How to save some time on doing the dishes...
Oh, deer...
One day last week, I was motoring through metropolitan Anna and happened to spot this “critter” along a city street. I drove on for a block, turned around, went back to have another look. I’m guessing there’s a story...
Meanwhile...
The Other Half and yours truly were doing our best impression of staying away last Sunday night. We were watching “Monk” on the telly-vision. A commercial for a well-known dish-cleaning product came on.
If I remember correctly, and there is no guarantee about such a thing, a big selling point for the product was that it could cut down on the amount of time that we spend on doing the dishes by 50 percent.
Well, I thought out loud. I have another way to cut down on the amount of time we spend on doing dishes by 50 percent. After dinner, just toss out half of the stuff in the sink. Yup. Throw ‘em out. Think of how much time that will save you.
A cherished friend once suggested an even better idea. Throw everything away. Then, buy new stuff. That would save you time...and give the economy a boost, too.
Even though she was almost asleep, The Other Half still was able to suggest that my idea was, well, silly... What do you think?
Meanwhile...
A week’s worth, or maybe it was a month’s worth, of USA TODAY newspapers showed up in the mailbox one day late last week. That’s pretty much the pattern pretty much most of the time these days. Sometimes, the papers that show up in the mail are from last month. Most of the time, they are at least from the current year...and century... I guess when it comes to the delivery of newspapers, the situation pretty much is what it is...
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I subscribed to USA TODAY after the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was no longer available in our little corner of the world. I’m kind of Old School and still like to read news in a newspaper.
One of the features that I enjoy reading in USA TODAY is “50 STATES,” which offers a full page of “News from across the USA.”
Just for fun, I thought I would share a little bit of the “News” which appeared on the pages in the most recent bundle of newspapers I received.
Charlotte, a female stingray at an aquarium in North Carolina is pregnant. “But this pregnancy is different. There are no other stingrays in Charlotte’s tank,” USA TODAY reported. Seems that Charlotte’s happy news could be the result of “parthenogenesis.” Which will be our word for the day. Look it up...
Speaking of critters that live in the water, a “News” item from Louisiana shared the story of a “lucky crawfish named Sherbin.” Seems that Sherbin “was saved from a seafood boil, during the 8th Annual Pardoning of the Crawfish.” The Pardoning of the Crawfish kicks off the crawfish season in Louisiana. And to think, I didn’t even know crawfish had names.
For whatever it might be worth, I’ve never seen a stingray in the creek at the Trail of Tears State Forest which I visit rather frequently. I have seen crawfish...or crawdads as we know them here in Little Egypt. Don’t know if any crawdads I’ve seen were named Sherbin. They don’t seem very talkative, as far as arthropods go.
As you know, I enjoy fossil hunting. However, as far as I know, I have never discovered a new species of fossilized critter. But a student at Oklahoma State University did just that. He is “the first student researcher to discover, describe and name a new dinosaur species,” USA TODAY reorted. Just in case you were wondering (and I know you were), the student named the dinosaur “Eoneophron infernalis,” which translates to “Pharaoh’s dawn chicken from hell.” Cockadoodle doom?
I even stumbled across a bit of “news” from “southern Illinois.” Goodness. I sure wish folks would remember that it’s “Southern Illinois.” Southern Illinois is a special place. I think southern Illinois is just someplace not north, east or west of Chicago.
The news was about Paul Powell, who actually came up in a conversation yours truly had with somebody Monday morning at The Paragraph Factory. The “News from across the USA” story noted that “Paul Powell, the southern Illinois political powerhouse who died and left behind $850,000 in cash in the notorious ‘Shoebox Scandal,’ used to say, ‘The only thing worse than a defeated politician is a broke one.’ For more than half a century, a Powell-established $250,000 trust sustained his legacy, for better or worse. But the account that maintained his birthplace as a museum will soon run dry. The fate of the home in Vienna is uncertain, but it likely will be sold.”
That’s all for now...keep reading newspapers...whenever they happen to show up...and thank you for doing that...