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. 😷😱
[My brother, Ron, has called me Queenie for as long as either of us can remember, but we all know Mom is the true Queen of All Kindness and Potato Salad. When this post showed up as a memory on my feed this morning, I simply had to post it for y’all once again. Ain’t Mom royally regal?!]
I love running across pix of Mom. Here she is, sometime around four years ago, visiting me in my former Delta abode. When I was in town, Mom wandered over to hang with me two or three times a day. Usually, Mom held court on my porch, where we solved the problems of the world. We were laughing so hard about something one summer day on the porch that Mrs. Rowlette—who just happened to be driving by—pulled into my driveway and asked what was so funny. We invited her onto the sacred porch, where she laughed with us for the next hour. Mrs. Rowlette was not the first, nor was she the last, to find out what happened on the porch, stayed on the porch.
When the weather and temperature didn’t cooperate, this bigly chair by the bigly picture window at my place was Mom’s throne. Mom’s style needs no neckwear, although I’d give her the bowtie off my neck if she wanted it. And you can see where I got my basic fashion sensibilities, right?
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. 🐶😷
Apparently, my Facebook account was hacked last night or early today, as many FB friends already know. It seems some of my FB friends were sent a video from me, which really wasn’t from me at all. If you received the video link, DON’T OPEN IT! Nobody knows what it is, but it ain’t from me. Let’s be cyber safe, boys and girls! And that means not opening files of any sort when we aren’t sure where they came from or what they are. Trust me—if I ever send y’all a link to something, I will be clear about what it is. I will make sure it’s safe before I send it. Sorry for any inconvenience that the link I didn’t really send might have caused you. (www.tie-o-the-day.com was not harmed.)
Having said all of that, it won’t surprise you to know that keyboard Tie o’ the Day and I have spent most of the day investigating how this relatively minor mix-up happened. I don’t have any sensical answers yet, and I hate not having answers. I spent a couple of hours changing passwords and running overall security checks on the three computers I use. Everything checks out as A-OK. But seriously, what demented soul would want to hack a Facebook blog about ties? Could there possibly be another tie-obsessed, eccentric writer out there who is jealous enough of my neckwear posts that they feel the need to steal them? As far as I can tell, writing about ties is not a competitive sport. But I suppose I could be wrong. 💻🖥⌨️👔
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.🍕🍔🌭🍟
With Labor Day now behind us, summer 2021 is gone, too. As I was going through some files yesterday, I stumbled upon this photographic gem of me in the front yard of my family’s home. I was 14 that summer. I think the head in the corner of the pic belongs to my nephew, Ronnie, who would have been 2 at the time. I’ve never had to recognize him by just his head before, but I’m almost certain this shaded noggin belongs to him. The Bow Tie o’ the Day I’ve drawn on my neck here is further proof that every look is vastly improved with the right neckwear.
I’ve had some new earrings I’ve been wanting to try out on a Saturday night, and yesterday Suzanne sent me a text from upstairs that said we were going to SLC to dinner for the evening. Finally, I had a place to wear my piggie earrings out on the town for all to see. I took an up-close pic of the chubby earrings so y’all can see both the front and back of my tiny pink friends. Since we haven’t been out a lot lately, I decided to be as formal and black tie-y as I get—with my fave black shirt (the oldest shirt I own, from the 80’s) and my black-background flip-flop Bow Tie o’ the Evening. Likewise, I went black vinyl with my record album Face Mask o’ the Evening.
Suzanne had made reservations for us at PAGO, where we filled up on some of our favorite foods. I almost ordered the pork chop, just to maintain the piggie-theme of the night, but I ended up opting for the steak. Suzanne, of course, ordered the scallops. We are very predictable sometimes. Suzanne chose a sauvignon blanc to drink, which she said was tasterrific, and I can verify that her wine smelled nummy and made my mouth water. I sometimes wonder if Suzanne gets weary of my sniffing her wine selections, but it’s not like I’m going to quit doing it, so we both might as well get over it if it’s a problem. I think Suzanne will agree that probably our best discovery of the night was an appetizer made with beets, strawberries, goat cheese, and candied quinoa. The true gem within the appetizer was the pickled strawberries. We didn’t know pickled strawberries even existed, and now we will never forget they do. We will be ordering them at PAGO again, soon.
