Tag Archives: funny

Blow ye winds, blow!

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My dear Humoristian hooligans,

We have got us some gusts here. Yesiree, bub, it is bellowing. Internet’s down. I am thumbing on my cellphone…which means this post is going to take a week or two to write. There will be grammatical mistakes and possible words that I didn’t bint …hah…right on cue…intend to write. But the good news is that my phone is adding a lotto…livid…lot of new words to my visit…dictionary…here.  It is entertaining to teach my phone new words like “bub” and “yesiree” and together we even created a new word just now: bint. Whuch…(yeah, just made that one up, too) …that actually might be a great assignment for my high school students – create your own words.

Wishing you all a day of interesting adventures and cool new wirds. May you be easily entertained. And may you know kindness and love.

Xoxo

Karen

Karen’s Pre-School for Grown-Ups

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We all know I have enough flaws, faults, and foibles to fill pages and pages of blog posts. But… yeah… I am not going to talk about those things at this time. Nosiree Bub. I want to talk about something good I’ve discovered about myself.

My discovery began when I became aware of how much fun I was having driving Moz and Dad around on the local backroads in search of views and birds last weekend. Their glee at busting out of the retirement community for a day filled me with glee, too. I realized I had that exact same feeling when my sons were youngsters and I would take them on “field trips” and hikes and introduce them to new places. And THEN I realized I get that same feeling when one of my students grasps a new concept and her eyes light up with the wonder of it. And all this led to my epiphany: I love helping people escape.from whatever confines them. It brings me great joy.

I posted this epiphany on Facebook, and one of my friends, Allen Nelson (always thinking, that one), responded with this comment: “There’s a business model in there somewhere: Uber meets TripAdvisor. Instead of shuttling people where they expect to go, taking them on short, ‘Madcap’ adventures. I suspect that there’s a large, untapped desire for adventure out there.”

And isn’t that just a FANTASTIC idea?!! .

I’m thinking maybe I could open up a kind of “pre-school” for grown-ups. The day might look something like this:

Nine-ish: We load up in the Madcap Adventure Van and head out for a field trip. This could be a search for views and birds from the van, or I might take us all some place where we can get out of the van and go for a nice little hike ((depending on my clients’ physical abilities and general state of health, of course).

Trumpeter swan in Bow, WA. (Photo by Karen Molenaar Terrell)
Padilla Bay Mudflats (Photo by Karen Molenaar Terrell)
Lake Padden Forest (Photo by Karen Molenaar Terrell)

Noonish: Back to my house for lunch. If it’s the right time of the year we can forage for food – gather eggs from our chickens, pick fruit from the orchard, and vegetables from the garden – I’ve found that most people find something kind of satisfying in the idea of “living off the land.” Of course, we’re only going to actually do this for one meal, because… like… a few hours after “living off the land” we are going to be craving some actual food. But by then my clients will be back in their own lives and can take care of themselves. 

After lunch: Arts and crafts time. This is when I might bring out the fingerpaints, the coloring books, the beads and pipe cleaners and pop sickle sticks and set my clients free to create something to bring home at the end of the day to give to their parents. Or children. Or friends. Their loved ones will be forever grateful to me for this. 

 

art

Two-ish: Math. 🙂 We might factor some polynomials at this time. That’s always fun. I especially like factoring polynomials that look like this: x^2 -15 + 36.  “Ooh!” I’d exclaim, “What are the factors of 36? Remember that you can multiply two negative numbers and get a positive one, so the factors of 36 include negative numbers, too. Do any of those factor pairs add up to a negative 15? Bingo! Good job, Grasshopper!”

Three-ish: Bring out the kazoos. 

Three-thirty-ish: Time to wind down and get the grown-ups ready to return to their families. We can all sing one last song together – maybe Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life – and then bid a fond farewell to one another. I’d be sure to pin any important notes to families on my clients’ jackets – stuff like: “David played well with the other grown-ups today” and “Kathy really knows how to rock a kazoo!” 

Yeah. I think this might actually work. 

 

 

“Thank you, Hon!”

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I got called “Hon” today by a sweet woman in the Fred Meyer’s parking lot. It has been a long time since someone older than me – someone I didn’t know – looked at me as a youngster and called me “Hon.” I really liked it. 🙂

First, a little background: I am one of those customers you sometimes see in store parking lots collecting all the abandoned shopping carts and choo-choo training them into the store – it drives me kind of crazy to see abandoned shopping carts recklessly rolling around without a supervisor. It’s probably the teacher in me.

So what happened today was this: You know how most supermarkets now have two sizes of shopping carts? There’s the jumbo size and the petite size? And you know how there never seems to be enough of the little carts? Well, today I found one abandoned about fifty yards outside the supermarket entrance and thought I would claim responsibility for it, and appropriate it for my own use. The problem was, though, that it had an upright cola can in it – still half full of pop. As things were, I would need two hands to maneuver the cart, and a third hand to hold up the can so it didn’t spill all over everything. I do not happen to have a third hand. I suppose I could have emptied out the pop on the sidewalk or something – but that didn’t seem very polite. An easier solution soon presented itself, though – there was another abandoned little cart there – and, after trying to maneuver the two carts into the store, I did the easier thing today: I transferred my affections over to the soda-less one and proceeded into the store.

I felt a twinge of guilt at leaving that other cart out there, but I decided that today someone else could take responsibility for it.

I did my shopping with my little cart and then grabbed my bags out of it and left it to socialize with all the other carts in the store’s entrance. And wouldn’t you know it? As I was coming out of the store I saw a sweet white-haired older woman pushing the shopping cart with the soda can towards the store. Karma, right? I went up to her and said, “Here, let me get that pop can for you – I think that’ll make it easier for you to maneuver the cart.” She smiled as I picked the can out of the cart and took it to a patch of dirt to empty it, and then dropped it into a bin near the store. This is when the dear woman said, “You’re a nice person. Thanks, Hon!” I sheepishly thanked her – not explaining that I’d encountered the cart before her and had left it there.

Here’s my lesson for today: As soon as I saw that abandoned shopping cart – as soon as I saw the pop can in it – it became my responsibility, didn’t it? I was going to have to deal with it sooner or later. I did get a “Thanks, Hon!” out of it, though. 🙂

Interracial Kindness 4