8 December 2024
Last night at Secret Garden was very nice. It was Barb’s first time and I think she enjoyed the food. My personal take was it wasn’t as good as in the past but you can’t beat the scenery. The conversation flowed very easily and even though we arrived a little after 6 pm for a 6:30 reservation, Yelena seated us immediately. We lingered until well after 8 pm and didn’t feel rushed at all.
Barb and I go back a long way and we’ve always had the ability to talk to each other over any topic, sensitive or otherwise. We experienced a lot of things together such as a Keith Harring exhibit that didn’t take place, several art shows and she told me last night I had introduced her to the Design District of Miami years ago. She’s always been there for me and I hope she thinks I’ve always been there for her. She’s a great friend.
I seem to have the date wrong for AJ to install the Christmas tree. It’s now Wednesday, the 11th. I’ve learned over the years not to be too sure of myself with my calendar. I think I’m putting the date in correctly but err. This isn’t a peculiarity of old age, just lack of attention to detail. I had to reschedule my Jeep maintenance to Thursday, the day after the tree installation. Just about every time in the past that I vociferously protested someone had the wrong date and time, it was me.
I’m glad I didn’t pull all the decorations down from the overhead in the utility room this morning. Smartly, for me, I moved the tree box into the living room but left everything else in the overhead in case he didn’t show. Sometimes I have a good idea.
Day before yesterday, I showed you a photo of the poinsettia that Chris gave me. The genus Euphorbia is pretty common in the southeastern U.S. When I moved to my current location, I found fire-on-the-mountain blooming in the yard.
All Euphorbias I know have a milky, latex sap when you break off a stem or leaf. There’s even a song called “Fire-on-the-Mountain” written by George McCorkle of the Marshall Tucker Band but I don’t think the lyrics refer to the plant but to an actual fire on a mountain.
There’s also snow-on-the-mountain and I’ve seen it in the southeast but this photo is from Mineral Wells, Texas.
Of course, the showy parts of the poinsettia, fire-on-the-mountain and snow-on-the-mountain are not flower petals but bracts. The flowers are located in the center of the bracts.
On a different topic but related to a past post, I remembered two more poop stories. Mother really believed in spring cleaning and that including me and Archie. We would come down for breakfast and the dreaded bottle of castor oil was on the breakfast table. It got so bad, she had to chase me down to force the spoon down my throat. Finally, she resorted to sneak attacks and put it in orange juice. It turned me off orange juice for quite a few years.
The other story was her belief in laxatives. She took them regularly and I seemed to develop sympathetic bowel movements with her. I was a freshman at Ole Miss when all of a sudden I had this urge to defecate, defecate, defecate. After voiding, I got on the phone and called Mom and asked if she had taken a laxative today and she said yes. I know men can have sympathetic labor pains but I think I’m the first to have sympathetic bowel movements due to laxatives.
Enough with the poop for the day. Stay tuned!