This is going to take some tricky maneuvers on my part – don’t know if I can pull it off. I have to figure out if Wednesday night or Thursday night will be Trash Night. I have to think what would be the best way share what is in LZP’s backyard . . . remember he had his tomatoes stolen. I’m going to do it this way – right in your face.

We don’t know if he inflates it or not; I asked Der Bingle and he replied, “I don’t know; I don’t know; I don’t know.”

October 16th is LZP’s birthday and I’ve decided one day is not enough; we need an LZP season. Oh, now, this is worth looking-forward to . . . for me.
Crazy laugh here. Imagine it. It’s more devious that way.

Oh, my gosh, the nightmare. No slimy monsters, no bad guys chasing me with weapons, no deaths of anyone – dear or not dear.

There was a bad guy . . . and it was me. I made one mistake after another and my life was on its way down the drain – probably into a sewer into which people had released pythons. The time frame was a jumble; somehow my last home was a slanting trailer that was the second floor of an old apartment building with a brick courtyard.

Not one bit of this seeped into that part of my sleeping brain that often hints “dream”.

But, hey, I think my cold is better.

I actually spent a second thinking about all my brain cells draining out of my nose with summer cold mucous. But, of course, if they all left, I wouldn’t be thinking at all. I feel, though, as if they all have dripped out; I feel like an ox-moron (and, no, that is not a typo).

I have no motivation – not even for forbidden fruits.

Blah. With sniffs and coughs.

The icemaker in the refrigerator has not kept up with demand and I am almost iceless. “Ruth, don’t take our ice to town.” I’m that pathetic: random phrases that come close to nonsense.

LZP arranged to have a box come to my front door. It’s journey started from here:

Included was this card:

It sat above the special space ship packaging:

Freed to celebrate in our pasture, the guys looked like this:

Then I looked among their provisions and found all this:

I just ate a cow pie and must say it is much better than the kind you step in. Sorry, one sentence too many.
So . . .
Thank you, thank you , thank you

I don’t know what the exact high today was in Fort Wayne today – or here – for that matter. Somewhere above 95 degrees with a knock you backwards heat index. Oh, yeah. At one point the thermometer in my car said the outside temperature was 102 on Lima Road.

Usually, I look at weather.com; usually, I have some inkling of the trend. But not this time.  So when I left this morning with two passengers for an extended trip including two appointments and a super important stop for skinny jeans, I did not have HOT in mind.

Later, it would have me in body.

But since I did not know it was getting in the high 90’s, I assumed the cooler nights had made me more sensitive to days in the high 70’s and low 80’s. Then I didn’t believe my car’s thermometer . . . Oh, it’s been on asphalt all day. I watched for bank signs and then grew much hotter with each one that posted 98+ numbers.

That’s me – had I not known the true temperature, I would have said it was pretty warm today; now I think I almost melted in a sweltering, energy-leaching  jungle.

And it’s going to be that way tomorrow! It will be a good day to stay inside and look for the hat. ACK! I had no more than typed that when I saw a notification of a comment from Albug about that very subject:

Maybe you had it on, then when you saw the mower problem you took it off to scratch your head.  When you were inspired to use the tree and the crow bar your head got too big to put the hat on and you left it behind the fence.  Then the dandelions carried it off to their hideout to use as ransom next spring to save their minions .

Time to call Dandelion Busters.

It was an accident! Maybe I can still find it. It has to be here.
You see, last Sunday, Der Bingle flew to San Diego and left his Predator hat and his John’s Grocery (An Iowa tradition * – – from his brother LZP) hat in my keeping.
I couldn’t find my Land’s End hat one day, so I wore his John’s cap and NOW I CAN’T FIND IT.
I will look in every nook and corner . . .

John’s Grocery used to be Dirty John’s, but it’s still cool.

I did not do much today, because yesterday I worked on straightening up the house for 8 straight hours. I was possessed. This morning I was tired.
Tonight when I spoke with Quentin, I mentioned I had cleaned house and he said he thought I had meant “cleaned house” as in killing a few people.
Strange how people get the oddest perceptions about me . . .

Today was a mowing day because yesterday wasn’t. There’s a story behind that sentence, but it’s not a great one, so I’ll let it go.
However, today’s story is a little over the edge even for me, the Amazing AmeliaJake, (not to be confused with the Amazing Lovable Furry Old Grover).
I concentrated on pushing Mother’s voice out of my head today, but didn’t succeed, so I had to go ahead and knowingly break the rule about not mowing too fast. It’s bad for the mower and the grass and low class, dontcha know? But I had limited time and the grass wasn’t thick and it worked well for the east section.
I guess I got a little cocky.
I kept mowing fast on the main lawn (yard) and was even thinking of slowing down when I saw a slim but long branch had fallen and decided to mow up on side of it and down the other.
The mower casing got just a bit too close to the branch and it hit it; normally, the branch would have been pushed away. That didn’t happen this time because I would find out an auxiliary branchlet had embedded itself in the ground like an anchor.
Everything stopped. I moved the branch, started the engine and flicked the blade switch.
OH, THE SCREECHING NOISE . . .
I looked closely and saw the branch had bent the steel frame way back and the blade PUNCHED THROUGH IT.
Hey, I stayed cool; I started the mower and drove around behind a fence in back. That’s when I found out it was really, realy bent back; no tugging was going to help. So I got a pry bar. Well, that didn’t work. I drove the mower up beside a forked tree and put the pry bar in the fork and pulled hard. Nothing.
Then, I thought, “Well, gee, what if I turn the mower on and put it in reverse?” Okay, it didn’t work the first time, but it worked after some pry bar adjustment.
I felt guilty and if I had left it at that, I probably would have been okay. I made the mistake of thinking how nifty it was of me to use the pry bar and the forked tree.
That’s when a walnut dropped off the tree right onto my head. It was the only nut that fell. No wind, not even a slight breeze . . . just PLOP!
I’m just glad Mother didn’t have a coconut tree handy.

Because I liked The Tender Bar so very much, I looked it up at the Kindle Store to see  what other people who read it had also purchased.

And I found this title: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption.

I coughed up the money for this book because I could not turn away from it. I knew it would be well-written and I couldn’t help but feel I owed it to the man who was the subject of Laura Hillenbrand’s interest.
Hillenbrand wrote Seabiscuit: An American Legend and says when she was compiling the material for that book, kept hearing stories of a man named Louie. She looked him up, listened to his story and wrote about him.
It seems to be this is going to be the story of another champion and I imagine I will eventually be looking around for a secondhand print copy because it will be special to me.
You can read her summary of the book HERE, about half-way now the page. Below is an excerpt from Publishers Weekly that nutshells everything.

The young Italian-American from Torrance, Calif., was expected to be the first to run a four-minute mile. After an astonishing but losing race at the 1936 Olympics, Louie was hoping for gold in the 1940 games. But war ended those dreams forever. In May 1943 his B-24 crashed into the Pacific. After a record-breaking 47 days adrift on a shark-encircled life raft with his pal and pilot, Russell Allen “Phil” Phillips, they were captured by the Japanese. In the “theater of cruelty” that was the Japanese POW camp network, Louie landed in the cruelest theaters of all: Omori and Naoetsu, under the control of Corp. Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a pathologically brutal sadist (called the Bird by camp inmates) who never killed his victims outright–his pleasure came from their slow, unending torment.

I was just checking on the headlines at cnn.com. Here is the official page that came up.

Okay, everything’s jake. Now look at the bottom of that first page and notice the line-up of news videos.

Look at the one about dermatologists; underneath in tiny writing is “advertisement”. You probably didn’t notice it; I didn’t.
Click on that segment and you see this official-looking CNN page – supposedly on health.

Like a tiny wrinkle, ADVERTISEMENT is at the very top.
Now I know all this is labelled, by the letter of the law, is okay . . . but, really, it ain’t jake.