Barb and I went on a cruise last week. One of the things we did was enter in a raffle for various spa services. We had to be present to win. They put all the entries in a box, announced what service they were drawing for, and then pulled an entry out of the box.

Just my luck. I won the “Keratin Hair Treatment”.

I took off my hat and walked up to accept the certificate as the entire crowd roared with laughter. I heard one person, jokingly, ask someone else, “Do you suppose this one was staged?”

I gave the hair treatment certificate to Barb. While she got her hair treated I got a back massage from the masseuse Carol.

With a tug on the PUG, the slug dug snug in the smug thug

Say that ten times as fast as you can, or add to it if you like.

That’s all I have. Whadaya want for nothin’ on a Friday night?

The PUG is one of NAA’s mini revolvers.

Joe has no category for “poetry”, which is probably a good thing, so I put it under “home life”.

Barb has been in Ecuador for the last ten days visiting her daughter. I picked Barb up at the airport today.

Joe: Were you ever concerned about your safety?

Barb: Things were fine except when the serial killer was there.

Things weren’t exactly “fine”. There were lots of times when she had her pepper spray and Spyderco knife at the ready. But she never had to actually deploy them. I’m glad she made it back with the worst wounds being the multitude of bug bites.

And the “serial killer” was a guy that gave her and her daughter “the creeps”. Things just didn’t add up right about him but to the best of their knowledge he didn’t actually do anyone harm.

Part of Christmas vacation 2013 was spent with my grandson Bryce.

On the way to Idaho with son James, DIL Kelsey, and grandson Bryce we stopped in Ellensburg for lunch. While James and Kelsey were busy with some other things Bryce and I had some time to ourselves. I decided he looked good in a hat:

James really wanted to take him on his first ride on the snow. So on Christmas Eve we borrowed a plastic toboggan from my brother Doug and went off over the hillside to slide down the hill. Kelsey and Zoe participated as well.

Casualty:

It wasn’t really a casualty. Zoe just liked rolling around in the snow.

Video/slide-show here.

This was his first Christmas (Eve).

The little red rocking chair he is sitting in was made by my grandmother King’s father for my grandmother. Hence it was made by Bryce’s Great, Great, Great Grandfather.

Via the New York Times, the way I pronounce words and the vocabulary I use puts me in these areas of the country:

That’s a pretty good fit.

On New Years Day Barb and I went to see Saving Mr. Banks. It is a Disney movie which IMDB.com describes as:

Author P. L. Travers reflects on her difficult childhood while meeting with filmmaker Walt Disney during production for the adaptation of her novel, Mary Poppins.

That doesn’t begin to do the movie justice.

I never really cared for Mary Poppins. For one thing I almost never like musicals. And Mary Poppins just seemed to be a bunch of pointless skits strung together. But Barb and I saw a trailer for Saving Mr. Banks a few weeks ago and it looked like it might have some promise.

The major plot line of the movie was that Travers needs the money but is exceedingly reluctant to allow Disney to change her vision of the characters and story. She holds back on signing the rights while simultaneously “working” with the screenwriter and music composers. It’s a contentious relationship with Travers pitted against everyone she meets at Disney who do their best to understand her and accommodate her outrageous demands. The demands include changing the grammar of lines in the script which describe a scene and banning of the use of the color red in the entire movie.

Scenes from Travers childhood in Australia are intertwined with scenes from Disney Studios in 1961. As the exceedingly personal and troubling origins of the Mary Poppins characters are revealed Travers becomes more a sympathetic person rather than just a grumpy old lady. I sometimes thought the world would have been a better place if the adult version of Travers had been dropped off in the middle of the Outback and forgotten.

Even though you know how the essence of how the movie has to end it has a tremendous amount of stress as it reaches its climax and then resolves the conflicts.

Barb wasn’t affected nearly as much as I was, so it probably is something about my abnormal empathy for females, but I found it emotionally overwhelming and draining.

That said, it was a very good movie. I liked it much better than Mary Poppins.

So rather than try to talk about it; here’s a pickled egg.

The color comes from beet juice in the pickling solution. The eggs are boiled and peeled, and after a few weeks in the fridge in the solution, the color permeates the white, and you can see that it’s already started into the yoke.

Here’s the beet prep from last October;

We use the greens in salad and whatnot all summer. In the fall they get kinda tough, but I keep them, either blanched and frozen, or pickled, as a green for use all winter.

Here’s a 19th century cider mill I rebuilt in the 1970s and again just a few years ago;

We make between around 90 and 150 gallons per year all told, using apples I pick at a local orchard. McIntosh and Liberty apples make my favorite sweet (as opposed to hard) cider. The real serious producers will blend juices from different varieties, including crab apples, to get the flavor they want, but straight Mac is usually just right as it is. You can’t find cider like this in stores, but rarely, and then it costs eight or nine dollars a gallon. I don’t get it. But it doesn’t matter if you make your own.

Here’s some square dowel joinery I was doing for another antique cider mill I have in process;

I won’t discuss how it’s done because I don’t know how. I just had to improvise using the limited tools on hand at the time.

And last, here’s a tomato from my garden;

They call it the “Taxi” for the obvious reason. They’re delicious too, and I suppose any ripe tomato right off the vine is vastly superior to any tomato that’s been picked for shipping. The deer got most of my tomatoes this year, but I got revenge this hunting season. Now I have vegetables and venison in the freezer. Life is good