Blog #462                                         January 15, 2026

 

The light went out in the bathroom.  It’s one of those long tube-thing lights.  Is that too technical for you?  Carol was out at a luncheon or something, so I was on my own, a position that usually leads to disaster.  But, somehow, I pried the plexiglass cover off, got the two tubes out and took them to the hardware store where I sheepishly asked for help.  I left with the two replacement tubes and then it hit me:  I had to get them home unbroken, install them and replace the Plexiglas sheet all by myself.  I considered that to have about the same likelihood as my getting hit by a falling cello.  Plus, my wife was gone.  I was alone!  I could fall off the stepladder and break both legs and die of starvation!  I could have a cardiac event and not be able to call 9-1-1!  I could get hit by a falling cello! 

 

Well, I got home, took out the stepladder and screwed up my limited courage.  I took a deep breath, told myself that I was a capable and clever man and had to do what a capable and clever man should do – wait for his wife to come home.  When she did, I asked her to hold the stepladder.  She refused.  You see, she remembered too well when her father was replacing a lightbulb and her mother was holding the ladder.  They were younger at the time than we are now.  Well, her father fell and broke a hip – not his hip, the mother’s hip.  So Carol said, “I’m not going to let you fall on me.  You’re on your own, Buster.”  And so I was, but then I remembered what the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev said -- “If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.”   So I pressed forward and got it done with only two band-aids and a little crack in the plexiglass that almost no-one can see.

 

And now I can concentrate on writing this week’s Limerick Oyster.

 

Message from Shakespeare, the three-legged cat:  I am sick when I do look on thee (A Midsummer Night’s Dream).  What he really should concentrate on is playing with me.  He spends so much time reading all those books and writing all those stupid blog things and going to his card games – well, he doesn’t spend enough time playing with me.  I mean, what’s more important than a man’s cat?  Purr.

 

Hi there and welcome back.  I hope you’re feeling well.  And speaking of limericks, let’s speak of limericks.  You know by now that I have been writing a letter to my three daughters every week for 28 years.  I still do, and each one contains a limerick, sometimes two.  And, of course, I have kept a copy of each one and a running count.  I am frighteningly anal, am I not?  The total as of now is 1,499 limericks, so I decided that my fifteen hundredth limerick should be about my fifteen hundredth limerick.  I guess that makes it a meta-limerick.  I wrote it about 4:00 in the morning while lying in bed.  Here it is:

 

I don’t juggle or do magic tricks

I just sit here and write limericks

I’ve written you rhymes

One-point-five thousand times

In two years, it’ll be one-point six.

 

Not my favorite limerick, but it got the job done.  My favorite limerick was inspired by the 2007 story of Lisa Nowak, an astronaut who had a boyfriend who was fooling around on her.  So she drove 900 miles to confront the miscreants, and to save time, she wore diapers so she didn’t have to stop.  True story.  That inspired me to write this:

 

To follow the man she sought

She went to the store and bought

A box of Depends

It’s perfect, my friends

To cover your astronaut.

 

Miscreant, our Weekly Word, means a person who behaves badly or in a way that breaks the law.

 

Have you been to a hotel lately?  The last time I was in a hotel, in Los Angeles, it was a bizarre and humbling experience.  They really should put up a sign:  NOT RECOMMENDED FOR OLD PEOPLE.  Unlocking the door to my room was the first challenge.  There’s this little card and you don’t stick it into anything.  You just swipe it in precisely the right place at absolutely the right angle for exactly the right number of mini-seconds, and it opens.  Well, it’s supposed to.  I was about to ask the desk clerk for the right Hindu mantra to use when Carol finally showed me how to do it.  Once the door was unlocked, you had to open it.  It weighed 800 pounds.  I had to get two bell-hops and Arnold Schwarzenegger to help me push.  Who designed this place?  Mengele?  Then you have to turn on the lights.  There was no light-switch.  What happened to light switches?  Instead, there was a white, plastic plate with a picture of a light-bulb on it and if you touched it in the right place, some lights got brighter or dimmer.  All I wanted was to turn on the light, not engineer a New Year’s Eve light show in Times Square.  And, of course, the likelihood that we would figure out the television set was the same as the likelihood of Joy Behar asking Kristi Noem to a sleepover.  And don’t even get me started about how to work the shower.

 

Why would you replace a thing as simple and obvious as a $2 light switch with a $90 touch-plate with arrows and pictures of light bulbs that only Elon Musk knows how to operate?  It was obvious that all these highfalutin, new-fangled gizmos cost a lot of money, because, even though the room was $350 a night, it clearly was not enough to pay for toilet paper wider than a roll of Scotch Tape.

 

You know, I’m not sure all this technology can improve on the old, reliable things they purport to replace – simple things like light switches, paper towels or light bulbs that actually cost less than a BMW.

 

Or simple, unassuming, friendly little blogs I send you each week.  I hope you enjoyed this one and will be back next week.  Stay well and count your blessings.

 

Michael                                    Send comments to mfox1746@gmail.com