Recent Comments

1. 1 day ago on Betty

   I got my only tat at 17. Health issues preclude me from having another. My sister got her first one when she was in her 40s!. The woman has always been very down-to-earth. She has an innate sense of what will stay in fashion at what is just a fad. The same thing happens with technology. She does not curse (which is weird considering who our mother was). She works in a boring aspect of the banking industry.

   Both of my daughters have tattoos. Neither has ever been in trouble with the law. Both have worked non-stop since graduating high school.

   My oldest got her first in her 30s. She has a Masters of Library Science.

   My youngest has 9. All are works of art that took hours to do. She has images from around the world. She has worked at the same place for almost a decade.

   So, for all of those talking about only miscreants and what-have-you being the only ones with body art I would suggest expanding your frame of reference.

2. about 1 month ago on Arlo and Janis

   I moved to the Springs right before I turned 15. All told I lived there for six years (broken up by a stint in Germany). I absolutely loved it and miss it. The year I got married I was wearing shorts on my wedding day (in February). Then 3 months later on my birthday in May there was a blizzard.

   When we moved here to NC and the post closed and the schools shut down for snow I couldn’t believe it! Even St. Mary’s (or whatever that one school that used to close constantly was called-I was in Harrison School District, we never closed) would have been open. Then I saw how the people here drive. I learned to drive in the snow in a car without power brakes or power steering. That was fun…not. Still it was better than how my husband learned about driving in snow. He was born in SC and raised in Fl. He didn’t see snow until he was 21 and joined the army. Ft Sill, OK in winter had him learning to drive a howitzer in the snow! Oy. Thankfully, he is darn* good at driving anything.

   *Guess what word isn’t allowed! That is so bloody stupid. When it is a word that my sister uses, it is NOT vulgar. Now anything that my mother would say…

3. about 1 month ago on Baldo

   When my youngest was three she fell off of the playground equipment. The kid was always a daredevil. She was also a klutz. At 18 months she tripped and hit her head hard enough to actually bend the door pull (it was for a cabinet). That time got her stitches. This time it was staples. She had actually quit crying almost immediately, and only started back up when I told her we had to leave the playground. The kid had blood dripping down her head. She didn’t care. The next trip to the ER was at five years of age. She was playing in the neighbor’s yard when I heard her cry. The grandfather handed her to me. She had closed her hand in the door of the playhouse. She had stopped crying on the drive to the hospital. Then she tripped on the way in and landed on that hand. So, the tears were back. By the time we were seen she was all smiles again. I was seriously considering that perhaps I had overreacted. The doctor was joking with me about her history. We were both shocked when the X-ray showed she had broken her finger. Due to her age and personality, they gave her a full cast that went up to her elbow. Mind you she did this on the first day of winter break, so she spent Christmas with the cast. She only needed it for two weeks. The technician who removed it was actually one of the soldiers who was on the tarmac when the C-130 crashed in 1993. He had horrible burns, and of course my daughter was worried about the saw cutting off her arm. I remember having similar fears when I was 11 and had a cast on my leg (for much longer than two weeks). The guy in the next bed over had been in a motorcycle crash, so that was why I was worried. The man that removed my daughter’s cast was awesome. He talked to her about his boo-boos. His strength of character amazes me to this day.

   My child is now in her thirties and is quite proud of all of her scars…of which there are many. You know how big guys are called “Tiny”? My mom used to call her “Grace”. lol

4. about 1 month ago on Broom Hilda

   In school I hated writing essays and book reports. All of the authors I read ask for us to leave a review (which is all a book report really is, at least the types that most of my teachers wanted-they did NOT want a summary) as it helps their analytics. I agonize over them since I am well aware that I have no talent. Oddly, there are people who follow my reviews. I’m not really sure why. Still, it is neat.

5. about 1 month ago on The Buckets

   We moved into our house in 1995. We rented for the first 27 years. We had a great landlord. He bought the house in 1981 to use as a rental. Over the years there had been multiple families here. The house itself was built in 1972. So, I have no idea when certain items were put into the vents. The walls were painted between families, and the carpets were cleaned. Nobody ever thought to do the vents. Before they started medicating me, I was extreme in my cleanliness. I vacuumed and scrubbed what I could reach of the vents. Toys, coins, etc. were not the issue. The jackwipes that had lived here at one time had urinated in one of the vents. It was rusted and smelled horrendous. I am almost to Gus’ (from Psych level when it comes to how sensitive my sense of smell is. There was also a chicken leg!! Who the h*ll does that?! Our neighborhood was hit by a tornado in 2011. When had to have a new roof as well as carpet and flooring. Due to all of the insulation being everywhere all of the vent lines were also replaced. They are still shiny, even though I can no longer clean like I used to.

6. about 1 month ago on Betty

   There is a pizza joint here that is owned by an immigrant from Italy. They do NOT have pepperoni. In an article in the paper years ago she said that pepperoni wasn’t used in her region. I wish I could recall specifically where she was from. They do not deliver, so I have never tried them. They stay on the top restaurants list though, so they must be doing something right.

   When we were stationed in Germany there was the equivalent of a food truck that used to operate outside of the Merrill Barracks kaserne in Nürnberg. It had great pizza. I was taken aback by one of the most popular items. They would cook the pizza and then crack an egg on it and that was how one ate it. {Ugh}. I cannot handle scrambled eggs that have some white in them. (Obviously I do not eat egg McMuffins.) There is no way I am eating a raw egg on anything.

7. about 2 months ago on Back to B.C.

   Since there have been many times where some of the original strips (be it because they were unavailable or the copyright holder didn’t want them released, or what have you) are missing I hazard to say that this weeks should have joined those. I do not recall this dinosaur being such an bully. I lump this behavior in with the Fat Broad abuse of the poor snake. Abuse played for comedy is rarely funny.

   Meanwhile, I wish that the powers correlate the dates so that we do not have summer strips in the middle of winter. Having Christmas (anachronisms aside) strips in July is always jarring.

8. about 2 months ago on Broom Hilda

   Here in the south what they call “sweet tea” is not tea, but colored sugar water. I swear their “tea” is made by dunking a bag a few times and then filling the water with so much sugar that I am surprised it doesn’t turn to rock candy.

   Ordering a cup of hot tea was always hit or miss for the earlier part of my life (I moved constantly as a kid). Add in the milk and eyebrows always raised in question. I guess the net and shows from around the world have made it normal to order hot tea.

   Back to the milk, I learned very young to NEVER use both the lemon (which almost every restaurant provided) and the milk. Yuck. My grandmother’s recipe for molasses cookies called for sour milk. That is not milk that went bad, but milk that one has “soured” by adding either lemon juice or vinegar. The recipe is over 100 years old, and everyone loves them. I omit the raisins because I concur with Garfield where they are concerned.

9. about 2 months ago on Broom Hilda

   There is an episode of Frasier where Martin (Frasier’s father) goes to the coffee shop that Frasier and Niles frequentt. He orders a black coffee and it pretty much goes like this. That episode is from the 90s, so it truly is a statement more about the pompousness of the drink, than about the age of the drinker. I would hazard a guess that a regular old truck driver would elicit the same response. I am a tea drinker, and I do not recall anything close to the idiocy of “half whip of this, a shot of that, a pump of whatever” being assigned to tea.

10. about 2 months ago on Big Nate

    Mary Tyler Moore Chuckles Bites the Dust