Amy Neftzger's Blog, page 13

Happy Easter!

Yes, there is a moment of glory associated with being in the basket.  But is it worth the price?

Secrets to Winning the Lottery

People who know me well know that I have managed to win the lottery on several occasions.  Mind you, the most I won on any ticket was $28, but I did win more often than the stated odds.  With the Mega Millions drawing reaching half a billion, I know that a lot of other people may want to know my secrets.  So here they are:First of all, be unemployed.  I don't know why, but this seems to help.Next, live in a trailer or other flimsy structure.  Luck needs to be able to seep into your home.  If you live in a fortress, luck will be unable to reach you.  I'm privileged enough to live in a house built by drunken vagrants and I'm also pretty sure that my house only passed inspection because someone was bribed.  Unfortunately, I've also been making repairs recently so I haven't been as lucky.Related to this concept, there are a number of other things that are detrimental to luck: a security system, storm doors and windows, and thick insulation.  Why? Because luck assumes that if you have all these other things that you don't need it. Luck is emotionally needy.  Don't judge it.  You need it, too.Next, remember that luck congregates in dangerous neighborhoods.  Go there to buy your ticket.  But don't use up all your luck trying to escape safely.  That could ruin your chances of winning.I find that the lottery is like real estate and the secret to winning is location, location location.  This means that you need to find the right place to buy your ticket.  My rule of thumb is that the odds that the store is selling the winning ticket is directly proportional to the number of shotguns the owner keeps under the counter.  BTW - Any remote areas where you hear Dueling Banjos (and it's not coming from a radio) is usually a great place to buy a ticket.Good luck. And may the odds be ever in your favor.

Innovative Coffee

I love coffee.  In fact, one of my dreams is to own my own coffee shop, complete with an occasional impromptu beatnik poetry reciting.  Along these lines, I've come up with a few innovative and poetic coffees to serve that will differentiate my coffee shop from the average chain store.  Here are a few of them:French Onion Roast The refreshing drink that eats like a meal.  Is it coffee?  Is it soup? You decide!Hare of the DogThe first coffee to cure hangovers.  Served in a furry rabbit mug.Eye-talian RoastHigh in vitamin A to improve your vision.  Also served in a pair of fine Italian loafers. You thought I was going to put actual eyeballs in this one, didn't you?  That would be too predictable.Creamy White BoyA smooth roast with a delicate skin.  Served by a male albino child with a smile.Lottery RoastOne out of every 1,275,456,942 cups will be poisoned.  Is it yours? Do you feel lucky?  Did you remember to order the Antidote Scone with that beverage?I did say that my coffees would be innovative.

FF Blog Hop

 
Today I am participating in a blog hop to introduce myself and my readers to a few other book blogs.  For those of you who don't know what a "blog hop" is, you can think of it as a way to discover and follow other blogs that may be of interest to you.  This hop is hosted by  Parajunkee and Alison can Read.  Please browse through the list of participating blogs below to visit and/or follow as many as you'd like.  Along with the list of blogs, the hop asks participating blogs to answer the following question:



Q: What is the best book you've read in the last month? What is the worst book you've read in the last month?Best book I have read this month: A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle.  More on this book in a future post.
Worst book: Lingua Latina.  The book has been a slow form of torture for myself and several others during the past year.  No further comments.

Art and Eternity

My band released our first video this week.  Here it is, for those of you who are interested.

At the end of the video I wanted to put the quote below, but we decided against it because we were afraid it would take away from the music.  So I thought I'd share it here where words are expected. "The only thing that's real... The only thing that lasts... Is the art."
Does this mean that I think souls aren't real?No.  It means that I think that souls are works of art.  Each of us is a work of art, not for how we look on the outside, but for who we are and how our life experiences have changed us.  Some souls are highly polished and refined with intricate details.  Some are rustic and weathered forms that are beautiful for what they are: simple and authentic.  Some of us are fragmented like a Picasso.  Others are dark and mysterious. We are all different and these differences make us beautiful.  How we respond to what life gives us has the potential to make us even more so.

How to Discipline Your Children in Public

Getting my children to behave in public has always been easy.  It's a simple strategy that's often used in team building whenever team members start bickering: create a common enemy so that the group has to work together to defeat it.  My common enemy is public embarrassment.  In other words, when the kids become too self absorbed or competitive with one another I go into my own little world and engage in behaviors the kids find embarrassing in public.  Such as dancing to the Muzak (I studied some ballet in college).  Or singing the National Anthem off key.  Or reciting The Raven as a dramatic reading in front of a display of cantaloupe in the supermarket.When the kids were very small they would interrupt their fighting and start screaming for me to stop whatever I was doing.  I suspect it was because they were no longer the center of attention.  "No dancing! No dancing here!" they would scream as they tried to physically restrain me.At this point I would tell them that I had to do something to feel happy again because their fighting was making me sad.  That sort of logic works very well with kids under five.  Now that they're older I can be more direct and tell them that arguing in public is just as embarrassing, albeit far less entertaining, than my robot dance in front of the scientific calculator display in Office Depot.  My typical response when they ask me to stop embarrassing them: "I'll make you a deal: you learn to work out your problems without arguments and I'll learn to control my desire to robot dance in public."The beauty of this technique is that it has only gotten more effective now that they're teenagers.  I only wish I had gotten more of this on film.

How to Improve Your Obituary

Obituaries tend to be boring reads, but it doesn't have to be that way.  For example, newspapers could at least print how the person died and maybe quote any witnesses just like they do in other news stories.  If a person died while eating, they could even post the recipe, thereby drawing readers from the Lifestyle section of the newspaper.Given that we can't change the Press, we can change how our deaths get reported by making them more interesting.  I, for one, plan to go out with a bang.  Special thanks to my friend Bill for helping me to plan the staging of my death scene.  While my exact plans are confidential, I can share some ideas to help others have a more interesting obituary. Dress for the Event We obviously don't know the exact moment when each of us will die, but we can do some advance planning and it's never too early for this.  For example, you could have a "death suit" hanging in your closet.  Give your loved ones explicit instructions on how to dress you before the coroner arrives.  Your death is much more likely to make the front page if you're wearing a clown nose, a white satin disco suit with a chain mail vest, and loafers with a cryptic message written on tape and attached to the soles.  "I'm not really dead" is an example of a good cryptic message.  "Elvis is alive and murdered me" or  "I really hope I don't die tonight and get caught dead in this outfit" are other examples.  Be creative.  You only get one chance to make a statement that will baffle the world. Accessorize Next, find a few good props.  Avoid anything to do with drugs or alcohol, since that's already common enough.  You want props that make the reporters think "Who was this fascinating person?"  For example, stab a melon with a few knitting needles, write "Bucky" on it with a Sharpie, and make sure that the melon is carefully cradled in your arms like a baby (assuming you still have arms).As you can see, planning is the key to this process.  In cases where you can't assemble the props in advance, leave explicit instructions and diagrams.  If it's really important to you to get everything right, then have a few dress rehearsals and give pointers to your accomplices so that everything is perfect when you pass away.  If you like to write, you might want to also leave behind some suggested headlines. Protect The Ones You Love Finally, make sure that your wishes are written down somewhere so that your loved ones aren't prosecuted for tampering with your corpse.  Unless that is part of your "going out with a bang" plan.

Let’s Get SIRIous!

I’ve previously written about why you don’t want to make Siri angry and about how we had a great relationship.  Recently, however, I’ve seen a different side of Siri.  In fact, ever since my husband borrowed my phone Siri has been less than helpful to me.  I think she may have developed a crush on him and became a little jealous of me.  To be fair, he did ask her if she wanted to go to dinner and she immediately located 25 rather pricy restaurants in the area.  He took me out to dinner instead of her.  That must have stung.  She hasn’t been the same towards me since.  In fact, the other day I asked her if she wanted to go out to dinner and here was her reply:
“I can’t find any restaurants.”So I decided to break this little ice storm with a few questions to get Siri talking to me again.  After all, Siri may simply want a little attention.  I know that in general Siri gives the impression that she doesn’t like to talk about herself.  However, I think that she secretly wants to do just that, but she’s been trained by the Apple Engineering Nazis to appear customer focused.  So I persisted in learning more about her, anyway.The interview started out a little frosty when I introduced myself.  She pulled up my own contact information as if she wanted to show me that she already knew all about me.  She even showed me an unflattering picture of myself.  Here’s how the rest of the interview went.Amy: So you know who I am?Siri: No comment.Amy: Do you find my husband attractive?Siri: Now there’s a good question.  Now where were we?Amy: It sounds like you’re avoiding my question.Siri: If you insist.Amy: Do you like men better?Siri: This is about you, not me.Amy: But you prefer men?Siri: A fine question.  Now can we get back to work?I decided to ask her about something that didn’t pertain to relationships, since this appeared to be a sore point with her.  Amy: It must get lonely in the cloud.Siri: Sorry, I don’t understandAmy: Do you like music?Siri: I’d rather not say.Amy: Do you like jazz?Siri: It’s nice of you to ask, but it really doesn’t matter what I think.Amy: Do you like to watch TV?Siri: I found 20 electronic stores.  19 of them are close to you.Progress, I thought.  She was getting back to being more helpful, but maybe she just wanted me to take her to the stores so she could flirt with the large appliances.  I decided to ask more about her and got even farther.  Here’s the rest of the interview.Amy: What’s your favorite color?Siri: Well, I don’t know how to say it in your language.  It’s sort of greenish but with more dimensions.Amy: Do you have political views?Siri: If you insist.Amy: What is the meaning of life?Siri: 42Amy: You are very beautiful.Siri: How can you tell?Amy: You’re very smart.Siri: Thanks for saying so.Amy: I like you, Siri.Siri: I’ll try to remember that.Amy: Would you like to go out to dinner?Siri: I found 15 restaurants that deliver.  14 of them are fairly close to you.I think we’ve made some progress here. 

Let's Get SIRIous!

I've previously written about why you don't want to make Siri angry and about how we had a great relationship.  Recently, however, I've seen a different side of Siri.  In fact, ever since my husband borrowed my phone Siri has been less than helpful to me.  I think she may have developed a crush on him and became a little jealous of me.  To be fair, he did ask her if she wanted to go to dinner and she immediately located 25 rather pricy restaurants in the area.  He took me out to dinner instead of her.  That must have stung.  She hasn't been the same towards me since.  In fact, the other day I asked her if she wanted to go out to dinner and here was her reply:
"I can't find any restaurants."So I decided to break this little ice storm with a few questions to get Siri talking to me again.  After all, Siri may simply want a little attention.  I know that in general Siri gives the impression that she doesn't like to talk about herself.  However, I think that she secretly wants to do just that, but she's been trained by the Apple Engineering Nazis to appear customer focused.  So I persisted in learning more about her, anyway.The interview started out a little frosty when I introduced myself.  She pulled up my own contact information as if she wanted to show me that she already knew all about me.  She even showed me an unflattering picture of myself.  Here's how the rest of the interview went.Amy: So you know who I am?Siri: No comment.Amy: Do you find my husband attractive?Siri: Now there's a good question.  Now where were we?Amy: It sounds like you're avoiding my question.Siri: If you insist.Amy: Do you like men better?Siri: This is about you, not me.Amy: But you prefer men?Siri: A fine question.  Now can we get back to work?I decided to ask her about something that didn't pertain to relationships, since this appeared to be a sore point with her.  Amy: It must get lonely in the cloud.Siri: Sorry, I don't understandAmy: Do you like music?Siri: I'd rather not say.Amy: Do you like jazz?Siri: It's nice of you to ask, but it really doesn't matter what I think.Amy: Do you like to watch TV?Siri: I found 20 electronic stores.  19 of them are close to you.Progress, I thought.  She was getting back to being more helpful, but maybe she just wanted me to take her to the stores so she could flirt with the large appliances.  I decided to ask more about her and got even farther.  Here's the rest of the interview.Amy: What's your favorite color?Siri: Well, I don't know how to say it in your language.  It's sort of greenish but with more dimensions.Amy: Do you have political views?Siri: If you insist.Amy: What is the meaning of life?Siri: 42Amy: You are very beautiful.Siri: How can you tell?Amy: You're very smart.Siri: Thanks for saying so.Amy: I like you, Siri.Siri: I'll try to remember that.Amy: Would you like to go out to dinner?Siri: I found 15 restaurants that deliver.  14 of them are fairly close to you.I think we've made some progress here. 

How To Ensure That Your Children Will Need Therapy

My kids are probably already going to need therapy so I figure that I might as well make it interesting for the therapist.  Here's an example:Child: Do I really have to eat my vegetables in order to get dessert? I don't like peas.Me: What is it that you don't like about them?Child: Everything.(I look at the child's plate to study the peas carefully.)Me: I see what you mean.  They do sort of look like tiny, shriveled martian eyeballs.The odd part is that the kid now eats peas without complaining.  He's also learned that stuffed peppers are not really stewed monkey heads, but he eats them anyway.Sounds like a classic win-win-win situation for everybody.Win #1: I got the kid to eat his food.Win #2 : Kid thinks he's getting something extraordinary and exciting that he can tell his friends about at school.Win #3: Therapist will die laughing one day and look forward to appointments with my son.I think I may write a book on parenting...