Hot Cranky People

One of the cool things about living in California is that stuff grows here. Cool stuff, like nectarines or limes or figs or or persimmons. There are about a dozen mature fruit trees in my sister’s yard. My next door neighbors have orange and apple trees. It’s fascinating to me.

I decided I want to grow something too.

Remember that avocado in a jar with toothpicks thing we all did in grade school? Well, I’m doing it again now.

I wasn’t sure where to start, so I poked around online and found a new friend. Meet Produce Pete. I like him because he takes the mystery out of choosing and using fruits and vegetables. He says so himself, right on the front page of his website.

Plus, he has fancy puffy hair.

Pete is a big fan of the avocado. In fact, he says if he were stranded on a desert island and could have only one food, it would be the avocado. Quite an endorsement.

He is also full of wondrous avocado trivia:

“Everyone knows that Mexican and southwestern cuisines include a lot of avocados, but the fruit–especially the Haas variety–has become extremely popular in the Far East. The French also love avocados, consuming an average of four pounds a year per person, while the average American consumes two pounds–that is, outside the state of California, where the average consumption is six pounds a year. In the U.S. the biggest consumption of avocados nationwide is on Superbowl Sunday.”

Who knew?

Well, I like Produce Pete, and I like avocados, but mostly I like sticking toothpicks into things and storing them out of direct sunlight for two to four weeks.

Here are Pete’s instructions:

Grow Your Own Avocado Plant

And here is another set of directions from someone who isn’t Produce Pete. These are more thorough, but this lady doesn’t have a catchy name so all she gets is a lousy link.

So here’s my little guy. I’ve named him Horatio the Festive.

Stay tuned for periodic updates. Only 8-10 years before he starts producing fruit. Wheee!

Imagine my excitement this morning when I found this page with a printout and instructions to make a Katamari Damacy little paper dude.

I enjoy the Google translation of the page almost as much as the paper doll.

Everyone favorite lump soul ” of continuation pleasure!

(via Boing Boing)

Apparently I don’t know my own strength.

So I’m sitting outside, waiting to meet my friend for lunch at the Japanese noodle house. My glasses were sort of smudged, so I took them off to clean them with my t-shirt.

SNAP!

Impressive, no?

It was horrifying.

I tried calling Arlo to tell him that he was going to have to bring me my old pair of glasses or some contacts, because there was no way I could drive home. I had just left the house though, and I knew he was in the shower and would soon be heading out for lunch himself. I also knew he probably wouldn’t check the answering machine between getting out of the shower and leaving, so there was only a small window during which I would be able to reach him. I left a message, and figured I would just keep calling every few minutes.

In the meantime, my friend Dot arrived and walked me down the street to the restaurant. Mind you, I can see, but it’s very very blurry (my prescription is about -6.0), abd I couldn’t even see if the Walk sign was green or red. I hadn’t been out and about in public without vision correction via glasses or contact lenses in, oh, 20 years. It was extremely disconcerting. We got inside the restaurant and it was even worse. I was so disoriented. I felt like I couldn’t hear. Creepy.

I acquired some supplies from the waitress, prepared to come up with something to tide me over in case I couldn’t reach Arlo.

I stuck the two halves together and felt a moment of relief as I balanced the bandaged frames on my nose. It was not to last though, and the left side just kept falling off my face, narrowly missing my bowl of noodles. After about the fifth time they fell off, I gave up. Dot decided to take off her glasses in a show of solidarity. There we sat, in a blurry noodle haze.

Eventually, I was able to reach Arlo and he soon arrived with my other glasses. I put on that pair, and Arlo modeled the broken ones.

It sort of looks like they go right through the bridge of his nose. “What a cool idea!”, I thought, until I learned someone had already invented them. Um…eew, eew, and eew.

So in the end, everything was fine. I could see my lunch. I could see to drive home. It really made me think about how lucky I am that my vision is correctable.

Now I have to get a new pair of specs. I’m hoping I can find something snazzy.

No Need to Click Here – I’m just claiming my feed at Feedster

I have offically moved this blog to www.hotcrankypeople.com

Please change your bookmarks. Wheee!

A couple of weeks ago Arlo and I drove down to Monterey with my parents. We had dinner at a restaurant with an amazing view of the water, right at sunset. Unfortunately, that’s where the amazing ended. The food was bad. I mean, really bad. But the best part of all was when Mom and I went to the ladies’ room and found this startling kitten wallpaper, complete with border. Oh, there’s nothing like the playful antics of the kitten. Especially at an “upscale” seafood restaurant.

I’m only sad I couldn’t capture in the photo the scraggly ballpoint pen drawing of a word bubble coming from one of the kittens, saying “Meow”.

At the end of the evening (and several glasses of bad wine), Arlo went to the mens’ room. This is the announcement he made when he returned to the table:

“Ok. Four things.
One: There is no festive cat wallpaper in the men’s room.
Two: It’s as cold as a meat locker in there.
Three: I probably shouldn’t be the one to drive to the hotel.
And Four: …I forgot the fourth thing.”

In other news, we spent part of the next day trapped in a giant clam.

Apparently there isn’t enough business going on *in* this shop, because it seems they have gone out to get some.

It seems that due to the title of this blog, I’m getting hits from a lot of people who are Googling for the words “hot people”.

Crap, I just made it worse.