Bushels looking for lights to hide

When I was in graduate school, I did an internship in the news department of a local public radio station.

I got it the old-fashioned way.

I knew somebody.

The week gone by — July 25

“I found your secret Twitter account.”

I was taken slightly aback when Suzi said that, because while I have multiple Twitter accounts so I can keep general news, sports and my writing separate, she knows about each of them.

So I didn’t know why she was claiming to have pulled an Ashley Feinberg.

Happiness is hiring someone else for the kids

From the Department of Interesting Job Titles (and Suzi, who noticed the job ad) comes …

,,, Assistant Director of Happy Kids.

Not Director of Happy Kids, the assistant director, but that may actually be a good thing, because you know at some point, the director is going to make some kids unhappy because of some silly “rules,” and who are they going to turn to?

Rainy days and Sundays always bring them out

I would have bought whatever they were selling … except I didn’t know what they were selling … and I’m not sure they’re selling anything, anyway.

If it was supposed to open in February, being able to see myself in the window means the inventory is only visible from the other side, you’re supposed to just walk in without knowing what’s inside, the store never opened or it opened and closed in five months.

But even though I find products named after parts of speech odd — Suzi gets hair products from a company called Verb — a company called Whom speaks to the grammar pedant in me.

The week gone by — July 18

I slept through it, but Suzi said our cat Sasha was very anxious for her to get up the other morning.

When she saw the mouse on the floor of our dining room, she realized why Sasha had been so insistent.

She must have gotten it overnight, since we hadn’t heard anything before we went to bed.

Remember regular, ‘ordinary’ days?

Paperwork … always paperwork.

So even though it was a regularly scheduled physical — pending the results of the standard bloodwork one morning next week, I’m healthy, although because of a change in age guidelines my doctor recommended something that starts with “colon” and ends with “-oscopy” — I was filling out paperwork.

OK, it was a minor annoyance at worst, but as I was checking to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, I noticed on one of the forms I had written the right date … but the year as 2019.

We always mean to remember, but sometimes we don’t

In the imagination, it’s a dock, or maybe a train station, early in the 1940s.

He’s leaving to join the military, with the ultimate destination either in Europe or the Pacific. She’s his girl, perhaps a high school sweetheart.

As they’re saying their goodbyes, she says, “Forget me not, sweet William.”

The week gone by — July 11

When the Yankees were playing terribly recently, I decided I had to step away for a bit.

It’s not like I was going to choose a new team — even though I live in Massachusetts, I won’t root for the Red Sox if you put a gun to my head — or not check to see if they won each night, but I just wasn’t going to watch for a spell.

The Captain’s Quiz 3: The Escape Quiz

Paul from The Captain’s Speech has created a game where only he can define success or failure based on standards that only he sets and which can change from moment to moment.

Basically, he’s like a home-plate umpire in Major League Baseball, although I have a plan to change that (the umpiring, not Paul, and that, dear readers, is called foreshadowing).

The time has come to pay tribute again

We all have our different ways and timelines for deciding life is back to “normal.”

Maybe it’s your own vaccination status, or a combination of being vaccinated and living in a place with high vaccination rates.

Or maybe it’s about the experiences — going to a soccer game where the discomfort was more about being soaked by the rain and not being in a crowd of 21,000 other people, or running your first race in 580 days.