Grab the Lapels

Uncle Ralph’s Carrots: Report #11 🥕

What’s with the carrots?

things that happened

🥕 From Facebook in the group Black People Love Cats Too! by Omar Fin (Feb 19, 2025):
“Remember when I posted about Rudiger (a cat) wanting my bagel a couple months back?
Well today he succeeded in stealing a mini naan right off my plate IN FRONT OF ME and then proceeded to INHALE it. As if I don’t feed this boy enough.
As us West Indian folks say, no broughtupsy.
Come get y’all nephew.”

🥕 I started interpreting in more settings, such as medical, recovery, and social services.

🥕 I attended a workshop during which the presenter discussed why it’s important to have Certified Deaf Interpreters. She shared the picture below, explaining that while the English on the candy bar is grammatically correct, it’s missing the component that lets a person instinctively know that if we call the coating on the candy bar “vegetable fat,” even though it is, no one will buy that product.

🥕 My mom sent me this video called A Normal Day in Australia. I’m especially fond of, “What the feck are you doing?”

🥕 “I need to get up, like my old cat, on my increasingly wobbly legs and see what all there is for me to do.” — Jeanne, at Necromancy Never Pays

photos

Met up for a night and spent time at a Route 66 museum.
My first time being served coffee in a beaker.
Uncle Ralph and my mom
Walking to my car on a sunny day in St. Louis
Quick shot while driving to show Anne @ I’ve Read This what the start of the mountains look like
What kind of school is this??

memes

This one is for Stefanie 🙂
This post is coming later, but I did acknowledge 22nd of February Day 🤣
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Published by Grab the Lapels

I'm a graduate of the MFA fiction writing program at the University of Notre Dame, which inspired me to follow along with trends in teaching, publishing, and reviewing. I also have an MA and BS from Central Michigan University. I used to teach composition, creative writing, and literature in higher education, then did a brief stint at a civic theater, followed by two years at a references desk at a public library. I'm now working toward my ASL Interpreter license.

25 comments

  1. I’ve lived in suburbs with bush nearby where kangaroos would sometimes jump around the streets (I think your situation with deer is pretty much the same, and we’re getting increasing populations of them too).

    Once when I was a kid, I lay on the ground under my bike on the town football ground to stop the magpies getting me. Eventually, some time after sunset, dad come and rescued me.

    But my big question is Where were the spiders?

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    • It does help to think of the kangaroos as being like deer. The magpies, though, sound like a nightmare! I did giggle thinking about you hiding under a bicycle, waiting for your dad to save you. Not sure why there were no spiders, because I know you folks have some honkin’ big ones, and you’re like, “Eh, leave it there, it will kill the even bigger ones,” or something like that.

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  2. The video of life in Australia is a condensed version of things that do happen (I say that having been recently been bombed by a magpie and stopping on the road last weekend for kangaroos to clear!). That said, a koala or wombat in the house is unlikely.

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  3. That video is very funny – but funny because they’ve concatenated into a couple of minutes many of the possibilities that might happen, but some rarely do. However, I love that it makes us all look so brave still living here! You should see the things people do to scare off magpies – particularly cyclists and what they put on their helmets (like big eyes, spikes, and so on). It is scary. The birds aren’t going to kill you and they rarely even touch you, but a bird coming full pelt at you? Not fun. I’ve been known to crouch on the ground flipping my handbag this way and that to ward off a magpie. We regularly had kangaroos in our street and garden in our previous house. One ran into our roller garage door damaging it so that it would work. At least, there’s no other real explanation for what happened. The garage was cream coloured and we reckon the roo was in the road at night (as they often were) and a car drove by scaring it, so it headed for what it thought was an opening only to find it was a door!

    Enjoyed some of the other memes, including the last “wet the drys” one!

    As for your carrots. Great stories there, particularly “no broughtupsy”. I can almost hear it in their accent.

    Do I have a carrot for last week? Yes, I had lunch with my old work colleague (you know, from the silver nitrate police!) We hadn’t caught up for a month because I’ve been away and then she wasn’t free, and it was just SO GREAT. There’s nothing like talking over a meal with a good friend, sitting outside on a fine warm day. Three of us technically lunch weekly, but it doesn’t always happen because two of us are away. The retired live is busy.

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    • Americans DEFINITELY think Australians are super brave. We all assume you’ll be killed at any moment, lol. I’ve seen a variety of methods for keeping away the magpies; however, I was under the impression that they DO attack and actually peck at you? Or does it just look that way on video?

      I loved “no broughtupsy,” too, but Nick was saying he didn’t know what it meant because he couldn’t hear the word in his head. I thought that was interesting.

      Aayyyyyy, the ol’ nitrate crew is back together! How did I not know until the last day or two that you worked with film so much? I always pictured you as a cataloger, sitting at a desk writing in MARC numbers, or whatever you use in Australia.

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      • I’ll keep the brave title though really it’s very safe here!

        Magpies do peck occasionally but in my experience and most people I know they swoop and rarely make contact. They get close but move fast so videos are not reliable indicators. If the person on the bike or whatever keeps moving, chances are they’ve not been touched. If they come off their bike, they might have been touched or they might have just over-balanced from the fear and the surprise.

        I had several different jobs throughout my career and cataloguing was one part of it. Australians do use Marc but we had our own in-house developed system because traditional cataloguing didn’t handle the sorts of things we needed to record in a film archive, including generations of film from negatives on. Each one has a history and a relationship to the other generations.

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  4. So glad my cat of steel was a carrot for you, too!

    I love that photo of what looks like I-55 south out of St. Louis, cut out with the rock cliffs on either side. We spent a lot of time on that highway when I was young, driving back and forth from Cape Girardeau to St. Louis.

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    • Your comment was both worded lovely and made me feel more sturdy myself.

      I’m not sure which freeway it is. I haven’t memorized, like, any of them, but I do have the route memorized, so how weird is that? I can tell you the steps but not the roads. Fun fact: I have the same issue with driving from my house to my hometown.

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  5. OMG this post was awesome. I’ve been away all week but I was so excited to read this, and get my week started off right!

    Firstly, love that Australia video. could you imagine coming home to a cuddly koala in your house? Adorable.

    Secondly, I see those cliffs you took a picture of, thank you. Do they start off as grassy rolling hills too? That’s we have as our foothills here in Alberta, but in Ontario, they don’t turn out as mountains, but it’s called The Canadian shield, and there are lots of little granite cliffs like the ones in that picture.

    Thirdly – From now on I’m calling chocolate cake “Goth Lasanga”

    Fourth – The frog statue?????hahaha

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    • The Australia video is funny because there are three Aussies in the comments who have piped up to let me know this stuff isn’t common, except the magpies and the kangaroos. HA. Also, don’t Koala have something worrisome about them, like chlamydia??

      I’m not sure if the rocks are cliffs or bits of mountain moving slowly up through the surface of the earth or what. The land starts to get hilly, then you see stuff like this, then next thing you know you’re in the mountains.

      I could use some goth lasagna right now, lol

      I saw a sign later for the frog statue school (and that frog was HUGE). It was established in 1969, and now I’m thinking it’s an alternative school for rich hippies’ kids.

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        • I have a few Aussie friends! The Koala chlamydia thing is actually true. They get it the same way that humans do and have the same negative effects, such as blindness, infertility, and death if untreated. I’m not sure how it started, but the guess is through contact with farm stock. Then again, why sheep and cows would have chlamydia, I don’t know. It’s a virus, and viruses be survivin.

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  7. I love that example of the chocolate bar wrapper. In fact, I might do something similar when I am explaining to my students (sigh) that they can’t get AI to write things for them because an AI is not actually capable of thought!

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    • That’s a great idea! I know Nick is adamant that AI can be a tool, but I think the circles you and I travel in tend to tell us all the negative uses of AI, so that’s unfortunate.

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  8. Why don’t we still have sunrooms in restaurants?? I can feel the exact temperature of that picture and it reminds me of going out to lunch with my Nana.

    Love all the Australians in the comments discussing magpies!

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