Disaster narrowly averted!

It wasn’t late, just after 8:00 p.m. and I was on the computer when the phone rang. “Arthur, I think I forgot to unplug a glue gun when I left the studio today!”

OK, what was I to do? The only close persons with a key and the ability to circumvent the security systems were out of the country. The two women who might help were one, not home, and the other, without a visible phone number. I had no car as our cars were commandeered by a daughter and a wife.

The instructor picked me up at home in about 10 minutes and off we went, on the wild goose chase. To do nothing risked a phone call from the fire department at midnight and a guilt filled sleep. To act only meant taking a ride to school and trying to see if she had unplugged the glue gun.

We determined it was not sitting on a hot pad or trivet, but placed on a piece of paper on a table. This was an accident waiting to happen.

We arrived in a few minutes with no smoke in sight and opened the doors, switched off the alarms and found that someone, either an assistant or the cleaner or the teacher herself had in fact unplugged the glue gun!

Disaster narrowly averted!

 

Todays Drama Queen...

I’m in the last two minutes of a documentary on TV, and my daughter, who had just left for work, comes storming back in yelling at me that her mother’s car is stuck in Park and she can’t get out of the driveway and needs the keys to my car immediately. She is nervously walking around trying to find the additional set of my keys, and proceeds to find mine. She tries to remove my car keys from the ring. I tell her that the car will release from park if she just steps on the brake when she does it, but she has no time for my nonsense.

I drag myself away from the documentary and go for my keys and offer to drive her to work, and of course pick her up at 10:30. She huffs and puffs for a bit and decides to believe me so we drag out the door after she chastises me for not wearing shoes and therefore taking more precious time to get shoes and get to the car.

On her way out she jumps into her mother’s car again and tries out my stupid idea and lo and behold, the car starts.

No thanks you given of course, but with a very red face she sheepishly backs out if the driveway.

Gio's Giant Feed

 On the way to DC, we have to pass by Gio’s Barbeque in Clearfield, PA. It was 1:00 p.m. when we arrived at the gas station and restaurant. Lunch was in high gear, a huge event. The most wonderful stuff one would ever like to see.

I was going to the bathroom so I asked my wife to order for me please. She would be angry with me if I ordered anything fattening, and since that’s pretty much all they have, I thought she could give it a try and find something ”healthy”.

When I returned I was handed a salad. It started with a plate of iceberg lettuce, followed by tomato slices, followed by thin sliced onions, followed by America’s favorite salad ingredient, a handful of FRIES!

This amazing surprise was covered by PULLED PORK! I topped it off with ranch dressing and I had a salad to die for (or because of).

My daughters roast chicken was pretty much the same although my wife somehow avoided the fries.

It’s a great place with a great menu.

 

The Puffy Coat

 

We were in Buffalo dropping my mother-in-law off at the airport last week, on her way home, and decided to go shopping at the big off-retail mall. This is always a treat for us, as we don’t really have such a thing locally, and it gives us all a thrill.

It was the week of 4^th of July so all the big sales were on. My oldest daughter was with us and wanted to go to Adidas.  Now as a guy without a workout mentality, Adidas is not usually my kind of place but given my choice of sitting on the bench outside the store or going in I opted for a trip through the store.

Most of the stuff, even well priced was slick and not for me. However, there  was a clearance rack, which will always draw me in, and they had a rack of winter down coats, puffy coats! I love those and they were great.

As I looked through the rack I realized there were a number of different styles and colours, including my favorites, navy blue and black. I tried on the blue but my daughter didn’t like it and the black one won out. It is puffy, shiny and says Adidas on it. It has a retail price of $150 (I even checked on line) or it did in the winter. The company is selling it on line for $90.

The blue one was marked $29.99 and the black was $19.99. However, if you bought two clearance items, the cheaper one was reduced by 50%, and as my daughter had found some other amazingly cheap thing my new puffy coat cost me $10!

Did I need a new winter coat? Of course not, I had tons of them. However, one of the local charities will get several now that I have this one. My $10 coat made me happy.

I am the hunter/gatherer. I am fulfilling my destiny.

 

Just looking on the Internet....

My thanks to Ingmar Bergman for the still...

 

I looked up an old girlfriend in Michigan on Google thinking I'd try and email her. We were "together" so many years ago, and we were good friends afterwards. My wife and I visited with her and her first husband several times.

She would now be about 56 or 57, the same age as my wife.  When she met her new (second) husband and decided to get married, she called me to talk about it, but that was 1989, just as we were leaving Michigan for Boston. We talked for a while but that was the last time we communicated. I have other stories about her elsewhere on this blog.

 I looked for her the other day and found out she is deceased! She is listed as “the late” in her father's obituary from earlier this year. I could find out no more information, but in reading her father’s obit it was clear I had found the correct woman.

 This would have been sad although not completely unexpected if she were my age, but mid-50's!

 I could find no other info about her. I had her new name and knew it was her for sure.

It left me very sad.

 

Symphony Fantastique

My daughter just recently graduated with a Bachelors of Music degree, and has been living home for the last few weeks. We had all gone down to the Chautauqua Institution for dinner with their mother and grandmother, and were driving home, a three hour trip. My oldest, the music person, had on her iPod and was listening to Rap. My youngest one seemed to be texting friends etc. I was listening to the radio.

Public radio was on from Buffalo9 and they were broadcasting the Pittsburgh Symphony concert. They were about to play Berlioz’s  Symphony Fantastique: (Fantastic Symphony: An Episode in the Life of an Artist, in Five Parts) Op. 14 is a program symphony written by the French composer Hector Berlioz in 1830. It is an important piece of the early Romantic period.

The first performance was at the Paris Conservatorie in December 1830. The work was repeatedly revived between 1831 and 1845 and subsequently became a favourite in Paris. The author imagines that a young vibrant musician, afflicted by the sickness of spirit which a famous writer  has called the vagueness  of passions  and sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her. The piece relates to an exploration of a drug overdose.

My daughter says  that she knows about this piece as they studied it in music history.

Twice during the ensuing ride, my daughter asked me to turn up the radio and she removed her iPod.

This has never happened before!

I thought with a wry smile upon my face, “$80,000 has gotten me this moment!”