Category: grandchildren

culture, grandchildren

Do Old Folks Pass More Gas?

Yes, we do. I hate to admit it, but it is true. Some people even get the walking farts as proclaimed by Larry The Cable Guy. Life is not all roses.

A conversation arose in my household as how we treated our children about those little gaseous events. I am a big proponent of MANNERS. My parents were insistent that their children were courteous to others. If you are a advocate of farting in public, you didn’t make the grade. There was something wrong with your upbringing.

The problem comes when you have grandchildren. Suddenly, farting is funny. Yes, our children are working on manners for these little animals. Somehow, it is not as important as it use to be to for the little ones to manage their farts.

One of the impediments of teaching kids to not fart in public is grandparents. You see, we remember the agony of our kids inability to contain their gaseous effluents. It is downright funny, now. It was not funny for kids to let one a loud one go in church, or in school. Other, more lowly born children do those things.

So, you get a blog about farts instead of about the old farts running the country. I better quit, now, before my wife discovers what I have doing online.

Remember, keep your kids in line over the farting issue. Have fun with your grandkids. That’s what life is all about.

family, grandchildren

She’s A Purty Thang!
baby picture of Georgia
Baby Georgia

Yes, she is. Her name is Georgia, and she is my two-year old grand-daughter. Her second birthday was last week, but her party will be today, the first available weekend.

The interesting thing to me is that she looks very much like her mother at that age, and also much like my wife. I can spot signs of my mother’s looks, too. That is one reason why grand-children are so precious. You can see not only yourself in them, but also the looks and mannerisms of other family members. Life is beautiful when they are young.

In my opinion there will never be a time when she becomes not-pretty. She will always be beautiful, but, she will mature in her personality, growing physically and mentally every day. Darn it!

Picture of Georgia Age 1 1/2
Georgia Today

Someday, she will be a teenager. God forbid!

There is a better than even chance that she will be like her mother, who was a beautiful girl, but drove us almost to insanity with her hormones coursing through her veins. As teenagers, girls are terrible specimens of the human race. Thank God Georgia is my grand-child, and I can turn her over to her parents for rearing during those troublesome years.

They all start out so sweet you could just crush them when hugging them. Then, they start growing up and slip into those awful teen years when everything you say is wrong, and nothing you say is heeded. Life is not fun during those years.

Then, sometime after college and a couple of dozen whacked-out boyfriends, she will grow up and become the person you wanted to raise in the first place. It is interesting that God brings us these tests of faith, knowing that not only will our children challenge our faith, but that those same faithless creatures will return to the values of their upbringing.

Life is good, and Georgia is our reward for a job well done. God bless grand-children.

family, grandchildren, humor, personal

Tongue-Tied Valentine

picture of heartNormally, Valentine’s Day is a day to be feared and avoided. I know this is not a healthy attitude, but surely you must understand my position.

Valentine’s Day is a contrived occasion for gift giving and candy eating. You are expected to give greeting cards to people with whom you would not share a meal, and give gifts to family members just to give them something. Humbug!

My wife doesn’ t understand my reticence to join in Valentine’s activities. I try to explain that I pay homage to her with gifts on Christmas, birthdays, Mother’s Day, and anniversaries. Buying Valentine’s gifts is just another Madison Avenue marketing invention.

Today, I was feeling a bit different about the occasion. My wife and I planned a visit to our daughter’s house to see our grandchildren, and she planned on getting some cupcakes for the kids. My assignment was to go to the super market for Valentine cards and balloons. That was OK with me, and I felt comfortable with her plans not violating my sacred rules of Valentine behavior.

After getting a sub-sandwich from the store’s deli to take home for lunch, I found the greeting card isle packed with people frantically grabbing cards off the shelf. I managed to find cards for my grandson, granddaughter, daughter, and wife. Then, I was stuck.

There were no son-in-law cards!

I could not go to my son-in-law’s house and give everybody a card but him. I could get one for a son, but that would not be appropriate.

Beseeching a nice looking lady for help, I said, “Have you seen any son-in-law cards? I need something nice, but not real sweet.”  I was trying to keep things in perspective. That’s about the time my eyes found a card for Daughter and Son-In-Law. Problem solved!

See how frustrating Valentine’s Day can be? Once you buy into getting cards, candy, balloons, or other stuff for one person, you have to do it for everybody. It is a slippery slope.

As I waited in the check-out line for Shirley, the cashier, a line of ladies burdened with cards, flowers, candy, and cakes was forming behind me. They seemed to be glaring at me, and I got the feeling I didn’t belong in that line.

As Shirley finished with me, I was relieved to be leaving that place, and sweetly said to Shirley and the ladies in line, “Happy Halloween!”

I hate Valentine’s Day.

grandchildren, Linux, recovery DVD's, Windows 7, Windows VISTA

Don’t Format The C: Drive!

Yep. I did it. I clicked “Format”, and had a period of instant nausea when I realized  what I had done.

Nooooo, I thought. Yessssss, said the “Format Complete” window.

So, how did I screw up? What would cause a computer professional to blow up his own machine? Well, you had to be there.

It happened while I was baby-sitting my two grandchildren. The little boy is three, and the little girl is eighteen months old. These are the sweetest kids in the world, sometimes.

While the two little wild Indians were ripping the house apart, I was trying to do some work with my laptop. I had one of those little 500 Gb USB drives for storing backup files, but Windows 7 was not seeing the drive all the time. Windows  recommended formatting the USB drive.

With little Thomas train cars whizzing past my ear, and a screaming little girl stealing her brother’s toys, I managed to get some valuable files safely off the USB drive. When I selected the drive to format, I picked the wrong 500 GB drive. The problem is that my laptop’s C: drive is 500 Gb just like the USB drive. This fact escaped me until about one millisecond after the fatal click.

Sometimes when things go bad, everything else goes down the tube, too. The Windows 7 recovery disks didn’t work, either.

Film, flam, damn, damn! 

No problem, I thought. I had upgraded to Windows 7 from Windows VISTA, and I still had the original VISTA recovery DVD’s.

Those damned things didn’t work, either.

I have just about had it with Windows. Whenever there’s a problem, it is like you have to start World War III to fix things.

So, what to do? I installed Linux in about one-half hour, and it works GREAT!

If I can’t come up with an inexpensive fix for my Windows partition in the next week or so, I will be used to working without it. Linux works just great, and is easy to use. Plus, it’s free.

Who knows what evil I can do with another operating system?