Picture Sunday

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

Well, what a weekend it's been for me. Besides being on Granny & Paw duty, it was to be "Fun on the Outside" weekend here at the Poderosa. See, once a year I trim my hedges and plant flowers in the pots that came with the house. I kind of wish those pots hadn't come with the house, because then I wouldn't feel obligated to plant flowers in them. But it gets me out, and I get all happy when they grow, and all upset when they don't, like the one last year that was pulled out by some unknown varmit two days after I planted it.

Anyway, my hedges had gotten shaggy over the last year.





















So I knew it was time to trim. I borrowed my dad's electric hedge clippers. I've been doing that the past couple or three years, because until then I'd done it with regular manual clippers and suffered heat stroke and rubber arms for the rest of the night. It's tough with manual clippers.

And so I began. It was going smoothly except the plug kept coming out of the unit and I'd have to stop and re-plug. I got two hedges trimmed...



















...and the plug came out again. I re-plugged, picked up the clippers and started back in on it, and yeeeeooooooow! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, and don't ask me how because I have no idea, I had a finger somewhere in the clipper blades. At first it just felt like it had ripped a fingernail. I looked down and saw no blood, and I was a little hazy because I was just standing there thinking, "Those things completely tore the top of the finger off my work glove." It took a second to realize I probably needed to take the glove off, and when I did, blood was streaming out of the top of my finger. I ran inside to the sink and began rinsing, but the damn thing wouldn't stop bleeding long enough for me to see the wound, and I started to get the sinking feeling that I may well have torn the end of my finger off.

I rinsed a while, then got a cloth and wrapped my finger and went outside, applied pressure, and held it up in the air. (I remember the doctor telling my mom that once when she cut her finger, minus the sitting outside part.) I bled through the cloth very quickly, and started contemplating another trip to the ER, but gave it a try with more rinsing and a second cloth. After about an hour it finally began to trail off, so I rinsed it in peroxide and bandaged it up tightly, and it didn't seem to be bleeding out of the bandage, so I figured I could skip the hospital.

However, late into the evening, I realized that the last time I had a tetanus shot was sometime during the Clinton administration. And I started to worry.

I spend a short time the next morning looking for clinics that were open on Saturday to keep me out of the ER, but it was not to be, and so off I went. When I got there I was the only person in the waiting area. I waited in the waiting area for two hours. When they finally called me there were about 20 other people in there waiting. I got my shot, a new bandage, and some take-home antiseptic, all from nurses, and I'm completely convinced there was not a doctor in the ER on Saturday. Our local hospital is famous for that.

Anyway, I'm OK. My finger hurts when it touches something, so typing's a little dicey, and the cut is deep but I will survive. However, I spent the rest of the weekend in a decidedly hinky state realizing that because I just wasn't paying much attention that I could have cut off my finger and never been able to play the clarinet again.

So after getting home from the ER, the rest of my Saturday was spent doing absolutely nothing.

Today I had to take my dad to the grocery, and he offered to finish up the hedges for me. However, I'm a lucky soul, and someone had already taken care of that for me.




















He's a wonder. While that was going on, I'd also gone to get my flowers, and, well, you know Sherman - he can't keep away from gardening of any kind.
























An interesting thing, though. I tried something new this year. Anyone out there watch "Dirty Jobs?" Remember the episode where Mike Rowe went and worked with the poo pot makers? There was a company that made pots out of poo and plant sets were put in them, so you don't have to de-pot a plant when you put it in the ground. You just set the whole thing in the soil. Well, I don't know if I got the original poo pots Mike worked with, but I went that route.




















Oh. There's Paw in the background. OK, he did help Peabody out a little bit on the hedges. Those clippers got pretty heavy after a while.

And now, a recipe du jour. Hey! It's summer, did you know that? I did! And what does summer say to you? Well, if you didn't answer, "Canteloupe and Jello," then something's seriously wrong with you. Tonight's recipe is for those who really want to impress at those backyard barbecues. And it's apparently low-cal as well! From the "Weight Control" file in cardland, will you please say hello to the incredibly classy Emerald Canteloupe.




















Well, I just had to look and see how this is made. I mean, it defies gravity! Apparently you peel and cut your cantaloupes in half. Then you mix up the greenest Jello you can find, and chill it with some, and I quote, "pineapple tidbits." You let that harden - well, you do it you're you, if you read my blog, then you know I can't make Jello, and therefore it will never harden - then you cut the halves in half and roll the outside out of the canteloupe with some crunched up rye crisp crumbs with sugar and cinnamon. And serve, taking in the oohs and ahhs of assembled guests.

Happy week.

Betland's Olympic Update:
* I feel quite odd that on the day BILLY MAYS passed, I finally got out my OxiClean to see if it would work on ink. See, I seemed to have written on myself at work this week, and thought I'd use my shirt as a try-out before I used the stuff on Sherman. And it works! My boy is next. And bye, Mr Mays. You got on my nerves like nobody's business, but I sure didn't want you to die.