August 29, 1999

Here is an Email received from a friend with a few enhancements and modifications.

Subject: Welcome to Texas

May 30th
Just moved to Texas. Now this is a state that knows how to live!! Beautiful sunny days and warm balmy evenings. Mountains, forests, and deserts blended together. What a special place! Watched the sunset from a park lying on a blanket. It was beautiful. I've finally found my home. I love it here.

June 14th
Really heating up. Got to 100 today. Not a problem. Live in an air-conditioned home, drive an air-conditioned car. What a pleasure to see the sun every day like this. I'm turning into a real sun worshipper.

June 30th
Had the backyard landscaped with western plants today. Lots of cactus and rocks. What a breeze to maintain. No more mowing for me. Another scorcher today, but I love it here.

July 10th
The temperature hasn't been below 100 all week. How do people get used to this kind of heat? Too bad it's not a dry heat. Getting used to it is taking longer than I expected.

July 15th
Fell asleep by the pool. Got 3rd degree burns over 60% of my body. Missed two days of work, what a dumb thing to do. I learned my lesson though; got to respect the ol' sun in a climate like this.

July 20th
I missed Tabby (our cat) sneaking into the car when I left this morning. By the time I got out to the car for lunch, Tabby had swollen up to the size of a chopping bag and exploded all over $2,000 worth of leather upholstery. I told the kids she ran away. The car now smells like Kibbles and sh*t. No more pets in this #$*&$!% heat!

July 25th
Dry #@*&$*% heat, my ass. Hot is hot!! The home air-conditioner is on the fritz and the AC repairman charged $200 just to drive by and tell me he needed to order parts.

July 30th
Been sleeping outside by the pool for five nights now. $1,500 in #%$@*&! house payments and we can't even go inside. Why did I ever come here?

Aug 4th
115 degrees. Finally got the air-conditioner fixed today. It cost $500 and gets the temperature down to about 90. Stupid repairman pi**ed in my pool. I hate this #%$*&@! State!

Aug 8th
If another #%$*&@! wise ass cracks; "Hot enough for you today?" I'm going to tear his #@%$*&! throat out. #%$*&@! heat! By the time I get to work the radiator is boiling over, my clothes are soaking wet, and I smell like a roasted #%$@*&! Garfield!!

Aug 10th
The weather report might as well be a #%$*&@! recording: Hot, dry and sunny. It's been too hot to F#*& for two damn months and the weatherman says it might really warm up next week. Doesn't it ever rain in this barren #%$*&@! desert? Water rationing has been in effect all summer, so $1,700 worth of cactus just dried up and blew in the #%$*&@! pool. Even a cactus can't live in this heat.

Aug 14th
Welcome to Hell!!!! Temperature got to 123 today. Forgot to crack the window and blew the #%$*&@! windshield out of the Lincoln. The installer came to fix it and said, "Hot enough for you today?" My wife had to spend the $1,500 house payment to bail me out of jail.

Aug 30th
Worst day of the #%$*&@! summer. I'm not leaving the house. The #%$*&@! Monsoon rains finally came and all they did is to make it muggier than hell. The Lincoln is now floating somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico with its new $500 windshield. That does it, we're moving back to California for some peace and quiet. How I long for a peaceful little earthquake!!

August 28, 1999

Perhaps you may have an opportunity to visit Dallas or Texas in general. There are many differences between California and Texas and therefore in an effort to help you more easily assimilate, listed below are a few tips.

A Texan's Guide to Life

1. Don't squat with your spurs on.
2. Good judgement comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgement.
3. Lettin' the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier 'n puttin' it back in.
4. If you're ridin' ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure its still back there.
5. If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around.
6. After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good that he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him. The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut!
7. Never kick a cow chip on a hot day.
8. There are two theories to arguin' with a woman. Neither one works!
9. If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin'.
10. Never slap a man who's chewin' tobacco.
11. It don't take a genius to spot a cow in a flock of sheep.
12. Always drink upstream from the herd.
13. When you give a lesson in meanness to a critter or a person, don't be surprised if they learn their lesson.
14. When you're thrown' your weight around, be ready to have it thrown around by somebody else.
15. The quickest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it back in you pocket.
16. There are tree kinds of men: The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. And the rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.

Happy Hunting!

Men Are From Sears; Women Are From Nordstrom
August, 26, 1999

I believe that, in general, woman are saner than men. I lie a lot too, but for example: If you see people who have paid good money to stand in an outdoor stadium on a freezing December day wearing nothing on the upper halves of their bodies except paint, those people will be male.

Without males, there would be no such sport as professional lawn mower racing. Also, there would be a 100 percent decline in the annual number of deaths related to efforts to shoot beer cans off of heads. Also, if women were in charge of all the world's nations, there would be a large reduction in military conflicts. If there were a military conflict, everyone involved would feel just awful and there would soon be a high-level exchange of thoughtful notes written on greeting cards with flowers on the front, followed by a Peace Luncheon (which would be salads, with the dressing on the side).

Women may be wiser than men, but there is one definite exception, and that area is: clothing sizes. In this particular area, women are insane!

When a man shops for clothes, his primary objective is to purchase clothes that fit on his particular body. A man will try on a pair of pants, and if those pants are too small, he'll try on a larger pair, and when he finds a par that fit, he buys them. Most men do not spend a great amount of time fretting about the size of their pants. Many men wear jeans with the size printed right on the back label, so that if you're standing behind a man in a supermarket line, you can read his waist and inseam size. A man could have, say, a 52-inch waist and a 30-inch inseam, and a label will proudly display this information, which is basically the same thing as having a sign that says; "Howdy! My butt is the size of a Federal Express truck!"

The situation is entirely different with women. When a woman shops for clothes, her primary objective is NOT to find clothes that fit her particular body. She would like for that to be the case, but her primary objective is to purchase clothes that are the size she wore when she was 19 years old. This will be some arbitrary number such as "5" or "7". Don't ask me "5" or "7" of what; that question has baffled scientists for centuries. All I know is that if a woman was a size "5" at age 19, she wants to be a size "5" now (regardless of the number of babies), and if a size "5" outfit does not fit her, she will not move on to a larger size. She can't! It's in her genetic programming, her size is "5"! So she will keep trying on size "5" items, and unless they start fitting her, she will become extremely unhappy.

She may take this unhappiness out on her husband, who is waiting patiently in the mall, perhaps browsing in the Sharper Image store, trying to think of how he could justify purchasing a pair of night-vision binoculars. "Hi!" he'll say, when his wife finds him. "You know how sometimes the electricity goes out at night and …" "Am I fat?" she'll ask, cutting him off. This is a very bad situation for the man, because if he answers "yes", she'll be angry because he's saying that she's fat, and if answers "no", she'll be angry because HE'S OBVIOUSLY LYING BECAUSE NONE OF THE SIZE "5s" FIT HER!

There is no escape for the husband/boy-friend/male companion. I think a lot of unexplained disappearances occur because guys in malls see their wives/girl-friends, etc unsuccessfully trying on outfits, and they realize their lives will be easier, if before their wives come out and demand to know whether they're fat, the guys just run off and join a UFO cult. It's a proven fact that this is a major recruiting source for the French Foreign Legion.

The other day my friend, Michelle, was in a terrific mood, and you know why? Because she had successfully put on a size 5 outfit. She said this made her feel wonderful. She said, and this is a direct quote; "I wouldn't care if these pants were this big (here she held her arms far apart) as long as they have a "5" on them.

This got me to thinking! Here's how you could get rich! Start a women's clothing store called "Three for all!", in which all garments, including those that were originally intended to be restaurant awnings or were designed by "Omar the tent maker" had labels with the words "SIZE 3". All the cloths, no matter actual size, would be scattered indiscriminately throughout the store, so that a woman would have to spend hours trying on garments until she found those that fit. These stores would be placed next to gentlemen's clubs. Naturally, since women often insist that men accompany them on these shopping expeditions, the men must have a place to "hang out". The key is to own both the clothing store and the gentlemen's club. Sensitive men could even volunteer to go shopping with their wives!

I'll bet you'd sell clothes like crazy. You'd probably get rich, and you'd retire, maybe take up some philanthropic activity to benefit all humanity. I'm thinking here of professional lawn mower racing!

Happy Hunting!