I seem to have real bad luck getting my favorite cookies home from the store without crushing the packaging and finding a whole bunch of cookies nothing but crumbs.
Part of the problem is also that the Mexicans have not yet taken to the way of protective packaging where you spend more time opening the stuff than you do devouring the content.
So the other day when the bag boy at my local supermarket ( bag boy is a slight misnomer. This bag boy was even older than I ) suggested packing my stuff in a card board box rather than the endless plastic bags, I felt righteous and "green" and agreed, also hoping that this time I would get my cookies home intact.
Not so.
When I grabbed the box from the back of the car and schlepped it from the garage to the front door, I had to get a good grip on the awkward sized box and not until I dropped it on the kitchen counter did I realize that exactly where I had had to grip the box was where the cookies were.
And yes, they were in crumbs.
Maybe I should pretend that I really, really like my cookies in crumbs. That way I would not be so upset.

I am sure other dogs do it too, but the pack of social misfits that i share my house with, have raised this to perfection.
Whenever they have eaten grass or some unsavory thing found on their forays in the jungle, they choose the couch to throw up on.
If they want to munch on one of the greasy mini cocos that they find at this time, it has to happen on the couch
and if they get a bone, which is not often as I have learned my lesson, it will be devoured on the couch or one of the chairs.
All of it messy and all of it annoying.
The only good thing is that they still think of the floor as their private place to do their business when it is the slightest bit damp outside or,which is getting more common, they really, really don't feel like going out late at night.
I dread the day they get the idea that couches and chairs make fine toilets too.

When I was a child, I cried easily and I blushed easily.
The crying I was able to control, but never the blushing.
As a young man, as a mature man, as a middle aged man I was pretty good at controlling the crying.
I am now an old man and I am right back to where I was when I was a child.
Show me an ad with a polar bear hugging a human and I weep;
Show me the diminutive president of Mexico excitedly yelling Viva Mexico on the independence day, and I burst into tears.
Strangely enough, it takes a bit more to make me blush these days. I still do, but not as easily as before.
I am not sure what this means, but since I spend a lot of time in the company of the rabble of mutts I share my house with, and since they don't give a hoot whether I blush or cry, the question is kind of rhetorical.
I cry and I blush and I am going to live with it.
So there.

I admit to being a bit tired of having the furniture eaten by termites, so I had the god idea--at least I thought it was a good idea--to replace my desk where the computer is with a table with a base made of iron. It might rust, but it would never be eaten by termites.
After the requisite waits and false dates I finally got my base and placed it in my garage and set about to find a place to have the top made.
The carpenter I found, an older guy with eyesight so bad his glasses looked like bottoms of coke bottles, promised the top in a week.
True to form the top was not ready in time and then my car had to go into repair and I had no way of getting th top, when it finally was ready, to my house; schlepping it on the bus was out. A taxi trip too expensive and my one and only neighbor and owner of a truck was strangely reluctant to help out, so there it was, the table top, at the carpenter waiting for my car to be ready. And when it finally was, after endless waiting for parts shipped from the US, I picked up the top and brought it back, triumphantly, to the house where I started the process of painting it only to run out of paint and when I went to the paint store for another can of the same paint,red, that I had started painting with, somewhere there was a misunderstanding, for the paint I was given was lavender. Now I nothing against lavender as a color, but not for my table and and most decidedly not in my house.
So here I am, months later, with an unfinished table top for a desk that is still sitting in the garage and wondering if it really was that important to get a new place for the computer.
And the price keeps going up as the latest idea is to have a filing cabinet as part of the system.
Yeah right.
I do have funny ideas at times.

Some guy in a trailer park in Kentucky shot his wife and step daughter in a dispute over breakfast.
He also shot the neighbors where the wife and step daughter were trying to hide.
And I thought...how very strange. To be that upset about a small thing like breakfast and to shoot somebody....I could never do that
or could I ?
Many's the time when the Worthless Ones on one of their barking sprees will not stop no matter how loudly I yell and cuss and I know
if at those times I had a gun
and I don't like them, if anything they terrify me
but if I had a gun at those moments
I think I would use it.
Is barking all that much different than some miserable breakfast ?.

And with humidity you get mildew.
I have seen my formerly white walls of the house develop streaks of green, and I was aware that the iron door to bodega was showing signs of mildew.
What I did not know, was that my front door, painted a bright and cheerful red, was being attacked as well.
Nasty stuff, mildew.
To-day, with a few hours respite from the daily rain, I took to the doors with a vengeance. The walls I can do little about at this point, but my doors I can keep mildew free.
Or at least try to.

So here is my conundrum :

Do I drink and then get depressed or
am I depressed therefore I drink ?

That I drink is a fact. That I get depressed is a fact as well.
The unclear part is how they interconnect.

I shall pour me another glass of wine and mull this over.

At my coffee supplier's there was a pot like the one I use in for repair, and I checked it out and I was appalled. This is the type you put on the stove to force boiling water through a filter to the top part and mostly they are made of aluminum. As was this. And with the bottom part black from sitting on the stove and I thought
Dear Me....not very nice this pot
and then it hit me...I am turning into my mother.
My mother would, surreptitiously, check out the neighbor's laundry when hanging on the lines and make comments like.....too bad about Mrs. So and So, she must have a hard time, her sheets are really not all that white, are they?
as if it really mattered if the sheets were super white.
And here I am, doing the same thing, thinking....poor owner of the coffeepot. It really is not all that clean, is it.
I am sure it still makes perfectly good coffee.

It took one lightning strike and one tremendous thunderclap and my mouse fainted dead away and I was left staring at the same page on my computer.
Nothing I could do would make the arrow move, so in desperation I called my computer store and was told that, yes, it might be something very serious and yes, it might just be a dead mouse, either way I was stuck with the unmoving page on my screen.
Enough, I thought, and pressed the magic button and shut down the computer.
There, I thought, now we try again, and pressed the magic button to start and there was the arrow....
and it moved.
All is well. The mouse has recovered.
Who would have thought that the mouse would be that sensitive.
The world of computers is a wondrous one

Well, well, well.
There I thought that I was an original. Not so I fear.
Trying to change my URL to something more manageable, I discovered that there are many, many thinking Alans around and many have chosen the name Alans Thoughts ( I seem to be the lone apostrophe ) so, much to my disappointment, no simple change for my URL.
But I tried, oh how I tried. And Oh how I found myself in places where I knew not what I was doing.
End result ?
Same old, same old URL.
Now it looks pretty good to me.

And another thing

I cannot change my silly url, but maybe I can figure this email business out.
Maybe.

--
Gay-bashing

Violence against men who love men by men who fear they love men

The Cynic's Dictionary

Now this is right fascinating.
I discovered a tab saying "Stats" and since I was bored and had nothing better to do, I clicked it.
And it showed me how many and when folks visited my blog
but most intriguing
from which part of the world
and to my surprise ( and theirs too, I'll wager ) there had been visits from China (!) and Argentina and Canada and, no surprise, Mexico.
Somehow my Danish audience is failing me.
Fascinating stuff, this.

I remember a hymn from my childhood which went like this:
Han bærer med smil sin byrde
translating to "He carries ( shoulders ? ) his burden with a smile".
Even as a kid I was a bit skeptical about that concept, the smiling through adversity.
I was contemplating this as I was sliding down the hill, this time ending up with a scraped knee due to a very slick stretch and not very secure sandals.
And I was on my way to town by bus since the car is still in repair, picking up parts for the latest disaster, my kitchen sink.
And frankly, the smiling and shouldering burdens is just getting a bit old. I want a break and soon.
Smiling and shouldering burdens..indeed.