Mild Amusement

As I like to mention, little kids can be ridiculously awesome. I've mentioned it at least six times before (the last time was here ), and it's no less true today then it was the first time I mentioned it. However, sometimes, they are more awesome than others. This, my friends, is a case of extra awesomeness. So, rather than describing several witty remarks like I usually do, I'm going to devote the entire post to a single exchange. Trust me, it'll be worth it. To begin with, the cable went out at my house a while back. I knew just enough about the cable boxes to try a few basic troubleshooting steps, but none of it worked. The end result was that the we couldn't watch anything but the basic channels on TV, and we had to have a technician come out to fix it. The technicians don't usually come out on the weekend, so we had to make an appointment for them to show up in the middle of a weekday. That meant that the kids would be around when the technician showed up...

No, this isn't going to be a rant about how much I get annoyed by other people doing silly things. That just doesn't come from the right place. Sure, it might be (darkly) funny in the right context, but it encourages all sorts of behavior that I'd rather not encourage. However, this is going to be a post about an off-hand comment my sister made that absolutely cracked me up. It'll take a bit to build up to the punch line, but it's a good one, trust me. With that said, let me start with something of an unofficial motto of mine: do things the hard way. I don't mean that I have to do every last task in the absolute hardest way possible; mowing the lawn with a pair of nail clippers would be difficult, but there's no point in doing it that way. No, I mean that when I'm faced with a choice, I almost always choose the tougher road. More often than not, it's the right thing to do. I rarely want to do things that way, but that's precisely the point. If...

I've mentioned before that getting sick is a source of amusement for me, largely because of the kids and the reactions I get from people at work. Well, it looks like I underestimated just how much laughter illness can cause. Yup, the whole process of getting sick managed to generate some (mild) amusement. First of all, my brother got a pretty bad case of strep throat, so he had to miss some time at work. He is also around kids quite a bit, so it's not uncommon for one of those "vectors of infection" he works with to get him sick in some way, shape, or form. In this case, he managed to contract a case of strep throat. His supervisor, however, was far more concerned about the work schedule than the fact that he had a really high fever and could not keep himself out of bed. She said she was going to make him come in later that day (to which he roughly said, "you're not understanding. I cannot come in to work today."), and then she insisted on a doctor...

It's time for another round of interesting things that people have said about me (there have been three previous rounds, the latest of which was here ). These are things that people have actually said to me, as close to verbatim as possible, and it's not like I am taking the words out of context. No, I just hear some very interesting commentary thrown my way. "You could probably fill an A cup" A long time ago, I used to go to the gym with my college roommates. They were really big on the bench press, so I soon got much better at that. Apparently, this made my pecs grow enough so that other people noticed. Most people didn't say much, but one female friend did. She compared it to the closest thing she knew: bra sizes. Now, I like to joke that I'm not sure whether to be happy or sad about a lot of things. This one, however, was legitimately baffling. I really wasn't sure how to take that. She meant it as a good thing, though, so it ends up on the list. ...