Heeeeey Essential Accessories

 

I went to a track that I haven’t been to in over a year

yesterday. It’s the one where the little old lady always show up before I can

get half way around the track just to say “Hey”. She has mastered this as she

walks in the opposite direction of the flow of walker traffic. I am sure this

goes on all day whenever a man shows up to get his walk on. She lives right

across the street in an apartment and from what I can tell, sits by the front

window, dressed and ready to go.

 

 

 

Usually she show up in hot pants and a really tight t-shirt

or tank top and some form of bedazzled flip flops and three essential accessories.

She surprised me yesterday. All I had time to do was park and get out of my car

and go less than half way around the track. I looked up and there she was,

almost halfway around the track in the opposite direction. As she neared me I

took in the new outfit. She had bought skinny jeans…very skinny jeans…and a

tube top. She might weigh 90 lbs  looked

like a pair of pliers walking towards me.

 

 

 

As she got near enough for my trifocals to focus, I saw her three

essential accessories:   a 32oz cocktail in one hand, a cigarette in

the other and a purse slung over the cigarette supporting arm. She sort of scoots along, dragging her flip flops along the track as

if  trying to scrape something off the

bottom of them at a pace of someone standing in line with a sort of “tail

tucked under” posture. She got close enough to speak and  let out a very deep, guttural “Heeeey” and

that was the end of her routine. I can’t help but notice every time I see her

that I am probably looking at the future of my skin in just a few years. She

has a tanned hide that only decades of no sunscreen and way too many trips to

the Chernobyl tanning beds of the 70’s could produce. I mentally put a “pick up

exfoliant and sunscreen” on my to-do list for the day.

 

 

 

I don’t know exactly where she went; she didn’t go straight

back home like she usually does. Instead, when I was coming around the end of

my first loop, she somehow showed back up again. She must have been hanging out

by the bushes or something. Anyway, she was suddenly walking in  front of me, going the same direction I was

walking in and was walking off through the grass leaving two crop circle-ish

stripes in the grass behind her with her dragging flip flops. I looked up and

noticed something different about her…something very different. Somehow, some

way, possibly Wal-Mart, QVC…I don’t know, but somewhere she had found some

padding. Yep, she was walking away with a bodacious Kim Kardashian /apple

bottom jeans, kind of look. What? It was one of the most bizarre things I have

ever seen on such a boney frame. I was trying to think positive and erase the

image from my memory banks all at the same time. I was trying to think “You go

Granny!” but I just couldn’t. Oh my word, that image is forever branded into my

brain. She really is a character right out of Greater Tuna. The image of that

overly tanned, scrawny woman in a tube top, skinny jeans and bedazzled flip

flops, slowly scooting around that track while carrying a large cocktail, a

cigarette and a purse, who now has “junk in the trunk” is not something that can just go

away…not without professional help. I can’t wait to go back.

 

 

Dirty Santa Stole My Mancard

You know how some small little machines make much more noise than little ones? Well I ended up with a mini electric food processor at some office Christmas party last year. It was the soul survivor of a vicious game of “Dirty Santa”. Let me tell you right now, trying to cook with a mini food processor is like cooking with a little kid. You are going to end up doing the work for them after they are done and when all is said and done, they are both going to need a bath. I had to chop everything up smaller and smaller to make the food processor work.

 

It was a beautiful night and I haven’t been outside much at all, so I decided I was going to grill out. I made the perfect beef tasting half chicken burger ever. It was half ground chicken and half ground up portabella mushrooms. I call them chick-a-bella burgers…”mush-ken” didn’t sound all that appetizing. I decided to fire up the grill (to burn off the rust…that’s normal right?) and I took my mini food processor outside too…cause I am an outdoorsy kind of guy. What I didin’t realize was how short my processor cord was. It was mini too. I’ll bet it was about five inches long. So I went out on the patio and found a flower pot I could turn upside down to rest it on. I sat there in a wicker chair feeding mushroom chunks into my mini processor only a handful at a time.

 

That thing was so loud! It sounded like some kind of power saw. Well this caught the attention of my neighbor. The one that heard me scream like a white woman when a rabbit jumped out of my storage shed. He’s a great neighbor but he is one of those guys that knows how to do things. He doesn’t just have power tools, he knows how to use them… and has. He built an entire privacy fence; including digging all the post holes and filling them with concrete, all by himself. Yeah, he’s one of those. Well he heard the sound of my mini food processor and reacted like a cat to the sound of a can opener. I heard a “Sounds like somebody got some new tools!” I gave a quick “oh yeah” and fired up my spinning blades of death to drown out the rest of the conversation. I then heard a noise and looked up and he had done a little pull up to look over the fence just long enough to let out a  “What the……?” I fired up the blades again. I looked up after it stopped and there he was again white knuckling the fence with just his eyes showing, “Is that…..a food processor”?

 

Oh holy mancard ding…what could I say? I told him that is was and that I was getting ready to grill on my huge gas grill with the new tank that I had installed ALL BY MYSELF, and I may or may not have used the word “chick-a-bella” ramble, ramble, and then I went back inside the house to mix the mushrooms with the ground chicken and to find my pride. I just kept re-living that peek-a-boo moment and wondering how completely absurd it had to look to my neighbor to think he was going to look over the fence and see someone cutting some wood for some kind of man project only to look over the fence and see me sitting on the patio in a wicker chair, using a mini food processor that was sitting on top of an upside down flower pot. Oy. What part of “privacy fence” does my neighbor not understand?

 

Oh my word, I really hadn’t planned on doing much landscaping this year but it looks like I am going to be in the yard doing manly things for a while. I may even trim a tree…or cut one down. There will be loads of mulch; that’s for sure. “Chick-a-bella burger”…really…that sounds like a sandwich you would get served inside Cinderella’s castle. Say what you will, those chick-a-bella burgers tasted just like beef burgers…I mean exactly like beef burgers. I think I am going to change the name…maybe to “Manwich”. All I know is that I am going to go out and hunt for a big food processor, a diesel powered weed eater and a couple of tall evergreens. Dirty Santa….Dirty Santa indeed.