Archive | August 2017

My Dirty Little Secret

Aug27

I tried to be a woman of the world, and did a pretty good job of it; but, the awful truth was I did not know how to put gas in my car so before I could go anywhere I had to send the husband to the gas station with MY car. And this he did.

To rectify this short coming, I stated watching YouTube videos on ‘how to pump gas’, and learned some rather interesting trivia in the process. You never have to guess which side of the car your gas tank is on because there is a little arrow in the gas gage pointing to the side of the car corresponding to the tank, you take the gas cap off with two clicks and put it back on with three clicks, and in the State of Oregon it is illegal for any private citizen to touch the gas pumps and all the stations have attendants to pump the petrol.

After two days of viewing YouTube, I hauled the husband to the car and drove him to the gas station so he could watch me pump gas to make sure I did it correctly. The next day, I repeated the same procedure with the other car. I would do it again, but I’m fresh out of vehicles and the ones we have are full to the point of overflowing. He says there will be no more gas purchases this week because gas is at an all time high due to the hurricane in Texas, but I don’t know how that caused the gas price in Illinois to spiral upwards but it did.

I am currently watching basic auto maintenance videos but I don’t like getting grease on my hands so I am uncertain if I will try to check the oil or not. I still my not be a woman of the world, but at least I can get gas in the car and travel from one gas station to the next.

Such is life on the prairie.

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Let’s All Fight With Statues!

Aug24

Years ago while sitting in a café in Argentina, I watched as a group of drunken Americans staggered through the door. It was not hard to tell they were Americans; they were rude and crude and seemed to think they were deserving of special privilege that did not include courtesy to other patrons.  While I sat there watching them, this is the conversation heard from the booth behind my head:

Patron One: “Now you know what the term ‘ugly Americans Abroad’ means.”

Patron Two: “What do Americans know anyway? They live in the only country in the world to declare war against itself.”

It was a simple observation of those diners, and I had forgotten the words until recently when Americans went to war with the statues left behind from that war. The thing is I don’t care one way or another about a civil war statue because I only see them for what they are; statues that are very old and commemorate a chapter in our history that was not pretty but history rarely is. However, if you need to beat up a statue to feel self worth, then go for it. But what happens once the statues are broken and lying on the ground as so much rubbish, and the supply of statues runs out?  Who then fulfills the wrath of a mob intent on vigilante justice, and we can but hope they don’t start looting civil war gravesites in search of long dead soldiers on both sides.

The real travesty of the statue thing is, I don’t have to travel abroad these days to watch ugly Americans on display. I only have to turn the television on.

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