Mr. Pringles gives us our Bow Tie o’ the Day this afternoon. It’s been chilly and windy for most of today, which signals how close we’re getting to official Fall. Fall weather is probably the weather I find most comfortable to be in. Give me shirt-sleeve weather any time. I wish it would last longer than it does. But for now, I’ll just put on my bigly girl socks and do whatever’s gotta be done, including watch the the leaves in the hills outside our tall windows do their turning. What a great life! I give thanks.
Bow Tie o’ the Day and I worry about a long list of things, most of which I have no control over. Still, I worry. But one thing I don’t worry about right now is messing up my hairs when I’m upside down. There’s not a hair out of place with this cut. About my hairs, I’ve got no worries. I feel so much more relaxed.✂️
[This is a re-post from 2018. I miss Dad. I miss kissing the top of his head.]
Bow Tie o’ the Day displays a host of animal tracks. And Shirt o’ the Day shows my own style o’ track-makers. We’re both looking ahead to the upcoming Fall critter seasons.
I hail from a hunting-obsessed home. In our house, the first day of the deer hunt was a bigger deal than Christmas morning, and I am not exaggerating. It’s an undisputed fact.
I knew how to reload perfectly weighted bullets at my dad’s bullet press before I had even been baptized. I fished. I killed pheasants, rabbits, and allegedly a deer. But I haven’t been a hunter since I was 16. I have nothing against ethical hunting. It just isn’t in me to do it. The thrill is gone, as they say.
But every Fall brings back amazing memories of trailing behind Dad– mighty hunter extraordinaire– on opening day of the deer hunt. When I see hunters getting themselves ready for their various Fall hunts, I can’t help but think about my Dad’s knowledge of– and enthusiasm for– hunting. I see folks buying orange and/or camo clothing this time of year. I know they’re re-loading bullets or buying ammo. They are target shooting to sight-in their scopes. In fact, I can already hear the “practice” gunshots in the hills above our house. Of course, I can’t see or hear all the hunting preparations going on around me, but it’s enough to just know it’s going on. Just knowing the hunts are happening makes me feel Dad’s presence near me.
When I was a kid, a friend once asked me if Dad was as mean as he looked. I started laughing, and then I started snort-laughing. Dad was a big guy. He had a huge presence. But he was a soft-hearted jokester. And despite his stature, he was a gentle man. And a gentleman.
As an adult, I finally figured out why someone could think Dad was mean. I was once accused of looking mean myself, so I pondered the topic. I stared in the mirror and tried on some different faces until I got back to my regular face, and there it was. I could finally see it. In fact, it was in every face I pulled, to some extent. But it was most prominent in my regular face. My face was Dad’s face, and I saw that we have the same serious-looking forehead lines and the same look-right-through-you eyes. Both characteristics are there in almost every face I can muster. (They are present even in my baby photos. And in his as well.) I see the clenched, focused lines even in my silly faces. When I surveyed a bunch of photos of Dad, even when he smiled, the forehead lines and knowing eyes were there. Those serious, focused forehead lines, together with our x-ray eyes, can be mistaken for meanness at times, I suppose. I don’t see “mean” in our faces. I see “serious” and “focus” and “I know who you are” and some “don’t mess with the people I love” in our faces.
Dad and I probably missed our career callings. If we look so intimidating, we probably should have been bouncers in a bar. Or Beyonce’s bodyguards. Or UFC fighters. Or Mafia enforcers. 🍺 🥊 🔫 We coulda been somebody!
The Tie Room needs constant up-keep because it has a bigly population. Around 800 pieces of the bow tie population resides quite happily in the old, tall card catalog, which I’ve shown y’all before. (It’s probably my fave piece of furniture, ever). Since I currently have over 2,500 bow ties, I would need at least 2 more old card catalogs just like it to house the rest of the critters in my collection, which is not practical for the size of the room. There’d be no room for me. Or for Skitter even.
Nevertheless, I am always on the hunt for interesting ways to house and/or display my little bow tie pals. And today I found—Voila! I found this fluorescent green and black tackle box to assist me in my current Tie Room organizing projects. It has the perfect amount of space to hold all of my small, diamond-point Bow Ties o’ the Day, plus room for me to collect more. As you can see here, it currently houses 27 diamond-point residents, with plenty of room for more in its main compartment. The tackle box is housing for my critters, and it helps me keep track of this style of bow. I haven’t fished in years, but I now have a reason to regularly visit the tackle boxes at Cabela’s.
I wore a lavender diamond-point Bow Tie o’ the Day today. My main goal for the day is to eat tomatoes for each of my meals. So far, I breakfasted on naked cherry tomatoes dipped in salt, and for lunch I had a gargantuan BLT without the “B” or the “L.” I’m already planning to have a dinner of sliced tomatoes, with two side orders of sliced tomatoes. It’s simply that time of year. Fortunately for us, with Suzanne’s parents on vacation for a couple of weeks ago, we are left in charge of harvesting the tomatoes in their garden. That’s how we got this crop of home-grown ‘maters. Here, also, are some magically minuscule tomatoes I had to show y’all. The green Skittle I put in the middle of four of the tiniest ‘maters puts their smallness into perspective.🍅🍅🍅
This smooshed diamond-point Bow Tie o’ the Day was my chosen companion today. Y’all saw this same Face Mask o’ the Day in a post yesterday, but I washed it and wore it again. This mask agitates me. In terms of grammar, there should be a hyphen between the mask’s two words: it should read, “immune-compromised.” I’m sure the lack of a hyphen here doesn’t obscure the meaning of the words for anybody, but it just ain’t grammatically correct. Since I’m the one wearing the mask, I don’t have to look at the ill-punctuated words myself, but I know what others can see—and it gives me the oogies just knowing there’s a hyphen missing on my mask. I will probably have to use a Sharpie to add the correction myself before I can wear it again. I get so vexed and ramped up about these linguistic concerns. I also know most other people do not give a hoot about such things. Okay. I’m now going to try to calm my syntactical nerves down. I shall simply find a thick, dusty, boring book of complex grammar rules to read until my blood pressure goes back down to normal and my hives recede. And then, I will be just fine again. 😷😱
Suzanne and I drink a lot of flavored water. It’s almost like a hobby. We have a bigly stockpile at all times. We don’t keep it all on hand in case of catastrophe. We simply go through it relatively quickly because we like it, and we don’t want to be caught with no water on the pantry shelves when we’re parched. We each like different brands and different flavors, and I dare say we have become rather snooty about which flavored waters we will drink and which waters we will turn up our noses to. In fact, we are so into our flavored water that yesterday we packed up a little cooler filled with flavored water from our fridge, and took it on our drive to a Walmart in South Jordan. We drank water all the way there. While there, we replenished our flavored water hoard to the tune of somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 cases of water. After we had finished buying the water and loading it in the car, we opened up our little cooler, took out a bottle and a can, and each drank our fave flavored waters—drinking water and crying “wee, wee, wee,” all the way home.
Since one of the ways I use this platform is to document every bigly and little change that happens to me on my life’s journey, I must inform y’all of my most recent “aging” change. It began simply enough: I wanted to put a new light bulb in the light fixture above the landing on the stairs. The ceiling there is very high, but I have changed the light bulbs a handful of times before, with nary a problem. I set up the ladder on the landing, to remind me to complete the task after Suzanne got home from work, so she could call for an ambulance if, for some reason, I fell off the ladder and tumbled down the stairs. I’m not a spaz, but I am cautious. Suzanne is a spaz, which is why she doesn’t climb ladders. And, to be honest, I’m older and ricketier than I’ve ever been. I didn’t anticipate any problems, but you never know.
Anyhoo… Suzanne got home and I climbed the ladder. I stood on the ladder right where I thought I had always stood before to do this chore, but I was not high enough to reach the light fixture. I would need to stand on the top rung of the ladder, but that rung suddenly seemed awfully high to me. I asked Suzanne, “Did I really stand on that top rung to do this before?” It didn’t seem that high the other times I had to put in new bulbs. I’ve never had a fear of heights, but suddenly, at 57, there was no way in heck I was going to move up to the last rung of the ladder again. Forget the fact that over the years, I had stood safely on that top rung. Clearly, something has changed. I told Suzanne I wasn’t going to even try to move up the ladder and change those light bulbs. No, I declared to her that we are going to live in stairway darkness until we can get the professionals here, with their professional ladder, to change the bloody high light bulbs. (They’ll be here to take care of it next week.) I wonder how many people it will take to finally screw in a light bulb. I also wonder if I’ll be able to turn that answer into a post-worthy joke. 💡
Things started out so well this morning. I had a Zoom doctor appointment, for which I chose to wear my Bow Tie o’ the Day of red and white polka dots. Skitter chose to wear her oranges Tie o’ the Day. After my appointment, I then cooked myself a nice breakfast of a few teensy pork chops. While they were cooking away, I wrote a little poem I immediately shredded because it was mean-spirited, and I don’t really do mean-spirited. I needed to write it and get it out of my system, but nobody needs to read it and get all offended by what amounted to a passing mood I simply needed to work through in my own mind.
I ate my well-seared chops, but had one left over. I’m sure you know who had been staring politely at my fork throughout every bite of breakfast I had put in my mouth. Now, we make it a point to never feed Skitter people food. Except for all the times when we do. She was eyeing that left over pork chop like it was a pot o’ doggie gold, which I guess—to her—it was. Her nose sniffed the air more dramatically than Elizabeth Montgomery’s in BEWITCHED. C’mon, folks! How could I not put a tiny pork chop in her bowl? I had to do it—after I cut off all the fat, of course. So Skitter ate her chop in no time. Just as quickly, she curled up in her bed for her mid-morning nap.
Fast forward about three hours. Skitter’s bed sat right beside me as I got some reading done. And then it happened. It happened once, then twice. Skitter let pork chop doggie farts. Silent, but deadly. I finally put on my first Mask o’ the Day to save myself from the stench. It wasn’t enough. I put a second Mask o’ the Day over the first one. Two masks at a time seemed to do an adequate job of keeping me from passing out, as Skitter’s gas kept wafting through the room in invisible waves o’ danger. She’s never been a particularly gassy dog, but it’s clear she is getting older, and so are her pipes. No more pork chops for The Skit, no matter how much she enjoys them. Even as I type this, she is sound asleep in her mid-afternoon nap—probably dreaming of bacon—and farting with gusto all the while. 🐶😷
It’s true: I wear my heart on my sleeve, as they say. I always have and I always will. I am not shy of letting it be known what matters to me, and what doesn’t. And for dang sure nobody who knows me has to wonder how I feel about them. I wear it all on my sleeve, pant leg, and hat brim—24/7. My heart is out there for all to see. But what y’all probably don’t know is that I sometimes wear my food on my Bow Tie o’ the Day (which is something they don’t say). Today was just such a day, as I grocery shopped at Harmon’s while wearing this bigly bow tie. One look at Bow Tie and you can rest assured I filled my sanitized shopping cart with nothing but fixin’s to make pizza, cheeseburgers, hotdogs, and fries. I’ll be sure to set a paper plate for you.🍕🍔🌭🍟
