A couple of Life's funny moments, courtesy of my better half

My better half enjoying quality time with his best bud, Sarah Jane



I feel sorry for family and friends who too often have a columnist in their midst during embarrassing moments.

One recent afternoon I was either working away in my upstairs foyer office or I was catching up with Facebook, when I heard a mild swear word coming from inside the Bat Cave. The first thought that popped into my head was that someone was having trouble with their TV channels. I was wrong.

The door opened and this question was posed: “Do you have anything that’ll take Super Glue off of skin?”

I slowly turned around to find that someone had glued two of his fingers together. “How did that happen?” I asked as I Googled “how to remove super glue from skin”.

The answer was just as comical as the result. “I was gluing a tennis ball to the doorknob,” came the reply.

OK.

Turns out that fingernail polish remover might do the trick but we had none on hand, so to speak. I do use nail polish, but I nibble it off instead of removing it the sensible way. Eventually the glue came off, but the memory gives me the giggles.

Another funny thing happened the other night. I had baked a cherry pie to take over to Mom’s for our weekly family gathering and gab fest. Everyone seemed to like it, though I did detect longing glances toward a banana cream pie on the counter. If that one hadn’t been too frozen to cut, I might have had more cherry pie left over to take home.

As it was there were two good size pieces left, and I passed the glass pie plate to hubby to put inside its plastic carrier. Someone, I won’t surmise who, might have missed clicking the carrier completely shut because the conversation around the table was rudely interrupted by a loud crash.

“Whoa,” said someone. Whoa indeed. Splattered cherries and flaky crust could be seen on Mom’s shiny kitchen floor and her lovely throw rug. The glass plate wasn’t broken, and when we turned it over, I found two lonely cherries clinging to a small piece of crust.

Hubby and his brother cleaned up the mess, and everyone felt bad that there was no pie to take home but that was fine with me. I’m sure the banana cream pie is thawed by now, so we’ll just have to pop over and have a piece—if someone hasn’t eaten it already.

You know who you are.

Cutting (some of) the cable cord

It's cool...now I can watch Bugs Bunny cartoons whenever I want. I love it.


The new fall television programming has always been an exciting time for me, simply because I love getting lost for just a little while in someone else's fantasy world.

In our home we favor crime dramas, mysteries, thrillers, some horror and comedies. We also love tennis, especially the big tournaments, so the U.S. Open is getting a lot of play right now.

Like so many others we jumped on the cable bandwagon and kept adding to the channels we thought we would watch. The cable tiers moved and changed and we moved and changed along with them. And our bill kept rising, but we poo-pooed the cost by telling ourselves that this was pretty much our only entertainment.

Eventually the cable TV part of our bill became awfully high and there were dozens of channels we never watched. We began eyeing ways to downsize, and that's when we found a money-saving way to get what we wanted for little cost. Eureka!

First I have to say I cannot get along without high-speed Internet broadband service. I send and receive photos to and from work, and I'm not about to go back in time and wait on slow service if I can help it. We made the decision to drop our telephone land line and everything but the most basic cable service.

Boy, did that cut out a lot of our favorite shows. We're fans of The Closer, Rizzoli & Isles and lots more on TNT. TBS, SyFy, History Channel and ESPN2 are faves too, so the decision to pare the channel selection was a tough one.

That's where the broadband comes in to save the day. We found an inexpensive blu-ray DVD player that will stream movies over the Internet. We already have a subscription to the movie service, and setup was a breeze. The remote and menu are user-friendly and we've taken advantage of watching unlimited movies and older TV shows whenever we want.

Still, we have a bit of tweaking to do if we want to stream some of our favorite stations but that's coming and it's well worth the effort if we can save some bucks here and there.

After all, it won't be long now before the wind will carry a frosty bite, the days will grow shorter and you'll hear the distant sound of sleigh bells. I told you we liked horror stories.

Playing hooky from work the weird way

I'm with Sarah Jane...I couldn't believe what I was hearing either.



It would seem that the movie watchers in our home have been exposed to some rather odd storylines in the past couple of weeks.

We took in the strange “Shutter Island” starring Leonardo DiCapprio and some other fine actors. I loved that show and my better half thought it was a total waste of time. The storyline stayed with me for days, and when I recall the ending I get a shiver.

The other night we saw “Informant!” with Matt Damon. Let’s just say the main character was no Jason Bourne, another Matt Damon role, but boy, this guy can tell fibs that’ll run rings around just about anyone. I used the present tense here because this story was based on a real-life dude that used to be a biochemist for Archer-Daniels-Midland out of Decatur. We were still shaking our heads the next day over the intricate webs of deceit this guy spun that took in the FBI and countless other mopes. Way cool, unless, I suppose, you were on the bad end of one of his schemes.

Movies are one thing, but what happens if you happen to stumble upon strange goings-on in your own family?

I’ll never forget the time I got a phone call asking me if I knew that my aunt and uncle had died. The caller mentioned the first names right away, and it had been over five years for my uncle, and less than three for my aunt so the part about them dying wasn’t a shock. The shock was that their obituaries were in the newspaper that day.

I stood where I was and blinked as the caller went on to say how sorry they were, blah, blah, blah. I’ve watched enough episodes of Twilight Zone to know when my world is beginning to tilt in that direction. I couldn’t wait to get off the phone and find that newspaper.

A few minutes later I had the proof in hand, along with an open mouth and a head full of unanswered questions. Though I love Stephen King stories, I was sane enough even then to know I wasn’t in one. A mystery, yes, but one that would probably be a lot of fun to solve.

It did turn out to be fun, and we got lots of laughs as we made the necessary phone calls to unravel the mystery that is my family. There was the obituary writer and funeral homes and pastors, and finally we had our answer: A cousin who was in a bit of hot water for taking too much time off of work decided he wanted even more “vacation” so he figured he’d rerun the obituaries of his grandparents to get some funeral leave. Now that’s using the old noggin’, wouldn’t you say?

I’d never heard of this before, and though on the surface it sounds like it might get the job done, it didn’t happen. I wondered how he thought up the idea in the first place. Did he see it in a movie? Read it in a book? Create it out of thin air?

There was also the matter of finding a newspaper (not the one you’re holding) that would print the false obit, and before that he had to find a funeral home that would hear his tale of woe and send the obit to the one and only newspaper he had chosen.

Ah, family.

As I thought about the weird movies and my oddly endearing yet misguided cousin, I came to the conclusion that I’ll likely never get bored with so many possibilities at hand to keep me entertained.