Dogs and cats on motorcycles?  I have seen people carry around ankle biter dogs on bikes, but I couldn’t imagine a cat putting up with that racket.

I really can’t stand those goofy-assed stick figure family stickers.  They’re too damned happy- in a really sappy way- for one thing.  The last time Jerry sported a shit eating grin like the cartoons on those decals it was because he had just won $200 on his Pick 3 tickets, and he was butt drunk.  As for my emotional state, I am doing good to stay on a nice, neutral even keel.  I get angry pretty easily, but as far as the shit eating grin, I would have to say that was some time back in the 80’s, if ever.

If I were to display those horrid stick figures on my car, I would have to design my own so I could at least have some truth in advertising.  Here’s “Beer Drinker” and “Woman, Fed Up.”

I wouldn’t go so far as to add all three dogs, all three cats and the two snakes.  They didn’t ask for stick figure humiliation, and I really don’t want the general public speculating as to whether or not I’m some kind of bizarro animal hoarder type.  It would look pretty weird to some people that there are four times as many critters in the house as there are humans.  The good news is the critters generally don’t sass, and all of them put together are cleaner and require less maintenance than Jerry does. 

It’s pretty sad, but I probably am scowling most of the time.  I should work on that.  The glass is also half-full. 

I actually scheduled a bit of vacation time.  Now let’s see if I can scrounge enough money to take a two or three day excursion to the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia- by myself if need be.  I am just weird enough to consider a foray into the wonderful world of antique medical ephemera to be a fascinating vacation.   Jerry, on the other hand, would probably be grossed out and would fail to find anything involving a museum to be a vacation.  His idea of a vacation is keeping me busy pandering to his needs so I don’t get a vacation.  This is why I am considering taking this trip on my own.  Steve-o can’t go for obvious reasons- he’s got school, work and his family to tend to.  It’s kind of sad because of all the people I know Steve-o would enjoy it the most.  But he’s an adult now and is very close to the becoming independent of the parental units phase of his development, and I would not want to do anything to interfere with that.  I should have took him to the Mütter back when he was in high school and he had nothing but time. 

 Then again, if I had the whole parenting thing to do over, and the resources to do it better, I would have done a lot of things differently.  I wish I would have been able to afford to do home schooling or to send him to a Christian school, but I wasn’t able to do either.   I know a lot of people in the educational bureaucracy would be very afraid of me (or anyone else of my political and/or social outlook) doing any kind of home schooling, but at least my son (on my insistence) actually has read the Constitution and several other things high school kids should be required to read but aren’t, such as 1984, Animal Farm, Atlas Shrugged, and The Federalist Papers.  I did make sure my son could read and communicate using the English language beyond the level of  “Whassup, dawg?”

Even though he did have to go to public school and didn’t get total immersion in the World According to elysianhunter, I won’t blame the public schools that my son can’t spell.  Most techies can’t spell.  It has something to do with the way their brains are wired.  They can get the math and the spatial skills, but for him, correct spelling makes about as much sense as algebra does to me.  I will laugh at his auto-correct fails though. 

Here’s another Truth in Advertising (sort of stick figure) decal for the car: