I have always loved this photograph. Riley blissed out  among in the hostas. It was a hot day. The hostas, I assume, were damp and cooler. I took this picture in July or so of 2011, which would have been about three months after we adopted him. In July of 2011 we had enough hostas to shelter a hot dog. Our entire fence row was flanked with them. We told each other, ‘next year we’re going to have to thin those out.’ The next year we acquired a second dog, lost her, acquired our third dog, there was a draught, and the hostas thinned themselves.  It appears dogs nesting in the hostas is not particularly good for the hostas.

I spent all day yesterday organizing, labelling, re-filing, sorting, deleting and renaming the photographs on my hard drive. I bought this computer in January of 2012. I imported files from November of 2011 on. So the photographs I was working with were the photographs I have taken since November 1, 2011. Not even the shots I have scanned and digitized–those are in a different file. Nope: these are just the digital photos I’ve taken in the past year and a half.

All day.

Then question then becomes, what/who are you saving these photographs for?

No one is ever going to look at them. The day I die someone will either trash my computer or wipe off my photo files and that will be the end of them. They’re mine. They have meaning and importance to me. And yet, I continue to file and label and store them as if I were archiving some marvelous inheritance.

Pop, last summer.  

My Dad is currently in rehab, where he is working on his walking. Between residual damage from his stroke a number of years ago and a UTI which sapped him of  his strength and energy this spring, he needs some professional help and encouragement to walk and build up his strength. I love my Dad dearly, but I’m not going to go down and wave a stick at him and tell him he has to get up and walk. Let the pros do it.

I called 24-hour PetWatch to renew Riley’s service and the young woman I talked to looked up all of my dogs and said, “Noomi’s service is about to expire.” I’ll swear I talked to them about her when I switched Annie’s name from ‘Sievol’ and her account over to us. I loved that little dog.

And I have lots and lots and lots of pictures of Nancy’s garden last summer. This is a squash blossom.

And I would never be forgiven if I overlooked my lord and master.

 Rest in peace, old friend. I’ll be along soon enough and we can settle into a comfortable chair and resume watching TV together.

I drove through or around and into and out of Yachats, once. I wasn’t there long enough to learn how to pronounce it. I must have read it on my map. I was in Oregon with a rental car that had 500 miles at my disposal and I had orders from my Beloved, who had rented the car for me, to use us all 500 of them. My home base was Corvallis, but every morning she got up and went to dirt class (she was learning about the organisms that enrich soil) and I got into my rented Focus and drove. Over the mountains, through the woods, up and down the coast, into and out of the state parks that dot the coastline, north, south… Somewhere in all of that is Yachats. I remember it because I remember thinking, How do you suppose these people pronounce that? 

I learned on facebook this morning that Yachats has a camp for reactive dogs. I like the word ‘reactive’–it’s so much more politically correct that ‘hostile to every other dog on the planet’.You can take any little black, reactive dog you might happen to have to Yachats and you and your dog can go camping. I am trying to visualize this.

Not very hard, really–I am not a sleeping-on-the-ground kind of girl.

I see this camp patrolled by regular troops of square, head-shaved, perhaps tattooed bikers with chains and cattle prods.

“Ma’am. Ma’am–your dog is reacting.”

“It’s okay, Ma’am, we’ve got this.” (Shoulders machine gun.)  

I would go back to Yachats. I would probably investigate how they actually pronounce it before I talked to anyone. I’m not sure I would take Annie. Like many dogs, Annie comes to a whistle, she comes to her name called, she comes when you’ve been out of sight ‘too long’…she does all of these things as long as she’s not seriously doing something else. like barking at squirrels or digging a particularly satisfying hole. But I loved Oregon. I suspect I loved Oregon because I was there during 6 of the 15 days of clear skies they enjoy each year. On the seventh day the fog rolled in and I was standing so close to a lighthouse that when it sounded it nearly blew out my eardrums and I couldn’t even see the fence at the end of the parking lot. I was touching it at the time. Fog and rain are indistinguishable, in Oregon.

So…camping with your reactive dog. Sleeping on the ground with one eye open for the other 50 reactive dogs in the area…in the down-pouring rain.

I have literally thousands of lovely pictures of my trip to Oregon.

However, the up-loader is mad at me. So you can’t see my pictures.

Nope. Not working.

Anyway. Every day for five days I jumped into my Focus, which fit much like an exoskeleton, and drove 50 miles to the coast and ran up and down Highway 101. Jumped out every 5-10 miles and to take photographs. This to me is a perfect vacation. Water, camera, scenic overlooks, a working car. I also drove around in the 50 miles between Corvallis and the coast, which is where (I think) Yachats is. I’m not sure I ever actually saw Yachats. I was in the area.

Well, yes I was. (Just took a brief visit to Wikipedia.) Yachats is one of the tiny cities (pop 690 in 2010) on the coastline on Highway 101. My short term memory is gone, so I can no longer tell you what I just read, but there is Newport, which is where an explorer like myself pops out of the woods and onto the beach by driving west out of Corvallis, there is Florence…I think, about 50 miles to the south, and–again, I think–Yachats is between them.  I was there for a week in 2006. There is, however, also the Yachats river, which I wandered around, so I must have been, at one time, in Yachats itself. It is pronounced YAH-hahts. And it is indeed half-way between Florence and Newport.

Anyway. If I were so inspired, I could take my reactive little black dog on a camping trip on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by other reactive dogs who presumably cannot see or smell each other because of the dense and persistent fog for while the northern Pacific coast is known.

All I have to do now is get her there. 

 

 

 

Tuesday morning, post holiday. My sister and her husband should be home, touching their favorite things in their own home again. My niece is now a high school graduate. Nancy’s mother has a new chair to replace the one that decided to retire over the weekend. I have touched noses with all of my siblings all at the same time, mourned the loss of a dog (not mine,) and here we are.

This is a slightly different pose from the one posted on facebook. I have trained my stand-in photographers to acknowledge that this is digital, not film–if you’re not sure of the picture you’ve taken, take another one. And another one. I can always erase the mistakes, I can’t make up the misses.

I always look forward to the Memorial Celebration on Golden Lake. Good food, family and friends, good stories and I always manage to get some really good photographs of the people I care about. This is siblings and spice. From left to right: Dan and Felicia (in front of him,) Lynn and Steve (in front of her,) Lee and Janean, Scott behind us, and me. Nancy was unable to attend because her mother’s lift chair broke and she needed to find a replacement and because her mother has mobility issues that we did not feel we could cope with at the cottage.

This is my favorite photograph of the day. This is my second-cousin (I think.) She is my cousin’s daughter. My cousin is all about being a momma and all about being with her baby, which is a wonderful thing and I’m happy for her. I just love this expression. No. This is not working for me.

The dogs and Nancy are about ready to go to work.

I need to pay a bill, fill the water bottles and pick up my scripts.

And another week begins.

 

 

 

Well all cheered as Delaney accepted her diploma last night. She’ll be going to U of M in the fall, where, at least in my imagination, she will lead the co-ed life I never quite managed while I was there. That particular phase of my life was extraordinarily difficult, although very little of that had to do with the school. I bottomed out, very nearly cashed out, and I skidded along on my butt for quite a while before I managed to pick myself back up. So I always have somewhat mixed feelings when we talk about U of M. I’m sure she’ll be fine.

We are here in the Conservatory. Annie is gnawing a bone. Riley has abandoned us for the more comfortable couch in the living room. Ilah is in her room. I am having coffee and Nancy is sneaking in a nap, since her efforts to sleep in this morning were thwarted. Oh dear. Now Annie is prowling the house with a low growl. Something is amiss. Apparently it can be resolved by a drink of water.

The problem appears to be that Nancy is sleeping. We do not like that. We have jumped up on the couch and nudged her about four times now. Wake up, Nancy. This isn’t like you. Nudge, nudge. Now, since it appears impossible to wake Nancy, we have curled up into a ball on the end of the couch and we are co-napping.

Much of the family gathered at my sister’s house before the graduation ceremonies and as we started to move toward the cars the door was left open a quarter of a second too long and my sister’s dog bolted out for a happy runabout. I saw him go, but I am too old and too slow and too unfamiliar to be of much help. All I could do was stand there and mutter, “Oh, shit.” My sister was not about to miss her youngest (and only) daughter’s graduation to chase a dog, so we went on to the graduation. Big brother Lance hung back to catch the dog, which he did successfully. And I remembered once the family gathered here, the door opened and Riley bolted off across the road for freedom. My car was blocked in and I was having hysterics in the front yard while Lance loped off and came back with Riley firmly in tow. There must be dog owners somewhere whose dogs don’t lope off into the sunset at every opportunity and I admire them all.

We have tracked Riley down a number of times. Usually if we can find him we can just drive past him, open the car door and invite him to take a ride and he’ll jump right in. Sometimes he picks his own time for that. Annie, on the other hand, has never taken off (perhaps we have more experience preventing that.) I took her to class once and in the PetSmart parking lot–which is huge and very busy–I put on her Gentle Leader, I restrained Rile who was in the car, I gathered up the stuff I needed to take, opened the door, pulled on the leash…which I had never attached to the dog. Fortunately she hates, hates, hates the Gentle Leader and she was on the other side of the car trying to dig it off with her front paws. I walked up to her and caught her before she realized she was free.

We are 3/4s of the way through our second run of Intermediate Obedience and we’re still using the Gentle Leader (which is one of the reasons why we will be taking our third run at Intermediate Obedience, with More Distractions, in June.) Perhaps that is what it takes for me to come to see training as a perpetual on-going process rather than a do it, get it done event.

My sister and her husband are here from North Carolina. They spent last night and will spend tonight at the new Firekeepers hotel. Our baby brother is the purchasing agent for the casino. They are going home Monday.

My father moved from the hospital to a rehab facility in Russellville yesterday. He could be there for as long as 20 days. He needs to work on his walking. Between his recent illness and perhaps residual effects of his stroke (10?) years ago, he is unsteady on his feet and reluctant to walk any farther or longer than he has to. The answer, unfortunately, is to do it more, and we will leave the encouragement and enforcement of that to the professionally trained. To be honest, the last time I stayed with him, which was in March, he was having difficulty walking and I let him sit right there in his chair.

I have had to sort or work through this mentally in the past week, since he went into the  hospital. He had a UTI, which made his weaker and sicker and he ended up in the hospital when he started to get up and fell because he couldn’t feel his legs. We took this to mean his legs were completely number and without feeling, when in fact, I suspect it meant he hasn’t had a lot of feeling in his right leg since the stroke, he hasn’t walked much for the past several months and he’s losing some muscle tone. Also it is harder to maintain balance or be sure of what you’re doing when the feeling is reduced. I learned this from my brother-in-law, who struggles with peripheral neuropathy. (I could have learned it from myself every time I try to comb my hair in the morning, since I’ve been babying my right arm every since I fell over Annie in September and slammed into the door frame, bruising my rotator cuff. There are certain positions my arm just won’t go into any more and I suspect it’s purely because I stopped making it do it for a while. I need to buck up and probably get some therapy on it.) (There may be visible traces of my father in my character. Doesn’t work. Screw it. find a workaround.) 

 

I’ll throw in a few random, totally unrelated pictures.

 These are Helene’s begonias. I went to writer’s group Friday morning and found two pots* of them sitting on either side of her steps. Out came the camera…

And it’s on to the weekend. 

*Okay, so there were two pots total, one sitting on either side of her steps. She likes flowers, but she’s not obssessive about it.

 

         

I am going to have lunch with my sister and her husband today. They live in North Carolina, are here for a long weekend to watch my niece graduate from high school and touch noses with the family.I’m looking forward to it.

I am sitting here in a heavier shirt, jeans and a denim jacket. I have no idea what the temperature is, but the burst of 80s weather we were having apparently blew away in the rainstorms yesterday. I steam-cleaned the carpets yesterday to evict the eau-de-dog (not to mention the chocolate dog tracks on what is essentially a mint green carpet) and now I live in a greenhouse. Between the humidity and the damp carpets, everything feels damp.

Annie’s classes are going well. We learned a new command this week, ‘park it’, and once again it felt as if Annie already knew it, she was just waiting for us to learn. (That, or she’s really, really smart, which is entirely possible.) However the great Dane puppy returned to class and storms were brewing in the wind and all of the dogs were excitable. Annie really, really wanted to school the Dane. At one point  they engaged in a little across-the-aisle name-calling. It takes everything I have not to tense up and jerk her away from other dogs as soon as I see one because I don’t have sufficient faith in my own abilities to read my dog and her reactions.  So while we are doing well with our commands, we could improve following commands with distractions, and we are really taking our classes to socialize and crowd/stranger-proof ourselves, and while we are making progress, we are not there yet. So we’ve decided to take intermediate obedience again. Perhaps we’ll just spend our shared lives going to intermediate obedience classes once a week. 

I’ve closed the windows. It’s not even 60 degrees on the back fence (which is a climate zone all of its own.) I still need to put on socks, although I did comb my hair.

Speaking of hair. Most of my front hair is white (I understand the back is more mixed. I can’t see it.) My white hair is thicker, sproingier, and–this is taking some adaptation–dryer than my brown hair was. So it appears that I have more of it, frothing like sea-foam all over my head. And some time has passed and it’s morphed from its original shape and it occurred to me about a week ago that…it’s not really short, any more. It’s not long: it’s just not…neatly trimmed. I can feel it on the back of my neck.

My one girly girl passion, lifelong, has been for long hair. I am, unfortunately, not blessed with the kind of hair that looks good long. I would need more extensions than nature-given hair to pull that off–but every once in a while I feel obliged to try again.

Yesterday I steam-cleaned the carpets. It was in the high seventies. Steam-cleaning is humid work, even when there isn’t a thunderstorm gathering around you. I glanced in the mirror and I had this haystack of wild half-curls teeming all over my head, it was crawling down my neck, hanging in my eyes, and I thought (once more:)

There’s a reason why cut this stuff off. 

But, I don’t have time right now. Need to meet my sister.

While wearing shoes.

I found this among my neglected photo files.

I have an obscure fascination with cows, which I believe I’ve been boring about before. I like cows. Grazing. In fields surrounded by secure fencing. I have no particular fondness for cows in any shared spaces. These cows live in Alabama between Haleyville and Russellville. It was hot. They were cooling their bellies. This is as far into a discussion of cow water as I choose to go.

Today I am putting off cleaning carpet because a.) I cleaned carpet yesterday an something small and black came home, ran outside to dig somewhere, coated her paws with black mud and then trotted (repeatedly) through my still-damp carpetting. This has become something of a habit, between the two of us. I could touch that up, and then I could actually finish the job I started.

I also like goats. (Same conditions.)

  I should crop the top off that photograph and probably will. I forgot, just now. These goats live in Haleyville, just around the corner from my Dad.

My father is in his hospital in Florence, right now. He has a UTI. He also has a brain tumor, but the doctors seem to feel it’s fairly irrelevant. Perhaps we all have them and just don’t notice them. My mother noticed hers, which is why when I appraised my siblings of his health, I tried to go carefully. DON’T PANIC! EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL, BUT… He was having difficulty walking, which could stem from any number of problems. He had a stroke several years ago that affected one side of his body more than the other. Now he has this benign little tumor the size of a quarter (I have no idea how they know it’s ‘benign’ since they’ve only photographed it with a MRI, but…it’s not the problem.) He has some heart problems. He has some residual stroke damage. He has replacement valves in his heart with expired warranties. He has prostate cancer. He is 87. His penalty for going to the hospital and bothering everyone is a sentence of re-newed physical therapy to work on his walking, since the diagnosis seems to be…you have to do it.

Like everything else, the more you do it the better you are.

I wish the very best of luck to whatever bright-eyed optomistic physical therapist gets to deliver that message to my Dad because…he’s not going to like it.

I don’t like it much myself. 

This is Allie Upside Down. She was a toddler here. She’s..give or take, six now. She’s a girly girl. My grandmother would have loved her: if you put all three of her grandchildren into a blender and ran it for an hour, you wouldn’t have as much attention to fashion and accessories as she could have had with Allie. She’s a little dress-up doll.

I have reunited with Flickr. I have a page, myownfineself49093 where I have posted a hodge-podge of photographs (76: one was there from 2008, and the rest I loaded yesterday.)

It is so damp today it’s hard to tell if it’s raining or just hanging in the air. Great day to clean carpets.  (On the other side of that argument, it’s a great deal to baste in the barn-smell of a shared life with animals, which the steam cleaner temporarily removes.)

I have no great insights into the world today.

And very soon it will be time to make lunch.

This morning lurking in my email was a notice from Poetry and Writers Magazine entitled “58 Writing Contest Deadlines”. I have  been rummaging among my unpublished works, bringing some of them to my writers group(s) for discussion and response. I should publish some of them.

Yes. Right.

*snaps fingers*

I simultaneously believe two things, both tucked firmly side-by-side in the same mind. They don’t even fight with each other until it comes time to submit something. I believe a.) I am a gifted writer, that writing is the reason I was put on this earth and an integral and significant part of my personal identity and that anything I write has value, purpose and should immediately be published, and b.) I write esoteric, obscure, extremely personal and probably boring stuff no one else on this planet would find even remotely interesting.   

And I believe my dogs are more interesting than any other dogs alive today, and I believe I will just magically begin losing weight without effort tomorrow.

So I opened the email and trolled around the writing contest sites. It’s amazing how convinced you can be that you have written something wonderful, meaningful, significant and extremely publishable versus how quickly you can review each contest and say, “Nope…probably not that one…doesn’t fit…wouldn’t get my style…” fifty-eight times.

So how many rejections are pending?

0.

How many submissions have I sent?

0.

You can’t fail if you don’t try.

 

Here we see the beet field (left) and the carrot field (right) in their first rainstorm.

I should probably explain our gardening system first. Last year Nancy took up tub-gardening. She raised beets, squash, zuchini, brussel sprouts, potatoes and several herbs in artfully-arranged tubs in our back yard.

Last year we started the season with one dog, added Noomi, lost Noomi, and eventually added Annie.

Annie is an avid gardener. She harvested her own tomatoes.

And then she took up gardening full-time.

This would be the garden she dug for Riley. As you can see, it’s nearly the perfect size. He’s coming along well, I think.

She also stood in the blue tubs and dug her way to the bottom. This accounts for the decorative fencing around the tops of the tubs. On top of that Nancy coiled a drip hose and ran water through it to create ‘rain’.

I am sometimes fascinated by peculiar things.

The beets and carrots may be a little hard to see. She planted the seeds saturday. This is the beet field and the herb garden from last  year, below:

And her pride and joy, squash blossoms.

 

My father is in the hospital in Alabama. I called his room: no answer. I’ve called almost everyone I know in Alabama, Indiana and Michigan, and I have determined that we don’t know very much about his condition. I have called Jenell 35 times today.

So the neighbors came home to use the back yard (theirs) which sent Annie into a frenzy and she had to run outside to throw herself against the fence. I called: she was too far gone to hear me. So I went out to get her, and half-way across the lawn I heard my phone ring…

Yup.

Jenell.

Hurried back inside…

I’ve called her five times now. Either she doesn’t answer or the phone tells me she’s talking to someone else. I am sure there are a lot of people for her to talk to.

I hate modern communication.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I first mentioned to notion that I might retire, many of my friends looked at me, smiled sympathetically and said, “Oh, I just don’t know what I’d do with myself if I had all of that time.” 

I said, “I’m going to write a book.”

And I do write, quite diligently, actually. I have a few other stopgap measures for filling that overwhelming burden, spare time, but I have nowhere near as much of the stuff as you might think.

What I do–often for hours on end–is look for things.

The stuff I had in my hand a few minutes ago. My car keys, which appear to be The Most Mobile Objects I own. That Thing (if only I could remember the word for it) that was right here just before the last time I cleaned my desk. The sissors which, for the fifteen years I lived in my house in Jackson were always in the second drawer to the left in the kitchen. (Not sure where they were in the house in Walnut street, but then, I was dating heavily then and I was almost never there. I’ve only lived here 7 years, six of which I have been home all day most of the time, but they move around here. I can never find the things.)

Not all that long ago I took some old negatives that would not fit my scanner to Norman Camera to have them transferred to CD. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to this process and it cost me more than I had casually figured. I have two CDs from that project. Somewhere. 

The problem appears to be (as it always appears to be) that I cleaned my desk (again) sometime between the last time I had them and the day I decided I wanted them again, which, as it happens, was today.

It would appear I put them somewhere ‘safe’.

I should get over that habit.

Okay. So I didn’t put them ‘away’–I put them in a temporary ‘safe’ place WIWFTL (where I would find them later.)

Where would that be?

It eventually comes down to the Eternal Hoarder’s Quiz:

What good does it do you to have if you can’t find it?

If you know it ‘has to be’ somewhere on this desk and you’ve been looking through the stuff on this desk for two and half hours, does that suggest a.) it’s in the wrong place, b.) your logic is bad, c.) you have too much stuff on your desk and d.) you really don’t need it that badly.

Maybe you threw them away.

Complete with the original negatives.

How long has it been since anyone looked at them?

You don’t even know who most of the people are.

You copied the four photos that were most important to you.

I don’t where they are.

I hope wherever they are, they’re having a party.  

 

Saturday morning has arrived with it’s ever-changing medley of lawn mowers, street traffic, chain saws and barking dogs. Annie struggles. It says in her contract that we should be alerted to the menacing arrival of the Johova’s Witness guy peddling Awake! throughout this hell-bound community, but we yell at her whenever she starts barking. He was on our porch!

His hands touched our doorknob!

Cheryl opened the door and thanked him for a free religious tract!!!

“Try not to eat the Witnesses,” Cheryl said as he hung her her lunging, barking dog from her hand by the collar.

I wasn’t going to eat him, I wanted to lick him, Annie pouted, but the man backed quickly away, out of reach.

“You’re right,” Cheryl said for not apparent reason to Annie, “that was mean of me.” Cheryl seems oddly pleased with herself this morning.

The blooms of the neighbor’s honeysuckle bush, which lean affectionately over our fence, are beginning to fade. I was going to show you a photograph of the blooms, but Xanga is refusing to download right now.

Nope. Not doin’ it.

I have this collection of ‘fiction’ pieces (most of them based on my life) which are all 6 pages long or less. Not really essays, not really stories… Not necessarily funny. I keep telling myself I’m going to submit them to various magazines and quarterlies, but I usually just end up writing another one. I would post them on Xanga, but most of the places I have studied for submissions require that any pieces they accept not be published anywhere else first.

So in addition to short pieces and the never-ending novel with no niche, I write blog entries and then sit down and write to myself in my journal.

When Ilah came here she was taking a handful of medications and she was struggling with a number of annoying, inconvenient bodily responses to life. Nancy looked over her medications and their side-effects and said, “Well no wonder she has dry mouth…  No wonder she runs to the bathroom so often…” One of the problems we detected was that she would hobble out to the kitchen to ‘get some Pepto’, and the next day she was taking something else, and it seemed reasonable to Nancy and me that if you took one medication one day, you would have a bodily response the next: Ilah, however, doesn’t always remember what she took yesterday, so she was bouncing back and forth between constipation and the utter lack of it. We said, ‘stop taking that stuff and let your body settle down’. And Nancy gave her a little book to write down everything she takes each day so she can keep track.

Nancy said, “Cheryl, do you have a little book my mother can use?”

I have boxes of little books. I gave her one.

So fast-forward three or four months. Ilah came to lunch one day and handed me a little slip of paper. “I found this,” she said. “I’d like you to put it up somewhere.”

I took it. Gazed upon it.

She said, “It was in that little book Nancy gave me to keep track of my meds. She must have put it in there for me to find.”

The paper is a blog entry about Riley a little after he came to live with us. It’s about a dog staring at a gate and  his impressions of what his new human thinks about that. I wrote it. I probably also printed it out and stuck it in a little book. The entry has nothing to do with Ilah or Nancy. Ilah didn’t even know which dog it was about, so I suspect she didn’t have the vaguest idea why Nancy would leave that particular message for her to find.

Because she didn’t.

But Ilah found it, and presumes it has some special meaning (even if it eludes her.) And now she wants it framed and conspicuously hung where we all can see it.

All of that kicks me back about ten years when we self-published Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs and proudly gave everyone we knew a copy and Ilah never remarked on it and finally I asked, “Did you like it?”

She said, “Not really.” And then she shrugged. “Did you want me to lie?”

(Well, now that you asked… When I take a piece to my writers group for help working out the kinks–no. When I have just published my very first book, which has been my goal and sole focus of ambition since I was thirteen…yeah, go ahead and lie if you have to.)

So it’s not as if she is a fan of my writing (or as if that particular blog entry were a particularly good example of that.)

I am not quite sure what to do with it. I put it in a picture frame, but she doesn’t want it in her room. Her suggestion was that I tape it to one of our Alice Lewis prints that hangs in the kitchen. (Something like tacking a grocery list to your Van Gogh.)

Sometimes life is just a series of quirky little mysteries.