Coffee and the Bobcat

Once again the elusive gobbler beat me, still at least I had some fun, Coffee Bitch and nature at one. There is definitely something to be said for sitting out in the woods first thing in the morning. I am camouflaged from head to toe, with camo gloves and a face veil. Comfortably ensconced under a tree I fancy that as long as I don’t move I am invisible and certainly a small herd of deer agreed as they ambled by with 10 feet of me. Then, just I was starting to relax and feeling one of those exotic eyelid movies coming on I spotted a Bobcat. It was huge, spitting and snarling and all teeth and claws. On reflection it might have been someone’s pet ginger tomcat but it was quite a size I can tell you. He was cautiously prowling through the woods, oblivious to my presence and getting closer all the time. When he got to within 2 feet I threw my hands up and made a dreadful hissing noise. The cat hardly expected the tree to come to life and leapt about 10 feet in the air. It spun around and started windmilling its legs so when it hit the ground it took off like, well a scolded cat I suppose. For my part I hardly expected it to vent its bladder in fear. Oh yes, as it span around in mid air it did a ghastly impression of a Catherine wheel of urea and lavishly soaked me. From bitter, bitter experience I can tell you that the one thing worse than the smell of tomcat urine is the smell of tomcat urine drying in the morning sun. When we all hooked up at the end of another turkey free day the very first thing my hunting chums said was “What is that awful smell?” When I told the story they laughed until they were sick, the heartless bastards. I would like to be able to tell you that I got my revenge as they had to hold their heads out of the window on the drive home. Sadly we were using my truck so now the new car smell has been replaced with the used public bathroom smell.

I don’t mind Mother Nature taking the piss I just wish that she wouldn’t keep the catheter in the icebox.

Fortunately for tomcats everywhere I won’t be hunting next week, as I am off to see FOTL1 and FOTL2 graduate college. FOTL1 has completed her Master’s Degree with a 4.0 GPA and has been accepted into the premiere college for her discipline to study for her doctorate. She has also been given a teaching position so I suppose I will have to start calling her Professor FOTL1. FOTL2 has completed her Batchelors Degree with honors and has been accepted into her chosen college as a graduate student working towards her Masters Degree. As a result of some very astute planning by myself, they both graduate from the same college at the same time so I will not have to waste two weekends pretending to be proud of the little helions.

Now to let you into a little secret. I left school at 16. I only mention this in the hope that you will join me in shoving Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. (to give it, its full title) up our collective bottys.

All together now, one, two, three, PUSH

Coffee and the Party

As I have mentioned before Smalltown is the buckle on the Bible belt. Churches outnumber topless bars by 1000 to 1 and ladies of virtue outnumber ladies of the night by the same ratio. I had no idea how serious things were until I went to the post office to buy some stamps.
"What denomination?" asked the clerk."Oh, good heavens! Have we come to this?" I replied.
"Well, give me 30 Catholic ones, 10 Baptist ones, 20 Lutheran, and 40 Presbyterian."

As you can imagine being a Coffee House we get through a tremendous amount of milk every week. Lately I have noticed the boss staring wistfully at the milk refrigerator and eventually she confessed that she had a secret fantasy to bathe in milk. Ever one to help out I told her that I could do that and would she like it pasteurized. She replied that she would be happy if it came up to her chest.

Well it is Friday and that has to be the best. My gentleman hunters have been in to make the arrangements for tomorrow and once again we shall be pitting our wits against the turkey. Fortunately my main man has twisted his knee. I say fortunately as this means that he doesn’t feel up to climbing the north face of Everest tomorrow, instead we will be hunting on level ground. I tell you, these good ol boys climb like freakin mountain goats and I can also tell you that a shotgun that weighs 10lbs at ground level feels like 200lbs after you have climbed what feels like 2000 feet. So if on Monday you see a blog that starts “Mortals, behold the mighty hunter” you will know that I beat the gobbler. Watch this space.

One more working day until the end of the month and we have not only beaten our previous best but we have shattered the record. Normally I would celebrate with a case of Grolsch and a big ol’ pull of white lightening but I have to be up at 5:00 again tomorrow morning, so we decided to have a party behind the Coffee House for our regulars. Most Smalltownians are pretty reticent when it comes to putting out and we were concerned that the party might not even get off the ground. Fortunately my little nursey girlfriends from the Smalltown hospital came up with a perfect solution. I am sure that you will have heard of Long Island Iced Tea, well with the aid of my little Florence Nightingales we made a big batch of Smalltown Iced Tea. I provided the ice and the tea and they provided the lysergic acid diethylamide and the Psilocybin mushrooms. I tell you this was the party of the year, I am so glad we got a video as I am sure you will agree that some of these Smalltown ladies are pretty damned hot. Of course you have to remember that almost all of them carry a pocket bible and that kinda takes the edge off. I say almost all as DQ was in this week relating a tale of unbounded altruism and at the end I said “Jeez woman you really are a saint” to which she recoiled in horror and said “I ain’t no saint CB”. One sinner out of hundreds, not a great percentage, still hope springs eternal.

OK enjoy the party and I will see you next week when hopefully I will be covering the keyboard with turkey parts

Coffee and the Accident

My Jim Beam induced moment of introspection was rudely curtailed by someone barging into the Coffee House and frantically asking me to call 911 as his wife had fallen over and maybe broken her leg. Suspecting, as one does, the old slip and fall scam I shuffled off to the office to have a leisurely read of our insurance policy after all one cannot be too careful in these matters. As a slight aside I once had a car radio stolen and when I made the insurance claim the premium taker asked me what model the radio was. Of course I replied that I didn’t have a clue. The insurance tosser then informed me that the make of radio would determine what size the check would be. Ah right replied I, I do believe it was a Rolex. Insurance boy replies "Well CB I don’t think that Rolex make radios". Sure they do I retort, It was a clock radio.

So I wandered outside to find the poor lady lying on the sidewalk with a clearly staved in patella (knee cap to you) and a husband flapping around like a headless chicken. As usual there wasn’t much of interest going on in the shop so I thought I might hang around for a while and see what happens. After a while the adrenaline starts to wear off (hers, not mine) and the pain kicks in. I decide to do the decent thing and get her some iced water and an ice pack. She accepts my gifts but studiously ignores the tip jar that I left clearly in sight. After some 15 minutes her moaning and wailing starts to get on my nerves so I offer to walk across the road to the Smalltown hospital. Back in the jolly old UK if you wandered into the ER and told them that someone had fallen over outside, Matron would dispatch a couple of skimpily dressed nursey types and a gurney and everything would be taken care of. Sadly it would appear that in Smalltown (and probably everywhere else in the US) there is no room for initiative in medical care and in consequence much of the ER just stared blankly at me, as if I had wandered in and asked for a Tabasco enema. Of course we know that we can lay the blame firmly at the doorstep of our litigious society and it doesn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to picture Messers Hemmer, Rhoyd, Piles, Sue, Grabbitt and Runne all following the gurney handing out business cards and waiting for a wheel to fall off. The outcome was that the best that the ER could do was to let me use the phone to call emergency services again. The charming dispatcher told me that they had got my call and the ambulance was currently on its way from Brokeback Mountain and would be there within 10 minutes. And here is the point of this blog. Did you notice the definite article? THE ambulance? In the whole of Kissbotty County there is one ambulance? Yet I have seen lots of different ambulances running around but I guess they are reserved for special customers who perhaps have a secret number to call. I might just try dialing 912 to see what happens.

Now one might like to suggest that the Kissbotty Emergency people should save their money and buy another ambulance so that anyone who falls over and breaks a leg doesn’t have to wait 20 minutes for a 100 foot ride to the Smalltown ER. However the Public Safety people are addicted to the Boss’s chicken sandwiches and every month they have a big meeting for which they order 22 Chicken on whole wheat. So if the choice is between spending money on our sandwiches or buying a new ambulance might I respectfully suggest that you tread carefully?

Note to the legal profession in Smalltown. The broken leg woman obviously didn’t make it, so there might be a juicy negligence claim in the making. I know she died because she never came back into the shop to pay for the ice water, ice pack and the jolly Coffee Bitch conversation.

People can be so selfish at times.

Coffee and Hunting

Yes indeedy I actually went huntin’ with my buddies and here is how it went down

CB’s diary

Got up at 5:15, it is dark and cold
Drove miles to the middle of nowhere
Climbed the tallest mountain in Virginia
Nearing the top, heard turkey gobble
Answered with turkey caller using last remaining joule of energy
Hear faint gobble
Hang around for 5 hours
Go home, no breakfast


Turkey’s diary

Wake up at sunrise
Flutter out of tree
Have sex with my hens
Make weird gobble noise to let the ladies know who’s their Daddy
Hear “hunters” dicking around with Walmart turkey call
Move ladies to next county, gobbling as we leave
Breakfast on bugs, berries and nuts.
Plans for tomorrow? Probably more sex and food, what a life.

Actually it turned out to be somewhat addictive and although I can’t believe it myself I am booked to do it all again next Saturday. We pitted our wits against a turkey and the turkey won. I blame it all on television myself.

The Bitch doesn't go hunting

In order to tell this little tale I need to set a scene and explain some cultural differences so bear with me here.

In England we have very few open spaces and no guns so hunting is pretty much a non-existent sport. In addition the champagne socialists have banned fox hunting on the basis that the fox did not get a vote as to whether or not he should be torn apart alive by a pack of dogs. England has neither moose, nor elk nor bears, so all in all hunting is restricted to small birds. If you are fortunate enough to be the friend of a multimillionaire (or indeed a multimillionaire yourself) you might get the opportunity to walk a 1000-acre grouse moor, and here is how your weekend might go.

Friday night, arrive at stately home for a nice leisurely dinner and cocktails. Saturday morning, arise at 9:00 for a spot of breakfast. Actually the full English is a rare treat. Eggs, sausage, bacon, kidneys, black pudding, kedgeree, kippers and so on and on and on. Incidentally for you culture vultures, breakfast is the only meal where the English gentleman serves himself, the butler just stands there, strange but true. Then at around 11.00 everyone piles off to the moor to bag a few grouse, scared up by the beaters. Then a spot of luncheon and we are done.

So back to the Smalltown Coffee House. It turns out that this is the start of Spring gobbler season (turkey to you) and my gentlemen hunters have invited me join them. We are making the arrangements over a coffee and things start to head south faster than Britney’s career. It seems that I have to be sitting under a tree before the sun comes up. Who would have guessed that turkeys spend the night in trees and you have to blow their heads off just as they are getting out of bed. There was to be no cocktails, no black pudding and worst of all no lying in bed until 9:00, in fact the final knife to my heart was that they arranged to collect me at 5:30 Saturday morning. I did, however, have one tiny out. Apparently the boys (who let me tell you are no spring chickens) do not go out in the rain so my instructions were to look out of the window at 5.15 and if it was raining, assume that they would not show. So it came to pass that with trembling fingers I pulled back the drapes to discover that God had answered my prayers and it was indeed hammering down. With a scream of joy I leapt back into the pit, crossed no man’s land and entered enemy territory. Of course I was rebuffed with the usual “Get away from me” but hey, at least I wasn’t hunting.

On reflection perhaps I could have removed my camo and boots before trying it on with the boss but when in Kissbotty……..

Coffee and Sickness

Bonjour, ma petit choux. I am back. I haven’t blogged forever as we got incredibly busy for the longest time and to be quite frank after a hard day of overcharging and shortchanging I never quite fancied writing about it. Then something happened that has not happened for 10 years, I got sick. I got so sick we actually had to shut down. Now I wasn’t exactly at death’s door, but I was sick enough to watch daytime television so it was almost like dying. In a coma like trance I watched a program where obese women with pendulous breasts and no bras, rush to the front of the audience, guess the price of a piece of trailer trash furniture and win a car. It was a triumph of mindless nonsense and is possibly the only program so simple that all the rules are contained in the title. It is called the “Price is Right” and America, I weep for you.

I was also bemused by the advertising, which let me tell you, outnumbered the programming by two to one. Here is a thought, if you are advertising payday loans or title loans or any of those other legal loan shark deals, should you not advertise to working people? You see advertising loans to people who are watching daytime television seems to me to be a recipe for not getting a loan repaid, unless the master plan is not to get repaid but to get your hands on the title to the family car. Still worse than this are the adverts that scream at me. “PAY ATTENTION MORON, PUT KAABOOM DOWN YOUR TOILET AND NEVER CLEAN IT AGAIN, DO IT NOW MORON”. Jesus if I had the strength to get my Magnum 500 I would have shown that bearded twat Billy Mays a thing or two.
Well if daytime TV is a plot to get the malingerers back to work, it worked on my sick ass. I tell you people I would rather be circumcised by a meth addict coming down from a five day high, whilst suffering from a grand mal seizure and wielding a rusty grapefruit knife than watch anymore daytime TV.

Coffee and Angels

We have a customer who is something to do with Bigtown’s Symphony Orchestra. Last year she gave us tickets to the Christmas Pops thingy and recently she gave us tickets to see the Orchestra and Aaron Spelling. I know it sounds a strange combination and indeed it turned out to be a night of disappointments, which seems to be a theme in my life lately.

The festivities started off quite well with the Liberty Bell March by Souza. Sadly for Souza (like he gives a rat’s) no one can listen to this without thinking of Monty Python, which incidentally is pronounced Pie-thun. I only mention this as inevitably when people discover I am English they tell me how much they like Monty Python. Dude, that was 40 years ago, move on, try watching a Bottom DVD at least that is only 20 years old. So at the end of the march the conductor says “And now for something completely different”. How the Boss and I howled. (If two people laugh in the Bigtown auditorium, does it make any sound?). Then he spoiled it all by talking about Tin Pan Alley music, which was apparently a flash in the pan at the outbreak of World War I in 1917. WTF! What are you teaching your kids out here? Where were you in 1914? This is just as bad as that nonsense you people spout about saving my ass in 1943. (BTW you are wrong on that as well, I wasn’t even an ovum in 1943). WWII started in 1939 and we broke the Germans backs in time for you to saunter over and steal all the glory. Oh well let’s not dwell on old history.

So the second half arrived and I eagerly awaited Aaron. I was particularly keen to meet Bosely and Charlie’s Angels as I needed to thank Farrah Fawcett for a very happy experience that involved the 14-year-old Coffee Bitch and that poster. You have no idea how crushed I was to discover that this was not a night to be spent with my lovely angels but instead some huge black guy warbling on about how “I don’t know much, but I know I love yoooooooouuu, and that may be all I need to know”. What a rip.

I tell you people, it is a sad Friday night when the only bulge in the Bitch’s pants is a S&W Air Lite PD351