Full moon? Two consecutive days of medium-hot posole for dinner? Whatever … Herself and I both had weird dreams last night that seemed to peak around 2 this morning.
In these dreams both of us had lost our phones. Herself was able to borrow one to have an extended chat with her dead mom.
I had a gun, which trumps the phone in anyone’s game. You got a gun, you can talk to anyone and they have to listen. That’s a call doesn’t go to voicemail, y’follow me, Skeezix?
I was talking to someone in a Batman mask without the ears.
Hoo-boy.
To flush that out of my skull I went for a 5K run right after toast and coffee, lifted weights when I got home, and following a more substantial breakfast hit the Elena Gallegos to ride a few trails I’ve been neglecting.
If that doesn’t hit the reset button I don’t know what will.
The usual nightmares continue in DeeCee, of course. But we can’t blame them on posole. Maybe the moon. …
Beauty and the Beast (guess which is which), from May 12, 1990.
And they said it’d never last. Ho, ho.
Today Herself and I celebrate 34 years of Holy Macaroni. She makes regular visits to the eye doctor so it’s not my fault. She’s either extremely tolerant or a secret drinker. P’raps both.
And for those of you who are mothers or had mothers, happy Mother’s Day. Ours were in attendance at the wedding in Hyde State Park up to Fanta Se (third and fourth from left, below) and neither of them disowned us, though mine considered it after I told her she couldn’t smoke in our house.
My sister, Peggy (far right) married Howard, a fine fellow and a Brainiac to boot, but decided against motherhood based upon having grown up alongside Your Humble Narrator, who never did.
And we are likewise without offspring because … seriously, have you ever read this blog? I mean, c’mon. Herself may need vision correction, but she does not lack perception.
Mary Pigeon and Mary Jane O’Grady discuss the pitfalls of procreation.
Shortly after we settled here back in September 2014 a handyman told me that The Duck! City was a much smaller town than one might think on short acquaintance.
On the surface, it seems a lot like Bibleburg or Tucson: All three are sprawling, medium-sized Western cities dependent upon military installations, universities, and tourism, with transient, ever-changing populations.
But dig a little deeper and The Duck! City feels more like Pueblo, where some folks really put down roots.
I don’t know that I ever met a native Tucsonan, and born-and-bred Bibleburgers were likewise rare. But in Pueblo, and The Duck! City, it’s easy to meet people whose attachment to location runs generations deep.
Longevity breeds networking, and this can work for you or against you. I took the handyman to be hinting that outlandish douchebaggery gets broadcast faster than a triple murder on local TV.
More often it’s a case of meeting some rando in the course of doing a bit of business and finding out that he or she knows everyone you know, and probably a whole lot better, too.
This was the case with the landscaper we engaged to tackle our back yard. North Valley guy, of an age with meself, and in one of our first chats it turned out that he knew more than a few of the guys I used to race bikes with when we lived in Fanta Se back in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
Then last night we’re chatting about the final touches to the project and learned that his mom saw the same doctor as Herself the Elder, lived in the same assisted-living home (albeit a few years earlier), and passed on there, just like HtE.
He knew the owner of the place, and the staff, and also was familiar with the operator of HtE’s previous digs, noting with discretion that he decided against housing his mom there.
A small town indeed. In a town this size, there’s no place to hide. Everywhere you go, you meet someone you know.
Her Royal Felinity, Miss Mia Sopaipilla, has retreated to the Winter Palace.
Forty-seven degrees is not what I would call cold, though it’s a few degrees cooler now than it was when she meowed me out of a sound sleep at 5:30 this morning.
Ordinarily it would be Herself who answers the call of duty at stupid-thirty, but she has gone a-questing to East Texas to join sisters Beth and Heather, other kinfolk, and friends in bidding adios to Herself the Elder, who is to be laid to rest tomorrow in the family plot.
Frankly, Miss Mia finds all this a feeble excuse for being short-staffed, nay, abandoned to the questionable care of a junior staffer who thinks that he belongs where she is now.
That’s treason, that is. Heads will roll, and they will not be cute gray furry ones with luxurious whiskers and fetching green eyes.
Mad Blog Media 