thisendoftheswamp

A friend sent me this story. I hope you enjoy it!

 Yesterday, I wore my Vietnam Veteran cap to Wal-Mart.  There was nothing in particular that I needed at the world’s largest retailer; but, since I retired, trips to “Wally World” to look at the “Walmartians” is always good for some comic relief.    Besides, I always feel pretty normal after seeing some of the people that frequent the establishment.
But, I digress. . . enough of my psychological fixations.

While standing in line to check out, the guy in front of me, probably in his early   thirties,  asked, “Are you a Viet Nam Vet?”

“No,” I replied.
“Then why are you wearing that cap?”
“Because I couldn’t find the one from the War of 1812 . . .”

I thought it was a snappy retort.

“The War of 1812, huh?” the “Walmartian” queried, “When was that?”

God forgive me, but I couldn’t pass up such an opportunity . . “1946”, I answered, as straight-faced as possible.
He pondered my response for a moment and responded, “Why do they call it the War of   1812 if it was in 1946?”

This was beginning to become fun!

“It was a Black Op Mission.   No one is supposed to know about it.”

“Dude! Really?” He exclaimed. “How did you get to do something that COOOOL?”

I glanced furtively around me for effect, leaned toward the guy and in a low voice   said, “I’m not sure.  I was the only Caucasian on the mission.”

“Dude,” he was really getting excited about what he was hearing, “that is seriously awesome! But, didn’t you kind of stand out?”

“Not really. The other guys were wearing white camouflage.”

The moron nodded knowingly.

“Listen man,” I said in a very serious tone, “You can’t tell anyone about this.  It’s still classified ‘Top Secret’ and I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Oh yeah?” he gave me the ‘don’t threaten me look . . “Like, what’s gonna’ happen   if I do?”

With a really hard look I said, “You have a family don’t you? We wouldn’t want anything to happen to them, would we?”
The guy gulped, left his basket where it was and fled through the door.   The lady behind me started laughing so hard I thought she was about to have a heart attack.   I just grinned at her.

After checking out and going to the parking lot, I saw dimwit leaning in a car window talking to a young woman.
Upon catching sight of me, he started pointing excitedly in my direction.

Giving him another ‘deadly’ serious look, I made the ‘I see you’ gesture.  He turned   kind of pale, jumped in the car and sped out of the parking lot.

 And these people VOTE!  

What a great time!  Tomorrow I’m going back, wearing my Homeland Security cap.

Then the next day I will go to the driver’s license bureau wearing my Border Patrol  hat, and see how long it takes to empty the place.

Whoever said retirement is boring?  You just need to wear the right kind of cap!

See you guys at Walmart

My weight had always been pretty steady – I weight 132 when we got married, and 140 when we celebrated our 25th anniversary – but several years ago, I suddenly started gaining. Ten, twenty, thirty pounds, and then forty! And we had not changed our eating habits at all. Gack! In fact, I was very, very careful stay below 1,200 calories a day, but the scale just didn’t budge.

To top it off, my blood pressure also climbed, but I simply put that down to my excess avoir du pois. My dad’s death was attributable to to hypertension, so this really, really concerned me. My GP put me on medication, but again it didn’t seem to make much difference.

A week ago, I had to look up the one medication both The Squire and I take, and discovered the side effects can include both weigh gain and high blood pressure. All those papers I had gotten from the druggist had simply been tossed into the recycling bin with my ever even glancing at them. As a shirttail member of the medical profession, I, of all people should have know better!

I betook myself to the store and asked the pharmacist if he had a spare copy of the handout for this med, and by the way, how long have I been taking it?

So now I am on a different pill, and hoping that I can drop a few pounds, now that my body is not fighting back. The Squire? He hasn’t had a bit of trouble. No particular weight gain and his B/P is still 171/20.

The fink.

This morning I heard a strange whirring/clicking sound when I went out to fill the birdfeeders. I figured is was some sort of “critter” so I walked very slowly around the corner of the house to investigate.

The heron was crouching by the side of the pond, either talking to himself, or channeling his inner “fish whisperer”.

When he saw me, he rose to his full height and stalked off across the yard to flap down into the stream. He continued to stare at me over the edge of the bank, so I finished my chores and went back inside. I watched from the bedroom window as he came back up and returned to his place at the water’s edge.

Mind you, it’s pretty near impossible to tell one Great Blue Heron from another, but for the last week we have a what seems to be a youngish bird hanging around the yard.

I’ve startled the poor creature several times – and been startled in return – but the last few days I’ve tried to remember to walk slowly when I go out to feed the fish in the evening, and he (?) will flap away a few feet and stay a while. I try to position myself so the line of sight is blocked by a bush, and last night he hung around until I moved again, but even then he only flew down into the stream and “crouched”. He’ll never be anything close to “tame” but somehow he senses that we mean him no harm.

This morning, he was in the driveway and Eddie decided to stalk him. The idiot cat will not bother squirrels or birds, but he’ll practice his skills on a five-foot heron! I took this photo through the living room window, after New Blue decamped to the pond.

As I was leaving Aldi’s this morning, I asked an elderly couple if they would like to have my cart. The lady smiled and replied that they “couldn’t use it.”

She was bent almost double over a walker – the sort that has a basket on the front – and he was blind, holding a white cane in one hand, and his other hand resting on her shoulder.

For richer, for poorer, and in sickness and in health.

And may God bless and keep them both.

I have just finished reading an absolutely fabulous book entitled Shakespeare Saved My Life. The book was written by Dr. Laura Bates, who is a Shakespeare professor and prison volunteer, about the ten years she spent visiting an Indiana prison, teaching Shakespeare to the inmates there.

This may seem to be an odd calling, but it enriched both Dr. Bates’ life and the prisoners with whom she worked. The play she chose for her initial sessions was King Richard the Second, particularly his soliloquy when he is, himself, in solitary confinement, how he peoples his cell with people he has known, places he has been, not talking to himself, but to “other people” trying to make sense of his life, and how he came to be in this predicament. The prisoners ate this up, working through the odd words, but gaining a new understanding of themselves, and eventually putting on plays where they has rewritten the Bard into modern English and modern situations.

The most enthusiastic and motivated – and motivating – of her students is a man named Larry Newsome, who was convicted of murder at the age of 17, and spent ten years – ten years! – in solitary confinement. In other circumstances, he would have been a college professor himself, but . . .

Well, read the book and find out. I promise it is a wonderful read. You will enjoy it.

My driver’s license expired some time ago, but when I went up to renew it I was turned away with the explanation that it was good until the governor lifted the Emergency Order. I got an email a couple of weeks ago with a vision test form to be completed by my doctor, and requesting me to make an appointment, which I did. Tuesday morning I presented my self and my vision form to the proper authorities, and was informed that I had an insurance violation that needed to be handled immediately. Oh. Dear.

To make a long story short, I bought a “new” Nissan around the first of the month, and we were so worried about my not driving an uninsured vehicle that we switched the policy from the old car to the new one. The tricky part was, I still owned the old car; the dealer wanted to give me $100 trade in, so we sold it ourselves almost two weeks later.

Two weeks with an uninsured car equals a $150 fine. Oy!

The problem started because I have a really easy tag number and I want to keep it. Maryland has issued new tags, with just a scramble of numbers and letters, with apparently no rhyme or reason. So – the nice lady told me to hang on to my old tags and when the new ones arrive bring them, along with all of my paper work, to the DMV and they should be able to make the switch.

For as long as we’ve had him, Eddie has simply refused to go into the back room via the cat flap. We know he does it at night, because his bowl is empty in the morning. He is willing to come out during the day, but he just won’t go in.

This morning he came into the kitchen and crouched down to use the flap. I was standing just out of his line of vision; I could see him, but he didn’t see me.

I must have moved or something, because he glanced over his shoulder, saw me standing there, and immediately sat back down and meowed. I leaned over, and he moved back a smidge, expecting me to open the door for him. Instead, I grabbed him and shoved him head-first through the door.

My mama didn’t raise me to be a doorman for a cat!

One of my many failings is that I have no Sense of Serious. Some people have no sense of humor, but everything in my life gets turned into a joke.

Drop a scalpel on my foot? Pfft. Get bitten by a snake? Giggle. (It was a black snake, non-venomous) I was being loaded into an ambulance and one of the EMTS told me that he and his wife would love to have a place like ours. “Let me know if you ever decide to sell.” I grinned at him and told him to at least wait until the body was cold. Poor kid was mortified. Have a near-fatal reaction to a prescription? I made a joke about that, too.

So – while I was working at the local hospital, I discovered the pharmacy had some leeches. Leeches are still used in medicine, mostly in reattaching severed body parts, but they were a cure-all in the 1700s, which is the time period I teach. I figured I’d get a couple of pictures to enlarge and show my students, so I waltzed into their office, and when they showed me the jug (they were in a gallon jug in the fridge) I reached in and grabbed one. I handed my cell phone to one of the girls, placed the leech on the back of my hand, and asked her to take a couple photos.

We had to wait for the poor creature to warm up to body temp, and when it flattened itself out, then arched its neck to set to work, she got several shots. Leeches have three jaws, and the scar resembles a Mercedes-Benz logo. Not being all that status conscious, I quickly removed the little beast. My hand was already over the jar when the supervisor popped up to ask what on earth I was doing. (That wasn’t exactly how she phrased it.) As I released the leech and watched it drop to the bottom of the jar, she reminded me that they were stored in sterile water – which I had just destroyed. Ack! She asked me if I knew which one if was, but by this time it had curled up and was lost among its brethren.

“I really didn’t get a good look at his face”, I replied. However, I did get a good look at her face, and decided to beat a tactical retreat.

Thanks to Gary Delainey and Gerry Rasmussen for reminding me.

On Monday, I ordered three rolls of the Lemon paper for the kitchen. Today, we received two large boxes from Target

Inside these two HUGE boxes were three rolls of paper – two in one box and one in the other. Will somebody ‘splain this to me?