It's all about me

I always read stories about really old people -- like this one about Indiana's oldest citizen turning 113 -- to see if they've had any lifelong bad habits that I also have so I can feel better about myself and say to people, "See there, it's not so bad drinking a pot of coffee every day" or "eating coney dogs for breakfast" or etc., etc. This one didn't have anything like that except for a snide remark from her daughter-in-law that she's been a widow for the last 68 years, ha, ha, ha.

I confessed in a comment I attached to my "Ah, spring" post that I have trouble taking pictures of flowers, always ending up too close or too far away. So my brother, Larry, e-mailed me a couple of photos of a flower he took just down the hill from his house outside Wimberly, Texas. Nobody likes a show-off.

Joshua Claybourn read the post about my mother's funeral and sent in something he wrote two years ago when his mother died. I could especially relate to the last paragraph, where he talks about two kids on bikes riding by right after his mother's final breath. At first, he found it a "loud, unwanted and out of place" intrusion, but he then realized that "in their laughter was life." Somebody brought a baby to my mother's funeral, and it was fussy through most of the service.

I just had to share with you one of those "Doh!" signs that are encountered now and then, apparently for the purpose of explaining to stupid people possible mistakes that even the stupidest of people probably wouldn't make. What does that say about the people who come up with the idea for such signs?

Until the day she died, I lied to my mother about the plants. There were two hanging rows of them, above my kitchen sink and in the windows overlooking the back yard. She watered them on her visits to my house, keeping them healthy and beautiful.

This will be my last post for a short while.

My mother died this morning after several years of declining health and a crises-filled couple of months. My deepest gratitude in advance for all the prayers and kind thoughts I know will come our way.

Back when I'm able.

I wonder how much parents are screwing up their kids by not letting go?

They text message their children in middle school, use the cellphone like an umbilical cord to Harvard Yard and have no compunction about marching into kindergarten class and screaming at a teacher about a grade.

So, a cop wants to find out how many suspects there usually are in an unsolved case. He adds up all the unsolved cases and all the suspects, divides the number of cases into the number of suspects and comes up with 3.8. He writes a report to the chief that says there are, "on average, 4 suspects for each unsolved case." Would that be known as rounding up the usual suspects?

Just asking.

It looks like God, when he's not too busy dispatching out-of-the-closet sodomites, is going to take care of me, too (see last letter to the editor in the package):

Think about it, Leo. You are far from God. You'd better get right now. Your feet will slide soon, and you will fall into an eternity of suffering and retribution in hell.

I hadn't written about the impending Knight Ridder sale because it was so unsettlingly uncertain. What would I say? Better to wait until the sale, collect my thoughts and then share my observations. Well, now the sale has happened, and things are as uncertain as ever, at least for some of us. McClatchy Co. has bought the company but plans to sell off 12 of the newspapers, including The News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne.