That’s the way it goes!!

My cousin sent me this and the bad thing about it is I could see that happening here!!!!

Two union guys working for the parks department. One would dig a hole and the other would come along and fill it in. This went on all day.  Dig, fill in Dig , fill in. I finally had to ask them what they were doing.

They told me that normally there are three of them but the guy who puts the tree in the hole called in sick.

My father was a smart man

When my father passed away several years ago, my mother was afraid she would have to go to work to pay the mortgage.  What none of us knew was that my father had mortgage protection on their home.  It not only covered what was owed on the home, but it sure gave my mother peace of mind.  I never quite figured out why Daddy didn’t tell her he had taken this out but maybe he did and Mom just didn’t pay attention.

Far too many times when one person dies, that leaves the burden of paying for the home they shared on the surviving spouse unless they were smart enough to get life insurance for mortgages.    My father taught us girls a lot of things and covering our rears with plenty of life insurance was just one of the life lessons he taught us.  I sure miss my Daddy.

This is the coolest thing I have ever seen

Animals absolutely amaze me.  The Cameleon is one of the strangest creatures God ever created.  I knew they changed colors to camouflage themselves to their surroundings but I had no idea just how fast they could change colors or the extent of the colors they could adapt to.  You have to watch this video.  It will blow your mind.  I know it did mine.

How many inches?

I almost fell out of my chair when I read this in an email.  Nothing better for your soul than laughter so have a good laugh on this one!!

A man wakes up in the hospital, bandaged from head to foot. The doctor comes in and says, ‘Ah, I see you’ve regained consciousness. Now, you probably won’t remember, but you were in a pile-up on the freeway. You’re going to be okay, you’ll walk again and
everything, but…… something happened. I’m trying to break this gently, but the fact is, your willy was chopped off in the wreck, and we were unable to find it.’

The man groans, but the doctor goes on, ‘You’ve got $9,000 in insurance compensation coming and we have the technology now to build you a new willy that will work as well as your old one did – better in fact! But the thing is, it doesn’t come cheap. It’s $1000 an inch.’

The man perks up at this. ‘So,’ the doctor says, ‘it’s for you to decide how many inches you want. But it’s something you’d better discuss with your wife. I mean, if you had a five inch one before, and you decide to go for a nine incher, she might be a bit put out. But if you had a nine inch one before, and you decide only to invest in a five incher this time, she might be disappointed. So it’s important that she plays a role in helping you make the decision.’

The man agrees to talk with his wife. The doctor comes back the next day. ‘So,’ says the doctor, ‘have you spoken with your wife?’

‘I have’ says the man.

‘And has she helped you in making the decision?’

‘Yes, she has’ says the man.

‘And what is it?’ asks the doctor.

“We’re getting new counter tops.”

Helping a friend pick out new furniture

One of my friends just bought a new Town Home near me.  I was thrilled to have her so close.  She needed some new furniture so I suggested she come over and we would shop online.  She had never bought furniture online and didn’t even realize she could to be honest.  Once I showed her some of the beautiful modern furniture she could find online, she was hooked.

The first thing she wanted to check out was  living room furniture.  They had a wide variety of living rooms to choose from and she couldn’t decide on just one.  Then we checked out  the bedrooms.  Again, she loved just about everything she saw.  On to the tables and still the same reaction.    Next she wanted to check out the closets.  Finally she had it down between just two.  I ended up asking her just how long it took her to find the right Town Home and she said a year.  Oh brother.

Ben Stein’s Final Column

Worth repeating:    How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today’s World?

As I begin to write this, I ‘slug’ it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is ‘FINAL’, and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.

It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world’s change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton’s, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to.
It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars.

I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton’s is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.Beyond that, a bigger change has happened? I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated.

But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today’s world, if by a ‘star’ we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsche’s or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.

They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.

A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton’s is a big subject.

There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament. The policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children; the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse. Now you have my idea of a real hero.

I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin or Martin Mull or Fred Willard–or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.

But, I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister’s help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.

By Ben Stein

Don’t ever forget to “Seize the Moment”!

Mom and her online shopping!

I can not believe how quickly my mother took to online shopping.  She’s become the online shopping queen.  She finds things I haven’t even found yet, can you imagine that?  Like I have been telling you, she’s redoing everything.  She found the bedding and bed linens at great prices online that she has on her new bed.  She even found the furniture and mattress online too.

She hasn’t stopped there.  When my nephew needed some baby bedding and linens for his bed, you guessed it, she found them online too.  Most of her home decor was found online and she has a beautiful home because of it.  Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.  Sorry Mom, I didn’t mean to call you an old dog!!!

How to save some American jobs and we can help!

I got this in an email and thought it needed to be shared by any means possible. Here’s what the email read:

I want to share with you some great information that I found out purely by accident. I believe it can also save and create jobs in America while giving people better customer service.

So how many times have you called a company’s service phone line and found that the rep. can barely speak English? Once with a major mortgage company it was so bad I demanded to speak with someone who spoke English. Right at that moment I broke the code, the secret password for customer service.

Come to find out that every American company using overseas operators must transfer you to an American rep. by saying…….” I want to speak to a representative in America “. (Don’t take no for an answer on this)

This was confirmed by the American rep. that they must transfer you after that request. I’ve tried it on a half a dozen major companies including cable, bank, phone and mortgage companies. It works every time and I actually get my issues taken care of.

Last thing to help save even more jobs…. don’t use the automated check out lanes they are pushing at the big box stores. Once again I found out that if we use those check outs rather than cashiers people loose their jobs too. I’ve refused to use the automated check outs and have had two cashiers already thank me for help saving their job.

Went out to eat

Jayce and I went out to eat at an outdoor type place.  The food was great, the atmosphere was great, the service was fantastic and I was absolutely amazed that there were absolutely no flies buzzing around our food.  I hate flies for that very reason along with how nasty they are.  I noticed that there were these nice lights here and there.  What I didn’t realize was they were fly lights.

The only lights I had ever seen that took care of flies were the bug zapper things that would scare you to death when something flew in them.  These were actually beautiful and would look great even in your home.  I must admit I peeked to see who made them and then checked online only to find out the company has several fly control solutions.  The prices were pretty darn good too.  When you’re dealing with experts, you know you can’t go wrong.