Life In A Nutshell: Pea Shooter

Well, I have tried to pay Google for the past few months for my domain name, unsuccessfully. Whether it is a problem with Google, my computer or myself doesn't really matter at this point.

I have given up!

I have no idea what this means, but I suppose that I will find out soon enough. Worse case scenario would be that all of the blogs I have written over the past few years will fade from the internet. I have them safe and sound, on my computer and elsewhere.

I will continue to blog, I kind of enjoy it. What the new blog will look like or which provider will handle it remains to be seen. I may scale down the output and go for quality as opposed to quantity. I may take a vacation. Whatever happens, I will definitely be back. Some of you will be disappointed by that, and to you I say "SORRY".

I have a few loyal followers and I will contact them directly to let them know how to find the blog when it rises from the ashes. The only one I don't know how to contact is D. Stewart and if you wish to get your contact details to me I will be sure to let you know what is going on.

See you in the ether...

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Yesterday, my wife picked up a Bubble Tea from a Vietnamese restaurant. Basically, it is like a thin milk shake with coloured/flavoured(?) tapioca balls at the bottom of the cup. It comes with a large straw big enough to suck up the drink and the pearls. I am told it tastes very nice, but I’ve never tasted one and more than likely never will. That is just me being me, not a reflection on the Vietnamese people or their food.

The cup and lid were rinsed and placed in the recycling, while the straw was washed and stored for future use. The straw is far too large for normal use in drinks, but I have other plans for it. It will become a weapon for Hurricane, Tornado and Tsunami to use when they are visiting Poppas place.

When I was growing up, all of the kids had pea shooters. It was the closest thing to a gun that we could get our hands on. I would spend hours practicing my shot, hoping to take down flies, knock over bottles and hit unsuspecting strangers at the movies in the back of the head. I never really managed to get to that stage of expertise, but I had fun trying. I could hit a friend in the chest or back, but more often than not I would miss them completely. They had a pea shooter too and it is exponentially more difficult to hit a moving target that is shooting back at you. That was a big part of the fun.

Another big part of the fun was that our mothers didn’t want us to have a pea shooter at all. I guess the lure of the forbidden fruit added to the allure. Moms would tell us that “If we weren’t careful we could put someone’s eye out”. That just made us want to shoot at people even more. I had visions of my buddy with an eyeball hanging by a thread bouncing back and forth as he ran home crying. It was always the left eye that was put out, as in my mind if you had to have only one eye, the right one was the best one to keep. I am sure my buddies pictured me running home with tears running down my right cheek.

Unfortunately or fortunately if you were a mom, it never happened. I would bet that even if I could hit someone on the eyeball, it wouldn’t do anything worse than leave a bit of spit in the kid’s eye. I suppose moms in the 90`s would have told their kids “Don’t shoot anyone with a pea shooter, you might put their eye out or give them aids!” Moms don’t care if they make sense, and telling them that their kids would need to have aids to give aids, would have made them all the angrier.

Sometimes if I were lucky, I could shoot a pea at a tree and I would hit a leaf. Every now and then, I would fill my mouth with peas and fire at an ant hill with a fully automatic, machine gun pea shooter. I have no idea of what terror the ants would feel being bombarded with hundreds of peas and gallons of spit. The beauty of shooting at ants is that you could pick up the peas, dust them off and reuse them. Yeah, I didn’t worry about getting some rare and virulent form of ant disease, but I bet my mom would have.

I was at the store today and I couldn’t find the right kind of peas. Actually, I think that I should be looking for navy beans. The ones I remember had a black dot on them and somehow seemed to be a little rounder than the choices I had in the store. Perhaps I could use some of those tapioca bubbles...