A few of the Butterbeans took a road trip this past weekend. We put gas in our car and headed south for a few days. South has a lot to recommend it, most notably its temperature. But right now gasoline has only one thing to recommend it. It makes your car run.
On road trips—well all of the time—Father Butterbean is preoccupied with the price of gasoline. I don’t think he notices the scenery or the wildlife or the stores or the speed limit signs, but he focuses on all of the station marquees and compares their advertised prices.
“That station back there a ways had gas for $3.19. This one has it for $3.29. It jumped ten cents in just a couple of blocks. And back there in the last town, I saw it for $3.05. Remember that.
We’ll stop there on the way home and fill up.”
“I can’t remember the price at the one we just passed, let alone the one in the last town,” I complain. “And quit driving all over this town looking for the cheapest gas. It’s okay if we have to pay three cents a gallon more.”
“No, it’s not. It’s the principle of the thing. If I go to the most expensive station, they will think they can get away with those prices all the time.”
Mr. B. judges stations by their gas prices—not by anything else. Don’t ever tell him, but I occasionally go to the station that is the closest, whether its price is less or not. Of course, sometimes I am in danger of running out of gas if I go to the station across town. At times like that, I will pay seventy cents extra for my tank of gas if it will save me a walk in the cold. In fact
I would be willing to pay a lot more than that.
This conversation took place during our road trip:
“Dad, will you pull over at a station? I need to use the bathroom.” Now you know how kids are, even big ones, they will need to go to the bathroom within half an hour of the last fill up, which was the case this time.
“Dad, don’t forget I need a bathroom. There’s a station just ahead.”
“We can’t go to that station; their gas costs $3.27.
“We can’t use their bathroom because their gas costs $3.27? It’s okay Dad. They don’t charge for their toilet paper.”
What really aggravates him is triumphantly saving five cents on gasoline and then going inside to find he has to pay more for his potato chips and drinks.
“These chips cost $3.19. That’s a gallon of gas. What good does it do to save on gas if I have to spend it all on treats?”
“Dad, this is a convenience store.”
“Those chips are $1.29 at the grocery store. Let’s go over there.” Notice that you didn’t hear him say that he didn’t need any chips then.
“Dad, it’s three miles away. That would make it an inconvenience store. Besides it will cost that much in gas to get there.”
“Here, Dad. Here’s some milk to go with your cookies.”
“I don’t want to buy a small one. It costs $1.69. You can get a whole gallon for less than twice that."
“Dad, do you want to drink out of a gallon jug while you’re driving?”
Mr. B. not only worries about the price at the pump, but like most men, he frets over his gas mileage as well. He has been calling out the mpg score every ten miles, as well as when we go up hills and down, in the city and in the country.
“I could get better gas mileage,” he remarks while eyeing the CD case I brought, “if we didn’t have to carry all of those CD’s around.”
Looks like in the interest of hauling less weight in the future, I am going to have to choose between my music and my potato chips.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Are men the biggest losers?
Well, last week I had to weigh in on studies, you know those “scientific” investigations that are administered I don’t know how which reveal nothing about something, or is it the other way around. With computers to facilitate the compilation of information, and the internet to proliferate it, life is all about studies. You can probably find a study to support about any idea you have. And if you don’t like the results you got from the study you found, just wait. Within a week you will probably find one that suggests the opposite.
Well, I am conducting my own study. Look, I qualify as a studier. I have a computer and I have the internet. The question is, “Do men or women lose more things?
So the survey goes like this:
1. Are you male or female?
2. Would you say that you lose five, ten or fifteen item per week?
Pretty good, don’t you think? So if I tie all of the responses to a gender and then total all of the responses and divide by the total number of respondents, I should be ready to publish, right?
Actually my study is not designed to lay blame. My theory is that this probably has nothing to do with men being more analytical and women being more emotional, unless of course you are talking about losing your calculator or your child.
I am just wondering whether losing things is related to the number and size of places one has to put things. In our family, the men lose things. It’s because they use their pockets for storage. Give them something too big to fit into a pocket, or dress them in sweats, and that’s it. They will not know where they put their sunglasses, their coats, their shoes, their books, and in the case of wearing sweats, their wallets, their car keys, their money,
But wait a minute. There may be a flaw in my study. Just one “poor loser” could distort the results. For instance, one male in the Butterbean family has lost enough items to skew the best of studies.
He has lost several wallets, the real ones with his driver’s license and credit cards inside. He came home from scout camp without his sleeping bag one year. He has lost indoor sleeping equipment too—at least two quilts and several pillows. Add to the list numerous tools and electronic devices, you know, cell phones, chargers, iPods, etc. He has supplied sunglasses for the masses out there somewhere. When he was young, the rule was: you get one coat per winter; if you lose that you are wearing a sweatshirt. with or without pockets. Once he lost his pants while wearing them. And he has lost his shirt due to buying so many sunglasses.
So my theory is that women lose fewer things because they carry a purse. The bigger the purse, the fewer lost items. When women are away from home and need to put their sunglasses down so they can put on mascara, they just throw them in their purse, which by the way is where the mascara came from. When they take the keys from the ignition, they drop them in the purse, even when they are not wearing sweats.
When women finish with their cell phones, their nail clippers, their change, it goes in the purse. Not only do they have a place to put everything, but they have everything they need hanging from one shoulder.
My daughter’s purse is probably more appropriately called a suitcase. (Come to think of it, she is always complaining about shoulder pain.) Inside her bag are all of life’s necessities and then some: ibuprofen, at least one water bottle, various tools, a curling iron, a full-sized lint roller, a chicken sandwich, her current novel, a pair of flip-flops, a camera, extra batteries, hair spray, All of those items would be lost if she had to depend on pockets. Nothing is lost; just don’t ask her to find anything in there.
Me, now. I may be able to balance out the poor loser. I only lose one item per week. I hate to say it, but it is usually my purse.
Well, I am conducting my own study. Look, I qualify as a studier. I have a computer and I have the internet. The question is, “Do men or women lose more things?
So the survey goes like this:
1. Are you male or female?
2. Would you say that you lose five, ten or fifteen item per week?
Pretty good, don’t you think? So if I tie all of the responses to a gender and then total all of the responses and divide by the total number of respondents, I should be ready to publish, right?
Actually my study is not designed to lay blame. My theory is that this probably has nothing to do with men being more analytical and women being more emotional, unless of course you are talking about losing your calculator or your child.
I am just wondering whether losing things is related to the number and size of places one has to put things. In our family, the men lose things. It’s because they use their pockets for storage. Give them something too big to fit into a pocket, or dress them in sweats, and that’s it. They will not know where they put their sunglasses, their coats, their shoes, their books, and in the case of wearing sweats, their wallets, their car keys, their money,
But wait a minute. There may be a flaw in my study. Just one “poor loser” could distort the results. For instance, one male in the Butterbean family has lost enough items to skew the best of studies.
He has lost several wallets, the real ones with his driver’s license and credit cards inside. He came home from scout camp without his sleeping bag one year. He has lost indoor sleeping equipment too—at least two quilts and several pillows. Add to the list numerous tools and electronic devices, you know, cell phones, chargers, iPods, etc. He has supplied sunglasses for the masses out there somewhere. When he was young, the rule was: you get one coat per winter; if you lose that you are wearing a sweatshirt. with or without pockets. Once he lost his pants while wearing them. And he has lost his shirt due to buying so many sunglasses.
So my theory is that women lose fewer things because they carry a purse. The bigger the purse, the fewer lost items. When women are away from home and need to put their sunglasses down so they can put on mascara, they just throw them in their purse, which by the way is where the mascara came from. When they take the keys from the ignition, they drop them in the purse, even when they are not wearing sweats.
When women finish with their cell phones, their nail clippers, their change, it goes in the purse. Not only do they have a place to put everything, but they have everything they need hanging from one shoulder.
My daughter’s purse is probably more appropriately called a suitcase. (Come to think of it, she is always complaining about shoulder pain.) Inside her bag are all of life’s necessities and then some: ibuprofen, at least one water bottle, various tools, a curling iron, a full-sized lint roller, a chicken sandwich, her current novel, a pair of flip-flops, a camera, extra batteries, hair spray, All of those items would be lost if she had to depend on pockets. Nothing is lost; just don’t ask her to find anything in there.
Me, now. I may be able to balance out the poor loser. I only lose one item per week. I hate to say it, but it is usually my purse.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Spring ahead, fall down
So, I set my clocks ahead for Daylight Savings Time—wait a minute (pun)—it will really take me at least a week to get all of the clocks in my life set to the right time. There are the bedside clocks, the stove clock, the 24-in clock, the decorative clocks, the mantel clock, the microwave clock, my watch, the clock in the car, the clock at work, and some I haven’t thought of just now.
Some of them approach rocket-science skill levels to set, and for some of them I will need a chair to stand on. Some of the low priority clocks just might have to wait six months (I guess it is more than that now) to be correct again.
After the clock-setting ritual, I will have to be watchful for a few days. Father Butterbean thinks that he can trick me into being on time if he sets the clocks ten minutes ahead. So I have to figure out which clocks are on time and which ones are set ahead so I will know when to subtract ten minutes and when not to. Don’t experts tell us to simplify our lives? And don’t think that I can subtract correctly all of the time. I get cranky and tell Mr. B. that I want to know what time it is, not what time it isn’t.
Speaking of experts and time, a young friend of mine told me about a study that was done to try to determine which nations and which cultures were more productive. It sounds like warped Bertha-logic to me, but they sent observers out to different cities in the world and stationed them in business districts. Their study criteria were: how quickly people walked a certain distance, how many of the clocks in the city were correct, and the length of time it took a public servant to complete a task.
Well, what do you think? Just checking. Keep on thinking.
Now if I were to use those criteria to measure my productivity, the results of my study would be skewed to say the least. First of all, I can’t walk as fast as I used to, especially if I have been sitting (not doing nothing, by the way) for a while. Second, Mr. B. sabotages my productivity scores by deliberately setting the clocks ahead; and third, no one could fairly measure the time it takes me to complete a task, because I am always working on at least three of them at one time. (Okay, I didn’t say I was doing them right.)
Interesting as that study is, I feel free to pitch it, part and parcel—especially the part about clocks being set to the correct time. I beg your pardon, but I walk slow no matter what my clock says.
My physiological clock is something else again. If I were to set 50 clocks ahead by one hour, my internal clock would still not get the message and never quite catch up. There is something about getting up in the dark. I am in good company. though; small children and animals don’t adjust so well to fiddling around with the clocks either. They can’t tell time and can’t subtract (or is it add?) an hour and conclude, "It’s really only six o’clock."
I understand from the ten o’clock news (it’s really the 11 o’clock news now) that the reason they, Congress, moved Daylight Savings Time up by three weeks was to conserve energy, not yours or mine, but ours. There was a study which suggested that in Australia, energy was indeed saved by doing just that. I don’t know what the model was, but the Good Lord only gave us so many daylight hours. Try as we might, we aren’t going to be manufacturing any more except by turning the lights on. It doesn’t matter whether we stay up later or get up earlier, it’s all the same. So a new study done after a year of the longer, better, DST season shows that, instead of saving, we are using more energy. Hmm…those darn studies.
Are you still thinking about that productivity study? Have you guessed which country scored the highest? How about the one most noted for superior timepieces? That would be Switzerland. Having your clocks set precisely on time must stand for something. I don’t know for sure what, but Mr. B. should take notice just in case it’s productivity.
Some of them approach rocket-science skill levels to set, and for some of them I will need a chair to stand on. Some of the low priority clocks just might have to wait six months (I guess it is more than that now) to be correct again.
After the clock-setting ritual, I will have to be watchful for a few days. Father Butterbean thinks that he can trick me into being on time if he sets the clocks ten minutes ahead. So I have to figure out which clocks are on time and which ones are set ahead so I will know when to subtract ten minutes and when not to. Don’t experts tell us to simplify our lives? And don’t think that I can subtract correctly all of the time. I get cranky and tell Mr. B. that I want to know what time it is, not what time it isn’t.
Speaking of experts and time, a young friend of mine told me about a study that was done to try to determine which nations and which cultures were more productive. It sounds like warped Bertha-logic to me, but they sent observers out to different cities in the world and stationed them in business districts. Their study criteria were: how quickly people walked a certain distance, how many of the clocks in the city were correct, and the length of time it took a public servant to complete a task.
Well, what do you think? Just checking. Keep on thinking.
Now if I were to use those criteria to measure my productivity, the results of my study would be skewed to say the least. First of all, I can’t walk as fast as I used to, especially if I have been sitting (not doing nothing, by the way) for a while. Second, Mr. B. sabotages my productivity scores by deliberately setting the clocks ahead; and third, no one could fairly measure the time it takes me to complete a task, because I am always working on at least three of them at one time. (Okay, I didn’t say I was doing them right.)
Interesting as that study is, I feel free to pitch it, part and parcel—especially the part about clocks being set to the correct time. I beg your pardon, but I walk slow no matter what my clock says.
My physiological clock is something else again. If I were to set 50 clocks ahead by one hour, my internal clock would still not get the message and never quite catch up. There is something about getting up in the dark. I am in good company. though; small children and animals don’t adjust so well to fiddling around with the clocks either. They can’t tell time and can’t subtract (or is it add?) an hour and conclude, "It’s really only six o’clock."
I understand from the ten o’clock news (it’s really the 11 o’clock news now) that the reason they, Congress, moved Daylight Savings Time up by three weeks was to conserve energy, not yours or mine, but ours. There was a study which suggested that in Australia, energy was indeed saved by doing just that. I don’t know what the model was, but the Good Lord only gave us so many daylight hours. Try as we might, we aren’t going to be manufacturing any more except by turning the lights on. It doesn’t matter whether we stay up later or get up earlier, it’s all the same. So a new study done after a year of the longer, better, DST season shows that, instead of saving, we are using more energy. Hmm…those darn studies.
Are you still thinking about that productivity study? Have you guessed which country scored the highest? How about the one most noted for superior timepieces? That would be Switzerland. Having your clocks set precisely on time must stand for something. I don’t know for sure what, but Mr. B. should take notice just in case it’s productivity.
Monday, March 3, 2008
I’m out in the cold
Someone told me I should write about the cold. Well, as I was wiping my nose, shivering, and feeling ambivalent about my sandwich, while watching my basketball team commit a ten-point turnaround, I blinked incomprehensibly. And which "cold" would that be?
Well, I checked dictionary.com just in case I could "heap some more wood on the fire," and I did, but it didn’t warm me up any. So here is a completely useless compendium of "cold" and the related usages according to Bertha. I skipped a few of the entries, which is all right since I thought of a couple of idioms on my own.
cold (kōld) adj., cold·er, cold·est
1. having a relatively low temperature; having little or no warmth: It has been extremely cold this winter.
2. feeling an uncomfortable lack of warmth; chilled: Bertha has been uncomfortably cold for five months now.
3. having a temperature lower than the normal temperature of the human body: She has cold hands, cold feet, cold nose…
4. not affectionate, cordial, or friendly; unresponsive; dispassionate: Winter gets a cold reception from me.
5. failing to excite feeling or interest: Father Butterbean attacked the snow-covered sidewalk with cold precision and a worn-out snow shovel.
6. depressing; dispiriting: With fog descending, it was going to be a cold, gloomy lifetime.
7. unconscious because of a severe blow, shock, etc.: Father slipped on the ice and knocked himself out cold.
8. So intense as to be almost uncontrollable: The character "Jack Frost" inspires my cold hatred.
9. faint; weak: The dog’s trail in three feet of snow was hardly cold.
10. (in games) distance from the object of search or the correct answer. Well, am I hot or cold now?
11. Slang. (in sports and games) not scoring or winning; ineffective: Sometimes the Jazz are cold this season.
-noun
12. the relative absence of heat: Bertha suffers from the incessant cold, even with many layers of clothing..
13. the sensation produced by loss of heat from the body, as by contact with anything having a lower temperature than that of the body: She cringes every morning when thinking about the cold of the bathroom tile on her feet.
14. cold weather: We can’t take much more of this cold.
15. Also called common cold. a respiratory disorder characterized by sneezing, sore throat, coughing, etc., caused by an allergic reaction or by a viral, bacterial, or mixed infection. I think I have another cold.
–adverb
16. with complete competence, thoroughness, or certainty; absolutely: He learned sidewalk skating cold.
17. without preparation or prior notice: I progressed from skids to three-sixties cold.
18. in an abrupt, unceremonious manner: He quit shoveling cold.
-Idioms
19. in from the cold, out of a position or condition of exile, concealment, isolation, or alienation: If you think it is spring now, you need to come in from the cold.
20. left out in the cold, neglected; ignored; forgotten: Missing the ski trip did not leave me feeling out in the cold.
21. throw cold water on, to disparage; disapprove of; dampen the enthusiasm of: Mark Eubank threw cold water on my hopes for a January thaw.
22. cold feet, lacking in desire or courage: I was going to go out to the mailbox, but I got cold feet. 23. cold shoulder, not receptive or welcoming: I tried giving winter the cold shoulder, but that didn’t keep it away.
Sounds like a pun festival to me.
So which "cold" is it? Take your pick.
Well, I checked dictionary.com just in case I could "heap some more wood on the fire," and I did, but it didn’t warm me up any. So here is a completely useless compendium of "cold" and the related usages according to Bertha. I skipped a few of the entries, which is all right since I thought of a couple of idioms on my own.
cold (kōld) adj., cold·er, cold·est
1. having a relatively low temperature; having little or no warmth: It has been extremely cold this winter.
2. feeling an uncomfortable lack of warmth; chilled: Bertha has been uncomfortably cold for five months now.
3. having a temperature lower than the normal temperature of the human body: She has cold hands, cold feet, cold nose…
4. not affectionate, cordial, or friendly; unresponsive; dispassionate: Winter gets a cold reception from me.
5. failing to excite feeling or interest: Father Butterbean attacked the snow-covered sidewalk with cold precision and a worn-out snow shovel.
6. depressing; dispiriting: With fog descending, it was going to be a cold, gloomy lifetime.
7. unconscious because of a severe blow, shock, etc.: Father slipped on the ice and knocked himself out cold.
8. So intense as to be almost uncontrollable: The character "Jack Frost" inspires my cold hatred.
9. faint; weak: The dog’s trail in three feet of snow was hardly cold.
10. (in games) distance from the object of search or the correct answer. Well, am I hot or cold now?
11. Slang. (in sports and games) not scoring or winning; ineffective: Sometimes the Jazz are cold this season.
-noun
12. the relative absence of heat: Bertha suffers from the incessant cold, even with many layers of clothing..
13. the sensation produced by loss of heat from the body, as by contact with anything having a lower temperature than that of the body: She cringes every morning when thinking about the cold of the bathroom tile on her feet.
14. cold weather: We can’t take much more of this cold.
15. Also called common cold. a respiratory disorder characterized by sneezing, sore throat, coughing, etc., caused by an allergic reaction or by a viral, bacterial, or mixed infection. I think I have another cold.
–adverb
16. with complete competence, thoroughness, or certainty; absolutely: He learned sidewalk skating cold.
17. without preparation or prior notice: I progressed from skids to three-sixties cold.
18. in an abrupt, unceremonious manner: He quit shoveling cold.
-Idioms
19. in from the cold, out of a position or condition of exile, concealment, isolation, or alienation: If you think it is spring now, you need to come in from the cold.
20. left out in the cold, neglected; ignored; forgotten: Missing the ski trip did not leave me feeling out in the cold.
21. throw cold water on, to disparage; disapprove of; dampen the enthusiasm of: Mark Eubank threw cold water on my hopes for a January thaw.
22. cold feet, lacking in desire or courage: I was going to go out to the mailbox, but I got cold feet. 23. cold shoulder, not receptive or welcoming: I tried giving winter the cold shoulder, but that didn’t keep it away.
Sounds like a pun festival to me.
So which "cold" is it? Take your pick.
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