Monday, August 25, 2008

How to kill a fly

Here is how I used to kill the flies that would buzz around the center of the room.

1. Stand at the perimeter of the room.
2. Hold a Zippo lighter in one hand. A can of butane fuel in the other.
3. Hold the nozzle an inch or so from the lighter.
4. Light the lighter and touch the nozzle of the butane canister for just a brief moment.
5. A very satisfying little fireball blows into the center of the room, killing the little flying monsters. Those that are not killed get their wings singed off and they can no longer fly and annoy you.

Warning:
Try this outside first so that you learn to make small fireballs, not big ones. This lessens your chance of catching things on fire.
Keep a fire extinguisher handy.
Do not do this when your parents are at home! They just do not understand ‘fun’.

Miss Adventure in L.A.

Yes, Molly is fine, the little shit!

So we are in L.A. and staying with our son and his roommate.
Saturday night, we leave their house to go see Donna Summer. All three dogs are getting along and while we expect them to be rambunctious, they will be okay. Okay Tommy(the old mutt) sleeps a lot and Enzo(the devil dog Jack Russell terrier) and Molly(the mostly good Beagle) chase each other.
(Nice concert, by the way)

We get back from the concert at about 11:30 PM and Tommy and Enzo greet us at the front door.
Molly is nowhere to be found!

And the little gate to the side yard has been shoved open! One of us forgot to lock the bottom latch and the Molly dog pushed through!

Of course we were frantic. Miles from home and the hound dog has gone wandering. We searched the neighborhood but could not find her. There are a number of busy streets around, so of course, we were worried.

Molly’s tag has our home phone number on it, but that does us no good when we are 400 miles away. We thought of calling our neighbor and having her go to our house to listen for messages. Then I remembered that we can access the messages remotely, but that I had no idea how.
So while some were driving around looking, I went online and found the manual for our answering machine. However, I did not know the access code. Roommate looked up the same info and was able to read the default code!

And the first message was from a guy asking if we were missing a Molly dog! And he lives on the next street over.
Roommate called him, apologizing for waking him up at 1:30 in the morning. Yes they had the dog and we could meet them tomorrow morning to pick up the little rascal.

So by 9am the next morning, little Miss Adventure was back in Wonder-Girl’s arms being punished with hugs.

Our son screwed a board to the little gate so Molly can’t escape again (she still pushes on it.)
We will add a cell phone number to her dog tag.
We will never trust a beagle.
I don’t think I will forget the code for the answering machine!

I Got Mine

I try to offer words of encouragement, advice to my friends; but knowing full well that my words are flawed.
I got mine.

And it wasn’t that hard.

So as I offer words of hope and I expect you will all understand that I always think that things will turn out okay for you.

They did for me.
I got mine.

And it wasn’t that hard and I didn’t look that long.
And I was probably very lucky!
(And maybe she was a little bit lucky.)

I got mine.

A good wife, a nice house, a job I like, a good son, some dogs that think I am almost a deity.

Okay, so I got lucky and got mine.

But I think that you can get yours too.