Frustrating Little Things: part 2

Twist off beer bottle caps that aren’t.

Book markers that mysterious move from one reading to the next.

Lawn movers and leaf blowers that only start on the last 1000th pull.

Cars with automatic door locks with the key still in the ignition while you are on the outside looking in.

Friends short cut directions that turn into long cuts.

A baker dozen that by the time you get home are 8 something.

Instant micro-wave soup that taste almost as good as it’s cardboard box.

Computer games that don’t fit the operating program – gridlock.

Withdrawal programs in which no one has a clue. Betty Ford or Iraq take your pick.
Sure things i.e. my brother bring up his wind surfing board for the weekend bring utter clam for 2 days.

Five star movies that in your opinion are minus ones.

Booo 10/30

Where’s the fun in Halloween?
It’s shocking and like everything today, its sugar coated.
Moms and dads accompanying their kids on the door kocking rounds in 'safe neighborhoods', where is the fun there?

There was a time when trick or treat meant something. That something was very similar to ye olde England when a highway man asked you to
"Stand and deliver!"
Another words fork over the good stuff and I don’t mean candy apples or cinnamon bars or else.

Back in the day a part of every kids Halloween kit was a bar of soap, a few dozen eggs maybe even a roll of TP and not an adult supervisor. The TP was used for something else than it’s main purpose. I think with each generation things have tamed down a bit. I can remember my dad telling me of the times they hit the streets in Peoria on Halloween and the main targets were a thing called outhouses. In his day they were still in use around the outskirts of town and over they'd go.

Fast forward to my generation’s youth, the place, the rolling hills of East Davenport Iowa… here the great Halloween night sport was lining up metal garbage cans in the steep curvy alley ways. Then listening to some resident drive their cars into the alley nailing the cans. The cans then would roll down the hills making a terrible racket and cause the residents to swear under the breath. The noise would echo through the night, oh the great sport of it.
Now today if I were one of those homeowners I’d be p.o’ed.

Living out on the lake away from town and the masses, I really miss all those little goblins who use to ring our door bell.
It was another day in our life’s calendar as are the four seasons…
Stand and delivery or I’ll soap your windows.

Pulp cutter on wheels 10/27
Next door our neighbor is having his property cleared, out with the bad keeping the good. He’s hired a small firm ( two guys) to take out the scrub trees. These being poplar, birch and many of the oaks that got nail by the Japanese beetles that wiped out many a tree four years ago.

Logging has come a long ways especially in the equipment they use. In the old days they had two guys on a band saw. Huff and puff. Then came the gas powered chain saw, which was used up until twenty years ago.

Then some engineer decided there had to be a better way…. So he took a large crawler hack hoe removed the bucket and added gripper disc’s which hold the tree truck then the operator hits a button and a chain saw cut the base. Then he hit another button and side blade trim off all the branches.

A third button is hit and the truck of the tree is then sawed in 8" sections, the right length for the paper mill. The unit is on tank tread and can crawl over anything, there’s even a push blade in the front allowing the unit to travel over all terrain.

Then these logs are trucked to the paper mill leaving behind a mess of branches which is for wild life. I was spell bound while they cut next door and are now cutting our back property. This sure beats having my younger brother pretend he’s the Texas Chain Saw horror movie main character and having the place look like the Normandy beach head.

One little old reply card… 10/26/06

It seemed harmless. The magazine ad got me thinking of warmer climates and bright blue skies. All I had to do was send in a simply reply card to this wonderful land development property in Rear End, Arkansas.

Two weeks later I received in the mail a huge color brochure which covered most aspects of this new paradise now being offered in a limited basis to only a few chosen people, I being one of them. The brochure depicted the place in art renderings of what the developed property would look like, paved roads with ornate streetlight. Tennis, golf and swimming pools, the artist’s hand hadn’t missed a beat. There were even hiking trails along the White River.
Could this be another Bill and Hillary deal?

They had an #800 phone number which I could call if I had further questions. They even would fly us down for a weekend to enjoy this once in a lifetime offer. Get the hook…. Then 10 days later I got this call from India from a "sales Rep" asking us when we would like to make a visit. I told the sales person...
" Gee, I just had brain surgery and will not be my self for at least the next 5 years and do you really know where Arkansas is?" There was a void at the other end.

So much for getting skin alive I told myself…not quite for my name and address must have been resold to a name listing company. Now several months later we receive 2 or three times a week another " Once in a Lifetime Offer". We even got one from Sotheby’s, an English land development firm, concerning their property in Costa Rica wherein the lowest priced unit was $2,400,000 and change.

S0 now we to headed to the paper recycling center weekly with an extra 10 ponds of unwanted paper all due to one little reply card.

Head way, one nail at a time...10/25

We are only 4 weeks behind. Our little flock is building a new church in down town. It’s a thing that many of us have worked on for ump-teen years. Somehow along the line I either volunteered or was out of town when a head man was needed and I wasn’t there to say no….

So after 2 years of planning we began construction mid year thinking all would be completed by Christmas. Well, due to some fore seen problems and one or two oops we are resigned to the fact that it’s not going to get done on time. A better rational approach is… let’s just get it right.

After weeks of messing around with the foundation which seemed like the contractors were working in reverse, they started on the walls. Now the roof is up and the last of the shingles are going on this week.

Windows? You need windows? I sure hope they were ordered. There was one other problem… I was missing in action for three weeks and just now getting back on my feet. The last thing that I could do was hobble around inspecting new construction for bent nails. Even if I could there is always the thought " I wonder what else went a-rye?"

Well, at least I’ll have two good legs to kick some butt…. Sometimes when you look at something daily it doesn’t seem anything is happening but there has to be headway somewhere, please! I’ve just got to remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day nor the pyramids. However, those guys weren’t deal with state building inspectors.

Finding the other side of the Garage……10/24

The Saturday games were played. Half the teams won, half the teams lost, the poor Wildcats! But now a days I can’t get to hyped about winners or loser.
The only difference between them are a few points on the score board. I have NO favorites for an event occurred in 1965 that change my view of the game. My school dropped football so I decided I could always go for the folks that don’t have a snowball chance.

So during the third quarters on Saturday my mind usually slips from the TV and the game(s) to things that I should be doing on Saturday afternoons. My list of things to do has grown out of hand. But where does one start? The garage of course.

For the last two years I’ve tried to make my little end of the world, the garage, presentable. But I have failed to get off my lead bottom month after month. Each time I go out with good intentions. Let’s let organized, lets get rid of all that STUFF that I squirreled away thinking that I could use that ‘thing’ in one of my many projects that on my list…. Well, last week I came to a grand fact that all that stuff was just stuff…. time to start many a trip to the recycling center and the Thrift Sho.

It’s just a re-adjusted mindset going having to go back to the time when my grandmother died and I was the one that had to clear out her home.
She kept everything, I mean everything…Christmas cards from 1910. She had aluminum salvage ball the size of a medicine ball, and a stack of newspapers dating from 1945.

So now if I haven’t used something in two years, it’s histor. I don’t want kids thinking of me as I thought of my grandmother. pack rat but only in this respect " Gee, Pop was a grand person."

Flu shots… no extra charge. 10/23

Having had another round of hospital care it always amazes me when I open the billing for both the hospital stay and doctor fees. Having lived with annual hospital stays within our family we now always request a second copy of their statements. The first statement is sent to the insurance companies who rubber stamps most of them for payment then they spent you a statement for the balance of the co-pay.

Another words you have to beg them for an itemized statement.

Its just mind blowing the pages of itemized costs just for a simple three day stay. I was going over the last one and talk about (nickel and dime) even cotton balls were costed. I then thought about some of the prep work I’d had, one of the items was this years flu shot… it was listed as a no charge?

Come on now, someone in the system had to cover the cost but there it was at N. C. Find I told mrself maybe it’s one of those government freebees. Free to the fact that some poor tax payer is footing the bill.

At the time I ask the nurse about the shot and she said, " S.O.P. standard operating procedure." I guess with my advanced age and that the surgery that I was about to have, I would be a risk due to a weaken state.

So here I am rehab’ing waiting around the house for the flu bug to hit home. Fat chance of that but if it should come to that I’ll head south and park my fanny on a sunny beach for I now can afford it having not to pay for a $200 flu shot.

Jack-O-Lantern 10/20

The search is on, oh where oh where can that perfect pumpkin be? You've got ten days to find the perfect October Holloween outfit. The stores are now outfited in orange and black themes with spiders working over time spinning excess webbs. The same holds true for candy makers putting out billions of bags of mirrco-sized bits of your favorite tooth breakers.

The rush is on for the commerical side of all saints day. I used the small cap "s" in saints for that's what the actual day was suppost to be. We are to remember the brave hearted people that gave greater meaning to your own lives. I am not takling about Saint Ralph or his better known fab four - Matt, Mark, Luke, and John. Nor am I talking about all the those great hearted people that are giving so much of the time rebuiling the Gulf Coast area.

I am talking about your grandparents and others who working their buns off to honestly give your parents a better life. Along the way they hauled their offspring into their places of worship hoping that something would wear off.

Most of these "trend setters" have past on to their greater reward and these are the "SAINTS" which the day Holloween was intended. So while your are out Trick or Treating, drinking orange beer, spend a moment of refecting on your past relatives which hopefuly got you headed in the right direction.

Direct TV… 10/19

( I was busy yesterday, I got locked in a car and couldn’t get out)

We put a small dish out side our home to pick up all the good stuff. There are so many channels now I just can’t keep my thumb off the remote. 10 seconds a channel then it’s on to another. I mean either my thumb is going to fall off or the batteries will go dead.

I just can’t keep it on one channel thinking that there has to be something better that will improve my brain. There’s even a channel that reruns all the soaps of the week, another that reruns games shows of the 1970’s. There is MTV as well as several dozen channels that are actual radio stations and you pick your era of rock or in Rosebuds case "swing".

You can turn in 24 hours of cartoons, remodeling, gardening and at home dentistry. My brother has a dish as well. He’s a wrench head and has it welded 24 hours on race cars, shop talk and machanics 101, the Speed Channel.

There was a time in this country when you went to the hardware store and for $15.95 purchased a TV antenna. An hour’s work of installing and could pick up free of charge all the local TV stations, all 3 of them. Now, it’s $60 per month for Direct TV allowing you to watch Lawrence Welk reruns… trilling, just trilling.

Then if you add the basic NBA, NFL packages your in triple digits$.
We only have the basic so for $720 a year I’ve been trying to come up with something rather than surfing the channels and failing. After due thought, there isn’t any but if anybody has any suggestions about better time usage let’s hear…

High Water mark….10/17
Living on a body of water you get to notice the little things. No this is not Waldon’s Pond just a small lake in northern Wisconsin. This year and last were dry, very dry as for the lack of Vermouth. Then add to this the lack of a proper snow cover for seven straight winters and this pond level has continued to head south.

So somewhere in this world there is 30" of water that does not belong. We are not alone in this for someone's swimming pool is overloaded or the Coke Company has been bottling way too much canned water.

The after effect of this is that if you were to walk the shore line on most bodies of water up here your eyes would open wide. The shorelines here are now twice their size. There are beaches everywhere. Who needs sand box? There are tons of sands; it’s beginning to look like the great northern desert.

If you look landward from the extended shore you can see something high above the old shore line. It’s what the County Zoning Department calls the high water line. These lines were established by the original USGS, the government map makers. They are long gone by not what they drew in the sand.

Right after the last glacial period they set the bounds and regulations as to the dwelling set back that our pioneer’s could build their lodges from lily ponds. They wrote their statues in granite and wooo to those that stepped over their line.
In today’s paper world, just try and get a building permit without two legal councils, a wad of cash, and a brother-in-law on the county board.

So they were wrong….10/16

Go ahead, it’s a cakewalk.
That’s what several people told me, go ahead have your knee replaced it’s easy, sure.

Crud, it’s been two weeks and it’ still a pain in the knee or someplace else. Maybe in several weeks I’ll be able to sleep at night and hobble around without cussing’ over a dull pain. So with that said and having downed half a bottle of pain pills maybe just maybe all of the advise I have been given over the years is about as bad as standing "knee deep" in a hog pin.

It first started in school with a guidance councilor telling me that I should go on to college and I should look at engineering at Purdue U. I think the guy was legally blind and couldn’t see my grade transcript. Designing collapsible bridges, unflyable aircraft or easy open jar lads just didn’t seem in the cards.
Thankfully I listened to my parents and the guidance guy lost a kick back from P.U.
Next stop was my freshman college room mate. First week of school he had talked me into everything. Let’s join this club and that organization and let’s rush a fraternity. Classes, studying, the basics forget about it he forgot about it.
So I did. There was flying club out at the airport, than I pledged, was a staff member of the yearbook, all the good stuff, classes? I could catch up with school work later…wrong.

This trend of listening to everything and everybody but the little voice inside lasted many a year, I mean there were get rich schemes that were just to good too pass by. How about a limited partnership in an oil drilling program?

OK, I admit decades later that it was easier to roll the dice as a young lad than as an old frat. To bad that they can’t go after outsider traders, fish on, set the hook.

Rehab’ing for the third time 10/13/06

So three times a week I am driven into the HYMC rehab Unit up in Woodruff. WI. Our car should know the way there by itself. I had to attend classes there last year for a total of 12 weeks. The car know the way just like Old Paint knows the way to the barn.

However, on doctor’s orders I am not to drive so Rosebud wheels me into town while am spread across the back seat of our van. I just can sit still in a regular car seat for more than 5 minutes. Once on site it takes at least 10 minutes to say hello to all the staff members who helped me through cardiac rehab then on to Physical therapy.

Now after a week of bending and prying my knee with crow bar, hammers and come-alongs the nursing staff can bend my knee 90 degrees, that up back and forth and not circular.
Now I know what they mean…. That progress is measured in degrees, just like Iraq, you can’t win them all and I’m in this for the long haul...
Pass the ice pack, please.

Sunny with a chance of two feet. 10/12

What’s with weather forecasters?
Some of these guys have been so wrong for so long you can make book on it, the weather, being usually 100% the opposite. We live just on the south end of the Lake Superior Snow Belt, meaning that either we get snow shovels out or the sun block 40. Our poor local guys have a 50 % chance of getting it right… they never do!

With us it’s hit or miss with the weather and local TV stations weather people who are recent grads of the Howard Sterns School of Broadcast Journalism. Most of them walk around all day with something other than a red face. They sell cars in the day time to put beer on their table. The question is ... How can so many people be so wrong about something as simple as the weather?

During the summer I work at the golf course and come in contact with weather daily as am sure you do to. But I get these really dumb calls from golfers asking about the weather going to be like at their tee times, like I can tell if it’s going to rain in the next five hours?

So, I‘ve come up with a system that TV weather people should use, it call RGC’s Window. I crank it open, a nearby window, and take a look. If there is only one cloud in the sky, I tell them "It’s Sunny all day". If there are two clouds I tell them, "there is a chance of clouds," three clouds " It’s going to be very cloudy" Then if the horizon is loaded I tell them, " it’s going to rain by noon, " even if it’s 11:30.

Say something intelligent, I can’t! 10/11

For four days in a row I’ve parked my fanny at my computer, sat and typed a sentence or two. It now seems that I have a new nerve or a displaced old one that will not let me sit in the chair before it starts screaming the Freddie Kreuger Fright Song.

It’s like a chain saw ripping into something it shouldn’t.

Another words, I put two thoughts down and I want to slamb the keyboard out the window…I get up hobble around a bit then sit and it’s at it again. It feels like my rear is about to explode. No, it’ not Rosebud’s cooking. I think it’s the physical rehab’ing on the new knee that has brought new lights to other older problems.

Right now it’s on fire and there isn’t one intelligent thing inside my skull. They (intelligence) all take a hike when I sit down. The doctors calle this thing a new they did a total knee replacement. Now with other body parts flaring up I am seriously considered booking passage on a Trans-sylvan Arrow Flight into Bucharest for a full body replacement. The only problem is my present doctor is having problems with a referral in Romania.

Cutting to the quick… 10/10

Ya, ya I missed a Columbus Day posting, the banks and post offices were closed anyway

But I was away from our place for 5 days plus a few more. It was a bright sunny morning as we left driving out our road then down the town road. All the tree leaves were ablaze, it was almost blinding. We were headed south and were away for some time. Upon returning we found littered all those colorful leaves which are now a dirty brown which are now all over the place.

Wasn’t it just last week (or last year) when I sent you a blog about leaf piles? How in the world can a year fly by so fast? I didn’t even get half of Rosebud’s Honey Do list finished.

Then looking ahead time wise it will be time to set the clocks back and lose another hour. So where did that year and one hour go? It's lost someplace. Didn’t Einstein have a theory about time compaction? (Ralph Einstein that is) It’s not only me but I’ve heard others comment on the fact that the world is spinning faster. Fast time and spinning? So8nds like Whitmans' Friday nights. So what’s that got to due with the price of gold? Everything! that is everything is relative or is it one of your relativeswhich is holding a golden pot and you’re sdtanding there holding a bag of animal waste.

Where is this headed? Glad you asked! most different departments of science only look at the "SMALL" picture… It’s up to us small fry to look at something that’s so simple that it effects many other things in our little world.
Just think of all the things that would be cleared away…by a change of attitude.


I.E. take Leap Year…. If we all forget about the extra day in that fourth year, what would it mess up? Nothing!
Let’s pretend it’s not there and forget about it. Then all calendars from year to year would be the same saving confusion. Plus we'd make New Years, Christmas and the 4th of July fall on three day week ends. We then would have calendar watches that wouldn’t need resetting; yearly calendars that would not have to be thrown away nor changed.

There is a ton of other stuff that we could forget about by not thinking about it. This is called the simpleton’s worldly view. I am proud I it have and I have not reset my calendar watch date in several years! (lost the instructions, again)

Other friends…10/6

Four and eight legged types are what I am talking about. Today my springer dog started her fall training. If I have to get in shape after the surgeon’s knife then she has to get in shape for fall hunting. We spent this morning in a confined area, our living room.

We were working on commands.... stay, bang, fetches and come, give. I think you get the picture. This is work for the two of us but for successful bird hunting it has to be done often. Iowa peasant is not a matter of luck, it is knowing where to be at the right time, just like fishing.

It was Oct 2nd and the new knee when in. They said I couldn’t drive for 6 weeks but waqnt me to walk. What better way than to take the dog along with a shot gun.

It’s old dead eye, just ask the Fryguy and how Mr. Annie Oakley put a hole in the side of his garage, damn here his head.

So it’s animal training and this isn’t a first for me. We had a prior dog that I almost trained, and several g. pigs, pets of the kids that lives in a cardboard box and eats carrots. They wouldn’t quite mind me either.

I’ve only had one successful pet training once and that was with a mysterious little black ante that would come out at lunch breaks. It was when I was teen cutting grass at a cemetery and I would take a lunch break and sit at the same stop daily. I noticed that a large black ant would come out and sit on my lunch bag. This happened daily and one day I offered it a crumb. It took it ran to it’s hole and came back for seconds.

This happened for weeks on end. The little guy knew when I was coming and was they’re waiting to share lunch before the noon whistle blew. On the third day I put a white paint spot on his back so I knew him from all his cousins.
His trick would amuse some of my rather keened minded friend and lasted all summer till one day it (the ant) tried dancing with a lawn mower blade.