I couldn’t find the saw I use on branches and maybe that should worry me, but I think I put it “someplace safe”.  So I pulled this little saw I have from behind the sofa; yes, not a typo, it was behind the sofa out here on the porch . . . maybe because we have the Christmas tree out here? Or maybe because I came in the back door and didn’t want to drag it through the house.

Hmmmmm. I’m thinking now. I’m thinking: Could my branch saw be behind a piece of furniture? What was the last thing I sawed with it? Maybe it wasn’t a branch . . . maybe it was a replacement Scrabble letter. No kidding; my granddaughter lost a “u” last year. We found it a couple of months ago, but by now I like the “funky” replacement better.

But never mind all this  – I sawed the shrub branches with my little saw. And now the muscle in my right arm is a tender. I have let the shrubs grow and grow because I liked the wilderness feel, but now they are too big. really too big. I got that idea last year and climbed up in them . . . Climbed up in them?`you ask incredulously. Yes, I said they were really too big. Anyway, I thinned them out, but apparently not enough so today, I attacked again.

This may take some reconstructive surgery.

Yes, Governor, we emailed you and we got an immediate acknowledgment of that email; I believe it indicated our email would be answered. We have not heard from you.

Yes, “That Boy,” my mother is waiting to see what you have to say.

What was it she said four years ago? Oh, yes . . . “If I had known that boy was going to do this*, I wouldn’t have voted for him.” I believe it is election time again.

*the Daylight Savings time thing.

Oh, yeah, we also wrote about you HERE.

I’m telling you straight out – right at the beginning – this is not the kitchen at the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse. A picture of that would probably be mostly of the butter knives we use in spreading the PB . . . and jelly. Maybe some bread knives for when we prepare our Pioneer Special with the loaf sliced by hand and to a thickness specified by the customer. Ah, it seems so odd to call them customers . . . they’re our friends who really just pay for their food and drink and we provide the place to gather. Heck, we don’t care if they brown bag their own PB sandwiches.

I’m off topic. The picture is of the kitchen where the United Brimfield Methodists make their famous beef and noodles for the Apple Festival. I don’t know if there are really words worthy of describing it – that deliciously comforting food. Just being in the place where the noodles and beef come together to make the ambrosia of the Heartland is an honor.

Well, for all I gripe about Indiana – it has given me  beef and noodles and for that, I am so thankful.

This is true: I am not going to stretch it even the tiniest bit; there is no reason to. I will not share the name because I have not asked permission, but I must tell this story because it is about True Spunk, as in True Grit.

Okay, it’s short, so don’t settle in for a long tale:

I know a lady who is 91 who knows another lady who is 94. Because the 91 year old injured her arm, she cannot drive and the 94 year old ferries her about 15 miles and back and forth to see her husband in a nursing home. Actually, it is a forth and back and forth and back set of trips because the driver lived in the same town as the nursing home, but the man’s wife lived 15 miles away. So she would go pick up her friend, take her to the nursing home, bring her back home and then go home herself.

A couple of days ago – in the middle of the forth and back trips, they went out to have a bite to eat. When they were getting back in the car, the 94 year old fell. The people from the restaurant came out and helped her up . . .  “Oh, I’m fine,” she said. She drove home and then returned to her house.

Later that evening, someone called to ask about her and she told them, “Ah, I’m here in bed all cozy with pillows.” Well, she was not. When her son came up in the morning, he discovered she had spent the night sitting on a kitchen chair with her head resting on her walker . . . because she could not walk.

He called the EMS and told her they would be there in 5 minutes. “Oh,” she said, “That is not long enough for me to get ready.” At the hospital, X-rays showed two cracks and a broken bone. She told her son, “Oh, I’ll just be here a day.”

For some reason I believe her.

I imagine she is asking, “Oh, can’t we just have that surgery as an out-patient?”

I can’t tell her name . . . but here is mine: WIMP.

I wrote about The Argyle Sweater last week after my son Quentin mentioned it to me. You can read what I wrote then HERE if you want, but you don’t have to. At any rate, I was looking for the comic online and going to The Argyle Sweater website didn’t do it for me – the same panel comes up, maybe the last one before Scott Hilburn went to official newspaper syndication or perhaps one of his favorites. It’s good; it’s the pinata one. I wanted more.

Now I did find today’s and the previous panels at one newspaper site, but when I checked the online version of the Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, I couldn’t find the comics. Maybe they are there, maybe not – perhaps you need a subscription. However, I did track The Argyle Sweater down at this part of uclick. Now, I don’t know if this link will take you to the panel published on the date you are looking . . . although, I guess I will know tomorrow. I suspect it will change with the date, just not betting my dog on it.

Today’s is great – the type of humor where you drop your head and kind of whimper.

I did notice that the target audience is 18-34. I am MUCH older than that; I just thought you should know.

On second thought, this isn’t the menu; this is the most popular item – the one slice FOLDED peanut butter sandwich. It is our signature offering and actually the identifying factor would be the folded over slice of bread. People specify different types of peanut butter and different kinds of bread, but the whole trick is to  spread the PB (and whatever use you might add – jelly?) on ONE half of a slice of bread and then you fold the bread over.

You do NOT cut it. You FOLD. Cutting would be not so much wrong, as just not right. People tend to look at sandwiches like that and pop “thought balloons” out of their heads. Once someone ordered our special but with the bread cut down the middle and the room was filled with thought balloons, exclaiming, “THAT SANDWICH AIN’T RIGHT!”

The direction of folding is determined by the shape of the bread slice. Usually, your basic sandwich bread folds from top to bottom, but we have some who do fold from side to side. An elongated slice, such as Vienna bread does, on the other hand, fold side to side as a rule.

We have chunky and creamy peanut butter – our house recipe, but some of our regulars bring in their own jars and we put their names on them and line them up on a shelf. Every now and then, someone will come in and pull a piece of bread in a sandwich bag our of his pocket and tell us to use that for his “foldover”.

One day we stuck two slices of bread together with PB in the middle and cut the crust off – kind of a fear factor thing. Anyone to order one AND eat it won a free bottle of vintage Pokagon Soda Pop from our cellar.

Yes, I have noticed that when I look at myself upstairs in the master bath with the sunlight over my head, that I don’t look too bad. Sometimes, I will not look in another mirror for a long time and then I will catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror somewhere else and I am surprised at the dumpy plain person I see. It occurs to me that I cannot conduct my life from that bathroom but the magic is in THERE, not in the other places I go. I ponder having a picture taken of me in that mirror and pasting it on my face. I guess I could start out with first pasting it on a bag and then putting the bag over my head.  I don’t think anyone would take me for a bank robber since I am not a president nor a movie star. But they might take me to the funny farm, which isn’t politically correct to say and yet it falls naturally from my tongue.

Now, “asylum”  – that would probably be real bad to say. Unfortunately, I say it sometimes: “Well, I’ll just pack my bags and go to the asylum.” No, I don’t say that. I say, “You pack your bags and go to the asylum.” Of course, I use asylum so much that no one thinks too much about it being insensitive. Odd though, it’s okay to say you’re seeking political asylum . . . Oh, never mind, I see my mind is all over the place.

A couple of years ago I discovered LemiShine, which is really fortunate because we have 1) very hard water and 2) people living here who open the dishwasher mid-cycle and don’t re-close it. I remembered that we used to run Tang down garbage disposals and in dishwashers and found that now there was a commercial product for that purpose – I think of it as white Tang.

Anyway, a few months ago it disappeared from Wal-Mart shelves and in its place was something else that didn’t work. I went running to the Internet and found other places that sold LemiShine . . . and then a couple of weeks later, it was back on the shelves and I knew there must have been an uprising.

But it scared me and I stay stocked up.

Then, a couple of days ago, I went to the Pioneer Woman’s site that refers to house and garden, wondering if she had a lodge update. I found she did not, but she was touting the wonders of LemiShine. Noooooo! I feared there would be a run on it, that I would be forced to use generic Tang until production caught up with demand.

And I was busy; I couldn’t go right away to replenish. So, today, finally, I went over and first discovered that they didn’t have any more red rubber mulch (made from old tires) – the cads. The LemiShine Shortage fear throbbed stronger in my mind and I went over to the aisle where is is displayed. At first I didn’t see it. But then, there is was – one row  . . . and I took three.

I am worried that this won’t be enough; I feel like General Buck Turgeson in Dr. Strangelove; I  feel myself becoming agitated over a LemiShine Gap.

Dear LemiShine people,

Please don’t forget me and others here in Northern Indiana. Please keep us supplied. See, look: I will link to you many times. LemiShine, LemiShine, LemiShine, LemiShine.

Sincerely,

Your friend, AmeliaJake

Down into the lost world of transcription I go; I hate this task, but it is so helpful; you hear again the actual spoken words and their intonation and that reminds you of the multi-dimensional quality of what they are expressing. But, gosh, it is just a time-consuming task. It is not listening to the recordings that is bad – except when I hear my stumbling voice – but the typing, this pain in the neck typing. Yuck. Okay, I’m going.

UPDATE: done, done . . . Doing a little happy dance. Woo Hoo