Bear City

We are big fans of SNL. To this day. And we keep saying that we'll put together a playlist some day of our favorite bits. Some of our favorites are pretty obscure, and they're part of our family language.

Example!

The last time we visited the neuro opthalmologist, we exited through this door:

and mrguy said "Thank you for visiting Bear City".

Which is funny to nobody but us.

Bear City was a series of little films on SNL a jillion years ago about bears doing banal things in a world of bears. Maybe 30 seconds worth of things, bracketed by an intro and outro narrated by Fred Willard.

I can't seem to locate a clip of my favorite, about a bear whose wife calls down to the bar and tries to get her husband to come home. If you substitute bears for humans, it reminds me of my parents in the 1960s. 

And bar but not bear related, while we were visiting our family in 1980 we needed to find one of our cousins, who had left the house a while earlier. Our family lived in a tiny town in New York where nobody locked their front door or their cars. This town was able to support three bars, however. One was the Bucket of Blood, one was Gallagher's (I think) and I can't remember the third. Anyhoo, the best way to find one of our cousins was to call one of the downtown bars, since everybody knew everybody. One cousin calls the bar and finds a sibling there, who talks to him, puts down the phone, goes outside, comes back in and says "Well I'm downtown and I don't see him". 

Thank you for visiting Bear City.

Bear Update

Remember Brutus, the bear that walked into our dining room while we were on vacation a few years back? He is no more -- killed in a legal bear hunt last year.

I feel bad for him. And now I know that two years before he invited himself for dinner he was officially weighed, and came in at 575 lbs. Good grief!

Here's the link about Brutus. Do not click if you do not want to see him after he was hunted. 

So sorry, guy.

Tahoedad 2018, Post 1

We're 4 days in, now, but Tahoedad 2018 got off to a rolicking start.

Nose, the 22-year-old cat, had a seizure at the vet as mrguy was checking him in to board. We learned that he has hypertension, needs his subcutaneous fluid intake increased, and that he has anemia. Most of those are also problems mrguy's mom has, so that's a little trippy. Nose has many fans at the clinic, so everybody came running to see him and make sure he was ok as the doctor was treating him. The founder of the practice came by. "Is that Nose? He must be 23 by now!" Pretty close, doc! They think that he will recover.

A few minutes after I got the initial phone call about the cat, my sister-in-law called to say that his bro-liness is in the hospital. Blood clots in the lungs, but he has been treated, is out of the hospital and is supposed to join us tomorrow.

Then the mama's fave caregiver's sister died in New Zealand, so we're figuring out scheduling around that. Poo. So sorry for her. Of course it's remarkable that her sister passed away when the mama was on vacation and didn't need her.

Here we are at Day Four. The mama, the frenchman and D were playing gin rummy. I was in the kitchen making sandwiches for mrguy and I. He was upstairs busying himself with fancy book learning. D, who missed Bear Night last year, looks up from his hand and says "Bear!" Yup, the door to the porch was open and there was an adolescent bear on the porch, lumbering toward the dining room. Really, Dude? The boys closed the door to the porch and siblings shouted for the caretaker, who was away from the house. His friend apparently heard us and called him to let him know there was a bear on the property. The bear went down the hill the same way Brutus did last year, and the caretaker walked around with his rubber bullet-filled rifle. 

Bayorr Update

A few Mondays ago I had settled in for a long winter's nap (really, a night of CNN and Vanderpump Rules). 

The phone rang. It's my "sister from another mister". Our moms were life-long best friends.

"Turn on The Bachelor," she says.

I tune in just in time to see the ladies of this season sitting around the living room in our vacation house. They were sitting on the weird wood burl coffee table where my Cheez-it and Jelly Belly bowls reside for one hallowed week every summer.

Hilarious. 

One of those girls sat in the bear poop chair. I saw it.

How 'bout that?!