Women's Day

Today is Women’s Day. I’m still figuring this whole thing out, but isn’t Women’s Day that magazine at the checkout at the grocery? It’s usually next to Family Circle Magazine, I think. If I’m the publisher of Women’s Day Magazine I’m not too happy about the Women’s Day holiday thing. I’d be thinking that the name “Women’s Day” was already taken and now, when somebody sees the magazine at Kroger, say, a month from now, they might think, “hey that’s an old magazine. Women’s Day was March 8^th".

I guess some women stayed home from work or wherever today because of this new holiday. What if, though, you were a woman, and you were really sick today, and you had to stay home, and now your employer thinks you stayed home ‘cause of Women’s Day when you really had no intention of staying home on Women's Day? It gets muddy.

Let’s start a “Family Circle Day”. Sit on the floor. With your family. In a circle. Hold hands. Yeah. I’m in!  

Holiday Update

The month of March brings us Pi Day on March 14^th which numerically is 314 like the mathematical pi formula. Clever! It’s too bad that this day occurs during Lent when many have given up pie or I would say go out and get a piece of pie on that day. I admire the creativeness of this holiday and would like to suggest a couple more for the upcoming weeks/months:

• March 4^th – Waltz Day. (3/4 time.) Listen to some Strauss!
• March 11th – Second shift day (3-11). Take a second shifter to lunch!
• April 9^th – Clean your microwave day (409 – do I really need to explain these?). A clean microwave is a safe microwave. Oh, and yeah, I lived in room 409 my freshman dorm in college. Looking back, our room was relatively clean once we realized there was no maid service.
• May 7^th – Ketchup variety day – Were there ever really 57 varieties? I, for one, have my doubts.  If there really were 57 varieties, why did they settle on this bland one? C’mon Heiny!
• June 1^st – “A Half Dozen of the Other” Day – Buy 6 of something.
• July 11^th – Visit a carryout day. Splurge. Get yourself a slurpee! Play the lotto.

So yeah, mark your calendars!

Uncle Thommy McAn

What’s with people buying shoes on-line? I don’t get that, ‘cause, what are the odds that the shoes are going to fit? Don’t you end up sending back half the shoes? Can you send back just one shoe? “The right  feels OK but can I get the left in a 7½?”

When I was a kid we had shoe stores everywhere, and kids would have to go to shoe stores with their Moms ‘cause Moms needed lots of shoes. Dads only got to have maybe 3 pairs and one of those was either golf or bowling shoes. And nobody ever saw Dads buy shoes. Never. Regardless, you’d have to go with Mom to these shoe stores with the long rows of chairs. Each chair had its own ashtray, these two foot high metal receptacles that sat on the floor between the chairs. They had these retractable metal covers that you could make open and close. For us bored to death kids, these were cool percussion instruments. Moms hated these things ‘cause they were noisy, they never got cleaned, and when you played with the lids, ash and soot would come floating out.

I bet if you asked 100 smokers how they started smoking, at least 10 would say it’s because they liked the ash trays at Thom McAn’s and Nobil’s.

Family Circus Peanuts

We had a nice discussion about circus peanuts the other day. Apparently they come in numerous flavors now. It reminded me of when I was about 10 and my friend and I would visit his Grandmother. The woman smoked. A lot. There was so much smoke in her house it’s a wonder that she stayed alive as long as she did. Heck, it’s a wonder my friend and I made it out of there alive.  We rode our bikes there sometimes in the summer. She’d let us in and then she’d sit at the kitchen table smoking Luckys and listening to her police radio. I never knew why she listened to it – I guess her son was some kind of deputy or something. With all that smoke she probably should have listened to the fire department radio. 

And she always had this candy dish filled with circus peanuts on her coffee table. We never ate any. Circus peanuts were supposedly covered with that powdered sugar looking stuff. These may have been covered by the powdered sugar but it could have been dust or ash. That’s the problem with circus peanuts. We left the candy for the other grandchildren who visited on other days. I’m not sure how many of those kids lived to adulthood…

Tom Sawyer

I was leaving a funeral home Friday after visiting a family when I heard this guy yell “Hey Tom”. It was this guy we knew from the neighborhood where we lived about 12 years ago. I never knew him real well. So, he came up to me and said, “You’re Tom, right? Tom Sawyer?” I assured him that I was not Tom Sawyer and that Tom Sawyer had been a fictional character in some Mark Twain writings a while back. So then he said, “But you used to go by Tom Sawyer, right?” At this point I was baffled. I do not have a period of my life when I had been hit on the head or had some type of accident or anything that would result in memory loss. I did have a “California Name” in college but I didn’t use it much and nobody remembers that. (Except me. My California name was Chad Stevens.) If the guy in the funeral home would have called me Chad Stevens that would have been cool. At least he didn’t call me Huckleberry Finn, friend of the fictional Tom Sawyer. That would have been weird. Maybe I shoulda called him Huckleberry Finn. But I didn’t want to get him mad. He’s a big guy.

If somebody else calls me Tom Sawyer I guess I’ll have to go back and check my old yearbooks and stuff and see if that was ever my nickname.

The Yodeler

I love live entertainment in restaurants. We’ve got this restaurant in town where a magician goes from table to table performing tricks for the guests. This typically goes well as long as the tricks aren’t about turning their food into something else, having their food disappear, or sawing someone in half (“Hey, give me back that steak knife!”). There was another restaurant in town that had an organist. People would start singing a song and he would start playing in the key they were in. Pretty, pretty good. Oh, and by the way, the guy was blind. Amazing! Then there was this Mexican restaurant on the west side which apparently for years had a yodeler who would come in and sing. I guess he just showed up and yodeled. I never caught his act but I sure would have liked to have heard him. Who doesn’t love a yodeler?

What would happen today if you yodeled in a restaurant? I’d try it but I’m pretty busy here with this blog. If one of you loyal readers could try it, and let us know how it went, that’d be great. Thanks.

Oh, and somebody please find out if yodeling counts as exercise in a calorie count.