I'm Not Sure Which Group He Meant

There's this homeless guy I pass every day, twice a day. Usually he's just sitting there drinking Starbucks (I don't know) and minding his own. But sometimes he's talking to himself. On Monday, he was talking about the film industry.

"No, we're talking about HOLLYWOOD here, man! And you know them Indians are gonna take over and pay me for that! HOLLYWOOD!"

Children of the Corn

Last summer, the hubs and I had a small container garden in the back yard of our rental in Uptown Minneapolis. We grew tomatoes, green peppers, eggplant, banana peppers, broccoli, basil, and oregano. It was lovely.

This summer, we live in a suburb of DC with no balcony and not even a view of grass. Circumstances being what they are, we've enrolled in a CSA. We signed up with Spiral Path Farm, a mom-and-pop certified organic farm about 2 hours from us in Pennsylvania. We payed around $400 for a medium-sized share in the farm and every week we pick up a giant bag of produce from our local farmer's market. The share goes from May until November, and works out to be about $17 per week for our share.

Being a local, organic, small operation, Spiral Path Farm experiences abundance and scarcity -- and as share-holders, we experience that right along with them. We have had an incredible experience every week -- our box overfloweth each Saturday, despite obnoxious heat and a rainfall deficit plaguing a large part of their growing season. The produce is fresh and delicious, bountiful and varied.

The farm is organic, meaning no pesticides. Pest-control is done by birds and other pests, just like it was in our back yard garden last summer. So it comes as no surprise that on occasion we find holes in our lettuce or aphids on our leafy greens. They're part of what happens when nature does its thang. And nature's thang features insects. Lots of them.

So it comes as no surprise that insects find the farm's sweet corn as delicious as we do.

What you see there are three ears of corn that have been nibbled by bugs

(the tiny one never really matured, so I just lopped it off).

What kind of bugs, you ask? Well, let me show you!

The smaller one is a corn earworm. The larger is your standard inchworm.

A baby corn earworm and our friend the inchworm.

The larger corn earworm had by this time scooted off somewhere

in the bag of corn leavings to continue eating.

I believe this was because the corn earworm and the inchworm seemed to be

having some kind fight that involved the two of them biting each other.

Many people would probably be ooked out by finding worms in their corn and toss the ears. But, in a move that will probably surprise no one, I opted to do this instead:

Because here at the Farley house we do not simply throw away perfectly good corn.

I just took the wormy bits off and will proceed to eat the rest of the perfectly good corn.

Now why does this not gross me out one bit? Well, because... honestly because it comforts me to find Children of the Corn. It makes me feel connected to my food. It makes me feel connected to my community. It reminds me that the corn and the worm came from a system that still lets nature do the work, where insects still get to play a role in the growing process. It makes me feel like my food was grown on a farm, not in a warehouse. It reminds me that a family went out onto their land in Pennsylvania and picked this corn, and that their choice to grow and pick this corn has allowed my family to make the choice of leaving the supermarket behind. And it makes me feel like even though I live in a crowded suburb with no grass right now, I will not always be in this right now. It makes me feel like someday I'll be able to get back out into a yard where I can grow my own food and pick my own wormy corn.

And I feel like I'll have a connection with those worms, too -- the same connection I had this morning -- when I got to nod with these worms and say "I know, this corn is so good, right?"

younger at heart

This may shock some of you, but when I was a kid I wasn't exactly the active, sporty type. No, no, it's true! While my compatriots were out playing tee-ball and soccer and tag, I was inside drawing pictures and imagining to myself what it would be like to be a piano phenom. Don't get me wrong -- my imagination also supplied me with visions of being the world's first great female catcher or a tennis superstar, but mostly it supplied me with cartoons and music.

I loved to color on construction paper, which is why this edition of MS Paint drawings are done on yellow backgrounds. Yellow was the closest you could get to white when you'd already colored on all your white pages.

I didn't know this until sometime in early elementary school, but it was while Peg Oman was doing daycare for me that it was brought to my attention that I liked to draw people. And that I liked to draw people whose proportions were all wrong. Their heads were ENORMOUS and they had these teeny, tiny bodies. The MS Paint up there I'm pretty sure doesn't even do it justice... I'm sure the bodies were really more like half that size. But I remember loving to draw hair and mouths, so I'm pretty sure this is why I paid all the attention to their heads and just drew on little bodies really quickly so I could move on to the next face.

"Why bother drawing bodies at all?" you may ask.

Excellent question. Apparently I am hard-wired to be... sick in the head. People HAVE bodies, we can't just go around drawing people WITHOUT bodies because it wouldn't be RIGHT!

But my imagination was always there, right alongside my obsessive side. When I was very young, I remember "inventing" a new symbol. I was so proud of it, and I would fill dozens of pages of construction paper with this symbol... over and over and over again. (This is an example of where imagination and obsessive go hand-in-hand, kind of like Jane Seymour being unable to stop painting what is clearly the female form over and over and over again.)

Imagine my disappointment in third grade when we began to learn cursive and I discovered -- after all that time -- that I'd only managed to invent the capital letter "L."

today my day is...

drama llama

I'm a green

There's a funny thing about being hired to be someone's boss, and it is the following secret: you were kinda thrown into the deep end of the pool, and some of the things you're saying are nothing more than your best guess. Yes, this is true of many jobs, but when you're also someone's boss it adds an extra dimension of danger, because your best guess could turn out to be a great big FAIL, and then you've not only hurt your own reputation but that of your employee. This is generally considered to be a bad thing.

Luckily, I find myself with an awesome staff who are not only solid at their individual jobs but are great at serving as backups for one another. They also have a really great understanding of now they work as individuals and how they work together as a group. One of the ways they came to this conclusion was through a personality test, taken about 9 months ago. Naturally, the first thing they did was insist that I take the test, too.

It turns out I'm a green.




Which means I'm good at being a boss, but not a lot of fun to be around.

getting back to my MS paintings

I work in a place called Foggy Bottom.

(pause for giggles)


However, Foggy Bottom is not on my Metro route. Rather than pay the extra $0.10 to transfer lines and suck air conditioning until I'm within a block and a half of my building, I get off the train 0.6 miles from work and walk it in. I believe it to be faster than switching trains. Also, there are far fewer people walking along the sidewalk than there are crammed into Metro trains, and that suits me just fine.

On my walk, I pass a few guys begging for change or food. Some artfully, by playing classical trumpet accompanied a full orchestra, playing with all their might from the confines a boombox. Others beg obnoxiously, by constantly shaking an empty McDonald's cup full of nickels. But none panhandle quite so aggressively as the guy I encountered on Friday, June 11th at the Starbucks on 19th and K.

I made eye contact with him as I passed by.

He seized the moment.



"GO BUY ME A WATER!!!!" he shouted.

"No, thank you," I whispered, and hurried off.

we can't take us anywhere

Last night, Bret and I decided we were feeling celebratory, so we decided to get a dinner out on the town. After much too much deliberation, we settled on Jackie's in Silver Spring. Citing a mere 30% chance of rain, we walked off into the gloom and soon found ourselves in Silver Spring's most retro eating establishment. A very cheerful man gave us our pick of tables and walked off to play The Cars - Greatest Hits.



Mini Elvis burgers to start followed by orders of fried chicken and potato salad.

What? We walked there. Don't judge.

The burgers came out and the inside was pretty pink. I am exceedingly squeamish when it comes to the sliding scale of meat doneness, but even Bret thought these were kinda raw. But it's an Elvis burger at a place with hot pink seats, so you figure they know what they're doing. And we ate 'em. Pretty good. Not "Sweet Mama I Need More," but pretty good.

Then the chicken. The first bite was like "Oh, this is pretty okay." As I continued to eat, it got less pretty okay. It was greasy. Oily even. But somehow the meat stayed dry.

Then I looked at Bret's chicken, and it didn't look anything like mine. Stilly greasy, but not dry. Moist. Squishy even. And... pink.

We chalked it up to the fact that the booths were pink and the lights were pink and figured it was probably an illusion of our decor kept eating. But my brain was skeptical. So I pulled the chicken out of his hands and... pink. It was pink and squishy and undercooked and even bleeding in some spots.

We stopped eating. I flagged down a waiter. He graciously offered to bring us anything else we wanted or to cook us up some new chicken, but we were pretty done with food by that point. He was kind enough to take Bret's "fried" chicken off our bill.


We walked out into a grey sky with a few raindrops plinking away, feeling less celebratory than when we left the house.

But then the incredibly cheery man who'd seated us started shouting into his phone. OH YEAH? I'VE PAYED MY MORTGAGE EVERY MONTH ON TIME FOR HOW LONG? AND THIS IS HOW YOU... YOU CALL ME EVERY SINGLE... YOU... OKAY, HOW ABOUT THIS, HOW ABOUT THIS? I CURSE YOU! HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT? I CURSE YOU! YOU AND YOUR FAMILY. YOUR WHOLE FAMILY. HOW ABOUT THAT, HUH? HOW DOES THAT FEEL? HOW DOES IT F- HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE DOG VOMIT, HUH? HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE DOG VOMIT?


And then the sky opened up and let go.

A helpful tip for the gentlemen:

No, I am not impressed when you wink at me and slowly say "After you, sweetheart" as you hold open a door.


Not impressed.

Baracktopus

Let's keep this octopus thing going.

Haptopus

Back... to the Marsupial

Dead air? Maybe not anymore.

I'd like to think he's watching a CSI marathon.