My godmother almost got scammed.

So, my godmother's son is trying to sell his jeep, so she keeps it on the street in front of their house with a "For Sale" sign on it, and one day this guy with half the teeth missing in the upper right part of his mouth came to the front door and rang the doorbell and asked about the jeep. My godmother got a bad feeling, so she didn't open the door, but went upstairs to get her son. After he came down, he was nasty to the guy when the guy tried to talk them down in price, and the guy ended up going away.

Anyhow, I guess that simultaneous to this, there's this scam going around where a bunch of Hispanics are going around to different people's houses in Detroit and if they see an older car out there in front of some homes, they go ask people if it's for sale, and if someone looks like they're home alone, they either knock them out and rob them or distract them so someone can go in the back door and rob them while they're busy. So, my godmother was like, "And I was talking to Claudia, and she started telling me about this scam and was asking me if this guy was Hispanic, but I said, 'Oh no, I don't think so, he didn't have any teeth.'"

Incidentals from my visit with my grandparents.

Hungarian sounds funny since there's only one stressed accent per word and it always falls on the first syllable, which makes it sound pretty funny if it's a borrowed word or a really long word. So, when I asked my grandfather what the Hungarian word for "porch" is, he was like, "It's a nice Hungarian word, 'VEY-rahn-dah'" (veranda). Also, he gave a two-pack of Metamucil to my dad that he got for cheap somewhere, and so he was talking to him in Hungarian and somehow incorporated the pronunciation "MEH-tah-moo-seal" in his sentence.

Also also, my grandfather is recording our family history from 1940-1949 on tapes that he's duplicating and giving to everyone. He finished the eventful years, 1945-1949, already, and he's starting on the earlier period now. When it's done, it should be two tapes front and back.

Also also also, he told me a couple stories from when they were living in Germany. In the one rural town they were living in, everything was under American control and had been for some time, but no Americans had been there yet, and then word got out that some officers were coming to visit, so the mayor and a couple officials came out with a white flag as a welcoming committee, only when the American officer peeled up in a jeep, he kept saying, "Eier, eier" to them, and they were confused until someone sent to a farm for some eggs, which they gave in a basket to the soldiers, who then drove away. It turns out that my grandfather later found out that soldiers got good breakfast rations in everything except eggs, which they got in powdered form, so the officers must have made a trip out to the country just to get fresh eggs. He also told me about another time that he went fishing with an American soldier, who just chucked a grenade in a river and let it blow up and then just picked up a couple of stunned fish to cook.

Went shopping with my grandfather today.

The last time I went shopping with my grandfather, he got a twenty-pound pork roast and twelve packs of Depends. Today no Depends, just groceries, and he bought me two new coffee cans for my collection that I've never seen before -- a "Sultan"-brand coffee with Arabic writing on the label, and this other knock-off Italian espresso brand.

We ran into some Muslims in the grocery store, including this one woman who was kind of thin and dumpy and had a big black scarf around her head, and like five kids (two boys, three girls, and the girls unscarved) following her. Another had a cell phone headset sticking out from under her scarf.

Biology and religion: An interdisciplinary moment.

I just found out today that like five or six years ago, the Catholic high school where my dad used to teach at started asking teachers to incorporate Catholic teaching into all their classes, since Catholicism should be a total worldview and something not just left to Sundays and religion class. At first I guess my dad was like, "How the fuck do you do that with biology?", but then he thought some more and retooled a few short answers on some of his quizzes, like, "Jesus healed many people afflicted with leprosy, which is caused by this class of organism" (bacteria). "There," he was like.

Problems at the ice cream counter.

Last night after the concert I got to play in -- more about that later -- I went home and I convinced my mom to go out for ice cream, so we went down to the small town near us and got a couple of cones. Only, even though it was almost ten, the place was packed with retirees from downstate in their polo shirts and tans and all the shit like that, and they were really annoying; there was six of them, but they were all talking together, and there was a ton of people behind them, but they had one person order and then another and another, only the first person and the third person were paying together but the second one was paying with someone else, and one lady had the girls behind the counter bring out a size of bowl for ice cream to show her, and then a larger one, only to say that the second was too large and have her go back again to bring out the first and only then get her some ice cream, and a ton of shit like that. I was getting pretty ticked -- my mom didn't even notice -- and then, when I decide to settle myself down and start thinking about ice cream flavors, the last of the pack of retirees, this old dude with this big old gut, has his gut resting against the cooler, and it was big enough to cover four ice cream labels (the counter was two deep, so his gut covered two labels over towards its left side and another two over towards its right; the place only had the ice cream labelled in the cooler, and didn't have a big list hung up above or off to the side or something). I had to exaggerate my motions and pretend to try to look around under his gut from both sides and then cough a couple times until he even noticed that he was blocking my view, and then he pretended to move as if that was what he was going to do all along. What a cockrag.

Sausage in my pocket.

Today on the way downstate me and my dad stopped at a bakery so he could get some coffee and I made sure to pick up some apple cinnamon bread to take to my uncle's since he always likes sweet things like desserts and pastries. We were almost checked out, and then I saw they had a rack of no-refrigeration-needed packs of Kowalski's hunters sausages, so I got one of them too so I can sneak them into a bar and share them with friends over beer and a shot once I get back home. They're really tasty, and I was stoked.

Anyways, there was this big thing where the lady had already given us a bag for our bagels and our donut (we got breakfast there too), and then she had given us a paper bag for the bread, but the bag was a really good fit, so there wasn't any room for the sausages to go into the bag when I tossed them on the counter and decided to buy them. She went to get some mega-big bag to toss all our bags in, but I was like, "No worries, that's why they make these shorts with so many pockets on them," and I put the packet of sausages in the lower pocket on the right thigh of my shorts. When I did that, the lady stepped back from the counter and looked at me and was like, "You're gonna have dogs following you if you do that."

Correction: Parade post.

I realized the other day that my parade post where I was talking about the one guy who was picked up by the police for picking up a transsexual hooker was incomplete. I think when I was talking to my one friend's one aunt, I was like, "That's the guy who was picked up by police for picking up a transsexual hooker down in Detroit," and she agreed, but then she thought for a moment and was like, "No, he's from Flint, that's where he was picked up; he knows the streets there."