You Don't Have To Be Smart When You're Beautiful

Murrieta: a Starbucks on Highway 79.  We are on the way home from our first Boy Scout camping trip, and stop at a shopping center after spending 70 minutes on a rough dirt road that should have never been driven in our Celica. We need to go out and buy an SUV.

We need a shower, and have not brushed our teeth. It was 37 degrees F at 02:00 a.m., while we slept in our tents in the high mountain pine forest. I am seriously ready for a doppio con panna. 

A voice squeeks behind me, in line, "Excuse me. What time is it?"

I turn, and am stunned by a smokin' hot girl in her twenties with long, black hair, high heels, and a mini skirt that calls attention to her gorgeous legs.  Instead of telling her what time it is, I swing my arm to the left and upside down, so that she can see my watch as if she was looking at a watch on her own wrist.

She stares at my watch, a Seiko SKX 781: the famous "Seiko Orange Monster" professional dive watch.
I have no plans to dive down to 200 meters below the surface, but if that ever happens, I'm wearing the right watch.

She stares at the watch.
She squints.
She leans closer.
Her eyes bulge.
She then straightens up, and huffs indignantly, "I can't read it! I can't see what time it is!"
I realized right away what her problem was: she has never studied a dive watch with a rotating bezel that helps you keep track of time.
Don't get me wrong: I'm sure her dad wears a Rolex Submariner, but she has never really looked at it.

She shrieks, "The numbers are all weird!"
Ah...the rotating bezel is still set to when we started our death-defying 10 mile drive on the dirt road, because we wanted to measure how long it will take us to get to the pavement.  She doesn't realize that if all she wants is to know what time it is, all she needs to do is stare at the dial, and ignore the bezel (the rotating outer ring).  Nice guy that I am, I rotated the bezel back to zero minutes, and presented the watch to her a second time, assuming that if the watch looks like this, Princess will now be able to tell what time it is.

Princess turns away from me, and turns on her force field. I no longer exist.  She stares past me at the girl at the cash register, squints at some clock that may or may not really exist (I didn't see any clocks or time displays anywhere), and exclaims, "It's 1:15!" and stomps out of Starbucks.

That's a Fine Kettle of Hawks, That Is!

Sunday morning, Claremont, Oak Park Cemetery.  So far, this has been a dismal fall migration. Very few passerine migrants, not a single Swainsons Hawk.  Got to the cemetery, and the place was full of Audubon's Warblers, White-crowned Sparrows, and 6 Black-throated Gray Warblers. Even got my First-of-Fall Ruby-crowned Kinglet: proof that autumn is upon us. At 09:15 a.m., an unusually shaped hawk flew behind the eucalypti at the north end of the cemetery, so I ran around to the open, undeveloped part of the cemetery. Cool! Eighteen Swainson's Hawks on their way to Argentina!

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Well...at first there were 18 of them, but more and more rose up from the trees in the neighborhood north of the cemetery, and eventully I had over 70 Swainson's Hawks!  The kettle circled overhead for an hour, but I didn't have my car (I had walked the Basset Hound to the cemetery from my house) and I feared that if I ran home for my 35 mm SLR, the flock would be gone, so I called a bunch of local Claremont birders. No one was home except or Rick, who has an ankle injury, and can't walk. Dang it! I took the picture, above, by holding my Android Droid X cell phone up to the left lens of my Swarowski 10 X 42 Habicht (how appropriate!) binoculars.
I took the picture, below, by pointing the cell phone at theat part of the sky had had most of the 70 hawks in one area.  My apologies for the low image quality:

Each one of the black dots in the blue sky is a Swainson's Hawk.

THE INTERNET THINKS I’M GAY

Dear Internet,
 I’m not gay.


Seriously.


I swear, I only like women. Women with drivers licenses, who can legally drink.

 So why does The Internet think I’m gay? Well, I like to check my emails on The Cloud. I don’t use email software like Eudora that stores your emails on your hard drive. I just let Hotmail and Verizon keep all of my emails up in the cloud. That way, I can access everything, and not worry about it. Whenever I check my emails on The Cloud, Verizon’s email web page has a bunch of annoying advertisements along both sides of the computer screen. More often than not these ads have a bunch of photos of natural and unnatural blondes, with the following text in 48 font:



“UPLAND WOMEN LOOKING FOR PARTNERS”



First of all, why do the idiots at Google and Verizon think I want to run around with women from Upland? If I was going to cheat on my wife, I would want somebody in Claremont. I mean, come on: On paper I have 3 jobs (I turned in my resignation at the ER, last week, and won’t know if I’ll be able to fit in any more shifts at the VA until I get up and running at my new full-time job). I have a wife, 2 kids, a dog who needs to be walked twice a day, and a Zebra Finch who won’t stop bleating every time I walk around in the living room. Between a boys’ soccer team, a girls’ soccer team, Girl Scout meetings, Boy Scout meetings, a never-ending sink full of dirty dishes, a kitchen trash can that fills up as soon as I empty it, and a never-ending supply of dog poop out on our patio, the only way that I could pull off cheating on my wife would be if there was a very lonely, patient, horny Claremont woman who willingly lets me into her house at the drop of a hat.



Other than that, ain’t gonna happen.



Oh, and if I cheated on her, it would devastate my wife.



Maybe I should have started with that.



Anyways, after years of Verizon failing to tempt me with surgically enhanced smiling blondes who are showing a lot of cleavage while smiling seductively into camera, they decided that if I’m not interested in 25 year olds with awesome boobs, clearly I must be gay.


So now every time I check my emails I get photos of tall, good-looking, dark-haired guys with perfect teeth and bulging pecs winking at me.



“SINGLE MEN IN UPLAND ARE LOOKING FOR YOU!”



Great.