Picture Sunday

Hello, Sunday nighters.

I came home from Mr M's today only to find strange things afoot in the impatience pots. Of my four pots, one, the white ones on the right, were fine and just as pretty as always. The top two, the pink ones, were both majorly wilted, wilted as in "in need of water badly." The white ones on the left, however, were majorly wilted, wilted as in "hep me, hep me, Lawdy I'm a-dyin'." I mean, it's hard to describe - they looked like someone had beaten them down with a broom. Now, I know I have some weird ass things going on here, number one of which is the fact that passersby seem to love to throw their trash in my yard, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to beat my flowers with a broom. We may have some goofballs in town, but I don't think it goes all the way to plant battery.

Anyway, I gave them all a healthy drink of water first thing when I got out of the car, even the petunias, whom I've grown to hate and kind of wish would die and leave me alone. But still, I can't kill them, that wouldn't be nice.

I may have found something to help fight the fact that I'm not enjoying playing the clarinet anymore. For the past two weeks now, four of us have been meeting to play clarinet quartets, Bob and Roger, very nice guys from R'noke, and Mr M and myself. And save for a song here and a song there, I've been playing bass clarinet. Mr M has one. I'd not played till a couple of days before the quartet gathered for the first time, and though I'm still way much a beginner, I'm having a really good time honking out those bass rhythms and learning to hold a big albatross of an instrument.

Which kind of brings us to our first picture. For some reason (probably done as part of his "touchy feely" class), Mr M had a sheet of stickers lying around in his kitchen, each sticker having a descriptive emotion on it. They ran the gamut. After the first clarinet session Saturday night, I very aptly chose "CRITICIZED." Sunday, I decided to go ahead and pick a sticker before we even started playing music.




Bob noticed right when he walked in that I was standing there with a "Shamed" sticker on my forehead. Roger either didn't notice or was too much of a gentleman to say anything about it.

The next picture has something of a story attached. On the road out to Mr M's, one may sometimes see different members of the animal kingdom. Sometimes one sees cows, sometimes, horses. Today I went out on a cow-finding mission, and by gum, succeeded.

I pulled off onto the side of the road, and walked as close to the fence as I could get. There was one white cow there, looking right at me. I said to him, as I would, "Hello there! I'm gonna take your picture!" Well when I said that, every white cow in the field came up and crowded around. It was like, "Take my picture!" "No, take my picture!" Those cows loved me!

After snapping one picture, dammit, my batteries went out. There's a little convenience store just down the road, so I zipped down there, got some new ones, and came back. Well, wouldn't you know, those bastards were gone under a shade tree at the complete other end of the field. There I was, standing like a complete idiot saying, "Ttch! Ttch! Come here, cows!" Like they actually would. However, one white cow kept looking at me, even from way over there under the tree. He still liked me. But from afar.

Boy, cows sure are fickle. Anyway, here they are before they turned on me.



OK. Anyone hungry?

With deference to my fickle friends above, we'll not be doing a beef dish tonight. Sorry, pig-lovers. But this one's a beauty, a dish any self-respecting pig would gladly give his life to become - Ham a la King!



Really, now. What could be better than some ham with a milky sauce that looks incredibly like human vomit, served, no less with beet salad, peas and carrots, and potato chips!!!! Let's be honest here, did anyone get potato chips for dinner with an otherwise hot meal? That's about as good as the combination we used to get in school lunches. You know the ones, tacos and green beans, and hot dogs and corn.... Ham, gravy, and tater chips. And coffee. I'd need coffee too. (The serving suggestion says "orange ice and cookies," but I don't see them anywhere. After looking at that ham and thinking about beet salad, the phtotographer probably took it and ran.)

Beet salad indeed. Some beet balls on a piece of iceberg lettuce.

Betland's Olympic Update:
* The US men's basketball team got beat today by Puerto Rico. haHAAAAAA! Basketball-playin', tattoo-wearin', smug-ass bastard thugs. Hope they don't get a medal.
* I've found my favorite Olympic name. A German swimmer named Heiko Hell. What a great name. "I'm Hell." "Oh, I'm sure you're not that bad...."