Category Archives: Humor

Things I thought were hilarious but apparently I was the only one

Humor

Within the past couple of weeks I’ve posted some images to Facebook and twitter that I thought were really funny. None of them got much notice either place. Either I have a really immature sense of humor or else the world of social media moves to quickly for people with senses of humor similar to mine to see most of what I post. Or else they were truly not noteworthy.

Luckily for me I have this sort of speakers corner and can say pretty much what I want to say. You may still not find it funny, but at least I can laugh again when I look at it — perhaps in triplicate.

The first image was only posted on Facebook. I’d been playing around with Google Plus and noticed that games were now available on my account. Even though I’ve been known to play games on Facebook, I was hoping that Google Plus would not have games. I clicked on one of the games on Google Plus (Angry birds) and saw that someone in my circles had recently played it. I played one round and as I quit the game a colorful scoreboard popped up on my screen. It seemed that I’d gotten a lower score than the person in my circles who’d also played Angry Birds. I thought it was hysterical so posted a screen shot of the scoreboard on facebook with this status:

If you were on Google Plus, you could play Angry Birds with Mark and me.

Come on, isn’t that funny?

The next thing was on Saturday when Clare was on her way back to school. I often use Google Latitude to track her comings and goings (with her blessing and only when she’s due here or due back at school. Shut up, I do give her some privacy). About 3 hours after she left us I checked her progress and saw that she was on Interstate 81 in Pennsylvania, just outside Harrisonburg. About a half hour later, Dean asked if I knew where Clare was and I told him where she’d been earlier. I checked again and found she’d moved a bit, but was no longer on the road. In fact she was in a lake near the junction of I81 and I78. I thought this was hysterical too and posted a screenshot with the following status:

This is why I should not follow Clare on Latitude when she’s on her way home or back to school…

You’re cracking up, right?

Finally, and not really so funny, but more creative (IMHO), was today’s series of photos of me cleaning up after Irene. I didn’t want to clean up and put it off for a while. Dean had to remind me twice that we needed to pick up sticks. Finally I got ready to go outside and pick up things off the lawn, but first I needed to put on my knock-off wellington boots which gave me an idea and made the job more fun…

One, Two -- Buckle my shoe
One, Two — Buckle my shoe
Three, four -- Shut the door
Three, four — Shut the door
Five, six -- Pick up sticks
Five, six — Pick up sticks
Seven, eight -- Lay them straight
Seven, eight — Lay them straight

Nine, ten — begin again!

Okay, you can go back to work now. I’m finished.

<snort>

New Whiteboard Rules, OK?

Humor

Something to keep you occupied while I work my way through work-related piles of PDFs and out of my blogging slump.

I don’t remember when we bought our first whiteboard. I think I may have bought a large one to use when I was a teacher, then to my husbands dismay, brought it home and hung it somewhere in the house. He ended up hanging it in the basement office, where it still hangs today usually filled with Clare’s temporary artwork or Dean’s explanation of some math or financial formula. When the children were very young he’d have them sit on a mini-John Deere tractor and they’d have lessons in math, written on the whiteboard. He called these sessions “Math Tractor”.

I purchased two smaller whiteboards, possibly for school as well, that ended up in the kitchen. One on the refrigerator and one above the doorway to the hallway leading to the living room. The one on the refrigerator was used to write notes while on the telephone or to let others know where we’d gone and when we’d be back. The whiteboard above the doorway was mostly used by Dean when he had something really important to say because it would be found lying on the counter with the important message — something the rest of us would find hard to miss.

The other day Dean replaced one of the whiteboards on which I’d accidently used permanent marker to write down a phone number of a caller. As soon as he attached the new whiteboard to the side of our refrigerator he wrote: New Whiteboard Rules. I thought, “it sure does”, but knew he’d have more to say on the subject.

Sure enough, yesterday morning I saw this when I wandered into the kitchen for my morning coffee:

 

New Whiteboard Rules
New Whiteboard Rules

Andrew, who rarely, if ever, used any of the whiteboards must have been inspired, because, to let us know he was headed to the beach with a friend, he’d taken down the old whiteboard from above the doorway, placed it on the counter and written this:

– sleeping at Will’s again – going to leave from there tomorrow – won’t see you til Weds – I may call in the morning to pick up anything – Love you, Happy Father’s yesterday

Like father like son?

A fun tease?

Or simply coincidence?

In Which Dona Admits to Loving Dozens of Men

Humor, Obsessions, Rave, Reading, , ,

In 1979 I spent a semester in London attending Southlands College and student teaching at a local primary school. The teacher with whom I did my teaching practice had a set of books in her classroom that I fell in love with and when I finished my student teaching, she gave me several titles in the collection. I’m pretty sure that I was the first person in Elgin to have copies of these books because they didn’t hit the States until a few years later. I remember being delighted yet dismayed to see the books being sold in a bookstore in Pittsburgh. Delighted because I could now easily purchase more of the books and dismayed because I was not unique in that respect any longer.

I used these books for lessons when I was a teacher because I loved the simple drawings, the life-lessons and the high vocabulary they offered. The books may have been small picture books, but when I did a readability evaluation on a few passages in several books found they were at the 5th grade reading level.

When my own children were old enough to care about books, I brought the books home and read to them from the books. We had fun laughing over the silly characters and the situations in which they found themselves.

The books are still in the house somewhere and while I’ve not seen them recently, thought about them the other day and made a mental note to blog about the set of books sometime soon.

Today when I saw the series of Google Doodles I knew that today was the day to write about Mr Men.

My favorite was Mr. Chatterbox and I never really liked the Little Miss books. They seemed more like an afterthought to me and not nearly as funny as the originals.