KLONIE JORDAN RETIRED LEDGER EDITOR
My Saturday morning golf game got “clouded out,” so I didn’t quite know what to do with myself.
I would have said my Saturday morning golf game got “rained out,” but it never did really rain. There were just some ugly gray clouds looming overhead.
Itallstartedwitha6a.m. text in which one of my fellow “sky watchers” (we all have different weather apps on our phones, so we often compare data; for the record, mine’s the best) wondered what my “fancy weather app” showed for the morning forecast.
He said his app predicted a very high percentage of showers during our prime golfing outing hours.
I consulted my app (did I mention that my app is the best?), and it showed a forecast with a much lower percentage of any significant precipitation.
I relayed this information to my fellow golf enthusiast and did not immediately receive a response. I interpreted this to mean that he was thoroughly convinced it was going to rain, so I threw in a footnote: “If you guys want to cancel, that’s okay by me.”
I plopped back down on the bed, which felt pretty good (I had been up since 5:30), so play or not, it didn’t matter all that much to me.
After a few minutes, I received a response that said, paraphrasing here, “I think we’ll stay home today.”
Alrighty, then. So, that’s settled.
After my brain told me that I should probably sleep for a couple more hours, my body told me that I should get up because I was now wide awake.
The missus, who had awakened from her slumber long enough to be informed about the dueling weather apps, turned over and had no problem drifting back into dreamland, or wherever she goes when she’s asleep. I’ve got a sneaky suspicion it’s probably the beauty parlor, or yoga class (I sometimes ask if Boo-Boo is going to be there), or kayaking on a serene waterway, or learning how to play a musical instrument. I know — the drums. You should see her cut loose with both hands flailing in the air when the drum solo in Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” comes on in the car.
Or maybe she was getting her hair done in a kayak while doing yoga and simultaneously playing the drums. Whatever it was, I left her to it.
I got up, checked the morning sports news, and then considered doing a couple of tasks on my to-do list. I would have gotten to those tasks, too, if I hadn’t found some recorded episodes of The Munsters and a YouTube video that showed what famous people look like now compared to how they looked 30 years ago (some of these people have really let themselves go).
By the time I absorbed all that entertainment, it was lunch time, and the missus had shaken off the morning cobwebs of snooze-a-tosis (it’s a medical term) and wandered into the kitchen.
“Do you want some cereal?” she asked.
“Cereal?” I questioned back firmly. “Do you know what time it is, woman? It’s high noon. As a matter of fact, it’s a little past high noon. If you had been a cowboy in the old West, you could never have been in a gunfight, because those are usually held at high noon, and you would have been very late. Your poor gunfighter opponent would have been standing out there in the dusty main street, ready to draw down on you, checking his watch, nervously tapping his holster with the fingers on his gun hand, and wondering where you were. He would have finally just given up and gone to find someone else to challenge.
Perhaps someone who gets out of bed a little earlier.”
After not having cereal for lunch and opting instead for a nice, healthy fried baloney sandwich with extra pickles, it came time to discuss what we might do on this day. Those conversations usually go like this:
ME: “What do you want to do today?”
HER: “I don’t know. Whatever you want to do.”
So help me, one of these days when she says, “Whatever you want to do,” I’m going to say, “Well, I want to go on one of those fly-in fishing trips in Canada where they drop you off out in the wilderness by a pristine lake with a fully stocked cabin and a boat, and they come back to pick you up in a couple of weeks. That’s what I want to do.”
I had always seriously wanted to do that, at least until I started hearing stories about how, when the plane returned, the fishing party was nowhere to be found, or the pilot found the heads of one or two members of the fishing party on sticks in front of the cabin. That’s the kind of thing that will discourage one’s interest in this kind of outing.
I was shaking off that disturbing visual when the wife’s face lit up the way it does when she suddenly remembers something, and she proclaimed, “Oh, I know what I need to do today. I need to go to the hardware store.”
In all my years on this planet, I’ve never once heard a woman say, “I need to go to the hardware store.”
This can’t be good. I guess she’s been watching those Bob Vila recordings again. If I’m not careful, she’s going to convert this into a “chore day.”
And that’s almost what happened, except that I’ve gotten pretty good at some of these home improvement projects, so much so that I can complete them in nearrecord time, and always much to the satisfaction of the missus. And when the missus is happy, I’m happy.
So, there you go. That was my Saturday. I watched a few Munsters episodes, discovered what some of my favorite entertainers looked like in the early stages of their careers, had a lovely fried baloney sandwich, completed my assigned chores, and watched the Reds game.
By the way, it’s late Saturday afternoon now, and it still hasn’t rained.
I told you my weather app was the best.
(Klonie Jordan is a retired newspaper editor who still writes about such things as the joy of kidney stones, those hospital gowns that don’t have any backs, stalking the elusive McRib sandwich, hand-tostinger combat with killer bees, why your wife moves your stuff, and other subjects of vital interest. You can contact him at [email protected]).
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