What A Crappy Weekend (Literally)!

I normally don't mind it when it rains.  But if it rains just about non-stop for several days in a row, it starts making me a little grouchy.  It's rained way too much over the past few days, and I'm sick of it!

Since it's been so rainy and wet, I haven't been able to mow my grass, and that really bothers me.

A couple of weekends ago, I was too lazy to go to the grocery store.  I decided that we had enough stuff to last through the week.  But that meant that by this past weekend, we really needed to go to the grocery store, because we were totally out of everything.  So yesterday, the rain had stopped just enough, so I figured it was a good a time as any to go to the grocery store.  So off me and Lilly went to town.  About halfway to town, it started raining, and the rain started coming down harder and harder.  By the time we pulled into a parking spot at the grocery store, it was raining too hard to get out, but it seemed like it might slack up soon, so we decided to wait it out for a few minutes to see.  Sure enough, thankfully, a few minutes later, the rain slacked up until it was barely a drizzle, so me and Lilly grabbed our umbrella and made our way into the store.  After we got done shopping, we were standing in the checkout line, and it let out a huge clap of thunder, and the ensuing rain that started coming down was so sudden and loud, that it sounded like a stadium full of people applauding as hard as possible.  Me and Lilly looked at each other and said "greeeeeat".  After we had paid for our groceries, of course the checkout clerk asked me if I needed help out with my groceries.  I never have asked for help ever in the past, and I wasn't about to start now.  I would feel absolutely horrible to make a poor bagboy go out in the torrential downpour to load my crap up in the car.  I don't know how anybody could live with themselves after doing that.  So, as always, I refused any help, and me and Lilly began our trek to the door.  Lilly had the umbrella.  We walked up to the grocery store door with our buggy absolutely overflowing with about $145 worth of groceries (because remember, I had to get tons of stuff since I didn't go to the grocery store the previous weekend).  I asked Lilly "Are you ready"? and she said yeah.  We stepped outside into the downpour, and Lilly opened up the umbrella.  Of course I just let her use it, and I began wheeling the grocery-laden buggy down to our car.  It was pouring so hard, and it was so windy, that it caused Lilly's umbrella to turn wrong-side out immediately.  Of course, Lilly didn't know what to do about it, or how to fix it, so the umbrella became useless.  In just a few seconds of being outside in the torrential downpour, we were absolutely drenched to the bone.  There wasn't one inch of my hair or clothes that was dry.  It's like I had jumped into the lake and hopped back out.  It was horrible!  About halfway down to the car with our buggy full of groceries, the wind whipped up and blew our bag of tater chips out, sending it crashing down to the ground.  Luckily, Lilly was able to retreive it.  We got to the car, and of course, Lilly climbed in.  And I was left to stand out in the pouring rain and load all 900 really heavy, sopping wet bags of groceries into the back of the car.  It felt like an eternity.  Finally, I got all the stuff loaded in the car, took the buggy to the cart return, and then I was able to finally get in the car.  I never even tried to hurry, because there was no use.  Plus, I had on flip-flops, and have you ever tried to hurry and run in completely soaked flip-flops?  You would bust your @$$ immediately if you even tried.  So we drove home, completely soaked straight through to the bone, with our 900 bags of drenched groceries.  When we got home, Lilly disappeared into her bedroom to change clothes and never came back out to help me, so I had to spend another eternity unloading all 900 soggy bags of groceries from the back of the car, and carrying them into the house, sitting them in the kitchen floor.  It took another eternity to get all the soaked groceries out of the dripping wet bags.  By the time I got done, the floor where the bags of groceries had sat was so wet, it was as if I had just poured a bucket of water on the floor in that area.  Needless to say, I was not happy.  I finally changed out of my completely soaked clothes, and my hair was starting to air-dry.

Then it was time to feed all our pets.  The bunny and cat are no big deal, since of course they're located inside the house, but the dogs?  They're located outside in their pen.  In the torrential downpour.  (Don't worry; we have a little roof over part of it, and two doghouses under that roof, so the dogs are easily able to stay perfectly dry even in the worst rain).  But I had to go out in that rain to feed them.  I took an umbrella with me, but it was hard to mess with, since both my hands were full of dog feeding supplies.  I've just about reached the point where I absolutely despise umbrellas, because it seems like I get a whole heck of a lot wetter when I try to use them, than if I don't.  I couldn't feed the dogs and hold the umbrella too, so I hung the open umbrella on top of the dog pen fencing while I doled out their kibble and canned food.  I noticed a hornet's nest under the roof, but thankfully it didn't seem active, so at least that didn't add to the disaster.  I finished feeding the dogs, and made my way to the door of the pen.  As I was exiting the pen in the rain, I accidentally stepped directly in a big pile of squishy, rained-on dog sh*t with my flip-flops.  I let out a long string of cusswords.  I locked the door of the dog pen, and right as I got the door latched, something caught my eye.  I had left the damn open umbrella on top of the pen fence.  Needless to say, I was severely pissed, and let out another colorful string of cusswords.  I unlatched the pen, stepped back in the dog pen (this time taking great care to navigate my flip-flops through the many land mines of dog sh*t more carefully), and retrieved the damn umbrella that hadn't even really been any help at all in keeping me dry in the first place.  I walked back into the garage, left my dog-sh*t laden flip-flops on the mat to deal with another day, went back in the house, changed into dry clothes again, made me and Lilly some supper, and plopped myself into the recliner, where I stayed for the rest of the evening.

I looked at the weather forecast this morning, and it looks like more %&*#@% rain is on the way.

Ugh!  :{

The Cat-Burglar

Lastnight, me and Lilly were settling down in the bed, when all of a sudden, we heard a faint noise coming from the next room.  At first, we just dismissed it, but when it happened again just a few moments later, we both looked at each other, and I said "What was that?...It sounds like a...bowl..."

And at that very moment, both me and Lilly knew immediately what the noise was.  We looked over at each other with eyes as big as saucers, and Lilly stammered "m...my...my macaroni!"

Lilly jumped out of bed and rushed to the next room.  Sure enough, our cat Domino had sniffed out and discovered Lilly's unfinished bowl of macaroni & cheese that she'd had for supper, and was greedily helping herself to the leftovers.  The little noise that we had heard was the sound of the fork softly clinking against the side of the bowl as Domino was feasting!  

Lilly said "DOMINO!" and started laughing.  Lilly carried the bowl back to me to show me and laughed "Look how much she ate!"  I looked at the bottom of the bowl at the remaining macaroni, and asked "was that full?"  And Lilly laughed "Yeah!  She ate that much"!  I told Lilly "Well, you were just telling me a while ago how much Domino loved macaroni!" and we laughed and laughed and laughed while Domino joined us in the bedroom and began loudly licking her chops and washing her face with her paw in delight that she had sneaked herself a macaroni feast!

LOL!  Silly sneaky kitty!  :)

Ooh, Look at This Caterpillar!

Earlier today, I was outside, and noticed that our dog Maddie was curiously looking at the ground, gently pawing at it, and gingerly picking something up in her mouth and dropping it.  I went to investigate, and discovered that she had found a big fat green caterpillar, and was playing with it!  I stopped Maddie from messing with it, picked it up using a leaf, and took it away from the dogs so I could get a better look.  At first, I thought it was disgusting, but the longer I watched it, I got to thinking that it was kinda cute!  I did eventually get brave enough to touch it a little, and it was smooth, cool to the touch, and soft.  It was pretty neat!

At first, it was scared and kind of wadded up:

But it slowly started coming around:

*where the hell am I?*

*is that dog gone?*

*whew! Thank God that stupid dog is gone!*

Check it out...it had 4 little red knobs sticking up on its head, and 1 little yellow knob sticking up on its rear end!:

It also had a 'smiley face' on its rear end, but I forgot to take a picture of it.  You can see its 'smiley face butt' near the end of the video below, though.

I don't know what this big weird caterpillar will turn into.  I tried googling it for a little while, but didn't come up with anything definitive.  My guess is that it'll probably turn into one of those great big moths that beat themselves against your windows at night because they're attracted to your light.  Who knows?

I became a little enamored of it and mesmerized by it, and videoed it crawling around.  I had given it a gentle little shower with the garden hose to wash the dirt and junk off of it where Maddie had been messing with it.  I was surprised that it wasn't injured at all.  It's obviously tougher than it seems like it would be.  Kinda gross, but kinda cute all at the same time!  :D

Speaking of discovering critters around the house and attempting to identify them, several weeks ago, I noticed that there was a cute little bird nest on a plank up under the tarp roof of our little paddleboat dock.  At first, I didn't know if it was an old nest from last year, but it did appear to look pretty new.  I told Jamie about it, and he was able to do a pull-up on the plank so he could get a closer look, and he saw that the nest has 2 cute little pink eggs in it!  He lifted Lilly up so she could catch a glimpse too.  At that point, I knew that we needed to steer clear of the nest since it was obviously active, and I wouldn't want for our eagerness to freak out the mommy bird and make her think it wasn't a safe place to hatch her babies, and cause her to abandon the nest.  So we've kept our distance from the nest, but over the past few weeks we've gotten close enough to it just a few times to see the mommy bird sitting on the eggs, and the mommy and daddy birds flying around it.  I don't know if the eggs have hatched yet.  I haven't been down there in a few days or heard the tell-tale baby bird 'cheeping' noises yet.  Maybe tomorrow I will go down there to check and see how they're doing.  It does make me a little bit nervous, though, because the nest is located at the dock, which would make it relatively easy for newly-fledged baby birds to clunk down into the lake and drown!  I sure hope that doesn't happen!

Anyway, we've seen the parent birds, but I don't know what kind of birds they are.  The male and female both seem to look the same.  They don't really have any distinguishing features at all like stripes or spots or vibrant colors or anything.  They're just kind of dull-colored; light grayish and brownish.  Their tails are kind of long, though.  Not super-long, but definitely not short.  That's about all I can tell about them.  I did think that their nest was pretty clever, because you could see that they had basically glued it on to the wooden plank that they built it on with mud, so when the mud dried, it was stuck there like concrete!

Like always, I tried googling to see if I could identify the birds.  As I was poking around (and not having any luck), I just so happened to run across a Robin.  But what really caught my eye was its scientific name.  At first, I thought it had to be some kind of joke.  Take a look:

Really?  Turdus?  You've gotta be kidding me.  Believe it or not, that really is its actual scientific name.  Sheesh.

LOL!

More Random Happenings

So I've received a complaint that I haven't posted anything new in a while (hi, Dad!) so here we go...

First of all, I didn't think that anything had happened lately that was really worth reporting.  I guess more people are interested in what boring ol' me is up to than I realized (hi again, Dad)!  :)  Second of all, since we've been stuck at home during summer break off from school, Lilly has gotten us into the horrible habit of staying up all night long and sleeping all day.  (Lilly sleeps in my bed with me, and Jamie usually sleeps in Lilly's bed, because we only have 2 bedrooms, and nobody can stand to sleep in the same room as Jamie because he makes the most God-awful rackets in his sleep).  He doesn't snore, but he does the worst, loudest, most annoying heavy breathing/wheezing/clicking/whistling you have ever heard in your life.  It's so terrible that sometimes I can still hear it all the way in another room, even with the door shut.  So anyway, the point is, since me and Lilly are forced to bunk together, that means that I am basically held hostage, so if Lilly is bouncing off the walls (and she almost always is), then I'm not able to get any sleep.  If we had one more bedroom (so that each of us could have our own place to sleep), it would be fine; but since we were stupid when we built our house, we only have two bedrooms.  Sometimes Jamie will sleep on the couch in the living room so that I can have my bed all to myself and Lilly can be in her own bed, and he never complains about it, but face it, sleeping on the couch sucks.  Even I tried sleeping on the couch the other night, just to try to get some relief, but it didn't work.  At around 5:00 in the morning, Lilly (who had never even went to sleep) came into the living room after me to tell me she missed me, and begged me to come back to the bed with her so we could snuggle.  So off we went, finally went to sleep, and as usual, probably didn't wake up 'til around 2:00 in the afternoon.  :P

So anyway, we're all messed up.

Last night while I was trying to get to sleep (probably around 4:00 AM), and Lilly was still bouncing off the walls, she wanted to play a game called 'Would You Rather'; a game in which you ask the other person "which would you rather do...(A - something awful), or (B - something else awful).  Well, this was one of the questions Lilly asked me, and it cracked me up so hard:
Lilly:  "Would you rather eat a broom, or have to go to a parent-teacher conference with no pants on"?
Me:  "No pants, but with underwear"?
Lilly:  "Nope, no panties either".
Me:  "I'd eat the broom".
Lilly:  "Yeah, 'cuz you'd get arrested for being naked".

EAT A BROOM?!?!  Even though we were supposed to be trying to go to sleep, I couldn't help but laugh hysterically at the notion of eating a broom!  XD

And at some other point last night, I caught a rare glimpse of the elusive (and rather large) cricket that has taken up residence in a corner of the bedroom next to my side of the bed.  I normally try to scoop unwelcome critters up into a cup or something so I can fling them back outside where they belong, but some things, you just can't do that with (or at least I can't; I'm almost as squeamish about crickets as I am with big spiders).  Luckily, the crickets that get in the house surprisingly don't chirp at all (you'd figure they would).  You wouldn't even realize that they're there, except for if they happen to crawl over something in the floor (like a newspaper, for example), and that's when you can hear their little feet and antennae making little scritchy-scratchy noises.  One night, I heard the scritchy-scratching of little cricket feet, but I couldn't see the cricket.  So I got the bright idea that I could put the cat in the area of the scratchy racket, and she would track down and murder the cricket for me.  I tried it, but as soon as I put the cat down, of course the cricket-scritching stopped, so the cat didn't even realize that there was anything for her to get to murder in the vicinity.  Well, last night, I heard the cricket-scritching loud and clear, and when I raised up in the bed, I saw the cricket crawling on the floor close by.  So I grabbed one of my flip-flops and SMACKED the cricket.  It was in a crumpled little wad, and I was satisfied with my achievement.  I thought to myself that I'd pick its carcass up and fling it outside in the morning (if the cat didn't find it and eat it).  :P  Lilly kept me awake for quite a bit longer.  Eventually, I just so happened to look over on the floor where the cricket's carcass had been, but it was GONE.  The cat hadn't even been over there, so that means that the whack I had given it with my flip-flop had merely knocked it out!  Maybe I can get the cat to find and attack it sometime soon.  Stupid crickets in the house!  Uhh!

Right now, Jamie's on his way up to Illinois to go visit some of his relatives that live up there.  I'm secretly really excited that he won't be home for a few days, so hopefully Lilly will stay in her own bedroom, and leave me alone so that I can get some peaceful night's sleeps in mine.  I just hope that nothing comes up while Jamie's gone that I'd really need him bad for (like getting a giant spider or 3-inch bee out of the house)!

Speaking of critters around the house, when me and Lilly were outside earlier this afternoon, we saw that there were a total of 6 frogs of various sizes (the biggest one being the 'disgruntled' one) in a pretty small area behind the house.  This is the time of year when we start seeing tons of teeny-tiny little baby frogs crossing the driveway.  I saw the first one of the season just a day or two ago, and I captured it and brought it in the house to take a picture of it to show everybody just how tiny it was.  It was hopping around all over the place, so we had to try to contain it in a bowl to take its picture.  And the closest coin we had nearby was a dime, so I slid the dime close to the frog to try to show how tiny it was in the picture.  It would have been neat if the frog had cooperated and actually hopped onto the dime, but it was too hyper, freaked out, and kept nearly escaping, so this picture was the best we could do, before having to put it back outside in the flowerbed where I had found it:

I think technically these 'frogs' are actually 'toads', but here in the South, we just say 'frogs'.  You know, how some places call this

a "soda", "pop", or "soft drink", well, here in the South, it's a "Coke".  Even if it looks like this

we still call it a "Coke".  And if you're really a hillbilly, you might even call it a "Co-Colie" (which is 'hick-ese' for "Coca-Cola).

So 'frog'/'toad', 'tomAto'/'toMAHto', you know how it goes.

Anyway, on the same subject as critters that I've discovered around the house recently, I noticed a small snakeskin that a snake had shedded off on our crosstie wall the other day.  Well, a day or two later, I met the snake that the skin had come from.  I was walking to the edge of the woods to toss something out (or something to that effect) -- and it's a good thing that I always look at the ground in front of my feet when I walk -- when all of a sudden, I saw the snake laying there on the ground right in front of me.  Of course I let out a loud "YEEEEE"!!! and briskly stepped back.  After I got over the initial surprise, I looked to make sure it wasn't venomous (it wasn't), and of course I took some pictures of it:

It looks like it's had something to eat recently (or it's pregnant)!  :/

NOTE:  I just googled it and discovered that it was a garter snake, which of course is non-venomous.  I also learned that they DO eat frogs, among other things (which is probably why it's hanging around our house, since we have an abundance of frogs).  So its belly is probably fat because it ate a frog (or like I said, it's pregnant); I also learned that these garter snakes have their babies live (they don't lay eggs), and when they do have babies, they can have more than 50 babies at one time!  :O

Anyway...good to know!  Now whenever we go outside, we keep an eye out for this snake since we know it's hanging around (just so it won't catch us off guard and give us a heart attack)!  :)

Let me think...what else has happened lately...?  Well, we went to another rodeo this past weekend (since the horse arena is literally just a few minutes' drive from our house), and it was fun.  We didn't make it there in time to see the bronc riding (which is one of my favorite parts), but the other two highlights (for me, at least), was a lady that did a little bit of trick riding, and rode her horses through a ring of fire (you've probably got that Johnny Cash song in your head now; sorry)!  :/  

And mine & Jamie's nephew John rode a bull again.  He's really young; just in high school.  He has been hurt a few times, but these days the bull riders do wear some protective gear and special helmets.  John's never made it to 8 seconds yet (I think he usually averages about 5 seconds), but he has made it in the top 3 places several times.  He's scheduled to ride in rodeos in several nearby counties and states over the next 6 weeks, so hopefully everything will go OK.  Here's a video of his bull ride from last weekend:

It might not look like he did that great, but he did just about as well as most of the other guys that rode that evening.

Just to prove that we hillbillies who go to rodeos on a semi-frequent basis and call this

a 'Co-Colie', I'll have you know that not all hillbillies are ignorant.  On Monday as I was in town, sitting in my car with the windows rolled down, waiting for Lilly to get done with her hour-long dance class, it must have been around 7:00 PM, because the chimes in the historic courthouse bell tower were playing music, as they always do at certain times.  I stopped and listened closely for a minute because I recognized the tune, but it was one that I never in a million years would expect to hear chiming out of a bell tower in 'the sticks'.  What was the tune?  It was a portion of the first aria from the opera Carmen!

Here's a link to the Wikipedia site so you can listen to it and know which tune I'm talking about:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habanera_(aria)

Hmm.  Purty classy.  Kinda makes ya wanna grab yerself a cold co-colie & a moon pie & set out on the porch & think about life fer a while, don't it?

LOL!

Speaking of the historic courthouse in our town, I did actually think to check the clock that is currently up in the bell tower, and it has an 'IV' for the '4', just as the original clock did.  Heh!

Let me see...what else can I tell y'all about.  Oh yeah!  I had to go to Blue Ridge today to pick up Lilly's prescription from her pediatrician.  On my way back, I just had to pull the car over so I could take a picture of this hilarious sign:

LOL!!!

Later in the afternoon, Jamie needed to get some sleep before he started his long drive up to Illinois in the middle of the night, so I decided that me and Lilly should do some 'outside' things to make sure the house would be quiet enough so that Jamie could sleep in peace.  So me and Lilly went out metal detecting with the metal detector we had borrowed from Dad.  Lilly dug up some kind of aluminum drink can from the side of the road.  Then we ventured up into our hayfield.  Jamie did some metal detecting in the field before, but he only found a handle to some old bucket, and some other random hunk of metal that I think probably came off of a tractor at some point in the past.  When me and Lilly were in the field, though, I got a really big hit, and I was excited, because I was under the impression that whatever piece of metal was setting off the detector might be valuable.  I mean, the little arrow on the detector was pointing in the 'silver', '$1' range.  The detector will tell you if the metal item is just a 'pull tab' off an aluminum drink can and stuff like that.  I mean, I don't have a whole lot of experience with metal detecting, but when I threw my ring down on the ground to test the detector with, it gave the same kind of reading and high-pitched beeps as the patch of ground in the hayfield was giving.

So me and Lilly started digging.  And of course Lilly quickly got bored because of her ADD and explored around elsewhere nearby.  While I was still feverishly digging, Lilly found a cool little old clear glass bottle.  Right now, I've got it soaking in water in the sink, but the bottom of it is embossed with the words "McCormick" (and when I first saw that, I assumed it was some kind of old cooking spice bottle, like that old bottle of McCormick vanilla extract that we found recently).  But under the name McCormick, it also said "Iron Glue"!  I'd never heard of that before.  It was totally unexpected and neat!

I googled it, and this is a picture of what the old glue bottle would have looked like originally with the label on it and everything:

I thought it was pretty cool.  I love finding old stuff and researching around to see what it used to be.  I guess you could call it Hillbilly Archaeology.  It's fun!  :D

Anyway, I kept on digging, and finally unearthed the 'treasure'!:

It was some kind of old, really heavy metal hoop of some kind!  (I was trying to hold my hand up to show how dirty it was from me struggling to dig and pull the hoop out of the ground).

Here's Lilly with the hoop (and holding the glue bottle in her hand):

And here's a closeup of the hoop:

It was a very satisfying treasure!  Finding this hoop only whetted our appetite to find more stuff, so we swung the metal detector around some more and found something else nearby:

This random hunk of rusty metal.  I have no idea what it used to be.  It's got this weird thing on it (it looks kinda like a barnacle in the picture above).  Here's a closeup of the 'barnacle':

What the heck?  I have no idea!

One more exciting (?) thing happened a day or two ago.  My laptop almost caught on fire!  Well, actually, the power cord that plugs in to the side had somehow become frayed to the point that the wires were exposed, and it started sparking like fireworks!  It was extremely alarming!  I don't know a whole lot about electricity, but I've read enough first aid brochures to know that electrical sparks = potential for being electrocuted to death and/or fire (stop drop and roll)!  So I yelled for Jamie (who was in the living room watching TV; I was sitting on the bed in my bedroom with the sparking laptop sitting on the flammable bed).  Even though I yelled to Jamie that it was an emergency, it took him a while to finally tear himself away from the TV to come save me from being electrocuted while the house went up in flames around us.  I had him unplug the laptop from the wall, and the sparking stopped.  Crisis averted.  But my laptop is most likely toast.  It's been torn up for several months now.  Lilly had been riding the skateboard around in the living room, and bumped into something near my laptop (the laptop was either sitting on the arm of the loveseat, or on the table next to it).  Anyway, when she bumped into something, it caused my laptop to go crashing down onto the hardwood floor, directly on its side, causing the charge plug to go cramming really far up inside the charge port hole.  Surprisingly, my laptop still worked fine; but you had to make sure the charger thing stayed rammed in really hard in place so it could still charge.  And my laptop's battery doesn't last that long at all, so you basically have to leave it plugged in the whole time you're using it.  Well, I guess with all the strain of the precarious position that the power cord was forced to be in, it finally wore thin and frayed enough to expose the wires.  Unfortunately, the problem can't be fixed by just getting a new power cord.  The problem is that the charge port on the side of the laptop has evidently come loose inside, rendering it impossible to charge anymore.  Thankfully, I did have enough laptop battery life left in it to quickly save my important files & stuff I didn't want to lose to a thumb drive, so that was good.  But anyway, I don't really know what to do about my broken laptop.  Right now, I'm limping along on Lilly's laptop, but it really sucks because neither of the 'shift' keys work, the 'a' key doesn't work, and the '1'/'!' button doesn't work.  Have you ever tried to type without using a 'shift' key, the 'a' button, or the 1/! key?!?  It TOTALLY SUCKS!!!  To get around the problem, I had to enable the On-Screen Keyboard, and use that whenever I need to 'shift', type an 'a', or a '1' or a '!'  Which is constantly.  So it's horrible.  Maybe I'll try to see if my smarty brother can fix my broken laptop.  We tried fixing my Kindle Fire recently, but it was a total failure, and off to the garbage dump it had to go.  I don't know.  It sucks.  I don't really know what to do about it.  Maybe we can fix this laptop with the dysfunctional 'shift' and 'a' and '1/!' keys.  I'd hate to have to spend the money to get a dang new laptop.  Grr.  Oh, well; if we attempt to fix anything, I'm sure that hilarity will ensue, and I'll be sure to tell you all about it...!  ;D  (Hey, you gotta at least get a laugh out of it to make the misfortune worthwhile)...!  :/

I'll keep you posted...!  Wish me luck...!

The Oldest Newspaper We Have - The Weekly Atlanta Constitution from 1895!

OK, I think I'm finally ready to tackle showing you this disintegrating Weekly Atlanta Constitution newspaper from Monday, August 19, 1895!  It's the last one that Jamie had salvaged from that old house years ago.

The newspaper is in extremely poor shape (well, it is almost 119 years old, after all), and what pages that we do have are in tatters.  It's incredibly fragile, but also incredibly interesting!

The first thing I noticed about this newspaper was how microscopically tiny the print was.  I wondered how in the world anybody could read it without straining their eyes.  I've zoomed it all in so you can see it without having to squint.

These days, this newspaper is called the "AJC", or "Atlanta Journal-Constitution".  Apparently, they used to be two separate newspapers -- the Atlanta Journal, and the Atlanta Constitution, and they merged at some point in the past.

Here are all of the things from the ancient newspaper that I thought was interesting.

This portion of the front cover shows part of the elaborate and old-fashioned-style newspaper title, and you can see the date and price.

You would expect the front cover to contain major headlines, but this newspaper first starts out with a really long fiction story, and then has an article about Japan!

Interestingly, in the fiction story, I noticed a typo.  A portion of it is upside-down!:

The article about Japan, titled 'Japan And Her Customs' is of course extremely un-politically-correct!  Here are some excerpts:

O__o

I know, right?  Can you imagine a newspaper trying to print anything even remotely like this today?  WOW.

And now for some old-timey ads!  By the way, remember how the ads from 1940 alluded to the fact that everybody must have been constipated all the time?  Well, back in 1895, they had quite different (and a lot more embarrassing than just simple constipation) medical problems indeed, as you will see further down:

Note:  Just in case you didn't know, the disease they called "consumption" back then was really tuberculosis:

The following one is my personal favorite.  It's basically the old-time version of today's frustrated woman telling a dopey man "Do I have to draw it out for you with a crayon?!?":

LOL!!!

Hmm...I wonder if they still offer these...I might need to order some for Jamie...! (Like they would help)...!  :P

Back then, the articles were much more exciting, in that they contained a lot more (and usually gory) details.  Below are the articles and tidbits that I found particularly interesting or funny:

Yep, that's right.  Queen Victoria.  She lived for almost 6 more years after this newspaper was published.

...and we thought that this kind of thing only happened in this day and age...!

This was a sad (but still interesting) article:

Here's the painting that the article above refers to:

This next article is interesting because it has to do with neighboring towns of ours:

Here's a little-known fact about Deana:  I hate monkeys.

...thanks for the tip (I think?)...

Here are a couple of dorky, old-fashioned jokes:

I know; they're real knee-slappers.  :/

And now, for some violent news (the first story's actually pretty funny):

Here's another sad article:

And now, more violence!:

The next article is crazy.  And what I thought was even wilder about it was that when it says 'back in the forties', you've gotta remember that it's talking about the 1840s!

Like I said before, it's interesting to read the articles from this old newspaper, because they're so full of detail.  The following article about a train wreck is riveting.  You feel like you're in the middle of the action.  It's like reading an exciting fiction story.  (Too bad it wasn't just made-up)!  :(

Seems like they did an awful lot of hangin' in those days:

Check out the following article.  It mentions Alexander Graham Bell (the inventor of the telephone), and boy, does he get pissed!:

I especially like this "Gossipy" stuff for the "Ladies":

The "Fashion Gossip" column is amusing:

I've never even heard of half that stuff.  It's like they're speaking a different language!  :P

Man, I wish the other part of this article hadn't been ripped off and lost, because it looks like it would've been pretty interesting!:

A soup ladle and a broom?!?  I wish I knew more...!

Here's some news about the Liberty Bell:

Well, guess what?  We got it after all.  In your face, Philadelphia!:

(Sorry about the 'souvenirs', Philadelphia)...  :/

And so ends our trip back in time almost 119 years ago.

It would be awesome to be able to go forward in time 119 years from now, just to see what people would think about the way we were......