Our Dumb Blog

We had our first real Valentine’s Day as a married couple yesterday. Last year we were driving through Bryce Canyon and splurged on firewood ($3 for an armload; Berck just about collapsed under the load I laid on him) for a nice, warm blaze.

This year, Berck cleaned the apartment and cooked a roast, mashed potatoes, and asperagus roll-ups. I washed my hair and put on a dress. Berck gave me a CD, in case I gave him a present. (I had given him a CD for Christmas, and he said, “But I thought we didn’t give each other Christmas presents!” I guess we’ll have to work on holiday traditions.)

After supper we played some Twenty Questions (cool site), then went to bed early.

It was my best Valentine’s Day ever.

Actual Fact: Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice banned the selling of red flowers in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day.

We had a Good Day yesterday. I made biscuits for breakfast. We went for frozen custard at Rusty’s, then took the long way home, exploring a good bit of southern Oklahoma. The weather was beautiful, perfect for driving with the top down. We passed through several of the little towns Berck flies to.

One of the little towns along our way was Maysville, which doesn’t have an airport but does have an aviation theme about it. There’s a diner with a plane tail sticking out of the roof. This is because Maysville is the home of Wiley Post, who seems to be the most famous Oklahoman in the world, barring Will Rogers; the two men died together.

Otherwise, Maysville doesn’t have much to offer. As we approached the center of town, the street signs proceeded as follows:

1st ST
SECOND ST
THIRD ST
FOURTH
MAIN ST

I guess Maysville couldn’t afford congruent street signage.

Main looked very much like an alley, the next street being far more main (and a state highway).

We turned east onto it, then back north when we got to Lindsey, which is big enough to support a McDonalds. Speeding along, we passed one mobile home with a man outside practicing lassoing a sawhorse. “Well,” Berck remarked, “I guess you can’t get any more stereotypical than that.”

Actual Fact: Wiley Post was the first man to fly around the world solo. He also developed the first pressure suit for high altitude flying, using it to reach a record of 50,000 feet and discovering the jet stream.

Berck woke me up Monday morning. “Jonah! It’s 6:32!”

I set my alarm for 5:55 a.m. It takes half an hour to get to work, so I usually try to leave at 6:20 so I have time to put my lunch up and go to the washroom before walking the two-minute walk to the other side of the warehouse where the timeclock is located.

I’m glad I was driving the Miata with the radar detector holster ready to go.

I clocked in at 7:03.

Last night I dreamed I got two tickets. So I drove extra slow on the way to work this morning.

Actual Fact: In a recent study published by the British Journal of Medicine, St. John’s Wort worked a heck of a lot better than Paxil. Half of participants felt better with St. John’s Wort, while only a third felt better with Paxil. And the Paxil takers complained of lots of side effects.

The Sam’s, that they’ve been building right down the street from us since we moved here, finally opened last week. That means we don’t have to drive all the way up to OKC to go shopping. We took Arthur on his first Sam’s run on Wednesday. He holds a lot more bulk items than the Miata.

The Sam’s is so new that the concrete floors still look shiny. There was a huge line to get membership cards, and the greeter/bouncer seemed surprised we already had one.

We went back today because we’d forgotten Velveeta and didn’t get onions and bell peppers. The place was jam packed, but there were lots of checkout lanes open, so once we maneuvered the crowds, we got out of there pretty quickly.

We also went to an army/navy surplus (is the air force less wasteful?) store in Norman today that has everything 50% off. Berck got a pair each of navy, green, and cloud BDU trousers, and I got a navy pair…about $12 each. I love surplus stores. This one had crampons available, which would have come in handy on our icy hike in Zion National Park, though I couldn’t come up with a good enough excuse to buy them now in hope saving them for when we embark on some treacherous trek in the distant future.

We had to dash back from Sam’s, because Berck was scheduled to fly in a little while. He flew today and yesterday morning and Thursday night. He said he made himself nauseous tonight practicing chandelles.

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Actual Fact: In 1996 Ringo Starr appeared in a Japanese advertisement for apple sauce. Apparently, that’s what “Ringo” means in Japanese. (I don’t know if “Richard Starkey” means anything in Japanese.)