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Mind Your Knitting

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Today’s post comes from Bathtub Safety Officer Rafferty (B.S.O.R.).

tightrope

At ease, civilians! Stay at ease and stay relaxed. And always, always be aware of your surroundings, Remember that your primary job is to preserve life and limb. As my Grandma Rafferty always said, “Mind your knitting. Unless you’re driving. Then mind your driving.”

This basic bit of commonsense instruction was apparently never given to the captain of the Costa Concordia, who sailed too close to the rocks while his illicit squeeze was watching him work. Never let someone watch you work! Never allow your attention to be drawn away by a distraction of any sort, such as showing off for some sexy someone whom you desperately want to impress.

If we counted up the cost of the rash things that have been done to leave a favorable impression with someone, it would leave a very unfavorable impression! That’s because wanting to impress anyone is ALWAYS a threat to life and limb, even if you’re trying to wow them with how SAFE you are.

When I was a senior in high school, I was courting the woman who eventually became Mrs. BSOR. I felt that I needed to demonstrate to her that I was not going to be fodder for one of those teenage car tragedy songs. I decided to do it by showing her how quickly I could become secured in the driver’s seat, literally grabbing the restraint system as I slipped into the vehicle and with one deft and powerful motion, slamming the metal buckle into its receptacle. As a result, I mangled my index finger and became hopelessly entangled in the seat-and-shoulder belt harness. Still trying to seem suave, I made a move to get out of the car quickly and gracefully, and in the process I hit the power recline button and wound up spraining my neck!

It was ill-advised and reckless of her to marry me anyway – a lapse for which I will always be grateful.

Y.I.S. (Yours in Safety),
B.S.O.R.(Bathtub Safety Officer Rafferty)

What do you do when you want to show off?

61 thoughts on “Mind Your Knitting”

    1. Occasionally I listen to Global Beat online. I like that show and many of the other music shows on KFAI. They have some good DJs on KFAI including your former student, Clyde.

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  2. Good morning. Talk smart. This started when I was young at the family dinner table. My parents put up with or encourage me to do a lot of talking about things I thought were clever. Once I made up a story that I told to a cousin as if it was true and was embarrassed when he repeated it, as a true story that I had told him, at the dinner table in front of our parents.

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    1. I ask of the passing freight cars,
      laden with more than corn:
      Is not all art communication?
      Do not all arts seek eye, ear, mind, heart?

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      1. Yes, I think we need more support for the arts coming from people seeking out and becoming more aware of the work of artists.

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      2. nice clyde. yes if the arts dont communicate they are moot. my mom took me to the guthrie to see a play by pinter and i wondered if i was witnessing something that missed the mark but by the end it was a great lesson in how the absurd gets your attention and makes a point of its own.
        abstract expressionism is not communicated by a concrete figure but it communicates on a different level.
        i recently had my old music partner back in town and got to listen to his new tunes, he has an essence about his music brain that paints pictures with the notes. i love his brain and we are discussing collaborating on tunes. that could be cool. nice to get back into that workld again. not showing off but kind of like fingerpainting. it feels cool just to get your fingers in the media and goosh it around.

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    2. In my childhood, the great virtues were work, frugality, and modesty. My point is that in the arts the showing off part is an instinctive part of the process. Thus we get ancient cave paintings to graffiti artists. My parents third virtue would rule out all arts, it seems to me. This community has a lot to communicate with their various arts (or craft, which also means ART). “Show-off” in this sense is the negative word for “communicate.”

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      1. agreed. my dad was the opposite of perfectionist. he came form a perfectionist house where it was a problem he reacted by the mickey saying “make it up on the next one” fence posts come to mind. hard work yes. perfect work no.

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  5. I show off my cooking or my garden produce. Today we have a soup potluck at work. We are bringing quite a good cajun chicken stew we dug out of the freezer. Little will our coworkers suspect the name for it is Desperation Chicken, something husband cobbled together when I was was gone and he had a lot of stuff to use up. I also will show off when the music system is operational in the waiting room next week. I have downloaded more than 1500 songs onto a laptop and have lots more to go. I am a little worried that people maybe more puzzled and annoyed than impressed by the selections but I guess that is a risk a person takes in such circumstances.

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        2. I am only about half finished uploading things, so when i am done (probably this weekend), we’ll talk.

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    2. When a music compilation is chosen to be inoffensive to anyone, it’s usually sort of boring to everyone. Better to show a little personality and attitude.

      How’s your dad, Renee?

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      1. Well, he is still at home, driving and volunteering at the local hospital. He is crabby with my mom, but she is doing ok with it and just ignores him. He is doing cardiac rehab. thanks for asking.

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        1. nice that he can drive. that was the final nail for my dad when they made him hostage to my mom shuttleing him around. ill always remember the sunday when i got a call form my mom up on leach lake saying he had left the house and driven off to lord knows where and the police and all were out looking for him. he pulled in my driveway about 1030 so happy to see me and i told him hjow happy i was to see him too but man are you gonna get your ass handed to you dad. he thought it was good just to come on down and see us. my dad never got crabby just that deep exhale, shoulder sag and resignation to the changes that were infiltrating his every move.

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  6. Will have to read later…
    OT: Moving day for my mom’s STUFF. (She moves in next week.) Wish us luck and no more rain this morning, baboons.

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      1. Sunrise Senior Living in Golden Valley. And the rain wasn’t heavy, and we had tarps. It’s all in… now I just can’t wait to get HER there.

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        1. My s-i-l just moved to one in Maple Grove. Just asked on the odd chance they were in the same one. My m-i-l was in Sunrise for a while and then went to Lake crystal, back in the mid 1980’s.

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  9. I show off way too much. Made a chocolate chip cookie pie w/ chocolate icing and then decorated fancily with candy corn – it’s in the “treat cube” here at work. This is the problem with not having the Teenager around… I don’t have anybody to make silly seasonal desserts for!

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    1. if you sign up for a company called spee dee delivery i think it 15 dollars a month or a 5 buck non member fee, you can send packages to the 5 state area for about 5 bucks/ ill bet teenager would be happy to share your silly seasonal deserts with other bluegolds who are away form home and dont have anything more than the cafeteria to remind them of food

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      1. Oh, I’ve been sending stuff down. In fact, made little Halloween baskets for Teenager and her roommates this past weekend. Very cute take-out containers w/ Halloween designs. Even made fancy candies in the shapes of skulls with oreos embedded in them – cellophone w/ raffia — the whole nine yards. Teenager harrumphed (sp?) because I gave stuff to her roommates. Apparently I’m only supposed to give stuff to HER!

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        1. send it to her divvied up into packets for her to give to her firends so she can be the hero or blow them off if she chooses.

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  10. Singing. I used to be ultra confident in my singing and would sing loudly and proudly. Age has reduced both my singing ability and my confidence. I still sing out most of the time but I’m more cautious when it matters.
    On Saturday, MN Community Sings will have a singing session in the Lakewood Chapel. The mega-echoes will make it an interesting event. I’ll be showing the incredible building to a friend for the first time. I can’t get enough of that little-known treasure in the city.

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  11. I brag about the crimes that I have pulled off successfully. There’s a lot of one-upmanship about that stuff here in the big house.

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  12. You all probably saw this coming: I dance wildly – kinda like Tina Turner only better. The saying, “Age gracefully” has long since been replaced with “age outrageously”. During the cancer battle, I kept on dancing with a picc line in my arm attached to a chemo pump. Nothing will stop me from dancing.

    Now then (and OT), my little trip to Mayo didn’t result in anything definitive, but the neurologist scheduled me for a six-day inpatient hospital stay in mid-November in which they stop all medications, have me hooked up to EEG wires, and try to provoke a major seizure. After I agreed, my anxiety shot through the roof because I’ve been told that sudden withdrawal from these meds can actually trigger a grand mal seizure; worse a possible 3-month driving ban!! Also, these meds are to be increased very gradually, so it’s hard to imagine that I could be re-stabilized enough to get back to my life. At the moment, this drastic plan sounds like a very expensive drug test just to find out if I’m seizure-prone. I’m now waiting to hear back from someone who works in this inpatient unit to get my many questions answered.

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    1. just trust em. its not the corner quack shop. you have to trust someone on this stuff and mayo is the one who should be at the top of your list. stop thinking and be thankful they are there and you have the insurance to plug them in. your anxiety should soar about dinging around with the guys who want to fix the unsure feeling about everything you have going on here. you need to bite the bullet and get some good books together for your 6 day stay. download some tunes and chill. they arent going to screw you up . they are going to get you on the right path. isnt that the premise?

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  13. This is how I show off: when you buy pseudoephedrine, you have to show your drivers license and they register you, usually by swiping your license. For the next few days after I buy it, like yesterday, ads for Pseudofed appear all over the Internet for me.

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  14. i dont get a chance to show off anymore. i used to sing and wear fine clothes that were way too expensive. today i appreciat the nice clothes they remarket at goodwill and garage sales i attend. i was just at my reunion and one of the old friends i saw there was giving me flack for getting dressed up. cmon man o threw on a sports coat and a hat to go with the jeans and birkys. i guess thats sort of dressed up but tis the same outfit exactly i wore in high school. i have another friend from way back who laughs and comments that not many guys ended being who they were in high school. good news bad news maybe. i dont know. i show off when i am introducing my kids, they came out good and i am real proud of not screwing that up in spite of all the obvious issues they have to contend with. riding a motorcycle kind of feels like showing off. hey i ge tot do this and you dont. all motorcycle people salute each other driving down the road in acknowledgement of this special club. i was laughing this last weekend scooting up to the top of the tall ladders to do the window washing before the winter set in. i guess i have no fear of heights relatively speaking. i ask others to give me a hand and they simply cant do it. they cant even watch. whats with that? im growing my mustache out and sort of handlebarrring it if it doesnt get to outrageous. thats kind of showing off. preening is showing off right. not much let to preen gotta go with nose hair. says something im not sure i want to delve into too deeply.

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        1. likes raspberries AND grows them. the fall raspberries are still producing – albeit, not a huge crop. just enough for a bowlful most days.

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  15. There are some folk dances I can still do that are pretty show-offy, mostly Bulgarian and Romanian. Beyond that, if I’m at a party and trying to make people laugh, I will sometimes start using colorful language more than usual… esp. if I’ve had enough wine.

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    1. Colorful? Like “red, purple, teal, turquoise, plum, gold, russet, burgundy, sapphire blue, lilac, sage green, magenta”???

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