I�ll never look at butter the same way again.
3:05 p.m.
I have mushrooms growing in my brain. Well, not really, but sometimes it feels that way.
I have just finished installing Mac OS X.4 (Tiger) on my lovely iMac, hoping that this ends my startup problems, as well as making life a little easier, not that it was hard to begin with, by letting me have at my fingertips more widgets (their name, not mine) than I know what to do with. The weather widget, for example, tells me that the sun will come out on Monday, and then the rain will resume on Tuesday. Do I really need to know this?
The Pur0Iator guy tried to deliver the package yesterday, except that I was out walking my daughter into town (and eating pho at the Captain), so I decided to drive out there this morning (in the rain) to pick it up, at the same time dropping by the garage to have Normand install the bumper piece (he did, it�s not the right colour and there�s not a damned thing I can do about it, and parts and labour cost over $200!) that got knocked out a while back. He thoughtfully pierced one of the tabs and attached it to the main bumper with some kind of tie-ring (he says you can only see it if you get underneath the bumper, which isn�t bloody likely, unless I have to crawl under the car for some reason) so that in the event I bump the bumper again on a high curb the piece won�t be lost and I have to go through the whole replacement process again. I cannot believe how expensive it is to maintain an automobile. Apart from feeding it!
So while I was out at that end of town, I went to R0na to investigate the purchase of a tool box with an assortment of tools that every 20-year-old girl should own, only to find that the store is totally overwhelming and I felt dwarfed and swamped and lost, happily stumbling across, or running into is more like it, a friend of mine, an older man who used to come to writing group about a year ago but whom I see at concerts and about town. He was pricing electrical supplies and advised me that I should really go to a different hardware store, and he was right, but I didn�t in the end.
We were talking about shooing the baby birds out of the nest, and I brought up that commercial from a few years ago where the grown son has returned home to his retired parents. He asks at breakfast if they have any butter and the father, upon looking in the refrigerator and seeing both butter and margarine, puts the latter on the table. The son is a little dismayed and says, �This is margarine,� and the mother replies, �Yes, we�re using that now.� In the next scene the son is leaving with his packed suitcases and the father says as he holds the door for him, �You�re always welcome son, any time.�
Jim told me a true story about visiting the home of a man he had worked with in a lumber camp (or something like that: just imagine an all-male work situation in the wilderness, unwashed, ripe bodies, coarse language, you know), the parents being rather genteel upper-class types. The son asked his mother to pass the butter and she didn�t react at first. So he repeated, �Would you pass the fucking butter?� The mother, shocked, looked to her husband for direction, and he said, �You heard what he said, Elsie, pass the fucking butter.�
<~~~ * ~~~>
