Prattle Inc.

She Said Nutmeat

I woke up this morning to find that the beautifully serene river photo that served as our laptop screen-saver has been replaced. Might I introduce to you to the vision, minus the 20 little icons floating over top, that I am now assaulted by each time I turn on the computer? (Why do I feel like I should put a bra on?)

Why it's Walt Whitman. Uh...of course.
(Jefferson. Easy does it, step a-way from the poetry.)

And he's back on that eating wild things kick. I'm convinced that he's going to die from it one day. Being a true lover of all things natural, Jefferson is interested in tasting leaves and berries and mushrooms (ok, maybe not mushrooms but grass, I definitely witnessed the grass), anything, really, that looks inviting to his palate. To try to preserve a long lifespan I ply him gifts of books like Peterson Field Guides' Edible Wild Plants. My thought was that he'd use the books to avoid enticing, yet potentially poisonous, plants when he's out hiking and camping without me. I figured he needed the backup when I can't be there to spend most of my energy on saving his life by shouting things like "dysentery!" and "death!" every time he so much as reaches a hand out to a plant. But no...he's not using the book to avoid inedible matter - now he's out looking for shit that we can eat. 

Dandelion leaves in salads and steamed like greens? So yesterday. This time, please help us, it's acorns. He read that it can be made into flour. The back deck crunches from the shells underfoot and the dog is probably going to barf on our bed at some heinously stupid hour in the middle of the night from eating 3 pounds of fallen nutmeat. Our kitchen has been abuzz with the impossible process (like 5 boils) of removing the tannin, then roasting the 30 pans of hulled acorns that he will try to grind with pestle and mortar to a mealy consistency. No matter that the nuts remain soft and look like dark-meat chicken and that even the flies are avoiding the meat drying in the sun, he candied some with maple syrup and cinnamon and force-fed them to the kids and I in an attempt to get us excited and pumped for Acorn Harvesting '07.

We lit out for the safety of Target.

I added Imodium to the list. 

Turd From A Horse?

You have to see this.
THIS IS JEFFERSON!
It is.
He kind of mutters like this under his breath when he's pissed, for example when we're doing home improvement projects together and a drill somehow gets dropped (I was totally trying to help) on his foot.

And he does it in the exact same order that these guys do.

I think we're owed some royalties.

(via Major Bedhead)

We Call His Style Homeless, or Senior Citizen, or Homeless Senior Citizen

Since I waited so long to actually retrieve the rubber-maided (yes, that's going to play an adjective today) summer clothes from the attic and by that time the knowledge that taking the repacked winter clothes back up there meant that the force of the heat would kill me dead and my ungrateful family would fight over who had to to go up and get me, then just decide to make up lies to account for my disappearance and leave my body until it was cooler in the Fall, I didn't store away the winter clothes this year. Instead, every bedroom has a rubber-maid container or two, the big ones, stacked in a corner.

I try to be an optimistic person, keeping on the sunny side and all that, so I decided that this was good. I would take this opportunity to weed out the things that we hardly wear or have grown out of and give them to Goodwill.

Rolled right through the kids' boxes, they being generally agreeable to my "get rid of" piles. Hey, that meant less stuff for them to have to put away, and "Oh look, I sure have grown. I must need some new clothes, conveniently enough, three days before school starts." (Puh! School clothes. Kids today. Aren't any clothes school clothes if that's where you wear them?) Kids' clothes = done.

Moved on to Jefferson's and I's. I diligently worked, taking a deep dive into Reality Ocean and created a small pile of jeans that had moved from the "dream" category to the "joke" category a fair while ago. There were also a few "favorite" sweaters that I haven't really worn in years.

JEFFERSON! on the other hand, will. not. part. with. ANYTHING. And he has two rubber-maids!

Now, you must understand that there is a major difference in the clothes that he and I pick out, and on a daily basis he wears the shorts, pants and occasional shirt that I buy, so we are mostly safe. But sometimes he shops on his own! This is so dangerous we're this close to a family intervention.

Due to the fact that he refuses to spend actual money on such an abundance of readily available commodity, he shops at Goodwill. (Sounds fine, I do, too, though not exclusively.) HOWEVER, I swear that he bribes some old lady with a nickle and gets her to pull out the oldest, ugliest, tackiest box of rejected clothes from 1966  that she can find. Then she sells him the whole box for a quarter. Oh, and it doesn't matter if they fit him, "Aw nobody'll know these sleeves are short if I wear it rolled up. This shirt has years of good wear left in it."

Negotiations have been going on for hours, but I am willing to fight to the death over most of the contents of that second rubber-maid container. There will likely be bloodshed tonight if at the very least, those maroon polyester pants that were handmade for a man 4 inches shorter and 15 inches rounder than Jefferson are not out of my sight, and out of this house, by morning.

{Edited: one hour later. "No, honey. A belt will not help."}