Mellow-Ville-by-the-river

A little of this, and a little of that,

   from Mellow-Ville-by-the-river

A swarm of three hummingbirds descended

   upon my amalgam of trees: Gingko, Pear, Fig,

   this afternoon, mesmerizing my cat.  She doesn’t

fantasize chasing nor catching them [too fast, too high].

I think it is the aerobatics that interest her.  She loves chasing butterflies: their erratic flight maneuvers tantalize her.  I concur with her that combat pilot training should incorporate butterfly flight maneuvers.  She has Tom Cruise envy.

Recently some may have wondered, “Where did all that stuff go: some his, some Cory’s, some just junk?”  Well, the answer is, downstairs.  So, as I now complete the “cleansing” of my house, I have begun the purge of  the basement floor area.

It’s the end of the post-flood cleanup. -I recently patched up the laundry, toilet, and sink; today I moved tools from the basement floor to a table in the garage.  

I packed up Corry’s things from upstairs into storage cartons in the garage.  I took a bunch of chess things [a storage carton full]  out to the shed.

Tomorrow, I need to pack up and move to the shed, my home movie equipment: projector, DVD player, stereo system(s), DVDs, and lighting, including some of last year’s “pics” – three more storage cartons, into the garage.

The weather is blissfully mellow, June 25, 2020, 6:16 pm.  Early crops in the garden are eatable, just starting to top.

Strange visit last night [7-9 pm] from “old” friend from KGGV/Church days.  Any visit to my house is odd, in that I don’t encourage contact these days.  I’m happy being a hermit and have severed most of my contacts with former groups.  I am only peripherally involved in one ZOOM weekly meeting about memoir writing.

The subject is always relationships [not with me] and I’m not sure I like the role of Father Confessor for the next-to-me, age group of women.  I happily opine, which is what old men do.  Visitors, however, rarely follow advice to the lovelorn.  It is the listening with attention that they seek.

Day 3 of my veggie stewp.

I pulled the smallest container from the fridge just now.

Way too dry.

All the bits and pieces are there, but “WAY TOO DRY”.

Should I add in a tomato sauce?

Prego

Or Paul Newman’s Sauce?

Suzy Home Maker – Day 2

I took my previous day’s Stewp-pot of chicken and veggies,

  and  brought it to a low boil;

  added two fist-full’s of spaghetti and various liquids:

   some water, yesterday’s red wine remains,

    the day before’s white, and last week’s cooking zin.

As I stirred this pot, I realized that it was now three meals.

But Suzy Home-maker to the rescue: while I was buying the spaghetti, I also bought a pack of containers,   (see pic).

So I ate about a quarter of this concoction, then filled  three containers: one in the freezer, two in the fridge.

The stewp was excellent

 – I had also bought some Parmesan cheese.

Saving food for later is a new venture into the unknown for me.

Veggie Garden - Whats Next

Now that I’ve got a vegetable garden, what’s next?

My daughter’s visit last Sunday was a Summer 2020 Marker.

This afternoon, I sampled some carrots (not yet large enough) and some radishes (exactly right now).  I’ve been eating, and cooking with, lettuce, chard, snap peas, and new potatoes for about two weeks now.

I started a kitchen window herb garden at the advice of my neighbor, Carol Carsner, who is my culinary advisor.  I have been using snips of herbs from there for about a month.  I have attached Pic 1, ”herbs”, along with my “Stewp” pot, which I used tonight to cook up some chicken with a ton of veggies.  It makes so much, I asked Carol how to stretch things out for a few days. [Pic 2 “Veggie Chicken”]

She referenced Rachel Ray’s TV program where they use a term halfway between stew-pot and soup-pot.  I was looking for adding in some pasta or spaghetti tomorrow night, to suck up some of all the liquid I wound up with.  When I told Carol that I had two Le Crueset cast iron, oval Dutch ovens, it stunned her.  

   Sure they were smaller-size, but still at $300 a pop!! – I got them at Whole Foods twenty years ago, and long before the Donald Trump Tariff Wars. [Pic 3 “French Pots”]

Today I changed from registered Republican to registered Democrat.

I was a Goldwater fan in 1964.  I became a Republican then.  In 68-69 I did some campaign analysis work for Mo Udahl, a conservative Democrat.  Back in 1969, Ross Perot scheduled me for an interview to join his computer management team, down in Texas, at the ranch.  I have never bothered to change my political affiliation  --  for no particular reason, other than just, pure laziness.

I will miss the artsy letters from Melania, but to be truthful, I have never sent a dollar to any political party, ever in my lifetime.  The only thing I every got was this [pictured] ashtray, nut dish.

Why now?  There is no one left in my Republican Party.  Maybe it is George Will’s recent about face; maybe it’s that of David Brooks.  There is no Republican Party anymore, only a small mass sycophancy of not much consequence.

The end of the current idiocy is about to be steam-rollered over by a mass uprising of public disgust as DJT continues to double-down on a patently losing hand: racism, despotism, and ignorance.

This happened in the thirties with Huey Long, he’s forgotten.  We’re about to see another FDR-era landslide.  This will be a prolonged period of correcting long-standing grievances, and the Court.  It will take twenty years, and we’ll only accomplish half of what needs to be done.

But we should clarify what we stand for, what our ethos is.  What our values are.  If we succeed, this American spirit can once again charge an era, the 21^st century, with inspiration and guidance for the remainder of the century.

Mask Secrets

As a person who has studied the mating game most of  my life, both chess and love, I couldn’t help but note that in our new age of masks, masks have always been an allure like at Fasching or Mardi Gras.  A thought crossed my mind, it happens so seldom these days, when a woman in public dropped her mask for a split second while she tasted something.  It reminded me on a woman lifting her hem line to show a bit of ankle or adjusting a dress to show a bit of cleavage.

Yes, it’s been only a few months, but the absence of optics of a woman’s lips, her nose, the cheeks has left me eager for but a mere glimpse of these real beauty spots.

Where will this lead to next?  Exposé photos in The Sun or Daily News? New porn mags showing retouched lips?  Teen fads texting bare noses?