Ad Hudler - Ad Libbing

This blog has moved
Wednesday, March 17, 2010

This blog is now located at http://adhudler.blogspot.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://adhudler.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

A Fort Myers Moment

I'm in the waiting room in the service department at Fort Myers Honda, putting some tires on my daughter's car. I came here at 7:00 a.m. so was thrilled to find a coffee machine in the lobby. Not just any coffee machine, mind you, but one of those fancy gourmet contraptions where you choose your flavor of high-end coffee (in a pouch) and insert it into a machine for a personalized and delicious cuppa Joe.

But this is Fort Myers, land of vein clinics, denture depots and early-bird specials. And most of the customers around me are men in their sixties or older, and they really HATE this coffee! They're sitting around me, complaining about it. Absolutely grumbling. They are accustomed to a different kind of coffee: institutional, not as strong, more like brown water infused with essence of coffee.

"This damned coffee's burned!" says one.

Another man is reading "Trigonometry For Dummies."

Most of them are wearing baseball caps.

Also popular with retired men: New Balance Tennis shoes....and I'm not sure why.

They are reading newspapers.

And watching me text on my phone.

If only they could get some decent coffee in this place!

Fast-food Adventure: Post #744G4
Monday, March 15, 2010

A reinvention gone awry:

Have y'all seen the weird new incarnation of the Big Mac?
Here's what they did. They took a Big Mac, everything except the bread, then chopped it all up into little pieces, and then put it in a wrap. I advise against trying it. It's as if someone popped a whole Big Mac into his mouth, decided he didn't like it, then spit it into a flour napkin. Yeegods, that's exactly what it looks like.

Methinks McDonalds needs some new innovative spirit.

Here they come!
Friday, March 12, 2010

My Florida-cracker daughter (cracker is what you call a native Floridian) is coming home from Ohio for spring break this weekend, and she brings with her a vanload of fellow college girls dying for sunshine and nicer weather. It's been pretty cold here -- hell, it's been cold everywhere, hasn't it -- but it looks like things are going to warm up nicely for them.
Oh, and good friends from Kansas are coming as well. Total household tally: 8.

They should roll into town late Saturday, so I've got lots to do:

-Find that aerobed that I haven't had to use since the last hurricane.
-Complete one HUGE trip to the supermarket. I'll have so many groceries that the checkout clerk will ask, "Is there a hurricane coming?"
-Set up the badminton net.
-Make sure I know where my ear plugs are.
-Sharpen kitchen knives (They'll be busy! Lots of cooking.)
-Reorganize refrigerator to accommodate 4,523 bottles of water and soda
-Hide family photos that my daughter will find embarrassing
-Practicing masking my own eccentricities so I don't embarrass my daughter.

It'll be a lot of work. But I'm looking forward to it. I sure miss that kid of mine. And it'll be nice getting to know her friends.

Mayhem on the patio
Wednesday, March 10, 2010

I recently was cutting down a small tree on my patio, and at one point I put a saw into my pocket and reached down with both hands to pull out an obstinate root. Suddenly, the root snapped loose, and my hand went flying backward with the force of a 3,650-man army, right onto the saw.

It sliced into my pinky, all the way down to the bone.

I went to the ER to get it fixed, and as the doc sewed me up he asked me what happened. I told him the honest truth.

"You're a writer," he said. "Can't you come up with something better than that? Something sexier? You're going to be laughed out of town. Who puts a saw in his pocket?"

"Okay, how's this?" I said. "Some asshole was badtalkin' my woman, and I let him have it, and that little sumbitch bit my finger clear through to the bone ... but not before I knocked out three of his teeth."

"Much better," he said.

Chinese secret
Monday, March 8, 2010

So I was showing a new friend around my hometown of Fort Myers today, and I learned a new phrase that you're going to love.

He's white but is married to a Chinese woman, and I noticed he already had the name of the only good Chinese restaurant in town.

"Yeah, it's good," I said, "And it's filled with Chinese, so I know it's good. But let me tell you what: I don't get the same food that they do. Their food always looks better than mine. I mean, I tell them that I want authentic Chinese, the real stuff, but they never listen to me. They give me that same slop that I get at every Chinese takeout in every strip center. And the Chinese eaters in the restaurant? They're served beautiful steaming platters of the stuff that I want."

My friend said this: "That's because you're Lo Fan.

Evidently, Lo Fan means WHITE RICE! It's the pejorative Chinese use to describe white folk. Don't you love that? I compare this to what the black kids called my daughter in her urban grade school: white cracker.

I'm just totally loving this new knowledge. Next time I go to a Chinese restaurant I'm going to try saying, "I'm NOT Lo Fan, so please bring me the authentic stuff."

HEALTH WARNING TO MY THONG-WEARING FEMALE READERS
Thursday, March 4, 2010

Okay, this is interesting as heck. Might be the most under-reported medical story of the decade.

A very good friend of mine recently got back from her OB-GYN, where she had to be treated for her fifth urinary tract infection in a year.

Finally, her doc got smart and asked her: Do you wear thong underwear?

The answer was yes, and the doctor said, "Aha!"

Apparently thong underwear have created a surge in UTI's! Throughout the course of the day, that stringy bottom goes back and forth down there, like a tug-of-war match, carrying fecal matter and germs directly to ... uh ... to its neighbor. (Trying to be delicate about this.)

Anyway, my friend's doc's advice: Wear thongs when you're "going out" (I think she meant "hooking up"), but when you're on your own be sure to wear normal panties.

I know this is strange coming from me, a guy, but I know a lot of my readers are women, and I thought this was really good advice.

Is profanity hereditary?
Wednesday, March 3, 2010

My daughter knew things ... bad things ... long before she should have, and it's my fault.

One of her first spoken words, for example, would get most kids kicked out of pre-school, or at least sent home for the day. My wife had warned me to clean up my mouth around our baby-turning-toddler. "She absorbs everything you're saying," she said. "You need to stop cussing in the car."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah ... sure, Carol, yeah, thanks a lot for your concern. I'll be sure to note this."

And then one day, some idiot pulled out in front of me in the supermarket parking lot.

"You ...!!" I yelled, stopping myself before finishing the sentence with a cuss word. "You! YOU! ... YOU! ... YOU!" (I felt constipated ... unable to finish something I so desperately needed to finish.) "YOU... YOU!! ... YOUUUUUU ..."

And at this point my not-yet-2-year-old daughter pulled the binky from her mouth and finished my sentence for me.

"Douche bag!" she yelled.

Wife, 1. Husband, 0.

Is that a birdy in Ad's computer?
Tuesday, March 2, 2010

I told you a few days back that I started tweeting on twitter. It is no secret among authors that blogs are on the way out, and they've been replaced by facebook and twitter.

If you're not my friend on facebook, you really should be. I give great status reports.
And on twitter I'm AdHudler.
Note to people not on facebook: Don't be afraid of it. If I can do it, believe me, YOU can do it. I am a technophobe moron.

Actually, I'm enjoying the Twitter. You can tweet from anywhere on a cell phone, and I have found it to be a nice way to pass the time while standing in line at the grocery store or filling my truck with gas ... except in Florida, where the stupid laws don't allow gas stations to have those catch thingies on the pump trigger.

Here are some recent tweets of mine:

"Starting to plan the menues for daughter and friends coming back to Florida for spring break. I'm thinking Nachos and cereal"

"cat is in the dog house: all night long, on the bed, then off, lick my face, etc. Note to cat: I am not a pillow."