The Slice: Everything starts with the socks

If you want to have a decent social life in Spokane, you need to have presentable socks.

At least at this time of year.

Showing up at someone’s home for a gathering and seeing that others have removed their shoes just inside the front door can trigger panic if your socks look like something from the L’il Abner collection.

In the matter of what to call your significant other: “Call them your friend,” wrote Karen Meade. “As in ‘This is my friend.’ ”

Not sure that provides quite enough information to satisfy some to whom one might say that …

If you want to have a decent social life in Spokane, you need to have presentable socks.

At least at this time of year.

Showing up at someone’s home for a gathering and seeing that others have removed their shoes just inside the front door can trigger panic if your socks look like something from the L’il Abner collection.

In the matter of what to call your significant other: “Call them your friend,” wrote Karen Meade. “As in ‘This is my friend.’ ”

Not sure that provides quite enough information to satisfy some to whom one might say that. But at least it’s congenial.

Sweet kitchen errors: “I have a friend, who shall remain unnamed (but it wasn’t me!), who wondered why cornstarch didn’t thicken her gravy like it should have, even when she kept adding more,” wrote Dana Freeborn. “It turned out she’d grabbed the powdered sugar by mistake.”

Following up on last Friday’s Slice: Ken Yuhasz came up with a slogan promoting the Lilac City as a marriage-material proving ground.

“Spokane: What’s good for Henry Kaiser is good for your daughter.”

Family alliteration: “I grew up in a large family and we all had names starting with the letter M,” wrote Molly Arnzen of Coeur d’Alene. “My parents were Maynard and Mariel. They named their children Mauna, Morris, Molly, Mark, Mary Cay, Mitchell, Melissa, Marne and Martin.

“Mom says that they did not start off planning to name us all with M names, and when they got to Mary Cay they thought about naming her Catherine but decided they couldn’t change the naming pattern at that point.

“We grew up in a Catholic farming community in Idaho where large families were the norm. Everyone knew which Arnzen family we came from because of our first names.

“Mom never called us by the right name, but at least whatever she called us started with the same mmmmm sound.”

Today’s Slice question: Who around here, when giving directions to his or her home, has to provide the greatest number of incremental “Then take a left” or “Then go half a mile” instructions?

Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. At least one Slice reader doesn’t regard the actors in the Northern Quest Casino commercials as a plausible couple.