Holy Crap!  Episode #2200!  We started this back in 2006, well, officially in 2006, actually further back then that, but let’s call it that.  Seventeen years.  Two thousand, two hundred episodes.  That’s 129 1/2 episodes a year (on average),  10.8 issues per month, 2.5 issues per week,  or finally, about 1/3 of an issue every day…or is that too much?  I’m sorry, I just can’t help myself when it comes to numbers. 

But,  2200 issues.  Wow.  You guys should be proud.  How many of you have been around since 2006?  From the beginning? 

Since we don’t go back to 2006 with WordPress, I can only go back so far, but I do have two subscribers who go back to November of 2010.  And 296 from 2011. 

Interesting stuff.

I want to take a minute to thank all of you who have said and offered prayers for my brother the Owl.  He is doing a little bit better, and I know that God performs miracles every day and is capable of anything.  Please continue to keep him in your prayers.

There are an awful lot of things I wish to share with you in this episode, so let’s get this party started…

Here’s another one of those really cool links that Stephanie has been happy to send us lately.   This one is especially fun.  Make sure you have the sound on.  https://www.facebook.com/reel/286705507048643?sfnsn=mo&s=F5x8gs&fs=e&mibextid=6AJuK9

“I’ve come to pay that bill I’ve owed you for so long,” said Jones. “That letter you wrote me would get money out of a stone. How did you ever think it up?”

Replied his creditor: “I didn’t. I selected the best parts from letters my son sends me from college.”

What are the lessons people most often learn too late in life?
**If it means something to you, fight for it till the end.
**You have to step out of your comfort zone to get success.
**Excuses make you weak.
**Travelling makes your soul alive.
**It’s ok to be different.
**Eagles never run in the race of dogs.
**Money isn’t the answer but it makes a difference.
**Do what you love and love what you do.
**Most people are scared of using their imagination.
**Perception is reality.
**Everything is temporary. Your good times are temporary and so are your bad ones.
**The best way to deal with toxic people is to cut them out of your life as soon as possible.
**Never take big decisions of your life on jealousy.
**Stop wasting your energy by reacting to toxic people comments.
**Crying isn’t a sign of weakness.
**Life isn’t fair, it never was and never will.
**Never compare your stars with somebody else sparkles. We all shine differently.
**Never stop learning and growing in life.
**Motivation comes from meaning. Everything comes from meaning.
**“When nobody else celebrates you, learn to celebrate yourself. When nobody else compliments you, then compliment yourself. It’s not up to other people to keep you encouraged. It’s up to you. Encouragement should come from the inside.”

My cousin had a small walk-on roll in the Hagar comic strip many years ago.

What the heck???

I encourage my children to read the newspaper, but they’re holding out for a remote that turns the pages.

Driving to a new restaurant, Judy took several wrong turns. When she finally found the right road, she asked her husband, “Why didn’t you tell me I was lost?”

“I thought you knew where you were going,” he replied. “You always know where you’re going when I’m driving.”

Because it is wicked cool!

The pessimist may be right in the long run, but the optimist has a better time during the trip.

You have no idea what that last meme means, do you?  DO YOU?!  Well, Impish Dragon is kind, he is wise, he will SHOW YOU what it means…

There are two things I’ve learned: There is a God. And, I’m not Him.

We should all swap problems; everyone seems to know how to solve the other guy’s.

Jon and I were sitting on the porch the other night listening to music and talking and just enjoying the night. Well, being Healey’s we were soon talking about food. He was telling me how much he liked seafood and how it was so good for you. Then he said “ya know, eating raw oysters puts lead in your pencil.” I told him, “I don’t like raw oysters, and to tell you the truth, I don’t have anybody I’m gonna be writing to anyway.”

Does no one edit anymore?

Jon and I went shopping and he was complaining that he always had to buy a dozen eggs when he only needed two or three. I showed him the store carried cartons of six, he was so excited…..he bought two cartons…..

Believe it or not, this is not a spoof.  This is, or was, a real place.

Morris, a  mild-mannered man was tired of being bossed around by his wife Hanna; so he went to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist said he needed to build his self-esteem, and so he gave him a book on assertiveness, which Morris read on the way home. He had finished the book by the time he reached his house. 

Morris stormed into the house and walked up to Hanna,  his wife. Pointing a finger in her face, he said, “From now on, I want you to know that   *I*  am the man of this house and my word is law! I want you to prepare me a gourmet meal tonight, and when I’m finished eating my meal, I expect a sumptuous dessert afterward. Then, after dinner, you’re going to draw me my hot bath so I can relax. And, when  I’m finished with my bath, guess who’s going to dress me and comb my hair?” 

“Moscowitz…the funeral director,” said his wife. 

And would solve an awful lot of problems.

Oh, this ought to be fun to watch!

I am five feet, three inches tall and pleasingly plump. 

After I had a minor accident, my mother accompanied me to the emergency room. 

The triage nurse asked for my height and weight, and I blurted out, “Five-foot-eight, 125 pounds.” 

While the nurse pondered over this information, my mother leaned over to me. 

“Sweetheart,” she gently chided, “this is not the Internet.” 

Two nuns were driving in the country and ran out of gas. They spotted a farmhouse to ask the farmer if he could give them enough gas to get to the next town. 

The farmer agrees, but says he has no container to put the gas in. He takes them into the barn to see if there is anything they can find that will do the job. 

Amidst a pile of junk one of the nuns spots a bedpan and says, “That will do just great! We’re used to using those bedpans in the hospital.” 

Farmer fills it with gas for them. The nuns take the bedpan full of gas back to their car. They pour the gas into their car’s gas tank when a car drives up. 

The window rolls down and a man leans out the window and says, “Sisters … I’m not a Roman Catholic … as a matter of fact I’m a Baptist clergyman. But I just had to stop to tell you how much I admire your faith that that’s going to work!!!” 

Michael comes home on payday and hands Sandra an empty pay envelope. 

Sandra says, “What happened?” 

“I’m not sure.” Michael replies. 

“Either they made a mistake in the payroll department or my deductions finally caught up with my salary.” 

Okay, here’s another “must watch” link from Stephanie.  You will definitely laugh.  That’s all I’m gonna say.  

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?extid=NS-UNK-UNK-UNK-AN_GK0T-GK1C&mibextid=2Rb1fB&v=572552604413223

This is a wonderful story that I sent many years ago. While long, it’s a very worthwhile read. …Joe
___________________
A story of an aging couple told by their son who was President of NBC NEWS.

This is a wonderful piece by Michael Gartner, editor of newspapers large and small and president of NBC News. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. It is well worth reading, and a few good chuckles are guaranteed. Here goes… My father never drove a car. Well, that’s not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car.
He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.
“In those days,” he told me when he was in his 90s, “to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it.”
At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in: “Oh, bull shit!” she said. “He hit a horse.” “Well,” my father said, “there was that, too.”
So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars — the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford — but we had none.
My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines , would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.
My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we’d ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. “No one in the family drives,” my mother would explain, and that was that.
But, sometimes, my father would say, “But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we’ll get one..” It was as if he wasn’t sure which one of us would turn 16 first.
But, sure enough , my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown.
It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn’t drive, it more or less became my brother’s car.
Having a car but not being able to drive didn’t bother my father, but it didn’t make sense to my mother.
So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father’s idea. “Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?” I remember him saying more than once.
For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps — though they seldom left the city limits — and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.
Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn’t seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage.
(Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)
He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin’s Church.
She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish’s two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home.
If it was the assistant pastor, he’d take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests “Father Fast” and “Father Slow.”
After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he’d sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I’d stop by, he’d explain: “The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored.”
If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out — and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, “Do you want to know the secret of a long life?”
“I guess so,” I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre. “No left turns,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“No left turns,” he repeated. “Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic.. As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn.”
“What?” I said again..
“No left turns,” he said. “Think about it.. Three rights are the same as a left, and that’s a lot safer. So we always make three rights.”
“You’re kidding!” I said, and I turned to my mother for support.
“No,” she said, “your father is right. We make three rights. It works.” But then she added: “Except when your father loses count.”
I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing. “Loses count?” I asked.
“Yes,” my father admitted, “that sometimes happens. But it’s not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you’re okay again.”
I couldn’t resist. “Do you ever go for 11?” I asked.
“No,” he said ” If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can’t be put off another day or another week.”
My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003.
My father died the next year, at 102. They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom — the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)
He continued to walk daily — he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he’d fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising — and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.
One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news.
A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, “You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred.”
At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, “You know, I’m probably not going to live much longer.”
“You’re probably right,” I said.
“Why would you say that?” He countered, somewhat irritated.
“Because you’re 102 years old,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, “you’re right.”
He stayed in bed all the next day.
That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: “I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet”
An hour or so later, he spoke his last words: “I want you to know,” he said, clearly and lucidly, “that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have.”
A short time later, he died. I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I’ve wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long. I can’t figure out if it was because he walked through life, Or because he quit taking left turns.
“Life is too short to wake up with regrets. So love the people who treat you right. Forget about the one’s who don’t. Believe everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it and if it changes your life, let it. Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would most likely be worth it.”

Thanks Joe, that was an awesome story.  I really enjoyed it!

Here’s another one from Joe.  It’s an old one that he told from memory.  And like I told him, I saw the end coming from a mile away…

Two hunting friends negotiated with an Alaskan bush pilot to fly them to their very remote cabin for an elk hunt. He finally relented. After looking at the mountain of gear they were taking plus calculating the weight of an average elk and his rather small plane, he warned them they could only bring back ONE elk. They agreed and loaded the plane.

With the great skill that bush pilots have, he took off and managed to squeeze into the narrow clearing by the cabin. After unloading and getting ready to depart, the pilot reminded them again that they were limited to one elk. They nodded and he took off.

When he flew in the following week, he was shocked to see them waiting for him with TWO elks! He started yelling at them even before he got out of the plane. “I told you we could only take off with ONE elk! They both argued back: “But the pilot last year let us take two.”

The pilot’s ego got the best of him and they crammed the second elk in the small plane.

The pilot knew he was going to need every inch of the tiny runway. He held his brakes, gave the plane full throttle, released the brakes and at the last instant pulled back on the stick and got barely air-born.

However, due to the excess weight, instead of climbing the plane went down not far from the cabin.

Everyone got out safely. The hunters, Bob and Joe were eyeing the wreckage when Bob asked: “Gee, how far do you think we got?”

Joe looked back and replied: “I figure about a half mile farther than last year.”

Sasquatch sent me a video that I can’t put in, but it was of a man telling a wonderful story, so what I will do instead is write you out the story here:

The Donkey said to the Tiger the grass is blue.
The Tiger replied, no the grass is green.
The discussion heated up and the two decided to go before the Lion, the King of the Jungle.
The Donkey began to shout, your Highness, is it true that the grass is blue?
The Lion replied, True the grass is blue.
The Donkey continued, The Tiger disagrees with me and contradicts and annoys me.  Please punish him.
The King then declared, The Tiger will be punished with five years of silence.
The Donkey jumped cheerfully and went on his way.
The Tiger accepted his punishment, but before he asked the Lion, Your Majesty why have you punished me?  After all the grass is green.
The Lion replied, In fact the grass is green.
The Tiger asked, So why are you punishing me?
The Lion replied, That has nothing to do with the question of whether the grass is blue or green.  The punishment is because it is not possible for a brave and intelligent creature like you to waste time arguing with a Donkey and on top of that come and bother me with that question.  The worst waste of time is arguing with the fool and fanatic who does not care about truth or reality, but only the victory of his beliefs and illusions.  There are people who, no matter how much evidence we present to them, are not in the capacity to understand and others are blinded by ego, hatred and resentment and all they want is to be right even if they are not.

There is so much wonderful and beautiful truth in this story.  Read it again.  Meditate on it and then read it a third time.  Consider all parts of it.  Then read it again.  It is very apropos, we think (Sasquatch and I) that the one creature is a Donkey. 

And that is it for today my friends, be well and be safe until next time.  May God Bless you and keep you until then.