Poems, The Baboon Congress

With Smuckers It Has To Be Glue

103 Comments

Today’s poetic guest post is by Clyde.

This morning I had some orange marmalade,
Which I spread on my toast with a kitchen blade.
With my tea it was indeed quite grand,
But then some stuck to my dominant hand.

So I put the plate down on the table;
To let go of it I was barely quite able.
I felt some hanging on the tip of my chin;
On the rug if it dropped would be a great sin.

So I wiped it off with the tail of my shirt,
Which I threw in the laundry to be rid of the dirt.
But some was stuck in my scraggly old beard,
Which to tell you the truth really felt weird.

I went to the closet for something to wear,
But of the handle I did not take care.
And to the hanger it transferred with ease;
Of none of this my wife would be pleased.

So I went to the bathroom to sputter and fume,
Still doing battle with my marmalade doom.
The soap dispenser was empty of course.
Now things could only get worse.

Soon it was on dispenser and soap jug,
The vanity door my hand gave a tug.
I should have gone then to take a long shower,
But control of the stuff seemed still in my power.

I washed and I scrubbed, even the tap.
Even under my ring was some of the crap.
I retraced my steps washing as I went,
Of places I had touched I had hardly a hint.

I did the very best that I could,
But find some I knew my wife would.
Plate, jar, and toast I threw in the trash;
By then such an act did not seem rash.

Back to my office I went to relax,
After trying to trace my gelatinous tracks.
“Of my kingdom,” I thought, “I will again be the lord.”
But some had dropped on my computer keyboard.

I troed to wope it off with some poper towels,
Bot now I cen type only two of the vowels.

When have you fought a long or losing battle with a thing?

103 thoughts on “With Smuckers It Has To Be Glue”

  1. Good morning to all,

    Well, I am currently trying to caulk some of my windows where the caulk is missing or about to be missing. This is not entirely a losing battle, but I hope not one looks too closely at my finished product, it isn’t real smooth. Some spots took me way too long to get into even close to an acceptable form. I get it almost right and try to smooth out or fill in the remaining bad spots and as I think I am nearly finished I mess up the good spots fixing the bad spots. This goes on and on. I try a new can of caulk because the old stuff is too hard and the new stuff turns out to be too soft.. I try a different puddy knife, but the problem isn’t the puddy knife, it’s me.

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  2. I do not have the knack of caulking either, nor sheet rocking, nothing you smooth out with your hand. But, Jim, I see by the radar you have a reprieve from caulking for awhile today. I am going try biking despite the radar image.

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    2. I rapidly came to the conclusion that caulking, like taping with sheet rock, is a true art form. My Dad said, “Wet your finger and smooth out the caulk with your wet finger, rather than a tool. And it’ll take some practice.” He didn’t say how much practice, though…

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  3. Rise and Stick to the Fly Strip Baboons!

    Clyde, this is a masterpiece–you and KK have been on a roll the last several days! In the last several weeks we have lost a battle with a ceramic tile floor of our porch that was supposed to have heat in it. It did have heat for 4 years, then one day in April it just ended. No heat there. This summer we hired an electrician, tried 2 different new thermostats, and imported a fancy “short-sensing” machine from the manufacturer to find the problem. All this was to no avail. We now approach autumn, then winter without heat in our 4 Season Porch.

    This reduces it to a 3 Season Porch which becomes a defeat and a tragedy in the winter.

    Time for a new heater in there which is the next project.

    $$$$$

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    1. 49 bucks at fleet farm will band aid it for a long time. those under tile heaters are great but not very efficient. the little space heater is a good choice for the small space used every so often.

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    3. You can also get an electric heating pad that goes under an area rug, up to about 5X7 or so. Could be paired with a space heater. A cold floor is hard to live with.

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  4. Dimensional lumber is my nemesis
    it splits and it splinters with emphasis
    But bend it I will
    Straight boards I have nil
    I will finish this project with no endesis…

    (Okay, I lost the last line…7:15 am is clearly not when I should by trying to rhyme things with “nemesis”….but if I had a nickel for every time I had to twist or strong arm a board into place for some project or other I might not be rich, but I’d have an awful lot of nickels).

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  5. I have made gnocchi on several occasions. Gnocchi dough is really sticky and hard to handle, and it gets all over your hands and the sticks to your hands while you roll it out and…ooh ick! Curled-up soaker hoses are a pain to handle, too, until the sun warms them enough and they uncurl and straighten out.

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      2. A horror story, just for you, Renee: When I was a child planting potatoes, acres of them, my mother would cut up the potatoes, two or three eyes to each piece. So we would carry them in a bag and drop each piece in a hole. Soon your hands were coated with starch and there was dirt and dust all around you. As the day went along layers of starch built up on your hands–worst feeling I know.
        Next time I am in Dickenson, I will come make them for you. By the way, as near as I can tell there is no one in the U.S. with my name,Clyde Birkholz but there is a Clydella Birkholz in Dickenson. Clyde is bad enough. But Clydella? I should go there and give her my sympathies.
        Wonder if a dough hook would work?

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      4. Renee, don’t hold your breath. Despite the fact that my grand-daughter was born there, I doubt we will be that way in awhile. But I would make it for you. I have to make it regularly for my children because I introduced them to it in their teens.

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      1. pesto in general is a very good thing. I can seldom grow enough basil to put some by. should just spring for a couple of bunches at the market this weekend. Couple of ice cubes worth of pesto on some pasta=instant well-being.

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      2. You can also substitute lamb’s quarter for the basil. It has a slightly milder flavor but is still quite tasty, and it has the added benefit of being free.

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  6. a classic clyde, thanks for the vignette
    ever see great stuff in the hardware store? little yellow can? 5 bucks and you spray it around doors and windows to stop the wind from blowing through. what a good idea. i can fix my life for 5 dollars!!! sound too good to be true? it is. it expands to be 4000 times its original size and gets on the walls the windows the hand doing the spraying the hand doing the cleanup the shirt shoes and carpet in the vicinity the door handle in the mud room to the garage the garage door the drawer handle to the rag bin. then to the frame of your glasses right above the lens oops on the lens, the nose piece. the hair and to top it off it turns black and takes two weeks to come off you hands. it is very good at stopping wind but not to good at forgiving lack of experience.

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    1. Oh yes, tim, I remember our first experience with that stuff too. Great stuff – once you’ve figured out how to use it (or possibly read the instructions!).

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  7. Pretty clever poem, Clyde. I especially like the two last lines, made me laugh.

    One thing that always gives me trouble is sticky tape. I’m talking about the wide packaging tape that comes on a roll that requires a dispenser for cutting the tape. Inevitably, the tape is never positioned correctly in the dispenser, and the tape is stuck to itself in such a way that I can’t find the end. After exploring the surface of the tape with my fingers for a while, sometimes the end will reveal itself. Other times I’ll have to make a cut across the surface of the tape with a sharp knife to create one. Then the real fun begins. Attempting to pull off sufficient tape for the job at hand, more often than not it comes off in small pieces that don’t tear off the entire with of the tape. I’m now trying to pry the pointy ends of the tape off where it has torn so I can create a new straight end. When I finally manage to wrest sufficient tape from the roll, I discover that the serrated cutting edge of the dispenser is in the wrong position to cut the tape. After some fiddling around, I’ll somehow manage to cut off a piece of tape which will then promptly curl up and stick to itself or something else I don’t want it stuck to. It’s a safe bet that it’ll take me 3 or 4 tries before I succeed. Small wonder I don’t send many packages.

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    1. Thank you. But the last two lines would be better if I had only used two vowels. GRRRRR!! I am back to working on my novel, in which a main character speaks with an accent. It is very hard to type words intentionally incorrectly.

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    2. PJ, your problems with tape remind me of battles with very large rolls of plastic wrap I had to deal with at one of my jobs. If you have troubles with finding the start of rolls of tape, try getting a very long roll of plastic wrap started. As for jobs that take 3 or 4 tries to finish, this is almost always the case when I have a plumbing repair to do. I have to make sure the hardware store will be open when I start on plumbing beause I will need to go there several times to finally get the right part or to get parts to replace ones that I have messed up.

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      1. I can imagine the trouble with a large roll of plastic wrap. I have sufficient trouble with the household size one in my kitchen. And I can certainly relate to the plumbing issue too. It’s usually my job to run to the hardware store for that thingamajig husband is missing or has screwed up. And, without fail, there’ll be three or four slightly different ones to choose from, and only one right one. We have lots of spare thingamajigs in the basement because I’ll buy one of each to save myself a trip.

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    3. But you’re fine with tape that isn’t sticky, right? I thought ‘unsticky tape’ was called ‘ribbon.’

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  9. Landscape fabric on a windy day. I dread windy days – I’d rather work in rain than wind. I also get completely worn out by those rolls of black plastic landscape edging. You try to straighten one out and it keeps curling back up on itself, and then if you bend it too far backwards you get a little caved-in notch in the tubular part at the top.

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    1. Bird netting to keep the birds from eating all my berries before I can pick them is a very . frustrating material. This netting keeps getting caught on all kinds things while I’m trying spread it or working near it. It is really good at hooking over buttons on my clothes and not easy to unhook.

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  10. Thanks Clyde for a fun read.

    Contact paper – I’m the contact paper queen and have lined drawers, wall”papered” a kitchen backsplash or two… You cut the right sized piece (well, maybe), and start to peel off the backing, positioning the exposed corner as you think will be correct. As you start to press it down, you realize it’s a little askew, and try to lift off and start over. Many times. With any luck you finally get it done, and it has little air bubbles in it, that I poke with a straight pin.

    Don’t get me started about sewing. (Well, you already have.) You think you’ve sewn two right sides together correctly, at least half the time one is backwards and you have to rip it out. (Is a seam ripper the most important tool on the planet? – yes!) I learned one summer that whenever I’d done something requiring a seam ripper, it was time to stop, go and cool off, come back later, or the machine starts to turn on you. I actually put the needle through the edge of my right index finger.

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  12. yards of lightweight polyester being laid out flat ion a cutting table in a dry room. Like an untrained puppy, it will follow you everywhere, it will not “sit”, neither will it “stay”. It can, likewise, sometimes be convinced to behave with a couple of squirts from a water bottle.

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  13. My old HP Deskjet printer (a hand-me-down from my brother) goes through phases in which it encounters some kind of internal error and begins to pump out page after page of programming symbols. It forces me to stand there and feed page after page into it so that it doesn’t use up a lot of paper. It appears to need to print until the error has resolved. I have tried and failed to find the nature of its problem. This malfunction has on occasion continued for hours, and even after turning everything off and rebooting, and especially when I’m in a hurry, and always when I’m trying to print the Rock Bend mailing list. I prefer to use ANY printer other than my own.

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    1. Oh my. That is absolutely horrible. I’ve had my share of printing problems (and, yes, they especially occur when I’m in a hurry and absolutely HAVE to have whatever I’m trying to print) but I’ve never had that sort of thing happen. Yet.

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    2. Hey Krista… speaking of Rock Bend, on the website, I can’t get the “This Year” page to show… I tried it at work and at home. Just a little red X. Is this the site, or am I just unlucky this week?

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      1. I’m not sure. I think it should work for everyone. If not, I can check with the artists and web gurus. Do you have a current version of Adobe? It’s graphic art made on a Mac. I checked it last night because it took awhile to get this year’s logo updated and it worked for me. That page is a little bit of a dead-end anyway. What you really need are the schedules found under “Saturday music” and “Sunday music.”

        Try copying and pasting this into your browser:

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      3. I sent a message to Kris, our graphic’s artist, who designed the page and does all the art work. She may or may not be able to shed light on this problem.

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      2. Will you be in the Twin Cities again sometime soon? This is a great printer that I had to retire when Microsoft, in its great wisdom, invented an operating system (Windows 7) that my poor old printer couldn’t figure out. I have a disk with the drivers on it. The output is pretty and the printer makes good use of toner (so you don’t have to refill it all the time).

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      3. Oh, Steve… I would love to have your retired printer. I still use Windows xp and hope to stay with it for awhile. Thank you so much!

        As far as I can tell right now, it will be a few weeks before I make it to the Cities again. Sometimes I have to make spontaneous trips to St. Paul. I’ll let you know if one of these trips comes up.

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  14. Many years ago, the tree in the front yard was just struggling. We had a couple of different folks out and the final determination by all was that it needed to go and be replaced with a healthier, hardier specimen. My ex was/is very, how shall we say it, “frugal” so the decision was made that we would remove the tree ourselves.

    We picked out a new tree, which was delivered on a Saturday morning with the stern warning that it shouldn’t sit aound too long before we got it in the ground, so we hurried down to Home Depot and bought a chainsaw. The ex tied a nice rope around the tree (think the size of a lumberjacks upper thigh for size here…. not too huge, but certainly not small) and instructed me to make sure it fell away from him, into the yard. Then he started buzzing away. Well, the tree clearly didn’t want to play our game and began to sway seriously. Needless to say, even with heavy gloves, I couldn’t begin to hold onto to as it fell. It headed straight at my ex, who yelped, dropped the chainsaw and jumped clear. But the tree wasn’t finished with us yet. As it went down, it completely crushed the chainsaw that my ex had dropped.

    So back we went to the Home Depot to buy another chainsaw to finish up the job. And by the time we got home, it was raining. I had to work the next day so we had to get done that day. So we chainsawed and dug in the rain for eight more hours before we were able to wrest the root mass from the ground. I don’t think I’ve ever been dirtier in my life. Or wetter.

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    1. I’m sure that story is a lot funnier in retrospect than it was at the time. Memories are made of this.

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    2. Don’t know if I told this story, but in case not:
      In my teens my father and I would work all day without talking to each other. No open hostility, just that we were so different and I was the basic teen who could only see his parents as the bane of his life and irrelevant to my future life. We knew each other’s routine at each task, so there was little that needed to be said.
      We were cutting wood, smaller popple (the north woods word for aspen, poplar) and birch. I would clear the snow from the base of a dozen or so trees in a bunch, and my father would come behind and kerf them (cut a notch on the side on which he would fall the tree).
      Then we would drop them. My father would run the chain saw, and I would stand over him and push the trees over. When all the trees were dropped, I would go to the tops of the trees and chop off the smaller limbs at the top. He would use the chain saw to cut off the larger lower branches and cut the trees into lengths to haul up.
      But one time as I was working on the fallen tree tops, he decided to drop another tree that I had not prepped. The sound of the chain saw did not bother me because I assumed he was working on the bottoms of the trees. As his tree started to fall, he realized it was falling on me. He hollered; I turned to look. There was the tree right in my face. I ducked to one side. The tree, which was it that point about three inches in diameter, hit me a glancing blow on my face and then my shoulder, knocking off my glasses and knocking me down.
      As I was lying in the snow under the tree, my father rushed up, saw my glasses were not on my face and said, “Did you break your glasses?” That was about as close as my father could come to expressing an emotion. I was fine and my glasses were not broken.

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      2. good story of production line work ethic on a family project. the punch line is a good one too. my dad was te son of a perfectionist so his expression was, we will make it up on the next one as we dug holes for fence lines or sawed 2x4s or whatever. i have kids who don’t understand the concept of labor as an everyday part of life but when they work they do good work and thier share plus a little. the kind of guy you’d want to have working with you

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      3. Glad you survived, Clyde. It’s good to learn at some point that talking isn’t always necessary (though in this case the holler was a good thing). Husband lived out on the “hippie” farm in early 70s, and he and a buy named Tom would be spltting wood and sometime use a crosscut saw – got in a groove where they wouldn’t need to speak for a coupla hours, just had a good rhythm going, liked to work together.

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  15. So many things. Madeleine L’Engle has, in at least one of her books, the phrase “the animosity of inanimate objects” and that really is a perfect phrase. Doesn’t it seem like some inanimate objects hate us?

    While I’ve had tangles with garden hoses, clothes hangers, printers, and computers, one of the craziest losing battles I had was when I stopped at a gas station to fill up the car. I just had to make a short trip somewhere and thought, “I’ll just fill up the car today because I have more time to do it today than tomorrow and it will only take ten minutes!” So I pulled up to the pump, swiped my card…and as soon as I picked up the nozzle, gasoline started shooting out like crazy. I’m standing there trying to figure out how to shut it off and it isn’t shutting off but spraying all over me and all over the ground. Finally I jammed the nozzle into the gas tank and had a reprieve while the tank filled. But of course the auto-shutoff did not shut off when the tank was full so I had to hastily remove it and put it back on the pump without dousing myself again.

    Of course, I had to go home and change clothes (as well as throw what i had on in the wash). My quick little trip to fill the tank turned out to be pretty long, not to mention pretty smelly.

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      1. I wondered what the people at the other pumps were thinking. I must have looked like a totally crazy woman spraying gasoline hither and yon…but not a one of them even seemed to notice.

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    2. you know a word to the guy at the cash register about how you need to take the clothes ot the cleaner and go see you doctor etc may have been a good thing at that moment. the least they could do is offer something for their screwed up pump that messed up your day. what would you charge to let someone douse you with gasoline?

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  16. I’m having trouble here because I’m still messed up on sleep from the cabin trip. But I certainly remember an epic battle I had with a pipe in my backyard. Think of the scene in “Shane” when the two men are trying to chop a huge tree stump.

    This pipe was two feet tall and as three inches in diameter. It just stuck out of the ground.

    I tried to dig it up. The pipe turned out be be anchored in a ball of cement the size of a bushel basket.

    I tried to unscrew it. After three trips to the hardware rental store to get bigger wrenches, I got one that made it turn. And turn. And turn. By this time, my neighbor was helping me. He’s built like a young bull, but he had no more impact than I.

    I tried to cut it. (Another trip to the rental store.) The pipe broke the saw.

    By this time the rental store guys were fascinated. After five trips to the store for bigger weapons of destruction, they decided they had to SEE this pipe. At the end of work week, the whole store (four BIG guys) emptied out and drove to my yard to meet this famous pipe in person. They had some kind of saw by now that equaled the power of the Jaws of Life. Four guys and my neighbor threw themselves at that pipe for about two hours before the pipe curled up toes and died. And by that time I felt sorry for the pipe and was deeply ashamed of having attacked it.

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  17. Marmalade: I learned to like marmalade from my English aunt by way of my mother. Marmalade has always been sticky and used to be quite tart. But over 60 years it has been adapted to American taste, meaning loaded with sugar, so now it is very sticky. Still like it. But somehow I cannot eat it without getting it on everything. Not as bad as in the poem, which is really Dale’s fault for bringing up Ogden Nash.

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    1. you did a great job with the inspiration. are their other ogdans in history? orson is a rarity

      here is what i found when i looked up ogden: more ogden quotes

      A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.
      Ogden Nash
      – More quotations on: [Pets] [Dogs]
      A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
      Ogden Nash
      – More quotations on: [Family]
      I think that I shall never see
      a billboard lovely as a tree.
      Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
      I’ll never see a tree at all.
      Ogden Nash
      – More quotations on: [Trees]
      Middle age is when you’ve met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.
      Ogden Nash
      – More quotations on: [Age]
      Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.
      Ogden Nash
      – More quotations on: [Parents]
      People who have what they want are fond of telling people who haven’t what they want that they really don’t want it.
      Ogden Nash
      People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.
      Ogden Nash
      – More quotations on: [Work]
      Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.
      Ogden Nash
      – More quotations on: [Progress]
      Candy
      Is dandy
      But liquor
      Is quicker.
      Ogden Nash, “Reflections on Ice-Breaking”

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  19. Here is my latest messed up home repair problem that just happened. We had a carbon monoxide detector go off last night for no reason as far as we could tell. I took the batteries out of it and set another one from a different part of the house by it and it didn’t go off. Today I decided I should check the batteries in the detectors including smoke detectors as well the two carbon monooxide ones. When I put new batteries in one of the smoke detectors the test button would not work. I have an extra smoke detector and I put it up, but it wouldn’t work.

    Then I went to the hardware and got a new smoke detector. It required new screw holes for mounting and that didn’t go smoothly, but I got it done. Now all I have to do is find the can of left over paint to paint around the new smoke detector because it is smaller than the last one and some old paint is showing. That took most of my afternoon and still isn’t completed. What fun. This might have gone better if I hadn’t lost sleep last night due to the misbehaving carbon monoxide detector.

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  20. Great poem, Clyde. Anna too! I nominate you both to write a poem about Ogden Nash. Think of all the rhyming possibilities … hash, smash, thrash, gnash, trash, stash, rash… T’would be a poem with rich, rich imagery, no?

    I’m fighting a losing battle with gravity. Damn you, Sir Issac Newton!

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  21. There was a poet named Ogden,
    Who wondered what had his dog done.
    So said Mr. Nash,
    “He did something rash.
    He went online to go bloggin’.”

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  22. If I could write like Ogden Nash
    I never would be short of cash.
    Blogs and magazines would pay
    For all my witty repartee.
    I’d correspond with true panache
    If I could write like Ogden Nash.

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      1. linda maybe you can do it
        you seem to rhyme like thers nothin to it
        if pay for rhyme is your desire
        just set them keyboad keys on fire
        and submit daily to the rags
        collect the moolah by the bags

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      3. never know until you try it
        poet gig would be a riot
        how bout life you love to do
        cmon linda, its for you

        the blog poet laurtate we shall crown thee
        so you have credentiality
        to gain the attention of the big dogs
        who print the poems form all the best blogs

        a new career is just the thing
        to make your poet heart go zing
        crank it up and whip em out
        you’re panachey repartee will leave no doubt

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  23. I’m afraid that I might make a hash
    If I try to pen like Ogden Nash
    I cannot manage repartee
    In rhymed couplet, so sirree (sirray?)
    To LiSP and Clyde I tip my hat
    And wish you all good night, good gnat

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  25. from clyde:
    Marmalade: I learned to like marmalade from my English aunt by way of my mother.

    do you have the recipe available. id love to do the old style stuff

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  26. Pingback: Orange Marmalade Monkey Poem | Trail Baboon
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