You oughta be in pictures

The morning could not be captured in a Power Point or even a big screen movie. This moment was a motion picture projected in a drowsy classroom full of dust motes. The red-haired kid in his red baseball cap. Monarch butterflies and queens and painted ladies all flying and feeding at the purple mistflower, dipping and swirling just above the kid with the cap. His smile widening. The fluttery-puttery sound of the projector reels turning. Opie and Aunt Bea.



I've never been happy with explanations of the butterfly" word origin. True, butter-yellow butterflies are very common. Do they hang around milk pails? I doubt that.

The monarchs look so lovely on the flowers the color of...? The color of... Why, that is just the color of the purple shoes worn on its ears by the very vain tiger!

And that tiger ran in circles around and around a tree until it turned into melted butter for pancakes! The little red-haired kid in the baseball cap is unlikely to encounter resourceful Sambo, that Clever Boy Odysseus. It's kinda sad since kids today have so many more tigers to outwit than I did.

 

In the butterfly swirl there were many Painted Lady couples. Talk about having some explaining to do! I think I'll go with the Victorian house definition of a "painted lady" having three or more paint colors to emphasize the architectural details.

And the skipper sips on.

2. 
   

© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder

Shelf shifting, continental drifting

Work-out #1

Two days, two work-outs.What does peckish mean?  This English word meaning hungry dates from 1785 "literally disposed to peck". Other slang meanings dating from 1902 are outside the scope of this post.

My mission was to shift the periodical shelves down to get more magazines into the reach of more users, and to cull back issues so they would fit in the reduced spaces. For eight of the nine sections of the shelves this was a simple task. Count the holes. Position the brackets. Slide the wooden shelves onto the brackets. The wooden shelves were not light, though, especially not the front display shelves. Lifting stacks of back issues was a pretty good work-out by itself.

But for one section of shelves this was a woodpecker-drilled nightmare. Perhaps the section was installed upside-down. The bracket holes did not line up with the other sections vertically. So someone, probably a woodpecker, drilled many more holes. These holes were spaced too far apart front-to-back. The brackets were not long enough. The installer must have been the poster child for Measure Twice, Cut Once.

Woodpecker work

I had to look up peckish again. It never seems to fit its meaning when I see it in a book.

Work-out #2

Craving autumnal food despite the temps in the low nineties, I had an attack of recipe posting on Pinterest, then wrote a very long grocery list based on the recipes. Never mind my failure to ever actually follow recipes.Then I went digging for quarters to use at the car wash.

After the wash, the grocery list was nowhere to be found. I would just have to shop by memory! The answer sheet for this test was probably on the kitchen table.

garlic fail sweet potato pass chicken broth pass ginger thought better butternut squash pass can of chickpeas reassessed Greek yogurt pass fruit for smoothies pass zucchini pass couscous pass tomato paste pass canned tomatoes pass fresh mint fail fresh sage partial credit for a jar of dry sage potatoes pass lemon pass parmesan pass rice vinegar pass bread pass eggs fail fail milk fail butter fail sparkling grapefruit soda partial credit birthday card partial credit gift card short ribs fail partial credit for getting close pork roast partial credit pie crusts partial credit for a bargain chicken thighs fail bratwurst fail turnip fail breast cancer donation fail yellow squash

The real work-out will be convincing myself I want those breakfast fruit smoothies.

© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder

Detain that bag lady!

Got a lead on bur oak acorns at a specific corner in an affluent neighborhood. I needed those acorns for the seedy kiddie class, along with sweet gum prickly stars and pecans. So there I was wandering in the park with a plastic bag and no poopy canine to clean up after.

There's a handsome specimen of a bur oak tree in a lawn, so I walk up the middle of the street to find nuts by the curb and on the public sidewalk. A man comes out of a nearby house to walk his labradoodle doggy, but instead watches me. He takes a smart phone photo of this nutcase autumn leafy homeless bag lady loitering and jaywalking in his neighborhood.

No, I am not sleeping in my old Buick. I have jobs. I don't mutter much, at least not audibly, and only in English. Smell? I pass the sniff test. Shoes? Functional, not stylish.

If the resident calls the police to report me this could get weird. "You gotta whole lotta 'splaining to do." I've never been frisked, except by airport security. "Frisky" is a word for teaching preschoolers about squirrels. I just want to teach kids about the bounty of fall and the fascinating shapes of seeds.

Being just a bit outside the comfort zone seems scary. How does it feel trying to get by, to stay under the radar as a daily strategy?


© 2013-2015 Nancy L. Ruder