Summer fruit in Tuaca

melon boat

Choose a variety of ripe summer melons:

Cantaloupe
Watermelon
Honeydew
Crenshaw

Add some other fruits:
Strawberries
Grapes
Cherries

Other ingredients:
Tuaca
Fresh mint
Juice

Cut one watermelon lengthwise in half to be a melon boat.

Using a melon baller, make a colorful selection of balls. Place in melon boat. Slice and add your other fruits. Add juice (orange, mango,  or watermelon) and a small amount of Tuaca (or Triple Sec, the usual choice), just enough to enhance the flavor of the fruit. Chop the fresh mint and sprinkle on top. Serve chilled in small bowls, on your patio, with your family and friends at a weekend barbecue. Save some for brunch on Sunday morning. Give the melon rinds and other fruit scraps to your geese and chickens!

Well, never mind then

For reasons that I am unable to understand, my brother has pulled the plug on moving himself and our mom here. Something to do with the money, but it doesn’t make sense.

I will have to go retrieve the deposit check from the assisted living facility (where I work with four or five patients every week), go find another renter for the house we agreed to manage for our friend who lives in Africa just because brother was moving here and wanted to rent it, and will be explaining it to the dozens of friends and relatives who have been expecting them to arrive this weekend (today, in fact).

I have no idea how to respond and I have no control over the situation. Anyone else had a relative blow a cork over eldercare and do crazy stuff that is not in their best interest?

Well, it’s less work and worry for me in some ways, but I wanted to be helpful and it’s been years since the old biological family has been in one place.

Guess I’ll need to regroup and start focusing on myself, my wife and my writing again.

Bigotrometer

Prejudiced? Bigoted? Intolerant? Carrying around benign but silly biases?

Take this simple test to find out: 

Fill in the blanks: 

1. I don’t mind ___________________, I just wouldn’t want one marrying my (brother/sister/child/etc). 

2. Some of my best friends are ______________________. Estimate how many and write the total here = _____. 

3. Everyone knows that ______________________ are _____________________. 

4. _____________________ can’t be trusted. 

5. _____________________ are lazy. 

6. _____________________ are always late. 

7. I frequently say something like “Well, what do you expect – all _____________ are liars?” 

8. I will not go to this activity or place if I expect _______________________ to be there. 

9. The world would be a safer place if ________________ would leave/disappear/convert/etc. 

Matching:

Recombine the words in the left two columns with the words in the two right columns that you associate with these groups. Mix and match as you like (Your person with mustache could be a tense power-hungry female - for example.)

White Black Hispanic Asian Republican Democrat Liberal Conservative Jewish French Gay Lesbian Christian Muslim Libertarian Teenager Atheist Immigrant

Female Male Elderly Politician Pop Star Talk Show Host Priest Minister Dentist Lawyer Southern Canadian Person w/mustache Athlete Person w/disability Nascar fan

Cheap Stupid Mean Violent Dangerous Educated Irrational Pretty Strong Dirty Rude Greedy Intelligent Selfish Wise Practical Pushy Weak

Generous Creative Smart Dishonest Polite Evil Power-hungry Tense Elite Stylish Arrogant Simplistic Drug-addled Insincere Promiscuous Foolish Damned

 Multiple choice: 

Most likely to start a war:

1. Americans
2. Arabs
3. Homosexuals
4. Homemakers

 Most likely to vote:

1. Women
2. Men
3. Rock stars
4. Convicted felons

 Most likely to help out in a natural disaster

1. Republicans
2. Democrats
3. Libertarians
4. Random strangers

 Most likely to share what they’ve got

1. French
2. Atheists
3. Artists
4. Programmers

 Most likely to pay taxes

1. Christians
2. Rich people
3. Poor people
4. Musicians

Please feel free to add an “other” line to any of the above multiple choice questions. 

How’d you do?

This is a score-it-yourself test. Remember those? On a scale of 1-5, with 1 being not at all and 5 being maximally bigoted: 

1. Full of love for all humankind – medicated and ready for world peace.
2. Some minor biases, but I try to see things with an open mind.
3. A little bigoted – I hadn’t really thought about it before.
4. Somewhat bigoted – that’s just how things are.
5. Absolutely bigoted, and proud of it.

Yard sale rhapsody

I love yard sales. I love the beginning of yard sale season. Like yachting, all the cheerful colored signs bobbing along on the horizon. Other people’s stuff.

I love yard sales the way I love eavesdropping, a guilty pleasure a search for rare treasure, a treat a retreat a brief moment away from my own life and into yours.

I love yard sales, the free box, the sticky lemonade and the 11-year-olds who wistfully offer me some for a quarter. I love the bad portraits of your mother’s cousin Jean, the macrame holders still tightly wrapped around 2 liter coke bottles, with leggy spider plants hoarily clinging to that crafty harvest gold past.

I love yard sales and talking to strangers, agreeing on the dangers of overpricing, underpricing, bad weather and early morning poachers. I love finding out that my girlfriend dated your son back in high school, I feel so local, and that he’s married now with two kids but having problems and then changing the subject.

I love yard sales and looking at other people’s decorative choices. The red walls with blue accents, the rock garden, the swoopy window treatments, kitchen appliance excesses, the incredibly organized and labeled garages of you not me. The beaten and smirched record of your children’s discarded toys, your baby’s first velvet dress with the little matching mittens.

I love yard sales and the over and under valueing we all do of our stuff and our stories, the unexpectedly good artwork inexplicably stuck in the workshop behind the arc welder and the broken rakes. I love the costume jewelry, the plastics and resins, the hand-blown glass beads and the tarnished milagros. I love rummaging for change, the good faith willingness to hold your perfect estante rústico until this afternoon when I can come back in the red truck with some muscle and moving straps.

I love yard sales, the lumpy old dogs, the ladies in sequined sweatshirts, the avon bottles shaped like ships and trains, the huddled men comparing tools and two-stroke engines. I love getting home with yard sale amnesia. Unwrapping the little packages in anticipation, I become my own secret Santa, pleased and surprised at the silliness in which your past becomes my present, rubbed clean and new and ready for whatever comes next.