by Kathy Brasby | Aug 19, 2023 | Country life, Family, Hope, Humor
This morning, I buckled on my sharp shiny sword and stepped out the door to do battle with the monsters growing at the edge of my property. I had postponed this for weeks, but it had to be done before the day got any hotter and the monsters got bolder.
The cult movie, The Little Shop of Horrors, featured a sentient carnivorous plant named Aubrey II that fed on human blood. My own monsters were threatening to swallow vehicles for the moment before moving on.
I wasn’t sure if my plants were carnivorous but why let them keep growing?
Was the dog safe? The chickens? See why I needed the sword? [spacer height=”30px”]
Prone to exaggeration
Because I have been known to exaggerate, I need to clarify that my sharp shiny sword is really a DeWalt cordless pruner, but hey, tomayto, tomahto.
This pruner can cut through three-inch limbs, so I strapped it on and headed for the monster forest surrounding my wood pile. Oh, the irony.
We’ve had a Seattle kind of year in normally arid northeastern Colorado. Really. We usually get about fifteen inches of rain a year while Seattle gets more like 34. Flip-flop those this year and you get the idea why the monsters were so eager to stretch into trees.
They’ve been thirsty forever and finally gulping gallons of rain.
Gulping gallons
This year, entire stacks of wood have disappeared within their jungle. Maybe devoured by the hungry dripping teeth of the Aubrey II’s out there.
Just for clarity, these are more like hybrid Aubrey II’s. Some people call them wild sunflowers. But potayto, potahto.
These guys are threatening to blot out the sunlight and swallow not only the log splitter in the yard but the privacy fence. The uncut logs. My entire house.
Last month’s hail storm left dents in heavy metal but didn’t even bruise these plants.
The trunk of several were bigger than my wrist. Huge by wrist standards.
I started by gripping the base of one and pulling in case it didn’t have a good root system. Maybe they’d all fall like dominoes and my work would be done.
As it turned out, if they could stand up to the pounding hail, my grip was a mere annoyance and no more.
I was kind of afraid of that.
Out came the sword. (Remember: tomayto, tomahto.)
Wrong choice
I should have worn a hard hat instead of gloves because it turned out the sword was mightier than the monster. The sunflowers began falling with a crash onto my head.
Imagine sunflowers succumbing to my trusty sword (humor me here) and slamming onto the ground. Or me, depending which was closer.
It was usually me.
Domino effect. Clunk, clunk, clunk. Onto my head. (That alone may explain this post. Brain injured.)
I now have a pile of slain sunflowers by my driveway. The monsters had surrounded an old coffee table, two tree stumps, and a tomato cage.
And, boy, am I glad that I got those rescued.
That’s my report for today and you can believe whatever you want. Just like The Little Shop of Horrors.
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by Kathy Brasby | Sep 24, 2022 | Family, Humor
I didn’t know I was a contrarian until I bought that mouth guard set.
I had noticed in the last few months that my teeth were tired every morning. I had never been a teeth grinder before, so I resisted the idea for a while.
But I finally buckled and ordered in a mouthpiece kit. It came with four gummy pieces that looked like what the dentist used to fill with some goopy paste and then stick in your mouth to get an impression of your teeth. The goop tasted okay but sometimes persisted.
So that, maybe you went out to eat after the dentist appointment and discovered, after smiling brightly at the waiter, that paste crumbs were hanging from your lips like miniature stalactites. Theoretically.
Well, this kit didn’t have any goopy paste.
No goopy paste but stern instructions, though, for molding the mouthpiece.
So, I quote:
Immerse mouth guard in hot water 175 to 180 degrees.
Where was my candy thermometer again?
Oh, yeah, my daughter had borrowed the thermometer. So I would not know exactly what the water was.
I guessed. I still wasn’t in contrarian stage. Just practical, although that might be the precursor to contrarian. Still puzzling that idea.
Next instruction: Soak for ten to fifteen seconds. Must be less than twenty seconds.
Wait, what?
Must be less than twenty seconds?
I’m pretty sure this is when the contrarian started to lift its head. Just what would happen if I left the mouth guard in the water for, say, twenty-one seconds?
Maybe at twenty-three seconds, the mouth guard turned into a gelatinous mass like a jellyfish floating in the water. Or like a glass octopus. Or a transparent sea cucumber. (Who came up with that creative name? Probably the same scientist who named his dog Dog.)
So theoretically, there was a jellyfish floating in the water after my temperature guess.
Since there were four mouth pieces in the kit, I wondered if they assumed somebody might test their instructions?
After the fifteen seconds heating-up period comes the next order. I mean, instruction.
Use a wooden spoon and wooden chopsticks to fish the mouthpiece out of the hot water.
I double checked.
Yep, it said AND. And wooden chopsticks.
I don’t have any wooden chopsticks. Whelp, time to just figure it out myself. I used a wooden spoon and then plopped the piece on a dish towel. I didn’t need another jellyfish if this mouthpiece was allergic to metal spoons.
Oops. I didn’t read ahead. I was supposed to lower the mouth guard onto a paper.
A paper.
Sure.
This was getting dumb.
Then the instructions said to let the mouth guard cool for three to five seconds.
I didn’t know I’d need a stopwatch when I started this process.
Well, I lowered nothing onto a paper.
I plopped the piece onto the dish towel and then shoved it over my teeth. I had watched the dentist do that, so I knew how.
I bit down into something slightly firmer than Jello at a church potluck.
By now, I was in full rebel mode.
Fifteen seconds here. A paper there. And then the last instruction.
Leave the piece in mouth for exactly ten seconds.
Uh-huh. Exactly ten seconds. I’d have chastised the instructions, except it was hard to talk with that piece of old Jello in my mouth.
Just to show them, I pulled the mouth guard out when I felt like it. I wasn’t timing that.
Good grief. I can count one-Mississippi as well as anybody, but there was a principle here. The principle of “don’t be ridiculous.”
Then….
No more instructions.
What do I do next?
Well, at that point, I did what any contrarian would do. I figured it out. Included in the kit was a little blue plastic case for the mouthpiece so it’s resting there until it cools into something stiffer than melted gelatin.
But now that I know I am a rule breaker, I suppose I’ll find out at bedtime if I will even use this gummy thing.
I’ll let you know later. Or maybe I won’t.
This contrarian stuff is pretty fun.
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by Kathy Brasby | Aug 26, 2022 | Family, Humor, Stories
I didn’t notice the rug burn on my knee until I was ready for bed. Hmmm.
Couch potatoes don’t have these issues.
Couch Potatoes Don’t Have Those
I have old scars on my knees from that cruel and ancient practice of requiring girls to wear dresses to school. I may still be bitter about that rule.
This elementary girl couldn’t stop running and somehow my feet didn’t cooperate all the time. Crash. Another scraped knee. Another scar.
Couch potatoes don’t have those.
My high school hosted a girls’ football game to raise funds for something that I’ve forgotten. We played flag football. No tackling. Just powder puff style.
I remember running with the football tucked under my arm and getting hit so hard that my breath flew away as I hit the ground. I fumbled the ball too. So much for the flag.
I could barely walk at school the next day, what with the sore muscles and bruises.
Speaking of barely walking, I was tossed over the head of my horse one weekend when I was home from college. Gypsy was galloping, and I asked her to slow down. She stopped. Dime kind of stop.
And I went over her head. I was nineteen, but I walked around like a ninety-year-old for a few days.
As an adult, I mellowed into more gentle sports. Like softball. Cycling. Skiing.
Speaking of Softball
Speaking of softball, I once found my left foot trapped under the fence behind home plate. As the catcher, I had to retrieve any balls that got past me and went to the fence. I knew the opponent was steaming home from third base, so I hustled to the fence, planted my foot, and went under.
It took both coaches and an umpire to lift the stiff fence off my ankle. My team didn’t have another catcher, so I limped back to my position.
Couch potatoes don’t have to put up with that.
Memories of softball games came up recently over lunch with a friend. She perked up. She’d played softball, too.
“Do you still have your softball glove?”
“Of course. You?”
We planned to play catch just because we miss throwing a ball around. Feeling a little nostalgic and unfulfilled, maybe.
Couch potatoes don’t get those urges.
I was five months pregnant, downhill skis strapped to my feet and our four-year-old sitting on the chairlift seat beside me, when the lift died.
We had hoped for one more run down the slope. Instead, we hung for an hour before the crew started lowering people to the ground on ropes. I never told them I was pregnant. I didn’t have time for the panic.
Couch potatoes don’t have to swing on a chairlift with a little boy for an hour, keeping him calm and warm.
Why do I complicate my life so?
The Watch Panic
Recently I crawled inside an enclosed cage retrieving young roosters. I had to roll onto my side to turn around so I could crawl out. No problem. I dropped onto an elbow, scotched around, and headed for the cage door.
And I heard a wild beeping. Was someone calling me?
I glanced at my watch, affectionately called “Dick Tracy” by my sister. Well, maybe not affectionately, now that I think about it. My watch sometimes poaches calls from my phone, which she thinks is goofy.
This watch plays music, tracks my steps, and alerts me to texts and calls. It ought to cook meals too.
Back to my story. My watch was shrieking, gaining volume with the second. Almost the shaking in terror. I looked closer. It hovered over the 9-1-1 call, assuming I had fallen. I punched a button. No, I didn’t need 9-1-1.
My watch was stubborn. Was I sure I hadn’t fallen? Yeah, pretty sure.
Can you imagine explaining that to the deputies who would have had to respond? No, officer, really, I’m fine. I just planted my elbow in the rooster pen.
Yeah, rooster pen.
My watch panicked last winter when I had to knock the ice out of a rubber pan so I could put out more water for my ducks. I slammed the pan on the frozen ground and my watch immediately leaped to alert mode, ready to call the deputies again.
“I didn’t fall,” I told the Dick Tracy. “I didn’t even leave my feet.” So why I was talking to my watch? My sister hadn’t even called.
Couch potatoes don’t have these problems.
New Plan
I have a new plan for this year. I’m slowing down. It’s time.
But I have to run a 5K with my grandson. It’s his first and he’s only nine. How could I refuse?
I’m riding my bike five or six—OK, sometimes ten miles a day—because it’s a new bike and I have a new helmet. Can’t let those go to waste.
I’ve started lifting weights, too, to keep the kids happy. And those extra muscles handle the feed bags a lot better.
So you can see that I’ve slowed down. No more skinned knees or planted elbows.
My watch doesn’t hover in ready mode anymore. It probably thinks I’ve retired into couch potato mode.
Well, yeah, I did shut off its fall alarm.
Out of concern for the deputies.
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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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