HUGH MOUSE FOR PRESIDENT

I, Hugh Mouse, hereby declare my candidacy for President of the United States. If elected, I will put cheese on every table and a mouse hole in every garage.

I will declare war on specism. That's racism against the rodent species. I will declare martial law and arrest all cats. I will wipe Garfield comics from the face of the earth.

I, Hugh Mouse, presidential candidate for the Rodentary Party, aim to represent my human constituency and fight for soft toilet paper, unbruised bananas, and easy-open medicine lids. I stand for freedom of the parent. No child will be sold watermelon flavored bubblegum without express written consent of the person driving the car.

My platform is: Decency on Television. I will ask Congress to outlaw soap operas and reality shows. Furthermore, I will make it illegal to advertise laxatives during the dinner hour. And I will return the bleeps for four-letter words.

If elected president, I will make the consumption of Spam a felony, and I will mandate that all junk mail envelopes contain the following: "Warning: The Postmaster General has declared this envelope to be a sales pitch. Open at your own risk." I will outlaw junk flyers in newspapers. The funnies can stay.

If elected President of the United States, I will declare war on holiday profiteering. Halloween costumes won't be sold until October, Christmas trees until December, and Valentines until February. I will declare a moratorium on the introduction of any more wacky holidays like Aunt's Day, Uncle's Day, Pet's Day (except, of course, mice), Pancake Day, and World Smile Day.

Vote for me! Hugh Mouse! What have you got to lose? Have you seen any better presidential candidates lately?

Yellow Hospital Gown

We went to visit my mother-in-law before her hip surgery. A hospital employee came in and did whatever he does. I’m not sure what he does because all I remember is the yellow gowns. Anyway, as he was leaving, he took a yellow paper hospital gown from a container on the door and said, “You have to wear this.” I said, “Me?” He said yes, everyone has to wear them. It’s for the protection of the patient. Sounded good, but I had been there all day and hadn’t seen anyone wearing them.

However, I accepted the yellow paper garment. It had elastic at the wrists, making the arms puffy, and it tied in the back, making the top portion and bottom portion puffy. Pretty soon, three of us visitors had them on. (One had escaped into the hall.) I looked at the three of us and decided we looked like those yellow marshmallow chicks in an Easter basket. George’s brother said they’re called “Peeps.” He’s a grandpa and knows these things.

About that time, Nurse William stuck his head into the room and asked us what in the world we were doing. I told him about the guy who had told us to put them on. I think William is still laughing.

First Birthday

It was nephew Logan’s first birthday. Aunt Anna, dressed as an ostrich, came running out to the car to greet us. Balloons framed the door - balloons with leopard spots and tiger stripes.

I walked in and looked for a place to put my gift. Then I saw the cake. Oh, the cake! My mouth started watering. The cake was decorated to look like a beautifully wrapped gift. It had three layers, each a different color, with little icing animals climbing around it. I love cake.

The honoree was napping and the rest of us were having fun - old folks, young folks, toddlers. I played with little Lila, blowing a feather around the room. Probably an ostrich feather. I picked up the balls the kids tossed out of the ball pool and tossed them back in. I ate chicken wings and drank beer and nibbled chips and dip, but I kept eyeing that cake! I love cake.

To my dismay, the time came when our little group had to leave - and the cake wasn’t even cut yet! Fortunately, our driver Tim wasn’t ready to go. The birthday honoree was awake and Tim was taking pictures of little Logan blowing out the candles on that beautiful cake and then burrowing his face into the little cupcake they had made just for him. I wanted him to hurry up so they would cut the big cake before we left.

I said to no one in particular (and more loudly than I intended), “I love cake!” Finally! Someone started cutting and brought me a piece. I hope I wasn’t the only one wanting a piece of that cake. I hope there was someone in the crowd thinking, “I sure am glad she made a fool of herself so they’d cut that darn cake!”

SHIPYARD DORMITORIES

One of Grandpa’s stories about working at the shipyard at Brunswick, GA, in World War II.

They had built new dormitories right there at the shipyard for single people like me coming in. It was a gun barrel building. There was an outlet at each end. You went in the end of it, and there was a hall, and rooms on each side, just like horse stalls in a mule barn.

Each room was a little biddy cubby hole of a room. There were two single beds in there, with just enough room to walk in between them. Your dresser was at one end of the bed, and that bed would be against the wall. So the other one was opposite from that. I don’t know what the width of it was - it must have been maybe ten feet wide and twelve feet long, or something of that nature.

Then they had a community bath, you know. Showers where everybody went to the same place in the middle of the building. And that was it. There was no eating facilities or anything. Just somewhere to sleep. Then they charged you so much a month, and whenever you hired on, you didn’t have an opportunity to go over there and see what you were getting or anything. They’d just tell you where to stay. Here’s your room number, certain dormitory, and that’s where you’d stay. That’s the way it was.

Pacing the Yard

I got injured on the same day Tiger Woods got injured. He only had to quit a golf tournament. But I had to quit my yardwork!

It all started when I decided to do some weed-eating. The trimmer battery was dead and the charger was lost. Lowe’s has a charger for $30, but the trimmer itself is not worth $30, let alone a battery charger for it. And besides, the lawnmower’s worn out, the edger doesn’t always start, the leaf blower only starts sometimes, and I myself am getting hard to start as the years go by. I called a landscaping service.

I’ll get a better price quote if I measure the places to be edged around the yard, right? I have short legs, so it takes a great big stride for me to pace off three feet, like I’ve seen George do. I had taken about 50 or 60 huge strides and was getting careless when I stepped off the edge of the grass beside the driveway and took a dive.

Now I’m laid up on the couch with an ice pack on my foot, watching the golf tournament where Tiger got injured today, and suffering what my cold-hearted friend calls “the agony of defeet!”

BEEF ROAST

I had just traveled from Raleigh to Brunswick, Georgia, and got hired on at the shipyard there. The furthest I had ever been away from home was the distance I could ride on a bicycle. At the end of the first day, I was hungry. I had bought some peanuts and there was something wrong with them. I was just about to starve to death, and I didn’t know where to go to get something to eat, and I thought, “My Lord, what have I done?”

I stood there so long, waiting for the shipping crowd to change, till the crowd thinned out. Just standing there looking around, I noticed a place over on the side. It looked like a place to eat, but I didn’t know anything about it.

I was as shy as shy could be. My whole world was within a twenty mile radius of where I was born and raised, and whatever was in that was the only training I had. I never went to cafes, other than barbeque stands.

But I finally went in that place. And they had a beef roast. You know how they have a beef roast. They cut slices off of it, and you get exactly what you want as you come down the line.

I stood inside there for a while to get some bearing as to what was going on and what to do. And I got it in my mind and went down there and got in line.

When I got down there to the beef, I looked at that thing, and the blood was running out of it! I’d been around cows all my life. And we didn’t have no such looking beef as that! I mean, when Mamma cooked it, she cooked it.

And I thought, “My God! These damn folks haven’t got a bit of sense. Eating damn raw meat!” But hell, everybody was happy about it, you know. I stood there a minute. The man looked at me and I looked at him and I looked at that beef with the blood running out of it.

He said, “What’ll you have, son?”

I said, “Some of that, I reckon.”

He cut me off a chunk of it and put it on there, and I went on down. I don’t remember what else I ate. But I tell you what’s the truth. I hated mighty bad to try to eat that raw meat.

BOILED PEANUTS

One of Grandpa's stories when he was working in the shipyards during World War II

You have some terrible disappointments in life, and I had the biggest disappointment soon after I got to Brunswick, Georgia.

I was hired readily to go to welding school. That was just real quick, because they were needing people to work so bad. And I got a place to stay. Bud I’d never been away from home, and I didn’t know anything about going to a café or a restaurant or anything else, you know, to eat.

I came out of the yard after the first day, and I was hungry as could be. I’d eaten during the day in the yard, because they had little old canteens you walked up to. And the only reason I knew to go to the canteens was because every four hours they had a break. I just watched where everybody else went.

But it was supper time, and I was hungry. I walked out and crossed the railroad tracks to get to the entrance to the shipyard, and there was a man standing right in those tracks when the shift changed selling peanuts.

We raised peanuts at home. Raised about everything we ate. But peanuts, you know, was one of the delicacies. Mamma would roast them in the oven, right in the hull, and they were extremely good.

I bought me a bag of those peanuts. I was all set for the good taste of those dry roasted peanuts. I busted one open and put it in my mouth.

“My God!” I said. “What in the world is wrong with these peanuts?” It was the worst tasting something I had ever put in my mouth. It was juicy, and it tasted like brine.

Everybody was so busy buying peanuts I couldn’t get back up there to him. I was hungry as I could be. Well, when I finally got where I could get to him, I told him, “Mister, there’s something terribly wrong with these peanuts. I can’t eat them. They taste terrible! Give me another bag.”

“Son, there ain’t nothing wrong with them peanuts.”

I said, “Yes there is. You eat one of them.”

He busted one in his mouth and says, “There ain’t nothing wrong with that peanut.”

I says, “They’re terrible! They’re salty as brine! I can’t eat them.”

He said, “They’re boiled salted peanuts. That’s the way they’re supposed to be.”

And that was one of the biggest dern disappointments I ever had in my life.

ERGONOMIC KEYBOARDS

Who moved the 6 on my keyboard!

If you type, you’ll understand this. I got carpal tunnel syndrome. My dear husband finally convinced me that it wasn’t going away on its own. So I bought a fancy ergonomic keyboard, only to find that some smart aleck thought it would be fun to move the 6!

If you type, too, I’m sure you learned on a normal, simple, sane typewriter where the KEYS ARE WHERE THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE, and you typed the 6 with the right forefinger. Well, now you've got to type the 6 with your left hand! It throws the whole right hand off-key. That includes numbers 7 through 0 and the symbols ^ & * ( ) _ and +.

It takes a long time to jump from the keyboard to the keypad and back to the keyboard - a lot longer than it does to reach that right forefinger up to the 6. There must be about a Brazillian user names with combinations of letters and numbers.

This blasted ergonomic keyboard is supposed to help, but it’s going to put me in the looney bin. (Some people think that’s all right.)

This blog has been SO hard to type. Too many 6s.

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