHY'S LAW ---AGAIN

MURPHY’S LAW AGAIN----

 

You might recall several years ago, there was a thing going around called ‘Murphy’s law’. It basically said that ‘if it could go wrong, it would’.

So, here are some of my observations to be considered in this day and age.

In the army I was always told to ‘pee before you have go’. This is a great suggestion especially if you are in a long line somewhere. You are at the doctor’s office for your appointment, or you are at a restaurant waiting for your name to be called for your table. I guarantee you that if you leave the area to go to the bathroom, your name will be called. Then you come back to find that you lost your place in line and have to sit there again for another hour or so.

Same thing, if you are waiting for a very important phone call. One that you have been waiting on for weeks or months. I can bet that if you walk away from your phone to go to the bathroom, no matter how close it is to where your phone is, your call will come through and go into voice mail. That’s Murphy’s law in action.

Hang in here with me, now you are in the grocery store, you pick the shortest line with only 2 people in front of you. You should be out in no time at all, right?

Wrong, the first guy has to have 3 price check made on items without any barcodes or stickers. You try to back up and go to another check out area, but there are now 3 people behind you and you are blocked in.

The price check guy gets finished and is gone and you think you have it made but wait not yet. This clown has 47 coupons some are expired, and some are for items he hasn’t bought. So now you are a witness to a verbal confrontation between the clerk and the customer for 1 of his discounts of 27 cents for a jar of peanut butter. You are getting older by the minute.

Your next trial is the post office, always a good place to see if you really have any patience. Again, you pick the shortest line, but this guy wants to see all the special edition bird stamps that have been printed. He has no other place to go and wants to discuss his sighting of a yellow-bellied booby that he saw this week and is there a stamp for his new bird?

My final examples for this week are simple. If you are driving somewhere and you are early, all the traffic light will be green and there will be little or no traffic. Also, when you get a text that you need to read and need to have the lights turn red so you can see what it says. You can make book that none of the lights will cooperate.

Conversely, if you are running late to the airport, the doctor’s office or to a meeting, you can bet all the traffic lights will be red and the schools will have dismissed classes early during the exact time you need to be on the streets. To prevent you from making a call to alert someone you are going to be late, you will enter an dead zone where cell phones do not work for some mysterious reason or another. You agree with me or not?

See you next week….Peary Perry

GIVE ME THE SIMPLE LIFE...

 

GIVE ME THE SIMPLE LIFE….

 

As you know by now, I have retired and moved to a rural community of about 250 souls with the nearest grocery store about 15 miles away. We are in the middle of a hay field and our allergies are acting up, but it’s something we can live with to be able to live here in peace and quiet.

I have lived in big cities nearly all of my life I and can tell you that I don’t miss it at all. Don’t get me wrong, the big cities were very good to me and afforded me many opportunities to make a good living and take care of my family. It’s just that after all of these years and being 83 years old, I am tired and want to get some pleasure out of the simple things.

We have put up some hummingbird feeders on our porches. We have tried these for years and never got any response to speak of. Here they swarm the feeders, and we can actually watch them for hours at a time. Now I have time to research stuff that I didn’t have time to do before. There are over 350 different kinds of hummingbirds, they travel about 3,000 miles each year and they are diurnal…meaning they sleep at night and fly during the day. Just like me, except I don’t fly. They have brains that are larger than any other bird as compared to body weight. Save these little bon mots as you can always use them at some fancy cocktail party in the big city….” Say, did you know that hummingbirds….?”

Stick with me and you’ll learn a lot, or maybe not.

I’m also heavily involved in trying to train a morning glory plant to take root and grow so the birds can have some flowers for food. Did you know hummingbirds eat ants? That one is free.

I have heard that the Eskimos have some 22 different words for snow. I can only think of 1 or 2 since I am not very familiar with snow nor have, I ever been.

I am more familiar with words to describe the heat in Texas in August. The folks around here use a variety of phrases much more descriptive than your average old words like, hot, oppressive, sweltering, or relentless.

Nope, here we have heat that is’ hotter than blue blazes’, ‘hot as hades’, a ‘barn burner’, ‘It’s a scorcher’. Then my favorite …which is ‘hotter than a stolen tamale’. I mean it can’t get any more descriptive than that, can it?

By the way, a hummingbird can also eat up to 2,000 insects a day. Add that to the above referenced material I have given to you and you can consider yourselves well informed.

You can thank me later.

 

See you next week…Peary Perry