What made you smile today?

Shouldn't be difficult for you to handle. According to a German truism, women don't get older anymore once they reach 25. Happy birthday!

Nothing except finding out its Dags birthday tomorrow and her birthday is as freaky as she is!!(I mean that in a nice way)

Er, dag .... do you have another preferred name? I hate to tell you this, but in Oz "dag" has less than wonderful connotations. (ie "daggy bum" = bum with residue of poo. (Sorry about that!) Or a "dag" is sort of a goose of a person, definitely not like your good self! I feel funny every time I call you this this inappropriate (in Oz) name that doesn't suit you at all! Anything you'd like for 2nd best?

This made me smile
Discovering Waggery.com today. Great section, and you have some really great writers. Thanks for the laughs!

Laughter:

"Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves". James Matthew Barrie

Thank you,

AE

BBB thinks outside the box
Thinking outside of the box can solve problems and make you laugh at your cleverness.

I had my contractor remove the hated vertical blinds from my sliding patio door and replace them with a metal curtain rod. He installed them two inches higher than the blind's existing screw holes using the top hole as the bottom hole for the new rod.

I bought some 100% cotton tap draperies and hung them (before ironing them) on the new rod. They were about two inches too long and puddled on the floor, where my dogs would love to play with them.

What to do? Install the new rod two inches higher on the wall resulting in nine wall screw holes that would need to be filled and touch-up painted?

Naw! I read the care instructions and discovered that washing in cold water would shrink the drapes about three percent. So I washed the new cotton draperies in hot water and dried them on high heat.

I removed them from the dryer, touch-up ironed them, and rehung them on the new rod. They had shrunk enough to be the perfect length.

BA

I know what you mean. Everytime I hear the word dag (in general usage, not when we refer to dag) I think of the words: idiot, fool, loser, etc etc.

But hey, its a free world. And I am assuming Dag is from the USA - its up to her. :wink: But you mean well, Msolga.

Msolga...very kind of you to fill her in on Aussie slang...actually, it's come up before. If it bothers you, you can always call her Dasha, like littlek (her former roommate) does. She answers to that, too.

Dasha ? What's wrong with gorgeous, sweetheart, sexy ?

:wink: i'll always be just 'gorgeous' or 'dahling' to you, prince. and vice versa.

while i have you on the line, i want to learn more about where you come from in india and all that. come play to my indian diary thread. i'll be back in august. now THAT makes me grin silly.

That would make me grin too, Dag!

<blows kiss at Prince G>

Got a call from a colleague today. Someone I've never met in person, but we do a lot of work together through phone and email contacts.

I'd sent him the link to my photos of my trip to NYC. He's been inspired to pick up pencil and pen again to start sketching, based on the photos. His wife is really happy about it. He'd been getting too got up in work.

I'd never known that he's a graduate of one of our best art schools - gone there on a scholarship.

The New York trip was an amazing visual experience for me, and I'm thrilled that it struck such a resonance in my friend as well.

I swear I need a thread that says what made you cry today? I am applying for a job, interview on Friday and I left my application letter and CV at home!! FREAK FREAK FREAK!!

my answer to the question?

NOTHING!! NOTHING!!



[why am I taking it out here? I am sorry!!]

I think you need the 'what made you grit and grimace' thread, pragmatic.

(you can't get the materials couriered, emailed or faxed to you?)

Nope - but thanks for the suggestion. Am tearing my hair out of my head...

And despite everything, in the end, people are beautiful <smiles>

They are?

Minor smile just now, though -- we were at the playground for a while, I was swinging while keeping an eye on sozlet as she played with some kids. This particular playground has much higher monkey bars that she is used to. She was doing this and that, then hung upside down, her head about 4 feet from the ground. I tensed up but she seemed to be fine. But then there was a little wiggle of not-fine-ness, losing her grip or something, and at the height of my swing I jumped off (which I haven't done since about 4th grade) and was at her side in about 2 seconds. I stood there without doing anything, she recovered, I retreated.

Another mom saw the whole thing and gave me a "nice move" thumbs-up. :-)

Never mind me, I was ambling through town this afternoon - it was hot - I'd spent the early afternoon at Aztek Chocolat, a delightful little coffeeplace in one of the most beautiful (in this gritty Budapest way) courtyards of town, reading the Guardian and occasionally grinning about something clever they wrote, and then I went back up to the app and out again to scan those cartoons and spend too much time on a2k in the internetcafe when I had really been planning to go there to do some work on my old work's website instead (they dont yet seem to have picked up much where I left off), so I left again and decided to go to another webcafe, a very pleasant one up in Ujlipotvaros, and start again -- but -- and -- anyway, I ended up ambling through town because the place was closed, and thats how I got myself on the other end of town on Raday utca, the cute backstreet that turns out to have all grown up now, where I read and had dinner in newly discovered, cosy cafe Castro and it turned out that down in that part of Raday utca, there was a festival going on. So I listened for a fair while to a band, cheesily called the Afro Magic Band, a Senegalese singer with Hungarian musicians, and they played pleasant West-African jazz that was only subtly danceable, and it was only when they came back for two more songs and switched to more upbeat African music that suddenly the one woman who had been dancing out in front, all the rest sitting at beergarden benches or standing around, was joined by this young crusty couple, and an older couple, and within literally seconds suddenly a dancing mass materialised after all, just like that, and I find something oddly moving about that very moment when suddenly people give in after all and surrender, fck it, and all ebulliently enjoy themselves in their individual way. An (I'm guessing) American girl sensually and enthusiastically dancing (her boyfriend well-meaningly bouncing along), an older man spiritedly hopping about, a twenty-something couple smoothely swinging, and the more the girls danced the more they spontaneously hugged their boyfriend or husband, and on my side there was this bunchy group of manly guys at their beergarden table slapping each others back and headbanging along, a Roma girl dancing in the back with her kid sister, kids running through it all with one (I think) retarded kid running up and down to the podium all the time, while a woman who just wanted to get home and whose big black dog thrusted and yapped against the sound ended up just picking him up and carrying him out, smiled at by everyone perhaps even the woman up on the fourth floor leaning out her window - with above it all in the now-dark sky an aeroplane blinking past. I'm a sucker for that all-together-now open-air concert group thing experience, it gives me a vicarious sense of belonging and watching everyone be together and themselves like that it's easy to love everyone again as well.

<nods>


Wow, playgrounds are the place to be, eh? I'm so looking forward to being a parent too and finally get some of the action as well...

I guess this is as just a good forum to share this bit of news from Silicon Valley. The new Kaiser Hospital being built across the street from our home had an open house today for employees and family. It starts operations beginning next month, and the hospital wing and most operations should be fully implemented by the summer of 2007. The "newness" of the hospital is very impressive; they have a pharmacy on all four floors with the lab on the first floor, internal medicine on the second floor, eye surgery, and injections, with the third floor with ophthalmology, optometry, orthopedics, and pediatrics, and the fourth floor with women's clinic/health, wound care, surgery clinic, and pulmonary medicine. We went at 12-noon to have a lunch of salad, hot dog, chips, pear, bottled water and ice cream. The hamburgers were out when we went through the buffet line. My wife still has to decide to either drive to work or walk when her department opens next month. That made me smile.

Oh. In the end, people are beautiful.

Lovely description, thanks.

(Ya don't need to have a kid to jump on a swing...)

This is Raymond, one of my co-workers.






He has wrapped one of my light green shawl thingies around his head.
Raymond is very comfortable with himself.

Raymond made me smile yesterday when he asked me to take a pic of him with the shawl (the story of how we got to that point in a conversation at work would need a nimh to describe)

He made me smile when I was going through the pix in the camera tonight.

He's a giant imp.