My wife and I don’t always use the same terms to mean the same things. This leads to all sorts of misunderstandings.

• We disagree on which part of the dishwasher is the “back”.
• We disagree on which pockets of the diaper bag are the “side” pockets.
• Subjective terms such as “cold” also lead to confusion.

And that brings me to today’s story: my trip to the grocery store.

I like to take one of the smaller kids to the grocery store in the evening, if needed. It gives the wife a slight break in that there is one less thing she has to do.

The problem comes when she writes something that makes sense to her and it also makes sense to me, but the two senses do not match.

One particular item was a “large bag of sugar”. I look around the shelves, and I grab a large bag. It turns out that it happened to be a 10-pound bag, and the wife was expecting a 5-pound bag. I didn’t even know they made 10-pound bags, so I didn’t bother checking the label – I just tossed it in the cart and went on.

The next time I go to the store and sugar is on the list, she tries to prevent my buying a 10-pound bag of sugar so she writes “small bag of sugar”.

I look around the shelves and find a small bag. All 2 pounds of it. I get home and find out that she wanted the 5-pound bag. I didn’t even know they made 2-pound bags, and neither did she.

It is for those reasons that I call home for clarification during my grocery shopping trips. My goal is not to be the husband who can’t shop for groceries on his own, but I would rather buy the right things than attempt to bolster my pride.

For now though, I go on the easy shopping trips and my wife takes the others.

Transcript:
The Scene: Harry Potter is learning about Quidditch from Oliver Wood
Harry: Oh no! Its wing is broken.
Harry: Quick! Let’s get some glue to fix it!
Oliver: You can’t use glue, you Muggle…
Oliver: Snitches get stitches!

Note:
Please be advised that anyone enforcing the policy of “snitches get stitches” is in direct violation of federal whistleblower laws (see 29 CFR 1960.46) and will be prosecuted.

In setting up a new page on Social Biblia, I had to provide profile photos for Midianite soldiers.

The Midianites were not exactly friendly people. The image that came to mind when I pictured unfriendly soldiers was the orcs from Warcraft. Not this fancy online World of Warcraft, but its grandfather – the old-school Warcraft II.

Back when games were games and ran on DOS.

Which was a problem because DOS-based games don’t like to run on Windows 7 laptops.

But I’m getting ahead of myself a little – let me rewind a bit.
(more…)

Transcript:
Package for Some Guy. Sign here please

Sure

(draws a baby swan)

All you did was draw a baby swan…

Yes. That’s my cygnet-ure.

The End

My car is 10 years old now, so I need to pay more attention to maintenance items. For example, sometimes the oil gets too low between oil changes.

At a recent gas stop, I noticed that the oil was low. I keep a quart of oil in the trunk for such occasions, so I pulled that out and added it to the engine.

The only problem was that I did not have a funnel with me, so I had to aim very carefully when pouring the oil. Alas, I did not aim carefully enough – I spilled some oil on the engine cover.

Normally, I wouldn’t care about that. But the extra oil dripped off the front of the cover and landed on the front of the engine. It landed somewhere in the middle of some tubes and heat shields.

I didn’t think much about that, other than “oops”.

Then the oil started to smoke.

Some flames appeared.
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Last year, we inherited a large play structure from some friends. The only cost was time and effort in that we had to remove it and transport it ourselves. After an afternoon of breaking concrete and sawing extra posts and digging, we had the fort on the trailer and drove it 30 miles to our house. That was slow going, but we got it there.

Arrival

Here is how it arrived.

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Ann Voskamp’s book One Thousand Gifts is fairly popular. But it’s getting a little stale in that it came out over a year ago. It needs an update.

I took it upon myself to produce some book covers, should she ever decide to write the following books:

A book on sorting flour, entitled One Thousand Sifts

A book on older formats of clip art, entitled One Thousand Gifs

A book on peanut butter, entitled One Thousand Jifs

A book on energy bars, entitled One Thousand Clifs

I thought about her book on elevators, entitled One Thousand Lifts, but I decided to pass on the cover art for that one.

Any other titles?