Sure it LOOKS like an innocent shower, but is it?
On our recent swing through the brights lights of Europe, we landed, or I should say we trained, into St Petersburg, city of a thousand and one enchantments. And perils, of which this shower may or may not be one.
Maybe it’s me and a few hundred too many sci-fi movies, shows and books, but this thing looks suspiciously like a disintegrator chamber, doesn’t it? I let Mary go first.
Usually, not always, but quite often, the first response from a Russian to even the most innocuous of requests is ‘nyet’. I think it’s just a part of the Russian character. We observed the same situation over and over again while we were in Russia. One person makes a request of another person. Second person shakes head, no. First person then has a discussion with the second person which lasts anywhere from one to fifteen minutes. Sometimes the discussion veers into what sounds like argument territory. In many cases, the second person (the negator) eventually acquiesces and things proceed from there. Occasionally, the requestor is not able to budge Ms. Negativity of 1964 and alternatives have to be explored.
May I tempt you with a nice bottle of vodka for breakfast?
From Russia with Love.
Mary was enchanted with this bear. Seems in her youth, which was mere months ago, she used to go to a restaurant in her little Arizona town that had also had a stuffed bear holding a tray in the lobby. Though in her case, it was a Mexican restaurant so the tray probably was holding a bottle of tequila.
So sorry. Been running around Europe and environs like madpeople and are we allowed to call them madpeople or should we refer to them as the sanity challenged?
Anyway, we’ve been so busy that I have not been able to turn on the laptop, well except when I wanted to catch up on my webcomics, but that’s really the only thing I’ve had time for these past couple of weeks. It’s been fun but exhausting, and I’ll have lots to write about shortly.
In the meantime, this photo, from a typical street in a typical London neighborhood, if by typical, you mean one that costs approximately the same as a small business jet to live in. Actually, now that I think about it, that is pretty typical. I like the advertising here. It sounds warm and inviting. Come on in, the food is something I myself, the proprietor would eat with little or no fear of gastro-intenstinal distress. So much better than those three star Michelin star restaurants, where the owner only shows up once a week or so to berate the dishwashers and collect the takings.
Ahh, the day can’t come a moment too soon when I can get my membership card in the Crotchety Old Guys Club. The Club has all kinds of benefits for Crotchety Old Guys, known hereafter as COG’s, because who doesn’t like acronyms? Anyway, one benefit is that you can get ten percent off your bill in any restaurant. As a COG you can leave only a 5% tip instead of the customary 15%, because you’re a crotchety old guy, and people just expect that kind of behavior. You also get to go to the front of any line, because dammit, you’re too damn old to be spending all day standing in line, and people will let you move to the front so they don’t have to listen to your grousing and bitching.
I think a cane comes with the membership card, too. Not because all COG’s need canes, but because it gives you something to wave irritably at young folk and their ilk. Or trip up running children, which is one way I plan to spend the afternoons till the Early Bird specials start at Perkins. Got my sights set on a nice antique ironwood cane with a heavy metal knob end perfect for putting dents in doors when I hammer on them, instead of knocking.
Last but certainly not least is the fact that as a card carrying COG, you can say senseless or silly things, and people will just have to take it because there’s no way to win an argument with a COG. It’s in the Club’s bylaws, I’m pretty sure. Case in point, our observations on a recent visit to a local restaurant that is a favorite with the COG set, as they have easily masticated food. COG and his wife (or caregiver, but then that’s pretty much the same thing) sat down beside us and proceeded to peruse the menu. When the waitress came by for their drink orders, the COG proceeded to tell her that they wanted “two ice teas, each.” The server was disconcerted and asked if they each wanted two ice teas, to which he replied, that of course they didn’t each want two ice teas. They each wanted an ice tea, so they wanted two ice teas.
An understandable error since the server probably wasn’t fully conversant in COG speak, which according to the handy COG manual means ‘anything I damn well want it to mean, dammit!’ So you can see why I look forward to the day when I can throw all social conventions to the winds and just be as grouchy and irritable as I want to be.
Welcome to this week’s Hero of the Week, which would be the first Hero of the Week, since I’ve never had a hero of the week before. And it should probably be Heroine of the Week, since after all she is a lady. Which of course, just makes her that much more awesome. Or so Mary tells me.
Anyway, whether Hero or Heroine, this woman is humbling. She attributes every one of her hundred and five years on this Earth to bacon, which I think I can safely say is a claim you rarely hear anyone making. Instead it’s a eulogy about poor old Marv, who died of a massive coronary at the age of thirty two, who only had bacon, and then only two strips every fourth Sunday, but only during the winter months.
Does anyone else hear their little peep, peep screams? Hmmm, maybe it’s just me.
I’m a firm believer that yellow colored liquids are not fit for human consumption. Yellow liquid is kind of like a caution sign. Like red signs mean stop, don’t push that, no, really, if you push that you will suffer dismemberment or worse, I’m not kidding, oh, for god’s sake, now who’s going to clean this up?
So, in a similar vein, don’t drink yellow liquids. Nothing good can come of it, regardless of how much alcohol said liquids may contain. And that does include Mountain Dew, by the way, because that stuff is just nasty. Which, I think, pretty much proves my point.
Besides irresolution, I would also have accepted dithering, indecisiveness, vacillation or hesitancy.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with using the Xbox, which I’ve used to play games like once in the last two years, to access Netflix. I’ve been reading about all these folks dropping their cable or satellite service, and using Netflix to keep up with all the cool shows. Late to the game I might be, but I’m still interested in seeing what the hubbub is all about.
Anyway, long story short and yeah, it does seem like Netflix might be a viable alternative, especially if like me, you don’t care whatsoever about sports or current events. I mean the local news is pretty useless, except in the case when there’s an escaped psychopathic serial killer roaming the neighborhood, but really, how often does that happen? Not more than once every two or three years, at most.
As a bit of background for this post there is a movie called Gaslight. For you film buffs, this is a 1944 Ingrid Bergman film where Charles Boyer, who by the way, is French, which explains a lot, tries to convince his wife (Bergman) that she is insane by taking things from the house and saying she stole them. He plans on convincing her that she’s insane, getting her committed, and then looting her stuffs.
Mary has the weirdest hole in her recollections. She can remember a movie from the Thirties or Forties that she’s seen, sometimes line for line, but more recent movies often enter some sort of black hole of memory.
So yesterday, it stopped snowing for a couple of hours, and I decided to go for a hike. It was a glorious day, temperature in the fifties, bright and sunny, and just enough of a breeze to keep one’s cheeks the proper shade of rosy.
Towards the end of my amble through the piney forests I encountered a group of thirty or so fellow hikers proceeding in the opposite direction. This being Colorado, where apparently they put nice in the water, every single one of them greeted me as I went past, either a good morning (the majority), to a hearty hello, and, I believe, a singular, “how ya doin’?”
