Because then, when I say something completely idiotic, I’m the one who gets to decide whether or not to share it with the world.

Like yesterday, when I was talking to my mom and getting an update on my grandfather. In the past week he has undergone knee replacement surgery, a catheterization, a heart attack that went on for two days before it was discovered and treated, and quintuple bypass surgery. And yet somehow, knowing all of this as I did, I still had the following conversation with my mother:

Me: Did someone tell me that [Grampie’s sister and her husband] were driving up there?

Mom: Yes they did. They drove 19 hours. And it will be 19 hours on the way back, too!

Me: Wow! They drove all that way just for this?

For creatures who lack the ability to speak, our cats have developed a large number of ways to communicate to us EXACTLY what they are feeling in any given moment.

One of their more effective communication methods is that of Knocking Stuff On The Ground.

After living with these particular animals for the past nine years I have begun to decipher the different meanings behind each level of this process.

The first level is pretty casual, taking place when they are bored, or curious, or just feel like messing around. They will jump up on my desk or the kitchen table and start batting around things like pens, bottle caps, scissors, pills, or anything that is small, light, and rolls easily. Here the meaning is pretty much along the lines of,

-”Hey, I’m bored.”
-”Hey, pay attention to me.”
-”Hey, look what I found.”
-”Hey, this is so cool! I’m totally stealing it for myself!”

The next level is a little more intense since it is an expression of their frustration and irritation. It usually takes place early in the morning on my nightstand, where they precisely and deliberately knock off One. Item. At. A. Time, calculating just how many THUNKS it will take before I can’t stand it anymore and will get up and do whatever they want if they will just PLEASE, LET ME SLEEP A LITTLE LONGER!

I thought I was getting pretty good at understanding what they were wanting. But apparently sometime during the night we moved to a new level in this process, because when we woke up this morning we saw this:

We’re still trying to figure out exactly what it means.

1. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who voted for my blog in the “Blogs of Summer Awards”! Thanks to all of you, “Using My Powers For Good” came in 3rd with 79 votes. Woo hoo!

2. Thank you also to everyone who has been keeping my family in your thoughts and prayers. Apparently when my grandfather got to the second hospital they discovered that all 5 of his coronary arteries were almost completely blocked, and so last night he had quintuple bypass surgery. He came through the surgery well, and now we are just waiting to see what happens next.

I have designed my own 2-part method of coping with this stress:

Part One: Designated Dining For Disasters

I make sure to get in enough nutrients from each of these four food groups:

-sugar
-fat
-carbs
-caffeine

Part Two: 2-D Action Plan

And I plan activities that rely heavily on

distraction
and
denial

(Along with the time-tested practice of going to bed in one room of the house and awakening the next morning in a completely different spot, with absolutely no memory whatsoever of how I got there. This is extremely bizarre, because I am normally a VERY light sleeper, much like Heather B. Armstrong of dooce describes her daughter: “Sometimes at night while she is asleep in her room at the back of the house I can wake her up from fifty feet away by imagining the sound an eyelash would make if it drifted to the ground.”)

So please keep us in your thoughts, and I will keep you posted.

Today I received what is maybe the most wonderful comment I’ve yet received on my blog and my writing. And it came as a result of a pretty difficult situation for our family.

My grandfather had one of his knees replaced at the beginning of this week. Everything was going fine until two nights ago when he had a heart attack. Apparently they are having trouble stabilizing his heart rate, so they had to move him from his original hospital to a hospital 3 hours away. [Read more…]

So the other day I faced quite an interesting quandary.

You know how some people think that we’re here on this earth to learn lessons? Well apparently one of my lessons is Learning How To Take Care Of Things Myself When My Husband Is Gone.

That’s fine when it is something like, hm, I wonder why we’ve lost power in these back 3 rooms but the electricity is still functioning in the rest of the house or, hm, the washing machine seems to be seeping out some kind of sticky brown goo. But I’m really not okay with this when the lessons involve insects, rodents, or reptiles. Because, as was clearly stated in our marriage agreement, my husband is The Person In Charge Of Creepy Crawly Critters. Not. Me. [Read more…]

Today I received this extremely helpful and thought-provoking email:

“Listen to the voice of your penis. He is asking to get Penis Enlarge Patch.”

And I thought, “Dude, if anyone’s ’stuff’ actually started speaking to them, I think they would have problems W-A-Y beyond the scope of anything a penis patch could help them with.”

Thank you so much to everyone who has voted for me in the “Blogs of Summer” Awards. I’m doing really well, but it is a pretty hotly contested race between me and one other blog.

So if you haven’t yet placed your vote, please do so by Thursday. And remember that all you have to do is this:

1. Go to this site.
2. Scroll down to “Blogs of Summer Voting”
3. Click on the little circle next to “Using My Powers For Good”
4. Click on the “vote” button.

And please spread the word to anyone else that you think will vote for me too!

Thanks!

This weekend we had a cookout here and a number of the guests were engineers, like my husband.

There are many benefits to being around engineers, such as the fact that they generally tend to know exactly where you are, where you need to be, and the absolute best way to get you there.

And then again there can also be some personality conflicts, especially if you personally are possessed of a non-engineer kind of mind. Like the time that my husband and I went to Germany with his family. He and his dad are both engineers. I, my mother-in-law, and my sister-in-law? Not so much. We had a lot of conversations like this.

We are all riding on the train.
We women: So, how many kilometers is it until our next stop?
My husband: About 50.
We women: Do you think we will be able to find a drink with some ice there?
My father-in-law (wielding a sheaf of detailed maps, a calculator, a slide rule, and a stopwatch all at once): No! It is exactly 47.975 kilometers until our next stop. At which point we will have exactly 6.025 seconds and only 6.025 seconds to walk from Platform 9 to Platform 17 and catch our next train. No ice for you!

Or the time that we were entertaining another group of friends, 7 of whom were engineers, and yet not one of them was able to stop our oven control panel from beeping, beeping, beeping, beeping, My God! The beeping! Make it stop! And so they had to fall back on tripping the circuit breaker. (Their excuse? “We’re mechanical engineers, not electrical engineers.” Which is totally a lame-o copout if I ever heard one, but whatever.)

So anyway these engineers were here this weekend, and one of them started talking about something called the “coefficient of friction” which, according to Wikipedia is “a dimensionless scalar value which describes the ratio of the force of friction between two bodies and the force pressing them together.”

He was describing a table he’d seen that gives values for the coefficient of friction between different materials, such as steel on steel, steel on aluminum, etc. And just as I was getting ready to completely tune out I heard him say this:

“And they actually had a value for the coefficient of friction for steel on steel that has been lubricated with bull semen.”

Thank you to everyone who nominated me for the “Blogs of Summer Awards”.

I am so excited to announce that I am one of the finalists in the “Humor and Satire” category.

Voting takes place Monday, July 24 through Thursday, July 27, so once again I am shamelessly soliciting your votes!

All you need to do is this:

1. Go to this site.
2. Scroll down to “Blogs of Summer Voting”
3. Click on the little circle next to “Using My Powers For Good”
4. Click on the “vote” button.

And please spread the word to anyone else that you think will vote for me too!

Thanks!

We have a friend who works as a technician repairing laptop computers. We love to talk to her, because we are always stunned by her stories of the un-be-lie-va-bly inappropriate things she finds in people’s computers. She’s seen everything from infestations of roaches, to nails, to controlled substances, to every imaginable bodily fluid (both human and animal), to condiments, to WD-40 (because “the fan was too loud”), to holes drilled completely through the motherboard (because “it was too hot on my lap”) (and that was going to help how?), to more porn than you could possibly imagine exists in The. Entire. Known. Universe.

Also funny are her reports of the customers’ reaction to finding out what is wrong with their machine: “Whaddda ya mean ‘it’s full of soda’? That’s impossible! I don’t have access to any soda! I don’t even have running water!”

Or the technicians having to explain the situation to the customer: “I’m sorry sir, but your service plan doesn’t cover damage due to sitting on the computer and causing the lid to cave in.”

She’s also friends with technicians in other areas, such as the Department Of Finding People’s Wedding Rings Stuck In DVD Players, and the Department Of Discovering That Your Printer Isn’t Working Because You Apparently Jammed It Full Of Painkillers And All Your Spare Cash. (Apparently if these people are ever robbed, they want the thieves to get all of their valuables, not just their electronics.)

So one day she was talking to a technician from China who had been working on some speakers.

He said, “Yeah, when I open them up, I find joint.”

“You mean, like a finger joint?”

“No, JOINT.”

“Oh, you mean you found weed?”

“Yeah. Also live ammunition.”

My response: “WHAT?!”

Her response: “Well, damn! The next time I play Resident Evil 4 and I need some ammo, I’ll know exactly where to look!”