Category Archives: oddity

Murphy's law, oddity

Murphy

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Murphy is alive and well (and seems to be living with me).  You know Mr. Murphy – the man behind the famous law: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. He and his eponymous law were in fine fettle today.

It all began when Molly and I decided to go for our walk mid-afternoon since the weather was relatively cool. We got just far enough to get sweaty and stinky, but not far enough to get any real exercise, when the cell rang. It was the artist making some prototype logos for the 5k pet walk/run we have coming up. So Molly and I turned back to meet with the artist. I really hope he enjoyed being couped up with sweaty and stinky me across the table from him.

Then I set out to fix the slow drain in the bathroom. It had reached the point of slowness that I was afraid it would overflow soon if I got distracted while the water was running. So I gathered the requisite equipment and got ready to go to town. Guess what? The drain wouldn’t go slow. It was draining perfectly. Nothing I could do would make it revert to it’s slow moving way of only a few hours ago.

I won’t even mention what happened to the hamburger I fixed for supper. Let me just say that Molly the dog dined exceptionally well tonight. The only good out of it is that Molly is sitting here making gooey eyes at me in utter admiration for the fine meal.

With that, I think I will go to bed. Assuming the bed doesn’t up and run away as I try to lie down.

oddity

A Conversation

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As some of the clean up crew and I were killing time until we could take down the tables and chairs from the church bazaar yesterday, I was a participant in the following odd conversation between three other gentlemen and myself.

M1: Every since I turned 80, I’ve had to go to the 40 pound salt bags for my water softener. I just can’t lift the 50 pound ones anymore.

M2: Thats too bad. Every since I turned 85 I haven’t been able to carry even the 30 pound bags down the steps to the cellar for the softener. I’ve started keeping the bag on the porch and using a bucket to carry it down a few pounds at a time.

M3: Heck, I gave up even trying to carry them years ago. My problem is that not only can’t I carry them, I can’t remember why I find myself standing by the trunk of the car staring at the bag of salt. By the time I go in the house and ask my wife and get back out there, I can’t remember again. It works out well – my wife has been putting the salt in for at least the last five years. The last time I remember carrying in the salt was back around my 86th birthday and I’m 91 now.

Me: I’m young enough that I can still carry salt, I can still carry two bags of salt at a time pretty easily. The bad part is that it seems like a new joint aches every morning at this age.

M2: Give it time. In another 30 years you’ll be my age and then no one will even think of asking you to carry salt unless you are married to them. 

M3: Son, you’ve just begun to discover one of the things we all know.

Me: What’s that?

M1: Getting old is not for the faint of heart or weak of constitution.

Me: Well, it likes like we can get to work.

Likewise, it is time for me to get on with real work.

mother's day, oddity

An Odd Mother’s Day Story

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Yesterday evening, as L and I prepared to go out to eat with some old friends, I picked up my phone to find a rather long message queued up for me. So as we walked out the door, I was listening to the charming message. The message was from what sounded to be an older lady. She was waxing poetic about the beautiful roses she had received and how they were so beautiful that she wished she still had the energy to plant and grow an acre of roses. The message went on talking about how wonderful the roses were, how brilliant their colors, and how they were the perfect gift, etc. It was clear that someone had gifted this lady with a gift dear to her heart that she treasured and deeply appreciated. Finally, about eight minutes into the message, the caller started to wind down and mentioned that she knew Shauna had to work and that she hoped to talk to family later.

Now I had a quandry. Clearly the lovely lady who had left this charming and gracious message on my phone had dialed the wrong number. She had either missed or ignored the intro message stating that it was I that her phone had connected to. Normally I do not call and tell people that they have not reached the number they must have been expecting. So should I use the caller ID and call back to tell the lady that her message was lovely, but had not reached her intended destination? Or …

A bit of back story first. The reason that I generally do not call and tell people that they have reached the wrong number is two fold:

  1. My answer message clearly states that you have reached the number of and that if you so desire, you can leave a message for . Thus you have to be a bit of a doofus to leave the message for someone else on my phone.
  2. My number is one digit off from the now defunct pig sale barn. For years I was plagued with 2-10 calls a day from people trying to reach the pig sale barn. The people that called to inquire as to the late day Chicago price of fat backs and other such arcana were amidst the rudest I have ever conversed with. I was accused of everything from lying to stealing the pig barn’s phone when I would answer or return a call via caller ID to let them know that the barn wasn’t going to know they were planning on bringing a truckload to the Thursday sale unless they actually called the pig barn. 

Thus my policy of not calling people to tell them the bad news that they called my answering machine rather than whom they desired.

In the end I did the only thing I could and have a clear conscious. I called the number and had a very pleasant conversation with the author of the original message. After her initial denial turned to acceptance when I delivered a brief synopsis of the message, we had a very pleasant conversation. It turned out she was trying to reach her daughter in Arizona (whose cell phone was indeed one off from mine) to thank her for the beautiful gift. When she was younger, she had always grown a large plot of roses on the homestead and missed them deeply now that she couldn’t do it anymore. Her daughter knew that and so sent her the gift that meant the most to her – roses.

So here is hoping the happy mother re-called the thoughful daughter and this time they connected. It makes my heart happier to think of that ending. In any case, I did my part.

google, oddity, sarcasm sex-linked question

Google, Sex, and Me

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Now that I have your attention, …

One of the things I find interesting is that the searches bringing people to this blog seem to be tad different than the ones reported by bloggers of the female persuasion. Blogger after female blogger reports that their blog is being found by numerous sex related searches. That certainly isn’t happening here and I feel really left out and undesirable. This blog is like the shy girl with a crush at the middle school dance as far as Google goes. All that desperate desire for attention, but Google only has eyes for others.

For your amusement, here are the top 10 search terms that have caused Google to deposit people here:

  1. grammar rap
  2. “russian woman” “she bit”
  3. 1936a811f775436384fe7b5e0582814f38e…
  4. blood test mpg
  5. broke my brother out of hospital
  6. dentist allergic to color
  7. dentists for dental avoiders
  8. don’t panic eau de toilette men
  9. favorite winter memories
  10. finger turns black and blue from finger prick

Grammar rap is an obvious fit for my post extolling the joys of sistersalad and their wonderful “Yo Comments Are Whack!” video. Blood test mpg is clearly a hit for my diabetes post. I can even see some relevance in several other of the terms. But where does the string of hexadecimal digits came from and why am I a match? I figure it must be a search from a double-byte language set, maybe Chinese? Whatever it is, it seems to be popular. Maybe that is where all my sex queries went. (That’s it, I have a horde of hot blooded Chinese women performing secret sex acts via my blog. I’m down with that!)

And how about “don’t panic eau de toilette men”? I can see how it might drop some poor schmuck or schmuckette into my Five Things I Know But My Dog Doesn’t Know I Know post, but I suspect that Google left its followers deeply unsatisfied and in need of the extra kick of eau de toilette when it happened. And I have to ask, why would one panic about men and eau de toilette? Do all men really smell that bad? Have we all joined Molly in drinking at the porcelain goddess’ fount? Inquiring minds want to know.

So I continue on, deeply disappointed that the lowlifes of the world aren’t looking for and finding my blog via Google. I want the unfettered joy of being able to write humorous posts on the spur of the moment about the odd contortions necessary to achieve a chosen search term. Besides, I can use all the readers I can get! {*grin*}

ads, AdSense, keywords, oddity

AdSense Oddities (part II)

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(This is the follow on to this post .)

I don’t know about you, but suddenly tonight the ads started switching from the dental mania to reflect some of the other posts. So for example right now I see the following four ads:

  • Volunteer at Food Banks
  • Vonnage Small Business
  • Fake Your Phone Caller ID
  • Frisco Lodge B&B
What a change from the dental mania. But still no car ads!
It is fascinating to watch the workings of Google’s crawler and it’s ties to AdSense and how it determines what to display with what page content. Right now I can see how it might connect this post with the Volunteer ad, and I can stretch to see how the Vonnage and Fake Caller ID ads tie to this post , but it is a stretch to see how the Frisco Lodge B&B connects to this post . One day I’ll have to try showing only the current day’s post on the page to see the workings in finer grain. 
Oops, just refreshed the page again and the dental ads are back in force. Those dentists must really have a hard time finding keyword tie-ins because one of them is in Las Vegas which is one heck of a journey from here to see the dentist.