Day: August 20, 2024

Motivation

What motivates you?

My early training still motivates me. Mother started us on chores early on. Long before I started school, Mother assigned me simple chores. Initially, I enjoyed it but my interest soon flagged. That didn’t matter. Mother would set a pile of washcloths before me and made it clear, their folding was my responsibility. I’d have to call for her approval before being released to play. Had I done a sloppy job, I’d be back to work. After enough times, it occurred to me I might as well get it right and be done. It would have been much easier for her to have done it herself but she stayed on point. Daddy reinforced Mother’s training.

Of course, as time went on and I faced other challenges, I had the benefit of my parent’s diligent training. I did well in school, got married, had children, became a nurse, and was prepared to face challenges daily. I wanted to be a good wife, mother, worker, boss, and friend. A well-ordered life was second nature. I am grateful for that motivation.

Homeowner Jokes

The dream of the older generation was to pay off a mortgage. The dream of today’s young families is to get one.

If you think no one cares you’re alive, miss a couple of house payments.

My buyers went through debt consolidation. Now they have only one bill they won’t pay.

If you want to know exactly where the property line is, just watch the neighbor cut the grass.

This country is great. It’s the only place where you can borrow money for a down payment, get a 1st and 2nd mortgage and call yourself a homeowner.

The trouble with owning a home is that no matter where you sit, you’re looking at something you should be doing.

My buyer told me that he lived in the same house for 10 years. When I checked, I found out he’d still be there today if the Governor hadn’t pardoned him.

The sellers told me their house was near the water. It was in the basement.

How much are they asking for your rent now? Oh, about twice a day.

I have a temporary mortgage. What do you mean temporary? Until they foreclose.

Realtor sign–We have “lots” to be thankful for.

Realtor: first you folks tell me what you can afford, then we’ll have a good laugh and go on from there.

The dream of the older generation was to pay off a mortgage. The dream of today’s young families is to get one.

There is no longer a need for the neutron bomb. We already have something that destroys people and leaves buildings intact. It’s called a mortgage.

If you think no one cares you’re alive, miss a couple of house payments.

My buyers went through debt consolidation. Now they have only one bill they won’t pay.

I listed a maintenance free house. In the last 25 years there hasn’t been any maintenance.

Did you hear about Robin Hood’s house? It has a little John.

My agent was always smiling. I didn’t think anybody could have that many teeth without being a barracuda.

If you want to know exactly where the property line is, just watch the neighbor cut the grass.

Houses today don’t have enough closet space. Sure they do. They’re just called guest bedrooms.

Trivia: The floors of buildings are called stories because early European builders used to paint picture stories on
the sides of their houses. Each floor had a different story.

A lot of homes have been spoiled by inferior desecrators.–Frank Lloyd Wright

I bought a two story house. One story before I bought, and another after.

The house is only 5 minutes from shopping . . .if you’ve got an airplane.

This country is great. It’s the only place where you can borrow money for a downpayment, get a 1st and 2nd
mortgage and call yourself a homeowner.

Home is where the mortgage is.

The best part of a real estate bargain is the neighbor.

The house was more covered with mortgages than with paint.

Home: A place when you go there they have to take you in.

Charity: A thing that begins at home and usually stays there.

A man’s home is his castle. That’s how it seems when he pays taxes on it.

Housebroke–What you are after buying a house.

This house has every new convenience except low payments.

The trouble with owning a home is that no matter where you sit, you’re looking at something you should be doing.

They have an all electric home. Everything in it is charged.

My buyers want a new home on the outskirts—of their income, that is.

A Happy Home is a place where each spouse entertains the possibility that the other may be right though neither
believes it.

By the time you pay for a home in the suburbs, it isn’t.

A Modern home is a place where a switch controls everything but the kids, and it has gadgets to do everything
except make the payments.

The house has a wall to wall carpet and back to wall payment.

A typical home has a TV set that is adjusted better than the kids.

House problem: The oven is self-cleaning, but the kids aren’t.

Our new house has one down payment and 240 darn payments.

Homesickness What you feel every month when the mortgage is due.

All Smiles

Mother recently moved The Bloom in Bossier City, Louisiana, in an independent living apartment. She struggled at leaving her home of more than forty years but is now ecstatic about her new life. She’s made so many new friends and gotten her walking habit back. She’s enjoying attending church again since she hasn’t attended regularly since she stopped driving. Her new apartment is centrally located between her children, so almost every day one or two drop by. We can enjoy a meal with her any time for a minimal price. I haven’t seen her without her beautiful smile since she moved in. We are all so happy she’s happy at her lovely new home!

Overcoming Educational Insecurities: My Journey from Rural High School to College

Having attended a tiny rural high school, fearing I could never compete with those from large urban high schools, I was sensitive about my educational shortcomings. Expecting to be labeled a bumpkin and hustled back to the farm “with my own kind,” in my mind, I had gotten to college with little to recommend me but a good vocabulary, a love of literature, and motivation.  Not only this, my knowledge of profanity and vile language was unimaginative, another embarrassment when I met sophisticates who drank beer, smoked, ordered pizza, and cursed with abandon.  Drinking and smoking had never appealed to me.  I liked pizza but had absolutely no pocket money, so easily avoided that temptation.  Had I been inspired to curse a blue streak, it would have been an extremely short and awkward one, with my lack of knowledge and complete inexperience with profanity.

Back in the good days, before cell phones and caller identification put an end to it, the fascinating practice of obscene phone calls was available to perverts, whereby a caller dialed his “victim,” likely at random, and launched into a raunchy, heavy-breathing monologue, usually complete with a description of how he might be entertaining himself at the moment. The object, of course, was for the answering party to respond in some appropriately shocked manner, gratifying and rewarding the caller.

Well, one night about midnight, I got my call. He wasn’t much of conversationalist and got right down to business.  Unfortunately for my disappointed caller, his terminology was beyond me.

“Huh?” I asked.

Clearly frustrated, he repeated his message. It didn’t help a bit.

“Huh?” By now I realized I had been tested and come up short, just as I had feared from the day I first stepped foot on campus.  I was devastated.

I think my caller also knew the bitter taste of failure. “You don’t even know what that means do you?”

“No.” Without thinking, I acknowledged the humiliating truth.

“Oh, Hell!” He slammed the phone down in my ear.  We had both been tested and found lacking.

A Hog a Day Part 17

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Original art by Kathleen Swain

Unless you’ve been cursed with a prissy, goody-two-shoes older sister, you couldn’t possibly appreciate this, so just go on with whatever you were doing. If you want to commiserate, jump right in. Phyllis was three years older than I. This put her just far enough ahead of me that all the teachers and Sunday School teachers were still raving about her performance. “Phyllis never misspelled a word on a test the whole year. Phyllis is the best student I had in all my twenty years of teaching. Phyllis is the neatest kid in class. Phyllis always reads her Sunday School Lesson and knows her memory verses.” It was all true. She worked on her homework from the time she got off the bus every day till Mother made her go to bed every night, copying it over rather than have an erasure.

I did my homework on the bus, on the way to school, if I could borrow some paper. The second day of first grade Miss Angie called me a blabbermouth and a scatterbrain. I was delighted till she sent a note home. My parents pointed out neither was a good thing. The only notes Phyllis ever got asked if she could be the lead in the school play, tutor slow kids, or be considered for sainthood. Mother had to chase the schoolbus to brush my hair. If we had pancakes for breakfast, my papers stuck to me all morning and dirt clung to the syrupy patches after recess. I never got the connection between being sticky and not washing up after breakfast.

It was bad enough that Mother tried to civilize me. After I started school, Phyllis was embarrassed about being related to “Messy Mayhem.” She started in telling Mother I needed to pull my socks up, brush my hair, not wipe my snotty nose on my sleeve, and most of all, not tell anyone I was related to her. She was a hotline home for anything that the teachers forgot to send a note about. It didn’t help our friendship.

Phyllis was always first in line to get in the door at church. I am surprised she didn’t have her own key. Sitting quietly and thoughtfully through sermons, she’d occasionally nod and mark passages in her Bible. The minister was sure she was headed for “Special Sevice.” Meanwhile, I sat next to Mother, barely aware of the minister’s drone, desperately trying to find interest, somewhere, anywhere. I liked the singing but it didn’t last long. The words didn’t make sense, but it sure beat the sermon. Once the sermon started, I’d start at the front and enumerate things: roses on hats, striped ties, bald men, sleepers, crying babies, kids who got to prowl in their mother’s purses, or the number of times the preacher said “Damn, Breast or Hell!”. Once in a while something interesting would happen, like pants or skirt stuck in a butt-crack, or a kid would get taken out for a spanking, but all this made for a mighty lean diet.

One glorious Sunday, the sun shone. As we filed out, I looked longingly at the lucky kids running wild in the parking lot. We had to stand decorously beside Mother and Daddy as he waxed eloquent, rubbing elbows with the deacons, whose august company he longed to join. As he discussed the merits of the sermon with Brother Cornell Poleman, a deacon with an unfortunate sinus infection, Brother Poleman pulled a big white hankie from his coat pocket and blew a disgusting snort in its general direction. Fortunately for Sister Poleman, she wouldn’t be dealing with that nasty hanky in Monday’s laundry. A giant yellow, green gelatinous gob of snot went airborn, landing right on Phyllis’s saintly, snowy, Southern Baptist forearm, where it quivered just a bit, before settling into its happy home. Her expression was priceless. Mr. Poleman grabbed her arm, rubbing the snot all over her forearm before she could extricate herself from his foul grip. She flew to the church bathroom to wash before joining the family waiting in the car. That snot trick had put a hasty end to all visiting. When she got home, she locked herself in the bathroom to scrub her arm with Comet. I enjoyed church that day.

My brother Billy certainly didn’t have to deal with comparisons to a saint when he followed three years behind me.