Happy Birthday Box Car Okie

[luvrbus]

Have a great birthday Don the very best to you and may the next year bring you better health

[FloridaCliff]

Don,

Hope you have good birthday!

Celebrating with your favorite folks and not getting in any trouble!

Best wishes,

Cliff

[TexasBorderDude]

Don,

Happy Birthday.  Hell, it's your birthday, get in all the trouble you want!

Best,

dg

[boxcarOkie]

Thanks guys ... I appreciate it.  Only 24,000 days old now, a fraction of time for a dinosaur.

BCO-CTA

[Van]

Happy B-Day! Big Guy! Woo! Woo! Have a two toot day on us 

    Van & Cheryl



     Sent from my Non Subsidized- Galaxy Single Four Sided Decto-Phonic Telecommunication device.

[lvmci]

BoxcarOkie, happy birthday, when you relate your age that way, you seem almost biblical, did you ever write one of the missing scripts, the gospel according to BCO? Lvmci...

[John316]

Happy B-day, Don. Don't light all them candles

[Seangie]

(In my best Marilyn Monroe voice)
Happy Birthday to you....

HAAAAAAPY Birrrth dayyyy to youuuu....


HAaaapy Biirth dayyy Mr. OAAAAAAAKKKKKIEEEE.

(I hope that wasn't to creepy...my Wifey laughed)

-Sean

www.herdofturtles.org
1984 Eagle Model 10S

[Scott & Heather]

^ creeped out. * shiver *


....happy normal birthday don


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk. Clumsy fingers may contribute to mistakes.

[boxcarOkie]

The miss'us sent me to the SuperCenter on my birthday, to pick up a bag of chips, a number three washtub bottle of Gatoraide, a couple cans of that "Healthy Choice" soup.  Which I thoroughly hate, even tho' I know it is good for me.  (I am a Denny's, bowl of soup and a hairball kind of guy, I want and need grease.  Give me grease, my Doctor isn't here.)  

She says "I need to eat healthy, at MY age."  Which I find somewhat amusing, as you see, "she is one month younger than myself."

Anywho, I am standing in the checkout line, where they have all those Tabloid type magazines, those cheap rags with the enticing incredible headlines.  Six year old girl has baby, aliens discovered in Brazil posing as Nazi's, San Jose, California announces that they have weapons of mass destruction and warns Oakland to back off!  

Stuff like that.

Looking down on the bottom shelf of the mag rack ... There it is:  "Chilean man surprises attendee's at his funeral by returning to life."

Now I am thinking, "Hey, this is BIG NEWS" so like the sucker I am, I reach deep down in my pockets and I cough up the cash, pay for it, take it home to read.  Turns out that this guy at his wake, is sitting up and demanding a glass of water from those in attendance.  I don't know about you, but THAT would get my attention.  

Y'sir.

Relatives had found Feliberto Carrasco, 81, on the floor of his house, so cold and apparently lifeless that they called for a funeral director rather than a funeral doctor.  After friends and relations had gathered to toast his memory, Ol Carrasco regained consciousness.  "I could not believe it.  I thought I must be mistaken and I shut my eyes" said Carrasco's nephew Pedro.  "When I opened my eyes again, my uncle was looking at me."

Must be a common occurrence in that part of the world.  I once read of a woman in Boliva that had virtually the same experience.  She had fell over, everyone thought she was dead, so the husband had his wife put in a pine box and they took her to the cemetery.

As they took her up the long winding, narrow path to the cemetery, the six pall bearers came to a gate, going thru the gate one of the men stumbled, they dropped the pine box, and the woman came tumbling out!  Thoroughly offended and very, very angry, she took the husband by the ear and cussed him out all the way down the hill.

She lived another six months after that, and there wasn't a day this poor sucker did not pay for his past discretions.  

Then pow!  She again drops to the kitchen floor.  

He once more, has her boxed up and they take her up the hill to the cemetery.  At the gate, the husband turns around, looks at all the pallbearers and says ........ "Now steady men!"

It has to be true ....... I mean I read it in the tabloids.  

Once again, thank all of you for the birthday wishes (even the creepy song .... Ooooooowie) and yes, I have added verse to several chapters of the Boxcar's Big Book of Baloney (look for it on Amazon-dot-com soon or on someone's stolen I-Pad at the Waffle House).

I now leave you to your related amusements, and head back out on the Dixie Highway to hog the smart aleck lane, and of course, make NEW friends in life.

BCO-CTA

'Cause you know we,
we live in a van (Eagle 10 Suburban)
Driving through the night
To that old promised land'

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oKR9MYYdBM#]Elvis - Promised Land

 

 

[luvrbus]

You forgot the Ensure Don I hate drinking 2 cans a day of that stuff lol thanks again for your Emails it helps me get through the long boring days 

good luck

[Ed Hackenbruch]

Whenever we get back to our old hometown we always make a point of stopping in at a small drive-in restaurant that has a sign that says, " we specialize in salt, sugar, caffeine, and grease".  Good burgers and fries.   

[TomsToy]

Happy Birthday Don, I'm sure you are like me and never thought that you would make it this far.  Like one of my friends said "you gotta be tough to get old".  I'm  also glad that you proved to your self that you can do without the internet so you can again post more like the one above.  Again happy birthday!

[boxcarOkie]

You forgot the Ensure Don I hate drinking 2 cans a day of that stuff lol thanks again for your Emails it helps me get through the long boring days 

good luck

I don't use Ensure, I use this other stuff, two teaspoons in my coffee early in the morning which "ensures" that I am slicker than a buttered doorknob by say four PM?  We call it Poop Fairy Dust.

One thing for sure, when you get older.

Never pass up a free meal.
Never pass up on a bathroom.
Never trust a fart.

Keep reading 'em Clifford (Emails) you are on the top of my list!

(Okie Humor)

BCO-CTA

[boxcarOkie]

Happy Birthday Don, I'm sure you are like me and never thought that you would make it this far.  Like one of my friends said "you gotta be tough to get old".  I'm  also glad that you proved to your self that you can do without the internet so you can again post more like the one above.  Again happy birthday!

What is that old line? 

"If I had known I was going to live this long ... I would have taken better care of myself!"

And yes, I did take a break from the Internet.  Maybe a month or so, I dunno.  We are using the Internet wrong. Smart-phones turn people into horrible listeners. And cat videos aren't as riveting as we think they are.  These are just some of the revelations I had during a brief period of self-imposed exile from the Internet earlier this year.

Life did change for me, after giving up the Internet for a brief period of time.  After a nerve-wracking start (including finding 139 e-mails in my inbox), I frequently found myself settling comfortably back into the Web's black hole of information and nonstop chatter.  That is what happens to addicted people.

So I just figured I would quit for awhile.  I had  no clue what going offline was going be like?  I thought it would be a ton of real practical hilarious hijinks. Oh, I couldn't find this place on Google Maps, or I don't have Wikipedia, or I have to send a real letter. I really thought that's what the Internet was to me, mostly those little practical things.

What was the actual experience like?  Existential and Introspective. I really learned a lot about myself. I did have a lot of free time, but a lot of it was loneliness and boredom in ways that I hadn't really experienced before.  But on the surface, most of that was just superficial, and not really that much of a departure from the norm for me.

Early on I discovered that being Internet impaired was kind of nice, that was a real inspiration. There were times I would realize my mind was in really cool places, having thought processes that are hard to have when you're on the Internet and the same news and information cycle as everybody else. I read some books I would have never read, and wrote some stuff I would have never written.

Strangely I counted myself a little bit out of the loop, in a good way, and I really enjoyed that. But it was really easy to sink in on myself and be withdrawn from people because it was just a little harder to get a hold of people, a little harder to make plans, and a little easier for me to just hide from the world and stay in my world of my own making devoid of electronics.

New things occurred and new goals for this time, discovering what I wanted to do. Read X number of books and write a first draft of my novel. This was my chance. I'm never going to have this much free time in my entire life, and so it was really hard at almost the end of the year to say I didn't do all those things.  Most of the time I just sat on the porch, with a cool glass of ice tea, and watched my hummingbirds who came to visit one of our many feeders.

At one point, I actually wanted to do some real serious reporting, as well, but it proved really hard to do journalism without the Internet. Not only was it really hard for me, but it was really hard on my readers because they had to pick up the slack.  It was at best sporadic, and in April, I shut down the webpage for good, and walked away from it completely.

Then I had three heart attacks, open heart surgery, and a life changing event in my life, and then all of a sudden, the Internet, Text Messaging, Tweets, Bus Board banter, all of it, just seemed trivial and unimportant, almost seemingly overnight.  Recently for example, I chose to stop reading bus boards and backed off of that completely.  I now do searches on how Van is going to get by when Lake Mead does eventually go dry.  Where butterflies sleep at night.  Would Melbo come to the campground and drink a beer with me the next time I am in the Land Of Enchantment? 

Believe it or not, in my personal life I became very content with not knowing things. I was fine with missing out. There were a couple of things that were a little hard, like Felix Baumgartner's jump from space. I saw it on CNN but they cut away during the actual jump.  During this brief respite I concentrated on learning new words for my vocabulary such as Twerking.

Very quickly I realized that I did not like the Internet or electronic's shoved down my throat day after day.  I did become pretty judgmental. I didn't envy them, but the most frustrating thing was people who couldn't quite get out of their phone, or get out of their laptop. And in their opinion they're listening, but I know they're not really because I've experienced what full-on, true interaction is, and it's different than someone glancing back and forth at their phone, or glancing back and forth at their e-mail.

So that for me, became really frustrating.

Often I really want to be the shining example of what it's like to actually pay attention to somebody and coach them politely to put away their devices.  Seldom I am successful at either endeavor.  Our kids, our grandchildren, even my own wife, are constantly sitting there with their face buried into some kind of gadget and it tends to drive me bonkers.

Fortunately, I have learned how to adapt and not allow it to consume me. 

So, things have kind of changed for me.  I have learned a few things along the way.  I do now understand that surfing the Internet was not a fad. That is the primary way we use it, and it's rarely productive. I spent a couple of hours last night looking for a new e-mail recipient, looking for a way how to balance my checkbook, looking for a program to teach me proper tire pressures on a thirty-year old bus, where to find the cheapest diesel, how to google Texas Border Dude and locate his present position in America. Instead of working on my e-mail, learning how to program or learning incredible new ways to amaze and astound the common man.   

I surfed around. 

The Internet wants to be surfed. It takes a proactive approach to actually be a productive person.  This new Google Glass from what I understand is about taking everything in your world and uploading it to Google. It's about using the Internet more, and it's about pulling more parts of your life into the Internet. So instead of using the Internet as a utility to make your life richer and be less interrupted, it's interrupting your life more to make the Internet richer with all the stuff from your life.

Which most likely will not work for me, unless of course, they can find my front porch and my lawn chair.  Because that is most likely where you will find me.  Most likely I will disappear for awhile, so don't despair.  Much like the proverbial fly at the company picnic I will come back later on.

Watch those right handers ...

BCO-CTA