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

 

WHY TRY?

 

WHY TRY?

Over thirty years ago, a friend of mine got transferred to England. In an effort to cheer him up I started sending him a fax (remember those?) containing a positive quotation I got from a book written by Steve Forbes. The number of people grew and grew, some dropped off and others added on. Today my list has about 70 people on it. Some I have know for many years, some I have met once or twice and some I have never met. 

To find a quotation and send it to each one of these people takes me about fifteen minutes each morning. And often times I ask myself ‘why are you doing this’?

Many of you don’t know that I wrote a weekly newspaper column called “Letter From North America” for over twenty five years to over a hundred newspapers across the country. It was a satirical humor column about people and the government. I never made any money and just did it mainly as a mind exercise and a hobby. I stopped about ten years ago when I lost my sense of humor.

Now that I am retired, I find I want to start back again but newspapers are a dying venue, so I am looking for other approaches to explore. The writing keeps my mind busy and occupied with thinking of new things and how to express myself.

But let’s go back to the daily quotation discussion. These had to be turned in every Tuesday and often I would be struggling to find something to write about on Monday evening. In my opinion some of the dumbest stuff I have ever written in a hurry received the most comments. Recently during the move, I found a folder with some of these comments thanking me for what I had written. So, you never know if it helps or hurts.

These daily quotes are the same way, I can see each day who reads them or not or if they are opened and discarded. I am often tempted to say, ‘to hell with them’ and drop them from my daily list.

But I always go back to what happened when I was writing the columns. Is this person ignoring me on purpose or are they preoccupied with some matter for which I am totally ignorant?

So, I think about them and how they got on my list to begin with and then relent and keep on sending something to them each day as I have for all of these years.

You know we never really know what is going on in other people’s lives do we? Our lives are so busy and complicated that we can never see through to the real person and express our concerns and our prayers for their well being. It takes time and a lot of effort to see beyond the masks we wear in our daily lives. Sadly, we don’t get time until it’s too late to do anything about it and we live with a sense of regret for the for opportunities lost for the rest of our lives.

So no, I won’t quit sending these out each morning. It just may be the words you needed to hear.

That is why I try.

See you next week….Peary