Neanderpundit

Wife and daughter are big fans of Dead Mobster, and while I’m not, I do like the garlic rolls and the Lobster Bisque. Anyway, how can you hose up Lobster Bisque? between that and the garlic biscuit, I dreampt last night that I was out on a job, on a machine so worn out that it should have been replaced ages before, and for whatever reason one of my co-workers-the lady who does all the parts ordering and makes sure our expenses get paid on time- was there helping me.

Now, she’s a tiny thing, but she has the soul of an engineer. When and where she grew up, Girls didn’t become Engineers, so she’s a housewife and personal assistant, but she would have been an excellent wrench, but for a bit more upper body strength.

Anyway, she and i are looking at this machine, and she’s being uncharacteristically frank. “This machine is fucked. We shouldn’t be trying to ressurect it, we should roll the stone back over the cave and start a fire.”

I agreed, but still, there we were.

The base of the machine was full of chips, having been used for many, many years with very little maintenance, and the chips were predominantly cast iron and aluminum; the cast was rusty and caked, and the aluminum (and apparently a bit of magnesium) were pretty evenly mixed.

“can we get this machine outside to clean it?” she said, and while I thought it an unusual request, the customer complied, I pulled the power and air, and they forklifted it far out onto the apron of the loading dock and sat it on blocks. They brought out a Hotsy and sat it there, and we went to lunch.

Not before she lit a cigarette out of a large book of matches from the Gobbler, took one long hit (She doesn’t even smoke!) and stuck the cigarette butt first into the end of the pack. She placed the pack on the congealed mass of rusty iron shavings and alloys in the base of the machine and we went off to have a gyro, whcih she ate daintily with her face, using her hands not once to nibble the pieces of Doner Kebab off the plate. Never even got a drop of tsa-tsi-ki sauce anywhere on her. Me, I used both hands and eleven napkins, and by the time I was done, I looked like I blew a seal.

When we returned, the Goldschmidt reaction was in full bloom. Representatives of the company were standing around, trying to extinguish the flames with what they had at hand, which was the Hotsy. It wasn’t working so well. The melt burned through the base of the machine and a trickle of molten iron and boiling aluminum was dribbling down the driveway where it pooled in a small pothole.

The customer got a new machine off insurance money, we didn’t have to fix the machine, and we got a free lunch out fo the deal. Winning!! {/sheen}

Good thing I only have Lobster bisque once in a great while.

When Dad was about my age now, he and mom started picking up a local elderly lady to take her to mass on Sundays. Let’s call her Mrs Grover, that’s close enough. She was a goodhearted woman and it was a pleasure to Mom and Dad to be able to help her out. They also took her shopping on a regular basis and it was not uncommon for dad to wait in the car while Mom and mrs Grover shopped.

They’d come back to the car and find dad curled up against the door snoring like a bandsaw, out like a light. So Mrs grover thought, here’s my chance to do something nice for him for taking me all over the place!

So she crochets a pillow. It’s a little round thing, green on one side and rust colored on the other side, and about a foot in diameter, maybe six inches thick.

Let me back up a minute here, and say, though Mrs grover might have been an attractive woman at one time, just getting a gander at her at that time would force a normal man to take a vow of celibacy, and her visage was used by the Romanian militia to discourage randiness in the ranks. She was as unattractive as a year is long, and god bless her, she knew it. You’d have to bite your tongue when she commented that she’d grown old and ugly, and it took all your willpower to deny it, though it was the plainest lie to do so. God made Mrs Grover to be an example to all who would die young and leave an attractive corpse; when she died, years later, even she requested a closed coffin. Nobody fought the matter, either.

Anyway, she gave Dad the pillow the sunday after she’d made it, and it made Dad’s life immeasurably easier. he carried that pillow in his car till he died, and every time he’d go shopping with Mom and Mrs Grover, he’d prop the pillow up against the window of the car, snuggle up to it, and doze off.

Years of doing this, every weekend he’d thank her for the wonderful gift, she’d be embarrassed at his thanks, but happy she’d done something to please him so well, and he was so genuinely pleased.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Mom is genetically programmed to clean, compulsively, anything that she sees, and one day she asked Mrs Grover “Is that yarn washable? Can I take out the stuffing and wash it?” mrs Grover says, “Oh, just toss the whole thing in the washer, just don’t heat dry it, wring it out and dry it on “cold” Mom says “Won’t that harm the foam inside?” Mrs grover responds “Oh, no, there’s no foam, I just filled it full of my old panty hose”

The look on my father’s face is a legend in northwest Indiana to this day. For several years, every sunday and many other weekdays besides, he’d been napping with his face pressed against this hideous old bat’s used pantyhose, and had no idea about it at all. Now that he did, he wanted to un-know it as soon as possible, and that just wasn’t happening.
Mom cleaned it and stuffed it with foam from a craft store, but it never was (according to Dad) quite as comfortable as it was before, though it was certainly more…. tasteful and sanitary.

A good twenty.. thirty years since I’ve been on a horse. I could probably still do it, though I might need- with my knees- a bit of help getting on. Still, I think I could still manage.

So watching an episode of NCIS last night, Gibbs throws a saddle up on a horse totally strange to him, then walks around immediately behind the horse.

Sorry, but I wouldn’t do that on a bet to a horse i KNOW. now, granted, he does keep his hand on the horses’ ass as he does it, but damned if i’d walk behind a horse unless I was a good eight, ten feet away, even a horse I know well.