One of my grandfathers was a farmer; he was born in 1877 and before he farmed a small place in Indiana, he travelled with a threshing crew. Somewhere there is a picture, which I need to scan into the computer, is of him on top of that machine with the crew gathered around it. Strangely enough, he was wearing a fedora.

One of my husband’s grandfathers was a farmer in Cathage, Illinois; he was  born in 1893. I remember him well. Tall, lanky, with a limp and a Will Rodgers look to him, he would come into the kitchen at lunchtime, hang his hat by his wife’s and ask me with a wry grin, “Do you think they’ll fight?” That first lunch, he poured my iced tea and said, “Say when . . . say when . . . say when; finally, I undersood and yelled “When” and he chuckled.

LZP found this picture of them on their wedding day and I’ve posted it once before, but it is worth posting again – Lydia Akers and William A. Vance:

So what got me thinking about farming? Well, it was LZP himself who sent me these photos of some FUI incidents (Farming Under the Influence). He asked this question: What would Grandpa have thought?

Dear, lovable, furry, old Grover has moved to Ohio with Der Bingle. The decision was made when Summer tossed him up into the space formed by two bookcases meeting in a corner. Using a coat hanger, we were able to snag (no pun intended) and slide him up and eventually out. After the first failed attempt, we saw blue fur on the tip of the hanger. It was not a pleasant few minutes. He immediately sought sanctuary in the trunk of the Ohio car with Georgia plates, coming inside under guard only to be seen at the local Urgent Care on the porch where his arm was more firmly secured.

This picture came via phone mail Sunday afternoon and was titled “Grover at Rest”  –  I don’t know but that sounds a little funereal to me so we are calling it Grover Relaxing.

What Summer will do now is unknown . . . but probably worth being concerned about. We advise all Sesame Street buds to avoid the sidewalk out front for a while.

Be afraid; be very afraid. There I was, watching Nicole Kidman in “Australia” when I heard the little notifying ring telling me I had a message. I figured it was Der Bingle sending me a photo of some scene or product he had come across. No, it was Lonzopalooza with a photo of his Halloween costume for this year. Yes, Halloween. Yes, the one in October. The one a few days before Daylight Savings Time ends – remember it is just beginning today. He likes to be prepared.

LZP  is  very, very bright and one of our personal heroes . . . and this Halloween he is going to be a banana. Between now and then we will try to get a better picture . . . I’m sure you will find him appealing.

First the washed out one from the camera in the phone and then the “enhanced” one:

Oh, dear, don’t some people put bananas on their peanut butter foldovers?

That photo below . . . the Gorilla Glue in the make-up bins . . .  I see the point of it now. This morning, Der Bingle had the idea to load up a granddaughter, a grandson, a daughter-in-law and me and go to Fort Wayne Glenbrook Mall in order to try and get the kids looking better.

I have put on nicer clothes and scrubbed myself, (not in that order) and an eveb wearing a nice understated necklace and decent loafers. But the most important thing is the glue . . . to hold myself together on this trip with siblings who cannot stand each other.

Also, after all this time of driving all the time except in California – not counting the trip to the Port when I was totally without anything to do and decided to take an afternoon cruise – it is  somewhat different to be riding in the passenger seat.  Well, for one thing, I can’t  say, “Don’t talk to me, I’m driving.”

I think I should put glue in my pocket.

I have visited an afternoon shower and am sitting here getting myself together as it were. Not yet ambitious enough to get up, I pushed my little ugly but on sale divided container off to the side of my leg. I sat just sraring off into space, thinking about . . . actually, well, nothing. Slowly, I began to realize “Gorilla Glue” was right there with the moisturizers and tweezers and perfume.

A few minutes ago I sat down, after having slaved working to get a loaf of french bread into the breadmaker, and thought I’d see what was on cable TV in terms of movies. I punched the guide and saw something about Tennessee Williams and found the channel. But something was wrong, weirdly wrong. I had grasped the name Tennessee Williams when what was written was Treat Williams and the movie is about pirates capturing a liner where the passengers have been eaten by sea monsters.

Kind of leaves you stunned, doesn’t it?

Fortunately, everyone here at the PBC&R is cultured enough to not throw Diet Cokes at the TV . . .  Or maybe no one was actually drinking anything.

Yes, I believe the chow mein from Wednesday did me in on Thursday – I was pretty much a MSG blob. I would not say that I am any less blobbish today, but perhaps there is more energy in my blobhood today. Summer and I have already had a go round about who is going to go and get her clothes – and I want you to know I sat my sofa. I did not even say, “Your legs are younger than mine.” I just sent the psychic vibes that yes, indeedy, I would let her go through on her threat to go to school naked.

This morning I found an email from Der Bingle about just how much a trillion is. If this were hands on math in first grade, kids would need more than a few colored marbles.

I came across this and thought you would enjoy it:

A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation that yields a sense of the size of the trillion dollars.  It’s one thing to juggle exponents; it’s another to conceptualize how much a trillion really is.

A stack of 4 bills is 0.5 millimeters thick, so ten bills are 1.25 mm thick.  Let’s round down to 1.2 mm for a stack of ten bills.

Therefore, a trillion dollars is ten billion (10 to the 10) $100 dollar bills, corresponding to a stack of bills 1200 km or 740 miles high!  If the bills were $1 bills, there would be10 to the 12 (a trillion) of them, and they’d form a stack 74,000 miles high, or 30% the distance to the Moon!

Suppose the bills were joined end-to-end.  Dollar bills are about 6 inches or 15 cm long, so 10 billion $100 dollar bills would form a belt 1.5 x 106  (1.5 million) km long.  That’s about 900,000 miles long, almost four times the Earth-Moon distance.

And if you string a trillion $1 bills end-to-end, you’d get a belt o’ bills a hundred times longer than that, or about 90 million miles.  You’re past Mars’s orbit and entering the asteroid belt going away from the Sun, and in the other direction, you’ve about reached the Sun!

Finally, finally, I made it back to the mall. I have not been there since one week before Christmas. Why is this? Oh, weather and shingles and weather and shingles. But today I was there and I ate some lunch.

Not here:

Not here:

But here:

And I had a big carton of chow mein because I love chow mein; I didn’t know that I loved chow mein until last year, but now I know that I love chow mein. I love it with a fork.

They had penguins at the fountain and I took a picture with my phone and was going to take more with my camera on the way back, but I forgot and went another way.

And, alas, Yankee Candle did not have a sale.

Yes, yes, I came back here . . . Sydney was here, dontcha know.

I sat today with this present in my hands and watched the light play on the inlay.

When two people were in California, they brought it home to me.