More About My Wonderful Wife...

In the last posting I told everyone a little about my wife Sarah…but there is so much more to tell.

Sarah has so many, many facets that it is like you’re a looking at some type of cut jewel.

First, she is extremely “down to earth” and one would be hard-pressed to find anyone who dislikes her. She is very bright, and has the type of mind that if we watch a documentary…she has to go online to find out more about whatever it was we were watching. If it is fiction…she has to explore what parts were true and what actually came from the writer’s mind.

I mentioned in the last posting about her recovery from the procedure she had done to correct Barrett’s Esophagus. She explored every aspect of the condition, the surgical procedure, the side effects of the surgery, the recovery period, and what things would change for life.

I believe that she may have taken over from Dick Clark as “the world’s oldest teenager”. I mentioned before that she is an electronics tech, with a second degree in computer technology. Well, you can add to this that she has been a “gamer”, and this aspect of her personality has given her a lot of young friends.

Now at the opposite extreme is this technologically challenged individual that she married. I am not good at any games that require fine motor skills and hand to eye coordination. I like the “old school” games like Civilization, and Pirates, and Age of Empires. These are strategy games but can be played solo. My technology is still “Hammer & Stone” and I still “drag my knuckles”.

Sarah has tried to teach me World of Warcraft…but she has played for a long time and I am sure that I must frustrate the hell out of her. She is probably going to have better luck at Beatles Rockband…cause I really like the songs!

One of the things that constantly amazes me is that her father and my father had the same sayings and humor…the first time I started one of these and she chimed in and finished it absolutely blew me away.




I’ll tell you more later…when I see you next time!

A new wife...a new life

I have told you a little about Sarah, my new wife, but there is so much more to tell.

Sarah is a certified SMARTASS…she is so quick that she has me “in stitches” a lot of the time. Most of the really good SMARTASS remarks are of a private nature, and I have promised her that they will not be shared in postings. Just let me say this…there have been times when one of her quick-witted remarks made me laugh so hard that I thought that I would “piss myself”.

The first example that I can post of the remarks that I remember is: when she was brought back to her room from surgery, and Dr. Guiterrez (the surgeon) asked how she felt and she immediately responded with “my fingers”. Now you have to understand that by this time Sarah had seen Dave Guiterrez enough times to know that the comment was one SMARTASS to ANOTHER. He has had some pretty good quips during our earlier visits.

I will say that she never misses an opportunity to “zing” me, but it is in the spirit of our relationship.

I always believed that if you wanted unconditional love…you went to your mother, you needed to find a child under the age of nine, or a dog of your own. My children have proved this wrong because no matter where I was in life, “Prince or Pauper”, they have loved me. But, I never had a wife that loved me unconditionally…until now. Do you know how lucky that makes me!

As I have mentioned in earlier postings…Thief River Falls has a population of about 8,500 and I really had no trouble getting used to it. It is colder here than it is in the Cities, and it is much more “laid back”. People leave their cars running in parking lots, and their homes unlocked, no one is fearful of any part of town…and yet there is some diversity provided by Northland, (the community college in town).

My politics and the fact that I express myself so openly haven’t endeared me to some people because I am so VERY Blue in this sea of Red population.

The local people here also eat “Minnesota White”…the biggest risk most will take is an occasional trip to one of the Cantonese Restaurants or a semi-annual stop at Taco John's. My ethnic cooking certainly doesn’t get the respect around here that I am used to…Sarah being the exception of course, she does gumbo better than anyone, and loves my cooking.


That’s all for now…see you next time!

Do You Think That It's a Requirement...

Do you think that it’s a requirement to be “batshit crazy” run for office as a Republican.

It certainly seems so…take these examples:

Republican Senate Candidate Jane Norton would eliminate coverage for cancer screenings…she compares them to “shoe fetishes” and caffeine addictions”. This would include cervical and prostate screenings.

Then we have our own “dear bitch” from the Sixth District, Michelle Bachmann saying that: “Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.”

And then there’s Sarah Palin who said: “ The America I know and love is not one in which my parents and my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide based on a subjective judgment if their ‘level of productivity in society’ whether they are worthy of healthcare. Such a system is down right evil.”

And this Palin gem: “I think on a National level your Department of Law in the White House would look at some of the things that we’ve been charged with and automatically throw them out.” (Here she refers to a department that does not exist to explain why as president she wouldn’t be subjected to the same ethics investigations that compelled her to resign as Governor of Alaska.) And she was on the ticket to be a “heartbeat away from being president”.

Did you know that there is a Sarah Palin inflatable doll…I won’t even go there!

One of the funniest things that I heard recently is that Tarry Clark should sell a “Chatty Cathy-Bachmann Doll” using actual Bachmann sound bytes…this would be a sensational success. Pull the string and out comes one “batshit crazy” statement after another. I want one!



That’s probably all you can handle for now…see you next time!

Holiday Celebrations

I don’t have any idea of what and how many holidays normal people celebrate.

In my household we celebrate a lot.

Of course, we celebrate New Year’s Day, Martin Luther King Day, President’s Day, Lincoln’s Birthday, Washington’s Birthday, and we celebrate Mardi Gras and Carnaval.

We also celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day and Saint Urho’s Day (he drove the grasshoppers out of Finland), Passover, Easter, Cesar Chavez Day, May Day, Cinco de Mayo, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day.

We celebrate Ramadan, Ros Hashanaha, Yom Kippur, Chanukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s Eve.

Next year we may celebrate Elsie farting…but that happens so often we wouldn’t be able to tell where one celebration ended and the next began.

The previous posting is the absolute truth…give or take a lie or two!

That’s all for now…see you next time!

It Could Have Ended Badly...

I have told you a little about our Aussiepoo, Elsie and the fascination she has with collecting thing and taking them to the “dogyard”. If you remember she decorated for Christmas with a Santa’s hat, bits of wrapping paper, ornaments, and ribbons. She has also, at various times, taken Sarah’s slippers, my pajama bottoms, my shoes, and about four dozen pairs of socks to the “dogyard.”

But, this time she outdid herself!

As you know my wife, Sarah recently had surgery for Barrett’s Esophagus. Well, the doctor prescribed hydroco/apap (generic vicodin) for the pain she was having. They were 5-325 mg tablets and there were 50 of them. They came in a childproof plastic bottle…but it wasn’t “puppyproof”. Elsie simply chewed through the plastic. We heard her chewing on something and looked down, and it was the medicine bottle.

My first thought was she really did it…she committed suicide.

So the first thing I did was look in the “dogyard” and low and behold there was a large stack of vicodin on the piece of carpet that she has to discourage her digging. Now getting in the “dogyard” wouldn’t be too much of a problem for young, agile souls…but there is no gate and the fence is six-foot high chicken wire. We had to call our young friend Matt over and he collected all the vicodin. I counted them and there were 46…Sarah knew that she had taken either three or four.

We watched Elsie for any reaction…but she obviously didn’t swallow any of them, because the next day we went to WALMART and locked her in the entry way, when we got home, we found her happily making mud pies all over the entry way and looked in the “dogyard”, and discovered the new four foot hole that she had dug while we were gone…there must be some burrowing creature way back in here genes…because no real dog could dig that fast.

So what could have ended in a family tragedy had a happy ending…at least for now!



That’s all for now…see you next time!