All posts tagged with "favorites"

We went on a Covid-summer road trip that took us the whole Summer. The cat took an entirely different Summer vacation in the Ozarks.

We decided to sail to Mandeville, a town that's usually four or five hours from our home dock. It's a pretty standard trip for us, but this one spirals into nuttiness.

Vanya's school had a Thanksgiving thing where we all go eat with the class. V served himself a typical little kid lunch: chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes, and a roll. While he was eating, the mom who brought the potatoes stopped and asked him how he liked them.

A description of my post.

Three really short stories, but they're all funny.

I think I mentioned once that Auburn fans think that the LSU fans smell like corn dogs. I had heard this through word of mouth, and then at the Auburn game last year, I actually heard an Auburn guy walking around LSU's campus say, "It sure does smell like corn dogs around here."

They say that Superbowl Sunday is the biggest day of the year for wife-beatings. There's simply no reason for that. It's easy to come to a common agreement if you just try a little bit. For example,

Last week, I looked up from my desk as a new woman was being led through the office from area to area for the "first day new guy tour." The proper etiquette, of course, is to nod politely and say, "Welcome aboard," as if we're all happy little shipmates. For some reason, I was possessed to boo. I didn't get too obnoxious with it. It was just a medium-volume, low-pitched booooooooo, similar to what I would do when the opponents come out on court to warm up before a basketball game.

Remember Garanimals? They were a brand of kids clothes from when I was young. Every item had some little animal visible, giving 1970s parents across the nation the misguided notion that their kids would look as cool as those kids wearing genuine izods. Their gimmick was that every piece of clothing with one animal on it would match every other cloth with that same animal. It's a very good idea (I could certainly use such a system as an adult), but one that was doomed by stretchy cheap polyester as the material of choice.

There are some pretty funny images here, all having to do with holiday greetings.

When I turned on my computer this morning, a program that lives in my task bar took the initiative to go to the internet, find some particular server, and ask it the temperature in Baton Rouge. It then changed its stock graphic to a bold, black number: 39.

Here is a collection of random observations with the uniting theme that they come from my business trip in Philidelphia. Think of it as four mini-blog posts, that you get for the low low price of one single post.

Back in the spring, our company had a users conference. We bring as many clients down to New Orleans as will come, and bombard them with all of the gee-whiz neato things that they could do with their software but probably aren't. There is also a lot of opportunity to socialize (or kiss asses, depending on one's nature). They make a particular effort to schedule activities where clients interact with the teams of people that support them specifically.

Once upon a time, I worked for a company with a VP of sales who was a complete doofus. Come to think of it, that describes more than one sales VP that I've had the pleasure of knowing, but one particular guy is story-worthy. I called him "Date Rape Dan," because in a meeting where we decided to decline some particular client request, Dan had this immortal quote, which seemed to be taken right from the date rape handbook.

This is one of my old stories, but one I haven't told in a while. It came up just the other day. In November of 1995, Mrs. theskinnyonbenny and I were newly married and on our honeymoon in Ireland. November is a cool drizzly month in Ireland (as I suspect most months are), but we were having a good trip.

One of my favorite gifts is a knock-off of a nice watch. My dad seems to know a good watch guy, in the sea of Bangkok vendors who sell any counterfit consumer product that you can dream of.

Here's an amusing thing that just happened to me.

At first, I thought it was my lucky day. I was about to board a three and a half hour flight, and I just found out that I had been granted an unrequested first-class upgrade. I'm not sure why; I'm just barely to the "silver" level of Delta's rank and grade system, but I guess that combined with low demand for those seats combined with having purchased a ticket that any sane person would laugh at got me through.

While my entries are in this reminiscence theme, allow me to spin you another tale of childhood. I guess most of us had that summer or two of childhood where we were old enough to run wild, but not quite old enough to drive or be tied down by a summer job of any consequence. When I was of that age, we lived in a subdivision in Little Rock with tons of other kids of my age. We spent every minute between waking up and curfew roaming the neighborhood in packs.

For a couple of weeks now, I have failed to mention my fight with a four year old over pajama-bottoms. No one has ever accused me of being the most mature grown-up in the crowd, but I proved over the Labor Day weekend that I can be as childish as, well, as a real child.

Once upon a time, Mrs. skinnyonbenny was just a young college girl named Heather, and I was the yankee guy that she kept bringing home for visits. It's important to note that I had not 6 ounces of muscle on me at that time. Home for Heather happened to be a working cattle farm, so occasionally, I got put to work. On this particular day, I don't recall getting any advance notice or warning that we were going to work, just a sudden invitation to take part.