short stories, part whatever

One of the yellow butterfly gingers is blooming.

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The county lifted the drought induced burn ban two weeks ago and so last Friday Marc emptied the piled high truck bed onto the already higher than me burn pile and torched it. Meanwhile, I was picking up all the branches still laying around because, face it, what was the point of picking them up before with no place to put them. I have a small pile ready to go in the truck now that it's empty again.

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Grandgirl Autumn left Thursday morning, heading back to Austin. We got all her mending done except for replacing the zipper which I'll try to get done or find someone to do it. I hate putting in zippers. She had taken a week off her part-time job as barback at a small Marriott Hotel and wondered if they missed her or if she was going to get fired. She called Friday afternoon to tell me that not only is she not getting fired, they called her into a meeting to tell her how much they appreciated her work, her friendliness, her helpfulness, her attitude towards the guests, that they thought she was being underutilized and so they were only giving her Wednesdays for the next two weeks in order to train her as a bartender (this is the job she wants for the interim while she waits to see if her application to the Peace Corps is accepted). They had already hired someone to train as the bar back to replace her and Autumn, knowing that the bartenders were too busy to do that, volunteered to train the new guy.

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We're still hitting low 90s though next week we're supposed to drop down to high 80s and low humidity. Until we get there, hot afternoons are spent in the house and so yesterday we watched Enola Holmes on Netflix. The actor who plays Enola is the same that played Eleven in Stranger Things and she's really good. Enola is a young child when her father dies and her two older brothers, Mycroft and Sherlock, leave the estate for London. Raised and educated by her mother to be a strong independent free thinker who makes her own choices in life, she wakes up on her 17^th birthday to find her mother has left during the night. When her brothers return to handle affairs and claim the estate and turn her into a proper young lady, Enola runs away and her adventures begin. It's a really good movie.

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I finished the box a week ago and it's been sitting in the living room for us to enjoy before I start packing it up for the gallery. I think I'm going to add one little piece of coral, not the one I removed, in the back to fill a hole that probably only I notice and only from a certain angle, but that's me. I'll head over to the shop later to get that done and clean up and pull out all my boxes and packing materials.

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We get some strange donations to SHARE sometimes. Two weeks ago we got an 18” long by 4” diameter log of gouda cheese. That's just too much even for the biggest families we get so one of the guys cut it up and handed it out to the volunteers since we wouldn't be able to give it out once the wrapping was compromised. Last week, we got four 18” x 4” logs of colby cheese. What the fuck! Anyway, Jan handed them out to us volunteers and I took one, took it home and cut it up into six 2” thick chunks and handed it out to family and neighbors.

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And finally, from the Department of the Absurd, I saw this at the grocery store.

Dog water. Flavored dog water. Because plain ole' tap water or puddle water isn't tasty enough?