My Bad Garden

Wow, a surprise day off. Thought about doing, oh, a million other things, but the yard and the chorus of cats was demanding attention, so I suited up and started digging. Took out more blackberry roots, put in a second raised bed—this one 4x6—and started breaking up clods to fill it with dirt.

At some point I went out with the hubs to do some errands, including stopping by Miller Farms Nursery and picking up a small bag of green manure, a nitrogen-fixing, weed-surpressing cover-crop mix. My intent is to sow the green manure as I finish a box, 'cause I really don't think I'm going to have time to actually raise any winter vegetables this year. Not with all that stinking blackberry and ivy yet to go.

Headless

Now that I live in the country—when there're cows grazing in town, that qualifies as country for this city girl—I'm adjusting to a different standard of what's considered news. Such as New Pavement in Rio Dell, or Fourth St. Stoplight Now Working. When G-man was in France a couple of weeks ago, part of our twice-daily email exchange was my recounting of the day's (non)news. So much nicer than Oakland Man Shot (half a block from my friend's house), Man Shot in Berkeley (while riding his bike), Drug House, Car-jacking...You get the idea.

So today I open the newspaper and gasp out loud. G-man called from the other room, "What?" but I was so stunned I couldn't answer. He came out of his office and I handed him the paper:

No mystery how Babe the Ox lost his head

(I especially like that someone hung a wreath up in place of his head. Festive, no?)

Rotted materials cited as cause of decapitation

Karen Wilkinson

the Times-Standard

A critical piece of one of Klamath's more noticeable landmarks has fallen off.
The head of Babe the Blue Ox, a 35-foot-tall statue of Paul Bunyan's mythical sidekick that stands by the Trees of Mystery gift shop, fell off and landed snout first on the concrete sometime Tuesday evening, Trees of Mystery manager Jesse LaForest said.
Rain and old, rotted materials are to blame.
"Apparently we had a leak and it rotted one of the beams," LaForest said. "When it gave way, it gave way to the rest of them."
"It's not something we expect to see often or at all," he said of the nearly 1,000 pound, 9-foot-wide ox head.
Repairing the head, which is made of chicken wire and stucco, will likely cost between $200 and $300 and should be done by the first week of January, LaForest said.
"It's fixable, but until then, he has no head," he said.
In the meantime, and during the business' annual Christmas light show that kicked off Friday evening, Babe's head has been replaced with a much smaller ornament—a Christmas wreath and a grapefruit-sized stuffed Babe the Blue Ox.
Folklore said that Babe was found in the "Winter of the Blue Snow" by Paul Bunyan, a lumberjack of enormous size and strength. The ox statue has been at Trees of Mystery since 1950, and Paul Bunyan has been standing there since 1961, LaForest said.
"Paul's made out of good stuff; he's never coing down," he said.

Feliz Dia de Demaciado, Gente!

shamelessly stolen from I can has cheezburger?

Fat Slices This Year

Tonight was my second night of Thanksgiving preparation. My step-daughter and I are splitting cooking duties, and we discussed the menu yesterday afternoon. Half the diners are either vegetarian or allergic to wheat, but I insisted on at least a small turkey, and stuffing.

Later, while I was cubing bread, roasting pumpkins, and toasting seeds, it occurred to me that I lay out just one of my family's traditional Thanksgiving dishes. Well, yes, turkey, but I don't cook it like my mom did. No cornbread stuffing, no green beans with bacon, no iced tea, no crescent-shaped rolls. But the candied yams, made the way my mom did year after year, survived to reach a new generation's table.

Weird.

But toward the end of our meal-planning conversation, Alisha tentatively asked about desserts: was I planning on bringing any? Well, just the pumpkin pie, I told her. Was there something else she wanted?

"Oh, no-o-o, I know you've got a lot to do..."

"No, what? Something in particular?" My daughter-in-law not only has me make pineapple upside-down cake for all family events, but asks me to make "one for the party, and a little one for me."! Which I am so happy to do. Who doesn't like making special foods for people?

"Lemon pie! Can you bring one?"

"You're kidding. Nobody likes that but me, and I got tired of eating the whole thing myself so I stopped making them."

"No! I really like it"—I can hear my son-in-law and husband chiming in from both ends of the connection, "Me, too! I like lemon pie!"

Okay-y-y. It's not a chiffon or meringue pie. It's sliced up lemons in pie crust. Intense would be the best word to describe it. Lemon just never struck me as a really popular flavor.

My step-daughter adds, "We all ate it, it's just that you usually make a lemon pie, and a pumpkin pie, and that cranberry pie, an apple pie, and a chocolate pie. We had to take really tiny slices to try them all."

Rock on. Lemon pie it is.

Surprise

I'm surprised to be surprised by this: maybe cats really do consider people their personal servants.

A dog? Now, a dog has got a job to do, and it usually involves barking at me, or sometimes saying very nasty things in dog-speak. But I respect the seriousness with which they take their position as guardians, even when they're trying to bite me or shredding the mail I've shoved through the slot.

But the cats. The cats look at me and say, "Oh, good. You're here. Open this door for me." Just like that, ordering me around. No "hello, how's your day, if you have a moment would you let me in?" Nuh-uh. Every so often one will say, "Open this door for me, please," so I ring the doorbell and continue on my way.

Know what else I'm surprised I'm surprised by? All the pot-smoking! I'm no naif, but geez, there's a lot of pot-smoking going on in this town! I smell it when people answer the door. I smell it walking down the street. I smell it coming like exhaust from the car ahead of me. If we didn't have a prevailing onshore breeze we'd have a permanent cloud of cannibis smog sitting over Arcata.

Wait; one more thing surprises me. In the whole of Del Norte county, the only thing between Arcata and those California-hatin' Oregonians, there is exactly one incorporated town. One!

Millionaires Need Your Money

"Just because you've rolled horse manure in powdered sugar doesn't mean you have a doughnut," said Scott Faber, a former Environmental Defense lobbyist now with the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

And agribusiness does love its doughnuts.

Why is California's leadership rolling over on this huge loss of revenue? It makes me pig-biting mad, and I love to write letters to my politicos when I'm pig-biting mad.

What makes you write your government representatives?

Hair Everywhere

Snip, snip, snip. Six women in a small room tainted with the scent of pamplemousse and a floor covered in hair.

"It's too bad about Michael. He was sooooo cute." Beaded flip-flops and red toenail polish. Her voice filled the room in a way no hydrating citrus spray could hope to match.

The stylist was using a big round brush, pulling the first woman's tawny hair up, up, up and out. "He was cute!"

"But he's dead, you know."

"Really? Recently?" Red flag No. 1. Angela and I exchange glances in the mirror. The third pair of women, visible only as two pairs of feet, are silent.

"He committed suicide."

One of the pairs of feet speaks up; I'm not sure which. "He strangled himself."

"Oh, that's right! He was doing that, that sex thing and died."

The stylist chimed in. "The owner of The XXX Factor died that way, too."

"No!"

"Yeah. They found him hanging by a doorknob by his belt. Nitrous and you know don't mix, do they?" She laughed. What was the problem with that word? Angela's pierced eyebrow arches and she snips in silence, Hello Kitty calaveras tat peeping out from under her shirt sleeve.

Red Toenails was gyrating in her chair. "They should put warning labels on the bottles. It's like in the old days when they'd say you'd get hairy palms if you, uh, you know, too much."

Another glance in the mirror. "Masturbation didn't kill Michael Hutchence; I'm sure the belt around his neck had a lot to do with it."

Silence from the corner containing the two pairs of feet.

Bouncing, booming, embarrassed, Red Toenails changed subjects. "Isn't it amazing that those hairy men, the cave-men, what are they called, Janine? Cave, cave, cave..." A shrug from Janine, still brushing in big long strokes and trimming oh so carefully. "All covered in hair, and first they're doing talk-shows and radio and now they have a tv show."

Did Red Toenails see me hang my head in disbelief? I don't know; I was looking down.

"I think they're wearing costumes."

"That's not what they really look like? Are you sure? I think they really look like that."

"Uh," sensing a diminishment in tip Janine backpedaled. "I don't know. But their tv show is good!"

I fled the noise and inanity before I could hear Red Flag No. 3.