Archive for June, 2008

Blackberry season.

June 29, 2008

The berry bushes in our yard are producing a bumper crop of either blackberries or black raspberries. My friend, Larry, says that they’re raspberries because it’s too early for blackberries. He’s a farmer so I’m assuming he knows what he’s talking about. 

Susie and Riley have been busy picking the berries and we’ve had them on our cereal the last few mornings. We also have a bumper crop of mulberries which both Riley and Poco II have been devouring at an alarming rate, at least it is alarming to Susie.

She doesn’t care for mulberries, abhors them, as a matter of fact. I suspect there is a story in there somewhere but she has yet to tell me about it.

Picking blackberries, of course, brings back memories. One such memory is recorded in my new book which I have been frantically getting ready for publication.  I have included a snippet of that story to whet your appetite for more. This is a what’s known as a marketing ploy. 

I was crossing the creek that guarded a great blackberry patch when I lost my footing on the fallen log I was using as a bridge and fell hard into the foot deep water. A broken branch scraped an ugly red welt on the back of my thigh as I went down. I allowed my mom to treat it with iodine but only after she promised to blow air on the sting that resulted from the medicine.

In a week or so, the redness went away but the lump where the welt was, remained. As a matter of fact, it stayed on and on through the rest of my childhood and into my adult life. After a while, it was just something that was there, like an extra finger or toe and I learned to ignore it. It went with me to boot camp and it went with me down the aisle when I got married.

          When the 7 cancer warning signs were identified sometime in the intervening years, there was my lump, front and center and that caused me several sleepless nights. But it wasn’t cancer, it was just a lump. It stayed on another ten years or so before it finally disappeared. I didn’t even notice it was gone for a long time and now that I sit here writing this, I suspect it may not be. Gone, that is. I believe it suffered the same fate as my belly button. My body fat swallowed it. I think the rest of my leg just grew up around that welt and it’s still in there awaiting the day when I get skinny again and am able to welcome it home.

 

I have submitted the book to one publisher and one literary agent and I have not heard back from either one although it has only been a couple of weeks.  I am reasonably sure that this book, while very entertaining, is not one for the masses and I suspect I will end up self publishing for the second time.

I actually like the self publishing route. I can dictate what I want and I give up none of the rights to the book. On the other hand, It is extremely difficult to market a self published book although the industry will argue with that. 

I wouldn’t buy ninety nine percent of the self published material but on the other hand, I probably wouldn’t buy ninety nine percent of the traditionally published stuff either.

I hate that.

June 29, 2008

I just posted a picture of my granddaughter on my weblog and somewhere in the back of my mind was this warning I read about pictures of children on the internet.

‘Don’t ever do it.’ was what the warning said. There are predators out there trolling and the thought of someone actually looking for kids in this way makes me sick to my stomach. 

Right now I’m resisting the urge to take the picture off the post because I just can’t believe that our society is so sick that we can’t be proud of our grand children.

wedding plans

June 29, 2008

Our family has been very busy preparing for our son Joe’s wedding in Seattle on August 9th. Susie and our daughter, Julie, have been looking for some months now for a dress that my granddaughter can wear as the official flower girl. The search started when we were in Mexico in March and continued on through the first of June. Finally Susie took matters in her own hands and produced this beauty on her sewing machine. 

 

I have also been busy trying to get an engagement announcement in the paper since February but my procrastination tendencies have been overwhelming the effort. I don’t want one of those ‘the wedding will be tomorrow afternoon’ announcements. All us old folks knows what that means.

Incidentally, for you younger folks, that last statement is a holdover from the old days when  people had nothing better to do than speculate on whether a couple ‘had’ to get married.

nope, they’re not grapes.

June 18, 2008

We have several fruit trees in our yard that I bought over the years, usually at season ending sales.  This year, we had one bearing what I first thought were peaches but it turned out they weren’t.  This tree’s branches were so loaded with plums that it looked like it had been taking fertility treatments.   

All the books said that in order to get good plums, the fruit should be about eight inches apart and so I pulled off probably 5000 little plums but I still left way more than I should have.  Now I just have to make sure that the branches don’t break from the weight.

After that, we have to prepare for a fight to the death with the Japanese Beetles who are going to want to eat these babies.

But should our plum tree and its plums survive all this,  the Plums are on me.

Should we be insulted?

June 18, 2008

Wal-mart just opened a new supercenter in Heartland Crossing just north of Mooresville. I’m not sure why their management felt that another big box store was needed in this area but that’s not the point of this drivel. 

Susie wanted to go to the new store to get some netting to throw over our cherry tree in hopes that it would keep the birds from eating them. I had my doubts ab out the sidom of that move but that’s not the point here, either. 

We walked into the customer service area and asked to be pointed towards the Fabric department and were told that there is no fabric department. That is the point of this story. Every Wal-mart we have ever been in has had a fabric department. 

I am assuming that because our new Wal-mart does not have a fabric department, the Wal-mart decision makers have decided that people in Morgan County do not SEW. Are we a bunch of hillbillies who cannot make our own overalls? 

Of course not.  

How could they not pick High Noon? Boo. Hiss.

June 18, 2008

I was sitting on the couch half asleep this evening when a tv show called the AFI top ten (or something like that) came on. I thought it had something to do with Americas funniest home videos (which aren’t, by the way) but it didn’t.  AFI is the American Film Institute and this show was their opinion of the top movies of all time. I didn’t disagree with somne of them but the people in charge decided that  High Noon was only the second greatest western.  Something called “The  Searchers” with John Wayne was number one. 

Now I’m a big fan of the Duke, but no way was his movie (which I never heard of) better.

I gave up on AFI after that. 

Actually, it should probably be God Bless Indiana.

June 13, 2008

I’m beginning to think we need it. I got the Marion County  make up bill for the property taxes on our two properties in Indianapolis.  Don’t ask me what the make-up bill was for. It is way too complicated. Suffice it to say that if anyone ever tells you investing in real estate is a good idea, don’t believe ‘em. 

So far, all this investment has done is to eat into our nest egg.  

 

And there wasn’t even a worm on it.

June 13, 2008

Just when I thought we might have a little money left over this month, along came the 176 dollar fish hook.

Why do fish hooks cost so much?  Actually, they don’t. That’s what it cost to remove one after our cute little puppy finds one dangling from the end of a fishing pole and swallows it. 

We childproofed the barn and completely forgot about the dog.   

I tried to warn her.

June 13, 2008

But no-o-oo-ooo-o.  She had to have a bite of that lemon.

What’s in a name?

June 8, 2008

Riley Marie wrapped up her ABC’s first, is well into reading now and she just graduated from Kindergarten. She is now learning to spell. This came in handy recently when Susie had a problem. She kept both cat and dog food in recycled coffee containers but she was forever grabbing the wrong one. Riley volunteered to identify them for her.

No more wondering which is dog and which is cat fod for us. Susie has not made that mistake since.