IMPORTANT NOTICE

If it says it’s important, shred it!

If I had a match, I would shred it and burn it.

Bossy Machines

We’ve had machines that talk to us for years now. I should be used to them by now, but I’m not. I find them highly annoying. The worst offenders are my GPS and the grocery self check-out scanner beepy thingy. (Okay, fine. What do you call them?) More on that one later. Right now I want to complain about my GPS.

I hate the way the GPS whines whenever I don’t take her preferred route. I can almost hear her exasperated sigh before she utters ‘recalculating’.

What she’s really saying, ‘You stupid human, you missed your turn! Again!’

What I say in response, ‘Look, you dumb @*!#$! I’ve driven this route a hundred times. I know where I’m going!’

One day I was driving around the boondocks and succeeded in actually getting myself lost. No worries, I thought. I have a GPS! 

Hahaha! Yeah, right!

I caught a glimpse of the smirk that flitted across her perfectly matte complexion right before she uttered a sarcastic, ‘You turn where possible.’

I wonder how long she lay on the side of that country road before someone picked her up….

Although I talked to my GPS, she wasn’t capable of actually hearing me. I often thought it would be handy to have a hands-free version that you could just state the destination and not have to try to drive and type. I thought this until I recently witnessed my friend’s voice-activated, user-friendly model in action. He precisely and perfectly enunciated an address in Indiana. After five minutes of thinking, his high-tech wonder returned ten addresses in Kansas. I understand completely why she was confused. North central Indiana looks a lot like Kansas these days. We even have giant windmill farms now.

I believe one could accept the utterances of these devices if they were just designed to at least sound like they want to be helpful to us.

Instead of a harsh ‘Recaulculating!’ perhaps something more like…

‘Honey, you missed your turn back there. I’ll just make another suggestion here in a minute. You don’t have to turn though if you don’t want to. You are, after all, a highly evolved being perfectly capable of making intelligent decisions.’

Is this too much to ask?

My phone has voice recognition. It’s just as messed up as my friend’s GPS. The first time I tried to use it to call someone, it played a song that I like. I got sidetracked, listened to the entire album and forgot to make the phone call. Sneaky phone.

I don’t completely trust machines that talk. I think that my next GPS is going to be a fairly basic model….

No talking necessary. And if I get lost in the wilderness it will come in far handier than a machine that would most likely tell me, ‘You really *!*#$% up! Good luck!’

Not that Complicated.

I love how even the simplest things seem to require complicated instructions. Greenies Pill Pockets, for example. Nothing could be easier, in my opinion. You have this….

And this…

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Yet, the package instructions would have one thinking otherwise….

I love how you are instructed to use the same hand holding the pill pocket to squeeze the top half closed.

I neglected to do this. I used the opposite hand and smooshed it until the pill was completely encased in the pocket. My dog didn’t have a problem with this. Apparently, she didn’t read the instructions either.

Boxelder Bugs

My house is completely infested with Boxelder bugs. When they first appeared about a month ago, we would see one or  two. They would appear seemingly out of nowhere and sit next to me while I ate breakfast. Now there are hundreds of the little buggers. Everything I’ve read says that they ‘overwinter’ in the warm spaces of homes and sometimes make their way inside because it’s obviously warm inside your house and they believe this to be an indication that it is spring. The poor little critters are confused.

All means of eliminating them are apparently off limits because; one, they won’t really kill the ones hiding in the walls and two, dead boxelder bug carcasses will attract more invasive and destructive pests like carpet beetles. Joy.

So the number one expert-recommended line of defense against the annoying, yet innocuous, boxelder bugs inside your home  is……

sweep them up.

Sweep? That’s what you do with a broom and dustpan and/or a vacuum cleaner?

‘Ain’t nobody got time for that!’

I’ll just walk around them or flick them off the counter when they try to share my breakfast. My dog sits on them and steps on them. They’re very fragile and they die when this happens.

My daughter and I were having breakfast and one had gotten a little wet and was stranded on its back. She felt sorry for it and turned it over. It began to walk along the edge of the counter, its tiny legs carefully navigating the edge of the precipice. Suddenly, it stopped, one leg poised to take the next treacherous step, and fell to the floor, dead.

I guess I will have to wait for spring for the Boxelder family to leave.

This seems like a hopeless choice, however, because apparently spring has been cancelled in north central Indiana. I’m quite sure this will be a year where we go from 32 degrees to 90 degrees and 100% humidity overnight.  Hopefully, when that happens, the Boxelder Bugs will pack their bags and evacuate en masse and I will have a pest-free house. Hahahaha!

Yeah. Right.

My house is over a hundred years old. I’m pretty sure the walls are teeming with all manner of lovely pests ready to take the place of the Boxelder.

I can hardly wait.

Jenny’s ‘Babies’

My dog, Jenny, is getting ready to whelp. These are her surrogate ‘babies’ she carries around. Don’t let the appearance of her ‘babies’ alarm you. She really is a good mommy.

Glass

I love glass and almost anything made of glass. I have a huge collection of old glass insulators. I wish I had one in every color, especially a red one. But the most exotic one I own is a deep purple. The one in the photo is a garden-variety aqua color. Like most things old and rare, glass insulators and glass items are highly collectible. I was obsessed with them for a while. I used to walk rail lines in search of them. I went to every antique and thrift store in central Indiana in search of them. There’s just something comforting about the nature and feel of a solid piece of glass in a world filled with plastic. 

I Wrote a Book. Now What?

I have to read it! Seriously! I have to read it because I wrote it over six years ago, then set it aside and although I remember the story very well, I don’t remember some of the finer details, like the names of minor characters, and who the real antagonist was, and how it all ended. Just kidding on that last part. I actually skipped to the end and read it to refresh my memory. Okay, not really. 

I’m like this with movies too. I can see a movie and literally a month later not be able to remember the name of the movie. Someone will say to me, ‘What did you think of Argo?’ My reply is almost always, ‘Now, which movie was that?’ Well, of course I remember Argo! It just won some kind of an award. That was just an example.:)

I’d like to write a sequel to my book. That is if I can get anyone besides my dog to read it. She has trouble with the names of characters too. She also has trouble pushing the little page turn button on the side of her Kindle, but we’re working on it.

Okay, goodnight all. I’m going to go read some more. I’ll let you know how it turns out!