Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #8,069

yeah I know you did not ask!

As you surely know, the primary sensory input for canines is the sense of smell. Our particular canine, Princess Lily, has the common but  troubling habit of rolling in whatever odoriferous substance she can find. This seems to be some sort of bold statement for dogs – here I am, I know you can smell me now.

Of course, this results in Señora giving The Wee Dog frequent baths. Lily tolerates these baths, but just barely. But she is so happy when they are over that she runs around the house crazily for five minutes. Señora being Señora, chases the ecstatic Lily and everyone is having a good time.

Thinking about this other day I came to the conclusion that if our precious little dog was human she would  dress in wild, bold, colorful clothes that would generate jokes about needing sunglasses.

Loud smells, loud clothes, all in the same ballpark… smell me, look at me!

And so it goes

Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #1,560

yeah I know you did not ask!

I wonder if at the various universities and colleges that teach Internet technologies if there are special writing classes, perhaps in the Marketing Department under Internet.

There seems to a certain, very common style of article on many websites.  There is a teaser headline that grabs your attention, so you open the article. You then start reading or perhaps scanning to through the article to find the tidbit that attracted you, but it is not readily apparent. So you scroll, and scroll some more trying to find it.  As you do so you go past one advertisement after another.  If you are exceedingly lucky you find the tidbit towards the end of the article, but it frequently has an O. Henry twist to it.  Not uncommonly, however, there is nothing in article that relates to the teaser.

It is amazing what we humans are willing to do to other humans in the endeavor to extract money from them.

And so it should not go.

Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #2,688

yeah I know you did not ask!

I was doing yoga style stretches before launching into more vigorous, traditional exercises in our basement gymnasium area.  As I was doing so my various joints were snapping,cracking and popping so loudly and so often that I thought I was consuming a bowl of Rice Krispies.

Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #1,799

yeah I know you did not ask!

In a post I used the phrase “in the Weinhaus-Rush household”, being a senior with a floppy neural network (do they make a Viagra for that?), I began to play around with the meanings of our two last names.

All my life people have made puns or jokes on my last name.  In the start of the Cold War era in the fifties it was, “Hey David, are you a Rush-AN?” During the hippie sixties it was, “Man, what a rush”, referring, of course, to the effects of drugs, generally said as someone passed me in the hallways at school.  My least favorite has been, “Hey, RUSH Limbaugh.” I quickly dissuaded folks from the use of that obnoxious appellation in regards to me.  And there is always the omnipresent jest, “Hey what’s your rush, Rush.” For the purpose of this randomness we are going with sixties version.

Indubitably, you are aware that Weinhaus is German for wine house as in the anglicized name, Amy Winehouse.

So our household is the Wine House Rush or perhaps the Rush Wine House.  Apparently, we are running some sort hippie opium den tavern/pub/wine bar.  Man, what a rush! Y’all come on down here, hear, aprisa, before the Ruskies  and MAGAs take over.

Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #6,930

yeah I know you did not ask!

There is a unit on vehicles called a flasher; it controls the flashing of the turn signals and emergency lights.  It also is responsible for the clicking sound that you hear when they are engaged.  I became familiar with this device when I drove an ice cream truck a couple summers in Oklahoma City while I was in college.  Since we drove very slowly in neighborhoods and had kids running up to the truck we had the emergency flashers on much of the time.  This resulted in the flasher unit having to be replaced several times a season.

I don’t have this problem in my Tacoma, but in my MX-5 Miata and my wife’s Subaru Outback I have an issue with leaving the turn signal on.  In the Outback if I get everything adjusted just right, I can see the indicator on the dashboard.  I have a harder time in the Miata.  This results in the old man syndrome of driving with my turn signal on for miles and miles and miles.

I went looking on the Internet, and they do make flashers with a louder sound.  One was advertising up to 5 times louder than normal. Why they are not marketing these aggressively to senior citizens I do not know, but if anyone wants to buy me a birthday present next year…

Just as an aside I was driving somewhere with the grandkids and their mother in the Outback.  She advised me that I still had my turn signal on even though I was done changing lanes.  I politely informed her that I was entitled as I was over 60.

And so it goes.

 

Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #4,845

yeah I know you did not ask!

After much gnashing of teeth, after much scrutinizing of checking  accounts, after accepting that she would not be 21 again, Señora bit the proverbial bullet and bought herself hearing aids.

This purchased has wrought an unexpected change in my life. In the past when we had a cross transaction I was wont to mutter some reply under my mustache, knowing that it was very unlikely that she would hear my utterance, thus avoiding fueling whatever fire was raging.  If she noticed my lips moving, and asked what I said, I would disingenuously reply, “That I love you.”  That is no longer an option. I know this to be true as I was in my man cave upstairs talking back to a balky computer when from the kitchen downstairs I heard her ask, “What did you say dear?”

Hopefully I am not too old a dog to learn a new trick, and can avoid being taken to the pound.

Let me see, how many cliches did I manage to get into three short paragraphs…

Keep well.

 

Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #8,342

yeah I know you did not ask!

A little after I woke up this morning I looked at the weather app on my phone.  For all the world I was hoping I had changed it from Fahrenheit to Celsius.  I do that sometimes as I talk regularly with folks in other countries via Skype in my endeavor to learn the Spanish language.  While I can do the temperature conversion fairly rapidly in my head, it easier just to change the settings on the app.  People living on or close to the equator are somewhat fascinated by cold and variable weather of the northern latitudes.  Or maybe we are just trying to find a topic to talk about!

The story I like to tell about is talking to a young man in Honduras.  When he popped on my Skype screen he was in a jacket and had on mittens.  I asked him if he was cold.  He replied that he was freezing and explained to me it was 15 degrees (59 degrees Fahrenheit). All is relative.  Some folks here would have been in shorts at that temperature in January.

Long story, short…I had not changed the temperature scale in use on my phone.  It is just freaking cold today and getting colder.

Rev. Joe’s Random Thought # 7,676

yeah I know you did not ask!

I was telling my wife something the other day that was true, but she was having a hard believing it to be so.  After all a bit she said to me, “I suppose it could be true, after all if Trump is our president any absurdity is possible.”

Rev. Joe’s Random Thought # 5,168

yeah I know you did not ask!

Somehow or another, one of my email addresses has become known to the spammers.  I am getting several emails a day that read something like this, “Guys do you want to do it 3, 4, 5 or even 6 times a night…”

First of all in my prime I would have been lucky to do it 3 times a night, let alone 4, 5 or 6 times.  Secondly, I could see a couch in my future if tried to wake up my wife up for  whatever it is they think I could do 3, 4, 5 or even 6 times in one night.

Rev. Joe’s Random Thought # 1,072

yeah I know you did not ask!

Raise your hand if this applies to you.

You know you are old when you read this statement:  “The project became a federal priority around the turn of the century…”  and you think 1900.

See me raising my hand.