Artie II

Aritie's 4 years old now, 28 in people-years, old enough to act like an adult.  However, he still acts like a naughty kid sometimes.  We wouldn't want him to loose his playfulness or his NASCAR routine or joie de vivre.  He's just got a couple bad habits we'd like to see go away.

Ranger and Artie

His main transgression is food related (surprise, surprise): he won't stay out of the kitchen.  Both he and Ranger are trained to stop and sit near the kitchen entrance - but not to enter.  If in the kitchen, the pooches could be inadvertently stepped on or kicked.  And, they could cause Trish to trip and fall, damaging her injured leg even further or ruining her bionic knees.  I could trip also, and old farts tend to have brittle bones.  Artie's no dummy, knows we want him to stay out, leaves when we remind him (numerous times each day) but just keeps going back in.

While her back is turned I'll sneak in, might find food morsels on the floor.

I know I'm being bad but..... might find food morsels on the floor.

Another food related bad habit: when we're eating at the dining room table, Artie circles around us like a great white shark closing in for the kill.  He makes this loud panting sound (hah, hah, hah) and bumps our legs or butts with his nose on each pass.  Hey, I'm starving down here!  (hah, hah, bump Trish)  Had my dinner 30 minutes ago but I'm still hungry.  (hah, hah, bump Mike)  OMG, that hamburger smells great!  (hah, hah, bump Trish)  Gonna save some for me?  (hah, hah, bump, bump)

Busted!  Had to go sit on my rug.

Artie had a troubled childhood, came from a dysfunctional family.  His dad was a ne'er do well and a womanizer, was hardly ever home, always out marking his territory and sniffing around stray females.  When he was home, he paid virtually no attention to Artie, spent no quality time with his son at all.  He'd just eat and sleep and mess around with Artie's mom - sometimes right in front of Artie!  Consequently, Artie has some emotional and psychological issues.  

Artie loved his mom and she cared for him, too.  She showed him affection and scared off the predators and bullies.  But, she had issues, too.  I won't go into the details here but what it boils down to - there's no nice way to say this, so I'll just spit it out: Artie's mom was a bitch.

Beat Feet

When Mother turns up the heat,
Mike and Trish beat feet.

Starting today, the forecast for several days is for 100+ high temps.  We're packing up, out of here in 10 days.  We usually launch a couple weeks earlier but 3 months on the road is our limit, and September is hotter than May.  In fact, May has been quite pleasant this year.

We'll be in Santa Fe, NM for a couple weeks, CO for a month, then north to see where Custer bit it, then east to MN for the family reunion and, finally, haul ass back across the Midwest.

One of our CO stops is Pike's Peak, which boasts the second-highest paved road* in the USA, topping out at 14,125'.  Mt Evans, about 50 miles NW of Pike's, is higher by a hair, 5' higher to be exact. Granted, that's somewhat thicker than your average hair.

The comb-over guys would die for that hair.  You know, those guys who part their hair just above their left ear and comb it over the top of their bald heads, all the way to their right ear - and then pray that the prevailing winds are from the west.  I feel sorry for those guys.  They can't seem to recognize that they're fooling nobody but themselves, and that it's terminally unattractive.

When we last visited CO, the pickup didn't like the high altitude, engine and drive train went spastic at altitudes above 8K'.  We're hoping the problem resolved itself, since it didn't reoccur last summer in Yellowstone NP at 9K'.  RAM service people are totally clueless as to cause or cure.    

* The highest paved road in the world is highway G318 between Lhasa and Nepal.  Mountain passes there go up to 17,260'.  Talk about a natural high.

Here's Your Sign

Have you heard the comedian Bill Engvall do his 'Here's Your Sign' routine?  The sign he refers to says I'm Stupid!  The Sign jokes are about stupid questions - to which Bill supplies witty, sarcastic answers. Here's one of my favorites:

A trucker gets his truck stuck under an overpass, and the responding policeman asks "Hey, you get your truck stuck?" The trucker answers, "No sir, I was delivering that overpass and I ran out of gas. Here's your sign."

Secure Login Your password has been blocked Your password was blocked on 5/23/2015 at 11:50 AM Eastern. If you are unaware of this change, please contact us immediately at 1-800-544-6666. • For your security and privacy, please do not respond to this email. Instead, please log into your account at www.fidelity.com/securemessage and send us a secure message. • If you would like to verify this email was sent by Fidelity Investments, log into your account and select Research > Alerts > View Your Alerts History.

I received the above email yesterday after a failed attempt to log in to my Fidelity Investment mutual fund account online.  Thought I entered the correct user name and password but Fidelity thought otherwise.  After 2 abortive attempts, they blocked my password and directed me to call them to resolve the problem - a typical security measure used to discourage hackers.

Do you see anything screwy in the email verbiage?  Think about it a minute.  Let's take it step by step, from the top:
1.  In the green area on top there's a Secure Login link
2.  'Your password was blocked.....'  (yeah, I know).
3.  'If you are unaware....'  (I'm quite aware, thank you very much).
4.  First bullet: '....log into your account.....'
5.  Second bullet: '.....log into your account....'

They say my password is blocked and then direct me to log into my account.  What the hell kind of magic trick am I supposed to perform here, you stupid shits?  Can't log in without a password and you blocked my password!

Oh yeah, I'm gonna call 'em alright.  And, after I get the password squared away I'm gonna vigorously rub their noses in their stupidity.  Fidelity Investments, here's your sign!    

Catalogs

Sears and Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, J C Penney, Spiegel: in order of preference, those catalogs were our school clothing source in the mid 1900s.

Our home town (Perham, MN) was small, 1800 population.  It had one clothing store which catered mostly to adults.  The annual catalog order was an established tradition long before I came along, the last of 8 kids.  It never even occurred to me that we could have driven to a larger town like Detroit Lakes to shop for clothing.  Even if it had occurred to me, I knew darn well that asking Dad to drive the extra 20 minutes would get the same reaction as asking to be excused from milking the cows for a week.

I once had a sweater like the one on the bottom, 4th from right. 

Was I cool or what?

Getting the new catalogs each year was a big deal.  We'd spend hours paging through them, selecting just the right stuff.  When I got a little older I became attracted to the pages showing women's lingerie, bras in particular.  Fancy that!

Thanks to Sears, I thought breasts were perfectly cone-shaped,

 like those flimsy little dispenser Dixie cups.

 However, I wasn't disappointed to find out otherwise

when first I fondled the real deal.

Mom thought jeans were bad for you, said they inhibited circulation, was a great fan of bib overalls.  Dad always wore coveralls and now I wonder: was it by choice or in deference to Mom?  Most of the boys at our 2-room country grade school wore jeans, so we were oddballs.  Being oddballs in grade school is, to say the least, not a good thing.  After several years of heavy lobbying we finally got Mom to agree to jeans.  The day we first wore them to school we were ecstatic.  Oddballs no more!

We waited with great anticipation for the catalog orders to arrive, and when they finally did, we ripped into those packages like a starving man rips into his first decent meal in several weeks.  Ah, the smell of new clothes!  The finest perfume ever!  We immediately tried everything on, even the denims, which were stiff as a board.  No pre-wash back then.

Catalogs had other uses, of course.  I don't know if toilet paper was hard to come by in the 50s or was viewed as a frivolous, needless expense.  Regardless, many outhouses were stocked with catalogs instead of TP.  The ripped-out pages didn't do the job very well, though.  Corncobs, another item commonly found in outhouses back in the day, worked better - although, depending on the cob, you often came away with a classic case of chaff-butt.