On to Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina . . .

. . .for this week's training class. Traffic to the airport was clogged-up a couple of times, while the flight was good. I'm only five miles from the Raleigh-Durham airport, so there wasn't much to getting to the hotel. I spent part of the day in Cary, NC, browsing around through a couple of shops. Dinner was at Cracker Barrel, while I finished the third book in the series by Gregory Maguire on which the musical Wicked is based - A Lion Among Men. (The other books are Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West and Son of a Witch.)

Tomorrow starts the training class . . . hope it's "good"!

High School Pranks

We were talking at dinner tonight, and the subject of pranks came up (somehow, I don't remember exactly why). Pranks and high school seem to go together well. Here are a couple:

That Locker Had Balls!

When my son Andy was in school, he and some friends decided to pull one that is still probably remembered even today. (My friend Larry would be proud; see below.) The guys went to a local driving range, loaded up with about 200 purloined golf balls and got into the high school (somehow; again, details are a little fuzzy here).

One of the guys held open the top corner of the locker while the others poured in the range balls . . . all of them. At the beginning of the day, with the halls packed with students, the owner of that locker opened the door, and, well it was off-to-the-races to try to pick up all the golf balls! I understand it was quite a sight!

The Cookie Stealer Gets His

Back in the 70's, at my high school, a bunch of us had fourth-hour gym class. Fourth hour was also the first of three lunch hours, so we used to detour through the cafeteria and get a large, 5-cent sugar cookie to eat on the way to class.

The trouble with that was that the shop classes lined the hall on the way to the locker room, and the shop teachers used to stand outside their classes, looking for students eating on their way to their next class. If they saw you with something, they'd take it from you and send you on their way. I lost a couple of cookies like that.

My friend Larry used to grab his sandwich from his locker and eat it as he walked to gym class. He got tired of having his sandwich taken, so he decided to get even. One morning, he made a "special" sandwich - bologna on white with very generous amounts of ketchup layered on both sides of the meat.

Larry grabbed his sandwich that morning and pretended to eat it on the way to class. The "Cookie Stealer" - I can't remember the teacher's name - seeing Larry's sandwich, demanded that Larry give it to him. So Larry pressed the sandwich into the teacher's hand and gave it a good squeeze, forcing out a river of ketchup. We left the instructor looking down at his hand and the soggy, sodden, ketchup-y mess Larry had given him. And what could he do? He demanded the sandwich, and Larry complied!

This is Winter 2008-2009

We have had quite a Winter . . . to date. Lots of snow, cold (with a capital "K", as my father would say), heavy rain (which washed the first substantial snowfall away) . . . But here it is 17 Jan 2009, and I really have yet to be cold.

I don't know why I don't get cold. Perhaps it's because I walk around barefoot a lot of times, and don't bother putting on shoes even to go outside in the garage. And even though some days are really cold - like last Thursday - they're still beautiful. We had clear blue skies, a full sun and just a slight breeze. When I walked in from working out at lunch time, I took a few very deep breaths of the cold air, and it felt great!

The sun makes all of the difference in the world, I think. It certainly makes me feel good about the days. I can't imagine what it would be like if it was overcast all the time as it is rumored to be in, say Seattle. (Sorry, Seattle, if this is un-true.)

Another thing - once it's stayed below zero for the daily high, it seems mighty warm when it gets back into the 20's. We went from -20 as the low Thursday night/Friday morning to a high in the 20's today - a 40+ degree swing. And it really felt warm this afternoon.

We'll see what happens in the coming few weeks, but so far this Winter, so good!

A Little Humor

I was going with this girl in college, but we decided we couldn't get married because of religious differences. She was an atheist and I was an agnostic, and we couldn't agree which religion NOT to bring the children up in.


My buddy broke up with his girl one time for religious differences, too. She thought she was god, and he didn't.


When a woman dies and goes to Heaven, she's called an angel.

When several women die and go to Heaven, they're called an angel choir.

If all of the women on Earth were to die and go to Heaven, we'd call it peace on Earth.


Thanks to Woody Allen and some un-named guy I met in Milwaukee last weekend. The latter sat down by me while I was waiting for my wife and her friend to return from the necessary and the last joke is the only thing he said to me.