Bust A Move

Hello World,

Happy Jewish New Year! Now is the time that we want to wish everyone out there a very happy L'Shana Tova, and don't spare the latkes, whatever you do. And speaking of new, Saturday will be the first day of the new month, and can cooler weather be far behind? I think not. Soon the frost will be on the pumpkin in more ways than one, and we can go back to enjoying those cool weather treats that are denied to us in the hot weather - at least as some of us discovered when a box of Red Hots literally melted to my computer cart in the sweltering summer doldrums in our living room, and thanks so very much not. I must say that the lingering cinnamon fragrance lends a welcome sensation to my online activities, but the sticky residue is something that I could really do without.

And what might be new and interesting on the local news scene, you may be wondering, and well may you wonder. By now, everybody realizes that this is just about my favorite kind of headline:

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Student Had No Drugs, Cops Say

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Ah, for those halcyon days of yore, when a student NOT having drugs would never be considered newsworthy in any way, and certainly wouldn't rate a headline on the front page of the newspaper, for heaven's sake. Why, an out-of-towner in the area scoping out real estate deals for a possible relocation, who happened across that headline while en route to the Classified section, couldn't help but wonder just what kind of a wild and woolly frontier outpost of an urban jungle they were thinking of moving into anyway, and I can't say that I would blame them one bit.

Speaking of property values, we recently received an informational brochure at church that was addressed to us exactly as follows:

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Holy Trinity Lutheran Church

Attn: Real Estate Dept.

30 Lockwood Ave

New Rochelle, NY 10801

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Now, I admit that I don't know what type of a church you would have to belong to where they had an actual Real Estate Department, but I can tell you for sure that it isn't my church, and that's putting it mildly. In fact, we don't have any actual departments at all, the most we would have would be a committee that's in charge of different aspects of our activities, such as Sunday School, music, youth ministry, evangelism and the like. And it's not that our friends at The Rosette Group Inc. sent this mailing to us in error, when they were trying to send it to commercial management services who really do have real estate departments, because the whole purpose of the brochure was to encourage me to sell them my church property, along with parking lot, parish house and adjacent facilities such as school, sports facility, day-care center, etc. I wish I could help them out, but I'm already the Finance Department and Personnel Department and Security Department at church, and if I take on one more job, I'm afraid the government will step in and bust me under the federal Anti-Trust regulations for restraint of trade, by jingo.

Meanwhile on the home front, anyone can tell you that I'm well known for having extremely relaxed standards when it comes to household hygiene, and I'm not some neurotic germ-o-phobe who flies into a frenzy at the first sight of a stray crumb or cat hair. In fact, I'm on a first-name basis with most of our dust bunnies, and some of my jackets have so much cat hair on them that I sometimes pet them by mistake. So when I say that even I have to draw the line at this product from our friends at the Harriet Carter catalogue, well, that's really saying something, believe me.

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MICROWAVE SLIPPERS

keep your tootsies extra-toasty!

Microwavable foot covers warm up

in minutes and stay warm; deliver

soothing heat for cold winter nights

and mornings.

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Well, all I have to say about that is YUK! I know I can't be the only person who feels that something you wear on your feet has no business being anywhere near some place where you prepare your food, and frankly, I can't believe that this horrendous idea could ever catch on. They cost $15 a pair, so it's not like this is a whole box full of disposable booties that you heat up and then toss after wearing them. No, these innovative horrors are designed to go back into the microwave after you've worn them, and I have to say that the very thought of that turns my stomach, and I'm famous for having a strong constitution. I can tell you that if the newspaper did a story about me with this item, it would never say: "Housewife Had No Drugs," because I would certainly need drugs to have that stuff anywhere near my microwave, and that's not just the latkes talking, by golly.

In other local news, the porch reclamation project is in full swing, and every day, we come home to find more progress has been made, often in astonishing fashion, so you really don't know what to expect next, and each evening brings new surprises our way. So far, we haven't heard of any neighbors' cats going missing, so the dreaded rash of construction cat-nappings has failed to materialize up to this point. As for ourselves, we performed our own preemptive strike in this arena, albeit inadvertently, when one of the strays that we had been feeding on our front porch, summarily and on his own volition, just waltzed right through our front door last week, and settled into the kitchen and library with the aplomb of a seasoned veteran scouting new quarters for bivouac. His coat of deep earth tones and mackerel pattern made him almost impossible to spot out in the wild, and I called him Buster Brown, although admittedly that would be an archaic reference that would no doubt be lost on young people nowadays, I shouldn't wonder. He shows odd signs of having been in a house before (he understands refrigerators and can openers better than most strays) but with enough unpredictably feral behavior to really keep us on our toes, that's for sure. But he seems to understand a good thing when he sees it, and his plan appears to be to stick close to where the cat food is stored, or as they say in the housing market, "Location, location, location." In fact, he's got such a grip on that idea that I'm thinking of bringing him to church to head up our Real Estate Department.

Elle