by Kathy Brasby | Jun 3, 2019 | Country life, Humor, Stories
A few weeks ago, I was teaching chicks how to drink. That probably makes no sense to you but baby chickens pop out of their eggs with no clue how to drink. When the hen is not in the picture, their human owner gets to fill in.
Chicks are amazingly cute little beings. There’s no room for brains in their head, but they make up for it with cuteness.
Photo by Kathy Brasby
If you’ve ever gone to the feed store with your six-year-old, you know how amazingly cute the chicks are. Six-year-olds never miss the chick cages. Once there, they unfurl all the tricks a child knows. Anything is fair here. They might scream or plead or remind you that you hadn’t bought them anything in decades, maybe centuries.
Parents: don’t trust traditional responses. Don’t tell your child, “You’re not old enough to care for this chick,” because the child will assure you that this is their chance to reveal the profound changes in their heart, character, and behavior that have emerged since breakfast when they left their cereal bowl on the table and spoon on the floor. They are changed creatures, just like that chick that just transformed from an egg to a fuzz ball.
Don’t tell your child, “We don’t have a place for any chicks,” What your child hears is “yet,” as in “We don’t have any place for any chicks yet.” They have hope! All they now need is a cardboard box, a saucer, and a bag of chicken feed.
Stay away from the chick aisle!
Amongst the research regarding chickens is the discovery that chickens wearing red-tinted contact lenses fight less, eat less, and produce more – the chicken trifecta.
Can you imagine the scientist putting contact lenses on chickens? I wonder if they were soft or hard contacts. What if a chicken lost a lens? Would she attack the hen on her right while giving sweet words to the one on her left?
Would you have to change contacts every day? Maybe mellow chickens would stand in line to get their contacts in for the day. Right after brushing their teeth and combing their hair.
If scientists could put contact lenses on chickens, you’d think researchers could find a way to teach chickens how to drink when they first pop out of the egg. Apparently not.
Chicks remain as ill-prepared for life as ever.
But back to my teaching moment. I had two dozen cute yellow fur balls wandering aimlessly in the desert of their cardboard box, about to start crawling wing over wing in the sand, lips swollen and canteens dusty. The overhead light probably looked like a huge angry sun to them.
They needed a mama to teach them how to drink water.
My son watched. “They don’t know how to drink?” he said.
“They don’t know how to find water,” I said. I dipped each chick’s beak into the water and let each one shake its head in amazement at finding water just before dying of desert exposure.
My son shifted gears. “And why did you put paper down in their pen?”
“So they wouldn’t accidentally eat the wood chips underneath. They don’t know the difference between wood chips and their feed yet.”
He stared down at the yellow wave of chick energy. “So you’re telling me that they don’t know how to eat or drink?”
“Well, I guess…..”
He headed for the door. “I’m amazed they know how to breathe.”
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by Kathy Brasby | May 27, 2019 | Humor
We have a great Mexican restaurant in our town called El Jacal. I had to find out what the name meant because I don’t speak Spanish. What if I was ordering burritos in a place called The Sloth or The Dirty Laundry?
You see my point. I looked it up. It meant The Shack.
Much better than The Horse Hoof.
One day recently, I made arrangements to meet my nephew at El Jacal for lunch. Full of myself, I asked him if he knew what it meant.
“It means the mansion or something like that,” he said.
“No, it means the shack.”
“No, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.”
He obviously needed enlightening. I asked, “Who told you it meant the mansion?”
“My buddy Jose,” he said. “Who told you?”
“Google Translate.” It stinks when you might be less right.
Photo by Kathy Brasby
Translating is a tricky business. Once a Chinese translator turned our American idiom, “out of sight, out of mind,” into “invisible, insane.”
That translation was handy when the kids were young. They knew the story about the Chinese translation so I thought I was being cute when I responded to their chaotic race through the house by calling out, “Be invisible, insane.” It was less helpful when they said they thought the last part described me.
A few years ago, I bought a small (cheap) PA system and dug out the instructions.
You’ll want to see these. And I did not make anything up:
- “Features: Lithium battery, long battery life. Loud-speaker works pretty good.”
- “To extend the battery life, please charge after the battery is use out.”
- “Attentions before wearing the ear-hanging microphone: Before wearing, please don’t turn on the power and volume.” I am still not making this up.
- “Don’t change the battery by yourself under warranty. Be sure that the pole is right when the change the battery.” (Why would I have to know how to change the battery if I’m not supposed to, under threat of voiding warranty?)
- “Turn the volume button clockwise or anticlockwise can increase or decrease the volume.”
- “Cut in and pull out the plug often may cause the disbad connection between microphone and amplifier.”
I kept the instructions long enough to copy these juicy phrases and then figured out the little PA system on my own.
My theory? These instructions were translated. Maybe by Google Translate.
In any case, I think they fall in the “invisible, insane” dustbin.
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by Kathy Brasby | May 20, 2019 | Humor, Stories
As we get better acquainted, you’ll know things about me that my kids may someday pay you to keep to yourself. This is a great reason to keep track of me. Think of it as retirement planning. Just fill out that email signup over there and the money may well come flowing one day. No promises, though.
Don’t you, by the way, get annoyed with promises coming at you in the mail and on your phone and email? You know what I mean. I have gotten a garden catalog in the mail for years. Most of the catalogs have a big red sticker on the front: “Warning: this may be the last catalog you will receive unless you order.” Yeah, yeah, big promises. I’ve never ordered. I’d be OK if this were the last catalog but no such luck.
I don’t make promises like that. I promise.
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
I’ve had several jobs in my life, none related to the one before as far as I can tell. I’ve been a property manager for four years. Managing rental units provides endless story possibilities. That’s almost a good enough reason to keep managing.
As you can imagine, we occasionally have tenants who don’t pay their rent. This particular tenant not only got behind on his rent, but he had creative excuses. One month, he assured us that his check must have gotten stolen since we hadn’t received it.
In fact, the police had contacted him about the stolen check, and he was getting another one issued. We asked, could he send us a copy of the police report? No, since the police were in another state.
What, they hadn’t heard of faxing or email?
He did finally get that rent payment paid. It was sort of the sweet-and-sour-sauce with that tenant. One month, he was great and the next, lots of complaints and no rent.
I reported the final events to my business partner, who is also my sister, Ann, via texts:
Me: “Guess what? No rent today again.”
Ann: “Still nothing? Didn’t he promise?”
Me: “Yep.” Captain Obvious is my texting handle.
Ann: “Can’t you just email him and tell him to send us his kidney.”
I was typing, “I’m OK with a kidney,” when Ann answered, “No! Ack! Money. Not kidney. Money.”
I liked kidney better.
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by Kathy Brasby | May 14, 2019 | Stories
This blog is getting a reboot. I’ve tried to be serious and grown up, but I gotta go back to my roots: stories.
I see the world in stories. I laugh at the goofiest things – and you might as well come along.
This morning, my sister, the artist, showed me a new set of paintings. “They’re about new life. Butterflies.”
Me, I am a big fan of cliches, as you’ll see. I said, “I don’t see any butterflies.” She had painted a green background with a round yellow area in what might have been the sky. It might have been irises for all I could tell. She’s an abstract painter.
So then I looked closer. I’m not sure if you are supposed to look closer with abstract work or step back but I was sitting at my computer so stepping back would have required getting up. Not sure it was worth all that.
“There are red splatters on the painting.” My mind flew to cliches because I’m a big fan of cliches. “Is this post-butterflies? What happened to the butterflies?” I started thinking of big predator birds which, by the way, weren’t anywhere in her paintings. Maybe they already flew away. I didn’t ask. I wanted to be a support like any good sister would.
So I asked her if butterflies were good symbols for new life.
“They’re safe,” she wrote me. Did I tell you we were texting on our computers? You may have figured that out from the not-getting-up-from-my-computer comment, but now you know for sure.
Anyway, my sister sometimes types goofy. What she actually sent me was “Sage.”
I almost asked her if butterflies smelled like sage, but she can get testy about her typing. So I just asked her if sage was helpful in creating abstract paintings.
Her exact words, and I’m not taking this up, were “You are such a help.”
So I’m on a quest today to find out how sage and butterflies and abstract skies combine into a new painting. I might even let you see her results. (Probably not mine, though.) Stay tuned.
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by Kathy Brasby | Mar 5, 2019 | Leadership, Paul
Leaders make decisions that are for the good of their tribe, based on clear goals. But what if those decisions land the leaders in trouble?
We’ve been following the story of Paul and Silas as they were visiting the ancient Greek city of Philippi.* Paul’s goal was to explain the story of Jesus to the people he met. His first encounter was at a prayer meeting. That went well.
Paul later met a servant girl who could tell the future. She was shouting words that were misleading people from what Paul was trying to teach, and so he commanded the spirit to leave her. That didn’t go as well.
The demon came out of the girl, but the servant girl’s masters lost their source of wealth. They were charging people for her fortunes.
Paul and Silas ended up in jail. They were severely beaten, and their feet clamped in stocks. Prisons in those days were miserable places, cold and damp.
Wouldn’t it be easy for Paul to re-examine his decision? The prayer group experience soared. Why had he tampered with the servant girl?
Locked away in a dark prison, Paul felt the bruises and the dried blood from his beating. Was that servant girl really worth this kind of torture?
Clarity of the goal always helps a leader and Paul didn’t forget why he had come to Philippi. It wasn’t for a cushy place to stay and a small group who hung on his every word. It was also for a poor servant girl who spoke words she didn’t understand. Paul had come to be sure people heard clearly the story of Jesus. This servant girl deserved to hear – not to distract others from the truth.
So Paul and Silas remained devoted to that goal. They were in prison, but that didn’t change their aim. Their audience now was other prisoners, and so they prayed and sang hymns to God – in part so the other prisoners would hear more about the nature of God.
God did amazing work that night. A massive earthquake shook the prison, and the doors flew open. Chains fell off. The jailer awoke to a shattered prison and assumed he had lost all the prisoners. That was the death penalty in the Roman empire, but Paul intervened.
“We’re all here!” he told the jailer. That’s impressive leadership in itself: the prisoners had not scooted away like cockroaches when the lights come on. They stayed with Paul.
Once again, Paul stayed focused on his goal. He wanted to tell people the story of Jesus. He wanted to explain the fantastic work of God. He was able to do that with the prayer group. And now he was able to tell a jailer about Jesus.
Talk about a transformation! The jailer listened and believed. He told his household. He cared for the prisoners and washed their wounds. He took them to his own house and gave them a meal.
Had Paul lost focus on his goal, he wouldn’t have taken the risk to free the servant girl. Had he forgotten why he came to Philippi, he could have escaped with the earthquake hit. In both cases, he took a risk.
But when the morning came, people had been changed. They found new life in Jesus.
Whether the immediate results are painful or joyful, leaders make decisions based on their goals. Even if it means time in a cold and painful dungeon.
*Acts 16
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