A Mighty Wind

No, this isn't another blog post about the magical fruit.  Despite what you might think, Ted and I can act somewhat mature when we don't even have to.

On our latest trip to stalk Mark Walberg of the Antiques Roadshow, we happened upon a wind farm. And we just had to drive up the side of a hill, possibly trespassing, for pictures.  I love the idea of solar energy, and quite frankly have no clue why people who live on the coast would think something like this on the horizon off of the coastline would ruin their view.

Would you rather look at this?

Or, if you are in the mountains would you rather see this...

Seriously?  I know in a perfect world, you want to see no evidence of a post-Industrial Revolution Society.  These idealistic scenes are becoming too far and in between, and unless you are Ted Turner and can buy your own island then you are going to have to deal.  I'd pick the wind turbines over the nuclear power plants or high tension wires personally.  They aren't ugly domino-like monoliths, nor are they towers of concrete spewing smoke.  They are actually quite graceful, moving with a silent peace and being productive.  All the while, they don't detract somehow from the landscape.  They add a sense of awe that something so quiet and fluid can save other environments without totally fucking up the environment they occupy.

Next...Back to reality.  We totally need a new remote controlled fart machine.  The last one bit the dust.

It has come to this.

I have on a pair of Ted's Toddler Pants.  (Click the link if you have no idea what in the hell I'm talking about.)

Why, you ask?  I'll tell you why.  I think I may have accidentally donated a bag of my winter clothes including yoga pants, hoodies, sweaters and my favorite pink fleece pj bottoms with reindeer all over them to the Salvation Army.  I am down one pair of yoga pants and one hoodie to lounge in when it is cold.  And those desperately needed washing tonight.

I am not wearing a Rocky sweatshirt, although I am wearing one of Ted's sweaters.

Next...Depends on whether or not I can locate some pics we took on our way home from the Antiques Roadshow, where we saw the Desert Storm Batmobile and stalked Abraham Lincoln.  Again.

Dear Tim Cook,

This iTouch charger isn't a year old...

Just this piece is $29 to replace.

This is another $19.

So, to replace yet another iPieceofShit is going to cost $50?  That's what I paid for the 3GS I just had to buy to replace my 3G that fell apart before it was 3 years old.  Seriously.

WTF?

Jim Thorpe, PA Revisited

We took our annual pilgrimage to see the fall foilage, and our favorite town did not disappoint.

We continue to wonder what they have against small ho's?

Uhhhh...

Bonus if you can name what theme park attraction this house inspired.

And then we found a man with a wiener on his head.

And another.

Very cool high school club that we thought were going to be just HP geeks, but it is an anti-bullying club.  Big thumbs up.

Mug of weed.

Who knew TX had their own romance novel genre?

Vintage granny panties for sale.

Dolls are creepy.  Especially these.

Because you know somebody did.

Another lovely day.  We did not find another gem like the Best Polyester Suit Ever, but had a great time.

Next...It appears we need a new poll.

And then, there were none.

The gardens are gone.  We made our final harvest this weekend.

Lots of peppers and tomatillos...

mean salsa verde and maybe we'll try our hand at a hot pepper relish or chow chow.

And one tiny gourd.

The gourd was a bit of unexpected fun.  We put the seeds in the ground as a last minute, late decision so I thought the only thing we'd see was vines.  I was pulling vine off the fencing to get rid of it and found the little guy.  I need to figure out how to dry it out and make it into a little GrowDammit bird feeder.

The idea for hot relish comes from our friend Bo out at Brookberry Farm.  We featured Brookberry as a celebrity guest garden because he is an amazing photographer and everyone should buy his book.  Well, As a Man Thinketh isn't his but they did a reissue of a classic using his wonderful pictures.  If you fan the page, you'll get a lovely inspirational quote every day.  They put me in a good mood, and help remind me that if I work to make myself a more spiritual, better person then I improve my situation and the world around me.  Whoa, that got deep for me.  And no, it's not just a bunch of religious quotes from the Bible.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's really not for me.  Don't judge.  The Bible is against that.  Even if you friend the page, seriously buy the book.  It's beautiful.  And feel free NOT to buy it from Borders, because they stiffed him on some royalties.

We had fun heckling our friends at Brookberry a little this year by taunting them with our clearly superior gardening skills.  They handled it pretty well, by mostly putting us on polite ignore.  All in good fun, and we look forward to being ignored again next year.  Haters.

I Swear to God Y'all...The Ghost of Steve Jobs is in my MacBook Pro.

I am seriously not trying to disrespect the dead.  The man was a goddamn genius.  He was my generation's Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison.

I did feel bad for making him retire. Okay, so I didn't make him retire; however, I sure looked like an asshole after I proclaimed that I did when I issued my open letter voicing my dissatisfaction with every Apple product I have ever owned.  Disclaimer - I acknowledged that at least part of my complaints most likely involve User Error.  Or most of them even.

Then a great man with a great mind who gave us the impossible passed away.

I swear to God he took up residence in my laptop.  Again, I mean no disrespect. Here's the thing.  The day after he died, the Safari browser on my Macbook just  up and disappeared. I whined at Ted, and he reinstalled it.  Things got weird.  Google Chrome disappeared.  Later that day, my laptop started talking to us.  Like it was narrating every move we made, which might be kind of cool in real life but is creepy on the interwebs.  "iTunes open. Table 1. Started.  Adele file accessed."  It was like I had the Howard Cosell of Apple, or a cheesy color commentator.

And, now the Apple homepage with Steve's obit picture keeps randomly opening.

Right hand to God, ask the spawn.  Randomly opening.

Dear Steve Jobs,

You win.  Rest in Peace.

Regards,
  iAmClearlyNotWorthy

Dear Mark Zuckerberg,

I know you are a very busy man, but do you think you could take a minute of your time and rein in your Developers?  They've lost their damn minds.  This was my Facebook wall last night...

Seriously?

I know, I know.  This is a free service that I take advantage of, so you are probably thinking Quitcherbitching.  However, this might induce seizures.  Just because you dodged a bullet with the last lawsuit, doesn't mean you will the next.  Hey, I'm just trying to be helpful.

I'm sorry my last status update was "I hate you Facebook."  I don't really hate you.  I love you, or Facebook that is.  If it weren't for FB, Farmer Ted and I wouldn't be together.  Can you imagine?  I mean our blog entertains at least a few dozen people every day.

So, if you can't control your own employees can you please, please at least give us the option of having the old Facebook?  Or, can you make it so people's comments to their friends that I don't even know don't consume my wall.  And while I'm sharing my wish list, can you fix the glitch that doesn't hide all games even though I've asked it to hide all games.  Also, can you explain why stuff my friends do and say will show up on my phone and not on my laptop and vice versa?

Sincerely,
Love/Hate Relationship with Facebook

Mystery Solved

Sort of.  Apparently Blogger hasn't been playing nice, and people can't comment.  They've been leaving them on my FB page.

Who knew?

Christopher Columbus was "himself an eyebrow threader..."  Bwahaaahaaaa

And, turn people into cows?  What horribly misguided B movies have you been watching Maintzie?

A new poll is up. Vote y'all.

Next...The Mystery of the Manjinder remains.

Fool me once

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  This is the proverb I have come to live by when Googling.  The first one to get me was the Cleveland Steamer.  After the Dirty Sanchez, I became really particular about what I Google.  My point is that after falling victim to malicious Google suggestions, I wouldn't steer you wrong.  And I don't Google without caution, which is why I didn't fall prey to the Two Girls, One Cup nastiness.  Thank God.

Don't Google Cleveland Steamer, Dirty Sanchez or Two Girls unless you are a glutton for punishment and happen to have a barf bag handy, or you have a fetish for Number 2...not that there is anything wrong with that?

It is okay, but uncomfortable to Google Eyebrow Threading.  The only pain involved is sympathetic.  You know, like when someone describes in detail having a long needle stuck in their fluid filled knee to drain it and then likens what comes out to grape jelly...Thanks for that cringeworthy image TED.

So, here is how we decided the poll tie.  Ted was Chives, and I was Rosemary.

I can't BELIEVE I didn't put two and two together and recognize Ted as a creature of habit who would go with Rock every time.  Fool me once...Now I've got your number pal.

I still haven't worked up the courage to Google Manjinder.

Next...Chives win.  New poll tomorrow b/c the napkin is downstairs, and I'm too busy watching Pawn Stars to trot my ass down there to get it.

The Twilight Zone

We found it today.  Right here in Pennsylvania.  We woke up this morning to yet another rainy, overcast dreary day.  I don't think we've had a nice weekend up here since July, and it put me in a bad mood.  The only way to cure that is Road Trip.  Where to go?  Where to go?

My first thought was the beach.  Let's try Cape May, NJ.  What do you know?  They are having shitty weather there too.  Same for St. Michaels, MD and Jim Thorpe, PA, two places we really want to visit again.  I remembered hearing a blurb on the news Friday morning about a Garlic Festival in Easton, PA.  A  quick look at their weather revealed that the afternoon was supposed to clear up and only be partly cloudy, so we hopped in the car and headed out to see what we could see about some garlic.

We set Sybil for no tolls, and she did us right today.  We started to get nervous as we neared our destination, and it was pouring down rain.  It all worked out for us once we actually got to Easton.  Weatherwise that is.  We parked, and tried to find the festival.  There was no signage, so we walked toward the river as the festival was at the Riverfront Park.  We turned around when we got to the river and all we found was some

trash.

 Turns out, we were at the wrong river.  Easton, you see, is situated at the fork of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers.  We finally got to the festival, and started to remark to each other what a weird town Easton is.  Weird weird, not good weird.  The Garlic Festival was small, and that's okay, but very few booths actually had to do anything with garlic?  Apparently, the fact that garlic repels vampires is a myth because most everyone there looked like a vampire.  We hotfooted it out of the festival area and walked back to the city center to see if there were any interesting little shops and whatnot.

And Easton just got weird weirder.  Maybe it's just us, but I'm not sure what it says about a town when the historic district and center of town has a Pawn Shop and Check Cashing place as a storefront.  Not one to be judgmental, we let other things convince us we had indeed landed in the twilight zone.  In addition to at least 15 salons, spas and nail places we found...

This kind of signage must not be good for business because the business was out of business.

A statue commemorating...

Huh?

Not a vintage shop...

...even though the decor transports you back to the 50's.

Ted can't help himself.

What the?  What is eyebrow threading?!?

And who or what is Manjinder?

When we got home tonight, we looked up the history of Easton and found out they also do weird things like covering up a statue of a civil war soldier every Christmas with this.

To each his own, I guess.  Maybe we only found the whole thing weird weird because of the crappy weather, and we still have no idea what the Christopher Columbus connection is.

Next...It's supposed to rain again tomorrow.  Sigh.  We decided the poll tiebreaker tonight.  The winner will be announced tomorrow.  We know y'all are on the edges of your seats.

Living with a retired chef...

Does not totally suck.  What can possibly suck about it you ask?  I never get to cook anything.  And I love to cook.  Okay, so suck is a strong word.

I got home last night from work and was in one of those whiny "I want something and don't know what I want and even if I knew what it is I want we don't have it in the house anyways" kind of moods.  So, I pulled out some shrimp, peppers, pasta and artichokes.  I was going to make Shrimp Fra Diavalo, but when I went for diced tomatoes all we had was tomato sauce.  And I was bummed because I don't like it made with sauce.  I prefer diced.  I whined at Ted while I started to chop some onion. Ted, being Ted, did what he does and started to help and the next thing I knew I was just standing there because he had completely taken over.

This totally did not suck.

Spicy shrimp in a tomato white wine sauce with peppers and artichoke hearts.  Now, I would have eaten the artichoke as a side.  However, after we took the picture he broke up the artichoke and mixed it in with the pasta.  Eating the dish all together, instead of making them separate bites, made the sweetness of the heart completely tame the spice.  That man is a genius.  He really should be on Chopped.

My only complaint is that we couldn't use GrowDammit artichokes.  We have plants, but they never flourished.  I think our growing season was just too rainy and wet for a lot of things.

Next...A GrowDammit 2011 retrospective b/c we'll probably be harvesting and pulling up whatever is left.  I think the season is pretty much over.  THAT totally sucks.