Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

Remember To Vote

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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!

Is There Anything They Won’t Try It On?

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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 might 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 cop out 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.”

Woo Hoo! We Made It!

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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!

Dude, Where’s My Stuff?

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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!”

Asking For A Big Huge Favor

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So I just discovered this really cool thing happening over at this website called “Bloggin’ Outloud”.

Apparently they are hosting “The Blogs Of Summer Awards”, and are currently in the process of accepting nominations.

And since I am totally cool with the whole idea of shameless begging and pleading self-promotion in the interests of tricking people into believing that I’m actually a writer sharing my writing with others, I decided to ask you, my honored readers, if you would be willing to nominate my blog in the category of Humor and Satire.

In order to nominate me, all you need to do is this:
1. Click here
2. Scroll down the page until you see “Comments via Blogger” and “Lots of Chatter”.
3. Click on either one of those two links and leave a new comment stating that you would like to nominate me
-“Using My Powers For Good” by Jenny Ryan
-www.jennyryan.com
-category: humor

Thank you so much!

Jenny

I Just Had To Share

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I found this poem in an ezine I received earlier this week. It expresses so beautifully what has been coming up for me lately that I just had to share it here.

I Have Learned So Much

I have learned so much from God
That I can no longer call myself
a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew.

The Truth has shared so much of itself with me
that I can no longer call myself
a man, a woman, an angel
or even pure soul.

Love has befriended me so completely
It has turned to ash and freed me
of every concept and image
my mind has ever known.

-Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky in the book
The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master

Why I Love My Husband So Much: Reason #1

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He “gets” me.

Today my husband invited me out to lunch, and as we were eating I was telling him how I was kind of nervous about a meeting I will be attending tomorrow. Everyone is very nice and very welcoming, but they have the entire agenda planned out Minute. By. Minute. and everyone has a specific title that you must use when referring to them, and basically there is just a lot of protocol, all of which I am completely unfamiliar with.

It’s not that I don’t respect those kinds of things, or that I purposefully want to be disrespectful. It’s just that I’m nothing if not non-conformist, and I’m afraid that the stress of trying to follow all of those rules will just build up inside of me until the point where I lose all control over myself and just start screaming out “ASS! ASS! ASS!”in the middle of the meeting because I can no longer take all the pressure.

Not only was my husband not horrified by this confession, he actually thought it was pretty funny. And then he offered an extremely insightful comment on my situation, saying, “Hm, kind of like Tourette’s by stress?”

Exactly.

See? He really gets me.

Failure To Communicate

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Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Yesterday evening my husband and I went to the park in order to try and get some pictures of the mama duck and her babies that we had seen there the day before.

After we successfully captured them on film my husband went off to explore a different part of the pond, and I stood at the railing just enjoying the beauty of the evening.

Unfortunately my reverie was rudely interrupted by the words that chill me to the bone and fill me with dread, even more than, “We’re out of Coke,” or, “If this were a math problem“: “Oh, look, A SNAKE!” (emphasis mine).

Of course I looked, and of course it was much, much worse than I thought. Because not only was there a snake somewhere in the general vicinity, there was a snake lying right next to my foot which foolishly was clad only in my Birkenstock sandals, which meant that my feet were mostly uncovered, which meant that the snake and all of the skin on my feet were sharing The Exact Same Air at The Exact Same Time, which meant that basically, the snake and I were touching!

So after levitating directly up off of the ground and into the air using only the power of utter horror, I found my husband and managed to convey to him the urgency of the situation.

“Snake. SNAKE. SNAKE!!”

Or so I thought.

Apparently, since there wasn’t a snake actually connected to me in any way, he thought I was only upset that someone had detected a snake somewhere within a 100-mile radius of where I was currently located. And being a guy (who thinks that things like snakes are cool), he decided that we had enough time before we fled the scene for him to go and look at the snake, along with the father and son (of course, more guys) who had originally detected its presence and were even now cheerfully following its progress through the grass.

So when he finally caught up to me in the parking lot he relayed the conversation that he and the other man had shared.

My husband: “He said, ‘Yeah, that lady didn’t even know it, but she was standing right next to that snake’.”
Me: “I KNOW! THAT WAS ME! I’M ‘THAT LADY’!”