Gone With The Ferry

I will miss both Dr Marshall’s, Kathleen and Christopher, I thought they were both terrific. I shared Dr. Kathleen’s passion for the movie Gone With The Wind. She’s the only person I’ve ever met who knew the script as well as I do. Plus, we’d quiz each other on GWTW trivia throughout my medical visit. It’s not just any doc who can prepare an injection and ask, “Okay, so what was Vivian Leigh’s biggest complaint about Clark Gable?” (Answer - bad breath from his dentures). We had an ongoing debate over the PDA’s vs. DayTimers datebooks. “PDA’s hold much more info and can perform many more functions.”
My response: “Unless you drop them or spill coffee on them, then they’re dead and there’s nothing to do but go berserk and have a panic attack because you just lost all your contact info and saved notes. At least with my old skool DayTimers, I can wipe off the coffee or sea spray and continue on.”

I saw Dr Christopher more than Dr Kathleen and he was very polite and effective. I always appreciated the way he looked directly into your eyes when he spoke to you and listened to your questions. Weight has always been a big problem for me and I didn’t even mind when he used chalk lines to mark off the parts he had examined and went on to the next section.

I’m sure the new docs will be wonderful. And they will have lots of interesting stories to tell very soon. We are coming into Deer Hunting Season and somewhere, on the Island right now, there is a conversation happening that goes like this...

“Try it on Sue, it looks good, don’t it? You like pink.”
“John, a pink camouflage deer hunting outfit does not count as a birthday gift. Why did you get this?”
“The kids are gone now. All I hear is how “we should spent more quality time together”, so I thought, since I’m spending my quality time in a deer blind this weekend, you could spend yours there too. You can be in charge of the coffee.”
“Oh, joy...”
“Give it a chance. It’s really more fun than it sounds.”
“You want me to sit in a deer blind in the early morning damp cold, freezing to death in a pink camo outfit, serving coffee.”
“Not just coffee. You can make sandwiches the night before and bring an extra thermos of tomato soup.”
“Thank you, John, that is the cherry on the cake of my day.”
“But you have to be quiet. We can’t talk. We have a few basic hand signals, I’ll teach you.”
“So I have to sit in silence with hot coffee, hot tomato soup, serve sandwiches, can’t read a book because it will be too dark, can’t shoot you because I don’t know how the gun works, besides which, it may scare off the deer which will annoy the other hunters. What part of this do you think I’ll enjoy, John?”
“We’ll be together.”
“That was enough when we were young and we could think of things to do alone together...”
“I know where this is going, Sue, I know you want more romance, but we can’t have sex in the deer blind. It will shake and scare off the deer.”
“I was thinking of when we enjoyed playing Trivia Pursuit. Having sex at four in the morning in the cold woods was not on my Bucket List.”

The next day, the new doctor on Shelter Island sees his new patient, John.
“John, I just don’t understand how a thermos could do this much damage to a human skull.”
“It was the heavy one, the one filled with tomato soup.”
“Who attacked you with this thermos?”
“I fell.”
“You fell on a thermos?”
“You’re new here, Doc, it will make sense as time goes by. Soon you’ll be able to distinguish a LLBean thermos imprint from a Rubbermaid one.”

The Deer Hunter

Reuters / Thu Oct 22, 3:15 pm ET
PALERMO, Sicily (Reuters) – A Sicilian builder transferred from prison to house arrest tried to get himself locked up again to escape arguments with his wife at home, Italian media reported Thursday. Santo Gambino, 30, did time for dumping hazardous waste before being moved to house arrest in Villabate, outside the Sicilian capital, Palermo, Italian news agencies reported. Gambino went to the police station and asked to be put away again to avoid arguing with his wife, who accused him of failing to pay for the upkeep of their two children. Police charged him with violating the conditions of his sentence and made him go home and patch things up with his wife. (Writing by Stephen Brown; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

This is the kind of thing that would never happen on Shelter Island; imagine, a man preferring to be put in jail rather than be home with his wife....

Joe: "Roger, did you see this article? This guy gets himself put in jail rather than hear his wife yammer on and on about nothin'."
Roger: "Yeah , I saw that. Jeannie is already bitching about me waking her up at 4 AM when I go deer hunting."
Joe: "Do you make a lot of noise?"
Roger: "Never. I tiptoe around, get my gear, guns, it's not me, it's Terry, he wakes her up when he pulls up to get me and the top lights on his truck cab shine into our bedroom. Then he comes in for coffee. He's not noisy, but sometimes we have to wake her up to find the filters, y'know..."
Joe: "Well, that's not unreasonable, she can go right back to sleep."
Roger: "She says the smell of the coffee wakes her up. I thought it would have been the bacon, but I guess it's the coffee. She always wakes up for some reason. Then she starts in about not leaving egg dishes all over and she's over at the sink rinsing dishes and complaining that it's now five in the morning and there's no sense going back to sleep since she has to get up at seven with the kids. Man, I can't want to get out of that house in the morning."
Joe: "We all put up with it, man. You think they'd be appreciative that we're bring home free venison. Jennie always rags on about how the venison is actually about $116 a pound. She does this weird calculation thing, adds up the cost of my gear, guns, bullets, boots, knives, gas, everything."
Roger: "You don't tell her the truth do you? You always trim off 25% of the price of anything you tell your wife you bought."
Joe; "I know that. I never tell her what the guns and gear really cost, then the venison would come out to about $182 a pound, and I'd NEVER hear the end of that!"
Roger: You know, if we could work out something, we could get arrested together after deer season and share the cell in the jail, there's only two."
Joe: "You know, that's not as crazy as it sounds. We could do something to get jailed for about two months, get three hots and a cot, no complaining about how much money we spent or how much time we spent away from the family..."
Roger: "No lectures on not letting the baby play with the empty rifle..."
Joe: "No complaints about washing clothes with deer blood on them."
Roger: "No one yelling at you not to throw your bowie knife at the shed door because someone might open the door at that exact moment and get a knife in the head."
Joe: "Women worry about the most trivial stuff, y'know...."
Roger: "I know, I always lock the shed door before I throw my knives."
Joe: "What about the time you nearly clipped Tom when he opened the door?"
Roger: "That was two years ago. Besides, Tom is a big guy, the knife couldn't have gone in far enough to do much harm."
Joe: "So what can we get arrested for?"
Roger: "We're a coupla bright guys, lets bring a six pack and we'll figure something out in the deer blind."

Flying Cow Lands on MiniVan

Udderly Implausible

SPOKANE, Washington (Reuters 11/7/07) - A cow plunged from a 200-foot cliff onto the hood of a minivan on a highway in central Washington state, according to police. The police estimated the animal weighed 600 lbs., the average size of a mature cow. It had been missing for two days and wandered 5 miles from home near the popular Lake Chelan tourist area.

“I swear to God, Carol, the cow just fell outta the sky on the van.”
“You talked me into letting you use my van to go deer hunting again - you swear not to mess it up this time but, nooooooo, you destroy it! Now I’m supposed to believe that - not only was it raining cats and dogs - oh no - it was raining cows! Are you kidding me? How am I going to get my insurance to cover that? Is a falling cow an Act of God? Why don’t you call the agent, ask what the deductible is for airborne bovine collision!”
“Carol, I’m serious, babe. Look, call Johnny, it nearly scared him to death, he’ll tell you, it’s the God’s honest truth.”
“Stop it! I’m so sick of this! You make up any excuse you can to go hunting as much as possible so you can avoid spending time with me and the kids! You always come home hungover and deerless, my van stinks of beer and doe urine for weeks, and now, somehow, you’ve crushed the roof of the van, and the best you can come up with is some cow and bull story about being attacked by flying cows in the night in search of hapless deer hunters in minivans. Tell the truth, you got blitzed and you have no idea what happened to the van.”
“Look, we were sober. I was driving. Johnny was opening up a bag of chips when, WHAM! There’s this huge crash on top of the van. I coulda had a heart attack - ever think about that? And then we hear something go ‘thud’ on the ground behind us. We turned around and saw the cow on the road and Johnny called 911.”
“You hit the cow.”
“NO! The cow hit US! The cops said it fell off a cliff.”
“A cow was wondering around and rather than face certain capture and deportation back to the farm, it decided to commit suicide by jumping off the cliff, and it just happened to hit you.”
“Yes.”
“How stupid do you think I am?”
“You’re not stupid, Carol, you married me didn’t you?”
“I think I just answered my own question.”
“Look, I’ll take the van in for repair first think tomorrow. You can drive my Chevy this week. I’ll get a ride to work with Carl.”
“I can’t drive the Chevy.”
“Why not?”
“The left side is crushed in.”
“You had an accident with my car?”
”No. We were driving home from the IGA when we were sideswiped by a rhinoceros.”
“Geez, Carol that’s not even close to a good lie. How the hell did a rhino get on a highway and sideswipe the car?”
“I don’t know, ask the cow, she should’ve had a good view from up on the cliff.”
“Good night, Carol, I’m going to bed.”
“My bed?”
“I guess not. I’ll get some sheets and take the couch.... hey, what’s with these sheets, they smell funny.”
“It’s my new cleaning agent for removing the smell of beer, cigarettes, doe urine, and campfire smoke.”
“Smells like kerosene.”
“Nope. Lighter fluid. Have a good night.”
“You’re killin’ me, Carol, you’re killin’ me.”
“Don’t tempt me......... flying cows.......”