HAT TIPS

Hello,

December is a tough month for me. My notes are due at the bank. My calves are just weaning and usually I have to doctor a few that catch a cold after weaning. The snow is starting to accumulate and I have to dig through the drifts to find stuff I left to pick up tomorrow. I start to count my hay bales and see how many I can feed a day and still make it to May. And, this is the kicker; Shirley’s birthday is next week.

You know by now that I am not much of a shopper. If they had a liquor store at Runnings or Tractor Supply, I could possibly never venture into another store the rest of my life. I’m a simple man.

But I feel that I must do some shopping for my wife on her special day. Which is very near the “Day of Infamy.” Do you think this is a mere coincidence?

I remember thirty years ago or so when I bought her the “Thighmaster” that Suzanne Sommers advertised on TV. That really didn’t go over as well as I had hoped. Never mind the “Buttmaster” that came free with it. It was cold sleeping in the garage. That was a cold December.

But all in all she is pretty easy to shop for. This year she wants a bale feeder for the saddle horses. Now I can handle that. And she would like to buy herself some new winter boots. The bottoms are coming off her old ones and her feet get wet. You know she can get anything she would like, but I said, “If you buy new boots, you have to throw the worn out boots away.” That woman hates to throw anything away. It’s a hereditary thing.

I remember when we cleaned out her mother’s basement. There was a bucket labeled “this bucket leaks, don’t use it.” Really. There was a box of string labeled “strings too short to use.” I’m not lying. So you can see how hard it was to throw away a pair of worn out boots.

I took her to a movie over the weekend. Have you been to a movie lately? I booked the tickets online so I we didn’t have to sit in the front row in front of a giant screen. Senior tickets for the matinee were only five dollars. At the theatre. Online, with surcharges, they were nine fifty. Nineteen dollars for two tickets. Still, her birthday is coming up.

We decided to split a pop and a bag of popcorn. A medium sized pop is more expensive than the movie tickets! And I had to call my loan officer to see if it was alright to order a medium popcorn (extra butter). It looks to me like if you took a family to the movies; you had better fill them up with mac and cheese before you get to the movie.

And that expensive popcorn, the kernels were so small that I used the straw from the pop to eat the popcorn. But I will tell you this; the reclining seats are a treat. And the movie was good.

I don’t know how I got off on this. I have to go buy a hay feeder for Shirley.

Later, Dean