Thought For Food

In case you haven’t noticed by now, I have a tendency to vanish occasionally.  Don’t despair!  I shall return.  This may or may not be a good thing.  I leave it up to you to decide.  I have my own doubts about that on occasion: Particularly when I wake up in the morning, stumble into the “library”, look into the mirror and scream because there is some strange elderly lady looking back at me from my eyes. 

If sleeping is supposed to be so darn good for me how come I always wake up looking like I’m just coming down off of a thirty day drunk?

Sometimes I wish I had been born rich instead of so damned good looking. lucky. with such a hot body. 

Sometimes I wish I had been born rich.

You know you live in the south if your heart gets blessed at least fifteen times a day.  

You definitely know you live in the south if someone can bless your heart in such a way that it makes you feel like smacking them in the mouth.  No one can be more ruthlessly kind than southern women.  A southern woman will invite you to dine in her home precisely because she hates you with a passion that exceeds her love of fried foods.  She will then be so drippingly kind and considerate of you that it will make your skin crawl. 

I stay home most of the time.  Luckily however, I am also rarely invited into the homes of southern women.  In the immortal words of Martha Stewart (a Yankee woman with a southern soul if ever there was one)…..That’s a good thing!

You know you live in a small, small, small southern town if every business on Main Street is closed on Wednesday but open on Saturday.  (The explanation for this is so that folks that work for a living can do their business on Saturday but the employees can still have two days off each week.  I know, right?)

The Buddha is an exceptionally accomplished driver for a young man of twelve years.  Living out here in the boonies is good for that.  He can drive all over the hill because it’s our property.  He will have all the wild oats out of his system by the time he gets his license and will be a safe responsible driver.  That’s the lie I’m telling myself.  Now shush up and don’t bust my bubble by telling me the truth. 

Princess Bella had us standing around with our mouths open like fly traps the other day when she sprang her latest hidden talent on us.  A gentlemen on some game show, probably Jeopardy, said the alphabet backwards.  As soon as he started doing it, she started doing it.  As soon as she started doing it I shushed her.  Then it soaked into my brain that she was actually doing it right.  I told her to do it again.  She did.  Turns out that the little jasper can spell anything, and I mean anything at all, backwards.  If she can spell it forwards, she can spell it backwards just as well.  And she can spell like a demon.  I’m in the process of teaching her to spell supercalifragilisticexpealidocious.  I can’t waitto hear her spell that one backwards!  Incidentally, I spelled that phonetically, so if I spelled it wrong, please let me know!  I’d rather hear it from you than have her find out that I taught it to her wrong, then have her roll her eyes at me.  You know what I mean?  I already went through that with the word “ablutions”.  I spelled it “abloutions”.  Lord, you would have thought I spit on the flag or something!  Cripes!

She has just been accepted into the Academically and Intellectually Gifted class at school.  She’s stoked.  Me too.  The kid’s got more intelligence in her pinkie than I have in my whole body.  Learning is one of her favorite hobbies!  One day when we were at the counseling center she was reading The Count of Monte Cristo to me.  She’s like having my own personal audio books.  Gradually all of the adults gravitated to the side of the waiting room we were on and sat down listening to her read.  She was so engrossed in the book that she didn’t notice them.  They thought she was a midget, not a seven year old kid.  I’m really jonesing for her to start on The Iliad and The Odyssey.  I think they’ll hold her interest. 

When we asked her how she learned to spell things backwards she told us that she just always knew it!  Duh!  I guess that was just a dumb question, huh?

Rocky is having a hard time adjusting to the far FAR more relaxed pace of country living.  She’s used to being able to hop in her car and be anywhere to do anything in fifteen minutes tops.  Here, it takes more than fifteen minutes to get to town!  Where she lived in Florida, it never got dark, it never shut down, it was never quiet, and there were always, always, always people in your line of sight.  Here, after the sun sets, it is totally dark until the sun comes back up again.  The stores and fast food joints shut down by eleven, and there is no one to see but us.  While in my own humble opinion we ain’t nuttin to throw rocks at, it is JUST the four of us here.  If she wants to see people, she has to do some traveling. 

Gee Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore!

We have some births coming up.  Two of the dogs are pregnant.  SugarPlum is significantly pregnant.  She’s eating for twenty now.  Poor thing can’t even squat to pee without her belly dragging the ground.  DeeDee is also pregnant.  I’m not sure she knows what caused that, or what exactly that is.  She seems mystified by the changes her body is going through.  She is fat and clumsy.  She keeps trying to jump up onto the back of the chair I’m sitting in, then she can’t quite make it and she slips off.  Then she will stand there looking around like, “How the hell did I get here?  I’m supposed to be up there!”  It’s funny as hell and kinda pitiful at the same time.  I called her a tub of lard the other day and I swear she knew what it meant.  She got this hurt look on her face and lay down on the couch, then put both paws over her eyes.  I felt so bad I gave her people food to comfort her.  Now every time I turn around she is hiding her face and looking pitiful.  I think I got played. 

I have this little kink about birds.  I love em!  So I have all these bird feeders outside where I can watch the birds eat.  Did you know that birds are hogs?  Those little buggers can knock back some bird seed!  Last Saturday all the neighborhood kids were at our house playing.  We jammed with Guitar Hero.  His Highness The Buddha kicked our asses.  We played card games.  We played board games.  They ate me out of house and home like a plague of locusts.  They played on the swing-set out back.  Then they got pissy.  You know how kids are when they’ve been together for too long? 

I decided to make them be useful.  I got out the big ass bag of bird seed and let them help me refill all of the bird feeders.  Here’s a little math question for you!  Red has six kids at her house.  Each kid has two hands each.  Red has one big ass bag of bird seed.  Each kid puts two hands into the bag of birdseed in order to refill the bird feeders.  How much bird seed gets into the feeders?  Answer: Only fifty percent of the birdseed removed from the bag will actually make it to the feeders.  The balance will be smashed into someones face, dumped down someones back, tossed into someones hair, fed to the dogs, and tossed around on the ground for the birds to eat. 

So, this week every-time I look out the window all of my feeders are hanging around sans birds and the birds are on the ground munching on the seed the kids spilled.  WTF?  It’s a clear cut case of nature over nurture!  When the seed on the ground is gone they’ll go back to the feeders!  But holy crap the birds are beautiful!  I have blue ones, yellow ones, red ones, orange ones, and every combination in between.  My very favorite, most beloved non-hummingbird bird is the indigo bunting.  It is awesome!  It’s like those cars with the paint that changes colors.  It’s feathers change colors with every move it makes.  Google it.  The pictures are gorgeous. 

Which reminds me, I need to go to the Dollar store and pick up some after Christmas tinsel on sale and hang it up for the crows.  They are my totem animal.  And just like me, they are captivated by shiny objects.  I figure the tinsel is harmless and they will like it for building nests.  You know, just a lil bling bling for the crib. 

I’m planning on planting a small veggie garden in straw-bales this year.  It’s something new.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  And because we’re in a drought, I have to figure out a way to water the bales so that they aren’t so wasteful of water.  This water waste is a major downfall of the straw-bale system.  I have an idea.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  I’m planning on putting out tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, summer squash, and some gourds just for fun.  I already have a grape vine.  And of course the plum tree out front and a peach tree out back. 

I might have to start another blog on my veggies and fruits.  I’ll be busy with them.  I’m going to dry a lot of them.  String beans!  They are very easy to make into leather britches!  You take string beans after you have pulled them off the vine, wash and dry them, then take a needle and thread.  Make it a long, double thread just like you were going to sew something with it.  Then one by one you poke the needle through the string beans, in the middle of each one.  You leave enough string at the top to tie them to whatever you’re going to hang them from.  Hang them in a cool dry place until dry.  Then store in an airtight container until you are ready to use them. 

When you want to cook them, take down a string of leather britches, cut the knot off the bottom of the string, and pull the beans off.  Rinse well.  Soak in a bowl of cool water for about an hour.  Then place in a pot, cover with water and cook until tender.  Season to taste. 

Okay, now I’m hungry and it’s the middle of the night!  Sheesh!  Hmm, middle of the night and I’m still up.  I’m still up and on the computer and thinking about eating.  Could this have anything to do with the fact that I look like the bride of Frankenstein when I wake up in the morning?  Just another one of those questions that nag me in the middle of the night like: Why do tornadoes always touch down in trailer parks?  And who is the braille for at the drive through teller machine at the bank?  And is rehab really just for quitters?  And why don’t people eat turkey eggs?  You could get a whole damn pan of scrambled eggs with just three of those babies I bet!  And why don’t we grow wheat in the dividers of the interstates?

And last but certainly not least, now that I’m back, don’t you wish I had stayed away just a teensy bit longer?