Stop that banging!

If you come down our street next Friday morning and take a notion to look inside our trash bag, you won't find anything too shocking...no torn lingerie, spent bullet casings or hastily-pasted ransom notes (they go out with the paper recycling, next Monday). We live a quiet life on a quiet street, with our quiet hopes and aspirations.

But you will find the original keyboard that came with our new computer two years ago. It became such an object of scorn around here that it finally had to go. I don't know what happened to it, but one had almost to pound each key each time with a hammer in order to make words appear on the screen in front of one. And that was a situation up with which one would not put!

It only cost 20 semolians to get a whole new keyboard from WalMart. And look how fast I'm typing now!

Speaking of Walmart, I love 'em. I know, I know...they are snaking across the nation, squeezing the life out of local merchants. But Peggy gave me a Kid Rock CD and two Taylor Swift CDs for Christmas, and two of them had little free stickers entitling me to a free music download courtesy of WalMart. Eclectic to the end, I chose Queen's "It's Late" from News Of The World, and Katy Perry's "Hot N Cold" from One Of The Boys. I'm getting sassy as the year slinks to a close.

Speaking of close, I am close to screaming about this. My Sears cordless drill died because both of its batteries did, and they would not stand a charge. So off to Sears I go, and after just a short wait while the clerk on duty in the tool department offered his girlfriend (I guess) on the phone a capsule summation of how smart he thought his boss is (not very) and how, pretty soon, he - the tool man - will be running the show IF someone will just learn to bow to his superiority, we talked business. There was certainly room to cast aspersions on SOMEONE'S chances of getting a letter from Mensa; he told me that it would cost 44 clams each to replace my batteries. I considered that for a while, out of loyalty to the old drill, which has been with me for many a trip to Guy Town, but when I found out that for far less that that - like 30 bucks less - I could get a new, better, more powerful drill, with two batteries and a free worklight thrown in, the decision was easy to make.

My loyalty to the old drill can be found in the trash with the damned old keyboard. The drill itself, I will offer around at work, but the new one is working just fine.