Free It's Always Darkest Before the Fridge Door Opens: Enjoying the Fruits of Middle Age by Phil Callaway, Martha O. Bolton Page A

to
improve, and adversity is the challenger.
John Wooden
    I thank God for my handicaps for, through them, I have found
myself, my work, and my God.
Helen Keller
    1 Complicated by the fact that the NBA playoffs were on.

Ten Lessons Learned in the Kitchen
    1. When showing your house to a potential buyer, avoid cooking sauerkraut, fish, eggs, or brussels sprouts.
    2. If left to themselves, cats will not make a kitchen any cleaner.
    3. If left to themselves, children will not, either.
    4. When it comes to hot dogs, the less known about the preparation, the better.
    5. Leftovers will sometimes be leftover. Don’t let that stop you from disguising them in something else.
    6. Any casserole with the word surprise in the title (e.g., Tuna Surprise, Seafood Surprise, Church Potluck Surprise, or Surprise, Surprise) should be approached with caution. 1
    7. When adding liver pâté to any dish, less is always better.
    8. Limburger cheese will never hear the words, ‘‘Hmmm . . . what smells so good in the kitchen?’’
    9. Your shirt is not a potholder. (A lesson learned the hard way by Martha’s sister.)
    10. And finally, always remember to make meals small enough to finish, big enough to share.
    I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. To reach the port . . . we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it— but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
    1 If you’re at a potluck and you’d really like to try it, though, simply watch carefully who brought it and see if their children partake.

In-Flight Misery
    If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
Charles Lindbergh
    I have found out there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you
like people or hate them than to travel with them.
Mark Twain
    If you’ve flown anywhere lately, you know what a challenge air travel has become. If you’re running late getting to the airport, double that frustration. In most major cities, they advise you to get to the airport at least two hours in advance of your flight departure. We believe Los Angeles recommends two weeks. If your business requires you to do a lot of traveling, as does ours (it keeps us ahead of audiences wanting their money back), you know all too well that in many cases, once you board the plane, your troubles have just begun. But since this is a book about recapturing joy, we won’t spend a lot of time on the negatives of air travel. Comedian after comedian has already amply tackled this topic.
    Instead, what we want to do is provide you with a list of Ten New Ways to Look at Air Travel. Drawing from the truth that life is 3 percent what happens to you and 97 precent what you do with it, we are convinced that your air travel experiences will change if you can change how you look at them. You’ve got to open your mind and realize that maybe the airlines aren’t out to make your life miserable just for the fun of it. That’s part of it, certainly, but there may be plenty of other underlying reasons why they do what they do. Our inconvenience is a small price to pay for the rewards we will reap from looking at our next flight in the following new ways.
    Ten New Ways to Look at Air Travel
    1. Moving sidewalks.
    Have you ever been walking on an airport moving sidewalk and found yourself wondering if you were moving all that much faster than the guy with the broken leg, pulling his Samsonite behind him, while balancing a latte with his teeth? Then, when he actually pulled ahead of you, did you start asking yourself why you even got on the moving sidewalk in the first place, but now you’re trapped and can’t do a thing about it?
    The problem isn’t the sidewalk, it’s your focus. Instead of getting upset at the airlines for tricking you into stepping onto the moving sidewalk that doesn’t seem to move you any faster than the slowest passenger strolling along beside you, look at it from the