Mild Amusement

I didn't grow up going to the beach very often, so I don't have warm and fuzzy memories of being near water. This was largely due to the fact that I learned to swim as a teenager, but the fact that the water  in the nearest beaches  is really cold didn't help matters any, either. Regardless, I can usually be talked in to hanging out at a pool or at the beach, but those aren't exactly at the top of my list of preferred activities. Even with this as a detractor, though, I discovered that I can still have quite a bit of fun while on or near the water. First of all, we ended up going whale watching on one afternoon. I didn't really think much of it before we left, but whale watching is one of those activities that sucks you in. One moment you're just sitting around on a boat talking, and the next you find yourself absorbed in the task of spotting brief flashes of whale tail. I think part of the fun was in trying to get a decent picture or video of the whales. It...

Since I was on a bus tour for this particular trip, I didn't really bother to pack much other than some jeans and t-shirts. Sure, I had a little bit of outerwear in case the weather got cold, but I wasn't super concerned about that turn of events. In fact, I wasn't even horribly concerned about rain because I figured that we'd be on a bus for good chunks of the trip. There were some advantages to traveling on one of those pre-packaged group tours, after all. Anyhow, since I was on this trip for a little over a week, this meant that I needed more than a week's worth of t-shirts. I did own that many t-shirts, but it's not like I the number I owned was orders of magnitude higher than that. This meant that I was bound to pack at least one shirt that I owned because I found it amusing (read: there was something smart aleck-y about it). As it turns out, I packed a few of them. For example, the current and former school teachers in our travel group chuckled heartily...

I was on a trip to Canada recently. Usually, I tend to to do road trips with a friend (with hilarious results ), but  this time, we both got a bit lazy about planning and driving. So, we hopped on a bus tour that took care of all of that for us. Sure, we had to sacrifice some independence in order to do this, but it seemed like a pretty good idea. And all in all, it wasn't that bad. Still, there were a few quirks. First off, I was the youngest person on the trip ... by far. I had never really stopped to consider what kind of people might be on the tour with us, but apparently the kind of people who have decent amounts of disposable income and prefer to be shuttled around tend to be closer to retirement age. Weird. We actually had an introductory meeting the first night of our trip, and we walked in to a room full of gray hairs. Don't get me wrong, the majority of the people were fun to talk to and I had no problem with them. Still, it was a little disconcerting at first. As...

A little while back, I was talking to the Mild Ex, and she commented that the air conditioning at her place was acting up. In it of itself, that was a bad thing. However, this conversation happened to take place right in the middle of a miniature heat wave. So the fact that the air conditioning was performing less than optimally was less of an annoyance and more of an actual problem. It wasn't going to kill her or anything, but it certainly didn't make her days any more pleasant. Worse yet, I wasn't in a position to remedy the situation in any discernible way. For one, I was sitting at home, she was sitting at home, and our two homes happened to be quite a few miles apart. Secondly, even if I had driven over there, I wasn't sure that I had the knowledge or the magical powers required to restore her air conditioning to satisfactory levels. Things were not looking good for our hero (that'd be me). Well, out of some combination of sheer curiosity, dogged determinat...

Way back in high school, there was a male teacher that all the girls thought was attractive. It was an open secret that a bunch of them had crushes on him. In fact, the school newspaper even did an article about him that quoted some girl saying, "he's so cute, he even makes pink look good." Yes, he had worn a pink shirt to school one day, and it had apparently been a big hit. I was reminded of this story when my sister-in-law suggested that she would choose pink as the color for her wedding and bridal party. I don't think I've ever made a color look good before, but I remember thinking, "well, I know it's possible to not look stupid in pink as a straight guy, I guess I can try." And I think that's almost exactly what I told her. I also happened to own a gray suit, so I figured the combination would look all right. However, I was pretty much the only one willing to play along. My sister-in-law's brothers wanted absolutely no part of th...

A while back, I had a nice meal with my family. Both my brother and my sister-in-law were present at that meal, and all three of us thoroughly enjoyed our meals. As it turned out, I finished my meal that night, despite the waiter more or less telling me he didn't think that I could do it. The whole thing cracked me up, so I wrote about it. Truth be told, it's not like I was bragging about my eating prowess.  Maybe it's because I'm getting older and wiser, or maybe I'm just getting lazy, but t hose days are past. I've decided that I should try to eat smaller portions , after all . In fact, I had lunch with a friend of mine recently, and she commented on just how small my lunch had been. I'm not just all talk, I tell you, I really am eating a little bit less these days. Regardless, I told the whole story as it happened: I finished my meal, but my brother and his wife did not finish theirs. There were some jokes about the size of the bowl of the soup, an...

I'm a curious person. I like to figure out how things work, and I like to understand what words mean. I don't pretend like I know everything about everything, but I do usually pay attention when I hear new tidbits of information. It's a trait that has served me well over the years, but every once in a while, it comes back to bite me in the butt. This is a story about one of those times. To lay the groundwork for how this came to be, let me back up about half a year. I was talking to a friend of mine, and she asked if I wanted to go a firearm course. I'd only been to the range once before , so I was intrigued by the concept. My friend just so happened to sign up for the class through one of those social deal websites, where you can get a discount if several people also bought the same deal. So, I signed up for an account. This was where it all started. The class was a decent use of an afternoon, though I did end up wishing that we'd had more time to shoot at the ...