How do you keep a turkey in suspense? I’ll tell you later.

Three shorter little stories in a row.  Why?  Because I am feeling a little generous!



Mike stopped by the bar and ran into his friend Jack.

"I've been taking evening classes at the university," Mike told Jack, "and I'm learning so much."
"Who is Hobbes? Who is Mill? Who is Bentham?," Mike asked Jack.

Jack replied, "I gotta admit I don't know any of them." "But do you know who Richardson is?" Jack asked Mike.
Despite everything he'd learned in his classes, Mike was stumped and admitted that to Jack.
"Well you should," Jack said. "He's the guy who's been visiting your wife every time you head off to class."

A lawyer was interviewing a doctor about the death of a patient

"When you examined the patient, did you check his pulse?" asked the lawyer.
"I didn't" said the doctor.

"And did you listen for a heartbeat?" said the lawyer.
"No, I did not" the doctor said.

"So in other words" the lawyer said "When you signed the death certificate you had NOT taken adequate steps to confirm he was dead."
"Well, let me put it this way," said the doctor- "At that point, the man's brain was in a jar on my desk. But for all I know I guess he could've been out practicing law somewhere!"





A grandfather and granddaughter were sitting and talking when the young girl asked, "Did God make you, Grandpa?"
"Yes, God made me," the grandfather answered.

A few minutes later, the little girl asked him, "Did God make me too?"
"Yes, He did," the older man answered.

For a few minutes, the little girl seemed to be studying her grandpa, as well as her own reflection in the mirror, while her grandfather wondered what was running through her mind. At last she spoke up.
"You know, Grandpa," she said, "God's doing a lot better job lately."

According to Rack the McNab Dog, Every Cyclist is Me

I should not be such a booster of the McNab dog.  Especially in an Internationally read Blog.  However, I'm constantly amazed by my own boy Rack the McNab SuperDog (TM).

You see, He's an amazingly intelligent creature.  He just does not get everything right all the time.

In this case, he's decided everyone on a bicycle is me.  Whether it is me or not, it's me.  Until that cyclist gets close enough to disabuse him of that belief, of course.

Once someone was walking Rack because I was training.  I have a very aggressive workout schedule who is not a professional athlete.  I walk average 4 miles a day.  Let's call that 28 miles a week.  Add to that another three cardio workouts, minimum of 1000 calories each.  I say it that way because when my inline skates are broken in, my preferred workouts are upwards of two times 30 miles a workout on skates, another two times 20 miles workout on the Bicycle.

That Bicycle workout is getting longer over the months as well.

All that cardio has a habit of feeding into itself so you truly need to keep all that going.  My "support team" knows that I am much easier to get along with if I am resting up from a workout, so one of the walks will get done by a friend occasionally if I am out carving a groove in the bike lane near my house.

Back and Forth, back and forth, North and South.

I find that while some people would find all this repetitive, I don't.  In fact, I have a habit of zoning out and forgetting that I am actually out there zooming along - at a heart rate average over 155 bpm.   I quoted all of this "biometric stuff" to my doctor when he suggested that I was getting near the age where I would be taking a stress test and he replied "we won't be doing a test, you just gave me the results".  Former (US) football player types make good doctors for sports inclined people.

The first time I had Rack out with my friends, I called to him and rolled to a stop to tell him that he was a Good Boy, of course.  That was all it took and he was imprinted on my bike, and on every other one who rides past.

Watch your neighborhood, you have more cyclists around you than you would expect.  Rack now wags his tail at every one.

I can't bring him along for a run.  My workouts are hovering around 21 miles, at speeds as fast as 24mph, and dogs are decidedly sprinters.  So he gets his four long walks and so do my support people.

Friends don't let Furry Friends stay at home, when everyone needs a walk.

He gets home and watches the door for me to return, but every cyclist he is passed by he expects to be me even when he's ahead of me.

Weird kid, isn't he?

Now the Skating?  I'm out for a couple hours training.  Crazy hours in summer, I have to get there at sunrise so Rack gets walked, and waits at that door until I come home.

There's no way he could handle 30 miles so I get my own time by myself doing my sport.  Those new full ceramic bearings are really sweet, but having Rack at the door, it's sweeter.

Mom is complaining about the cost to pump up her tires at the garage. Well, that's inflation for you!

The moral of this story is No Good Deed Goes Unpunished!

 

 

 There was a man who worked for the Post Office whose job was to process all the mail with illegible addresses…

One day, a letter came addressed in shaky handwriting to God with no actual address. He thought he should open it to see what it was about. The letter read:

“Dear God,

I am an 83-year-old widow, living on a very small pension. Yesterday someone stole my purse. It had $100 in it, which was all the money I had until my next pension payment. Next Sunday is Christmas, and I had invited two of my friends over for dinner. Without that money, I have nothing to buy food with, have no family to turn to, and you are my only hope. Can you please help me?

Sincerely, Edna”

The postal worker was touched. He showed the letter to all the other workers. Each one dug into his or her wallet and came up with a few dollars. By the time he made the rounds, he had collected $96, which they put into an envelope and sent to the woman.

The rest of the day, all the workers felt a warm glow thinking of Edna and the dinner she would be able to share with her friends. Christmas came and went. A few days later, another letter came from the same old lady to God.

All the workers gathered around while the letter was opened. It read:

“Dear God,

How can I ever thank you enough for what you did for me? Because of your gift of love, I was able to fix a glorious dinner for my friends. We had a very nice day and I told my friends about your wonderful gift. By the way, there was $4 missing. I think it might have been those bastards at the post office.

Sincerely, Edna”

Did you hear about the guy who lost his hearing aid? WHAT?!?!

 Huh?  Sounds like me following someone on a dog walk and trying to continue a conversation!

Sugar tongs

A mother from Brooklyn decides to pop in on her son Michael to see his new Manhattan apartment. When she gets there she's shocked to learn that her son has a female roommate.

Her son assures her that there is nothing going on between him and his roommate, that they have separate bedrooms, that Manhattan apartments are very expensive and that he needed a roommate to afford the place and that Maria was the only one who answered his ad.

The next day Maria said to Michael, "Michael, I can't seem to find my silver sugar tongs. They are a family heirloom. We used them when we served tea to your mother and nobody has been here since. Now, I'm not saying she took them and I'm not saying she didn't, but can you please call her and subtly ask?"

So Michael calls his mother, saying, "Ma, Maria's sugar tongs are missing and you were the only one in the apartment. Now, I'm not saying you did and I'm not saying you didn't, but could you have taken them accidentally?"

The mother replies, "Michael, you're my son and I love you, and I want to believe what you tell me. You say there is nothing going on between you and your roommate. Now, I'm not saying I believe you and I'm not saying that I don't, but if she was sleeping in her own bed you wouldn't be asking me where the sugar tongs are."

Croton Flower and Propagating Croton

I was talking with a neighbor and got a complement.  "Your yard looks so nice!"

We were talking about placement and variety of plants here, and I said "You know, everything I have a lot of I propagated myself."  After getting a semi-blank stare, "It's all from either seeds or cuttings."

The property was planted well by the prior owner, and we liked what we saw.  So when we settled in, I took the attitude that I would figure out what grows, what works, and what I can make more of.   I have a row of pots in the back by the pool in the sun that has all sorts of cuttings in it.  That row is on "drip feed irrigation" which gets a blast of water for only 10 minutes a day, and it is legal even under water restrictions in South Florida.

All by design.

If you are moving into a place where you can garden on your own and wonder what you can grow, look at your neighbors, and take a general view of what they have.   If you like the stuff, plant it.

When I lived in Horsham, PA, I liked the Rose of Sharon that someone had about a mile away that I saw during my walk, so I grabbed a few seeds.  That Rose of Sharon grew, bloomed, and was planted when I got my own house 10 years later in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, PA.

Here I did the same thing with all sorts of things.  Dracena, Screw Palms, Mango (of course), and Podocarpus.  Mango from seed, the rest from cuttings.

But everything here was only green with no color.  I introduced that with Croton.  Now if you are above the freeze line, Zone 8 or so, you really only know Croton as a house plant.  It was a house plant that was a plot point in a British Sitcom called the "IT Crowd" where they brought a palm sized plant I would use as a cutting in their dank basement office and then went back to "Switching things on and off again".

Here, it's everywhere.  It grows fairly slowly even under ideal conditions.

To propagate the stuff from cuttings, you take a hand to arm sized piece cut on a bias, remove the lower leaves, dip in rooting hormone, and place in wet soil.  6 weeks later it should be growing.  I get about 90% success rate.

I have two different sets of the stuff growing in the nursery pots right now because I started them on different months.  They will go in the ground a month from now, minimum.

But the strangest thing I have ever seen is a Croton Flower.  They are tiny things, only about the size of a child's smallest fingernail.  Of all things, this is on one of my original plants that I have butchered and am ignoring to let it recover.  It's little more than a stick with a few leaves and must really like where it is at.

Since I am trying to fill in the front gardens with Croton, I harvest the plants, make cuttings and limit myself to when the plants get waist high.  

For now, that seems to be once every two months, but I have time.

Besides, I still have a podocarpus plant that is chest high that needs to go in when one of the existing plants thins out.

I did say our landscapers are overly aggressive around my plants, didn't I?

The bottom line is that if you see something you like, try to propagate it.  When Lisa across the street was fighting off the cancer that eventually took her, she planted a bottle brush tree.  It's supposed to be able to be propagated but I have had no luck. 

I know, if I don't have luck with it, who knows what I am doing wrong.

But I want some cuttings from Her Tree, so I took some seed and dropped it in my pot with the Basil.  I will look after that every time I make pizza.  Just like Lisa looked after everyone else.

What do bent lines and war torn countries have in common? Crooked Rulers.

 There's just something appropriate there!  Jus' sayin'!

On the other hand, I'm going out to wear some rubber off my tires on the bike in a bit.  Or as I tell people about all three of my sports "I'm in competition with yesterday.  How about you?"

A guy who was born with no arms goes to the doctor one day and the doc says, ‘I have bad news, you are terminally ill and you only have one month left to live.”

The man was a absolutely despondent - but as he walked out of his doctors office, he looked up at the monastery atop the hill near town and thought to himself, I have always wanted to ring the bells in the monastery tower - if I don’t do it now, it will never happen.

So he walks up the path to the monastery and, using his head, ‘knock knock knock’, bangs on the door. A few moments later, a portly monk answers the door and asks how he may be of assistance. The man with no arms explains his plight and asks if there is any way that the monk can help.

The monk pauses, then looks at his watch, looks back at the man - focusing on his lack of arms - and says, ”well, I don’t know how you would do it, but it is almost time to ring the bells so I will give you a shot.”

The man is overwhelmed with joy and can’t stop thanking the monk as the monk leads him to the bell tower, slowly waddling across the yard and up the long spiral staircase to the bell tower. They reach the bell tower with just minutes to spare. The skeptical monk looks at his watch, and when the hour strikes twelves, he says , ‘ tis time to ring the bell, my son’.

Expecting the young man to grab the rope in his teeth in his attempt to ring the bell, the monk is stunned when instead the man leans forward and runs full speed into the bell. And ring the bell the young man did. When he made contact, the bell let out the most glorious ring - a sound so beautiful that the monk was brought to tears. And as the bell rang, it slowly swung backwards from the force of the impact before swinging back. But when it did swing back, it squarely struck the young man, sending him flying out the window and down to the sidewalk just outside of the monastery.

The chubby monk waddled down the stairs as fast as he could - which wasn’t very fast - and when he finally gets around to the side of the monastery where the man had fallen, a passing police officer had already arrived and covered the corpse with a blanket. When he saw the monk running up in a flustered state, he just assumed that the monk knew the victim, so he pulled back the blanket and said, ‘I am sorry to ask this brother, but do you know this man.’

The monk paused for a moment as he looked down at the newly deceased before he said, “Well, I don’t know his name, but his face sure does ring a bell.”

Mafia have boiled a man to death in a industrial pasta cooker. Police are still trying to al dentefy the victim.

I think this line was from Fried Green Tomatoes and came to mind when I read this particular gem but "Intelligence, and Insurance beats Youth and Beauty every time".



An old man calls his son and says, "Listen, your mother and I are getting divorced. Forty-five years of misery is enough."

"Dad, what are you talking about?" the son screams.

“We can't stand the sight of each other any longer,” he says. "I'm sick of her face, and I'm sick of talking about this, so call your sister and tell her," and he hangs up.

Now, the son is worried. He calls his sister. She says, "Like hell they’re getting divorced!" She calls their father immediately. "You’re not getting divorced! Don't do another thing. The two of us are flying home tomorrow to talk about this. Until then, don't call a lawyer, don't file a paper. DO YOU HEAR ME?” She hangs up the phone.

The old man turns to his wife and says, "Okay, they’re both coming for Christmas and paying their own airfares.

How Shipping Boxes Taught My Old Dog A New Trick

I am not completely convinced that internet shopping is better than going to a mall or a local store, but I do know Rack prefers it.

When we get things delivered, they have to be inspected by Mr. Dog.  Everything brought into the house gets a thorough sniff.  I have to blame Chewy.com for this particular quirk.  

My own boxes come and they are typically only casually looked at.  However Rack is a very smart dog.  He knows what His Things smell like.  I get a powder that gets mixed with water and ground beef and it makes dog food.  It’s considerably safer than anything in a can or a bag from the market, and I do think commercial dog food is garbage, irrespective of the advertised quality of the food.

There is only so much you can do with the "floor sweepings" that go into pet foods after all.

On the other hand, we do get things from Chewy.  Specifically his flea meds.  They come in an iconic box with a blue side and the company is kind enough to toss in a large dog cookie.  He’s a medium dog so so much the better, he gets multiple treats!  

The large bones they toss in the box can be broken up.  I won’t tell him he’s getting half, only that he can enjoy two treats.  He prefers things that way and can go through the ritual of the hunt at least twice.

These boxes do have a dog cookie scent to them by the time they get to my porch here in South Florida.  A Pro Tip – only send chocolate in the coldest part of the winter.  Otherwise, the “cold” days of December being as warm as mid 80s (30C) will melt things down.

I take out of the box what has arrived, and now I have a dog at my feet staring up at me with twin brown laser beam eyes.   A quick flip of the wrist and the cookie pieces are broken and put back into the box.  The box lid is closed without tape by folding and placed on the floor.

The last time that happened he pushed his snout through the middle of the opening of the top  of the box and had it stuck there.   Dog Logic being what it is, he was jumping on his front feet trying to knock this thing off his face and not having the best time of it.  

Bounce Bounce Rattle Rattle Thump!  Shake Shake Shake Shake Shake!
Bounce Bounce Rattle Rattle Thump!  Shake Shake Shake Shake Shake!

Finally after laughing, we take pity on him and take it off his head.  He has not quite gotten the idea that he is actually ALLOWED to put his foot on the box to hold it in place.   Say what you will about him, but Rack the McNab SuperDog(TM) has impeccable manners.

The fun thing of this is now we have a new ritual.  It keeps his mind going and anyone who knows a herding breed dog knows that you truly have to work to keep their mind occupied.  If not, bedlam will ensue.

So toss a cookie in the box and fold the lid back in place.   Should last a minute or two of fun before he gets bored with it and wants to deal with a different shiny object.

What do you call somebody with no body and no nose? Nobody knows.

 This just has to be another Bill.  It really does not sound like something I would do.  But well ya know how these things are, they get "fictionalized".

Still a good story...




A modern day ghost story

Bill was on the side of the road hitch-hiking on a very dark night and in the midst of a fierce rain storm.

The night was rolling on, and no car went by. The storm was so strong he could hardly see a few meters ahead of him.

Suddenly through the swirling rain Bill saw a car slowly coming towards him.  And as it drew level with him, it stopped.

Desperate for shelter and without really thinking about what he was doing, Bill got into the back seat of the car and closed the door.  That was when he realized there was nobody behind the wheel and the engine wasn't even on!

Mysteriously and soundlessly, the car started moving slowly forward. Bill looked at the road and saw a curve approaching.  Now he was scared, and he began to fear for his life.  But just before he reached the curve, a ghostly hand appeared through the window of the car, and turned the steering wheel.

Bill, paralyzed with terror, watched how the hand appeared every time they came to a curve.

When he saw the lights of a pub down the road, Bill gathered all his bravery and strength, jumped out of the car, and ran to to the pub.

Wet and out of breath, he rushed inside and asked for two shots of scotch.  Shaking and half crying, he began telling everybody about the horrible experience he had just been through.  A silence enveloped everybody when they realized he was not drunk, but was for real.

About 10 minutes later, two guys walked into the same pub. They were also wet, and were out of breath. Looking around and seeing Bill sobbing at the bar, one said to the other, "Hey Bruce… that's the idiot who got in the car while we were pushing it."

Never date a radiologist, they will see right through you.

Here in South Florida it's a beautiful day.  The snowbirds have not crashed the party too hard yet, and it's a pure blue sky.  Clear as a bell. 

So why am I hearing some booming?

 

 
An unhappy couple go to a marriage counselor

He tries to work with them, but they absolutely refuse to talk about anything in front of each other. The counselor gets fed up, gets his bass out, and starts playing it.

The couple sit there looking at each other dumbfounded. The counselor keeps playing. After several minutes of this, the couple starts making small talk with each other. Pretty soon they're deep in conversation.

At the end of the hour, the counselor puts down the bass and the couple turn to him, and say “Doctor, that was amazing! We haven't talked like that in years! How did you do it?"

“Ah" says the counselor "people always talk during the bass solo.”