With me, it’s all about the neckwear. My days revolve around finding the right tie or bow tie to wear at any particular point in historical time. Being vigilant about neckwear is not as easy a path to tread as you might think. I see it as my calling in life. But yesterday, as I was flipping through my television offerings, I saw a sport that caused me to second-guess my tie priorities. Was it golf at the Master’s Tournament? Nope. I landed on a channel which offered up something I had never seen on television before: The Johnsonville ACL Cornhole Championships. Holy cow! I have tossed beanbags through holes at mountain campgrounds, on beaches, on front lawns, and in city parks throughout my life. I had not known—until yesterday—that I could have made a career out of it! And, until I read the programming description provided by DirecTV, I really didn’t know that Ye Olde Bean Bag Toss is considered an “extreme sport.” Wow! I feel so misguided. I could have done something truly important with my life, if I had only taken the path of tossing bean bags. I could have been on tv. I could’ve won prize money. I have to now re-think every jot and tittle of my existence.
FYI Yes, I do always have the Closed Captioning setting turned on when I watch tv. My ears are old.
It was hairscuttin’ time again. I knew the head hairs I got shaved off last month were due for a tune-up shaving, but I wasn’t in any real rush to get a touch-up at first. And then an odd thing started happening—or, I should say, an odd thing started not happening. You see, after I got that bigly shave, every time Suzanne walked past me, she was automatically compelled to rub my bald head. I liked it. But this past week, I noticed she easily walked right by my head billions of times a day, without paying any attention to my barely-there head hairs whatsoever. Well, my head fur is not going to stand for being ignored. I can take a hint: It was time for a #2 razor shave. Miss Tiffany at Great Clips was happy to oblige. And Miss Tiffany was just as happy to see me show up in my beautifully designed Tie o’ the Day, with its open straight razors and shaving brushes.
So all I had time to do in the TIE O’ THE DAY department this afternoon was to take this one picture of me in my Bow Tie o’ the Day and in my Face Mask o’ the Day. That’s all.
Bigly mustache wood Bow Tie o’ the Day and I sat at our kitchen island this morning, in the virtual “waiting room” of my crazy-head doctor, and then I had my virtual appointment. I was a very patient bipolar patient.
Sometimes I’m sitting at home in my Oriented Strand Board (OSB) Tie o’ the Day and I get bored. Not to fear! My wood ties are capable of entertaining me in the simplest ways. My wood tie can be easily stacked up to double as a Slinky. I do not, however, send Tie to march down the stairs when it is around my neck. That would be dangerous for my old body.😬
Tie o’ the Day screams to show y’all the Delta house we had for 17 years. Mom and her Pepsi are with us in this collage snapshot. Suzanne’s holding Skitter. I’m being the tie/bow tie missionary I truly am. And Bernie Sanders stopped by to chat.
Suzanne and I called our Delta house Southfork (as in the tv show DALLAS), and we called it the Desert Beach House. I think of it most fondly as my grandparents’ former house. When I owned it, I thought of it as my own private tumbleweed ranch. I had a serious green thumb for growing all shapes, sizes, and styles of tumbleweeds. The best part about this house is that it was just an easement away from my parents’ home, which came in especially handy after Dad passed away. When we were in Delta, we could keep a protective eye on Mom, without cramping her gallivanting style. Rowan and I spent the bulk of his childhood summers in this house, while Suzanne stayed in Ogden and slaved at the office. She grabbed chunks of time to spend in Delta whenever she could get away from work. Rowan got the benefit of growing up by my parents and surrounded by my grandnieces and grandnephews. Our summer porch was always full of Mom, and kids, and bubbles, and root beer floats. Oh, and the porch was home to buckets of sidewalk chalk for creating miles of kid art to behold. I am proud to say that no self-respecting kid ever walked off our porch clean. 🏖
Back in December 2020, closer to our actual anniversary, we made a pilgrimage to the one place we had lived in Ogden. This was not just an apartment, like all our SLC residences had been. This was our house—with a swell porch for sittin’ and watchin’ the world go by. It was located on the “bad” side of Harrison Blvd, but it was a good area for Rowan to grow up. We lived here until we moved to our current residence in Centerville, almost a decade ago.
Note that in this photo I am wearing a Christmas Tie o’ the Day and a Suzanne-made Cape o’ the Day.
At our BAMBARA brunch, Suzanne gave me a Valentine’s card, a birthday card, and an Easter card. This was her signal to me that our first real dining-out-fancy in a restaurant since the pandemic began was meant to celebrate more than just Easter. In my post this morning, I told you Suzanne called our 3-in-1 holiday “Valenbirtheaster.” But after we completely filled our tummies at brunch, Suzanne had yet a fourth “holiday” which we needed to acknowledge on her agenda.
Not only did we not venture out to a restaurant to celebrate our 7th Anniversary back in December, I had told Suzanne that in honor of our anniversary, I wanted us to go on a trek to re-visit the three places we had lived in Salt Lake City when we first got together way back in the ancient 80’s. Due to the pandemic and life’s busy-ness in general, we never got around to doing the anniversary abode trek—until Suzanne surprised me with just such a nostalgic drive after brunch yesterday.
Behind us in the first photo is a house which had been split into apartments, one of which was our first residence. Our apartment was on 8th East, near the 9th and 9th neighborhood. We lived on the 2nd floor, in a U-shaped apartment. Suzanne’s brother, James, lived with us in this apartment too. We enjoyed watching him eat pizza-sized pancakes whole. Most notably, our apartment had red popsicle-colored walls surrounding the bathtub. Also, we had a neighbor across the hall who had the jaunty name of Sadie Cowboy. She was probably not much older than us, but she had lost most of her teeth—likely to violence. She did have a young daughter whose laughter brightened Sadie’s otherwise dire situation. One of our downstairs neighbors was a Goliath of a U of U football player named Kyle who took a liking to us, and made sure nobody gave us any trouble.
Our second apartment was in a big complex on 9th East, around 3rd South. We had a lot more room there, and the apartment was closer to the U of U where I had a teaching fellowship. But the apartment’s plastic yellow carpet was sharp to bare feet, so we wore shoes in the apartment all the time. If we wanted to sit on the floor to read the Sunday paper or watch a movie, we had to lay down a thick blanket over the carpet first. I kid you not, if your skin directly touched the carpet, it gave you a carpet burn even if you were completely still. We named that apartment The Kingdom of Scary Yellow Carpet. We had another U of U football player living right next door to us there too, but he wasn’t protective like the football guy from our first apartment building. On more than one occasion this guy threw his wife against the wall we shared, knocking out his wife, and knocking our pictures off the wall.
In the third photo here, you are seeing us in front of two houses on 10th Avenue, just off I Street. When we visited our third—and final—SLC apartment we once occupied, we couldn’t agree which house our garden apartment was in. Suzanne thinks we lived in the baby blue one, and I think the gray-blue one’s house numbers sounded like the right address. We aren’t sure which one housed us, but we are sure it was one of the two. It doesn’t surprise me we aren’t positive about it, because we didn’t live in this one very long.
And so, after revisiting our old SLC domiciles, the word Valenbirtheaster had to get longer. I have officially christened yesterday’s celebration of four different things to be “Valenbirtheastaversary.”
The pandemic has cramped our out-on-the-town celebration style, but Suzanne decided our masked and vaccinated selves were finally safe enough to go forth and eat fancy food in an actual restaurant in Salt Lake City. Of course, she didn’t tell me exactly what we were doing or where we were going to do it. All I knew is that she had made secret reservations for something somewhere, but she told me nothing more than when to have my goin’-out duds on. I just did as I was told and got in the car. Off we drove to the bigly city o’ Salt. When the car was safely stopped in a parking stall, I finally knew we were going to dine at BAMBARA. Well played, Suzanne.
I had a superb meal of grilled asparagus, a perfectly fried egg, and a pork chop the size of a pork roast—all smothered in a cherry tomato vinaigrette and a tomato hollandaise sauce. I’ll be eating what’s left of my pork chop for lunch for the rest of the week, and probably the upcoming weekend. Suzanne ordered the salmon Caesar salad, which had garlic croutons the size of popcorn balls. The waiter brought us a piece of chocolate cake with strawberries and cream to share—and a lighted candle—when he found out we were celebrating my birthday, among other things.
Suzanne surprised me with not one, but three different special occasion cards. With this one Easter brunch, she was handling three separate and distinct celebrations. We hadn’t been able to go out to eat for Valentine’s Day or my birthday this year, so Suzanne says we were celebrating what she calls Valenbirtheaster. After Easter brunch, Suzanne took me on a drive to celebrate a fourth “holiday.” Valenbirtheaster morphed into Valenbirtheasterversary. I’ll tell you all about that in this afternoon’s post.
