more saturday

I'm sure because I write here so often it seems as if I have nothing to do. Ummm, that's not true. It's a nice distraction from more productive endeavors like doing dishes and cleaning.

I was thinking about the menu for tomorrow. Here it is:

Appetizers~
Chili cheese dip
Shrimp

Smoked pork butt sandwiches
Cowboy beans
Cole slaw
Chips
Melon and berries

Peanut buster parfait dessert
Puppy chow

The meat was cooked yesterday so only has to be heated tomorrow. I'm making the beans, the fruit tray, and the dessert. Easy. We're hoping for nice weather. Happy birthday to Regis.

We came inside to a less stimulating environment to watch the Boston Pops and their fireworks which you can do with fewer exploding noises. Much to our chagrin, they are playing country music. Country music. I like most kinds of music except that whiny country crap and of course, rap. Regis says this is what happens when they move the Boston Pops from PBS to ABC. Sure enough, we went back to PBS and there was the 1812 Overture.

On to the next celebration.

highlights of the parade

It's been a peculiar 4th of July. We took jackets and a huge umbrella to the parade and needed all of it. The people who sold cold drinks and freezies didn't do so well but there was a great crowd in spite of the rain.

We saw the usual DFL politicians: Kathy Sheran, Terry Morrow, Tim Walz and lots of people holding signs and passing out stickers. No Al Franken or his kid this year but they're probably busy moving to new digs. The Republicans came a few units later and they had one miserable looking guy in a pickup pulling a float. That's it. What's up with that? The Sarah Palin news probably has them all in a dither.

There was a non-English speaking family in front of us by the end of the parade. The little kids were darling and sure got in the spirit of the candy tossing!

We stopped at Bob's for a while after I had a nap to warm up and re-charge. Nice to visit with people there.

Regis and I came home to sit on the patio. We had to pull our chairs under the tree to keep dry as it keeps sprinkling. (And the neighbor kid is playing loud rap music on some outdoor speakers.) We're getting like my dad: we sit outside every minute we can in any kind of weather. We like to watch people go by and we like to watch the birds.

We're going to cook a steak and a piece of halibut on the grill for dinner. And we're going to attempt to stay awake for the fireworks.

Enjoy the slideshow! Be sure to read the captions.

Happy 4th of July!

Safe and happy 4th of July! We're heading to the parade early and will stop at the park on our way home. I'll post parade and party pictures sometime tomorrow.

Friday evening update

Busy day.

Pork butts on the grill all day. I had to be responsible for the charcoal while Regis went car shopping with Reg and Amber. They bought a pretty silver Honda Accord. I think we're going to make a deal on an Accord Monday. This will be my car to drive but I'm not too interested in most of the details. I don't care about cruise control but I wanted a seat heater. It has the former but not the latter.

Kathy came and helped me clean today. I'm a pretty worthless cleaner because I get distracted. She bossed me around (in a good way) and scrubbed my kitchen floor on her hands and knees. I paid her extra for that, believe me.

We went to Patrick's for dinner. Nice time...bad bench. Made my legs numb.

We sat outside this evening even though it rained ever so lightly from time to time. A few fireworks in the neighborhood that made the dog very nervous. I don't get the attraction to fireworks myself. I like them on television when you don't hear the sound of exploding.

Happy almost 4th of July. Be careful.

short list of cars

The Honda Fit is off the short list of cars. I think it's too small and the cup holder thing is so weird. One drove past our house last night and it was a really ugly color.

I just found something interesting on the internet. I've lost between the weight of a newborn calf and a two-month old horse. Man. That's funny. And scary.

We invited Bob and Emily for dinner tonight so Regis is cooking ribs and sweet corn. A true summer meal. I hope it's warm enough to be outside.

Regis helped Tom build an arbor on the back side of his garage. They finished yesterday and last night Regis had a dream that is so funny and weird that I won't even write about it here. You'll have to ask sometime when you see us.

garden photos

Here are some garden photos that I took tonight. It was a cool day but Regis and I loyally donned sweatshirts and cooked on the grill. We had two orioles come to the grape jelly so we were rewarded for our efforts.

Hey, we finally have a senator! Looks like the governor signed the certificate and it's over. We're going to look for Franken's kid at the 4th of July parade.

Enjoy the garden. Jill, do you recognize the big metal daisy?

ten cup holders

Regis and I are looking for a new car. We sort of like the VW, but we worry that one day the electronics will just flame out and we'll be left on the side of the road. We're looking at a Honda Fit which ranks really high in all the things that matter to men most of which are in consumer reports and do not include size. It comes in red and that's all I care about. One thing is very curious about this tiny car: it has ten cup holders. Ten cup holders. Ten people wouldn't fit in this car much less ten people with their drinks. I would be surprised if five people would fit in this car. Maybe that's why they call it the Fit...nobody fits. Hahahaha.

I advised Regis to not let me make any decisions about cars as I can't be trusted. As I said, I care about the color...and the radio a little. The other stuff not so much. It's a lot of money for something to just drive around in. Those necessities of life should be free: cars and toilet paper.

Here's an interesting newsflash. I checked our cell phone bill online today since it's due on the 9th and found, much to my chagrin and amazement that it was double and then some what it usually is. More investigation led me to the conclusion that Peter had committed what they call overages in text messages. I called Alltel to see if we could get unlimited text messages going back to the date of this apparent change in his love life. Don't tell him I said that as he would keel over of mortification.

That all makes a good story but the better one is, the customer service person asked me, did the owner of the 4864 number meant to sign up for Premier Text Messaging. I said I didn't know what that was. It's the one you always see on tv, she said. Hmmm. The plot thickens. I ask Regis and he flips a wig and calls Alltel. Here's where you have to pay attention.

Apparently, a THIRD PARTY VENDOR attached itself to his phone and allowed Alltel to charge him ten bucks a month for the last six months for some service he has never used and didn't even know he had. I pay the bill online and as long as it's in the ballpark, I don't examine it too closely. This seems like a real load of BS to me. Alltel has to know this company is doing this because Alltel generates the bill. What the hell. The CS person said yes, many people were upset about it. She refunded our 60 bucks but I'm writing to the Attorney General. I have experience with that sort of thing. Stories for another day.

Calling cell phone companies generally makes me weep and that's why I avoid it. They talk too fast like the old grifters. I don't like going into their stores either. The store gives me the willies.

So, there you have it. The end of another day.

wizards

My friends, Bob Bengtson and Mike Hazard are truly wizards of words and images. This is one of their latest video poems.

sunday in pictures

Johann, former neighbor and son of my former teaching partner, Peter, came by to visit today with his girlfriend Georgia. We miss his family down the street and it was very good to see him.


I have lots of pictures of the garden but we're over at Bob and Em's keeping care of Alex (as Ella said) while the rest of the family attends a Moondogs game. So I'll have to post the garden pictures later. Wait. They're on my facebook page. Ah, it's too much technology to keep track of in my muddled brain. I just added the last three words to that sentence to avoid ending it with a preposition.

Our garden is beautiful this year, in its usual random way. I moved some perennials today...a hosta here, a cone flower there. Some things end up in the back and get no attention. I have an astilbe that rarely gets watered and has only managed to hang on for dear life the past few years. I'm going to move it into a more prominent spot tomorrow.

The cannoli count is now 40! They pop through the ground and grow several inches a day. It looks like our tobacco crop.

I made the menu and grocery list for the week. That's a job with two holidays (4th of July and Regis' birthday) and a dinner for Bob and Em. I've been encouraging Peter to eat at home more as part of an austerity program and we like to fire up the grill in the afternoon so it's more like fun than work.

I'm going to play with Sir Alex His Babiness. Regis brought the camera but forgot the card so we won't have evidence of this part of Sunday.

Hey, that cat video in the Youtube segment below is a hoot.

good, sunny morning!

friday night tuna on the grill

It was a lazy Friday afternoon and evening. I did a little housecleaning (damn little) and a little shopping and a little sitting in a lawn chair. Two boys here for brats on the grill. I had a tuna steak marinated in a thai sauce. Delicious.

I went to Mankato this morning for a meeting. As I was turning onto Adams from Highway 22, there was a clean-cut guy standing there, as if waiting for a bus. He was wearing surgical scrubs and carrying a battered brief case and a big chunk of rusty metal. Now, what's up with that? It's puzzled me all day.

I visited the bargain table at B&N again today. Bought another Jeffrey Archer book.

Regis is watching a boxing match. Eeeeeishhhh. That is a brutal sport. I'm outta here.

The weather forecast is for storms tomorrow. That will keep me out of the garden. Don't know if that's good or bad.

brief update

A good time was had by all at the Legion.

Regis and I sat on the patio until 9:00 tonight. That's about 5 hours past sunset in the dead of winter. Imagine that.

One of my neighbors is blasting Michael Jackson music out over the area tonight. Oh please.

I feel like my nerves are sticking outside my body today. Two neighbors mowing lawns with big and loud lawn mowers. One shrill barking dog. This is why I don't keep dangerous weapons in the house. Ha! Actually that's the title of a poem by Billy Collins but I think he used the word gun. I should live in the country.

I'm on my way to bed and I don't have a book to read having finished False Impression by Jeffrey Archer. It's a suspense book which is outside my zone of comfort but it was so good I finished it in three days. He's a good writer.

Good night.

dollar burgers and waiting for my mousse to dry

I went to the pulse and worked out with Rachel. That girl can put you through your paces. I sweat more (in a good way) than I have in my life. I always avoided things that produced sweat and now, honestly, I can see it drip from my forehead. She tried to convince me that I won't get big muscles from lifting weights. I laughed and said I haven't spent 10 seconds worrying about that...ever.

We're going to the Legion down town for dollar burgers, which I can't eat, and dollar beers, which I won't drink. It's going to be a happening, though, and that appeals to me on a hot summer afternoon.

More later...

cannolis

My friend, Ann, gave me a dog food bag full of canna lily bulbs. Regis was intrigued by them but wasn't familiar with the name so he started calling them cannolis with which he has great familiarity. Cannoli is an Italian pastry rolled around a tube and deep fried before being stuffed with a sweet ricotta cheese mixture. The cannas kind of look like cannoli when they first come out of the ground...rolled up like, you know. We planted about 30 of them in front of the west window and covered them with mulch. About three days later, we noticed a pattern of burrows going from bulb to bulb in a criss-cross fashion. I thought they had been consumed by moles or pocket gophers or chipmunks of which I have seen many darting around the garden. Today we counted eight cannas, or cannolis, maybe four to five inches high. So either the rodents only ate a few or didn't eat enough of any of them to keep them from growing. Pictures of the cannolis in a month.

beef brisket

Regis made the weekly trip to the HyVee this morning, then spent the rest of the day smoking a beef brisket. He made his own dry rub and put that on last night. The meat is wonderful. That red ring you see around the outside is from the smoke.

It's really hot here, like in the 90s, but not so bad that you can't sit on the patio and enjoy the birds and the breeze. The nice thing about slow smoking is that you can sit and do nothing but still feel like you've being productive.

I got a new pair of shoes in the mail today. I like the New Balance 845s and have already trashed one pair. I bought another pair about a month ago but they were a tiny bit tight when I walked on the treadmill. Now I can alternate and only squeeze my feet every other day. Betty, did you know you left your black shoes at The Pulse? Speaking of shoes.

P.S. I can't eat that beef brisket. I had one taste but then moved on to chicken. The beef is in tiny serving size packages, vacuum sealed in the freezer.

party like a rock star

We had a party for Father's Day yesterday but we called it patriarch's day in honor of the patriarch's in attendance. It turned out to be a beautiful day, one of the few in the last week. A good time was had by all and the food was great. Remember the chicken sauces.

Today, we're back to gloom and humidity. I planted a few hostas and some impatiens in the garden this morning, then Regis took me to Mankato to shop for pants. I bought a pair of pants without an elastic waist. They have a zipper and a button. Ta da!

I gave Regis a Tom Tom gps unit for a combination Father's Day and anniversary present. Tomorrow is our tenth anniversary so I thought it deserved special treatment. We don't go very many places but he set it up and we used it to go to Mankato. Not like we don't know the way. There is a colored drawing of the road, with a little blue VW motoring down the highway and some woman inside narrates the trip. I don't really understand how all this happens, you know. Regis tries to explain to me that it 1. does not interface, so 2. everything is inside the unit. What? All the maps and the woman are inside the machine. The drawings include driveways and side roads...and probably a cat if it would sit still long enough. It's a mystery, like why planes fly and why birds legs don't freeze off in the winter.

Well, sunday night. Time for a little psychosis.

I read...

that Robert Louis Stevenson said: "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor." Interesting and worth thinking about some more in terms of all the things we work for and think are important in our lives.

Baby Belle, of This Goat's Life, died yesterday afternoon. Not sure what will happen to the blog. I'll miss it if they decide to stop.

Regis has a baseball game on the television. I like the sound of baseball. It sounds like summer and it's a gentle noise unlike football which sounds aggressive. This from a real sports fan.

I'm getting ready to move toward bed and a book. I'm reading one (Digging to America) that isn't as satisfying as the last one (So Brave, Young, and Handsome). Ah, well. They can't all be that good.

a dream...read at your own risk

Regis is famous for his bizarre dreams. He had one a week ago that involved a catastrophe of some kind that meant we would not have access to food and people were encouraged to eat their pets. So, barbecue king that he is, he cooked and carved up Bert, our Jack Russell terrier who has been gone (as in dead) for a couple years. Bert's disposition being what it was, nobody was inclined to eat him. We didn't want to eat our other pet who tends to have a sweeter personality so Kramer was allowed to hang around the yard with his fat lizard friend. See the picture. I told you it was weird.

I cleaned out the back porch today. I'm so glad I have good enough standards for cleaning. I just don't like to spend my life scouring dirt and sweeping cobwebs. Who cares really.

Regis and I went to the cooking store this afternoon and bought a couple little silicone basting brushes and some squirt bottles for our sauces. See? I'd much rather spend time dinging around with basting brushes and sauces than cleaning anything. People in some places live in houses with dirt floors. My doctor doesn't believe in anti-bacterial anything so she supports my slovenly notions.

When our current dog passes, we're going to replace the floors in our house. I'm thinking of something in a nice stainless steel with a big drain in the middle.

treating our kids equally

I just read over the post about asking Peter to pick up a dead mouse. A couple nights before, we asked Regis to pick up dog barf under the table. So, Tiffany and Bob, next time you're over, we might have something disgusting for you to pick up...just in the interest of fairness.

P.S. I did a search for images of dead mouse, but decided I couldn't do it. Here is a live mouse by way of illustration. The one in the garage was deader and not nearly as cute.

sauced

Regis and I spent some time in the kitchen this afternoon making sauces for the chicken legs we're cooking Saturday night in celebration of Patriarch's Day. As you can see, we made a thai barbecue, a regular barbecue, and a teriyaki. Aren't they pretty? We also cleaned the house, and I used the word clean loosely. Neither of us have much patience for it but at least we're not as bad as that woman who had squirrels in her living room.

More severe weather tonight but we're ready for it this time. I told Peter to be prepared in case we stumble down there in the dark.

I've been filling the tray feeder up every day. The grackles get in there and root around like pigs. They're all the same sunflower seeds, can't they see that? It's like they're looking for one special seed. They shake their heads from side to side and the seeds go flying. They've also had a loud and screechy baby with them who wants to be fed constantly.

We had tuna steaks and stuffed mushrooms on the grill for dinner. I love sitting out there when the garden is gorgeous. The daylilies are starting to bloom and it's like a jungle with all the birds.

Peter carried all the winter flotsam and jetsam from the porch to the basement. I don't know why it accumulates so badly over the winter: crock pots, blankets, empty boxes, bags of towels, bags of holiday decorations, boxes of junk I've picked up in previous cleaning missions. Ugh. We need less crap.

I told Regis that one day I'm going to take down every curtain in this house and throw them in the trash. Most of them have been up for ten years, or close to it. I'm tired of the Miss Havisham look.


We're going outside to see how long we can tolerate the humidity. The AC is on in the house so we can always beat a hasty retreat.