BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

As promised, I am throwing together a few blogs about our adventures on vacation. Please make note that they won’t necessarily be in chronological order as far as the vacation itself went. They are actually in “transcribed jotted down note order,” which makes sense to me, but not really everyone else. At any rate, this is number three in the series…

A Yellow Headed Blackbird... Native to the Tetons

So there we were… Grand Tetons… Jackson Lake… Signal Mountain.

Beautiful scenery, wild “thangs” running around all over the place, and I’m not just talking about E K, mind you. Yes… She is the quintessential “Redheaded Wild Thang,” but there were other furry, feathered, scaled, and otherwise armored critters running about the land of desert, prairie, mountain, whatever…

Seriously. There are pictures. One of them is over there to the left. We saw that crazy little bastage running around at one of the scenic pullouts that overlooked a prairie-like tableau, complete with the Teton mountain range in the background. Just for the record, I can show you the pics of the critters, but not of The Redhead being all wild. There are laws…

So… Again… There we were, coming down off yet another mountain. Or maybe we were cruising about on the two lane highway betwixt point A and point B. Or maybe it was a combination thereof. I’m here to tell ya’, it tends to get mixed up after a bit… The thing is, we were in the rental Jeep, with E K behind the wheel – Why? Because we were on our way somewhere and because E K has to be in control at all times. Y’all should know that by now.

Something else I’ve mentioned about The Redhead Who Shall Be Obeyed, is that she has some sort of organic GPS built into her brain. That, or a lodestone. Probably both. The only problem she will run into with it is, of course, construction that she wasn’t warned about, and the unfortunate occasions when she neglects to download the map updates to her brainpain – she has a Firewire socket on the back of her head, ya’know… This was one of those incidents.

The Tetons hiding in the clouds...

Where was I? Oh yeah… We were traveling and The Evil One hadn’t updated her Grey Matter 2000 GPS. Not to worry… Liz was in the back seat with a map, and she was feeding coordinates to the redhead, so all was good. In fact, Liz not only had a map, she also had a book that contained all manner of info about various attractions in the area – a tourist guide of sorts. We not only used this to figure out what we WANTED to see, but also what we should probably avoid – as in, too many tourists. Now, during all of this map deciphering, Liz enlisted the aid of the O-spring to read some of the smaller print.

“Why?” the child wanted to know.

“Because I’m blind as a bat,” Liz replied.

And so, all was still good. The o-spring read the small print, and together she and her Aunt Liz provided targeting coordinates to the Redheaded Tank Commander behind the wheel.

At one point, after offering up some pretty spectacular information and directions – much like the folks on the Bing commercials who spit out a whole list of things – we all mentioned how great it was that Liz had the book along with her.

Liz replied, “I just love books and maps.”

This prompted a comment from the tween, “If you’re blind as a bat then why do you love books and maps so much?”

“What do you mean?” Liz asked.

O-spring rephrased her question. “Well, if you’re blind as a bat you can’t see, so how can you read them?”

Instant logic. Just add gifted tween.

We all chuckled. Well, all of us grups did, anyway.

Liz, being quick with a comeback herself, explained, “I just use my bat sonar.”

I'm A Bison... Moooo

Again, we all laughed. Except the o-spring. She puzzled over the comment for a moment, remaining silent as we drove along. After a few moments, our chuckling and chittering died down, and all that was left to fill the void was the sound of the tires against Wyoming pavement.

Then, without warning, child-o-mine spoke up again, deadpan serious as she explained,  “I don’t think you can use echolocation to read maps and books…”

Good thing E K didn’t wrap the Jeep around a Bison on that one. The damn things were everywhere. As it was, we had to clean Cherry Coke off the inside of the windshield and driver’s side dash. You know how those rental car outfits are about the extra cleaning charges…

More to come…

Murv

We’re about to have a problem… A BIG one. As in, Cat on a Stick.

As most of you know, we tend to rescue animals. Cats, in particular. Now, while we haven’t been taking any in for several years now, we recently ended up in a situation where we DID take in a half-drowned, flea-bitten, six-week old, somewhat feral kitten rescued from a highway post flash-flood.

E K and I wanted to call him ARK (Almost Road Kill) because the person who picked him up actually saw him nearly get hit by a car. When I say nearly, I mean the kitten was literally pummeled by the rush of air from the vehicle’s tires as it screamed by on the highway. In fact, the person picking him up thought that he actually HAD been hit. As it turned out, he hadn’t. Good thing too, because there wasn’t much of him there to hit… As it turns out, the o-spring sort of adopted him for her own, so she named him Tiger. Me, I just call him “Nachos El Tigre” or, more recently, “You #$@@^&* SH*THEAD!”

Why? Because the little bastage has taken to playing under my desk. Now, it’s already bad enough that I’m getting kitten needle claws stuck in my legs, but that’s not the BIG issue. The BIG issue is that he has discovered the cords on the back of my computer.

Actual pic of Sh*thead "killing" the feather on a stick...

And he plays with them…

And he unplugs them…

Or he jumps up and down on the UPS until he lands on the button…

Know what happens?

My system shuts down. Unceremoniously. Without warning. WITH extreme prejudice. Killing and corrupting files that I have open.

Fortunately, he hasn’t destroyed a manuscript yet. Besides, I keep those backed up all over the place so we should be safe.

But I’m here to tell you, if the little sh*t messes up any of my “pR0N”, he’s toast… Just kidding. I back that up too… 😉

More to come…

Murv