The Heat! The Humidity!

But actually it's not bad right now since the sun has gone down but all day it's been miserable. I need my pool, and it's getting put up tomorrow thank heavens! That'll cool me off and relax me. Water/sun always make me feel sooo good!

So it's only seventeen days until I go down to Tunica and w/ the stress level I've suffered lately I gotta tell you, I am so ready! I realize we all have stress but I don't deal w/ it well when it's one thing after another so I'm really going to enjoy my time away when I see ...
YEAH, BABY! I get excited every time I think about it. And then after that I'll see ...

Oh, me ... Be still my beating heart!

I don't have a lot of news -- the garden is going strong of course. We have more canteloupe and Sugar Baby watermelons than we'll know what to do w/ -- someday. They're in various stages of "babyhood" right now but we have several we're keeping a close eye on. I do believe that biggest Sugar Baby (about the size of a tennis ball) has my name on it! I have a real weakness when it comes to watermelon! My daddy's is canteloupe and there are more than I can count on the vines right now! We have so many tomatoes on our vines I don't know what we're going to do w/ all of them, even if we can as we always do. And the cucumbers are going wild of course -- my parents took several dozen to church to give away on Sunday.

Wait -- I do have some sort of cool news, at least to me. Remember the jacket my Snickerdoodle got me for Christmas?

I bought a pair of boots to match!

Which just happens to match my Bebe bag!

I love the rhinestones!! Of course I'm not wearing the jacket right now but the boots fit like they were made for me. WOO-HOO!Okay, I admit, it doesn't take much to tickle me.

My two Prune Danish are fixing to take them a little trip I guess next week. Now they need a break -- seriously! So far the plan is to leave here and hit Little Rock, OKC, Tulsa, Springfield, MO, STL and then come back here. I think that's the route they're taking. Or it could be OKC, Dallas, Shreveport, Jackson, MS, Tunica and then back here. I think that's it ... Sigh! I'll have to ask Daddy again. Well, I never said I'm intelligent -- I just try really hard to fake it!

So we had two electronic items drop dead on practically the same day. I got my mama a TV for Christmas and on Saturday she turned it on and got ... nothing. The next day I tried to use Daddy's printer because mine's not even out of the box yet and ... nothing. Well, you know me, I'm the Fixer Of All Problems: I called the store manager about the TV and I'll be exchanging it tomorrow. And I just went out and bought Daddy a new printer as a surprise for him. I was surprised that clunky little Canon that he got free w/ his PC lived as long as it did. The new one is an HP which is truly easy on the ink unlike Canons. For some reason if anything goes wrong I have to take care of it, and fast or I get very upset about it. So all is well in my world ... at the moment.

I've not heard a word from my Crusty Cousin about Mr. Crusty's brain surgery. I'm gonna guess he actually survived the surgery because no one's called us to a funeral ... On the other hand, I don't know that they'd even let us know about that. Oh, who the hell knows ... ? I don't know what's wrong w/ people. She has to know I'm extremely concerned! Probably I'm not the first person on her list to notify but jeez! It's been three days and ... Well, maybe I'm not on her list at all I guess.

I may as well post this now. I've been working on it for two hours exactly but I keep getting interruptions so that's it for me tonight! I give up.

Later --

Why Is It Every Armadillo I See Is CROAKED??

It's true! It's absolutely true, and frankly I'm tired of it. I'm on a quest to locate a living, breathing Armadillo. I'm so tired of seeing them w/ their feet in the air I could holler so I'm going to locate one -- just one! -- w/ its feet on the ground and moving under its own power. Yup, I'm gonna find me a real live one if I have to stay up all night for the next month -- they're nocturnal -- and then I'm gonna photograph it and when the flash fires it'll probably scare it so badly my next frame will be:
That's right they're all tits up! That's the old Hillbilly Speed Bump, the Possum on The Half Shell, the Pillbug on Steroids -- that's what they call 'em down here. Want a closer look? Here you go:
UGH! And why does it not bother sensitive me to look at those photos? Well, shoot -- all I have to do is get in the car and keep my eyeballs open! Those poor things are all over the place! I don't know a whole lot about the critters yet as I've not completed my research but I'll tell you what, they must be the dumbest, slowest animals on earth because as I said, they're everywhere and they're always deader than ... dead!

Well, you know how we all piss and moan about our problems. For example, my major complaints recently have been:
It's so hot and humid down here I can't even get a breath of air -- about 95° w/ a heat index of 105°.
I scratched my favorite Louis Vuitton handbag -- naturally I had to buy a new one.
My horse had another upset tummy, had to be rushed to the vet but now he's fine and on special food. Snickerdoodle has a sensitive tummy.
I want a SureFire flashlight, I can't locate one around here so I'm forced to get one via a copper supply place -- I mean, police department supply ...
And you get the idea: Most of the things I fuss about are trivial, or easily dealt with. I wasn't exactly thrilled when my Palomino became ill but I knew he'd be seen by a very good veterinarian, and odds were he'd snap out of it, which he did w/ a change in diet. So it's blazingly hot down here, I scratched my favorite Louis Vuitton, my Big Man got an upset tummy and I want a cool flashlight. And then there's my cousin -- my beloved cousin, the one who is a sister to me, and who has been married to her best friend forever. He treats her like a little princess and if there was not one other good thing about him he would still be important to me because he loves my cousin, and the love they share together is just about perfect for them. On 15 June, 2005 Mr. Crusty had a heart attack and required stent surgery. He recovered just fine, and said he felt better than he had in years. On 15 June of this year -- appearing hale and hearty -- he had a seizure and was rushed to the hospital. Long story short, he has two brain tumors and will have surgery on one this coming Friday. The other is inoperable. Did I mention both are cancerous? You can pray and ask God why this has happened but the fact is no one knows. You can beat your head against the wall, lie awake several nights in a row -- you can even scream your lungs out and bawl until your eyes ache but none of us will ever know why this happened to him, why it happened one year ago to the date of his heart attack -- we'll just not ever know. One thing I'm sure of is, prayers are gonna pull him through this. The other is, life is just not freakin' fair. The thing is, I honestly do have an issue that is ongoing and hurtful for me but when you deal w/ this kind of person, it's sort of expected. And now, w/ this traumatic event impending it's amazing how trivial every single thing else in the world seems right now ...

On the up side, I made a bundle when I had my tag sale -- for junk! For crap that I absolutely had no use for, no need for and was sick of looking at! I couldn't believe the stuff people bought but it could only have helped that I priced everything at bargain-basement level. I wasn't out to make a killing. I was hoping to get rid of this junk and I'd say 2/3 of it sold, the balance was taken to Goodwill. If they didn't want to pay fifty cents for my Gap tops here, they can pay five dollars for them there. What can I say?

Sharmy, this is for you my love:
Isn't that adorable?

And, guess where I'm going to be in 22 days?
And you're not!!

Shortly after that, guess where I'll be?

And you? NOT!! Yeah baby!!

OOPS! Well, sometimes you just gotta get away from it all ... Right?

--Later!