Category: This and That

OK, ©BUTTERBALL TURKEYS and whoever wraps them up in the heavy duty plastic:

Yes, I have a complaint, and I thought about taking a photo so ya’ll would know what I am talking about. But then I felt bad because as interesting as the photo would have been, it probably would have gotten me arrested. Picture this: a giant turkey, ready to throw in the roaster, shed of its plasic and mesh, and all its little packets of giblets and liver and other turkey parts, finally stripped down to its bare skin.

A NAKED TURKEY, with no head, no feet, and no feathers. It weighed in at just less than 20 pounds. The inside cavity, all locked in with the turkey legs held in place with the turkey’s tail … um, neck…sticking up out of the cavity several inches.

Now I hasten to point out that I am no prude. I admit that my husband and I would have gotten a huge laugh out of this turkey’s NECK, even more than we ever did when the neck was fully enclosed inside the bird, and was not free until said (butt cover) was cut or otherwise moved aside to let go the legs.

However…I couldn’t deal with releasing the legs, and etc., yank the neck out because it was still frozen inside and held in place with ice. So I had to call on my SON to extract the cavity contents. How embarrassing! Son’s lack of remarks about the turkey situation is much appreciated.

YES, it was THAT BAD! Anyone who has ever dealt with preparing a Thanksgiving Turkey can appreciate the experience. I was able to cope partly because I have “dealt with” dead turkeys for 60 years or so, and also because one of my first jobs as a young teenager was working at a Big Chicken Farm, on an assembly line where I was required to remove all of the guts from the chickens. GROSS.

I may or may not mention the incident to Aldi’s, I wonder if this turkey had an isolated packer…or if the shipment included a similar sight for customers. There is NO chance that this was an accident. None whatsoever. Someone at ©BUTTERBALL no doubt thought it was hilarious.

I wish the “media” et al would stop using the description “Gunman” in headlines about those jerks that insist on shooting up other people. I always think of a “Gunman” as Jesse James, or Wyatt Earp, or my personal favorite Tennessee Jeb. The term always sounds like something cool: heroic, dashing, macho…glamorous, exciting, sexy…

I have some suggestions for more accurate names:

PipSqueak with a Gun

Asshat aka assh.le with a gun.

Idiot with a rifle?

Total Asinine Jerk with an Automatic Rifle

Fool With a Gun

Yes, INSULTS instead of some kind of badge of honor.

Back in the day, way back, the Pilgrims had “stocks” in the town square, where perpetrators of various wrong-doers were literally locked in restraining wooden gadgets that limited movement. Their peers, or other detractors were not only permitted to tease and annoy these “criminals” but encouraged to throw things (rotten fruit) and heap ridicule on them. Laugh at them. Drag younger kids who hadn’t yet matured to the point of “earning” time in the stocks to stare at them as examples of what mischief resulted from misadventures.

Shooting people with ANY weapon—from BB-guns or water pistols or the like—is not something to joke about.

But please—stop referring to them as “gunmen.”

One of my unsung skills, to my mind, has always been my ability to spell English words. So I knew I was slipping this morning when I tried to use coyote, and mediocre in a sentence. (Actually it was two different sentences.)

I usually lose my WordPress post-in-progress when I try to access my dictionary link, so I keep a variety of old-fashioned paper dictionaries handy. So when I had difficulty with spell-check accepting my version of the two common words , and my paper Merriam-Webster wasn’t cooperating either, I knew I was in trouble.

When I find errors in old posts I always go back and edit out any errors. Usually these mistakes are typos, or technical glitches, occasional auto-fill spellings, but there are also the inevitable brain-errors which have official names that I learned 80-odd years ago in elementary school but have not worried about since. I always took to spelling and grammar details as a part of my affinity for writing, I guess.

Now, the automatic red underlining of iffy punctuation and such….that’s another thing. Like right here, the writing police don’t like my use of ellipses (I love ellipses) and my use of keyboard characters to make smiley faces and the like.

Call me an old-fashion writing hack if you want to, but I am of the old school that considered a well-done typed assignment paper or other submission to be part of the presentation. I still like to have certain spacing between sentences for purely esthetic reasons. I dislike the new grammar rules that eliminate double spacing at the end of the sentence, running the sentences together with just one space. I don’t appreciate the snarky comments like “…one space is better than two at the end of a sentence,” and “it is better not to have multiple characters at the end of a paragraph.”

Anyway, that’s my two-cents, and I’m sticking to it. haha so there…!:-)

Sounds simple, right? Just get some command strips and cheap hooks, and put it up there.

My prowess with a screw driver has never been one of my listed skills, and I hate following directions. I don’t need no stinking directions! Why do they have to be so talkative? Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Prepare the surface with alcohol? Really? Why: the walls are clean? And why not put the stick-up hook up over the old anchor things that remain since before the painters removed all the nails and fixtures.

Once the hooks were up there, the search for the blue curtain panel I have began. Of course the panel is not where I thought it was, and I refuse to buy another one. I wanted blue, but what the heck, I’ll settle for a nice gray sheer that I had. Then I spun the folded panels in the dryer, and loaded them on the curtain rod. Moved out the bed, and situated the step-stool, put the rod across the hooks, and voila! all that needed to be done was fix the gathers and it was done. I stepped back to admire the curtain, and the rod came crashing down. Back to the drawing board…

I’ll do it right next time, instead of giving the job a lick and a promise. Look at the directions 😉

splender in the grass (©patricia dreger, Sometimes 2022)

I have always been partial to red cars. My first car, a beat up old 1938-something Chevy, was a dark maroon, and the next several cars we had were not of my choosing. When I reached the point of actually deciding what color I wanted, red won hands down. Well, except for my blue chevy pickup.

One of my weird obsessions is counting red vehicles on the road, or in parking lots. That includes not only passenger cars, but trucks and miscellaneous vehicles of all types. Rather subjective when it comes to classification, all shades of red count, but not purple or orange. There have always been lots of red cars.

However, it has come to my attention lately that there is a great increase in the number of black, dark grey, and unidentified drab colors. Waiting at a long traffic light recently I amused myself by observing that the opposite bound traffic looked like a Mafia funeral. The entire line of oncoming vehicles were black or very dark. Not a red one within my line of vision.

The main “other” car color seems to be white. as contrasted with the usual array of light grey, beige, tan, silver. Blue also seems on the rise, and yellow! School bus/taxi cab yellow—and orange!

What dreary highway intersection wouldn’t benefit from some strategically placed touches of color?