Pigs in a bladder

I had to have this surgery yesterday and now I have to really take it easy.  No lifting anything heavier than a gallon of milk, no coughing, and no hysterical fits of laughter.  Okay, sure it sounds easy enough but I have this insane children who are constantly coming up with off the wall things.

So my daughter asked me what a manger was, because you know, they laid the baby Jesus in a manger.  So I explained to her that a manger is like a huge wooden box that they stick hay in to feed the cows.  She asked me if the cows ate out of a manger and I said “yes.” 

Then she asked me if the cows tried to eat the baby.  Honestly, how do you answer a thing like that.  I had to bite my finger and keep from laughing.  I sure am glad that we are all out of tootsie roll mustaches.

Oh don’t worry.  It wasn’t a serious surgery or anything.  The doctor just lifted my fallen bladder and stuck it in a sling mesh made out of some sort of pig body part.  The ear I think, that’s roundish isn’t it.  My cells have to fuse into the mesh until I become one with the pig.  This got me wondering…”Is this Kosher?”

In the Jewish faith, pigs are unclean and anything unclean is called “trife.”  When pigs were labeled trife this was before handwashing, vaccines, anti-biotics, and modern sterilization techniques.  The doctor swore up and down on the Torah that the body part she used from that filthy unclean animal was completely free of disease and bacteria and was completely sterile. 

So I guess it’s okay, and especially because I’m just a lowly Gentile, and it’s okay for me to be part trife.  But I still wonder if I could have the pig sling if I had been Jewish.  There is an alternative synthetic sling, but I hear they have problems with those and the body doesn’t recognize the material and fights it and causes a serious infection. 

That which does not kill us makes us stronger, so why would you hold fast to a practice that has been remedied by modern medicine.  I guess those poor old Jewish ladies all walk around peeing all over themselves because they can have a pig mesh to fix their prolapsed bladder.  Personally, I think that’s unclean.

I learned on a TED talk that doctors use pig materials as replacements in humans because the pig cells are very close to humans.  So I wonder if some humans at one time evolved into pigs and Jewish people knew this and made it forbidden to eat the pigs because that would be cannibalism.  But I wonder, though, If I can ever become Jewish now that I have this pig organ in me.  Do you think they have a “Don’t ask, don’t tell policy?” 

When you become Jewish, do they give you one of those past history sheets where you have to answer whether or not you have received a pig transplant? That would be a shame, because Jewish folk tales are so wonderful and I do hope to meet a Rabbi Some time who would tell me some wonderful stories and I am afraid now that Jewish people might not be allowed to come near me now.

Frugal Tips for Tightwads

According to my son, cell phone charges are the most left behind items in hotels.  So if yours happens to break or you lose it, just drive to your local hotel and say you spent the night last night and left it in one of the rooms.  Chances are they have a box full of cell phone cords just waiting for their owners and you are bound to find one that fits yours.

New Innovations from the Gifted Youth of Today.

 

My biggest problem in life is the stupid little speakers that plug into the mp3 players.  They work for two weeks and then they break.  I keep having to buy speakers over and over again.  That’s when my gifted and talented teenager came up with this brilliant idea. 

The human speaker

He swears that if you get the angle right in the nostril, the sound will come out of your mouth and enable others to listen on the headphones. 

Why risk loosing your hearing with headphones when you can just stick them up your nose?

Garage Sale of the Future

 

It’s that time again and I am so excited….that’s when the future garage sale catalogs come in the mail and I can get a sneak peak of everything that will be tossed out onto front lawns across America and sold for a buck.

 

I am wishing and praying that Garage Sale Gary, the patron saint of Garage Sailing, will lead me to the house that is selling Cotton Candy Maker, unused and still in the box. 

Have a look at it…it’s awesome, it turns hard candy into cotton candy.  It’s amazing, it’s magic, $39.99 now plus tax and credit card interest over six months.  But I don’t need that 20% off coupon, and I don’t have to hope for someone to   buy it for me  because I have faith that this handy dandy machine, plus all the other new innovative gadgets will all be for sale at every garage sale all summer long. 

I’m not psychic, I’ve just been watching the madness from the sidelines because I am far to weird for normal people to socialize with.

Every year, year after year, it’s the same old thing.  You have a Christmas party at work, a Christmas party at school, then a Christmas party with the extended family that you never see because they drive your crazy, then another Christmas party with all the friends you really do like, and then lastly, the Christmas party with the relatives that you really like, but aren’t sure if they like you back.

For each and every person that you know, you have to buy a gift.  We have to buy people gifts, because if we don’t, they will think we either don’t like the friend, or we are being miserly like Ebeneezer Scrooge. 

And forget about re-gifting, that is taboo and socially unacceptable.  It means that we don’t like the gift, and it symbolizes our cold hearted ingratitude toward our friends.  So we have to buy the best gifts that our friends will be sure to never get rid of.  We must buy the gifts that our loved ones will cherish for all seasons and until the end of time (which won’t be long, actually, because my parents believe that it is the end times, but that’s another story).

If you are a kind God fearing pious human being with love in your heart, you will never get rid of anything that anyone gives you and you can either spend thousands of dollars on household organizing systems and spend all day and all night organizing the mounds of worthless objects.

or you can just live in the clutter and hopefully get your house put on the TV show, “Hoarders”…

All of this money is spent on other people who don’t really want the gifts in the first place and in return you get a house full of clutter and realize that you everything you don’t need and nothing that you really do need and so you hit the after Christmas sales.  On the credit card right?

 

But if you just eliminated these insane Christmas spendings for a few years you would have so much money that you could pay off the credit cards, your cars, and even the mortgage and have loads of money to buy the finer things in life, like marble for the bathroom floors and those nice Japanese toilets that wash and dry your fanny after you do your business.

There is a group of people who swear that Christmas has been commercialized and we should say no to buying anything for Christmas.  I used to like Christmas until everyone ruined it with making me feel guilty with not buying them loads of things.  The teacher send notes with the kids and they have to have a new gift that costs $5 and it must be new.  But I have 4 kids, so I have to spend twenty bucks on new pieces of crap that will be sold for a quarter at a garage sale next July.

I’ve really been giving this a lot of thought and I have decided that Christmas isn’t the problem.  I think that people are just spending way too much money all year long on anything and everything they see and by the time Christmas comes along, they don’t need anything else and its just buying stuff for the sake of trying to out do the rest of the year.

So here is my solution to making Christmas enjoyable again:

1. Eliminate gift exchanges – it’s just crap that will end up under a pile of clutter or at a garage sale.

2. Don’t buy anything all year round.  Write a list of everything that you really need for the house or clothing or tools or anything.  Ask to borrow from a friend, anything that you absolutely have to have.  Then buy everything on the list at Christmas time.  This will eliminate all that clutter and save you thousands of dollars every year.

3.  If you have to go to a gift exchange, make cookies, fudge, caramels, or bon bons, tie them with a pretty ribbon and give it away….no overspending…no excess clutter…no ill feelings of regret…you can’t throw out the gift…you can eat it.

Use the money you save with the “no buying anything all year” theory and use it to pay off your debt and pay cash for your new red Ferrari.  Seriously, what would rather have…garage filled with worthless clutter, or a garage with a sportscar? 

The best things come to those who wait.  Waste naught, want naught.  (naught means nothing)

Have you been naughty this year?

Weeds may be legal, but I’m not growing them in my garden

 

Okay, so like, maybe I am.  But I didn’t plant them.  Our house was a foreclosure.  That means we bought it cheap from the bank because the previous owners didn’t take care of it and decided not to pay the mortgage.  So naturally, we have mostly weeds and barely any grass.  The entire yard is filled with this horrid crab grass. 

 

Weeds are like problems.  Let one get out of hand …let one go to seed…

and the whole dad gum yard is filled up with them.  They are alive and they grow fast and pretty soon, there are so many that it seems overwhelming…you just don’t know where to start.

Other people’s weeds can blow their seeds into a perfect lawn.  You have to be on your toes all the time to have the perfect lawn.  Is it worth it?

If you are the only one who cares, there’s a rough road ahead.

I care, though.  I want a nice pretty lawn.  But I’m a cheapskate tightwad and I don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars a month paying someone to spray my yard with chemicals and fertilizers.  So I started thinking.  How can I have a beautiful yard and not spend any money at all? 

I tried weed killer.  But this is Texas crabcrass and weed killer is like fertilizer to this stuff.  I tried to pull it out, but the roots are too deep and there’s so many of them.

So then I had it.  I decided to boil them all to death.  So for the past three days I have been boiling water in the kettle and pouring boiling water on each and every nest of crabgrass in the yard.

This is a great way to meet up with neighbors and catch the latest gossip.  And speaking of gossip, I made a joke that the neighbor killed his wife and stuck her on a moving van.  Well I was half right.  It turns out that the crazy lady that lives behind me has a daughter who shot herself a few weeks ago.  Yup.  She killed herself.  I kinda feel bad, but still, you know.  I guess she’s such a psychopath that she ran her own kid into the ground.  Talk about naysayers. 

So here’s my strategy for the thrifty lawn:

Step 1 : Kill all weeds

Step 2: Fertilize with fish fertilizer and epsom salts in the springtime

Step 3: Let the grass grow so long that it grows to seed while keeping out all the bad weeds.

Step 4: Mow the thick lush lawn. 

Step 5: Ignore comments made by naysayers who want to tell me this won’t work, but have no earthly idea what will work. 

By the way, I can afford to spend loads of money on my lawn, but I am saving money to purchase rental property.  I don’t want to look poor, and yet at the same time, I don’t want to spend money.  There is method to my madness.  I promise.

Beware The Naysayer

A Word about Naysayers.

Are you prone to frequent illness? Are you clumsy?  Do you habitually fail at tests that you have studied for?

 

Do you do poorly at tasks that you have prepared for tremendously no matter what positive thinking tactics you attempt to use?  Do you have trouble focusing and paying attention?

Do you have streaks of bad luck that never seem to end?  Do things around you perpetually break?

Then you very well have a naysayer in your life.  It could be you.  It could be some lady in the PTA who overheard you talking about the new wood floor you’ve just installed in your vacation home and they are jealous.  Or worse yet.  It could be your grandmother.  It could be anybody. 

I know who my naysayer is.  It’s my very own grandmother. 

My grandmother is the lady on the left.  The lady on the right tragically died shortly after this picture was taken.  She tripped and fell on a knife that was sticking point up in the dishwasher.

When I was 5, I wanted to do handstands and cartwheels.  I practiced all day and night and finally I could do a perfect cartwheel.  I said “Hey Meemaw, look at me, I can do a cartwheel.”
She looked at me, and with her look came the evil eye.  My back bent the wrong direction and my hands landed in the only clump of briars in that grassy meadow.  And I hit my head on a very sharp rock that caused me to bleed so much that my mother forbade me to do gymnastics ever again.

This is not the only incident.  In fact, I have spent years making charts and analyzing the misfortunes of my life using the scientific method and other science things like petrie dishes and litmus paper and I have gathered loads of evidence to support this theory, which I now believe is fact. 

I am usually a wonderful cook, but when I cook anything when my grandmother is around it magically gets burned or too salty or the crust on the bread is too tough.  And then she says “Well, you’ll learn.”  Oh yeah?  I’ll learn.  That’s just great.  And then she makes fun of me because I can’t cook and compares me to Lucy Ricardo!

Whenever I am around my grandma, I trip over things, or get bad burns.  One time, I lived with her when I was taking some college classes.  I studied my brains out every night for hours and barely scraped by with 70 percent. 

There is some circuit in her brain that is is malfunctioning and causing bad things to happen. 

Now she’s in a nursing home.  She wants me to visit all the time.  I used to bring all my kids for a visit.  But my kids were nearly attacked by some old lady’s dog. (They let the old people have their animals at this home) and on the way back home, I got a speeding ticket because of this speed trap that I completely forgot about.  I never forget about that speed trap.  I am a slow driver. 

And the last time I visited her, I got a flat tire on the road as I left.  So I stopped visiting her.  But it’s not over.  I dream about her at night.  She comes to me in my sleep and gives me guilt trips.

 

Living in suburbia

 

I have these really annoying neighbors that always seem to be poking their noses over my back fence and coming over to tell me that my children are too noisy or that they are yelling curse words in the street or being victims of acorn chucking thugs in the street.

You know the type, they make up stories about me and spread nasty rumors around the neighborhood about me that have no basis on reality.

 

Anyway, I couldn’t help but notice today that there was a moving van parked in front of their house for a couple of hours.  It wasn’t a nice kind of moving van that rich people use, it was a budget moving van, and a small one at that.

I have been on my knees day and night praying to my dear lord and savior begging for his divine mercy… begging him to make those pesky good for nothing scoundrels move back to Oklahoma where they came from.

Thats why they are so horrible, it’s because they’re from Oklahoma, you know.

I wonder if it would be prudent to march over there with a clipboard and start asking questions, because I am just dying to find out if they are really moving away. 

I mean, they do this sort of thing to me all the time, I might as well get my kicks, right.  so I made up a list of questions to ask them when they answer their door.

1. Are you moving away?

2.  Why was there a moving van parked outside your house?

3.  Are you having marital problems?

4.  Is it about money? 

5.  Are you having financial problems.

6.  Tell me how much money you make annually and all your expenses and I will help you out with your budget.  I’m really good with money. 

I bet the wife left the husband.  He’s a nasty fellow that suffers from anger management problems. 

Actually, I think that the husband killed the wife and stuck her in the Budget moving van and checked the van out under my name.  I hear he works for the CIA, he has connections. 

I bet they are moving away because they were really offended by the ten foot fence we put up between our house and theirs. Maybe they are depressed because they have lost their only source of entertainment.

I’m going to go ask them what’s going on.  If I’m not back in 5 minutes, call Budget moving van rentals and ask them to check their storage units for dead bodies.

Protecting your loved ones in the Zombie Apocolypse

In case you haven’t heard the News, it’s 2012, and it’s the end of the world.

……And Zombies are everywhere.

If you’re like me, you are sick and tired of chopping off heads and burning those vile ferocious beasts.  It’s stinky and disgusting, causes terrible nightmares, and frankly, its bothering the children.

That’s why I use

Raid Zombie Barrier Spray.

Just spray the perimeter of your house with this pleasant smelling foam and Zombies won’t come near your home for six to twelve weeks, guaranteed or your money back.

Even if Zombies haven’t invaded your neighborhood, this is definitely something your apocalypse survival kit should not be without.

But wait there’s more.  With every purchase of Raid brand Zombie barrier spray, you can get a free sample of the new Combat brand Zombie Bait station.

Just leave this outside your home and Zombies will snack on the contents and bring the poison back to others in the Zombie nest.

Let’s face it, zombie problems can get out of hand and nasty if left untreated.  So buy your protection today and stop the problem before you have an infestation.

Okay, my kids tell me that zombies aren’t real.  But maybe they are real.  Maybe Zombies are some sort of metaphor or analogy of a type of person who exists that people are subconsciously afraid of.

Maybe zombies are people on meth-amphetamines who are just living without using their brain.

Or maybe zombies are people who just just aren’t living consciously and are completely unaware that modern day society is completely computerized.  Art isn’t beautiful anymore!  Artists can only express themselves by tattooing themselves because they are afraid that whatever they paint will be paint over with beige neutral tones!