I’m not sure who said, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”  I know some PHD wrote a book or two about it. Usually, I can’t do a thing about the big stuff and wasting my time and energy sweating about the big stuff gets me nothing but indigestion. My wife handles all the big stuff, anyway. It’s the small stuff that keeps my interest.

I wonder where our daily newspaper gets its rubber bands.  When my paper is ‘rubber-banded’ in one, it is always dirty. Do they buy them that way from a used rubber-band place or are they using so much ink that just putting one on gets it all dirty?

I personally like the ones the Post Office uses. They are wider, thicker, and almost always new and clean. I use them around the house for all sorts of things.  I put the newspaper ones in the trash container before I even get back in the house.

I have never figured out why anyone would enjoy using toilet tissue mounted with the leading sheet under the roll. It makes no sense at all. When the leading sheet is over the top, it is easy to get at. No groping around under the roll, usually mounted in an awkward, hard to reach spot, anyway.

When I’m out at someone else’s home or at a restaurant, I feel compelled to correct any roll that is improperly mounted. It is just something that would nag at me the entire time I am there if I didn’t do that.  I do not tell other people [oops] about that little quirk.  Don’t they know that the patent for TP has the roll going over the top?

I also find myself often taking a paper towel and wiping down the sink splashes in restaurant and airport restrooms. I just do not understand how some people can be so thoughtless of others.

I don’t like the way some people load dishwashers. When we have guests for dinner, the ladies want to help clean up and I’ve gotten so I wish I could tell them not to.  I know better, though.

There are ways to load a dishwasher and ways not to.  I must wait until they leave and reload it. There is a system and I doing it right, you know. Gotten so I do most of the cleanup lately.

I always wonder of the bread they put on my table at a restaurant includes the bread from an earlier table that someone else didn’t eat.

I wonder about doctors who make me sit for an hour and a half in the waiting room with sick people ever had to do that themselves.

I read the obituaries every day. I’m Ok if most of the people listed are older than me, but I have a bad day when most are younger. I have come to realize that at my age, most are. Now I have more descendants now than I have friends. They’re going faster than I like. 

Planning ahead, a few years ago, I asked one friend to speak at my funeral.  When he died and I spoke at his funeral, I asked another friend there to take his spot at my farewell. He reluctantly agreed and then died the next year. I asked another friend who had been at both funerals if he would speak at mine and he vigorously shook his head and screamed, “not on your life!”  I thought that it was an odd statement, considering the subject.

I finally resolved the issue by recording my own farewell message, including my special rendition of a few Jimmy Durante songs. The big question is how can I be sure the kids will actually play it

Now I keep my pre-paid cremation card in my wallet, just in case my dentist kills me the next time he does one of those deep cleaning jobs on me.   

My wife said, “Ed, stop worrying about this. Just slow down, you will last longer. And Ed, be nicer to the kids. They will be choosing our rest home.” 

It annoys me that the lights in my area are the most unsynchronized lights in Washington. I am convinced that they are designed to force stop me at every single intersection, even when there is no cross traffic.

There must be a hidden device on my car that some sadistic traffic controller has placed there, just hoping I drive out.  I think he sits there, watching me on his traffic computer and then with cackling joy, pops the red-light button at every light I approach.  

Well, the laugh is on them. My son took the cars keys away from me after my seizures came back. They will not have me to persecute any longer. I finally get the last laugh!

I have yet to figure out how a golf ball that I hit straight down the fairway can suddenly pick up speed and veer off at a sharp angle, usually ending up hitting a roof of a house where the occupant is standing in the yard.  Never a vacant house, where I can quietly sneak by.

I have tried to trick the ball and compensate by aiming at a house, but then it goes exactly where I aimed it. It is demonic.

Sometimes, a little article on an off page in the newspaper stays with me for days. I wake up in the middle of the night, sweating over it.  Here are two that had me awake at 3 AM this morning.

Just the other day, I read that the Governor, out of his compassion and in a cost savings effort, was planning on releasing 6,000 inmates from the state prisons.

In another article, cleverly hidden in a different section of the paper, it was announced that the state would be stopping its parole monitoring of low-level offenders after their release.

This is being done, to reduce the number of parolees returning to prison for violating their parole, because if they aren’t monitoring the parolees, the state will not know if they are violating the terms of their parole.

Does anyone but me, and most of the owners of convenience stores throughout the state feel like these are really, bad ideas?