My Weekend LOL

It usually takes a lot for me to laugh out loud when I am by myself. Laughter is best (and most infectious) when shared with others. Usually, when alone, the most outrageous laughter I make about humorous things like a sitcom or movie is a snort of air through the nose. I’m getting better at that now, really. But one thing happened over the weekend that not only made me laugh out loud, but a good belly laugh that lasted for several minutes. I am going to tell you about it, but for it to be funny for anyone else but me, some setup is required.

Setup Item 1: My Grandfathers house. My biological Grandmother died before I was born. She lived in a small house in rural Idaho with my grandfather. This was in the 40′s through the late 60′s. To this day, it is almost impossible to get a decent over the air television signal there, and radio signals aren’t much better. What I am getting at is that during that time frame, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to do to keep yourself occupied. My grandmother read books. A lot of books. She also did jigsaw puzzles and there was a lot of card playing. (Never play Pinochle with my Dad. He literally grew up on the game, and shows signs of paranormal abilities regarding what cards you are holding) Grandma had a preference for mystery books. Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, Agatha Christie… they were all well represented in her library. And her library outlasted her, and remained in the house. There were built in bookshelves in every bedroom, as well as a bookcase in the living room. They were all filled to overflowing with books.

Setup Item 2: My Childhood at “The Ranch.” Grandpa eventually remarried, and the woman he married already had a house. It was a nicer house, and she didn’t want to leave it. So, Grandpa would drive about 40 miles every day to what we called The Ranch, and do his job of farming and raising cattle, and then return home at night. The house he used to live in was now only being used when he had lunch. It would also be used when my family would spend the weekend there. The point is, since the Ranch wasn’t lived in, it fell into a bit of disrepair. There were three bedrooms, and two of them were one big room split down the middle. You had to walk through one room to get to the second. When we stayed there, my parents would sleep in what would have to be considered the “master bedroom” only because it was where the parents slept, my sister would sleep in the first of the other two bedrooms, and I would sleep in the living room on the pull-out couch.

I know what you are wondering… why didn’t I sleep in the back bedroom? Well, there are two very good reasons. One: the second bedroom was being used as a storage area. It held boxes of toys from when my Dad and his brother and sister were young. Second: It was full of dead flies. My sister and I called it “The Fly Room.” See, over the years, a bit of a hole opened up in the wall. Not completely to the outside, but the space between the inner and outer walls  was exposed. As a result, flies were able to get in that room. They lived their entire life cycle in that room. They were born, lived and died in that room, their crunchy carcasses blanketing every surface, including the floor. The practice of my grandfather and my family was to keep the door shut and pretend it didn’t exist. My sister and I were the only ones to venture in there, mostly out of boredom. TV signals were still poor, and the TV itself was a black and white holdover from the 60′s. I did not know that the General Lee was orange until The Dukes of Hazzard went into syndication. I went in there for books, my sister for anything she could find that was interesting. I was a voracious reader from the time I was very young. It helped that my family literally lived across the street from the county library. Before we would leave for the weekend, I would check out several books from the library, take them to The Ranch, and have them read by mid afternoon on Saturday. Then I started reading all of Grandma’s old books. She introduced me to Nero Wolfe, who I still visit regularly; Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, who did not interest me as much as Nero, and others that I remember enjoying, but can’t remember the titles or authors to re-read them today. I probably read her entire library.

Setup Item 3: Recently, my sister had a hard drive crash on her laptop, and it was replaced. I was trying to help her with getting her programs set up the way they were over the phone, and she told me that she had lost everything in the crash; pictures, videos, financial records, everything. I told her to mail the old drive to me and I would see if anything could be recovered. When it showed up in the mail, the box was waaaay bigger than necessary to hold a laptop hard drive. She had sent me belated x-mas gifts and a bunch of Valentines candy along with it. The belated x-mas gift was around eight books from my grandmother’s library that she remembered me reading. It was very sweet of her. I put the books on a shelf and intended to read them as soon as possible.

Setup Item 4: The eBook Revolution. Over the years, I have bought and sold or donated a staggering number of books. A few years ago, I got my hands on an Amazon Kindle. I still have at least half a dozen U-Haul small boxes full of books in my shed. And yes, even the small ones packed with tightly compressed paper are heavy. So I decided to find as many books that I owned and enjoyed in an electronic format so I could lighten the load. I found that many of my old favorites were not only out of print, but also not available in an eBook format, anywhere. So I did a little research and decided that if I had to, I would scan the books in their entirety and use an OCR program to try to decipher the text and I would make my own eBooks for convenience, but keep the out of print originals.

On with the story: Over the weekend, I spent a lot of time reading, and cataloging the eBooks that I have acquired so I would have an easy method of sorting the physical books I own into Keep, Scan and Keep, and Sell or Donate piles. I decided to do a test run of the whole scanning and OCR process, but I didn’t want to go out to the shed, since the grass is still super saturated with melted snow and I didn’t want to unseal the book boxes. But, there on a shelf were the books my sister had sent me that would work wonderfully for a test. I went to the shelf. “Peanuts, no its all graphics and the first gen Kindle doesn’t deal with that very well. The Great Brain? Encyclopedia Brown? No, too many pictures along with the text… I just want something text only. Ahh, here we go. This one shouldn’t have any pictures!”  I pulled the book from the shelf and opened it to a random page, intending to flip through it to verify it’s “no pictures” status. It opened to the most likely page, the one with obstacles in it. I knew at a glance that this book had indeed come from The Ranch. In between the pages, the reason the book naturally opened there, I found about a half a dozen very dead, very flat flies. And I laughed. Then I laughed harder. I knelt there on the floor in front of the shelf and roared with laughter.

The book? William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies.”

OK, so maybe it’s still only funny to me. But you now you can’t unread this post and you’re stuck with it.

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