Partly Nonsense

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN JOEL KLAASSEN
A classmate I knew at KU way back when told me once he never knew that trees had leaves on them until he got glasses in seventh grade. Since then I have found out that many more people had the same experience as a child.


They also said that they started noticing bricks on buildings and pepper on food.


* * *


We just cleaned up our leaves that accumulated this fall on our second-story deck. They all swirled up in one little pile and we couldn’t even fill one grocery bag.


* * *


Is Joe Paterno the only coach left in college football who still wears a tie on the sidelines?


* * *


When daughter Amy was little, I decided to build a playhouse. Money was tight so I started scrounging materials from around Lawrence building sites from the dumpster bins. When I had enough stuff to start, I needed a circular saw to cut some of the pieces.


One of our neighbors was a carpenter who was nicknamed the “wood butcher” by one of our other neighbors. The carpenter was kind enough to lend me his saw.


I used our porch deck as the saw table and everything was going fine until I dropped the saw to my side after one cut.


There was this “ping” sound. I looked down and the power cord was just a stub about a foot long.


I was kind of fearful of taking it back, but knew I would have to face the music eventually. So I took it over and showed it to him. He just looked at it and said, “Welcome to the club.”


* * *


Not everything goes as planned. I volunteered to take pictures for the Hillsboro Chamber during the “Trick or Treat Downtown” promotion on Halloween. The plan was to take photos of the kids and then have them available for the mothers to come back to pick up later at the stores that participated.


When Chamber secretary Rhonda Toal called me to say that none-I said none-of the photos turned out, I nearly choked. All seven rolls came back gray or shades of gray.


What made it even worse was that the same camera went to Atlanta and all of the photos we took down there came out…gray.


The camera advanced film, loaded film and flashed just like normal. Needless to say, it picked a lousy time to go kaput.

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