#2...more peaceful/tranquil, though #1 is more colorful

Maybe check your teeth

"Old age comes at a bad time." – San Banducci

"Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you are aboard there is nothing you can do about it." - Golda Meir

"The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened. - Mark Twain

"Nice to be here? At my age it’s nice to be anywhere." – George Burns

"First you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to pull your zipper up, then you forget to pull your zipper down." - Leo Rosenberg

“You spend 90 percent of your adult life hoping for a long rest and the last 10 percent trying to convince the Lord that you’re actually not that tired.” – Robert Brault

“Old people shouldn’t eat health foods. They need all the preservatives they can get.” – Robert Orben

"At my age, flowers scare me." - George Burns

"The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down." - T.S. Elliot

"At age 20, we worry about what others think of us… at age 40, we don’t care what they think of us… at age 60, we discover they haven’t been thinking of us at all." - Ann Landers

"When I was young, I was called a rugged individualist. When I was in my fifties, I was considered eccentric. Here I am doing and saying the same things I did then, and I’m labeled senile." – GB

"The important thing to remember is that I’m probably going to forget." - Unknown

"We don’t grow older, we grow riper." - Pablo Picasso

“It’s paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn’t appeal to anyone.” - Andy Rooney

“The older I get, the better I used to be.” – Lee Trevino

"I was thinking about how people seem to read the bible a lot more as they get older, and then it dawned on me—they’re cramming for their final exam."- George Carlin

"Everything slows down with age, except the time it takes cake and ice cream to reach your hips." - John Wagnerf

"Grandchildren don’t make a man feel old, it’s the knowledge that he’s married to a grandmother that does." - J. Norman Collie

"When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it’s a sure sign you’re getting old." - Mark Twain

"You know you are getting old when everything either dries up or leaks." - Joel Plaskett

"There’s one advantage to being 102, there’s no peer pressure." - Dennis Wolfberg

"There are three stages of man: he believes in Santa Claus, he does not believe in Santa Claus, he is Santa Claus." - Bob Phillips

"Looking fifty is great—if you’re sixty." - Joan Rivers

"Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician." - Anonymous

A woman is at home when she hears someone knocking at her door.

She goes to the door opens it and sees a man standing there.

He asks the lady, "Do you have a vagina?"

She slams the door in disgust.

The next morning she hears a knock at the door, it's the same man and he asks the same question to the woman, "Do you have a vagina?"

She slams the door again.

Later that night when her husband gets home she tells him what has happened for the last two days.

The husband tells his wife in a loving and concerned voice, "Honey, I am taking off tomorrow so as to be home, just in case this guy shows up again."

The next morning they hear a knock at the door and both ran for the door.

The husband whispers to the wife, "Honey, I'm going to hide behind the door and listen, and if it is the same guy I want you to answer yes to the question because I want to see where he's going with this."

She nods yes to her husband and opens the door.

Sure enough, the same fellow is standing there, he asks, "Do you have a vagina?"

"Yes I do," says the lady.

The man replies, "Good, would you mind telling your husband to use yours and leave my wife's alone!"

A quite elderly couple goes to a sex therapist's office.

The doctor asks, 'What can I do for you?'

The man says, 'Will you watch us have sexual intercourse?'

The doctor raises his eyebrows, yet is so amazed that an elderly couple is asking for sexual advice that he agrees.

When the couple finishes, the doctor says, 'There's absolutely nothing wrong with the way you have intercourse.'

He thanks them for coming, wishes them good luck, charges them $50 and says good-bye.

The next week, the same couple returns and asks the sex therapist to watch again. He is a bit puzzled, but agrees.

This happens several weeks in a row. The couple makes an appointment, has intercourse with no problems, pays the doctor, then leaves.

Finally, after 3 months of this routine, the doctor says, 'I'm sorry, but I have to ask. Just what are you trying to find out?'

The man says, 'We're not trying to find out anything. She's married; so we can't go to her house. I'm married; and we can't go to my house.

The Holiday Inn charges $98.

The Hilton charges $139.

We do it here for $50, and best of all....Medicare pays $43 of it.'

I will do so, G-Man. But, my daughter is flying to Sacramento to visit with her brother and his Family this Fall...in October, I believe...from 10-5 thru 10-11. I will likely make it out there to join 'em. Also, I am joining a group of Veterans for a 4-day weekend in Washington D.C. That will be from the 30th of Sept. to October 4th. I will return home from D.C. only to head west for that visit.

I will get back to you if and when I can make it to Tennessee.

Dear Tech Support,

Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slowdown in overall system performance, particularly in the flower and jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0.

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5, and installed undesirable programs such as NBA 5.0, NFL 3.0 and Golf Clubs 4.1.

Conversation 8.0 no longer runs and Housecleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. Please note that I have tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail. What can I do?

Yours, Desperate housewife

To which Tech support replied:

Dear Desperate,

First, keep in mind that Boyfriend 5.0 is an entertainment package while Husband 1.0 is an operating system. Please enter the command: "I thought you loved me.html", download Tears 6.2 and be sure to install the Guilt 3.0 update. If those applications work as they were designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewelry 2.0 and Flowers 3.5.

However, please remember that overuse of the above applications may cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1. Please note that Beer 6.1 is a risky application that may download the Snoring Loudly Beta program.

Whatever you do, DO NOT, under any circumstances, install Mother-In-Law 1.0 (it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources.)

In addition, please do not attempt to reinstall Boyfriend 5.0 while on Husband 1.0. This program is unsupported and will crash the system.

In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but does have limited memory and doesn't learn new applications quickly. You may consider running additional software to improve both memory and performance of the system. We recommend Cooking 3.0 and Hot Lingerie 7.7.

Good luck ,

Tech Support

R.I.P., RonnieJW.

Yes, it struck me as such, so I posted it with memories of BB on my mind.

Well said, Grasshopper.

In a crowded city at a busy bus stop, a beautiful young woman wearing a tight leather skirt waited for a bus. As the bus stopped and it was her turn to get on, she realized her skirt was too tight to allow her leg to reach the height of the first step of the bus.

Slightly embarrassed and with a quick smile to the bus driver, she reached behind her to unzip her skirt a little, thinking that this would give her enough slack to raise her leg. She tried to again take the step, only to discover that she couldn't. So, a little more embarrassed, she once again reached behind her to unzip her skirt a little more, and for the second time attempted the step.

Once again, much to her embarrassment, she could not raise her leg. With a little smile to the driver, she again reached behind to unzip a little more and again was unable to take the step.

As this was happening, Jeremy, who was standing behind her, picked her up easily by the waist and placed her gently on the step of the bus.

The woman went ballistic, turned to the would-be Samaritan and screeched, "How dare you touch my body I don't even know who you are"

Jeremy smiled and responded, "Well, ma'am, normally I would agree with you. But, after you unzipped my fly three times, I kind'a figured we were close friends".

As so many of my age have experienced the loss of friends/Family, I too often find myself dwelling on the past and my times with them. In recognizing and accepting that BB will not likely be rejoining us on The Stage, the below is not by me nor about BB and/or myself. Yet, as I thought of him while reading it, it very well could have been.

Ode to an Old Friend, by Tom Grasso

I shouldn’t be doing this. I have so much to do, and I just don’t have the time to sit and write right now. Yet, like some obsessed creature of habit, I have no choice. The feelings well up inside of me and I must, without pause, sit and let them out.

I can feel the emotional tides shift within me. They come in waves, sometimes they crash into the crusted shoreline of my mind, and in others they gently lap upon the grainy sands of time, pulling those sands away while gently erasing the footprints left behind. I do, sometimes, struggle with it in the face of my own conditioning. Emotions are for the weak, sadness for the meek and tortured soul with the phony stoicism of men being the standard-bearer of good behavior. Yet I can’t help myself as I feel it all, and in that moment I decided to let it go because someone, somewhere, feels it too. And there the lie ends.

Death does not ordinarily affect me in this way. It is a certainty, and because I have no idea what will happen during or afterward, I usually don’t dwell on it, instead choosing to focus on the act of living. Death will come to me, as it will to all of us, yet I see no value in dwelling so much on the destination when there seems to be so much left in the journey to get there. Maybe. One cannot be certain of the destination, except that I have arrived where I am, now, at that may need to be enough.

I lost a friend, and I’m not sure why I remain so affected. We were good friends, and I’ve always held fond memories of him. He was a gentle man, with a happy, peaceful way about him that made the chaotic, confused me stand up and take notice. He was always someone I was happy to see, and I would always enjoy his words and voice, which was unique in its deliberateness as well as in its pure goodness. I was fortunate to experience him for a few years until, as is quite often the case, I went one way and he went another, and we lost touch.

Enter social media, that often-vilified method of human contact that, to me, has amazing potential to make the world smaller and our experience greater. On November 4th, I received a Facebook friend request from him. I felt like I always did back “in the day”, elated to hear from him and looking forward to seeing how time had treated him. As many of us do, I immediately went to his page, checking out the pictures and stories in order to close the gap between then and now. He looked just like he did back then, with the same smile he always had. He appeared to not have aged a bit, with that bright, genuine smile and graceful posture I had always known. It was awesome to see he had become engaged, and that his life had brought him the love he so readily deserved.

We caught up a bit, promising to catch up more after the holidays. On Saturday, December 1st, I laughed at his admiration of the new recliners at a local movie theater and suggesting that they are designed to put you to sleep so you’d have to pay to watch the movie again. I had suggested the same thing to my own children when we went not too long ago, and I wondered how many had the same thoughts when sitting in those chairs for the first time. Great minds think alike, even on the simplest of experiences. Yes, I smile at the notion, and feel a joy in my heart even through the sense of loss that comes with these memories.

On Sunday, he talked a bit of “trash” as most Eagles’ fans do when our team wins an important game. Thankfully, he was a home-town guy, and not some Cowboys fan who must have been switched at birth. Yes, somewhere out there is an Eagles’ fan living in Dallas, switched at birth with a half-brained sports nitwit who, with their blue star and pathetic love of a team whose city they’ve likely never visited, dumbs down the sports IQ of the entire City of Philadelphia. I have a feeling there are many out there who understand what I am saying and are laughing at the suggestion. Even up in that mystical place some might call “Heaven”.

There are events that clearly define a person’s place in the world. Not their physical place, but their metaphysical place. You can find a lot about yourself in how you react to others. In this case, I’ve found that I truly value the loving presence of great people, people who judge everyone as equals (or don’t judge them at all). They work to be a positive influence in the world, and rarely create anything but ripple after ripple of positive energy in this sea of life. Of course they aren’t perfect, they struggle like the rest of us with varying degrees of humanness, but they so effect your life in the positive that their negatives don’t seem to matter. They brighten up your day by making you see something in yourself that makes you smile, laugh, or at peace, and they do it from a distance was well as from the inside places of who we are.

So I honor my friend tonight, not because he left us, but because he lived. I honor him not in his passing but in the permanent mark he made upon others. While his sudden passing made me take inventory of the impermanence in my life, it also made clear the permanent imprints we can make on one another. We can have that kind of effect if we choose to.

It is said that “charity begins at home.” So does happiness. So does joy. So does peace, love and bliss. Anger and fear begins there, too, and we all have a choice on what kind of life we are to lead. The good news is that one can make choices in an instant, and we can choose to take the desires we have for beauty and make it real in any holy instant we want to. It is never too late, it is never too much to bear, and it is never anyone else’s fault. We are the creators.

I’m grateful that the life of my friend has created so much for so many, and I’m grateful to have known him. I’m grateful that, in his passing, so many of us can share the exact same experience with someone we’ve known at different times in our lives. In his case, this is not lip service paid to the newly departed, but a true testament of who a person was in the life he lived; a life lived as a beautiful pebble who created a gorgeous splash and wonderful ripple for us all.

So, we move on as we must, shed tears in memoriam and smile in honor of a life well lived. There are some flowers you simply stop and smell for a while, and whose fragrance you never forget. I am glad to know so many.

Peace be with you, my friend.

Having recently had my computer hacked and fried, the following caught my eye.

A language teacher was explaining to her class that in French, nouns unlike their English counterparts, are grammatically designated as masculine or feminine.

'"House" in French, is feminine - "la maison", while "pencil" in French is masculine - "le crayon."'

One puzzled student asked, "What gender is a computer?" The teacher thought it would be a good exercise to have the students decide what they thought the gender should be.

So she split the class into two groups appropriately enough, by gender and asked them to decide whether "computer" should be a masculine or a feminine noun. Both groups were required to give four reasons for their recommendation.

The men's group decided that computer should definitely be of the feminine gender ("la computer"), because:

1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic.

2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else.

3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later review.

4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you constantly find yourself spending more money on accessories for it.

The women's group, however, concluded that computers should be masculine "le computer") because:

1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on.

2. They have a lot of data but still can't think for themselves.

3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem.

4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer you could have gotten a better model!