Lisa Hendrix

This morning, I walked into the kitchen to find this:

On this, Towel Day, the 25th day of May, we celebrate the life and writings of Douglas Adams, whose sublime silliness has kept my family entertained on long car trips and brought us some of the most memorable—and occasionally annoying—catch phrases ever, including such treasures as:

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Ford, you’re turning into a penguin. Stop it.

If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

You should send that in to the Reader’s Digest. They’ve got a page for people like you.

There’s no point in acting surprised about it.

Apathetic bloody planet, I’ve no sympathy at all.

If you’re so clever, you tell us what colour it should be.

Funny how just when you think life can’t possibly get any worse it suddenly does.

The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved.

Stick it up your nose.

The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.

Life is like a grapefruit. (It’s sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It’s got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.)

Forty-two.

Once you know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.

And the most important advice ever given, in any book ever in the history of the Universe:

DON’T PANIC!

You may ask yourself, Why the 25 of May?

Why not?

You may also ask, Why Towel Day?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-tohand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase which has passed into hitch hiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

~Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

 

Of course, Gunnar and the rest of my guys each carry a towel everywhere.

Today, you  should join them, in memory of Douglas Adams. Carry your towel proudly, and if anyone gives you an odd look, tell him to stick it up his nose.

I don’t know about the rest of them, but for me, all it takes is animals and British accented voiceovers…

Enjoy this bit of BBC Silliness:

I decided to do a version of Twelve Days of Christmas for my Viking guys, but I need some crowd-source help. Come over to my Facebook Page to make your suggestion, and when we’re done, I’ll bring our efforts back over here and we’ll have some fun with it.

Never say never, but really…

On Sunday morning, 17 called and asked if he could have some friends over for a last-minute SuperBowl party.  Now this surprised me, because he’s a theater kid and neither he, nor his girlfriend,  nor his theater friends have ever demonstrated any interest in football.  But we said yes, told him to tell his friends to bring the junk food, and set about tidying up the house to make it presentable,  and then I went to fetch a variety of pop and a couple of bags of ice while my dh started making a big pot of chili.

Shortly after the kids arrived, it was clear they did, indeed, have no interest in football, as they brought a Wii and all its accoutrements. By then, the chili  had been brought up to temp and dumped into the crockpot, and dh asked me to taste it for spices.

I did, and almost barfed. Seems one of the packages of ground meat had gone bad.  Way bad. Ugh. Pot of chili ruined.

Love of my life got rid of the nasty chili while I went into the pantry to dig through the cabinets for ingredients for a new pot (For speed, I used a base of canned chili, jazzed up with fancy beans, Ortegas, etc.)

As the new chili bubbled, I slipped off to the john.  It smelled of chili in there, which I chalked up to my husband dumping the first batch down the toilet.

A bit later, however, hubby went in there and promptly stepped in water—overflow, it turned out, from the shower, which had backed up. Turns out that was the smell I smelled, because hubby, bless his heart, hadn’t flushed the chili, but had run it down the disposal.  The whole 6 quarts of it. Clearly too much for the rather finicky pipes of our nearly 50 year old house.

Off to Safeway for Liquid Plumbr.  Let sit.  Nothing.  More LP, more sitting, more nothing.  Much use of plunger (including imprint of hollow handle-top on my palm). Nothing.

Next morning, one more large bottle LP, couple of hours of sitting, more plunger. Nothing.

So, a call was made to the plumbing service  The same plumbing service that was out a few months ago when our incoming water line failed.  Now, to their credit,  they were here within a couple of hours both times, and to their further credit, the receptionist/scheduler didn’t even laugh when I suggested that I was due a freebie.  They just showed up, fixed the problem, and handed me a bill.

So I added it up.  Plumber + ingredients of first batch of chili + ingredients of second batch of chili + multiple bottles of totally and utterly ineffective Liquid Plumbr = $117

All for one pot of chili.

How about you? What’s your most expensive meal disaster?

I have copy edits on IMMORTAL OUTLAW coming the first week in January. Those are the ones where you and the copy editor (not your “editor” at most houses, but a grammar-freak-with-a-red-pencil-for-hire) clean up your commas, fix mis-usages, find those dropped periods, and catch all your typos.

You hope.

I ran into this video from slam poet/comedian/teacher Taylor Mali over on Writers Technology Companion Today that is so funny–and so totally apropos–I had to post it.  (Warning: NOT Safe For Work, unless you have on headphones)

It’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day and  I’m practicing the pirate lingo I learned at the Official ITLAP Website, including the pick-up lines for Lady Pirates (my personal favorite: That’s quite a cutlass ye got thar, what ye need is a good scabbard!)

If you don’t have time to learn Pirate, try their English to Pirate translator.

To the left, the original Lady Pirate, Anne Bonney.

P.S. — Vikings are pirates, too, you know.  So I suppose “Pass the lutefisk” is also Pirate Lingo…

Michael Palin, that is…

Via Red State Rebels

…apparently involves including a screenshot with an inane comment of my husband’s.  Yep another one, this time on Syrinx from MRR Software (link on the image).  That’s him, third one down (second human).

If you can’t read it, it says:

Considering ingredient list for pizza and wondering if I should make enough for the boy that isn’t home yet.

Deep.

Yes, he cooks, Actually makes pizza dough from scratch…part of the reason I love him.