"Bits and Pieces" (ad infinitum)

Just a few things that have crossed my mind or my desk lately....

1.   Grayleym, Bastian, and Hendrix --  Law Firm??  Ice Skating moves??  The next "Idol" competitors???  Nope!  Not even close.  These are the FIRST names of three little boys (ages 2, 5, 6) in one family!  The poor kids!!  What were their parents thinking??? 

2.   In order to replace my glasses with just new lenses (same frames, just new lenses) with the new perscription, it will cost me $340  (after insurance payment)through the physician-owned Vision Center we use.  (Still can't figure out why so much!)  So, I opted to put off purchasing said lenses!  Today, I received a birthday greeting from them.  In addition to their best wishes they are "pleased" to offer me a discount on my next services from them.... of ....[drumroll please]....$20.00.  WOW!  A whole 6%!  Golly gee whizz, Doc!  Can you spare it?

3.  I've had an "almost cold" for the last week.  Not too many symptoms, not even anything too painful....a cough, a few sneezes, kind of achy muscles....that's all.  Well not quite all.  After five days of being "almost" sick, today I can't hear!  Again!!  I am so bloodly sick of every wayward germ in the world feeling free to just settle right into my sinuses until they are good and ready to leave!!  I mean really!  I can't hear too well as it is, getting head and sinus congestion just turns my world into a soundless, muffled, annoying place and I have had ENOUGH!  Go away, you little varmints!  And don't come back! 

4.  This is just curiosity, but have you noticed how many Mormon families have blogs??  Is it a new part of the Mormon Missionary work?  For the most part, there is no prosletizing and collectively they seem like a pretty contented bunch, but it strikes me as slightly surprising.  Along the same lines, a lot of infertile couples write about their struggles and triumphs.  Some of which is pretty personal stuff.  It's good for these families to have a place to talk about their frustrations and all, but it strikes me as slightly surprising.  (And yes, I do understand why I end up seeing so many on the same subjects.   It's just that the numbers surprise me.)

5.   I don't know how or why it got started, but when I was a fairly little girl (maybe 5 or 6?) I began to collect salt and pepper shakers.  My whole family would send me cute ones or or funny ones or souvenier ones from across the country. The collection got pretty large over the years (around 150 pairs!) and it got packed up and moved, unpacked, and displayed many times (we moved a lot.) Unfortunately when I was 17, my folks separated for a while.  A very small town in Florida in 1963 was not the place for a suddenly single mom to try to support 2 kids on her own.  So when it was just my mom, Little Sis and I, we moved from Florida back to Chicago (my uncle and his wife came down to get us) in just a VW bus and a U-Haul. There wasn't a lot of room and choices had to be made. So the salt and pepper collection didn't make the cut.   At 17 I was pretty miserable about the whole thing, so not taking the collection didn't matter too much to me then,  but since then I have often wished there had been another something we could have culled instead.   I wonder what ever happened to them?

6.  Does this ever happen to you?  I got a call from the Big Guy this afternoon, saying that suddenly a crown that he has had for a number of years had come off without warning.  Well of course it did!  It was Friday afternoon on the holiday weekend while he still had to work tonight, why wouldn't his tooth pick that precise time to complicate his life??    It happens a lot....at least to us.  Cars break down on weekends.  Unexplained pains occur in the middle of the night on a Saturday.  The nights that your hubby is clear across the country on a business trip, is the time the washing machine overflows, you find a mouse in your pantry, and your mother-in-law who doesn't like you, makes a surprise visit!!!  The universe has some sense of humor!  Ha. Ha.