Is the Solo Company still making straws for sale in grocery stores? I haven’t seen then at Wal-Mart or Kroger’s lately. I have had to buy a different brand for a few months now and my family and I have decided these other straws are “sucky” – yes, they suck at sucking.

You can do it, put them in a beverage and pull it up into your mouth by suction, but the flow doesn’t seem optimal. We have noticed that the newer straws seem lighter and narrower. But what were we to do? Then a couple of days ago, we found a package of Solo straws behind something in a cabinet. And, yes, the Solo model is more rigid and wider. You can, and I will post a picture, slide one of the newer straws into a Solo straw quite easily. I suppose with the proper use of duct tape you could create a long pipeline by alternating Solo and the other (let’s call them Yucky) straws.

This morning, while using a Yucky straw, I had trouble getting a steady flow of Diet Coke to feed into the bottom of a straw nestled in ice. Other times, the liquid gives the feeling of being “stuck” in the straw – as if the little molecules are fighting to make it into the mainstream flow.

While I was in the Google pool, I found a youtube video of some little girls using Solo Straws, obviously being filmed by a mother.

What would these girls do without Solo Straws??

I went into Rural King and they were having a special on little animals, so we figured we needed a couple more. Here’s a little buffalo and a little black bear – I couldn’t justify the expense of the big ones – so we have Little Buff and Little Bear, or, for those in the know, Little Four. And, of course, they are watching over me.

How many times have you heard someone say, “I’ll see you in a fortnight.” Probably not too often, maybe not at all. I want to revive it; I want to have people use it again; I want to say it myself, often and with ease. I want it to just fall off of people’s tongues. I don’t know why, especially. I just like it.

Fortnight; fortnight; fortnight.

So I’m going to use it  . . . maybe. Well, with people I know – really well – and who know I am trying to revive its usage.

I suppose a lot of people are born not fitting into the holes the world issues very well. Some do a good job of whittling themselves to fit; others carve out the hole to fit them. I think for the most part I have just chosen holes in Jello that stretch this way and that but don’t provide a good foundation. I have always thought I wanted to be like others – with a neat house and a nicely presented dinner table. That would have been nice for my family, I know it. But I never did it. Not that I didn’t love them. It was just . . . frankly, I don’t know. It was, for lack of any other way to put it, it was just AmeliaJake.

Now is the time, in writings that express ideas like this, that it is kind of expected for the person doing the expressing to decide it hasn’t been so bad, that the oddness has perhaps been a blessing, that if their peg and hole matched better they wouldn’t be so delightfully unique.

Well, that’s one way to live with it and it’s tempting to think that way. . . but I don’t think it’s so. I wish I had been wise enough to compromise a little –  to realize that some of my quirks were luxuries that embarrassed and caused those I love discomfort.

I regret that. I hope they know that . . . because I have loved them more than life itself. And, maybe, I can come up with a new, improved AmeliaJake. I sure hope so.

Bed bugs = high CF (Creep Factor) Dog =  high WCF (Warm, Cuddly Feelings)

Aha! Read this story Garfield. Just like Lassie barking to save Timmy from the well, Radar is saving people from what first got attention as the scourge of New York Hotels a couple of years ago – Bed Bugs. Smaller than a poppy seed? No problem for Radar.

But, if he sniffs too hard, does he get bed bugs up his nose?

I want to thank the AJ contributor in Georgia for bringing this brave lad to my attention.

If you want to learn more about bb’s, go to this site and if you want to see cuddly puppies, try The Daily Puppy.

I stole a picture from the site:

A definite chill in the air this morning and we have a fire in the den and that means warm and toasty feet and the comforting smell of wood smoke – not so much inside but out by the door when you come in from taking her nibs to school.

I decided to bite the bullet and carry an armload of wood down to the basement and start a fire there, let it freshen up the air and lift spirits for vacuuming and picking up. In fact, I have talked myself into taking a shower down there and getting dressed in front of the fireplace – but first I have to talk others into bringing down more wood. Maybe I should carry a piece of firewood with me as I beseech them to go out to the woodpile.

I did not get to go all the way back to those days when I freely exercised in my experiment last night; the phone rang and it was Glenda my cousin from down around Covington. We are coordinating my mother’s and my Memorial Day trip to the cemetery. Maybe this year we will stay overnight with Glenda. We have been going down and back in one day – Mother driving down and me driving home, with her riding like a crash dummy waiting for impact.

Last year I took a picture of the back of the truck we followed on one of the  little two lane state roads that Mother insists on taking. Lots of towns to go through that way: Goshen, Warsaw, Rochester, Logansport, Frankfort. We catch the interstate long enough to go past Crawfordsville and then exit onto the 41 to head to  Kingman. I remember my father said when he was a boy sometimes his father would take him out to watch the men build that road.

But I am rambling; right now the sun is cheery and so is the fire and I need to get clean . . . and get more firewood down to the basement.

About 20 minutes until prime time and I don’t know what I want to do: hunker  down with a book, grab a puzzle, get down on the floor and do some sit-ups, surf the Internet for interesting places, stick a DVD in the machine or make myself throw away one bag of annoying knick-knacks. Did an exercise thing sneak in there? I think it did.

There was a time when I did jumping jacks a lot; at the drop of a hat I would whip off 50 or more. I just wanted to do them, had this urge to do them. Now, I know I should be active, but I am not.  Has my brain’s need for action changed because of chemical changes? Don’t know. Maybe it is age – don’t know that either.

So this is an experiment I’m going to try: Close my eyes and work back a few decades . . . feel like now is then in my mind . . . and see what I feel the urge to do.

Thinking of the Shakespeare rewriting led me to recall the days I would find Henry V in the in the VCR, set to the St. Crispin’s Day Speech. I liked that speech too, a lot.

The kids in Cameron’s English Lit class are studying Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet to be specific – and the teacher has broken the class up into twos and threes to read scenes. Or, you can rewrite the scene. Cameron is doing that because his scene has Capulet, the nurse and Juliet. He changed the nurse into a male servant, but, as he says, “I couldn’t do anything about Juliet.”

He has worked very, very hard on this venture, turning our dining room into the setting for the scene – I am to film it.

Since he re-wrote the scene somewhat already he decided to move the action to Vienna and to a more recent time. Then he told me he thought he would include the “Winter of Our Discontent” speech from Richard III and have Juliet speak it to end the scene. He likes that scene, it seems. I said I thought it would be better to just go watch the movie again.

Personally, I would have had Juliet say, “I want to elope . . . someone’s kingdom for a horse.”

I don’t know why I got up at four, other than because I woke up and thought it was Monday and I couldn’t dread it any longer, I might as well jump into it. I think there is something not quite right about that logic, but I’m not going to delve into it any further, other to say that I am certain I had the intestinal fortitude to pull the covers over my head and dread it some more.

I got up; I did some work on the computer and then I got a Diet Coke and a half a peanut butter sandwich. I put the DC in a glass with ice, even though it was already cold and then, because I felt an overwhelming need for sugar, I put in a few ounces of actual Coke. Then I worked a little more on the computer.

I have now been up four hours and I would really like to nap – because my eyes are tired and because it is a gray sky out there. It is also damp and chilly. Oh, what would be the word for that? Do you remember the incredibly hard time Billy Crystal had trying to sum up hot and humid and moist for the book he was writing in the movie Throw Momma Off the Train? (Sultry – Momma thought of it.)

The dog is sleepy. He needs company on the sofa. It is a long sofa – the two of us could curl up on each end, sort of butt to butt. And then someone could take a picture . . . Bum to Bum and Butt to Butt. Of course, if we were to assume this pose often, that someone could paint us. It might become a famous painting, maybe hang in the Lourvre. In the remake of The Da Vinci Code, there might be a message on the painting . . . probably on my butt – it’s the bigger of the two.