Mixed Metaphor Fun

The other morning my wife was talking about a small company that was having some pains dealing with a recent change. She said that the change had "thrown them a wrench".

I'd never heard that before but it sounded vaguely familiar. I thought about it for a few minutes and eventually figured out that it came from a combination of two rather common metaphors. Can you guess what two metaphors she mixed?

Answer to come later after I find some web site about metaphors to link to.

Update 12/3/2012

"Thrown for a loop" and "Throw a wrench in the works"

!!Go Big Red!!

This has been an interesting year for me as a college basketball fan. My favorite team, my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) has been struggling a bit this year and is currently enjoying a winning streak in the NIT tournament. The NIT is sometimes known as the loser's tournament. This is a big disappointment to me and all those other fans who saw us win it all last year and figure that a trip to the NCAA tournament is a birthright. Humbling.

But maybe this year I was pulling for the wrong alma mater. My other alma mater, where I went to graduate school, is doing surprisingly well. Amazingly well, in fact. Cornell University will play Kentucky tonight, in Syracuse, in the first round of the sweet sixteen of the NCAA tournament. This is the first time in 30 years that an Ivy League team has made it this far. And historically it's always been Princeton or Penn, that made it. If memory serves me correctly, Princeton knocked off UNC to get there back in '79.

Anyhow, for the first time this season, I'll be watching and pulling for my other alma mater as they take on the highly favored Kentucky Wildcats. Maybe it will turn out to be a better basketball season that I thought.

!!Go Big Red!!

Update: It didn't happen (62-45). Cornell started good and played them respectable but it didn't happen. Oh well, back to the NIT.

Bad Idea

My wife recently noticed a blue bird flitting around the back yard and decided that maybe we should encourage their presence. So while out shopping one day she bought a little bird house to encourage the blue birds to take up residence in our yard. We looked around in the back yard and thought we found a pretty good place for the house, right on the end of the swing set. No one swings on the swing set anymore and it looked like a pretty good height. We often see birds perched there, including the occasional hawk. So I pulled out the ladder and attached the bird house to the end of the swing set with the included screws.

About a week later, well, you can see what happened. Lucy, the fat one that rarely climbs anything anymore, had made her way up to scratch the edge of her cheek on the bird house. I didn't catch the picture, but yesterday she had her paw in the hole rooting around inside. As she pulled her paw out, a little bird flew out and away, barely missing mealtime.


You can see one of the omnipresent deer in the bottom right corner looking on as I snapped the picture. Here's a closer picture so you can actually tell that Lucy is a cat.


Note: add to to-do list, move bird house!

Singin'

My daughter and another young girl sang a duet at church last Sunday. I thought it sounded pretty good. You can hear and see it here. Hit the arrow to start.