We have a cat who can open the front door. And some people don’t think cats are very smart.   Tigger figured out a long time ago how to open the storm door. But now Mr. Whiskers can open the other door, too. We have a lever type handle on the front door. Mr. W hits it with his paws till the door pops open, and then he pushes the storm door open. *sigh* Now we have to keep the door locked all the time. At least till he figures out how to get it unlocked. This is Mr. W:   This day didn’t start out quite like I had hoped.   I needed to get more sleep. Instead, we were hunting for car keys this morning, after maybe 3 hours of sleep.  Jamie (faith2faithintx) just sent me some beautiful pictures they had made on their cruise. I hope she posts them. A friend from high school just sent me an email I can’t post on a family friendly blog. But I’ll tell you about it. The title is “New Guidelines for Boarding a Plane” and it has a line of naked people waiting to get on the plane. But another friend (she use to be a member of our church and I’ve known her all my life) just sent this, and I can post it: Black and White (Under age 40? You won’t understand.) You could hardly see for all the snow, Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go. Pull a chair up to the TV set, “Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.” Depending on the channel you tuned, You got Rob and Laura – or Ward and June. It felt so good. It felt so right. Life looked better in black and white. I Love Lucy, The Real McCoys, Dennis the Menace, the Cleaver boys, Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Superman, Jimmy and Lois Lane. Father Knows Best, Patty Duke, Rin Tin Tin and Lassie too, Donna Reed on Thursday night! — Life looked better in black and white. I wanna go back to black and white. Everything always turned out right. Simple people, simple lives… Good guys always won the fights. Now nothing is the way it seems, In living color on the TV screen. Too many murders, too many fights, I wanna go back to black and white. In God they trusted, alone in bed, they slept, A promise made was a promise kept. They never cussed or broke their vows. They’d never make the network now. But if I could, I’d rather be In a TV town in ’53. It felt so good It felt so right. Life looked better in black and white. I’d trade all the channels on the satellite, If I could just turn back the clock tonight To when everybody knew wrong from right. Life was better in black and white!   Another Goody For The Oldtimers…. My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn’t seem to get food poisoning. My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in icepack coolers, but I can’t remember getting e coli. Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then. The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system. We all took gym, not PE… and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked’s (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can’t recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.. Flunking gym was not an option… even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym. Speaking of school, we all said prayers and the Pledge of Allegiance, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. I just can’t recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. Oh yeah.. and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed! We played ‘king of the hill’ on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn’t sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked. Now it’s a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat. We didn’t act up at the neighbor’s house either because if we did, we got spanked there and then we got spanked again when we got home. I recall the boy from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck. To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that? We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn’t even notice that the entire country wasn’t taking Prozac! How did we ever survive? Of course, not everything from our childhoods was perfect, and I would not actually want to go back to it. But back then, there were things that just weren’t shown on tv.    And the above piece is a little dated. There is no such thing as a $49 bottle of antibiotics. Now, that’s just the copay.   Every family is somewhat dysfunctional. It comes from not being perfect.   We didn’t usually have our sandwiches wrapped in wax paper when I was in school. We had graduated to the sandwich bags – the kind that had the little cuff that folded over the top. It was the newest thing. It didn’t zip.   We didn’t have a stereo in our house until I was 17. My dad splurged and bought one at Sears. When he picked it up at the loading dock (they were quite large), there were 2 stereos in the box. And you know what my dad did? He took the other one back! No…he didn’t keep it and say it was the store’s fault that we got a free stereo. Honesty is in short supply these days.   And one more thought about medication….not every kid is ADHD. Some just misbehave. *gasp* It’s politically incorrect, but I believe God provided the perfect place on the back of the human body to curb inappropriate behavior. TRIPLES with EMMA