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is that they choose the most inconvenient times to die.

According to Andrew that is!  Case in point. Former President Gerald Ford died the day after Christmas. And Andrew was indeed saddened by the news, when the realisation sank in that he was already in his Christmas break and would not get an extra day off school!  From Andrews point of view it would have been far better had he died either two weeks earlier or two weeks later. I’m pretty sure considerations of how the former President himself might have felt about the matter didn’t occur to Andrew. And I fear I made him feel worse when I pointed out that Former President Reagan had also died during a school break.

As Andrew himself expressed it; ‘Why do I get all the bad luck?’

A few months ago, when my citizenship oath ceremony was fast approaching, Mom broached the idea of taking Andrew along, on the grounds that it would be ‘educational’. I was all for the idea but Andrews only comment was ‘cool - that’ll be a day off school’.  Call me hard hearted if you will but if the only reason he wanted to come along and see me take the oath was to get a day off school then as far as I was concerned he could damn well go to school instead!  Which he did!

Poor bastard!

a plan works!

Andrew has no idea how to sustain a conversation. Whenever he feels the pressure of silence he’ll ask something like ’so, how’s everybody?’ or ‘how’s the weather.’. Hmmm, we live in Phoenix - how does he expect the weather to be anyway???

I’ll give him points for trying even though over the past year or more I’ve been encouraging him to break out. How is it going to look when he’s having dinner with his girlfriends parents for the seventh time and he can still only ask about the weather?

So a couple of months ago we, that is Mom and I, decided that he should talk for two minutes at dinner each evening about any subject that enters his head so long as it doesn’t relate to our health or the state of the weather. Seemed like a good plan.

After a few false starts he got onto the subject of his favourite band. I’ll claim credit for the suggestion. With the smile of someone who is certain that his interests won’t be shared he imparted the knowledge that one of his favourite bands is Slipknot[^] and dwellt at considerable length on some of their song titles. ‘Pulse of the Maggots’ for one! Uh huh, just what you want to be talking about over dinner!

I’ve been a subscriber to Rhapsody for some months now - great service for the kind of music I like - beats Urge and Napster and Yahoo!music hands down. So a little later that evening I checked if they had StinkbuttSlipknot. Yep, and the album he enthusiastically endorsed.

Five minutes later the album is on my music player and I gave it a listen at the office the next day. I made sure to memorise some of the lyrics (and the tune) and, at dinner the next evening I was sitting there chanting ‘I won’t let it build up inside of me’!. Took him a few moments to catch on and when he did he asked where I got that tune from. ‘Oh’, I said, ‘from that band you talked about last night, what was their name? Stinkbutt?’. Grin from Andrew. ‘You know, Andrew’, I said, ‘they’re quite good.’

You should have seen the amazed look on his face. ‘You liked it??? Wow!’.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that anyone who grew up listening to rock in the late 60’s wouldn’t feel all that lost with Slipknot. About all that’s changed is that nowadays rock bands have license to slip in a few four letter words. *shrug*

And nope, I very much doubt Slipknot will ever make it to my ‘must listen’ list. But I did enjoy it for a few listens.

Nicked fromInspired by Vern[^].

The Seeker You scored 60%!

I don’t know if you’ve been searching low and high, but you do know your bare-bones classic rock basics. With this kind of score, you probably nailed the signature song questions and most of the albums. You probably don’t have much of a classic rock collection yourself, but when your friends play theirs, you recognize the songs. This is a respectable score: you’re neither know-nothing nor nerd.

How things change. Time was when a thermometer, the type one might use to take ones temperature, contained a drop of mercury in a thin tube and you had to squint just right to read the damn thing. I’m not sure I could even read one these days; the years are taking their toll on my eyesight.

Nowadays there’s a thermocouple and an LCD display supposedly calibrated to tenths of a degree. One of these days I might do a couple of checks to see how accurate they are.

The thing that amazes me the most though is that they give the things away at the local pharmacy! Cue the old codger music. I remember when the glass and mercury thermometer was expensive enough that most households in our heighbourhood didn’t have one!

Whilst picking up a prescription the other day Sonya grabbed a couple of thermometers and left one sitting on the dinner table. We’re a bit like that; almost the only time the dinner table is cleared is at Christmas. (There! I knew there’d be another use for Christmas!) Sat down to dinner Andrew picked it up and stuck it in his gob to test it.  I couldn’t resist.

‘Ummm, my dear?’ I asked Sonya. ‘Do you think we should tell Andrew how we tested that thermometer?’

‘Nah’ she said. ‘It’d only put him off his dinner’.

It did too!

My US passport finally arrived last week. As you know I wasn’t in that much of a hurry for it to arrive; I was quite content to be unable to do international travel and now that we’re getting close to *that* time of the year (the only use I have for Christmas) it’s unlikely I’ll have to travel for at least another month. That said, it was in December 2004 that I was sent on less than a days notice to France. France I wouldn’t mind - I’m just not in any hurry to go back to The Philippines.

The passport arrived on November 27th but curiously it was dated October 30th.  Hmmm, so they made it and then took nearly a month to ship it out? Seems so.

Of course I have my theory. I didn’t pay the expedite fee so, having made it, they tossed it into the cheap bastards pile, in the bin marked, do not ship until November 24th!

With *that* time of the year fast approaching I was indulging in my usual rant about Christmas and all it stands for.  My wife asked, ‘how is that I ended up married to such a Bah Humbug’.

‘Simple’ I replied, ‘you didn’t do your research!’.

I’ve made no secret in the past of my distaste for the American manifestation of the humble hamburger. It may, once upon a time, have been edible, but I fear the relentless spur of competition to put more and more into or onto it has gone way past the point where wisdom should have prevailed. In short, I can’t stand the bugrgers!

Americans of course don’t understand just why it is that I find the things so unpalatable; within minutes of discovering how much I did *not* want to eat one nothing would do but that my wife had to take me to In-N-Out[^]. I can imagine her disappointment when their burgers turned out to be just as unpalatable. She hasn’t said it in so many words but I’m sure she thinks I’m impossible to please when it comes to fast food. She’s right!

It seems that when the local In-N-Out opened the police were required for traffic duty in the surrounding streets for some days. I take this as evidence of appalling burger taste in the populace!

Anyway, the fact is that I find the American burger has way too much meat, the meat is barelyundercooked and their idea of a burger with onions is to bung raw onions on the side! Toss in the inevitable pallid mustard, barbecue sauce, ketchup or, heaven forbid, ranch sauce, and you’ve got a mess!

The other night at dinner the subject of burgers came up again and, again, I said something about how much I didn’t like the local version. Andrew piped up with an enthusiastic endorsement of In-N-Out, concluding with the statement ‘I like In-N-Out’. Now what could I do? It was there, like low hanging fruit, demanding to be said! So I said it. ‘Yeah, I’m rather fond of In-N-Out myself - but I ain’t talking burgers!’.

*Boom boom*

Andrew blushed and choked back laughter. Mom? She reached over the table and clocked me one! Can’t blame her.

As you might remember[^] my wife has been researching her ancestors for some time. Lately she’s discovered that some great grandfather or other once ran a pie shop in an English town by the name of Nuneaton[^]. Me being me it was, of course, impossible to resist remarking that they couldn’t have been very good pies. ‘Why do you say that?’ she asked. ‘Well they were Nuneaton of course!’ was my reply.

*boom boom*

A little later in the conversation Sonya dropped the fact that the pie shop was next door to the residence of one Mary Anne Evans. I shrugged. ‘Who, pray tell, is Mary Anne Evans when she’s at home?’ I asked. I do sometimes talk pretentiously like that! ‘Aha’ she said, going for the jugular. ‘So you don’t know that Mary Anne Evans was George Eliot?’

Uh huh. A gotcha indeed! It was indeed feeble of me to riposte by asking if she knew who Ellen Price[^] was. But geeze, am I supposed to remember the real name of every 19th century English novelist? Don’t answer that!

There’s some golf tournament or another about to take place down in Tucson. Personally I’ve always thought that if you really really wanted so badly to get that ball into the little hole surely bashing it with a funny shaped stick is going about it the hard way. Why not just pick the ball up and put it in the hole?  But that’s me. *shrug*

As I was driving home tonight an ad came on for the golf tournament aforementioned. The usual extolling of virtues followed by the breathless announcement that they were restricting ticket sales to a (and I quote) relatively intimate 15,000 per day.

Yikes! Relatively intimate? Imagine being invited to the copy writers for a dinner party!

cats as comfortable, recognised members of our household.  Ginger died this evening, very suddenly, of what the vet described as a heart attack. Doubtless he (the vet) was trotting out a formula of explanation easy to grasp when old age wouldn’t fit the bill.

If this were written about a human person we’d launch into a description of early years, achievements, spice (is that the plural of spouse? If not it ought to be!) and so on. But as I’m writing about a cat those things don’t apply.

Nope, he walked in late one evening about three years ago, liked what he saw and decided he wanted to stay. We took him back to his owners and he was back the next night. The night after that his owners had moved away so here he lived. The most placid cat I’ve ever known. Nothing except cars seemed to worry him; whilst he’d happily climb onto or into one he’d run for cover if the engine started.

He was very good with the new-comers. Where the other established members of the household (Cleo and Roo and, latterly, Kitten) would ignore the new-comer or snarl and spit he was more than happy to play and, I presume, helped them feel more at home.

I’ll miss him. Rest in Peace Ginger.