Random Thoughts on Raisins, Rihanna and More

 

I can’t stand raisins. When I started eating  a cinnamon roll,  my dad joked that the raisins were flies. He apologized for it repeatedly in later years. 

 

Unbelievably, my college roommate was the son of a very large raisin farmer in California’s Central Valley. (Was this an eternal punishment for something I did?) He brought big boxes of little raisin packages to our room and stored them underneath our bunk.  I ate them anyway. What ya gonna do?

 

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A 12-year-old had a bouquet of flowers in the check-out line at Food Lion. He looked too young to have a girl friend—was it a Valentine gift for his Mom? It reminded me of the time I bought some flowers near my work and brought them home for Pickett. Women on the bus smiled at me as if to say, “I wish somebody would do that for me.” I loved it!

 

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Rihanna must not be afraid of heights. Her Super Bowl halftime show almost made me dizzy, as she sung from narrow raised platforms moving from 15 to 60 feet above ground. How could she possibly concentrate? (And she was pregnant too!)

 

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Does anybody ever get sued for violating the fine print on emails and websites? If I were a lawyer, my defense would be, “Nobody reads it.”

 

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“Cunk on the World” on Netflix is the funniest show I have seen in a very long time. The British interviewer

 asks scholars stupid questions about the history of the world. I can relate to that! (“Do the pyramids have a pointed top to keep the homeless from sleeping on them?”)

 

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DON’T see Banshees of Inisherin, even though it was nominated for Best Picture. Maybe the acting was good, but I would nominate it for the Most Depressing Picture I have ever seen.

 

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I love to sing at First Baptist Church. The people are so friendly!

 

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“Perfect,” the customer service rep says to me. If makes me feel good to be called perfect, but maybe it is an exaggeration? Making a doctor’s appointment for 11:00 instead of 10:30 is perfect? 

 

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I rarely kill insects. They are my brothers and sisters, living on this planet at the same time as I am. But I’ll make an exception for ticks and mosquitoes!

 

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Wind chill is absurd, fanned by the media and Weather Service to worry people. And why are storms given such horrible names all of a sudden? Bomb cyclone? It also bothers me when meteorologists say on TV, “Stay home.” Let me decide that.

 

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I just love the phone and ipad apps Seeing AI and Envision AI. You point the phone at a printed page in a document or at a book and they read it back to you. So cool!

 

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I really like the idea I heard recently that our lives are stories. “There are no throw-away lines in life,” said theologian Eugene Peterson. So watching two wasteful basketball games on a Saturday is part of my story? Everything I do is for a reason?  There are no do-overs. Let’s hope for a happy ending!