He/She is ...

Please add to this list via emails to hirschwrites@sbcglobal.net


not the brightest lightbulb in the box
not the brightest crayon in the box
not the brightest bulb on the porch.
not the brightest bulb in the chandelier
not the brightest penny in the bunch
not the brightest balloon in the bunch

not the sharpest pencil in the box
not the sharpest tool in the shed
not the sharpest crayon in the box
not the sharpest razor in the pack

not the ripest fruit on the vine
not the fastest gun in the west
not the one thinking at warp speed
not the highest card in the deck

a few bricks shy of a load.
not playing with a full deck
one crayon short of a full set
a little low on wattage
His/her elevator doesn't go all the way to the top floor
All her puppies don't bark.
a few screws short of a hardware store.
a few peas short of a casserole.
The gates are down and the lights are flashing, but the train isn't coming.
couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel.
a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
His/her antenna doesn't pick up all the channels.
A nice person, but the oars don’t reach the water

Some odd/mixed ones
not the brightest shelf on the knife.
not the brightest tool in the shed

Restore

These are some notes regarding iPhones and mine in particular. It is not a rant. When I bought it, I had a Spring phone and the helpful guys at Best Buy who sold me the iPhone plugged the two phones together and transferred my phone directory from one to the other. I have a very large directory, as in over 100 numbers.

Very soon, I learned that contacts within iPhone are synced with your Mac computer using MobileMe. And the file structure of Address Book on a Mac is different than the file structure of Sprint. Our son took my entire Sprint directory after I had cleaned it up a bit and put it into the format for Address Book and I imported it all. After a few syncs, my Contacts within the iPhone looked like Address Book on my Mac.

But I noticed some odd things. First, when I tried to use a specific ringtone on numbers that had either a different ringtone on my Sprint phone or were just the default ringtone, I could not change them, even though the Contacts file showed they were changed. Second, every once in a while the phone would show a name calling in that was how it had been in Sprint but was not shown that way either in Contacts or Address Book.

What tilted it all over the edge was my abandoning Eudora and going to Mac’s Mail program. This meant importing all my address/email, etc. information from Eudora into Address Book. That’s a whole other story. Suffice it to say that after a couple of days cleaning up the files, all was good to go and seemed to be syncing just fine with my iPhone.

I awakened one morning a few days later to find that my Contacts on the iPhone now had (1) all, and I mean all, my old Sprint information, and (2) duplicates and triplicates of any Address Book card that was a business.

A call to the iPhone tech line solved the problems. Over the next 45 minutes, the technician had me go into iTunes and hit “Restore” for my iPhone. This wipes out everything. Everything. Firmware, software, individual files, applications, etc. Then we went through the process of building it all back in. We had some problems with getting the MobileMe to sync the iPhone and had to add and delete the MobileMe account a couple of times to make it work.

After it was all done, I had to go into each of the programs that had things like having to log in and input all the data needed.

The final thing, I found, was the next morning when my phone showed it had no service and had a picture telling me to plug it into my computer and iTunes. Seems like the first time it was turned on after being turned off from the restore that it needed to be authenticated again.

So, if you get an iPhone, do not let the seller brain suck numbers from your old phone to it.

Snake Stories

Yesterday, my younger sister and I had lunch. She lives in Florida and also owns and rents the house where our parents lived a couple of blocks away. She told me that she had seen a bunch of black snakes around that house over the past few months. Of course, she didn’t disturb them since they were harmless and also eat any rodents they can find. She even told me of the day she went over to that house and opened the garage door, leaned down to pick up what looked like a piece of bungee cord, and discovered it was a dead black snake.

A few days ago, Marian was cleaning out part of the garage. She came across some metal stakes in a bag and left them for me. When I saw them, I knew they went with a roll of netting that we use to cover newly seeded grass areas. I left the bag on the garage steps until this afternoon.

The roll of netting is on top of my tack room in our barn. I lowered the set of attic stairs that is the only way up and ascended. When I got to the top, there was a dead black snake. Yep. It was probably three feet or more long when alive. And it hadn’t died that long ago.

First, I haven’t seen a snake around here (although I expect they’re in our pastures) for a couple of years. So, here’s this dead black snake I see the day after my sister has told me of her finding one.

Second, and this is the most curious to me, how did the snake get there? The tack room exterior is smooth metal. The walls around it are smooth metal. Did it somehow crawl up a drainpipe and come in on the roof through a vent? Guess we’ll never know until I see another one trying it again.

So far this year:

• Salamander in the dog’s water bowl in our barn, which is nowhere near any body of water.
• Dead black snake one story off the ground with no visible means of getting there.

Wonder what’s next.