I Love You!*

One day back in High School I opened my locker to find an envelope that held a handmade Valentine from a formerly secret admirer. It was signed "Love*, Jane" (not her real name) and at the bottom of the card was "*It's true!" This took me by surprise as I had no idea that Jane had any feelings like that for me and I didn't have them for her (and as far as I could tell I never even remotely sent signals that I did). Acting in a mature, high schooler's way, I passed it around my little circle of friends and we all had a good laugh.

I kind of feel bad now but I had no idea how I should have handled it. But I think things probably worked OK. From what I understand, Jane and I have maintained some of the world's parity in that department.

I didn't keep Jane's card. But its memory lived on.

In the box of treasures from my past I found a letter from Karen S. that she sent to me after a Spring Break trip home from college. She apparently had brought along two of her friends and there were some enclosures from them. I seem to have spent time with them but I have no recollection of what might have happened during that Spring Break. It sounds like we must have had a lot of fun together.

Karen's letter started out saying "You're in a heap o' trouble, boy!" It seemed that both Jan and Joyce (the friends) had fallen madly in love with me and wanted to marry me and adopt Donald.

Jan allegedly said "I love him more than the expanse of the sea!" and Joyce said "Well, I loved him from afar before we ever met." They then spent all their time fighting over me and even drew straws to see who was going to get me (Jan lost).

Here are their testimonials to their love.

Jan's Valentine	(back)
Joyce's Valentine	(back)

Later I got another letter containing:

Jan's desperate attempt to win my heart.

Karen's letter had this to say about their trip back to Luther College in Iowa:

We had bunches of fun wearing our eyeballs at the people in Nebraska. (Especially in Omaha.) We made a sign that said "Hubba Hubba", too. Old ladies did not like it. You definitely had a nasty influence on these people. (Thank goodness—Jan used to be very boring. Now she is only semi-boring.)

I guess "Hubba, hubba!" was something exotic for Jan and Joyce. I have no idea what eyeballs they wore.

The letter finished off with:

P.S. Please try not to break their hearts too miserably.

P.P.S. Jan said you could move to India and marry both of them. (How romantic.)

Well, Jan and Joyce, I hope your broken hearts have mended by now. It would never have worked out. You see, how can I say this?, I'm (oh, just be blunt!) not Lutheran.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A clock (time doesn't fly here!).

Orange you glad you've got a BlendTec blender?

A couple of days ago I was gloating over my good fortune to have neighbors who have more oranges than they can use. In one of my comments I said that we'd probably try using the Whole Juice setting of the BlendTec Blender to see if juice made by the blender would be any good.

It wasn't.

We threw in the peeled oranges and blended away. What came out was a thick, frothy, slightly bitter juice. I'm sure it was more nutritious than juice that doesn't include all of the orange (minus the rind). But it was bitter from all the pith from the rind that stuck to the segments.

Anybody out there who is lucky enough to have a BlendTec Blender should not waste any oranges this way.

I'm one who tries not to waste good food so I put the leftover juice in the refrigerator to have with my breakfast this morning. I didn't have juice, I had a chilled orange souffle. All the pectin in the membranes did its job and turned the juice into a semisolid.



The rest of the oranges will be juiced in the traditional manner.

If Izzy can do it, so can I

Another political cartoon.


For the rest of Banned Books Week, you're on your own at New Adventures of Queen Victoria.

Better than zucchini

It's that time of the year. The time of the year when you open your front door and there it is. A large grocery bag. Filled. With. Zucchini.

I like zucchini as much as the next man. Maybe not as much as Mombert does (Mombert isn't a man but you know what I mean), but I like them. But after a while they lose their charm.

Yesterday I got home and there was a variation on that theme. Our neighbor left us two large bags filled with Valencia oranges. Eighteen pounds of them.

We had fresh squeezed orange juice with breakfast this morning.


Are you jealous or what?

Bless you!

The habit of blessing a person who sneezes is one of those customs, like greeting someone with "how are you?," that really isn't doing anything more that acknowledging something about the other person. As far as I can tell, nobody really thinks that they're providing any real blessing to the sneezer since nobody knows where the custom came from. When somebody blesses me for sneezing I simply make a half-hearted attempt at a smile. I certainly don't say "thank you" since, being an unreligious person, I can't bring myself to encouraging religious behaviors (even though I don't think religion enters into it in anybody's mind when the blessing is going on).

Even a nonreligious "gesundheit" seems to me to be an unnecessary pointing out that somebody had an involuntary reaction to a tickle in his nose.

To me, all this seems about as necessary as hearing "who cut the cheese?" when somebody makes a different kind of involuntary emission.

I have a neighbor at work who quietly murmurs "bless you" whenever she hears a sneeze. The sneezers can't possibly hear these blessings. If the person she's addressing can't hear the blessing, is the blessing conferred? If so, couldn't it be done completely silently? If not, what's the point?

I lied. She doesn't bless everybody who sneezes. She blesses only those who can't hear her. If I sneeze I don't get blessed. My colleagues don't get blessings when they sneeze.

Does she hate us and wish us the evils that these "blessings" are supposed to ward off? I'm miffed. Confused, at least.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Buffet lamps (but not currently on the buffet).

Comics I do understand

There are few comics in one of today's posts to Comics I Don't Understand that made me laugh.

The saddest day

While I was searching for a souvenir for a recent post, I ran across several treasures in my souvenir boxes from my youth that, like it or not, I'm going to share with all of you.

For our first stroll down that memory lane, here is a letter to the editor of The Lookout, the Los Alamos High School newspaper, that I signed that Brian Lanter and Colleen wrote. I thought that I was going to get to help write it but they apparently didn't need (want?) my help. (They needed to use big words, some of which I still don't know, so I guess I couldn't have effectively contributed to the letter.) I don't remember whether it got printed.

The newspaper had printed a story about a recent snowfall that made the local skiers and their Snow God very happy. Colleen, Brian and I were not fond of snow and took umbrage (how's that for a good word, Colleen?) at their promotion of one (false) god over another.

So, on this saddest day of the year, the day the sun leaves our hemisphere for six painful months, here's our letter to the editor.


OK, here's a quibble. "Spalpeen" seems to be only a noun but was used as an adjective in the letter. And "morrhuol" doesn't show up in any dictionary I've found (either on my computer or on the Internet), though it is defined in the Google results. Somebody liked to show off his or her vast vocabulary.

---

Hey, did you notice the use of "there" where "their" should have been used? Boy, I'm glad I didn't have a hand in that letter!

---

Just because I had a few spare minutes, here's the letter for search engines to index (typos and all):

Dear Editor,

Actually you're not all that dear, and this is not going to be a nice letter (no, not at all nice). We, the disciples of the Sun Cult, are incensed! Why? You ask why, after what you've done to us? As an established religious cult, we stand adamantly behind our constitutional rights to equality. We therefore resent, sir, the blatant bigotry and callous treatment that have been our lot at the hands of your unworthy rag. You spalpeen miscreants, you fatuous hypocrits, have you no sense of social propriety, have you no vestige of civilized decency, have you no cognitive faculty, have you no rubber galoshes?

Three issues previous, in this moribund mouthpiece of corrupt winter promoters, you deemed it appropriate to glorify the snow god, while failing utterly to extend the Sun God those aggrandizements and encomia due so august and resplendent a diety.

What insensate gawks you must be, to allow the tramontane vagaries of vehement vituperators to violate the vestal virginity of verisimilar verbalization. Only the willing pawn of the basiliskine juggernaut of unbridled press would have refused to publish our supplicatory epistle, in which we requested equal representation.

Therefore stand warned that our glorious leader has revealed unto us his divine design for the demise of the snow god and the subjugation of his followers. Those who have slighted the Sun God to curry favor with the snow god shall be hoisted by there own petard. Resistors will be calcined by his refulgent wrath as they writhe in the mucilaginous morrhuol of moral decay.

Be it also know that the last true snow melted before the presence of our lord on Sunday, March 4. Any subsequent appearance of “snow” is but an illusion, drawn up by the ignoble snow god to tempt the followers of the True Lord.

For as it is written in the Book of Truth: “WE LIKE TO EAT (Oh yes, we do), BUT MOSTLY WE LIKE TO GET VENGEANCE!”

Yours Truly,

Tony Alamo in the news

After I graduated from New Mexico Tech in 1978, Poss and I took a road trip to Washington, D.C., our nation's capital. On the way there we had a meal at a restaurant in Alma, Arkansas, where I had grits for the first time.

At the restaurant I picked up a tract where Tony Alamo tells us of his life and conversion to Christianity. I seem to remember that the restaurant was owned by Mr. Alamo. What a thrill it was to eat where a great evangelist spreads the Word of the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation! As Poss and I drove east, I read his story. The nutcase somehow got stuck in my brain. He occasionally shows up in the newspaper and the stories often somehow seem to catch my attention.

His sainted Susan died in 1982 and Tony was planning on her resurrection. He's been jailed for tax evasion from his sequined jacket business (he apparently didn't pay his cult members followers wages that should have been taxed). He's apparently been charged in various child abuse and brain washing incidents.

Today's news article was about a raid on his compound for a child pornography and abuse investigation. According to Mr. Alamo, little girls reach the age of consent at puberty.

And Poss and I ate at his restaurant!

Anyway, I saved his little tract all these years as a souvenir of our trip to D.C. It's not worth reading but here it is anyway. (The blots are Windex.) The news stories from today are interesting in a very scary way.


And as I was commanded, I didn't destroy the tract and am now passing it on!

Successories

You've probably seen Successories^® products. Their motivational posters feature beautifully photographed scenes and extraordinarily apt sentiments that high-powered managers strew around their workplaces to inspire their extraordinary teams to perform at 110%. No, make that 120%!

I had a manager who had many of these posters around the office and in the conference rooms. Most of us felt that they were rah-rah, cheerleader-y drivel. We enjoyed the products from Despair, Inc. that are parodies of the Successories. They feature the same sort of beautiful photography but sentiments befitting the Dilbertesque environment we work in. Wally's desk surely holds the Pessimist's Mug that lets you know when the glass is half empty.

But there might be something to the Successories items (or at least the people who think that they're swell). The manager who provided us with all that inspirational sap left the company and started his own company. He sold it to a big, multinational company for megabucks, started another company and sold that one to another company for more megabucks. He made many people rather wealthy.

Our marketing group seems to have seen those posters and have decided that they can show potential customers that we can be just as inspirational.

Or something.

There are some posters on the wall outside the bathrooms in the part of the building where they make presentations to potential customers. I guess they're supposed to see that they'll become high-powered competitors in their fields if they use our product.

But the posters are lacking the beautiful photography of the Successories. And the sappy sentiments. Heck, I don't know what the point of the posters are. They wouldn't inspire me to buy anything.

One tells them that we'll make their companies smarter.
The model doesn't really give me the impression that intelligence is to be found here. He's just somebody smiling for the camera. And I'm not sure what the swirls of light are supposed to inspire. That he's getting brighter?

The one that really bewilders me is the one that says we'll enable business growth.
How does a bored looking person staring blankly into the camera illustrate that a company is going to make its customers' companies grow? What are they trying to tell me?

I'll never understand those people in Marketing.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A bell for summoning the butler (press on his tail or head and he rings!).

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Bookends (ironically used to hold DVDs, most of which we haven't watched).

Naked ladies

Back in March, I mentioned that I had transplanted some naked ladies around the yard. In that post I said that they take a few years to get established before they'd bloom so I probably wouldn't be posting pictures of them this year.

I was wrong.

Imagine my surprise when I walked passed our overgrown acacia this morning and happened to see some pink beneath it. There was a naked lady! Blooming! Its first year after being transplanted! A month after everybody else's naked ladies have bloomed!

So here is the picture I promised I wouldn't be posting this year.

Ladies (naked or clothed) and gentlemen, my naked lady.

I can see clearly now

The following is really MrBears's project but he seems to have gotten out of the blogging business. So I get to share the news.

Today we lit up the house. We had some Solatubes installed. They're basically skylights that bring the light into the house through a mirrored cylinder.

There were parts of the house that weren't lit very well. The hall, even with its light turned on, was rather bleak. That has all changed. Here are some pictures taken after the installer got finished. The whole project took only about four hours to install.

Mind you, these pictures were taken with only the light from the new Solatubes.

Here's the hall lit up all pretty and nice. The Solatube replaced the former, very inadequate light fixture. There is a light in the tube so that we can light up the hall at night.

The family room has a lot of lights in its ceiling. We had to turn them on in the middle of the day if we wanted to see on the side of the room away from the windows. We now can see without using electricity! We can even read in our red recliners without turning on lights.
We were planning to have a dimmer sort of thing inside the family room's Solatube. But that would have involved engaging an electrician to run a wire through the rafters, down a wall and to a new switch. The installer supposed that it was going to be unlikely that we'd find an electrician who is willing to do that work in a space that is very inconvenient to get to. So we scrapped that and the light will always come in when the sun is shining. We don't watch many movies in the daytime so it probably won't ever be a problem that the light is always there.

And Jerry is always thinking of others. It would never have occurred to me to add such a light to the garage where I do the laundry. He thought that I might like to be able to work in the laundry room without having to turn on the fluorescent lights. It will be great laundering in natural light. Saturday is the day I usually do laundry but I couldn't do it today since the ceiling was going to be torn up. I can hardly wait to do laundry tomorrow!

If you thought that all that was enough, you're not thinking as well as Jerry. The Solatube folks have a solar-powered attic fan. Our attic space gets hot. And that keeps the house hot through the night. The dormer vents we have probably help to cool things off up there but they're passive. We had two of these fans installed. One is over the family room and one is over the main part of the house. The two parts are pretty much separate spaces with just a tiny hole in the wall between them that electricians probably don't want to shimmy through to run a wire.

Here's a view of the project from the roof. The attic fan is the black thing near the weather station. The Solatubes' tops are the domes beyond the dormer vent. (The disintegrating ridge caps are shoddy materials used when we had the family room and garage added. We need to get our roofer to replace them.)

Here's a close-up of the Solatube collector.

And here's a close-up of the inside. This picture used the flash to show the ceiling and lens's frame. We got the OptiView diffusers. The light coming from them is sharper than the other diffuser and is somewhat prismatic. We get pretty rainbows on the walls.

Here's one of the attic fans.

All of these improvements aren't using any electricity from the grid. We're Green! (Now if only we had insulation in the walls...)

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Baccarat and Waterford crystal from Mom.

See here for a handmade present from Mom (posted earlier by MrBears).