Word of the Day

Fratulence: The tendency of brothers to encourage one another in vulgar behavior.

I think I have a defective gene. This is the gene that controls the part of one's brain when it comes to remembering birthdays and anniversaries and any other important date that would require mailing out a store bought card. My gene is defective. It's not that I don't remember. OK. I do have a problem with remembering the exact date of my own anniversary (the 28th? the 29th?), but other then that, I'm pretty good about remembering most dates. I actually will go out to the store to buy cards. I will take hours, searching the card racks for just the right cards for these important special occasions. I even bought postage stamps with Happy Birthday on them. I buy the cards. And the the defective gene causes me to put the cards on my desk and forget to mail them out. Ahhh!!!! I have a drawer full of store bought cards that have been abandoned for months on the top of my desk and then once remembered, filed in the desk drawer with other abandoned cards. I suppose I could just take one out of the drawer and use one of those but that doesn't seem quite right. So I go out and get a new card and then forget to send that one too so it joins the ranks of the other cards in my desk drawer. I buy stationary too and don't use it. I don't have any idea why this happens so by default, I'll blame it on a mutant gene. I think my youngest daughter has inherited this defective gene. She's worse then me...or better because she actually arrives at the next step. She'll drive around for months with a store bought card sitting on the front seat of her car. Addressed, stamped and ready to put in the blue postal box. She means well. She actually hand-delivered a card to me here in Arizona that she bought and wrote in Florida while she lived there. Talk about snail-mail! She told me that she never could find a blue postal box in Florida. I didn't get that card until she moved back here to Arizona. It's the thought that counts.

I have a friend who remembers everything and everyone. She was my room-mate in college. Maybe she stole my gene and added it to her own. No. She always was the organized one of the two of us. I was the absent-minded professor type. I still am but having three kids forces you out of the fog somewhat. I probably would have starved if she hadn't dragged me out of the fog of studies on a daily basis so we could both go down for breakfast and supper. Back in those days, the dorm cafeteria was open only for set meal times. If you missed those times, you didn't eat. We finally rented a fridge for our room to off-set those times that I would forget to eat. I'd still forget to eat but I'm married to an engineer. He keeps me organized. We don't forget to eat even if we probably should.

Murphyism of the Day

Issawi's Observation on the Consumption of Paper

Each system has its own way of consuming vast amounts of paper: socialist societies fill out large forms in quadruplicate; capitalist societies put up huge posters and wrap every article in four layers of cardboard.