kinked eyebrows and clean pennies

Tonite I shopped for some printer ink at the large discount computer store in town, the one that attracts Everyone from Every walk of life. We exchange non-glances - stone faces - the cultural common denominator to avoid any hard feelings. I cringe when I have to go into this store. It's like walking among the dead. I make a beeline for the items I need and I get out. But I take in all the oddities I see along the way.

Like the otherwise average looking guy who stood at the checkout severely flexing his knees together once a second. I considered offering to help him find the bathroom. Then a boy with a gadget sticking out of his head. Was it a medical device or a new phone style? I have a scar on my face that I don't try to cover up and I'm comfortable if people notice. I realize not everyone's as comfortable so I tried not to stare, but my curiosity was working overtime and I admit I stared. But his back was to me. And I never did figure it out.

Then the woman who checked me out. When I glanced at her face, I saw a thickly drawn dark eyebrow with a distinctive kink above each eye. And they occurred right above her real eyebrows - her real ones? She's got two brows for each eye? I almost started laughing right then but wait, she's talking to me, telling me she's trying to find the cleanest pennies to give me. "I always look for the least grungy ones. Some of them are very dirty." I could not make this up.

Stone face, stone face. I thank her for her consideration. I take my silly bag and receipt and clean pennies and get the usual strip search on my way out. I get in my car, close the door, and let out a huge laugh. I survived another trip!

what's the problem?

I'd been driving my car around for a while, noticing that it felt like it was running heavier, harder than normal. The sound was like the AC was on. Over the next week, I tried to correlate it with speed, weather, time of day, to no avail. Hmmm ... it is getting old but it's a Toyota, they run fine, and this one has been running fine all along. More days passed. No correlation developing. Am I headed for an expensive repair?

Then I glanced down at the AC button. It was on.

how old are we?

My friend and I had coffee at a cafe where the people working there can't be older than a few months shy of 17, we think. And yet we feel almost that age in our hearts, of course.

The young guy behind the counter referred to us multiple times as "ladies". "Good morning, ladies." "What can I get for you ladies?" And as we left, "Have a good day, ladies."

As we got outside, my friend, in her mid-50's turned to me (in my late 40's) and said, "Well, at least he didn't mam us."

tow truck driver woes

Sooo, how much intelligence does it take to be a tow truck driver? My friend - we'll call him Ron - relayed this story to me.

Ron's wife's car wouldn't start at her work. So they had it towed to their home. Ron drove his car to her work, let her drive his car home, and he rode with the tow truck driver.

They attempted to park the broken down car along the curb near Ron's home. The driver had towed the car by connecting the chains to the back wheels and lifting up from there. As they arrived at his home, the driver realized that if he just dropped the car off like this, it would be facing backwards along the curb, an illegal move. So he decided to turn around and park it on the other side of the street.

Heh heh ... reminds me of a time I saw what must have been at least a 10 year old girl standing in a puddle next to the shower trying to dry her feet. She picked up the left foot and dried it, put it down, picked up the right foot ... left ... right ... .

The tow truck driver tried three locations before figuring out that this was not going to work. While he was doing this, he exhibited his slick ways on the phone, "Martha, I'm in your neighborhood now and wondering if you're available this afternoon." My friend, an existentialist, just watched, the truck driver's smoothness and panache being foreign repertoire to him.

At this point I didn't even bother to ask if maybe this was the first time this tow truck driver (I keep typing tow trick driver) had ever towed a car backwards.

I tell ya, I'm really hard on fiction writers – their stuff has to be believable. But as I get older, man, I now wonder if it's even possible that the wildest fiction writers could actually really even possibly make stuff up that has never happened. My friend remarked that everything is real.

he's doing what?

I was out walking in the park at lunch today and glanced up at one point to see a guy maybe 30 feet away. I had a side view, his hand was to his face in such a way that he looked like he was picking his nose. Is he really? Out here? I stared a bit longer than usual. He's staying in this position rather a long time. Digging deep like one of my brothers was prone to do? He turned toward me. Oh, he's talking on a cell phone.

If everyone talking on a cell phone realized that to someone, they look like they're picking their nose, I wonder what would happen to the use of these things.

Finally, something happened in my life that meets my high aesthetic standards for this blog.

what does it mean

what does it mean when I hear an unusual sound and go down the list of my household electronic gadgets and electrical devices in my mind only to realize it's a bird...

I can cook ... really

As I was pouring soy milk into my can of clam chowder to thin it, I caught a whiff of vanilla. Oh yeah, it's vanilla soy milk. Too late now. Hmmm ... smells like vanilla clams. But you know, once you heat it, it only smells like clams.

Once I grabbed the wrong orange box of white powder to thicken gravy and ended up with something that smelled overwhelmingly like bleach (and it didn't thicken it, btw). To this day, I still can't remember which powder is the right one for gravy. And why did the wrong one make a bleach smell? Did it actually make bleach? It's corn starch that I should've used, right? And the one I did use was either baking powder or baking soda. And one of these is composed of the other plus something else. It was added to water and chicken drippings so if it made bleach, it did it all by itself. Doesn't that sound bad? Does anyone know what happened chemically? I'm curious.