Smoking!!

cough! cough!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, How bad can it be if Einstein did it and Sherlock Holmes did it? Intelligent and logical, right?

I did it for forty years.  I know about smoking.  It was wonderful.  I really enjoyed chemistry in high school.  Most of the chemicals I dealt with in high school were in the Lucky Strikes I was smoking.

How did it all get started?  It was easy. It all started during my sophomore year of high school.  The "In crowd" would go to a hangout that was just off school property.  I wanted to be part of the "In crowd".
We will call this place "Scottie's" to protect the guilty. This is where I went for lunch.  I had a choice of eating in the school cafeteria, which served awful stuff like  Shepard's Pie,  Lasagna, Beef Stew, Chicken Stew, Baked Tuna Casserole for 15 cents (milk included) or go to Scottie's and have a tasty bag of Wise potato chips and an absolutely delicious bottle  of Pepsi.  A no brainer. I went to Scottie's with the rest of my friends. (Yum..yum!!)

Scottie's was not a big place.  It had 3 or 4 booths, a bench, and about 6 stools.  The place was built to hold about 20 or 25 people max. At lunch time it had about 50.  There were two shifts of about 50 people.  If a fire marshall had walked into the place he would have had a stroke.  Everybody was smoking and putting out their cigarettes on the floor.   It looked like a mosh pit.  The owner had an orange tree in the window.  It gave nicotine flavored oranges.  In this environment I started to smoke, actively and passively.

Cough! cough!

My friend Andy would steal cigarettes from his grandfather, his father, his mother, anyone that had cigarettes.  I would  "bum" cigarettes from him and others after they got me hooked.  One day Andy growled at me, " Why don't you buy your own cigarettes?" Ironic?
He was yet to buy his own first pack.  I pointed out this discrepancy in his logic.  This actually gave him a chuckle.  We decided to split cost so we both could smoke.

When you start out smoking tobacco you tend to experiment a little.  You start to be pretentious. I started smoking a pipe, a nice curved briar pipe.  I purchased some nice smelly pipe tobacco.  The old guys would smoke things like Mechanic's Delight, Half and Half, or Prince Albert, of "Do you have Prince Albert in a can? well let him out" fame.
The younger pipe enthusiasts like myself smoked Borkum Riff, Mixture 79 (or was it formula 44) or other exotic mixtures.
I was very pretentious about the whole thing. I would act like pseudo-intellectuals.
People would ask me a question and I would puff on my briar thoughtfully, not immediately answering their question. I would slowly start to talk, then suddenly stop, take the pipe out of our mouth, look at it, then I would either relight it or clean the pipe.
Then I would say, "Now what was your question?"  But the questioner would be long gone.

I was quite arrogant and boorish.  I would sit on some steps near the school, puffing my briar with a book in my hand.  Maybe it would be War and Peace.  People would walk by and I would say something foolish like, "It's about Russia."  Most of the time people would just mumble some obscenity.

I even tried cigars. A few big stogies, a few rum crooks, a few White Owls. This grew old rather quickly and I went back to cigarettes.

I enjoyed cigarettes for many years.  I loved coffee and a cigarette.  I loved cigarettes when I was drinking beer.  Delicious combinations.  These combos were like...bread and butter, cheese and crackers.  These things were meant for each other. Cigarettes were pervasive in my life and it seemed like it was pervasive in everyone else's life.  At some point it started to control my life.  I realized there was a problem.

My life started to revolve around cigarettes.  Everything else was secondary.  I had to do a cigarette count before I went to bed at night. It was just not an option to wake up and have no cigarettes in my smokey filled life.  Their had to be a plan.  I could not be without access to tobacco.  The thought of running out of cigarettes made me edgy and nervous, almost paranoid. The thought of it would make me perspire profusely.

Then something bad happened.  At least I thought it was bad but it turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me.  I injured myself at work and it would require surgery.  It was a hernia. I would be in and out the same day.
All went well,  I would stay at my parents house for a couple of days and recuperate.  I could still walk. The pain killers had not worn off and I waddled to my sister's house which was very close.  I was having a good old time.  I drank some coffee, ate some fried food, had some more coffee.  I felt like I was ready for a cigarette.  I lit one up.

Five minutes later my sister and brother in law were dragging me up the street to my parents' house in a semiconscious stupor.  I was put in bed and I slept for about 12 straight hours.  That last cigarette got my attention.  I haven't smoked since. I never felt the urge to smoke again.  Strange.

I do tell the people who wish to stop smoking that it isn't one day at a time, it's one urge at a time.
I wish I had never started smoking.  I am glad I stopped.  It was starting to get really tough to find a place to smoke.  I have seen smokers standing out in a field out in the middle of nowhere during a blizzard, not wearing much.  I could picture the headline in my head, "10 SMOKERS LOST DURING BLIZZARD, SEARCHERS START RECOVERY OPERATION."
Well, I guess they died happy.  Clueless but happy.

A reformed smoker is like an insurance salesman, a Mormon missionary, and 3 Jehovah Witnesses, all in one package.  We are the worst. We lecture. We are right.
Do you know what your house smells like?  Do you know what you smell like? Do you know what your lungs look like?  How do you feel about toting around a canister of oxygen? Do you know how much money you would have now if you invested the money you spent on cigarettes into Apple stock in 1990?

The little French Lady is a reformed smoker too.  In Canada they kept cutting down on places she could smoke.  She wouldn't smoke in her new car and she wouldn't smoke in her new condo.  She really couldn't smoke at work.  One day she was standing out in a field near Laval with three other shivering smokers and said to herself, "What to hell am I doing?"  She hasn't smoked since.
Until we quit our attitude was: What is wrong with these non-smokers?  What a rude group. So what if I burned a whole in your rug? Get over it.  We call that collateral damage. Why is your baby coughing? Oh, well.... get him to hell out of the room.  Why can't I smoke in your car?  It has an ashtray, doesn't it? WHAT IS THEIR PROBLEM?

Now that we are reformed smokers, we look at smokers with disdain and contempt. You smell bad. Your car smells bad.  Your breath is like an ashtray.
I will be a better person than you.  I will allow your canister of oxygen in my car.

The New reality? The Portly Pia and other Ramblings.

Ok! I just watched a rerun of American Idol.
Yes, I finally get it.  Pia Tuscano was voted off by 13 year old female cellphone users.  We all know how astute the critical judgement of 13 year old hormonally imbalanced females can be. That is why there are 2 girls and 5 guys left.  I suspect that Haley and Lauren will be next.  I can forgive these teenage girls for being 13 year old teenage girls.  AI is, after all is said and done, a popularity contest.

I know Pia will have a very successful career. Remember Jennifer Hudson?

My problem is with a critic.  I am referring to NY Daily News critic Jim Farber, who referred to Pia as "The burly singer". What?  I had to recheck the meaning of the word "burly".  I thought I knew what it meant.

Burly: (of a person) large and strong, heavily built. Large and thick of build. Stout, robust.

Yes,  I do know what it means.

I don't know which event is more shocking.  Pia getting voted off was flabbergasting but I was really flummoxed when Farber referred to Pia as "burly".
Does he have a television?  I did not see a portly Pia, the chubby chanteuse.  I saw a gorgeous lady.  I believe about 98% of American women would be ecstatic if they looked as good as she did.
So I will assume this critic (Farber) has a working television so he saw what I saw.
I am supposed to trust his judgement as a critic?  Really?
This person writes for a living.  He is a wordsmith.  He should choose his words carefully.
The balding, myopic, toothless, bulbed nosed music writer for the New York Daily News should be dragged through Howard Beach, NY by a herd of goats with diarrhea.
What? He has teeth?........whatever!!!
I see what I see and he sees what he sees. Subjective!!!!

Which brings me to my favorite judge on America's Got Talent, Howie Mandell. He was so clueless. He thought this Indian impressionist (Ronith) was hysterical.  Piers thought it was "twaddle".  Howie didn't think that we "got it".  We got it.  Ronith had no talent.
I guess Howie has some Indian blood in him.  He is, after all, an"untouchable".
Howie and Sharon voted for Ronith to go through a couple of times.  Well, what can you expect much from someone whose basic job is to be an translator for Ozzie?  Is Ozzie English? Is that what he is speaking or is it Ozziespeak?

Since I am here, I have a question that has been keeping me awake for many nights.
I realize that "people of color" keep changing their name.  When I grew up they were called "Negroes" (or something worse), now they call themselves "Afro-American".
This is all good. I have no problem with that.  That is not my problem.
My problem is what do they call black people in Canada?  Afro-Canadians?  I don't think so.  My wife spent most of her life in Canada and the term Afro-Canadian never came up.
She is French Canadian and probably lived closer to the North Pole than to Montreal for a few years, so it didn't come up in conversation that much, I suppose.  I suspect they said things like, "Cold, eh!!" and "Sacrebleu".  Another thing about Quebec is every town is
Saint something or other.  There may be a town with that name: "Saint something or other".  They ran out of Saints.
She lived in Saint-Something or other #19 for 2 years.

The little french lady and I watch Househunters International on HGTV.  We thought it would be interesting to live in a different country.  Then she started thinking about it.
"I am getting close to my retirement. We will have to find a country that has a better health care system than the US." she stated.
That cuts it down to about 30 countries in the western hemisphere. Cuba, Belize, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic to name a few. Avoid Haiti.
OK...I'm done.  I will sleep tonight.

"AWKWARD"

I pledge allegiance to my belly...?

Awkward seems to be my favorite word lately.  I misappropriated it from the little French lady.  You would think she would use the word gauche. She seems to be using awkward on a regular basis.  It seems to go well with her other favorite word, "obtuse".
For those of you who tuned in late I will define the difference between awkward and obtuse.  At least I will give you my definition.

Isn't math exciting and AWKWARD!?

Awkward is when someone crosses the street (jaywalking) while texting and I run them over with my Mazda, then I back over them trying to check out what I ran over.........."AWKWARD" .

Obtuse is when the family of the victim blames you for what happened.


Perhaps a better example of obtuse would be George W. Bush's presidency. 
An example of awkward would be George W. Bush's presidency.
Hmmm!.....This doesn't seem to be working  out as I expected.


Ok, I will try again.  Do you watch "The Office"?   Michael Scott is obtuse.  
This video on youtube will help define awkward.
We've all had those awkward moments.   Did you ever walk out of the bathroom with a toilet paper tail?  You go to an event and you're sitting in a chair and your legs are crossed and you realize your socks don't match, causing you to jump up quickly to hide it and you knock over a table, spilling your exotic red drink on the carpet. After that things really start getting awkward.
Did you ever go to somebody's house for coffee, take the milk out of their fridge, pour it into your coffee and ten minutes later find out you just used the breast milk meant for the baby sleeping upstairs?........A..W..K..W..A..R...D....!!!!!
Did you ever try to give a pregnant woman a hug but her belly was so large you shook hands with her instead?...AWKWARD!!!
Worse yet....You ask a lady how many months along are they are in their pregnancy and they say, "I'm not pregnant!!!!"....and they storm off in a big hissy fit.....Sorry!!!!....AWKWARD!!! 


Things can get a little strange.  I went to high five with someone and he didn't notice me so I hugged him instead.  I may have attempted to kiss him also, but I am trying to block that out of my mind. I am no longer invited to the Sunday football fest....AWKWARD!!!


Well at least I didn't go to the State of the Union speech and holler out, "you lie!!!" to the president. AWKWARD!!!!!  That one also qualifies in the obtuse category as well.


There are numerous awkward occasions in my life:

• You think someone is talking to you.  They start swearing at you.  You finger them.  They were talking to someone behind you.  AWKWARD!!!!...DANGEROUS!!!!
• In my youth I had a pair of ice skates.  We had an outdoor rink at our school.  I wore fairly thick glasses, and the ice rink had two puny spotlights.  We decided that we were going to do the "whip" a few times.  I took off my glasses and put them "somewhere". After we were done skating we decided to go home.  It was so cold my feet were frost bitten.  I could not find my glasses.  I walked home, a distance of two miles. When I got home and explained to my parents that I had lost my glasses, my father drove me back to the rink to look for them.  It was 10 o'clock at night.  I was hopeless looking for them in the dark.  When I got home and took off my boots,  I found my glasses.....inside my boot.  The frames were crushed but the lenses were ok.  My feet were so frostbitten that I could not feel anything.  I could have walked through crushed glass and I would not have felt a thing......AWKWARD!!!!...and very short sighted on my part.
• Sometimes you get struck down by strange psychological conditions.  Sometimes I used to get a "shy kidney or bladder".  I would walk into a restroom, usually in a bar to use the urinal.  Five seconds after I walked in, someone else would walk in.  I would be standing at the urinal for a couple of minutes and the guy behind me would say, " Are you done yet?, I really have to go."   "Done yet??...I haven't even started!!!"  A  lot of  mumbling and swearing would commence. A gay guy asked me if I needed any help.  I told him I could handle this myself.  AWKWARD!!!! 
• Sometimes a really good idea goes bad.  I am always trying to improve life on the planet.  I watched a program very recently on recycling human waste.  I had tinkered with this idea I  in the past.  One of my neighbor's dog took a large crap practically on our doorstep.  I purchased a large mouse trap, put it in a low gauge plastic bag that would rip easily, filled it with  his dog poop, put a string on the spring, wrapped it, put it on his doorstep and waited. It was spring loaded and ready to go. I was sure to do this late at night with great stealth.  When he opened his gift, it was regifted and recycled.  This is truly the definition of recycling. The neighbor did much cursing.  He did not seem to appreciate my gesture to improve the planet through recycling.  AWKWARD!
•   I had a very similar idea with human waste.   I was going to save my own human waste and sell it around the neighborhood.  I asked my wife to do the same.  She is very resistant to this proposal.  In fact, she insists that I get some type of psychological counseling.  She didn't say it exactly like that.  One of her suggestions was for me to call my hometown and see if their village idiot is missing.  What do you suppose she meant by that?
• If you really want to get revenge on someone all you have to do is send them a letter with the heading:  Herpes Testing Lab, U.S. Communist Party membership drive, Subscription renewal for Gay Hustler Magazine.....well, you get the idea. AWKWARD!

Isn't life just a series of awkward events interlaced with moments of lucidity?  There is no doubt in my mind.

No awkward events in you life?  "You lie!!!!"

Hurry up, Brain...My body is waiting.

It was a dark and stormy night.  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

There!!!!

My English teacher said you should try to grab your readers right from the start.  It worked for Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Dickens.  It will work for me.  I actually tried to fit Hemingway into this but saying, "Did the earth move for thee?" did not seem to fit into the introduction.  My English teacher would be so proud.

So much for introductions.  Let's move on. 

This is for all of you who tuned in late.

My name is Jonathan Hemlock.  But not really... this is a fake name.

I try to write blogs that have a beginning, middle and end.  My English teacher also mentioned that.  I want my blog to be original and quirky.  A wry little story about life as you get older.

"Getting older beats the alternative."

The thing about getting older is that your body knows but your mind is usually eight to ten years behind.  That is why I have pain medication.  I try to do things I did in 1973.  I can still do a one and a half back flip off a diving board.  I am sure of it.  

I can barely walk down the street without falling off the curb but I believe I can run a hundred yard dash in under a minute. I say fifteen seconds.  I am sure of it.

I probably could do ten or twelve pull-ups if I didn't have a torn rotator cuff.  I am sure of it.

I  thought about training for a half marathon.  I probably could win my age category if my hips, back and shoulder did not hurt so much.  I am sure of it.

This is my current mindset.  There is a lot of things going on in your body that you are not ready to accept.  Just the other morning my wife said to me, "Your loud snoring kept me awake half the night."  My response was, "Really? I kept you awake? How long have I been snoring?"   Her quick reply was, "Since 1993!!!!"  That's odd! I never heard a thing.

The body is like a finely tuned automobile. My mind tells me that I have a Rolls Royce but I went to my mechanic at the health clinic recently and he told me I have an Edsel.

I noticed a few quirky things.  When I enter a building ... or even plan to enter a building, I always have to check out where the restrooms are. This is very important as you get older.  We have two and a half bathrooms in our townhouse.  A good thing.  In the morning all of them will be in use.  Wilson will use the half bath as his personal water supply.  The initials IBM have a totally different meaning now.  IBM means Impending Bowel Movement.  I can't imagine living in a place with one bathroom.  I shudder.

I also noticed something about flatulence.  In my youth it was something we did for amusement.  We had total control over this.  It was like burping.  Something the guys did to amuse each other.  Who ever burped or farted the loudest or the longest was a person to be envied.  At some point, like in your early twenties, you mature and stop doing it for amusement.  This is something you control, more or less.  But then you realize you don't control it so you try to be discreet.  You try to find open space.  You run to an open field. You avoid places that have echoes.  You blame it on the cat. You adjust your life... then you get old.  

The rules change again.  Now you are afraid to pass gas.  There is a degree of uncertainty involved in this endeavor.  This is why older people are cranky.

There are other issues involved in olditude.

When I was growing up I thought old people smelled funny.  I am now "old people".  Do I smell funny?  My wife tells me I smell just fine.  She is starting to be "old people". Should I trust her opinion?  I don't dare walk up to a young lady at Walmart and say, "Do I smell old?".

Your other senses start to diminish.  You don't know you smell old.  My sense of smell has gotten so bad that my neighbors call me when Wilson's litter needs to be changed.  I can eat a Limburger sandwich and a glass of sour milk while I change the litter.  I'm guessing that my sense of taste is diminishing also.

My sense of hearing is not as keen as it used to be.  I learned to compensate.  I learned a few tricks from my dad who had the misfortune of being too close to numerous dynamite blast in the mines.  

An example of my dad's bad hearing would be: I would say, "My sense of hearing is not as keen as it used to be."  My dad would say, "My fence of fearing snot as bean looses bees? What does that mean?" It made for some comical non-sequiturs, but it was also very frustrating.  He would never admit that he had a hearing problem.  We just didn't talk loud enough or there was too much background noise.  He had trouble accepting his aged hearing.  I guess the acorn did not fall far from the mighty oak in that respect.  I will try to make a better transition, or as my father would say," I will dry and bake a letter transmissions?"

As a person gets older it gets more difficult to sleep unless you are watching your favorite television program on the couch. Then it will take about ninety seconds to fall asleep. Why is that?
Someone told me to count sheep.  It would make you sleep.  I tried it.  Guess what?  It didn't work.  The damn sheep kept moving.  I had to keep starting over.  I was getting really annoyed with those sheep.  I decided I would sheer the sheep for their wool.  That way I could keep track of who was counted and who wasn't.  This would have worked except I started to get allergic to wool.  So I would wake up exhausted and itchy.
My wife has a similar problem.  She can hear crickets farting at three o'clock in the morning. She has extremely keen hearing except when I am talking to her. After I repeat something three times she will then demand I write it on paper.  Then she scolds me about my bad handwriting.
Yeah....Penmanship does not get better with age either.  I now write like a doctor does a prescription.  So now we just email each other.  This does not make for good dinner conversation. But...we have documentation.

There are other things that just don't make sense anymore.

• The hair on my ears is growing faster than the hair on my head.
• A young whippersnapper is someone under sixty.
• The diaper aisle at the pharmacy has as many diapers for adults as for infants.
• Television..(kata...boomm!) grams hav...(kata...boommm!) a lot of backgro..(boom...boom) background..(boom...boom!!) noi..(boom!..boom!) noise.  Am I the only (boom...kata..boom!!) person this...(boom!..kataboom!) annoys, Dr Phil? (Kata...boom!!)
• My television has I about seven thousand channels. Why is there only about five good programs on television?  Why isn't one of them "The Codger Channel?"
• Jennifer Lopez looks like a teenager and I yearn to see Betty White's cleavage. She's hot.  I am not well.
• If I am not snoring my wife puts a mirror under my nose too see if I am still alive.  So far so good. 
• One of our neighbors is so old that she was friends with (and outlived) people who had streets named after them.  She called the "Robert Grissom Parkway" The Bob!!!! A personal friend of hers.  That's old.

I have a lot more questions, but this is a good start.  Now I can go read my book.  My book?  I don't remember where I put my book.
Someone told me yesterday that memory is the second thing to go.  That person told me what the first thing to go was.  I can't remember who told me that and what he/she said.
If you are reading this, call me.  Whoever you are.  I need to know.
Hmm...What do I need to know?

Early life on a dirtpile

The Pile!

When my wife and I talk about our education we realize how different we were educated and raised. This should come as no surprise. She was raised in an area in Quebec where aluminum mining was the big industry. I was raised in an area of New York where the big industry was iron ore mining. That is where the similarity ends.

Her dad was the Assistant Superintendent of the company, my dad was the guy who went into the ground every day. A dangerous place. There were many mine widows in our town.

Sadly, my wife's dad could never become the big boss of the facility. He had the education. He spoke perfect English, but he was French Canadian. The facility was owned by English people. He could drink coffee with them but he would never be invited to join the country club.

It was very much like being a black man in Mississippi during the 60's. As long as you stayed in your place life was OK. The French Canadians were treated like second class citizens in their own province. This may help explain why "Parti Quebecois" became so powerful.

But that is another story.

This is about kids being educated and socialized.

My wife is surprised that I can remember all of my teachers from Kindergarten to high school. I am not.

She was educated by nuns. They all looked alike when she was in school. They wore black with white trim. Sister Mary Margaret and Sister Elizabeth looked like twins.

She did not have teachers with colorful nicknames like Peg Leg, Hose Nose, Frizzy, Fossil, Whitie, Bull, and Izzy, to name a few.

Some of the students had very colorful names also. Most of the names were some type of animal like Beaver, Horse, Dogbone, Mole, Cougar, Cub, Munger, Slats, and Carp, to name a few. That was my class only. I am sure some of the other classes had some colorful names also.

The teachers who survived and got tenure were actually quite good. You had to be pretty dedicated to hang around and teach at this school. The school was built on a pile of tailings. Our campus was dirt, gray dirt. If you left the windows open you could hear the sounds of ore cars coming out of the mines and the 2:20 PM explosion. The ground would rumble. They're getting more ore ready for the next shift.

One thing we have in that area is dirt, mountains of dirt.

The people who worked in these mines were a very diverse group. There were many names with "ski" at the end. I guess that would be the Polish People. We had black people who came from South Carolina to find work. We had numerous Spanish people, many French Canadians and of course, the Irish.

I lived a sheltered life for a while. I didn't actually meet a black person until I went to school. Let me correct that. I didn't actually see a black person until I started school.

I was waiting for the school bus which would drop off kids at the school.

The bus arrives and kids start getting off the bus. Suddenly this really black human gets off the bus. I was shocked. I never saw a person with that particular condition. Whatever he had I didn't want to catch it. I didn't know whether to run, poop my pants or go blind. I was traumatized. I eventually got over it. I made a full recovery from this trauma. The guy actually became a good friend later in my teen years.

My school never had a "gay" issue. Huh?...Well, maybe.

I knew of some people who were "different". The one person who really stood out as being gay was not really given a hard time. It was more insidious and subtle. He really wasn't "one of the boys". He was tolerated.

The odd thing, a couple of my classmate came out as gay later in life. I didn't have a clue that they were thinking of joining that club. It's a choice, right? (wink! wink!)

No child left behind? What a concept! There were no Special Education classes when I was in school. If you had an education issue, too bad for you. About half the class I started with in Kindergarten was left behind. It was a miracle that I didn't fall behind.

I made it through. I was horrible in math until 9th grade. The light bulb finally went on.

I was good at physical Education.(Gym)

Life on the dirt pile was interesting. This town of 5 hamlets had about 7,000 people in 1970. Numerous churches, 3 small high schools, 2 catholic schools, 5 post offices, numerous taverns and eateries and big brother, THE COMPANY!!!

The Company decided to close the mines in 1972. They could import steel cheaper.

Outsourcing began. 800 people lost their jobs. My dad retired in 1972. He collected a pension, social security, free health insurance for the next 33 years. Not too bad. I hope to do the same. That will take me right up to 2041. I don't know what I will do after that. I will be getting close to 100 years old.

The town is still there but they are dying a slow painful death. Me too. I hurt everywhere already. 

Pictured: Miners on their way to work.

Note:While getting information for this blog I came across a side story that is interesting.  It was a topix blog called "Remember when". It happened in my hometown.

Pictured: My school literally on a dirt pile.

December 1968: (posted by HWH)
I was at HWHenry(a car dealership) having a beer with Dick F, George B. , C. Henry, and Mark S.
Mark took a bottle of beer, put it on a steel beam in the back of the garage.  He said he would drink this bottle when he gets back from Vietnam.  
End of story? Not really. They say the bottle is still there.  The building is now the firehouse.  
April 26 would be 42 years.  Mark would be 62 years old now.  
Let me know for sure if the bottle of Genesee is still there.

Irony defined? A True Tale of geocaching.

Irony defined: A state of affairs or an event that seem deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.

My wife and I recently  became geocachers.  One of my internet friends occasionally made reference to "geocaching" .  I tried to ignore it, but it just kept popping up.  I am a naturally curious person.  I googled it ...  I google everything.

It brought me to a website which, strangely was called "Geocaching".

The website defines geocaching as: A recreational activity of hunting for and finding a hidden object by means of GPS coordinates posted on a website.

In other words, finding tupperware in the woods using billion dollars worth of military satellites.  

This sounded like a fun activity to me.  It would be easy enough to get started: I already  had a TomTom GPS for our vehicle.  I signed up on Geocaching.com.  It was free and I found a few simple caches near our home.  

I was hooked.  Since a TomTom would not do the job out in the woods, I  started looking for a GPS that would best suit my needs.  

 A GPS saying, "Turn left on Ocean Blvd." would not be very helpful.  The actual decision took me only about four months.

One day my wife said to me, " Are you going to buy that GPS before you die?"

I had it the next day.  My biological clock is ticking, you know!

After a couple of days figuring out how to put my batteries in and turn it on, I was ready to geocache.  The little French lady went with me on my first few geocaches.

She seemed amused by my antics.  I would slither on the ground like a lizard, get hung up in bushes, have brambles in my hair, walk in dog poop, pick up dog poop thinking a cache would be hidden under it.  Once I even crawled under a gazebo looking for a cache.  A woman came along and asked my wife if she should call 911.  My wife talked her out of it.  I generally made a mess of myself while geocaching.

One day the little French lady asked some question about my GPS.  She started showing a little interest in my new hobby.  The next time we went geocaching she started questioning my navigational skills.  I was meandering all over the place.

Finally, she said, "Gimme that thing!" . Sigh... I did not see much of my Garmin Etrex that day.  Every once in a while I would whimper, "Can I look at it?"  The next day she ordered a Garmin GPS for herself.   She was hooked.

We learned about geocaching very quickly.  But...alas, not fast enough.  We would take a trinket out  and put a different one back in.  The trinkets are called "swag".

Somewhere in the beginning we apparently made some breach of  swag etiquette.

One of the cache owners sent us a nastygram accusing us of replacing her high price swag (her treasure)  with our cheap swag (our trash).  She said we plundered her cache.  We acknowledged that her swag may have been more valuable than ours. We did not consider our swag as  "trash", nor did we plunder her cache.  We didn't think swag was the point of geocaching, and we still do not.  Nonetheless she called us everything but a human being, which we thought might be considered a breach of etiquette also.  We were kinda taken aback by the whole incident.  I guess "One man's treasure is another man's trash".

We decided we would place our own cache and dedicate it to this incident.  Naturally we called it, "One man's treasure".  Wanting to keep with the theme, we decided to hide it at an appropriate place, near a flea market.  But ... we had no idea how ironic the whole story would be.

Life can be funny.

We received an email this morning from a geocacher named "The Shady Lady".

Here's what she said: "We  saved this cache! The landscape clean-up crew had thrown it in the garbage.  They were pretty interested to hear the explanation of geocaching and will be on the lookout for other mysterious containers that may pop up in their line of work. Tftc (Thanks for the Cache)".

Whew! that was close.  From Trash back to treasure!!!  Thanks, Shady Lady for saving GC2N3XP (One man's treasure).

A Report from the Hemlock Institute.

Life in America

A skewered look at life on this planet.  Brought to you by the Hemlock Institute, an non-profit think tank running on fumes.

Think tanks are quite adept at making prediction.  I will make some predictions.

• In the year 2030: There will be millions of people walking around with their heads bent to one side.  They will have radiation marks on their face from cellphone microwaves.  Chiropractors will become millionaires.  They will be new rich. 
• New type cellphones will be put out by Apple.  It will be implanted in your ear at birth. Sadly you will not be able to sign up for "Do not call" until your eighteenth birthday. Many teenager will go insane while others will go bankrupt buying stuff from telemarketers.  
• Cigarette companies will come out with Nicotine flavored baby food. 
• Governor Lindsay Lohan will sign the California free drug law into effect.  This will drive the Mexican Cartels out of business.  She will also sign into law the "English again law".  This will once again make English the first language in California after a 12 year absence.  English may be taught in schools again.  The Latino community is furious.  Since they are 70% of the citizens of the state they should have some say in the decision.  Texas is keeping an eye on the developments. They may also switch to English.
• Airport security is starting to get slack again.  You will no longer have to go through the checkpoints completely naked.  You will be issued a washcloth to use as you deem appropriate.  After the inspection you will be issued a orange jump suit before...Yes...before...you get on the plane.  Your baggage will be forwarded on a flatbed railroad car.  You can pick it up at a train station closest to your destination.
• Movies with people wearing clothing is coming back into vogue.  Studies have shown that people wearing certain clothes can be very sexy and provocative.  Hence, any movie with clothed people will be rated "R" or "X".
• A member of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas questioned whether they were doing the right thing.  They told him that he was a homosexual and deserved to die.  Some things never change.
• The Democratic majority in Congress voted to revoke the Republican revocation of the previous revocation of the revocation of the Obama health bill.  They were all in agreement that they should get a big raise.  It was voted into law 99 to 1.  The one "no" vote was by Bernie Saunders of Vermont.
• The average adult American now weighs 294 pounds.  Down from a high of 302 from 6 years ago. McDonald's has downsized their Mac (no longer called the big Mac) to a half pound.  The Biggest Loser is on Every night of the week on every channel.  The average would be higher if it wasn't for the diabetics, which is now 83% of the population.  The diabetics are dropping like leafs in October.
• Destiny Lovechild is voted Playboy's playmate of the Year. The beauty from Los Angeles, Mexifornia is 6 ft 3 inches in heighth, she weighs in at a hefty 107 pounds. She has broken the mold.  She is the first to weigh in over 100 pounds since Angela "Porky" Gonzales, who hit the scale at a whopping 109 pounds on her 5'11" frame. That was 9 years ago.
• The blockade of Cuba is in its 73rd year.  The President hopes to have troops out of Afghanistan by 2035.
• The chairperson of the Republican party once again scoffed at the idea of global warming.  He issued this from his Condo at the Little America, Antartica after 18 holes of golf.
• A District Attorney for Cook County Illinois stated that Johnnie Lee Jones, a convicted murderer was innocent.  He showed ample evidence of police misconduct, videotape showing the real murderer doing the deed, incompetence by Johnnie's attorney,  Proof that Johnnie was somewhere else, (he was in Washington, testfiying before Congress at the very second of the murder), and someone elses DNA at the scene.   The DA was fired.  When questioned, Cook County officials stated that Jones was convicted by his peers.  (12 white guys with a IQ total of nearly 100). No new trial for Johnnie.  He will be executed on schedule.
• Microsoft has solved "The blue screen of death" problem.  It is now red.  It will be called "The red screen of death".
• Clint Eastwood stated he may run for Mayor of Carmel, Mexifornia again.  He must finish his last Harry Callahan adventure called "The nursing home caper."  Quick plot line: Someone steals Harry's "Depends".  He tracks them down and beats the crap out of them or something like that.  Actually, He just touched their belly and said, "I know what your thinking. Did I have five depends or 6 depends?  Well, Frankly, with all the excitement and my Alzheimer's, I kinda lost track myself. Being that I just took in a boxful of prunes this morning, the most powerful laxative known to man,  you have to ask yourself, "Do I feel luck, punk? Well, do ya?....Oops!"  "GIVE THEM TO ME........NOW!!!!!!"......Well, I guess you get the idea.
• There is a new program on TV called "Press the meat". It is about life in the Salami and cold cut industry. 
• Former President Obama returns home to Kenya.  Ummm!...Huh?...Even that one surprised me.
• Former President George Dubbaya Bush finally learned how to say strawtiggery.
• Colleges have adopted the "No Student must fail".  You can just send the college the tuition money and you get drunk for 4 years.  At the end of four years you get your degree.  Hmmm? That didn't change much except for the "No Student must fail" part.

Well, I have given you a glimpse of the future.  We (WE???) here at the Hemlock Institute continue to notice the trends of the day and can predict the future from these trends.  That is what a think tank does.  I think..possibly, could be, perhaps, maybe.

I can say these things unequivocally.

I could be wrong.