Overheard and overseen

[resonant]

Mostly little tidbits I picked up on vacation.



Kidlet: "I go to school every day, but they never tell me what I need to know."
Me: "What do you need to know?"
Kidlet: "Plumbing. They never get into that."

Kidlet climbs a playground structure and meets a little girl at the top. The first thing the little girl says is: "May I take your order?"

Sign on a coffee shop bulletin board: "Mow and Blow Basic Yard Care."

Old guy in coffee shop: "Judaism is the religion of no wrong answers."

Seen in coffee shop: The difficult dance of trying to maneuver the stroller past the walker.

Old guy in coffee shop: "To take ten dollars and make it into twenty dollars is very difficult. To take ten million dollars and make it into twenty million dollars is inevitable."

Little boy at library: "Mom, may we please just get out of here? This place is trying to get me sick."

Woman walks into store with two little girls about 3. They both run up and embrace her legs. Then one of them looks over and sees that the other is hugging her, and she whacks her and says, "My mom!"

Teenaged boy lying on the sidewalk on Haight Street: "Got any change for beer and mushrooms?"

Seen in a doorway in San Francisco: a pile of pennies, one unlit cigarette, and a bottle of Vitamin C. Might have been a stash; might have been a memorial.

Comments

[aspacer.livejournal.com]

I love your kidlet. He (I guess it's a he) sounds so cute. So why does he think plumbing is integral to his education?

[buddleia.livejournal.com]

I want to talk in that coffee shop with that old guy.

[suaine.livejournal.com]

Teenaged boy lying on the sidewalk on Haight Street: "Got any change for beer and mushrooms?"

That's so honest I would probably have given him some XD

Money, that is.

[snailbones.livejournal.com]

Wonderful - I love them all.

[laurelwood.livejournal.com]

I wish the old guy in the coffee shop was one of my neighbors. He sounds like a real kick, and I'd totally be able to glean enough pithy observations from him to fill a batch of the homemade fortune cookies I keep meaning to make.

I love the kidlet. She's always got something hilariously dry to say, doesn't she?

And "mow and blow"- my next-door-neighbor has always disparagingly referred to the more hurried yard care that way, but I didn't know the industry had picked it up themselves.

[neery.livejournal.com]

Kidlet: "Plumbing. They never get into that."

So, so true. I'd gladly sacrifice one of those stochastics lessons for a lesson where someone could tell me what the hell I'm supposed to do when the faucet gets so clogged with lime that water starts spraying into every direction when I turn it on.
*changes out of splattered shirt*

[mordyn4]

I love these posts, and the hints of your thoughts you sneak in.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

No, she's a girl.

I asked her about the plumbing thing, and she said it started one early morning when the toilet overflowed and she had to get me out of bed to fix it. ("All I did was make a ball of yarn out of toilet paper, and then flush it!")

I wish she would learn about plumbing; it would be a guaranteed career for her -- useful work, too, arguably the thing civilization depends upon, and not likely to be made obsolete by changing technology or outsourced to India.

Plus it would save us a lot of money.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I'm not completley certain they were both the same old guy, but they were both in the same group of five or six old guys who were there all morning talking about temple politics and life in general. I wanted to go sit with them; they were cooler than most of my friends.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

If you're going to make that kind of pitch, Haight Street is the place to make it!

[isilya]

Seriously! And a lesson on how to change oil, how to change a flat tyre, first aid, rewiring a plug and which seasons plants grow in.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

There was a whole group of cool old guys. Their conversation was much more interesting than the writing I was allegedly doing.

When the kidlet was much, much smaller, I told her once, "You've got an interesting brain," and she said happily, "I know! It's in my skull!"

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Real life is sadly neglected in school, isn't it?

I can rewire a plug -- at least, I've done it once, following directions out of a book. But quite recently I tried to de-lime a faucet, and yesterday we had to hire a plumber to install a new faucet because the old one just fell to pieces on me. Evidently the lime was the only thing that was holding it together.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Oh, good!

[dracostella.livejournal.com]

Oooo, I have the perfect quote.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. John W. Gardner

Also, the kidlet is adorable.

And ain't SF a great city.

[kudra2324.livejournal.com]

i love your kidlet. i also appreciate the honesty of the guy on haight street :).

[libitina]

There was a lovely boy on my streetcorner (not anwhere near Haight Street) with a sign asking for change to buy a cold beer. Since this was near my home, I went to my apartment and brought him back a cold beer. The thanked me, hid it away, and explained that asking for beer got him more money than asking for food.

[giglet.livejournal.com]

The old one just fell to pieces on me

They do that on occasion.

But seriously -- show her how to clean out the trap under the sink, and how to replace washers in the faucets.

[libitina]

Not that I am saying I in any way regretted giving the boy a beer. We was clearly going to drink it, and it was a fun conversation.

Also, I love these posts.

[spoonfuloftears.livejournal.com]

:)

I love all of these. But the plumbing? That really made me smile

[reedfem.livejournal.com]

Uhm... okay, I'll ask.

Beer and *mushrooms*? What's that about?

[neery.livejournal.com]

I can usually de-lime with vinegar without any problems, but this particular faucet has such a weird shape that it's impossible to submerge it without unscrewing it first, and I have no idea whatsoever how to do that.

[neery.livejournal.com]

God, yes, that would be great. They could call the class "How to save thousands of dollars", even, because the amount of money I have paid to mechanics to take care of stupid little tasks like that is staggering.

At least my boyfriend taught me how to change a tyre this spring, and I finally got around to taking a first aid class. Changing your own oil is illegal in Germany, though.

[neery.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd expect he meant "magic mushrooms", the kind that act as drugs. Although maybe it was just a badly phrased request for some dinner money because he had a hankering for plain old mushroom pizza...