Religious Debate

The community in which I live is rumored to have the most churches per capita than any other city in the South. I would tend to to believe this is true. Life revolves around religious activities here, and if you're not religious it impacts your life just as much since you have to adjust your daily time line on Wednesday nights and all day Sunday to deal with the "church crowds" at restaurants, grocery stores, and other various places. It is not an exaggeration that in the South when a person meets you for the first time one of the the ways they make small talk is to ask you what church you attend, and if you don't have one they immediately invite you to theirs. It's only the polite thing to do.

When I received this e-mail this morning via a forward from a friend I knew I had to post it here. It was just too good not to share with the world. Here's the premise:

"This is literally a 'church signs' debate, being played out in a Southern US town, between Our Lady of Martyrs Catholic Church, and Cumberland Presbyterian, a fundamentalist church. From top to bottom shows you the response and counter-response over time. The Catholics are displaying a much better sense of humor! You get the impression that the Presbyterians are actually taking this seriously and are getting a bit upset..."



And now to spoil all the fun... yes, it's fake. I could have told you that when I saw that the two churches used in the church sign generator were a Catholic Church and a Presbyterian. In the South, all other churches pretend that the Catholics do not exist.

Fire Drill

I live in a house that has 12, count em', 12 smoke detectors. No my house is not a mansion. It has 10 rooms when you count the bathrooms and the basement. The lady who previously owned this home either was super paranoid about fire or the door-to-door smoke alarm salesman was wicked hot. There's really no other explanation.

I guess it isn't a bad thing to have a ton of smoke detectors in your home, until they all need to have their batteries replaced at once. That's what I've been faced with for the last month - running around listening for where the annoying high pitched beep was coming from. Then once you think you've found it, hauling out the step ladder for an impressive balancing act to get the old battery out. Every single one of the alarms had the batteries go bad within five weeks and the high pitched warning sound became the norm around here.

I guess that's where Seka learned her latest trick which involves whining at the top of her lungs in the middle of the night to make Roxy get up and move off of the bed she is sound asleep on so that she can have it.

Yes, she sounds just like the failing smoke alarms.

Now the first night this happened I fell for her trick hook, line, and sinker. At first stumbled around and tried to figure out where in the world the 13th smoke alarm could be. Lying there at 3 a.m. I had decided that I the one place I didn't check were our closets.

Then I realized it was Seka doing a pretty realistic impression of our alarms. I laughed and got up and went downstairs to let her out. But when I turned around I discovered only one dog had followed me down to the backdoor and it wasn't the one I thought it would be. I went back upstairs to find Seka settled in Roxy's spot, happy as a clam. And not moving.

The second night I ignored the crying but Roxy didn't. She got fooled again and lost her warm spot on her favorite bed. Roxy was a good sport about it and just found somewhere else to sleep.

The third night, not even Roxy fell for Seka's false alarm impression, which only frustrated her. I have to admit it is funny, but not at 2 a.m. And when she doesn't get her way, it isn't pretty. And when I'm jolted awake due to an unnecessary high pitched scream, let's just say it's not pretty either. The alpha order was restored pretty quickly.

Luckily Seka realized her audience for her stupid dog trick has been reduced to zero. And I've done some selective reduction of my own on the smoke alarm front.

I'm still on the look out for that hot fire alarm salesman.

-- Post From My iPhone