Damned Old People

“I was walking through the closest home improvement store looking for insulated stove pipe and saw a couple of nice old people walking toward me. Having been brought up right, I stepped aside, smiled at them and said, "good afternoon". They nodded back at me and tottered unsteadily on their way. They disappeared from my memory even quicker than from my view as is so often the case with senior citizens in our culture.

Momentarily I heard them call my name. "Ray" is that you "Ray" (the old farts didn't even know my name is Nimblefoot). I turned around and saw those same old people coming back toward me; my mind raced in a vain attempt to place where I might have met them. I drew a blank. Trapped with no way out. I was forced against my will to be honest. "Yes, I am this Ray of whom you speak, but I am embarrased to not recall who you might be". "It's us", the cuter one (female) replied, "Joanne and Orlo". Oh my God, I had known Joanne since before grade school and had a serious crush (unrequited) on her in the first grade (high school too, for that matter). Her husband I had known since the 8th grade. I had seen neither for more than 44 years. It was amazing that they so quickly recognized me. Guess that's what I get for being so young and studly.

Damned Old People.”

“Nimble...my classic reply to someone who "knows me" when they ask if I am...is "maybe....do I owe you money?" They laugh and introduce themselves.


The other problem I have is that there is a certain 'segment" of life who will do their time, get out and run into me in the Store/Mall etc. So I usually take it carefully (LOL)”

“Thats been happening alot to me in the past few years since retiring and moving back home after being gone for 20+ years.”

“Exactly why I moved a way from home. Far away...”

“I'll be damned...........Nimblefoot!
last edited: 9/19/07 5:40:36 PM”

“Yes you will Marko!”

“Yeah, but I will have some fun 'tween now and then!”

“Sho you right!”

“Snake Eyes?   That you?”

“SC must be taking a breather,  ”

“No speakie old people.”

“Well, you are rather darling Ray.”

“LOL :)”

“well, did she seem like she wanted to lose the other old fart for an afternoon of memory lane sex with you?”

“If sticking her hand out to be shaken in, perhaps, an attempt to thwart a dirty old man hug is an indicator, then "no". Thank God for small favors. I don't think I could close my eyes tight enough to conjure up an image of what she looked like in high school (HOT!).”

“Since I didn't sign in to the "Christian" thread or the "Pagan" thread, can I, (as a Damned Old Person), sign in to this thread?

Dunadan, signing in!”

“Nah Dunadan you're not damned, yet.
last edited: 9/25/07 3:50:44 PM”

“I usually get...

Steve, that you? You're still alive?!

I'll be damned if I can remember them. Occasionally they do look a little familiar, LOL.”

“I hadn't been home for about 40 years and, so seeing any of my classmates was scary...as I'm sure it was for them. To see a 17 year old cheerleader morph to 62 before your eyes is not pleasant. The good news is that it only lasts for a few seconds and then all is well.”

“

SEMINOLE � Walter Funk, 77, stared in disbelief Saturday morning when he found a strange young woman casually walking through his home.

In the minutes to come, paramedics would carry someone out on a stretcher.

It wasn't Funk.

A brazen morning burglary that might have led to tragedy closed with a female suspect pinned by a 160-pound retired construction worker who doesn't like surprises.

"When you are in my house, I am the master of my house," said Funk, a native of Germany who has lived on 123rd Street N in Seminole 20 years. "You don't leave me. You don't get away."

And Nicole Mason-Suares didn't.

Mason-Suares, 22, 5-foot-2, 100 pounds, of 10925 91st Ter. N was charged by Pinellas sheriff's deputies with armed burglary, aggravated battery on a person 65 or over and possession of burglary tools.

Mason-Suares, who has arrests on her record for offenses that include petty theft and worthless checks, was being held at the Pinellas County Jail on $25,000 bail.

It all started like many other lazy Saturday mornings for Funk and his wife, Ingeborg, 81. Someone knocked on the front door at 9 a.m.

"Lawn man," Funk thought. He opened the blinds. Then he answered the door wearing just pajama bottoms, but the sidewalk in front of the couple's Oak Creek Estates home was empty.

Funk unlocked the back door and looked out to his pool and still didn't see anyone. He went to his bedroom. A sound echoed from the other side of the house.

As Funk walked out, he said, he saw Mason-Suares, wearing rubber gloves, walking toward the back door. "What are you doing here?" Funk asked.

The woman told him she was looking for her boyfriend's house. She started to walk out the back door.

Big mistake.

Funk grabbed her and threw her to the floor. She struggled to break free, and the two wrestled, first in a patio area and then on Funk's pool deck, deputies said. She grabbed a knife from a purse, Funk said. But he twice knocked it from her hand before she could unfold it.

She bit his leg, Funk said, and tried to kick him in the groin. He grabbed a pair of handy pliers and knocked her on the head.

"Just a tap," Funk later said sheepishly.

He screamed for his wife to call police, which she did after locking the bedroom door.

As they struggled, Funk said, the woman tried to eat her rubber gloves. Funk desperately pulled them from her mouth. "Evidence," he explained.

Still, Funk said, Mason-Suares ate at least part of them before deputies arrived.

Funk said he didn't really think of any danger. He said he just couldn't stand the thought of the woman getting away. The fight left him exhausted.

"It is quite a story," Funk said four hours after the incident. "What a job."

Funk's wife, who is in ill health, was taken to Morton Plant Hospital as a precaution, but she was not hurt and soon returned home. Funk drove himself to the hospital to have the bite looked after.

Mason-Suares was carried out on a stretcher and treated for minor injuries at Suncoast Hospital before being released into the custody of deputies.

Neighbors just shook their heads afterward and said Funk's stand was no surprise. They describe him as a "feisty" but good neighbor who is always busy around the house and full of energy.

"I guess," said neighbor Charlotte Gear, 70, "that burglar picked the wrong house."

http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/crime/article499085.ece”

“KEWL!”

“kick ass, gramps!”

“WARSAW, Poland - Irena Sendler — credited with saving some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, some of them in baskets — died Monday, her family said. She was 98.

Sendler, among the first to be honored by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as a Righteous Among Nations for her wartime heroism, died at a Warsaw hospital, daughter Janina Zgrzembska told The Associated Press.

President Lech Kaczynski expressed "great regret" over Sendler's death, calling her "extremely brave" and "an exceptional person." In recent years, Kaczynski had spearheaded a campaign to put Sendler's name forward as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city's welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II. Warsaw's Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto.

Seeking to save the ghetto's children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants ventured inside the ghetto — and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.

Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.

Records show that Sendler's team of about 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and its final liquidation in April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.

"Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory," Sendler said in 2007 in a letter to the Polish Senate after lawmakers honored her efforts in 2007.

In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families — most of whom perished in the Nazis' death camps — Sendler wrote the children's real names on slips of paper that she kept at home.

When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips, which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate's yard. Some 2,500 names were recorded.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080512/ap_on_re_eu/obit_sendler”

“Had he used a gun to hold her, Tilt and violin would've denounced gramps as a " redneck criminal vigilante".
last edited: 5/13/08 5:47:57 AM”

“"Objection!"

"Speculation..............calls for a conclusion."

"The jury will disregard the witless."”

“Tilt actually did call someone who used a firearm to kill an intruder a criminal vigilante. It was a while back, and I don't remember the thread.

But you're right, I'm speculating on violin. However, I strongly suspect he thinks very similarly.”

“Sticks and stones might break an intruder's bones but a gun can leave his brains on the wall.”

“I doubt that person would be convicted on Tilt's word.

It might hurt the "vigilante's" feelings but, oh well.”

“Awesome stories!!!!!!”

“Oh no---a stick will leave brains on the wall too. Ah, memories.”

“Swingin' for the cheap seats?”

“Sticks and stones might break an intruder's bones but a gun can leave his brains on the wall.”

MarkO
9:39:02 AM
5/13/08

i think we just found our leading candidate for "who is salebored"?”

“Watch it, I've been practising on all our new border fences and that DMZ will be like hopping a dead snake on the last 100trail metres on the way to a cold beer.
last edited: 5/13/08 7:54:38 AM”

“Ya gots me beat, Cliffy.

Eat kimchi, Crash!”

“You cattle prodders are gona break me with your Nigallic nonsenCe -I just missed a down spike buying opportunity in (EP) El Paso Gas @ 19.59- okay you're aquitted with only a 20 cent bump.”

“El Paso Gas??

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!

Excuse moi, senor!”

“Funny how Salebord and MarkO so easily settled into a geriatric thread.”

“I learned to lie about my age back in the eighties when I used a faux ID to buy beer.”

“You're pretty lucid for a guy in the eighties.”

“You're memory is a little short, don't you remember making me buy the beer , because you had earlier, wandered into a HAZ-MAT area and had been exposed to some eviromental resin smoke and were having trouble maintaining a straight face.
last edited: 5/13/08 10:04:20 AM”

“That would make you older than me, Pops, since I was too young to buy the beer.

"enviro mental"?

Maybe we will need a torque wrench to tighten the head bolts.”

“Slow down MarkO, remember I'm Kerrying that big bottle of fine Irish Whiskey in my pack.”

“I'm closing in on 29 from the low 30's this week, join me .hehe”

“I'm as old as dirt....well....almost...”

“My Earth Day falls on the same day as my father's birthday and seeing as he's 20+ years older than a day that celebrates dirt, we tell him he's older than dirt.”

“I forget whether I'm older than dirt.”

“I'm getting there. next year I will be old.”

“Sign up for senior discounts next year.”

“Stupid AARP sent me a card and dues to sign up. The letter said you can sign up when your 50, I have YEARS to go till then!! I called my Mom and told her that and she said she felt old (not older than dirt!)! And we both had a good laugh!”

“If you die and are buried in dirt, does that make you as old as dirt, but not older than dirt...at least for a few days...years?

I dunno?

BTW(I have my AARP card, saves me $10 a night at hotels when work won't let me sleep on the ground.)”