Lassie...what a strange show.

After an interesting day of job interviews – one each for me and my wife – I sat down in front of the TV to put my mind in vacation mode for a while.  Flipping through the channels, I stopped at our COZI-TV affiliate, and they were showing Lassie.

Now, I say the following in jest.  Well, partly in jest anyway.  I remember watching the show as a kid, and you couldn’t help but like Lassie.  Say it with me folks, “Good girl, Lassie”!

What I saw tonight wasn’t one of those “Timmy fell down the well…again” episodes.  Apparently some calamity had happened in the woods – maybe a forest fire – and Lassie took it upon herself to go around and check up on the little woodland creatures, and set things to rights if necessary.

(Hey, you know what you can find in the woods?  Squirrels!  I saw one on Lassie.  Okay, yeah I’m sure that’s true, but they’re not what you’d call exotic.  It’s not like you’d hear, “Dad!  Let’s go to the woods.  I know it’s a long way to drive, but I really wanna see a squirrel.  Please?”  Look kid, just come over to my yard.  We got your squirrels.  Bring your traps along, and you can take as many of those tomato thieves with you as you want!  But I digress.)

Where was I?  Oh yeah, the woods…Lassie…little animals.

By the way for those of you new to our fine world, Lassie was a big, good natured collie dog who apparently communicated by a combination of body language and barking.

So a fox walks into the woods.  Which sounds like a setup to a joke, “A fox, a dog, and Indiana Jones walk into the woods”.  No, no, no.  No joke, this fox was a skinny, scrawny thing.  Really pathetic looking.  Lassie watches the fox for a while, then harangues it with a few barks.  The fox pauses, then ambles on a bit.

Then we see a quail.  The camera pans over a bit, and there’s the quail’s nest, with five eggs out in the open, unprotected!  Lassie looks at the nest, then looks at the fox looking at the nest.

Foxes gotta eat too, you know.

For some reason this made me think of Solomon, preparing to pass judgment on a difficult dispute.  What will Lassie’s decision be?  “Okay fox, you can eat two quail eggs, but no more than that.  Got it”?

Then the camera cut to the branch of a nearby tree, where sat an owl and two owl chicks in the nest.

“Okay, two quail eggs, and I’ll throw in one of the owl chicks.  But don’t you even think about going for the other one”!  But of course, all you heard was barking.  More barking.

It’s as if Lassie expected all the different forest animals to understand Doggish.  That would be like one of us traveling to France or Germany and expecting everyone to understand English.

What must be going through the minds of these animals?  It wouldn’t matter much to them that Lassie lived on a farm.  No, when you live in the woods you have to be tough.  I can almost hear them thinking, “Just who does this softy from the suburbs think she is, coming here and poking her nose into our business”?

Right then I was called to supper, which is just as well.  I don’t know if the plot turned into some dramatic struggle, fox versus helpless small animals.  It wouldn’t have been anything really intense, though.  We could watch Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom if we wanted to see intense.

Trunk or Treat 2013

Happy Reformation Day, and Happy Halloween!  For the past several year (seven?  eight?  - something like that) our church has had trunk-or-treat in our parking lot.  We get to enjoy watching the kids in their costumes, and the kids and their parent or parents have a safe place to go get candy.  We've been to this before and this year as always, a good time was had by all.

Highlights...

The weather cooperated, thankfully.  We've had rain here pretty much constantly for 2 1/2 days now, something like three or four inches total.  It all stopped around four p.m., and the sun came out for a while.  The bonus to that was the illumination of the leaves.  I think the fall colors are peaking now through this weekend, and while I wouldn't quite call it a spectacular fall, there are some really nice trees around the suburbs.

Costumes:

I think the cutest costume was an owl costume worn by a little boy, maybe 2 1/2 or almost 3 years old.  My words can't do it justice, you would have had to have seen him.  A couple of girls, maybe seven or eight, had a cowgirl and indian princess theme going.  I could tell a lot of effort went into the costumes; nicely done.

My favorite though was a girl maybe nine or ten, who was dressed as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.  The costume was first rate, and she was carrying a dog that looked a lot like Toto.  And I don't mean a stuffed animal, this was her well behaved pet, just looking around, apparently enjoying himself or herself.

And a lot of the kids wore superhero costumes, mostly store bought.  Batman was there of course, along with Iron Man, Superman, Spider-Man, and at least one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

One of the cars...

...was interesting.  With the trunk open and lined with big teeth, and with the dorsal fin on top of the roof, it had a "land shark" look to it.  Sitting in the trunk ready to hand out candy, was a young lady in sweats (going for a wetsuit look, I think), and she had goggles strapped across her forehead and also a snorkel.

We handed out four bags worth of candy, and only saved back a few candy bars for ourselves.

Pet peeves

I was thinking about this subject recently, and it could be that you can learn something about a person by knowing what really annoys them. Now, I realize I might be “stepping on the toes” of some readers, but I decided this just might be blog worthy. So please take no offense if your mileage varies, as they say. At least I spared you my rant about planned obsolescence (for now). These aren’t ranked, just written down in the order I thought of them; and I'm sure this list isn't complete. Anyway, here's a few of...


Bob’s Pet Peeves


Having sleeves or pant legs turn inside out when I take them off.

I don’t know why this bugs me – and it doesn’t happen often - but I’ll go to great lengths and even risk a fall to shake my legs out of my pants when the pant legs start trying to turn inside out. It even bothers me a bit to find pants or jeans turned inside out like that in the laundry.


“Are you a dog person or a cat person”?

Hey, I’m friendly with other people’s cats, though I wouldn’t have one. I do like dogs, and I get it about the love and affection. But, I’m a bird person! I don’t like it that somehow our choices of pets seem to have been narrowed to only two.

I’ve had a total of six parakeets over the years. One could say just a few words and three were good talkers, but they all brought a whole lot of cheerfulness to the home. It seems that fewer people keep birds now than in years past, and it’s a shame. They’re missing out.


“Mother nature”.

Give me a break. If you’re an athiest, don’t personalize natural laws. If you’re a Christian, give glory to God and His works. There is no goddess.


“What’s your sign”?

I don’t hear this much anymore, but in the past when asked, my reply was “Don’t Even Think About Parking Here”. I’m a Christian, and I’ve studied and enjoyed astronomy. So don’t even get me started on that astrology nonsense. If you happen to find out when my birthday is, well you did, that’s all. If you want to make something of it, I’m not playing that game.


“The weatherman never gets the forecast right. Why, I shoveled three inches of partly cloudy this morning”!

They’re not always right, but weather forecasts are a whole lot more accurate now than they were 30 years ago. Give them some credit, okay?


Hats or caps with the label “one size fits all”.

What an immense, dastardly lie, they all cut off at about size 7-1/2 at most. I wish I had more hats to wear, but I need at least a 7-7/8 or size 8, and they’re very, very difficult to find.


Chocloate Easter bunnies, or cookies with cute faces on them.

Hey, just give me a plain cookie or a chocolate bar and spare me the twisted comments about “You bit his ears off first”.


Going to a pizza party where all the choices are some kind of “meat lovers” or “combo” or “supreme”.

You know the kind, with the flesh of several assorted beasts and every oddball vegetable under the sun (olives...shudder), including the latest variety of tongue searing pepper. (Also mushrooms...shudder.) Is it too much to ask that there be maybe one simple Canadian bacon or an even simpler cheese pizza? Apparently, sometimes, it is too much to ask.

By the way, what is a pepperoni anyway? Judging by its cross section, it’s some kind of round or tubular critter. I get this mental image of several cute little furry pepperoni, happily bounding through the meadow on a sunny spring day...while stealthy hunters approach with their clubs.

The poor little innocent things.

So readers...what are your pet peeves? Curious minds want to know.