Picture Sunday

Hello, end of weekenders, and welcome to another round of Picture Sunday.

My weekend began on Friday, when - get ready for it, regular readers - it was Lemonade Day in my hometown of B'field. As you who read me know, this is an annual occurrence in our little town, created to honor the longtime tradition (it began in the '40s) of the town handing out free lemonade to its citizens when the thermometer hits 90 degrees.

One part of this celebration is the Window Decorating Contest, where businesses in the town decorate their windows in lemony ways, and they are judged by a local weatherman, the same local weatherman who judges every year, the same local weatherman who stops by our window, looks, lingers, laughs - and then gives us - nothing.

Yes, we are the persona non grata of the Window Decorating Contest, even being told that as good as our windows are, there's just not enough going on on them. Now, we are a business with three slim windows. We're not a store with large expanses of window space and floor space to put things. We're handicapped from the start, and so we use our imagination for the WDC.

The first year we did the (8/6/06) Lemon Art Gallery. Then we did the (8/14/07) Evolution of Lemonade. We used creativity, we used imagination. This year we just decided to suck up. Our theme was "What To Do in B'field When It's 90 Degrees." We took pictures of places around town, the Dairy Queen, the Farmer's Market, the local pool, the golf course, the field where the farm team Orioles play, and the like. We captioned them, "Take a Dip," "Cool Off With Ice Cream," etc, then in the middle window we had "Drink Lemonade," and had pictures of townspeople drinking lemonade.






















We lost again.

(By the way, this picture was taken today, after our window had endured two torrential thunderstorms. The window borders didn't always look like that.)

Now, the winner, I have no quarrel with. Although it was a store and therefore had more space, it really was a lovely window. But the second place finisher was a flower shop that had lemons and yellow flowers in the window. OK. If you're a flower shop and you don't have yellow flowers, you need to shut down. And the third place finisher - well, there's a story there. They won the contest two years ago by putting some construction paper lemons in their window. They came in second last year - with the same display. And this year? Well, I drove by there after work to see if they had the same display again, but instead, I'll be damned if I could find a single lemon decoration in their window. They had nothing! They had a Christmas tree in front of their store that had some construction paper lemons on it.

So we at TheCompanyIWorkFor officially hate Lemonade Days with every fiber of our being, and though we said we wouldn't do it this year but got roped into it, we have sworn a sacred pact that next year our windows will be bare. Or maybe I'll just stand in the window all day in yellow with a raised middle finger.

Another facet of Lemonade Day is the Wacky Lemon Hat Contest. I'd never been so interested in that, to be honest, but this year I got to thinking how funny it would be if I entered the WLHC. With Sherman. I set about making him a hat, still half-thinking I wouldn't have the nerve to enter him, but when the time came I plucked up my courage and headed to the WLHC. With Sherman and his hat.

























It was sponsored by a local dress shop in town. There were five entrants including me. They gave out first, second, and third prizes. Of the five entrants, Sherman got - squat. Didn't even place. The winner was a straw hat with some flowers pasted on it and a straw coming out of the top.

And so I'll also never enter the WLHC again, although I will say that every entrant got something, something handed to us in a bag by the store owner (who is a very nice lady and didn't judge). Mine turned out to be a really pretty bracelet, so I guess I didn't come away from Lemonade Day empty-handed. Sherman's hat also got displayed in the store's window, where it will remain this week. (It's circled, lightly, on the lemonade stand. And that's the winning window, too.)




















I still hate Lemonade Day, though.

Friday night I headed straight to B'burg after work to hang out with Mr M for a while. When I was there he gave me a present. A present for being a part of his clarinet recital. It was a great and fancy-ass new tripod.

























Look at that, if you dare. All this time I've been using a cheap and tiny desktop tripod, the head of which moves every time I press the shutter on my camera. This is like entering a whole new Tripod World. Thanks, Mr M!

Saturday I didn't do much of anything, and it was glorious.

And today I worked just about all damn day on the Comfy Chair Cinema movie before heading out to have dinner at Granny's. The Comfy Chair Cinema movie, while time-consuming and brain-taxing, was a lot of fun, and I really hope you'll head over to the Cinema and give it a look.

And since I was at Granny's anyway, how about a little Granny love with the recipe du jour. Yep, no joke food here, from the "Always Good!" file at cardland, will you please say hello to Dinner at Granny's.






















Yep, there we have a big hat hen (sorry, when The Nephew was just a toddler, he used to always end the "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe" rhyme with "Big Hat Hen"), some garlic mashed potatoes, a lovely ear of corn, and some green beans. And no, we generally don't have two kinds of potatoes with every meal at Granny's, but the green beans were given to her and they already had potatoes in them. There was also, of course, biscuits and gravy, but I didn't partake.

Happy week.

Betland's Olympic Update:
* Please, again, go and enjoy "Rubber Stamp Fun," this week's Comfy Chair Cinema movie. Just click right here.