Co-ed Life

My friend is sending his daughter off to college in the fall and he and I were reminiscing about dorm life. I don’t think I ever lived in a co-ed dorm. Maybe we were co-ed every other floor one year– I don’t remember. The crazy thing, looking back, is that I don’t know ANYBODY who met their spouse in a co-ed dorm. I bet you don’t either. We know of one guy who went off to college only to find out his roommate was a girl. There was a mix-up, to say the least. I think they got that straightened out the first day. But no, those two did not marry.

Not everybody’s gotta have a "co-ed to live by" I guess...

Baby it's Cold Inside

 

Before Christmas I kept hearing commercials on the radio for an HVAC contractor who was giving away a free furnace to a needy family. Great idea! Apparently, anybody can submit the name of a needy candidate family. Three finalists were selected and then a winner was selected from the finalists. That’s nice for the winner, but I must be missing something. And I can’t be the only one. How do you get three families’ hopes up and then disappoint two of the families? Is this like the Baseball Hall of Fame where, if you don’t get voted in, you’re on the ballot again next year? There was no mention of runner up prizes. Hopefully the second and third place families get a space heater or some wood or something...

Hopefully this was just a poorly worded commercial and they forgot to mention the consolation prizes.

The whole process left me cold.

Roundabout Way

 

Roundabouts are popping up all over, aren’t they? I think, in general, people are not fond of them. One person around here has had enough of them apparently. There are two new sets of frozen tire tracks right through the middle of a roundabout near us. Admittedly, the driver maybe did not see the roundabout and drove right through it, but I doubt if that’s going to happen twice. I think it’s somebody who’s saying “enough is enough, I’ve had it with roundabouts, I’m going through the middle. I’m not doing roundabouts in 2025”.

When somebody drives through a roundabout and comes out the other side, who has the right of way? Does he or she have the right of way or do those drivers already in the circle have the right of way? Sounds like a good question for the sheriff at Rotary Friday!

There's no Business like Snow Business

We’ve been getting some snow showers this week – enough to mess up the roads a bit. I was on the freeway this morning and got stuck behind a slow moving truck. He was in the right hand lane but there was some snow on the edge of the road so he was encroaching into the passing lane, thus preventing me from passing him. There was one of those “How’s My Driving” signs with a phone number on the back of his truck, so, since I couldn’t pass him, I took the time to call the number. Well it turns out that those numbers are not the truck driver’s phone number. So instead of asking the truck driver to move a little to the right, I ended up on phone with some guy at a phone bank in Calcutta. Who knew?

 

The Big Picture

 

I attended a Christmas party last month and my picture ended up in society page of the paper. I was with two friends in the picture and they looked great. Unfortunately I looked heavy. They say the camera adds, what, 20 pounds? Or, is that just on television? How do I get on television to find out? It was hard enough just to get in the paper…

Why would the camera add weight to me but not to my friends?  Should I stand farther back next time? If the camera adds weight, and if there’s nothing we can do about that, is it asking too much to ask someone to invent a camera that also adds height?  

I don’t want to blow this up to the point where the picture doesn’t fit in the frame I bought…

Big Sale

Do you ever think about jewelry stores who, especially in smaller towns, might have a large diamond for sale, and they know there are only a couple of families in town who could ever afford that diamond? Well, we were talking the other day and somehow the subject of big clothes came up. Somebody said that they saw a pair of 10XL sweat pants at a store nearby. Do they get any bigger than that, I wondered? There aren’t many men that size, and our community is only so big, so I was like wondering how many men there were of that size in our community. I mean, is this a case of the store targeting like maybe just one guy they were aware of in the community? And how long do you inventory something like that?

Management conversations may have gone something like, “Hey, that pair of sweat pants is taking up a lot of shelf space. I hope that one guy comes in pretty soon. I hope he likes gray.”

Plungers

Today is New Year’s Day, the day of the Polar Bear Plunge (PBP) in our local river. They call it a swim, but it’s really just people walking into the water and walking out.  And now, with the warmer temperatures, the swim is even less of an event. It needs a facelift. Here are some suggestions:

•           Move the event to February 2^nd. Can ground hogs swim?
•     Bring in a food truck with a water theme. Watermelon, Water Chestnuts, Watercress, Water Buffalo…
•     Bring in a celebrity swimmer. Michael Phelps? Joey Chestnut?
•     Water polo

We need to see some real swimming here. I’ve seen better swimming at baptisms!