Duh No. 11: Toasted!

I thought I read the instructions carefully for our new toaster oven. I set the Function knob to “Toast,” turned the Toast/Timer knob to past 10 and back to the desired darkness setting. The only problem was that the bread took sooo long to toast.

Something had to be wrong. Waiting for more than 15 minutes for toast seemed idiotic. Today I sat right down next to the toaster oven. I stuck my face in its control area. Duh. Why is the word “Toast” on the temperature knob? I didn’t think that knob would have anything to do with making toast. Hmmm. Sure enough, I set that knob to “Toast,” put in my bread, put on the kitchen timer for four minutes. I thought I’d better see how the bread was doing. The bread was darned near black when I went to retrieve it after four minutes. But I was happy. Toasting will never be quite the same.

Duh No. 12: Words in the Margin

A couple of weeks ago I noticed the words on my Blog (where these essays appear with pictures) went over the right side margin when I viewed my completed blogs. I assumed the problem was with Blogspot. I re-formatted my blogs to move the words back within the margin. Today I forgot to re-format. My son emailed me that he could not read all the words because many were outside of the margin.

Wait a minute, I thought – duh. Margins? Hmmm.  That sounds like something related to a word document. I Googled advice: “How to change margins in documents.” The answer was there: Click on “Format” and “”Document,” set the margins for default. It worked. Somehow my default margins had changed. Now my Blogs are readable to all.

Duh No. 13: Tortillas Oh, My!

As you may recall, I wrote about my new tortilla craze two weeks ago. This week, in my excitement to prepare a tortilla sandwich lunch for Berta, our Hispanic housekeeper, and me, I quickly asked her, “Berta, do you know about tortillas?” Duh! Berta and I had a good laugh about that!

Mr. Ebsen may be contacted at robertebsen@hotmail.com