Nutrias Don't Wear Flippers
Oregon snorkeler mistaken for rodent, shot in face. That is an actual news headline and there is no way I'm coming up with anything better than that. News people must live for days like this. Going out on a fairly routine call, snorkeler shot in the water, blah blah, but then as a bonus you get a 60 year-old, dope smoking, pill popping shooter who states in his defense that he thought the snorkeler was a giant rodent, or in fact just an average sized nutria, which is an introduced South American specie of rodent, brought to Louisiana in the 40s for some ill-conceived reason, and now has pretty much taken over that state. Nutria-glamorizing ad campaigns which have tried to convince the Louisiana populous that nutrias are tasty (try some nutria chili), or fashionable (dawling, I love your full length nutria), have mostly fallen flat.
At some point, the Louisiana nutria, hunted to near extinction (not even close) and convinced that they would never defeat Sheriff Harry Lee, began a campaign of their own entitled Run for your Life. The general consensus among the Louisiana nutria was that their homeland, Argentina, was just too far away and also fearing ridicule for the curious version of French they now spoke, they headed to the closest destination where people also spoke a curious dialect, East Texas. Of course that went badly, as Texans are a very gun-friendly people, and also none of the younger nutria wanted to give up their sexier hybrid French language for that curious language being spoken in Texas. Oklahoma proved not much better. Kansas, forget about it, so in time they made their way to Oregon,which was believed to be more progressive.
But the snorkeler incident has raised some fears in the Oregon nutria community that there may be a backlash effect and that the heretofore environmentally-evolved Oregonian may take to the Louisiana model of nutria slaughtering so that the question of mistaking a nutria for an even more beloved Oregon specie, the snorkeler, becomes a moot question indeed. There is even rumor that focus groups have begun to address the difficult issue. It is generally agreed that slogans are an effective way to sell a pogrom campaign to a hesitant public and some of the suggested slogans so far considered are--Love a Snorkeler, Kill a Nutria. It's Just a Rodent, So eRATicatem. Nutrias Are Not My Friends, But Snorkelers Are. My Dad Is Not a Nutria. Nutrias Don't Wear Flippers. On a Clear Day You Can See Sea Anemone. Some Fish Fly But How Many Nutrias Snorkel? To Sir With Love. Mission Accomplished.
...more recent posts
The Lonely Metaphor
At the cafe while ripping the last bits of ribeye meat free from a juicy wad of fat I overheard from another table the supposition that the reason a woman I don't know was so crotchety was because, according to her doctor, her heart was like an old hose left outside in the rain and sun, and was all dry rotted.
And as much as I try to make something of this metaphor, I can't really seem to get anywhere with it. So for now it will just stand alone, as is.
At the cafe while ripping the last bits of ribeye meat free from a juicy wad of fat I overheard from another table the supposition that the reason a woman I don't know was so crotchety was because, according to her doctor, her heart was like an old hose left outside in the rain and sun, and was all dry rotted.
And as much as I try to make something of this metaphor, I can't really seem to get anywhere with it. So for now it will just stand alone, as is.
Sassy Basil
I'm having tea for breakfast because I ran out of coffee five days ago. There is some oatmeal on the stove incubating. I didn't use enough water so it almost burnt up but I added extra water and now it seems fine although lightly toasted. On the breakfast table is a basil plant wrapped in a clear plastic cone and if you keep the roots wet (there's no dirt) it will live for a while and be your fresh basil supply, even though when alone you rarely cook anything more ambitious than toast, or oatmeal, two things which generally do not benefit from fresh basil. Although I guess there is something you can do with a toast-like product and fresh basil, if you add some other ingredients. I would rather not at this time delve too deeply into the depths of my culinary in-expertise.
But the thing about these fresh, plastic cone-wrapped basil plants is I think they are grown in a controlled laboratory or some otherwise stress free environment and they suffer from it. They don't really smell that sweet. They smell like a picture of a basil plant. Or if you had a basil plant next to a mirror and you sniffed the mirror, that is what this plant smelled like.
I say smelled like, past tense, because I, not entirely on purpose, quit watering the basil and it shriveled up to a state that had you seen it you would have surely remarked--looks like you thoroughly killed that basil. I thought so too and felt that pang, that unique, resonating anguish we living feel about death. Though, as it was only a plant, my anguish was relatively short-lived. I felt the anguish and then in probably only a matter of minutes was thinking about other things, like who would win the Superbowl. Is it true you can never remember who lost the Superbowl? If you are ever faced with the question of who lost a Superbowl you could play the odds and guess Minnesota or Buffalo, with their eight cumulative losses.
It was likely a state of denial that had me so summarily moving past the demise of the basil and conjunctively, watering it after it was dead. The miracle here is like that reworded blues standard, my basil come back to me, and in the first day that formerly thriving, dull-smelling basil plant, which was now barely a wad of chloroform, showed some effort to live and in the days following showed not only the will to live but the desire to thrive, wrapped in plastic on my breakfast table.
It is now back to its former state of good health and we--the basil plant and I--joke about the past as if the past has no other purpose but to amuse us.
You know basil, you smell a lot sweeter now than you did before I almost killed you.
Yeah, well, you know what they say--what doesn't kill you makes you sweeter.
I think that's--stronger.
What?
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
If you say so.
Hey basil, don't sass me or I will make pesto out of you. And put you on a piece of fancy toast. With tomato. Some olive oil. A little mozzarello. Salt and pepper.
I'm having tea for breakfast because I ran out of coffee five days ago. There is some oatmeal on the stove incubating. I didn't use enough water so it almost burnt up but I added extra water and now it seems fine although lightly toasted. On the breakfast table is a basil plant wrapped in a clear plastic cone and if you keep the roots wet (there's no dirt) it will live for a while and be your fresh basil supply, even though when alone you rarely cook anything more ambitious than toast, or oatmeal, two things which generally do not benefit from fresh basil. Although I guess there is something you can do with a toast-like product and fresh basil, if you add some other ingredients. I would rather not at this time delve too deeply into the depths of my culinary in-expertise.
But the thing about these fresh, plastic cone-wrapped basil plants is I think they are grown in a controlled laboratory or some otherwise stress free environment and they suffer from it. They don't really smell that sweet. They smell like a picture of a basil plant. Or if you had a basil plant next to a mirror and you sniffed the mirror, that is what this plant smelled like.
I say smelled like, past tense, because I, not entirely on purpose, quit watering the basil and it shriveled up to a state that had you seen it you would have surely remarked--looks like you thoroughly killed that basil. I thought so too and felt that pang, that unique, resonating anguish we living feel about death. Though, as it was only a plant, my anguish was relatively short-lived. I felt the anguish and then in probably only a matter of minutes was thinking about other things, like who would win the Superbowl. Is it true you can never remember who lost the Superbowl? If you are ever faced with the question of who lost a Superbowl you could play the odds and guess Minnesota or Buffalo, with their eight cumulative losses.
It was likely a state of denial that had me so summarily moving past the demise of the basil and conjunctively, watering it after it was dead. The miracle here is like that reworded blues standard, my basil come back to me, and in the first day that formerly thriving, dull-smelling basil plant, which was now barely a wad of chloroform, showed some effort to live and in the days following showed not only the will to live but the desire to thrive, wrapped in plastic on my breakfast table.
It is now back to its former state of good health and we--the basil plant and I--joke about the past as if the past has no other purpose but to amuse us.
You know basil, you smell a lot sweeter now than you did before I almost killed you.
Yeah, well, you know what they say--what doesn't kill you makes you sweeter.
I think that's--stronger.
What?
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
If you say so.
Hey basil, don't sass me or I will make pesto out of you. And put you on a piece of fancy toast. With tomato. Some olive oil. A little mozzarello. Salt and pepper.
Global Warming
I can hardly see that it is debatable that we humans will hurry up the ending of our planet, be it by not loving each other enough or overuse of hair spray, but I would think that if the brain trust of scientists who put out this latest study on Global Warming wanted ME to take it seriously, they would have released it in the summer when it's really hot. Or even a month ago when it was an unseasonably warm winter month here on the east coast. It would have made greater impact on my simple-minded nature.
15, 11, 5, 8, 13, 16--These are not lottery numbers (but feel free to play them), they are the nighttime lows for my part of Virginia for the next six days. Of course, if I look at the weather for the whole country I see that there are a large number of states over this same time period that will be experiencing lows in double digit negative numbers. Forty or fifty below zero? I shudder, really I do, at the thought of it. I guess if I lived in N. Dakota and came to visit Virginia this weekend, where it might be a balmy 5 degrees one morning, I would think, jiminy, or holy cow, this global warming thing is for real.
I can hardly see that it is debatable that we humans will hurry up the ending of our planet, be it by not loving each other enough or overuse of hair spray, but I would think that if the brain trust of scientists who put out this latest study on Global Warming wanted ME to take it seriously, they would have released it in the summer when it's really hot. Or even a month ago when it was an unseasonably warm winter month here on the east coast. It would have made greater impact on my simple-minded nature.
15, 11, 5, 8, 13, 16--These are not lottery numbers (but feel free to play them), they are the nighttime lows for my part of Virginia for the next six days. Of course, if I look at the weather for the whole country I see that there are a large number of states over this same time period that will be experiencing lows in double digit negative numbers. Forty or fifty below zero? I shudder, really I do, at the thought of it. I guess if I lived in N. Dakota and came to visit Virginia this weekend, where it might be a balmy 5 degrees one morning, I would think, jiminy, or holy cow, this global warming thing is for real.
Can We Stop At Stuckey's?
Decided to clean up the hard drive a little and get rid of some files that seem under used or superfluous and in doing so accidently deleted all my audio drivers, or something, I don't really know what I did, nor do I want to pretend that this was some sort of well thought out computer maintenance scheme by a person who goes about boldly and courageously taking care of business in a kick ass and take names fashion. This clean up was more like one of those actions that would come under the general heading of dangerously bored. These are the types of periods that were it a little warmer I would be out building a fire in a fire pit and throwing into it all the leftover pyrotechnic devices that weren't exploded in the foyer of the bighouse several months ago.
So I lost all sound on this computer and my first step after doing this was to convince myself that sound on a computer is not all that important. I can do without sound, I told myself. And I could, too, but after awhile it just seemed dumb to make this relatively minor sacrifice so I tried to download a driver that seemed like it might fit from a page officially sanctioned by Microsoft. But when I tried to install the driver my Microsoft driven OS informed me that the software was not certified and I that I would go to hell for my bold, ill-conceived actions. And then this computer crashed, a thing it rarely does. I rebooted and carried out the same ill-conceived process a couple more times before moving on to something else.
Oh, a Vaio recovery system. That looks promising. It informs me that I can restore my computer to its fresh out of the store original settings or I can pick a date on a calendar and restore to whatever the settings were at that time. I don't need a recovery disc or any of the original softwares, which is great news because I would not have them anyway. The very idea of this frankly blows my mind. I know that deleted things on a hard drive are not actually deleted but just stored out of the way in some digital compartment, I mean I had heard this before, but still the idea that this computer is holding on to my past and every original installed software and also those I have downloaded and then becoming bored with, deleted, seems to carry with it such an amazing level of computational complexity that I find myself becoming in awe of this little device which I generally speaking, take for granted.
I only had to go back two days but instead I picked a date over two weeks ago and presto, I got sound. I don't know why I picked the date I did but it was stuck in my mind for some reason and after I realized I could not access the Internet it came to me that the day I had picked was the day the guys came and hooked up my cable and for some extra change configured my wireless router for me. The restore date is actually very specific and looking at the hour I could see that I had restored to an exact moment--10:43 a.m on January 11th. This was four hours before the guys had come and hooked me up and typed some commands into this laptop which made it communicate with the router. So I reconfigured for a time that to the system would now be the future but was still actually the past. A past that had no awareness I would in a couple of days forward delete something that controlled my sound. Or, actually, maybe this was a past that did have an awareness of the future, since it was a "future" that had already happened.
I'm telling you, when this worked it made me feel in touch with something extra-normal and made me feel close to an idea that is way bigger than I, like that something you might feel in nature, or in church, or under the influence of a psychotropic agent. I was in a sense, if only two dimensionally, time traveling. So yeah, time traveling, that's what I did this week. And some of it was good.
Decided to clean up the hard drive a little and get rid of some files that seem under used or superfluous and in doing so accidently deleted all my audio drivers, or something, I don't really know what I did, nor do I want to pretend that this was some sort of well thought out computer maintenance scheme by a person who goes about boldly and courageously taking care of business in a kick ass and take names fashion. This clean up was more like one of those actions that would come under the general heading of dangerously bored. These are the types of periods that were it a little warmer I would be out building a fire in a fire pit and throwing into it all the leftover pyrotechnic devices that weren't exploded in the foyer of the bighouse several months ago.
So I lost all sound on this computer and my first step after doing this was to convince myself that sound on a computer is not all that important. I can do without sound, I told myself. And I could, too, but after awhile it just seemed dumb to make this relatively minor sacrifice so I tried to download a driver that seemed like it might fit from a page officially sanctioned by Microsoft. But when I tried to install the driver my Microsoft driven OS informed me that the software was not certified and I that I would go to hell for my bold, ill-conceived actions. And then this computer crashed, a thing it rarely does. I rebooted and carried out the same ill-conceived process a couple more times before moving on to something else.
Oh, a Vaio recovery system. That looks promising. It informs me that I can restore my computer to its fresh out of the store original settings or I can pick a date on a calendar and restore to whatever the settings were at that time. I don't need a recovery disc or any of the original softwares, which is great news because I would not have them anyway. The very idea of this frankly blows my mind. I know that deleted things on a hard drive are not actually deleted but just stored out of the way in some digital compartment, I mean I had heard this before, but still the idea that this computer is holding on to my past and every original installed software and also those I have downloaded and then becoming bored with, deleted, seems to carry with it such an amazing level of computational complexity that I find myself becoming in awe of this little device which I generally speaking, take for granted.
I only had to go back two days but instead I picked a date over two weeks ago and presto, I got sound. I don't know why I picked the date I did but it was stuck in my mind for some reason and after I realized I could not access the Internet it came to me that the day I had picked was the day the guys came and hooked up my cable and for some extra change configured my wireless router for me. The restore date is actually very specific and looking at the hour I could see that I had restored to an exact moment--10:43 a.m on January 11th. This was four hours before the guys had come and hooked me up and typed some commands into this laptop which made it communicate with the router. So I reconfigured for a time that to the system would now be the future but was still actually the past. A past that had no awareness I would in a couple of days forward delete something that controlled my sound. Or, actually, maybe this was a past that did have an awareness of the future, since it was a "future" that had already happened.
I'm telling you, when this worked it made me feel in touch with something extra-normal and made me feel close to an idea that is way bigger than I, like that something you might feel in nature, or in church, or under the influence of a psychotropic agent. I was in a sense, if only two dimensionally, time traveling. So yeah, time traveling, that's what I did this week. And some of it was good.
Not To Mention XY-Wing
It is 15 degrees this morning but feels like 8. I am just going to take the computer's word for it. Aren't I curious about what 8 feels like? No I'm not. I have taken up Sudoku and all my curiosity is now used considering the candidates 1 thru 9, times 81. Ok, less than 81. A Sudoku puzzle with 81 blank cells. That would be a very hard one. I am working on one now with 55 blank cells and it is pretty hard. It is safe to say that I have perfected the technique of recognizing single candidates and hidden single candidates but am not as comfortable with recognizing at a glance locked candidates or naked pairs, triples or quads and am a long long way from attempting any X-Wing or Swordfish maneuvers, although am cautiously and optimistically looking forward to the day when I can in the context of any type of maneuver use those terms.
It is 15 degrees this morning but feels like 8. I am just going to take the computer's word for it. Aren't I curious about what 8 feels like? No I'm not. I have taken up Sudoku and all my curiosity is now used considering the candidates 1 thru 9, times 81. Ok, less than 81. A Sudoku puzzle with 81 blank cells. That would be a very hard one. I am working on one now with 55 blank cells and it is pretty hard. It is safe to say that I have perfected the technique of recognizing single candidates and hidden single candidates but am not as comfortable with recognizing at a glance locked candidates or naked pairs, triples or quads and am a long long way from attempting any X-Wing or Swordfish maneuvers, although am cautiously and optimistically looking forward to the day when I can in the context of any type of maneuver use those terms.
Pass On This One
I have been pretty successful (with some help) at distracting myself these last several weeks from the one year old imagery that is still crisply imprinted inside of me and which occasionally I will pull up and look at with pain and regret, knowing that such images fade but wondering at what point these will. There are some things for which intellectual preparation is both unavoidable and also a complete waste of time, for example knowing that my mother would die of some old age related disease did not prepare me for the specific circumstances of her death one year ago today.
I wrote that previous paragraph yesterday as the beginning of some imagined profound one year commemoration of my mother's passing. But the truth is, at this point, one year away, I am only grateful for the distance from the events that led up to her death and they are this--a thirteen year lonliness which began on the day of my father's death by cancer April 21, 1993. A "widow's hump" which made her seem strange to us, her six children adrift across the country ( I only speak for my siblings out of artistic license.), A day that began the end when in her early-eighties we took her car away and then more lonliness. Some years of it perhaps. A few years of discussion when it became obvious there was something to discuss regarding her well-being and then the giving of a name like Alzheimers or dementia and you can start the intellectual preparation. I love a good intellectual preparation. About a year after diagnosis we tricked her, I'm not being harsh it's just what we did, and took her on a trip to somewhere that was a facility we all felt very good about, but which to her was a prison imposed on her by the six of us. It was those thoughts she lived with for the next two weeks before dying. I honestly don't know what are the words on the death certificate or how accurate they may be.
I'll get a handle on this eventually, and this is me doing it.
I have been pretty successful (with some help) at distracting myself these last several weeks from the one year old imagery that is still crisply imprinted inside of me and which occasionally I will pull up and look at with pain and regret, knowing that such images fade but wondering at what point these will. There are some things for which intellectual preparation is both unavoidable and also a complete waste of time, for example knowing that my mother would die of some old age related disease did not prepare me for the specific circumstances of her death one year ago today.
I wrote that previous paragraph yesterday as the beginning of some imagined profound one year commemoration of my mother's passing. But the truth is, at this point, one year away, I am only grateful for the distance from the events that led up to her death and they are this--a thirteen year lonliness which began on the day of my father's death by cancer April 21, 1993. A "widow's hump" which made her seem strange to us, her six children adrift across the country ( I only speak for my siblings out of artistic license.), A day that began the end when in her early-eighties we took her car away and then more lonliness. Some years of it perhaps. A few years of discussion when it became obvious there was something to discuss regarding her well-being and then the giving of a name like Alzheimers or dementia and you can start the intellectual preparation. I love a good intellectual preparation. About a year after diagnosis we tricked her, I'm not being harsh it's just what we did, and took her on a trip to somewhere that was a facility we all felt very good about, but which to her was a prison imposed on her by the six of us. It was those thoughts she lived with for the next two weeks before dying. I honestly don't know what are the words on the death certificate or how accurate they may be.
I'll get a handle on this eventually, and this is me doing it.
Above Aisle Seven
While having the ability and inclination to appreciate a wide variety of activities it was not I think until she met me that Bernadette was made to consider football watching as one of the activities she might choose to enjoy. I do not mean to imply that I am a real football fan. For me it is a diversion I will gladly give into if in a given year there is a team that I can find even the remotest connection to and this year the New Orleans Saints more than fulfilled that role. There have been years or I daresay sequential years where I have not watched a single football game nor perused the sports pages for those statistics that seem to have so much meaning when you care about them and amount to so much wasted space when you don't.
Bernadette traveled all the way from NY to be here at Mt. P to watch with me last weekend's dismantling of the New Orleans dream season by the Chicago Bears.
It was predicted to snow here all day just as it was predicted for Chicago. I was going to make chili but only if I could find at a local mart a packet of chili seasoning that makes chili the way I like it. The seasoning packet is called Wick Fowlers, and I had the previous week seen it at the market . Several hours before the game I went to pick it up but it was sold out. There was not even a facsimile of the loose seasonings at the market to attempt real chili, that is chili the way I like it, which requires chili powder, onion powder, cumin, cayenne and whatever else I am forgetting, probably garlic. No sugar. Sugar is ok for Boston chili as is adding beans but I'm talking about chili with only chunks of chuck, and so hot with cayenne that it makes your cheeks sweat. I was not sure Bernadette would like this hot chili so I was not going to go all the way 3-alarm but maybe up to as high as 1.75 alarm. We have never talked about chili, Bernadette and I, so this was uncharted territory.
As Bernadette in her satellite office at Mt. P scratched on her Wacom tablet, filling in color to the outlines of the most famous and beloved (if slightly irritating) character in the modern history of children, a character emblazoned worldwide onto lunch boxes and t-shirts and panties and pencils, I broke to her the sad news. We won't be having chili.
At this point Bernadette, a woman who up to very recently, to my knowledge, was neither a fan of football nor chili, made in this context a rather curious and passionate response. She lifted her hand off the Wacom, thereby damning all children worldwide to a thing they are least good at--waiting (for some new product stamped with their favorite brightly colored character)--and said to me in no uncertain terms, we can't watch football without chili.
Ok then, I will drive to the nearest large grocery, in a town sixteen miles away, over one of the steepest and winding mountain passes in the area, during what was the very beginning of a mini-blizzard, and look for a product (Wick Fowlers) which I have never before seen on the shelves (it was a shock to see it at the local mart, as it is mostly a product sold in the southwest.) She said, great, see you when you get back, and returned to her work.
By the time I started climbing up the road to Chester Gap the snow was sticking and packing to the road quite well and I was shifted into 4-wheel drive. Or at least I think I was, this being the first time I had attempted to use it on this new second hand Jeep. I had already passed a few abandoned passenger cars skidded off into culverts but I was doing pretty well and was in no way grumbling or muttering under my breath--we can't watch football without chili? Where did she get that? I've never heard that before. Oh, so she's Miss Football Culinary expert now. None of those things did I say for they would have distracted me from the focus of keeping a very liberal distance between myself and the truck in front of me, with absolute minimal breaking, while keeping an eye on the passenger car behind me, on a winding 6 or 8 percent grade over packed snow.
I made it to the grocery parking lot and pulling into a space lost control for the first time but just a little fishtail, nothing serious. Inside the store was the predictable scene of an areas first snow of the season shopping panic. With two or three lanes open there was a line of at least 40 overflowing shopping carts running almost the entire width of the full sized grocery store. Sure I considering briefly that I could just loot the item and be on my way but then, above aisle 7, I saw the floating visage of Bernadette shaking her head and wagging a finger at me. Over the stores' loudspeaker system came her voice and it said--you get your skinny ass home right this minute. So I bolted.
Back at home but only after a crawling speed of 20 mph passing several more minor wrecks and I was met by a Bernadette apparently broken out of that spell, that fugue state which had her temporarily acting as a football crazed, chili loving chick, and she welcomed me contritely and lovingly in a way that made me feel that she honestly did care about me more than some dumb old NFC championship game and chili that would make her face sweat.
The game was a disappointment as was the Taco Bell queso dip I had heated up in the microwave. But football fan or not, the season of the Saints was of inestimable value to New Orleans lovers scattered around the country.
As it turns out, Harrisburg, PA, is the midpoint between Mt. P and NYC so if Saints rookie receiver, Marques Colston, holds any more of his fundraisers at the bowling alley there, I might just meet up with Bernadette and bowl a game or two. And I'll stock up on some of that Wick Fowlers before next season rolls around.
While having the ability and inclination to appreciate a wide variety of activities it was not I think until she met me that Bernadette was made to consider football watching as one of the activities she might choose to enjoy. I do not mean to imply that I am a real football fan. For me it is a diversion I will gladly give into if in a given year there is a team that I can find even the remotest connection to and this year the New Orleans Saints more than fulfilled that role. There have been years or I daresay sequential years where I have not watched a single football game nor perused the sports pages for those statistics that seem to have so much meaning when you care about them and amount to so much wasted space when you don't.
Bernadette traveled all the way from NY to be here at Mt. P to watch with me last weekend's dismantling of the New Orleans dream season by the Chicago Bears.
It was predicted to snow here all day just as it was predicted for Chicago. I was going to make chili but only if I could find at a local mart a packet of chili seasoning that makes chili the way I like it. The seasoning packet is called Wick Fowlers, and I had the previous week seen it at the market . Several hours before the game I went to pick it up but it was sold out. There was not even a facsimile of the loose seasonings at the market to attempt real chili, that is chili the way I like it, which requires chili powder, onion powder, cumin, cayenne and whatever else I am forgetting, probably garlic. No sugar. Sugar is ok for Boston chili as is adding beans but I'm talking about chili with only chunks of chuck, and so hot with cayenne that it makes your cheeks sweat. I was not sure Bernadette would like this hot chili so I was not going to go all the way 3-alarm but maybe up to as high as 1.75 alarm. We have never talked about chili, Bernadette and I, so this was uncharted territory.
As Bernadette in her satellite office at Mt. P scratched on her Wacom tablet, filling in color to the outlines of the most famous and beloved (if slightly irritating) character in the modern history of children, a character emblazoned worldwide onto lunch boxes and t-shirts and panties and pencils, I broke to her the sad news. We won't be having chili.
At this point Bernadette, a woman who up to very recently, to my knowledge, was neither a fan of football nor chili, made in this context a rather curious and passionate response. She lifted her hand off the Wacom, thereby damning all children worldwide to a thing they are least good at--waiting (for some new product stamped with their favorite brightly colored character)--and said to me in no uncertain terms, we can't watch football without chili.
Ok then, I will drive to the nearest large grocery, in a town sixteen miles away, over one of the steepest and winding mountain passes in the area, during what was the very beginning of a mini-blizzard, and look for a product (Wick Fowlers) which I have never before seen on the shelves (it was a shock to see it at the local mart, as it is mostly a product sold in the southwest.) She said, great, see you when you get back, and returned to her work.
By the time I started climbing up the road to Chester Gap the snow was sticking and packing to the road quite well and I was shifted into 4-wheel drive. Or at least I think I was, this being the first time I had attempted to use it on this new second hand Jeep. I had already passed a few abandoned passenger cars skidded off into culverts but I was doing pretty well and was in no way grumbling or muttering under my breath--we can't watch football without chili? Where did she get that? I've never heard that before. Oh, so she's Miss Football Culinary expert now. None of those things did I say for they would have distracted me from the focus of keeping a very liberal distance between myself and the truck in front of me, with absolute minimal breaking, while keeping an eye on the passenger car behind me, on a winding 6 or 8 percent grade over packed snow.
I made it to the grocery parking lot and pulling into a space lost control for the first time but just a little fishtail, nothing serious. Inside the store was the predictable scene of an areas first snow of the season shopping panic. With two or three lanes open there was a line of at least 40 overflowing shopping carts running almost the entire width of the full sized grocery store. Sure I considering briefly that I could just loot the item and be on my way but then, above aisle 7, I saw the floating visage of Bernadette shaking her head and wagging a finger at me. Over the stores' loudspeaker system came her voice and it said--you get your skinny ass home right this minute. So I bolted.
Back at home but only after a crawling speed of 20 mph passing several more minor wrecks and I was met by a Bernadette apparently broken out of that spell, that fugue state which had her temporarily acting as a football crazed, chili loving chick, and she welcomed me contritely and lovingly in a way that made me feel that she honestly did care about me more than some dumb old NFC championship game and chili that would make her face sweat.
The game was a disappointment as was the Taco Bell queso dip I had heated up in the microwave. But football fan or not, the season of the Saints was of inestimable value to New Orleans lovers scattered around the country.
As it turns out, Harrisburg, PA, is the midpoint between Mt. P and NYC so if Saints rookie receiver, Marques Colston, holds any more of his fundraisers at the bowling alley there, I might just meet up with Bernadette and bowl a game or two. And I'll stock up on some of that Wick Fowlers before next season rolls around.