The Good, The Bad, and the Heartburn

After a month of extremely healthful eating, minimal contact with meat, poultry, or fish, and practically no cheese or butter, something catastrophic happened: Memorial Day Weekend.

You just can't avoid cookouts and potato salad and all things grilled on Memorial Day weekend, you can't! Oh, I know, I know- you actually can avoid those things if you really want to and are dedicated, but who the hell wants to on a holiday weekend, especially the one that marks the start of the summer cookout season?!

We indulged in chicken brats, fresh from the West Side Market, and if you've never had the opportunity to buy your meats fresh from them, you don't know what you're missing! On top of yesterday's brats and potato salad, and chips and dip, we had pizza on both Friday and Sunday nights, and even allowed ourselves each a Diet Coke on Sunday. What?! Lesbians gone wild, I tell ya!

Saturday contained a mixture of fried potatoes and eggs for breakfast, then Subway sandwiches with cheese, potato chips for lunch, and then wine later on that evening. In fact, I also had wine yesterday. Shh!

So, after a weekend of bad food indulgence, is it any wonder I came home yesterday with my belly aching, acid in over-production, and that gnawing, aching, bloated feeling which lasted well into the morning and woke me from a deep sleep on several occasions throughout the night?

The thing is, once you start eating healthfully, really eating healthfully every day- you realize how bad all those good-tasting foods make you feel. And That is one hell of a let-down. Because I do love those bad for me foods. I really, really do!

Unsung Heroes

Memorial Day has become a day of barbecues, beer, and swimming pools. We've extended a weekend and given ourselves yet another excuse to party and have a great time, but have we forgotten what Memorial Day is really about? How often do we actually stop and think about all the men, women, animals...everyone who has fought and served our country? Many of which have given the ultimate sacrifice.

And maybe we do stop to think about the soldier...but how many of us think about the truly unsung heroes? Most soldiers are happy to go into combat. That is what separates them from the rest of us. They may be afraid to die, but they know deep within themselves that this is the job they signed up for, and they feel a true duty to their country, their countrymen and women to be there on the front lines to protect us. Sometimes they chose to go into service hoping they will never see wartime, but electing that service as the most promising option to advance their education or career...Sometimes they are coerced by family or friends to make that choice, but always it is a choice.

Not so for the truly unsung heroes.

Dogs, horses, even dolphins are chosen to serve our country, and more and more are losing their lives for us. Worse yet, they survive and are traumatized by the horrors of war. They live with fear, anxiety, depression. They have PTSD, only these poor creatures didn't get a choice that was fair. They didn't know that doing their job, obeying their commands, would place them in such harm's way. They only want to please their human counterparts. They don't get the option of choosing to place their lives on the line in combat situations. We take it upon ourselves to choose them. This Memorial Day, think about all the creatures of this planet who have given so much of themselves in order to preserve your freedom to grill burgers and drink beer by the pool.

Me and My Veggies

I've almost always loved my veggies. I mean, sure, when I was a young one, I put up a fuss over certain ones, like those evil green pebbles that call themselves peas. But broccoli, and cauliflower, okra, and brussel sprouts, collard greens, squash... zucchini? All good in my book. In my late twenties I developed a love affair with eggplant. I had to get grown and move from my parents to even experience such a fabulous vegetable, but once I did, I knew what it meant to live off the land, for I could surely sustain my every cell's nutritional requirement with eggplant. I even spent a few years avoiding anything that once had a face and blood all together. Opting for plants only. I felt much healthier then. Aside from all the chemicals that I was pumping into my body at a feverish pace, as though I was in a race to some junkie-only finish line, and only Keith Richards could lap me to take the lead. But I digress...
One of my other all time favorite sustainable, succulent sustenances are brussel sprouts. I love them. They may reek to high heaven when you're cooking them, but it's an aroma that makes my mouth water and gets me all a tither. Until, that is, a few months ago...when I got soooooo sick. Then just after I got over it, like a week later, it all happened again, in exactly the same way. symptoms and all, identical. The only thing I could attribute it to was the meal I had eaten the night of becoming so viloently ill each time. I had brussel sprouts. From the same store, from the same batch. They were frozen, steam in the pouch brussel sprouts, and honestly, I believe that they were tainted. Oh, they tasted fine, and if they smelled bad, well, how the hell would anyone have known? But a short time after eating...I was violently ill. We'll leave it at that. I didn't even relate it to the seemingly innocuous morsel nestled upon my plate, or else I'd have never seen fit to eat them again, as my symptoms subsided and I was able to move from clear liquids and on to solid foods again. I just thought vegetables always give me stregnth, I'll make some brussel sprouts! Bad, bad, bad idea.
So needles to say, I've been less than gung ho over the sight of those tiny cabbages ever since then. Wifester and I were at the store last weekend, and I saw the lovely brussel sprouts, bobbing their heads from behind the mist and beckoning me ..." come back into the light...just a try, this time will be different, we promise", And I, with all the strength I could muster, turned and walked away from them. Tempting as they may be, so was cocaine and every other chemical substance that I could snort and smoke and....well, let's just say I've learned that when something is no good for you, you just gotta leave it alone.
Likewise, my love of okra has been, er-um, squashed, due to the unfortunate "Memorial Day Experience", which is always said, now, with the quotation marks gesture, just for added emphasis. I went how many weeks without tomatoes because of the salmonella scare, only to find out they were safe all along! Meanwhile, I was chopping up jalapeños, who were responsible, left and right! I don't know how much more of this I can take. Please, stop ruining my veggies! I love my veggies. I don't want them taken away from me. When, where, for the love of all that's green and organic will this crazy madness end?

My memorable Memorial Day & WWC - Penultimate & Entrance

I had no sooner settled into the sofa to finish watching The Brave One. It was Saturday morning, I had just paid my lawn guy for a freshly mowed yard and referred him over to my neighbors house (not the urban jungle house, but our friends, who live a couple of doors down). Suddenly, I heard a shrill scream coming from the cul-de-sac. The Wifester and I looked at each other and simultaneously said, "What the hell is that?!" Before we could look out the window a hard BAM! BAM! BAM! on our front door followed instantly by our friends' voices yelling, no, screaming our names in a sheer panic alerted us to the fact that the scream was directed our way and trouble was just outside of our living room. I tore the front door open to see their panicked faces, shock and horror, trembling hands waving in the air while M said "Come quick! Come quick! He cut his fingers off! HE CUT HIS FINGERS OFF! OH MY GOD, HIS FINGERS ARE GONE! ¡Probrecito!"
It only took a second for me to realize the lawn mower was no longer running and that this was gong to be the very ugly beginning to everyone's Memorial Day weekend.
I ran across the cul-de-sac with the girls and into their back yard to find one of the assistant workers standing there, hand shoved into a bag, looking a bit lost. I quickly assessed the situation with him and realized he was not fully in shock, but probably headed that way, distant, aloof. You know, for a man who'd just cut off his fingers, he wasn't bleeding as much as you'd imagine. Of course, he was holding his wrist very tight, so that may have been slowing the circulation. Regardless, I expected to see a lot more blood. Not that it wasn't there, it was, just not quite as much as I expected.
OK, now here's the first thing I just don't get. No one had called 911 yet. Someone cut his fingers off and no one called 911. I suppose it was panic, and the first thing that anyone thought was to get the nurses. I used to be one, The Wifester is one and the first instinct was to get us. But still, 911. It's like the first thing we do when when people sever limbs or digits or nearly die.  (edit: turned out they couldn't find their phone, you know, they slide in between sofa cushions and hide from time to time)
So here I am, trotting over calling 911 trying to tell them what's happening and where, all before I even arrive at the scene. Once I get there, the first thing I see is the injured man with his hand in a bag of what I assume to be ice. Did I mention that none of the guys speak any English? Thank god M, one of the girls from the house that this happened at, does because my Spanish is deficient, at best. The 911 operator is asking me how many fingers have been severed, I'm looking in the bag at his bloody stumps to see, and honestly, I don't want to look to closely. I see lots of blood on what looks like the first three fingers and tell them it looks to be the first three fingers. They asked if the fingers were found, I look into the bag again, and upon seeing three blood covered nubs, I told them yeah, they found 'em all. Then I looked around and realized everyone is still looking around on the ground. I asked "What are yall looking for? The fingers are right here aren't they?" Nope! See, as it turns out the bag was frozen whole okra, it was the quickest thing that they could grab, and the "fingers" I saw, well, that was just blood covered okra (can you say YUCK!)
Needless to say, I don't think I'll be having okra anytime soon.
Oh, the next thing I don't get is that as we're waiting on the ambulance to arrive, 911 tells me, "Ma'am, the ambulance for La Vergne is currently dispatched on another emergency, we've sent one from Smyrna, so it'll be just a few more minutes." It took over 20 minutes for the ambulance to get here. We could have had the poor guy to the hospital down the road quicker, although, they are not really equipped to handle that kind of situation and the ambulance ended up taking him to Vanderbilt in Nashville, who is. But really, is there only one ambulance for my city? Really? We have, according to the 2006 census, a population of 25,278. One ambulance for what has to be at least 26,000 people by now? I feel so safe. So we're standing on the front porch with the police who got there quickly, I'm still on the phone with 911, his hand is in the bag of frozen whole okra, and plop, there spills out blood covered okra looking ever so much like fingers. One officer is spazzing out saying "if that touches me, I'm gonna puke" and here comes P with another bag, this time a ziploc bag with ice and a piece of finger. It was like some demented horror fest right here in the suburbs. Who needs Stephen King when you have immigrant gardeners who don't heed the warnings on the side of their lawn mowers?
Needless to say, the fingers were not saved, even the one that was found relatively intact. The mower does a mulching number. He's lucky he still has a hand at all. He did turn the mower off, but it seems that as he was clearing a clump of grass, the blades were freed and then continued their rotation. I suppose that is precisely why that label on the side of the mower says "Never place hands on or near mover blades" in English, Spanish, French, and German. Poor guy. He thought since it was off, he was safe.
Oh yeah, and after the poor man was loaded up into the ambulance, and the police cleared out, the remaining two workers went back to work! They told our friends, "we finish your yard, then we go" She told them it was fine to leave it unfinished and just go on to the hospital, but they said no, they wanted to finish their job.
Now THATS some work ethic.
I know people who won't go to work when they have PMS, this guy's uncle just mulched his fingers in a lawnmower right in front of him and he went back out there and finished up the job.
Amazing.
Needless to say, that was the penultimate experience I wanted to have launch our Memorial Day weekend.
Which brings us to Tink's WWC words for this week.
Penultimate & Entrance
No worries, I didn't take photos of bloody stubs for my WWC, I promise. Nor of bloody okra.
If you want to join the WWC posse' mosey on over to see the well rested and recently vacationed Tink, of Pickled Beef and she'll show you how.

Penultimate:
Before the finger mulching incident happened, I thought that cleaning this closet out was the penultimate thing I'd want to do on my holiday weekend. I was wrong.

Also before the finger mulching, the penultimate thing I expected to see was the urban jungle finally disappeared this weekend! (And without any loss of limbs or digits, yay for them!)

Entrance

the entrance to a very yummy beverage


flowers make the entrance to mi casa welcoming and inviting

sure, Mr.Ebola virus looks cute and cuddly, but you'd be sadly remiss to allow him entrance into your body!

Friday Blooms

The weekend is upon us and THANK GOD for that! My neighbors STILL have not cut the grass, and it has reached the point of being as tall as the fence in their back yard. Sad. The grass is taller than their front porch. The day before yesterday, as I stood outside watering my flowers, talking with Wifester, said neighbor sat on his front porch step smoking a cigarette. I don't get how you can sit on your ass and look at grass like that and not do something about it. When I lived with the Party Boys, we partied. We stayed out till 4am drinking, consuming mass quantities of illicit substances, wreaking havoc all across town, and quite often, being subdued by Nashville's finest. Yet, with all of that going on, we were still able to get up on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and cut the damned grass. One time, our lawn mower was broken, so one of the party boys, J, got a brilliant idea, mostly triggered I'm sure, by the fungi he'd been eating for the hallucinogenic effects...His chemically altered ingenuity lead us to take hedge trimmers and get on hands and knees and cut our grass. Oh, we did it alright. We were a threesome of madness out there on the lawn, gigantic scissors in hand, laughing our mind-altered asses off, but we did it, and our lawn looked nice again. One time, we pawned movies that we no longer watched so that we could pay someone to cut our grass. Yeah, we were those people. Hey, I don't claim to have lead a perfect life. I've lived a life. But I've kept my lawn from becoming an urban jungle, even in midst of being in the house of "The Party Boys and Lesbot Too".

All I'm saying is if we could keep up with our yard, so can they.

Ok, enough about that. Here's some good stuff from MY yard. I took the pup out this morning for her morning potty and SURPRISE! My lily has given me such a beautiful bloom! Just look at this!

Ahhh... that makes me feel better. Then I noticed, just behind it, another bloom. This one the wife picked out. I'm not really sure what this flower is called, I just know it's pretty. I have yet to plant it, it's sitting there in the pot we bought it in, I'm gonna dig a hole and plant it today when I get home. I'm sure it'll be happy. I've placed a nice trellis for it to climb. Here's wifey's pick:

Today is full of prizes for me, not only did my garden give me these lovely blooms, but I only have to work a half a day, then I get to go get my hair cut! YIPPPPPEEEE! Annnnnnnd... best of all.... 3 DAY WEEKEND!

I never saw such a thing when I worked at the phone company. I never saw such a thing in retail, in nursing, or at the hotel. This is a whole new world for me, and quite frankly, I'm loving it. I am basking in the glory of a nice cushy job with perks that are perky and incentives that are
motivating rather than condescending.

That's it for today, my job awaits...Have a great weekend yall, and be safe!