My father was the most off the wall man I have ever met to this date, Please remember to take it in as it was meant to be……All in fun.

My father was not a very big man, this was a discovery however I did not make until I was much older. In my childhood he was the, Boogey man, monster in the closet, noise under the bed, and the one person I knew that could kill me and put me out with the trash.

If you read #9, “Growing up in a nest of Scorpios” then the following will make sense to you. The dinner table was set up with my father at the head, then on one side my oldest sister then brother, mother at the other end, then me, and last my middle sister.

So picture this, us kids sat directly across from each other, and if one was mad enough at the other, payback was a bitch, kicking the other person under the table until someone eventually made a noise or a movement that caught the attention of “the beast”.

One of these times was my middle sister being kicked by my older sister. She could not help herself, she lost her mind and yelled out. “The beast” stabbed her in the forehead with a fork, it did not go through her skull but to this day she has four pit marks on her forehead. (I know it sucked then, but it is a great conversation piece now).

Those of you raised in the late fifties- early sixties, know that there was no such thing as child abuse, so I remind you again, don’t fret, just be amused. I’m over it.

My only dinner table wound was a steak knife to the upper arm. You know in restaurants when the waiter brings you a steak knife… it still makes me jump a little.

Back in the day pools got rust spots in them real easy. Every Saturday was rust removal day. We all had a pumice stone, the task was simple, you had to go underwater, scrub it till gone, then you could come up and breathe. That’s where I learned to hold my breath really well for the Navy.

Punishments were varied. One he liked the best was, “the bag”. He would give you a brown lunch sack and you had to go out to the yard and fill it full of weeds pulled from the law. Now you could not just fluff it up, because he would push it down, it had to be one inch or less from the top, or you had to start over.

I for some reason screwed up a lot and would be given a grocery bag to fill, and at times he would make me eat the weeds. I don’t know about you vegetarians, but to this day I hate green leafy vegetables.

He was not just a menace to us however, one day he was installing a sprinkler line in the front yard and needed to turn off the water to the house, he could not turn the valve at the meter off, so he had to call the city.

The city told him it would be Monday for them to fix the meter because they would not respond over the week-end. Not satisfied with this response, he accidentally backed his car over the fire hydrant outside our house, the city responded and while the water was shut off to the whole neighborhood, he connected his pipe to the water line……

There is loads more to say, but I don’t want to be the cause of you all needing therapy, so I’ll leave you with this, my mom divorced him when I was 12, I stayed with my mom and never saw him again until I was 17.

When we met again I discovered that I was 6′-4″ and he was 5′-10″, he was frail and I was young and strong, I could have blown him over. This was at my sister’s wedding, I walked up to him and looked down and said, “you ain’t so tough” and walked away. The next time I saw him was at his funeral……Karma…..

More to come next time….

Hints, tips, and whatever:

This is little-known story from the Pentagon on 09/11/2001:

Immediately after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, a daycare center near where the impact occurred had many children, including infants who were in heavy cribs. The daycare supervisor, looking at all the children they needed to evacuate, was in a panic over what they could do.

There were many children, mostly toddlers, as well as the infants that would need to be taken out with the cribs. There was no time to try to bundle them into carriers and strollers. Just then a young Marine came running into the center and asked what they needed. After hearing what the center director was trying to do, he ran back out into the hallway and disappeared. The director thought, ‘Well, here we are-on our own.’

About 2 minutes later, that Marine returned with 40 other Marines in tow. Each of them grabbed a crib with a child, and the rest started gathering up toddlers. The director and her staff then helped them take all the children out of the center and down toward the park near the Potomac and the Pentagon. Once they got about 3/4 of a mile outside the building, the Marines stopped in the park, and then did a fabulous thing – they formed a circle with the cribs, which were quite sturdy and heavy, like the covered wagons in the Old West. Inside this circle of cribs, they put the toddlers, to keep them from wandering off. Outside this circle were the 40 Marines, forming a perimeter around the children and waiting for instructions. There they remained until the parents could be notified and come get their children.

The chaplain then said, “I don’t think any of us saw nor heard of this on any of the news stories of the day. It was an incredible story of our men there. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room. The thought of those Marines and what they did and how fast they reacted; could we expect any less from them? It was one of the most touching stories from the Pentagon.”

Remember Ronald Reagan’s great compliment: “Most of us wonder if our lives made any difference. Marines don’t have that problem.”

God Bless the USA , our troops, and you.

Please pray for the men and women who have served and are currently serving our country and for the families of those who have given the ultimate sacrifice for freedom.

Useless Virgo Facts:

Thought this would be good to pass on to my friends….I was not aware of the difference, in fact I didn’t even know that there were “two” versions of the abbreviation.

What is the difference between http and https ?

Don’t know how many of you are aware of this difference, but it is worth sending to any that do not…..

**The main difference between http:// and https:// is It’s all about keeping you secure** HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol

The S (big surprise) stands for “Secure”.. If you visit a website or web page, and look at the address in the web browser, it will likely begin with the following: http://. This means that the website is talking to your browser using the regular ‘unsecured’ language. In other words, it is possible for someone to “eavesdrop” on your computer’s conversation with the website. If you fill out a form on the website, someone might see the information you send to that site.

This is why you never ever enter your credit card number in an http website! But if the web address begins with https://, that basically means your computer is talking to the website in a secure code that no one can eavesdrop on. You understand why this is so important, right?

If a website ever asks you to enter your credit card information, you should automatically look to see if the web address begins with https://.

If it doesn’t, You should NEVER enter sensitive information….such as a credit card number.

PASS IT ON (You may save someone a lot of grief).