Friday, December 9, 2016

Good morning crew,

For the last week or so we have been getting daily deliveries of mysterious boxes to the house. So apparently the wife has been doing her Christmas shopping.

I, on the other hand, will do the majority of my Christmas shopping some time next week during a one hour excursion to the Liquor Barn.

But the wife is a little more compunctious than I am about giving everyone she knows a bottle of whiskey for a present (and I don't think her 7 and 8-year-old nieces would appreciate it anyway), so the boxes continue to arrive.

I never get to see what is inside most of them. The wife squirrels them away to whatever hiding spots she has around the house to be wrapped later. But one delivery she did show me. She had sent some of the digital photos she had taken in Europe to a company online which turned them into big portraits. These she proudly unwrapped last weekend and announced her plan to hang them over our bed.

There are three, big, wall-sized images printed on some kind of woodgrain surface, not canvas or paper. Very nice. Very sturdy. They should last forever. But after studying the subject matter for a few seconds something occurred to me.

There is one image of the wife and I, with our backs to the camera, looking at a mountain, another image of a tree against the sky, and one more of a valley as we were driving up into the Alps.

"What do you think?" she asked me.

"Well," I said, "they're beautiful pictures, but, uuuh, did you notice we're not in any of them?"

"What are you talking about? We're in the big one, right there."

"Our backs are in it," I responded. "Really, those could be any two people."

"But they're NOT any two people. They're us!"

"Okay, what about the tree and the valley?" I asked.

"What about them? They're gorgeous."

"They are gorgeous. Beautiful pictures. Very artful. But they could have been taken anywhere, by anyone. Didn't you want anything that has us in it, to show that we were actually IN Europe?"

"No," she answered confidently. "I don't want to have to stare at our faces plastered all over the house. Sometimes all I want to look at is a tree and a mountain."

Fair enough.

Laugh it up,

Joe

joe@gophercentral.com

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"I read about a woman from California who is driving by herself across the country to visit every single Costco in the U.S. So far, she's traveled 2,000 miles - and that was just walking through one Costco." -Jimmy Fallon

***
"Pope Francis has warned the media to stop spreading false information. Or as the media reported it, 'World's Top Rabbi Says 'Keep Up the Good Work!'" -Conan O'Brien

***
"Today in 1884, the Washington Monument was completed, and if George Washington were here today to see it he would probably say, 'That looks nothing like me.'" -Seth Meyers

***
Part of my job as a 911 dispatcher is to interrogate callers who are in various states of panic so I can send the appropriate emergency equipment.

One day a woman called to say that a family member had fallen and needed to go to a hospital. After finding out where she lived and assuring her that the paramedics would arrive shortly, I asked her, "Do you know what caused the fall?"

"No," the woman nervously replied. "What?"




*-------------- Guaranteed to Roll Your Eyes --------------*
While doing a crossword puzzle, I asked for my husband's help.

"The word is eight letters long and starts with 'm', and the clue is 'tiresome sameness.'"

"Monogamy," he answered.