No Mice Were Harmed in the Filming of this Commercial

The other day, I saw a television commercial for the Native American Rights Fund.  I was ignoring it, as I do the vast majority of commercials, until the end, when they displayed their contact information:  NARF.  Maybe I should donate to them, if it's going to put "the right mouse in the White House".

There's Gold in Them Thar Hills

One of those half-finished thoughts from my last dream this morning was about opening a second-hand shop on the rocky hill where my mom's sister scratched out a living.  (You wouldn't think it would work, but haven't you ever passed a store like that in some out-of-the-way place and wondered how they could keep going?)  I would name it Aunt Eke's Tor.

Yeah, I know, it would be a lot better joke if I had named it after the mom's sister:  Ann Teak's Tor.

Incidentally, wouldn't Rocky Promontory be a great name for an Italian-American boxer?

It's in Owlbuquerque, of Course!

My mom and I ate lunch at the Owl Cafe this weekend.  I may have mentioned before that this is one of my favorite restaurants, not least because of its theme.  We went because I was wearing one of my myriad of Owl Cafe T-shirts.

"Oh, look," I pointed out to my mom, "They have a new T-shirt design."  Since a friend in high school dubbed me "the man with a T-shirt from everywhere"*, and since it's an owl T-shirt, how could I resist?  (I really need to gather all my owl shirts, count them, and photograph them, to see if there are any the restaurant has which I missed.)

While we were there, our waitress commented that she had never seen the design of the shirt I was wearing.  Nor had any of the other waitresses, the hostess, nor even the manager.  (To be fair, the manager hasn't worked there all that many years.)

I started pondering how long we've been going to that restaurant.  Well, I moved to ABQ...  Oh, dear God, has it been that many years ago?  Let's see, my dad discovered the place when he went to ABQ for his job interview back in the fall of 1987.  Yes, that was 29.5 years ago.  (Ouch!)  The shirt isn't older than any of the restaurant staff (at least on that shift), but I can't be surprised that they've never seen it.

Along those lines, I have to confess an incident that occurred at work earlier last week.  A salesman stopped by with some information, and a coworker asked me what company he represented.  "He's with [Z], which used to be [Y].  Before that, it was [X]."  I paused, then added, "Have I been in the business that long?"

* I had (and still have) so many T-shirts from other places (London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Hawaii, etc.) because my dad often traveled on business, and he always brought me back a T-shirt.  (To be honest, I can't remember at all what he might have brought my brothers.)  I think it started when I was very young, and he came back from Las Vegas, NV with a T-shirt which read, "My dad went to Las Vegas, and all he brought me was this lousy T-shirt."  (This should also clue you in that I came by my sense of humor naturally.)

Aren't We All?

One of the other tabs open in my web browser is for a plant search that I did at one of our nurseries.  I was looking for the availability & price of Pink Delight Butterfly Bush (Buddleja davidii 'Pink Delight').  "Butterfly bush" and "pink" are too broad for search terms, so I simply searched for "delight".  (It was the first plant on the resulting list, of course.)

The browser tab tells me, "Searching for delight".

It's to Grow a Field of Mongeese, of Course!

Before clocking out for lunch, I left myself a note to remember what I want to look into when I clock back in.

Mongoose seed

We have a bag of it here in our office.  Specifically, it is a cultivar of Kentucky Bluegrass, named Mongoose.  What I don't remember, and what I need to determine, is which of our customers we had ordered it for, and why we haven't sown it yet.

The Best Policy

A potential customer phoned for an estimate to repair a part of his property which was damaged by another person's vehicle.  We prepared & sent the estimate.  The customer called to say, "What about this or this?"  All three of us in the office agreed that we would create a second estimate as an "add-on" but that we wouldn't combine the two because the second group of items were not existing to be damaged by the vehicle.

The customer phoned today to say that the insurance company denied the customer's claim for the additional items.  The person who took the call didn't say this to the customer, but we all thought, "I told you so."

It's comforting to know that I'm not the last honest person in the world.