by Kathy Brasby | Jun 15, 2022 | Humor, Leadership
When it comes to fishing, I don’t.
But when the kids had an invitation to a party at a local fishing pond, I saw an opportunity. I loaded my newest book in with the fishing gear.
Being a responsible mom and all, I would, of course, check on the kids frequently. Occasionally. If they screamed like a pig waiting for a second breakfast.
You’d think I’d find a book that didn’t captivate me so I could monitor the kids.
Well, I didn’t.
I found an outstanding book and a comfortable chair.
Once we got to the little pond, my kids ran to the gaggle of other kids where a brave father was digging worms out of a cardboard box and weaving the bait onto each hook. How the kids didn’t all sink hooks in their bodies while not really waiting their turn is beyond me.
Maybe they did. I had a book to read.
This book grabbed my attention from page 1. It had wit, quirky characters, and page-turning mystery. I leaped into the story.
So much so that my daughter had to call my name twice before the word weaved its way through the story and into my brain. I actually heard the book’s hero call “Mom” the first time, which was so confusing that I heard “Mom” the second time.
Kind of like when you’re dreaming and somebody is shaking your shoulder. It can take a bit to pierce the fog.
“What?” I answered before I even located her along the pond’s edge.
She held her pole high in the air with a fish as long as my hand squirming on the hook.
Great. She’d caught a fish.
“Wow, way to go.” I had already dropped my eyes back to my hero, who was racing through an alley looking for a place to hide from the bad guys.
“Bring me a tackle box.” Reality can be so tame at times.
I jammed the bookmark in place and marched through the thick grass along the mossy green water’s edge. Our tackle box was blue and dented and I wasn’t sure what all the kids might have packed in there besides bobbers and weights. I hoped no soft bananas or squashed sandwiches.
My daughter danced from foot to foot, her ponytail bouncing like fifth graders set loose for the summer. “Look at my fish! We gotta get the hook out before it gets hurt.”
True. I didn’t want an injured fish. I wanted to rejoin my hero.
How does one get a hook out of a fish? This was fresh territory for me.
I set the tackle box on the rough wood of the dock and gazed into the tangle of hooks, bobbers, weights. No banana or sandwich. The kids had some focus.
“Grab those pliers, Mom.”
OK, I knew pliers. I lifted the metal tool and held it out to her.
“I can’t do that,” she said with a voice that sounded like the whine of a jet engine starting up.
Like I could? “I don’t fish.” Clearly, a boundary was in order here.
“I’ll hold the fish, and you get the hook out.” She gripped the squirmy fish in her nine-year-old hands.
Um, I don’t get hooks out. I stared at the fish, which stared back with empty black eyes. This was no time for a “who blinks first” contest. Do fish even blink?
I drew a deep breath. Parenting involves more courage than you’d think. Extricating a hook from a fish’s mouth ranks pretty high on my “don’t want to do this” list. I took a deep breath, wishing an excuse would pop into my mind.
My daughter squeezed the fish’s mouth open, and I raised the pliers. Changed grip. Moved my thumb down the knurled metal. Shifted the handle into my palm. Stalling.
And then, while the pliers circus continued, a blast of green pond water hit me in the face. A cold, slimy, gritty tidal wave.
I raised my eyes from the squirming fish.
My five-year-old son stood a few feet away from me, gripping a stained, slightly concave paper cup two steps from dissolving into soggy mush.
He gazed at the fish while I glared at him.
Then he saw me staring, and he shifted his weight. “I grabbed the cup from the edge of the pond.” He held out the forlorn cup minutes from its ultimate resting place in the trash can.
“And I scooped up some water.” He dropped the cup down and scooped some air to show me how he’d gathered his treasure.
“Why?” I could feel the pond water still dripping from my chin. I still held the pliers, so I wiped my face with my off hand.
“I didn’t want the fish to die before you got the hook out.” His eyes were soft with concern for the squirming fish. Then he grinned just a little. “And I thought it might take a while.”
“So, you scooped up the water and threw it in my face?”
“I was throwing the water on the fish.” He shrugged and crushed the cup. “I missed.”
When it comes to fishing, I still don’t.
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by Kathy Brasby | Mar 17, 2022 | Leadership
I just made progress on Cutting Through Despair: Dare to Hope! So far I’m 96% complete on the Writing phase. 12 Days remain until the deadline.
[mybookprogress progress=”0.96424″ phase_name=”Writing” deadline=”1648598400″ book=”1″ book_title=”Cutting Through Despair: Dare to Hope” bar_color=”CB3301″ cover_image=”1096″ mbt_book=”1095″]
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by Kathy Brasby | Mar 18, 2021 | Family, Humor, Technology
It is totally my fault that CAPTCHA has returned to my computer.
I tumble down the rabbit hole every time the little box comes up for me declare that I am not a robot. I check that I am not, and obviously the programming has second thoughts about that. Understandable, actually.
By Nikolay Shaplov – Transferred from en.wikibooks to Commons by Adrignola using CommonsHelper., GPL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12813815
The idea of CAPTCHA is that humans can handle these puzzles while current bots – computer programming – cannot.
I was almost nostalgic the first time I ran into a new CAPTCHA. I rarely saw one. The nostalgia faded quickly, like remembering the smell of mentholatum.
The new onslaught of paranoid puzzles threw nine photographs in front of me. Click on the ones with cars in the picture.
One of the photos was so grainy and dark that it could have been a runaway giraffe for all I could tell. Another had a shadow under a tree that might have been concealing a car or cheerleading squad.
And then there was the shot down a highway with lumps of something in the distance. Were those cars or elk? Who could tell? Was I supposed to know?
Who would think that proving I’m human would be so challenging? (Siblings are not allowed to join the discussion at this point.)
I clicked three photos with cars and leaned closer to my monitor, hoping the other photos would somehow enhance.
If you’ve seen CSI shows, you know what I mean. They take a street video that consists of grainy pixels and enhance it about 100 times until the license plate magically -and clearly -appears. Or they can do facial recognition on that shadowy form in the front seat that could have been a bag of groceries as far as I could tell.
Trust me on this: that enhance technique would produce a photo as sharp as a blob of gray clay.
Then there are those letters that you have to read and type in the box below.
CAPTCHA letters may have been created by optometrists waiting just outside the door for your next eye exam. You’ll think you need it after trying to untangle blurry, elongated, and overlapping letters politely called distorted text.
Although I have to admit that there are guys in my life who don’t write any better.
CAPTCHA now happens every time I log into a website, throwing goofy letters or blurry photos in my face. These are puzzles that I’m supposed to solve.
I guess bots can’t do those things. Neither can half the adults, I suspect.
The reason for CAPTCHA reappearing in my life is my fault. When I got concerned about tech giants tracking my web browsing, I shut off the permissions. Suddenly my digital fingerprint disappeared.
For years, websites knew it was me – not a bot -by the fingerprints I was leaving. When I shut off that permission, CAPTCHA got suspicious.
I’m stuck with CAPTCHA or leaving fingerprints. The CAPTCHA tests seem fiercer now than what I remember. I can hardly wait for the one that asks me to count all the blades of grass on the out-of-focus lawns.
There could be a plausible reason for this stiff response. Since I’ve gone rogue on the internet harvesting, a new movie could be in store: CAPTCHA’s Revenge.
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by Kathy Brasby | Mar 11, 2021 | Country life, Family, Humor, Stories
The first time I saw the movie Jaws, I almost gave myself a concussion. Don’t read on if you don’t want spoiler alerts, but, come on, that movie came out in 1975. If you haven’t seen it, you deserve spoilers.
I was sitting in a cushy theater seat when the shark came up out of the water and nearly bit the camera. And me, it seemed like at the time. I jerked myself back in the seat and hit the knee of the guy behind me.
Because of that movie, I’ve always believed in shark attacks. I mean, I saw one up close and personal. Since I don’t live near the ocean, that movie was like a documentary on sharks for me.
So imagine my surprise when I heard a radio host recently reading statistics. According to him, more people die of cow attacks than shark attacks.
Apparently, more hippos kill humans than sharks. In second place are cows.
This was mildly disturbing to me since I live around cows. No hippos or sharks in sight but cows, well, right across the road from me.
Just to clarify, I am not afraid of cows. I grew up with them and, for the most part, they care more about eating grass than goring humans. Unlike sharks. Sharks don’t even eat grass. Just saying.
But I do remember an adventure my mother had when I was a teenager. Our family had a small cow/calf Angus herd. If you know anything about Angus, and you may not, they are sweet cattle until babies are born. Then they become slit-eyed, dripping-incisor Mama Bears. Red eyes, teeth bared, the works. You get the idea.
So Mom went into the corral one day with a stick to help chase the cows out to pasture. We did this often but this time, the mama cow lowered her head and charged at Mom. Her baby wasn’t even that young but apparently, Mom and her stick looked like a roaring mountain lion.
So the cow charged.
Mom slammed her stick down on the cow’s head. The cow hesitated and then lunged forward again. Mom began beating on the cow’s head over and over. The stick broke off a little each time she struck.
Mom was out of stick when the cow finally backed off and Mom went scooting over the fence.
We all learned after that to take something a lot more substantial into the corral. A pitchfork handle worked very well.
So cow attacks are a thing.
But after hearing the shark attack claims, I did a little more searching (here’s the article) and found out that here’s the attack order:
- Hippos
- Cows (they put horses in the same category although any self-respecting farm kid knows those aren’t the same thing at all.)
- Dogs
- Snails (They were stretching it on this one.)
- Ants
Sharks weren’t even on the list.
The radio host did speculate about chicken attacks but by then his credibility was shot. I had seen Jaws and I knew: shark attacks were a lot higher than chicken attacks.
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by Kathy Brasby | Mar 4, 2021 | Family, Humor, Stories
I’m not usually big on joining new fads, but I succumbed on this one.
I’m talking about a floor-sweeping robot: those little disks that motor around your house, vacuuming and sweeping the floor when I don’t want to. Which is pretty much all the time.
So I got the little guy and found a safe place for him in our library. On his first outing, our grandsons were here. Talk about cheap entertainment. They lay on top our bed for an hour just watching him go back and forth vacuuming the floor.
I think the youngest may have offered him a cookie.
His controls are connected via app to my phone and so I was asked to name him. “How about R2D2?” I asked the boys.
“Um, what were those letters again?” the oldest said. They knew nothing of Star Wars movies. Talk about instant aging. Me, not him.
The first time around, the little robot was R2D2. Then he started having issues. One day I got a text while I was out and about: R2D2 couldn’t start his route because his dustbin was gone.
What? Fortunately my daughter was at the house so I asked her to check the dustbin. It was in place and she sent him on his way.
Then he wasn’t able to trek over the same edge of the rug that he’d managed the week before. All seven days of it. This time, it was a mountain too high. He sent another notification.
He was able to map out the rooms of our house, which I could then label. The idea was that I could send him just to the kitchen or the bedroom. Yeah, well, he lost the map. Then he found it. But now, as far as I can tell, that map is in Bogota.
He got caught in a bathroom, swiveling from the toilet to the door, circling endlessly. I picked him up and put him in the hallway so he could return to his dock. He kept circling. I am not sure but he may have discovered perpetual motion.
So I deleted the robot on my app and started anew, giving him a new name. Robot Boy.
Suddenly Robot Boy found the map of the house. Apparently after journeying to Bogota.
And then it was gone again.
I could schedule a time each day for him to begin his cleaning chores. For two weeks, he would do a run at 9 am and another at 12.
I assumed I had accidentally bumped the two-times-a-day switch so I did a little checking on his website. The company apologized but they don’t yet offer two-times-a-day scheduling.
Except on Robot Boy.
I didn’t report Robot Boy. Would you want him scolded by his own company? I can live with twice-a-day cleanings.
He does try hard. Even when he’s caught under a chair, he doesn’t give up. Only a dead battery will keep him from his appointed duties.
He doesn’t scratch, knock off lamps, or climb up curtains and he’s very loyal.
But I think his next name will be Confused.
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