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Showing posts from November, 2004

A dollar and a dream

I walked into a Wawa store the other day to purchase a Gatorade and a coffee cake, and while I was at the register performing my duty as a consumer by paying for my chosen items, I was asked by the cashier if I would like to give one dollar to the "hungry children." I replied - without hesitation - "No." There was no explanation to follow either. A simple "no," seemed, at the time, to suffice. I did not say, "No, thank you. That was my last dollar," which would have been a lie because I DID in fact have several other dollars, AND I wasn't really thankful at all for being put in that position (the one where you're standing up and people pressure you to give them money for various reasons). I did not say, "No - I have a dollar in my wallet, but that's all the way in the back of my pants now, and I really don't feel like going back there to get it," which would not have been a lie, but didn't feel like the actual reason

Frost art

If somebody out there has a worse ice scraper than me, I'd like to meet that person. That way, we could compare ice scraper horror stories, maybe over a cup of coffee on a cold winter night, while our respective vehicles waited outside, acquiring multiple layers of frost that neither of us would be able to defeat. We would probably call a cab. It was last winter that I said to myself, "Mike, you need to get a new ice scraper." But then summer came, and purchasing a new ice scraper was the farthest thing from my mind. My scraper was left unattended underneath my seat, along with my trusty first-aid kit (one day I fear that I may actually need that kit, and I will open it to discover that there is only a note inside that reads, "Call 911.") It wasn't until recently, on a crisp November morning, that I walked out of the door only to realize that my vehicle was a startling shade of white, like it had seen a ghost, and tried to protect itself by covering its'

Beat the clock

The alarm clock in our bedroom is nine minutes fast. The reason for this is that the interval time in between snooze bar hits is nine minutes, so if the alarm goes off at 6:00 am, I can hit the snooze bar with the comforting feeling that it's REALLY only 5:51 am, so I have plenty of time for another dream in which I win the World Series with a walk-off home run, defeating some random team that features my cousin John and Nelson Mandela. The thing is, I usually set the alarm for 5:00 am, so the hour or so before I have to get up for work is spent like this: "Yes - I can still sleep! Yes - I can still sleep! Yes - I can still sleep! Yes - I can still sleep! Yes - I can still sleep! Yes - I can still sleep! Yes - I can still sleep! Yes - I can still sleep! What?! It's 6:03 already? Crap - I have to get up. I hate (fill in the day of the week)!" From this point, I hop into my truck (not immediately - I usually get dressed first...usually) where THAT clock is seven minutes