There was an ad on the radio a couple days ago for a revolutionary new prescription sleep aid; the latest in a long line of sleep aids claiming to be “non-addictive and non-habit forming.” (Believe that and I’ve got some ocean-front property in Arizona you might be interested in.) At the end of the commercial came the usual list of possible side-effects that make the cure sound worse than the disease. Midway through the list was one that really caught my attention.
May cause drowsiness.
Isn’t that the entire point?
Category Archives: Stories
The Green Green Grass of Home
It didn’t rain much in July or August. As a result, the grass went dormant and didn’t need to be mowed. It’s at times like these, when the yard requires zero maintenance, that I feel like a lawn care genius.
September’s rainfall has been somewhat higher, with several inches in just the first week or so. The grass is growing again. Last week the grass in the backyard was deep enough that Wylie could hide by just laying down.
It rained some more over the weekend with the result that on Tuesday evening, I spent an hour in the backyard. It wasn’t intentional, I just couldn’t find my way back to the house.
I don’t feel like such a genius now.
The Rest of the Story
After reading yesterday’s tale of laundry day, SueP wrote to ask for “The Rest of the Story.”
I suppose the request makes sense. After all, the tale ends almost as soon as it starts. There’s a brief explanation of why water doesn’t burn, followed by the revelation of a washing machine full of clothes and water with smoke coming out of it.
Clearly the water is on fire! Given that this takes place at Blair’s house, you know there must be a story behind it. Maybe the inhabitants of Pluto, enraged at losing their status as a planet have declared war and set fire to the laundry as a first strike? Or maybe it’s something more mundane after all, but with all that setup, surely there’s at least a half-dozen fire trucks!
This is exciting! Sue was doubtless looking forward to reading the next paragraph (both my other readers probably were too), and when she scrolled down a little further, there it was: Nothing. Nothing at all.
With that lead-in, you can’t help wondering, what’s going on? How can he stop there?
It’s simple really. It’s not that I didn’t want to write more, it’s just that “the Rest of the Story” is quite anti-climatic.
My best guess is that I just overloaded the washing machine. Once I realized where the smoke was coming from, I took the sheets out and washed them along with a shirt and some towels that had been previously overlooked.
That’s pretty much it. No spaceship battles for Terry. Wylie didn’t get to fulfil his dream of riding in a fire truck. Nothing dramatic at all. I didn’t even get to write about the smoke detector going off!
Leaving it with smoke coming out was just more interesting.
Where there's smoke there's…Laundry?
Water is a most interesting substance. It forms the basis of life as we know it and can be used for cooking, cleaning, swimming or dumping on your younger brother.
Aside from dumping it on my brothers, one of the properties of water which I’ve always found interesting is that it’s composed of Hydrogen and Oxygen. Combine them and they form water; but separate them and they burn – leaving water as the only residue.
Given the tendency of its constituent elements to combine in a flash of flame, water seems an unlikely choice for extinguishing a fire, and yet that’s exactly what you use in most cases. (The most common exceptions being, of course, grease and electrical fires.)
The reason it’s safe to use water on most fires is that once they’re combined, the Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms form a bond which requires a great deal of energy to break. In order for a fire to split water molecules back into individual atoms, the fire would have to be around 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit. By comparison, the water in your water heater is generally only 140 degrees or so. Nowhere near the temperature required for the gases to dissociate and burn.
Knowing all that, perhaps I’m being something of an alarmist. But I can’t help thinking it might be cause for concern when midway through a load of laundry, smoke starts coming out of the washing machine.
Dinner and a floor show
One day last week Laura and I decided to go to Lone Star for dinner.
More specifically, it was Lone Star #4306. I don’t know why that would matter, but they seem to worry that people won’t know that bit of information. Neither the waitress nor the hostess told us the store number. They no doubt guessed – quite correctly – that we didn’t care about the store number. (Besides, how strange would it be if either of them greeted us with “Welcome to Lone Star #4306, the 4306th store in the chain”?) But the management (probably at the corporate office) compensated for that by programming the register to print the store number across the top of the check in the same size print as the name of the restaurant. It seems quite odd, but most managers seem to be odd in one way or another. But I digress…
It used to be that you could go to Lone Star (and this was the entire chain, not just #4306) and while you waited for your food, you could munch on peanuts and throw the shells on the floor. It leant a fun sort of folksy air to the place and made for some crunchiness as you walked to your table. That ended a couple years ago when the health department (I have no idea what level, but it does seem to be a national thing) declared that anything fun, folksy or crunchy was unhealthy and forced them to end the whole peanut thing. (This no doubt also made life a lot easier for the staff members who had to sweep up the peanut shells at the end of each day.)
Despite the lack of peanuts (or shells) we still enjoyed our dinner and halfway through the meal something most unexpected happened.
Lone Star has a Western theme to it and the background music is Country. The song playing right then was “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” and David Allan Coe was just about halfway through explaining how his friend Steve Goodman had ended up writing an extra verse for it, making it the perfect County and Western song when the music switched to Tracy Byrd’s “Watermelon Crawl.”
What happened next seemed like something from a musical, where one of the characters says something to someone and the next thing you know the know, the entire cast, plus all the extras in the background are suddenly singing and dancing as if it’s a perfectly common occurrence and the entire population spontaneously feels the need to sing. And just like the residents of one of those only-in-the-movies towns, the moment the music changed, the entire restaurant staff started dancing!
Bunny Sue Fu and others have told me that this is a common occurrence, but evidently I’ve never timed my dinners correctly. And just like the folks in those movies, the people working in that restaurant seemed to be enjoying themselves.
And then, just like in the movies, the moment the song ended, everyone went back to work.
Out of Touch
Our department head quickly walked through the office this evening, talking to nobody in particular, “I lost my blackberry!”
Someone (possibly me) promptly asked, “That’s bad?”
(Although, I use technology to stay in touch, I dislike the idea of being connected 24×7.)
Alternative Transportation
Back in May of 2003 I bought a Honda Civic hybrid. I had several motivations, but mainly it was the geek factor of being able to get 50 miles to a gallon. Three years later, gas prices have nearly doubled, the waiting lines for hybrids are measured in months, and suddenly I’m looking like a genius! 🙂
One of the people who’ve expressed jealousy about the car is my coworker Greg. While I’ve been getting 46-51 miles per gallon for the past three years, he’s been getting 20-35 depending on which car he drove. Back in June, he decided to get a motorcycle, in part because of the gas mileage (he recently calculated it at slightly more than 80 miles per gallon).
On my way to work on Friday, I spotted someone who has both of us beat when it comes to saving gas.
I don’t know where she works, but about half a mile from the office I spotted a woman who was clearly on her way to work. She was dressed in a green skirt with a matching jacket and was wearing heels.
Nothing unusual about that, except that she was riding on a Razor scooter.
As I watched, she zipped across the street, picked up the scooter, walked across the grass (the heels no doubt do a great job of aerating it), put the scooter down in the parking lot on the other side, pushed off, and continued on her way.
I’ve seen plenty of people ride scooters, and if you live near the office, that’s probably a fun way to do it. But she’s the first person I’ve ever seen riding a Razor in heels.
Catching Some Sun
Laura and I went out to the Maryland Seafood Festival today to help the Annapolis Jaycees with their funnelcake booth.
I spent most of five hours in the sun and at the end of the day, my face felt warm. When I pulled my shirt away from my neck, it became clear that I’d overdone it. It’s not a full-blown sunburn, but this evening I decided to put some Solarcaine on it, “just in case.”
I’m generally pretty careful about the sun. Aside from the risks of skin cancer and long term damage, sunburn hurts and the healing process itches like crazy. So I’m careful, and for when I do overdo it, I keep the Solarcaine handy.
This was the first time I’d needed it in a couple years, but when I sprayed it on my hand and rubbed it on my face, it worked just like it always does.
That can of Solarcaine had been in my medicine cabinet for a while. Wondering how long I’d had it, I idly turned it over, looking for any sort of expiration or sell-by date.
I found one. The expiration date stamped on the bottom of the can was sometime in 1991 – fifteen years ago! That means I probably bought it within a year or two of moving to Nevada.
It’s possible I need to clean out the medicine cabinet a little more often.
Oh Deer
Wylie and I were about 2/3 of the way through our evening walk, we saw a car turning onto a side street and slowing down. I thought they were slowing down to look for a parking spot, but it turned out that they were watching a group of pedestrians.
There were five of them. As Wylie and I watched, three adult deer and two fawns crossed the street and went into the park on the other side.
For the next half mile, Wylie looked in the backyard of every house we passed, looking for more deer.
Not Quite Poetry
“I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.”
Granted, that’s a very quotable line (and no doubt intentionally so), but when Wash said it, you knew you were about to see him “In the Zone,” flying like nobody else.
I really like that line. To me, it’s all about staying nimble and getting through, no matter what the opposition throws at you. I find it downright inspirational. (Learning from Wash’s example however, I try to avoid declaring victory too soon.)
A co-worker recently asked why that quotation was written on the whiteboard in my cubical. I tried to explain why I found it inspiring, but she got hung up on the literal text.
“Leaves don’t fly!”
“Sure they do. Haven’t you ever seen how the wind can carry them?”
Jing’s next words made it clear that she’d never spent the afternoon raking leaves, only to have the wind deposit a new batch from the neighbors’ yard.
“Leaves just fall down.” And then, brightly, “But I’ve seen plastic grocery store bags fly!”
Somehow “I am a grocery bag on the wind” doesn’t sound nearly as poetic.