Yesterday for One-Liner Wednesday, I shared something my subconscious spat out during a dream that involved clowns and telephone wire. Naturally, there were a couple of people who wanted to know what I thought it meant, and my reply was “I dunno.” I think it’s one of those “cow tools” moments for which there are really no explanations. Birgit, who is a faithful reader of this blog and whose blog you really should be reading because it’s excellent, asked me “what’s your take on clowns?” Since one of Mama Kat’s prompts for today is “Write a blog post inspired by the word: creepy,” I thought answering Birgit’s question would be a good way to approach this.
Mary and I never had kids, but my brothers have done their part in repopulating the planet: six boys and one girl between the three of them. I won’t embarrass the kid or the father, but this is just too good not to share.
The perfect comeback to “I changed my mind” is “Thank goodness! Does this one work better?”
Remember “Pat” from Saturday Night Live, back in the days when it was actually funny? (source: Giphy)
No, seriously… Sunday, I was hard at work writing all the blog entries for this week, and for today I referred to the big master list of prompts Kat sent out. I thought I had the right group of prompts, but it was the one for next week.
I was just going to let it publish, then thought, “nah…” So you’ll see that one next week. That is, if it’s on the list.
I really don’t like change that much. There was a time that I embraced it, but as I’ve gotten older I realize I am getting a little more set in my ways. I think that’s the reason I stayed at my last job for almost 20 years, and would probably still be there if I hadn’t agreed to leave when I did.
On the other hand, I installed the new version of MacOS, Mojave, today, and I actually kind of like it. As with all new version of MacOS, there’s a lot of garbage I’ll never use and can’t get rid of. I can’t move it into a folder called “Apple Crap I’ll Never Use” either. I tried and a box came up and said, “sorry, that’s part of the operating system.” Hey, it’s my computer, I should be able to do whatever the hell I want to it. Maybe I’ll suggest it to them, even though I know what the answer would be. “We would have replied to your request sooner, but we hadn’t stopped laughing at it yet.”
Did you ever want to get in a time machine and go back to times when you really screwed something up, or times when you just thought of the appropriate comeback, or times that you had the choice to do something that you know you should have done, and just didn’t do it? Kind of like Back To The Future, but serious? Yeah, me too.
I always wanted to learn German. What gave me that idea was my days as a paperboy, when I had one customer who took the Abendpost, a German-language newspaper we had in Chicago (and probably other parts of the country, I don’t know). I learned the days of the week delivering that little paper: Montag, Dienstag, Mittwoch, Donnerstag, Freitag, Samstag, und Sontag (the weekend Abendpost was the Sontagpost, even though I delivered it on Saturday). Problem was, I never went to a high school that offered it, and in college I didn’t have the presence of mind to say, “no, I’m not going to take Latin, I’m going to start another language.”
Both my mother and Grandma Holton took German, so I can’t see where they’d’ve had a problem with it. Grandma said that, when she took it, they had to learn to read and write Fraktur, the Blackletter script that all German used to be written in.
Fraktur-Walbaum script. (Source: Ranveig Thattai/Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0)
I guess the Nazis decided to go with more modern typefaces and declared Fraktur Judenschrift (i.e. Jewish script) and thus illegal. So Mom didn’t have to learn it.
On the other hand, I might have taken French or Spanish. I taught myself enough Spanish to be able to communicate with my crew when I was working as a production supervisor. Maybe knowing Latin helped me learn Spanish. I’ve heard that learning Latin and French helps you in both languages. Makes you wonder why.
For now, though, I think I’ll just stick with English.
