More than fifty victims recipients of our annual newsletter this year, which is hot off the press this morning. For those of you looking in, as you breathlessly await the arrival of your very own copy of the 2014 Nibbles in your snail mail box, a little vignette therefrom to tide you over:
I even red eye corrected this. Well, at least one eye. When I went for two, Photoshop erred and added a black stipple to Happy Wife’s lower lip. This escaped my attention. When I submitted the photo for her review she asked, alarmingly, “Why do I have a melanoma on my lip!”
Oops. Ctrl-Z.
Which just shows to go ya, Photoshop can cause cancer.
Ice fog this morning. But a few more seconds of daylight today! Out of the seasonal trough we come, ready for what feels like a Sisyphean climb to summer solstice.
Listening to Christmas carols on Pandora this morning. “Round Yon Virgin?” There’s an oxymoron for ya. If you ask me anyway. Ask a master of ministerial matters, however, and you’d learn this:
Let’s back up. “Yon” actually has nothing to do with Mary’s youth. Rather it is a shortened form of “yonder,” as in “way over yonder.” “Round” is short for “around.” So the entire lyric is an abbreviated way of saying, “around yonder virgin,” which doesn’t make a lot of sense until you put it in context. The previous line is “all is calm, all is bright.” Put it all together and you get: “All is calm and bright around the virgin over there.”
If you say so, pal. Not the kind of atmosphere that attended any virgin I ever knew. And I knew at least one, in high school (I took her word for it). The atmosphere in the basement at the after-football-game party was anything but calm and bright once she showed up. More like frenzied and shadowy, what with all the attention she got from would-be suitors queuing up trying to snatch her away from the crowd to get her alone. I took her to the prom one year. I was the boyfriend, for a while, but being she was a year older than me, when she graduated and became a working girl and I was still a school boy that was the end of us. It wasn’t for lack of overtures on my part. I stalked her once. Showed up where she ate lunch during the week and spied her from the other side of the bar. Or I’d park a block away from where she lived and wait for her to come home. Just to see. Eventually, the last time I remember seeing her, I hounded her into coming as my date to a wedding reception. She was a real looker. I recall the raised eyebrows and elbow-jabs of approval from some of the guys at the bar. Drove her home that night and that’s all I’m going to say about that.
Pretty sure she’s not a virgin anymore. She met some guy where she worked, agreed to marry him and off to Arizona they went. To raise a family, so I heard years later. If she Googles my name and clicks the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button she’ll land directly on this blog and recognize it was her I was talking about. One gander at Happy Wife and she’ll also discover, after all, I was the luckier one.