I’m starting to think that my anapalactic episodes are caused by a bacterial infection that is now running wild! I had another one today when, in talking with a co-worker, I thought he said ‘they call him the Samus programmer’. Samus, of course being Samus Aran, the female hero of the Metroid games who is only revealed as a female at the end of the game.
As I’m prone to wildly delusional thoughts anyway, this immediately brought questions to mind. He said the guys name was Aaron. Did he really mean Erin? Does this guy sit around in an orange helmet all day? Does the code he writes turn out to be not exactly what you expected when it’s done? How did this even come up in conversation?
Turns out he said ‘they call him a programmer’. That goes beyond mishearing to totally making stuff up. And I’m just waiting for the AAS (American Anapalactic Society) to show up and ask permission to use me for research. Which means that my going insane will be good for something at least. I mean other than entertaining the people who I mishear.
There she is. Across the bathroom. Yon fair maiden. My blushing bride. Yea verily she is beautiful to behold with her crimson lips and skin like satin. Behold, she speaks. Oh rapture! Each word from her lips is as honey for sweetness. I still myself to hear what my lady doth say unto me.
“I’ve got an anapalactic line on my chin.”
<que sound of needle being pulled across a record>
What? Anapalactic line? What is that? That sounds serious. She said it like I’m supposed to know what it is. Will she be upset if don’t know? How should I respond? With happiness? No, she didn’t seem thrilled about it, a line on her chin sounds like a bad thing, and anapalactic sounds like a real bad thing. Upset? No, that might make her think that I’m too focused on her looks. Bad idea. Resignation? She might think I don’t care. Disbelief? Too over the top. Amusement? I’d be taking joy in her suffering. So many choices, so many ways to hose myself. Argh!
Alright, be cool. She’s your wife. She loves you. Just be honest. It’ll be fine. Really. I put on best confused look (which is easy to do right now) look at her and say “What?”.
She stops to cast a sidelong glance at me and says “I’ve got a black line on my chin.” as she rubs the errant line of makeup from her chin.
Forget making a mountain out of a molehill. I just made a 5 syllable word out of a color. Beat that. Instant laughter ensues as I share my faux pas. And bonus, I get an extra couple of kisses out of it.
Further research shows that anapalactic isn’t even a real word. I’ve created a word! Woo hoo!!! I’m claiming it today, April 21st of 2008. I created the word anapalactic. My use defines it and I become immortal. Feel free to use my word as you see fit. Just remember, you heard it here first.
anapalactic [an'-uh-puh-lak'-tik] adjective - Related to the state of confusion resulting from mis-hearing a word while brushing your teeth.
Alert readers may ask “What happened to farming tip #13?”. If hotels can not have a 13th floor, I don’t need a 13th farming tip. But you may say “That’s not fair!”. Tough, you can tell it to the judge. I don’t think so because you’re never taking me alive you pig. For your own good, put your hands on your head and step away from the car Mr…..
Sorry. Different conversation. On with the farming wisdom. Have you ever dreamed of running over 3,000 head of jewel producing mollusks? I’m talking about farming pearls. Or rather pearl oysters. Our tip today comes from the Center for Tropical and Subtropical Aquaculture’s document The Basic Methods of Pearl Farming: A Layman’s Manual. And it points out some conditions to look for when deciding where to park your pearl farm.
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Pearl oysters prefer clean, clear water far away from sources of contamination such as chemicals, oil, sewage or other pollution. Areas near large villages or towns will usually have some pollution, so farms should be located as far away as possible, or up-current from the source of pollution. Do not locate your farm near the mouth of a river or other sources of freshwater since sudden changes in salinity can be harmful. Areas with rough water where sand and silt are stirred up should also be avoided since pearl oysters have trouble feeding in cloudy water. A general rule is that a site with thriving corals will be a good site for pearl oysters.
In essence, pearl oysters are a lot like chickens. You have a place where you pen them up, you keep them healthy, & then you go rip what they’re producing from them. And if they don’t produce, you can eat them. (Mmmm, roast chicken with oyster stuffing) The differences being that chickens produce more often than once every 2-3 years, you can’t make omelets from pearls, and pearl oyster farms smell a lot better than chicken farms with much better scenery. So there you go. Your petite pearl producers prefer pure pollution-free places to provide plentiful pearl profits. Precisely! Happy farming!
Then do what I do.
KHAAAANNNNN!!!!
There. Isn’t that better? I thought so.
The Maize and Blue won two this weekend so we are headed to Denver April 10-12 for the Frozen Four!
For those of you who don’t follow college hockey, the Michigan Wolverines have the most national championships (9), the most Frozen Four appearances (23), the longest streak of appearances in the NCAA tournament (18), and they’ve been ranked #1 in the country most of this year.
I took my daughter to her first Michigan hockey game when she was 8, my son when he was 11, and this will be my wife’s first time watching them (but she did go to the Frozen Four last year). We have an excellent chance of winning, but it’s hockey so anything can happen. We play Notre Dame at 8PM Central time Thursday April 10th, my birthday. If we win, we play at 6PM Central Saturday against the winner of North Dakota & Boston College. The semi finals with be on ESPN2 & the final on ESPN.
I know. Michigan hockey fans in rural Missouri? Don’t question it. Just go with it. It rocks.
By special request, today’s farming tip focuses on milking your cow. From the National Mastitis Council’s list of milking tips, our tip today extols the benefits of teat massage.
- Good Massage Increases Production - When teats and the lower part of the udder are massaged, a signal is sent to the brain which secretes the milk letdown hormone, oxytocin, into the blood stream. The hormone is then carried to the udder where it acts on muscle cells to “squeeze” milk out of the milk-secreting tissue. Massage of all teats is better than massage of only one or two teats and physically squeezing each teat will reduce the amount of milk left in the udder at the end of milking. Large amounts of milk left in the udder increase frequency of clinical mastitis in infected quarters.
You can’t have good quarters with infected quarters. I think the less said here the better. Happy farming!
Amidst the normal morning activity, I heard a knock at my bedroom door. I open it to discover my son holding a pair of sweat pants in one hand (the kind with the zipper up the leg) and a stapler in the other hand. “Can I just staple this since the zipper is broke?” he asked. Of course it would have to be sewn so I told him to wait for mom to take care of it and sent him on his way.
As so often happens with the boy, I wondered about him. This time I wondered aloud to my wife if our son was becoming a redneck. My wife disagreed. “That’s just a guy thing.” she said and walked away. I thought about it & realized she was right. He could have stapled the zipper shut without anyone knowing it. Using the stapler wasn’t redneck. Duct tape would have been redneck. The stapler was brilliant. Hadn’t I made creative use of safety pins in the past? Of course. What a fine piece of creative thinking my boy had laid down.
So I drove of to work sitting up a little straighter, head held a little higher. With a gleam in my eye and a smile of satisfaction on my face. For my boy is becoming a man. Just as long as he doesn’t try to staple his sister.
I try not to daydream too much. For the most part I left that behind when I finally realized that I wasn’t going to be a professional athlete. But every so often I find myself drifting. Drifting back to the trip my wife & I took to Juneau, Alaska 5 years ago. We didn’t have a honeymoon to speak of when we were married, so I convinced my wife we needed to do something together before the kids got big enough to want to come along. She wasn’t hip on heading to the tropics, so I arranged for a week in Juneau.
There are sights that you see that you simply cannot forget. The entire week in Juneau was a never ending parade of unforgettable images, events, & experiences. We explored glaciers, climbed through ice caves, got up close to feeding whales, flew in sea planes, boated down the Inside Passage, and had our senses assailed by the most majestic, amazing, beautiful land I’d ever seen. I guess it can’t be called a ‘life-changing’ trip since my course hasn’t been altered by it to this point. But it certainly changed me. Part of me was left in Alaska. Whether it was taken from me or I left it willingly doesn’t matter. It’s there. And although I’m not a globe trotter, I’m a fairly well-traveled man. Never before had I ever felt the urge to stay in a place I was visiting. Even with my children and home at the end of my journey, it was with great reluctance that I boarded our plane. For as long as we could, my wife and I stared out the window until all that we had seen faded from sight.
Now that urge to stay continues on as an equally strong urge to return. Always present, it lurks and seizes my daydreams in an attempt to gain control of my heart. Someday it might. For now, it succeeds only in keeping bright and vibrant in my mind the images and memories of a land that is still a true wilderness. Then I long for a glacier breeze in my face and an ice-capped mountain in my sight. Alaska.
A fire at a meat packing plant? Who’s bringing the barbeque sauce? You better bring a lot. This place pushes out about 2 million pounds of steak & ground beef a week.
What’s that? The fire was burning anhydrous ammonia? Um…. nevermind.
Darn. Now I’m all hungry for a T-bone.
I shouldn’t be shocked anymore. I’ve seen so many things when driving that I should be immune to astonishment now. But I can’t help it. It still happens. I blame NASCAR.
No don’t get me wrong, I love NASCAR. Or I used to. My father used to race all over SW Mo before he settled down, got married, and got busy gettin’ busy. So we used to not only watch races on TV, but we’d go to the local dirt tracks to watch the races. And I’d listen to my dad tell stories of his racin’ days. So I love auto racing, but it should be confined to the racetracks & dragstrips that were built for it. Not on the road I take for my daily commute.
And yet there he was, doing his best Intimidator impersonation as he passed me on the shoulder this morning. And if I could have stopped time when I first saw him in my rearview mirror, I would have wagered my life savings on there being some form of NASCAR sticker attached to his car somewhere. Sure enough, as he zoomed past, I glimpesed an “Our friend Dale” sticker in the window. He completed his daring pass on the high side, thankfully without having a vehicle pull out from one of the numerous side roads to cause a disaster, and took the lead coming into the homestretch. The checkered flag waiting for him.
Of course it would have been a different story if I had given into my first impulse to swerve out & put him in the wall. But unlike him, I realized I was just driving to work. Not racing to the line.
I’m starting to think that my anapalactic episodes are caused by a bacterial infection that is now running wild! I had another one today when, in talking with a co-worker, I thought he said ‘they call him the Samus programmer’. Samus, of course being Samus Aran, the female hero of the Metroid games who is only revealed as a female at the end of the game.