Quick Thoughts

It seems that's all I have time for these days:

- This is a recurring issue that is coming up in the weirdest places. We watched an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm a couple of nights ago. Larry kept calling people's homes after the cut-off period, which seems to fluctuate from person to person. In the Dear Abby the next morning, a newlywed bride asked for guidance about how to tell her in-laws to refrain from calling after the cut-off period.

For the first several years of marriage, I had the same problem.

Unless it's an emergency, I don't talk on the phone after 9 o'clock. Let me restate that - unless it's an emergency, I don't talk on the phone. My homage to Big Paulie, as it were.

I generally need that 9-10 pm timeframe to wind down or else I won't sleep at all. My in-laws, however, will call at all hours of the night. It's not uncommon for the phone to ring past midnight. It used to be an issue - we just took the phone out of the bedroom and I got over it. Tell the newlywed that.

- Only Colbert can make the Nobel Prize funny.

Another American won a Nobel Prize this year (in economics) which means the United States still has a clean sweep.

Nothing has made me laugh more the past couple of weeks than when George Smoot won the Nobel for his work in Physics. Colbert said that he deserved the award, praising his earlier work with Hawley.

Yes, that's the kind of joke gets me rolling on the floor.

- This is a story that regularly is recounted at the Cates' household so I thought I'd share.

In high school, Nikki dated a boy who, like me, has a Hispanic mother and an Anglo father. We joked that together, we comprised a full Mexican.

One day last summer, we were hanging around the swimming pool and Nikki's boyfriend and I started to have a conversation in Spanish; I told him to kiss my butt and we both started to laugh. Nikki, wanting to be part of the conversation, asked what I had just said; I told her I'd tell her whenever she got old enough. So, she turned to her big sister, my wife, and asked what I said.

Melissa translated the phrase to her. Nikki, thinking that Melissa was telling Nikki to kiss her butt, got mad at her. "No, Yea Yea (Nikki's childhood nickname for Melissa), you kiss my butt!". Everybody get a really good laugh at that.

Anyway, tonight I was at Tom Thumb shopping for dinner. They're done renovating the store to give it more of a Central Market look. Perhaps I've never noticed or perhaps it's new, but I saw that one of the aisles was titled "Hispanic Foods"; it's right next to "Asian Foods". I laughed to myself that Nikki's high school boyfriend and I would have a great time with the racial element of grocery shopping.