What??!!

 

This Old House

 In all the time I've lived here, since May of 1969, today marks the first day there is no other breathing organism in the house. 

Waiting for GODOT or God's Own Time

 Battery---soonest is Monday

Cat-------soonest is Sunday

Furnace ----1 Postponement, 1 No Show, Who knows?

10/15/ 24 Fails

 

Lifetime Compliments Received

 Not counting academic or professional awards and acknowledgments, here, in chronological order, are the compliments I've received:

1) My father taught me to play checkers, and when I was 10 years old or so, he said I was as good a player as the men who used to meet and play checkers at the Valley Falls Train station.

2) There was a large number of lectors at our parish , and one day after Sunday Mass, Father Ellis whispered to me that I was the best lector of all. 

3) My former gasteroenterologist Dr. G. said he thought I was very smart.

    That's about it, but I just remembered that in the last year or so the neurologist I'd visited said he knew I was smart because I understood the sarcasm he used. If that counts.

 Furnace 

Dog Story

 Everybody is talking about dogs nowadays, so here's a tale from the archives.

    One of the puppies, evidently intrigued by the colorful fly attached to Uncle Joe's fishpole which was kept in a corner of the barn, batted at it playfully and somehow got the fishhook inserted all the way through its front paw. It was yelping in pain and my mother cut the line from the pole and tried to pull the fishhook out of the pup's footpad, but true to its name, it was hooked, and firmly, with those multiple barbs not allowing it to be pulled back through. The fish was hooked.

   Back then, all unsolvable problems were taken to the front porch, and my mother in consult with Sara as to what to do. No success in backtracking the hook from the paw of the pup, who was now calm but crying piteously. Then a customer pulled up to the store, George Kagel's brother Herman. He quickly assessed the situation, went to his vehicle, retrieved a pair of pliers, snapped the protruding barbed section of the hook off, and then pulled the straight section out of the paw. Emergency medicine at its finest. The pup was back to normal.