also from the vault

My dad is working on the papers for the close of the purchase of their new house. When he was telling me about all the details involved, I said, "Wow. Buying a house is a full-time job." He said, "I didn't work this hard on the paperwork after the fire." And I said, "Well, burning a house down is a full-time job, too." And he said, "It doesn't take very long to do it, though." And we laughed.

Yerba Maté tastes like a lawn. I know it's good for you, but it tastes like drinking the bottom of someone's shoe.

Beulah answers the phone when Justin calls her. Then she yells, "Is this George Bush again? *groans* He called yesterday!" Then Beulah explains to me: "It's this recording, and it goes, 'Hi. This is George W. Bush.' Last time he called, I handed the phone to Dad and said, 'Dad, it's for you. It's the President.'" He listened for a while and then hung up.

Beulah's wish: "There are times when I'm driving down the freeway and I think, 'I wish I could just get hit by a semi, and as long as it didn't fuck up my face, I could totally be lying in a hospital for a year watching TV!'"

Adam's wisdom: The rule in Internet dating is round down. And if you can't see his arms in the picture, he doesn't have any.

I'm reading about the Ents in Two Towers. And there is discussion of a younger Ent called Bregalad, or Quickbeam. The Hobbits notice how he laughs at things. "He laughed if the sun came out from behind a cloud, he laughed if they came upon a stream or spring: then he stooped and splashed his feet and head with water; he laughed sometimes at some sound or whisper in the trees." I started to think that when you use very grand language, as Tolkien does, you can describe someone in this manner and he sounds jolly and perhaps endearingly peculiar. But in reality, these are the symptoms of a crackpot.

Sarah and I were discussing what makes a wigger. I maintain that, just because a guy has soul when he sings, that doesn't automatically make him a wigger. Eminem? Wigger. Daryl Hall? Not a wigger. There are a number of criteria that must be satisfied, but the guy definitely has to talk like a black guy -- and I don't mean Frederick Douglass.

When I look some sort of arcane word up in the dictionary and it has a simple one-word definition, I sort of get cranky and wonder why even have that other word. "Fructuous" was the Merriam-Webster word of the day. And I opened the email to find it defined as "fruitful." It didn't make my day.

Beulah is getting her music news from a ringtones web site. Times have changed.