Wheels-off Wednesday

Well, this weather has shot my wheels off completely. My garden needs so much work, and I just can't face it. Just a quick trip outside to water the shrubs about does me in. I'm gonna have to get up at like 5:00 am one day and just deal with it. What a drag.

Last night, as I was enjoying a delicious parfait of seasonal berries, I told Kev that about the only thing that made these heat-index-of-105 days bearable was fruit. I said berries are like a little gift from God to make up for the hot. Then Kev reminded me that people in cool climates also get to enjoy summer fruits. So there goes that. Dangit.

I tell you what. if I end up making a best-selling sock monkey book, I am going to buy Kev a kick-ass guitar, and then I am going to build my dream cabin on one of Maine's many lakes, and I will live there in the summer. Anyone is welcome to come and visit me. You will find me in the yard in my adirondack chair, which by the way I am going to build myself, looking at the loons or reading a book or having some blueberries.

That reminds me of when I worked at TeachSmart between college and grad school when I still didn't know what to do with my life. It was a cool concept...giant teacher super-store, with educational books and toys and art supplies and bulletin-board materials and so forth. Our store manager was a guy named Dennis, who I swear they used as the inspiration for Ned Flanders. When something went wrong, Dennis would say, "Oh, Potato Chips!" instead of dammit or something. The store owner/CEO was a rich guy named Jim, who had a series of toupees that he would change weekly to make it look like his hair was growing. At the end of the month, he'd go back to the short one, so people would think he got a haircut. A clever plan, but no-one was buying it.

Anyway at TeachSmart, we sold a series of soothing-sounds-of-the-environment CDs, and we had to play them in the store so people would hear them and want to buy them. One was called Classical Loon, and as the name implies, it was a CD of classical music, with occasional loon sounds dubbed in over top of it. Oh, I hated Classical Loon. I hated it so much that the other people who worked in the store would play it over and over just to annoy me. Now, I've changed my tune on loons. I think they are probably in my top 5 favorite birds. I'd love to have a copy of Classical Loon now so I could put it on and pretend I am in Maine in my adirondak chair on a cool summer day.

Oh, Potato Chips! Time to face the brutal outdoors and to go to work.