In A Mood

Not "In the Mood" like the old Glenn Miller song, I've been in a mood for the last week or so and it came to a head this afternoon when I burned the daylights out of my right pointer finger. I had fired up the charcoal and then sliced up and marinated a bunch of veggies to make yummy grilled veggie sandwiches for lunch. We've got a nice screen that sits on the grill that keeps the smaller stuff from slipping through so I spritzed it with Pam and got grilling. I took a big cookie sheet out to hold the done pieces while the next batch was on the coals. While taking the last batch off I rested the edge of the cookie sheet on the grill edge because it was getting heavy. Like a thoughtless moron I grabbed the edge with my un-potholdered right hand, burned my finger, and dropped the whole shebang right on the dirty patio and perilously close to the ant killing granules I had sprinkled earlier. Damndamndamndamndamn. I cried and sucked my finger because I did a really good job burning it. I scooped it all up and dumped it right into the trash and started over. Luckily I had another of every veggie and I've got a nice shiny white place on the pad of my finger that hurts like the dickens. Yes, I put ice on it, any number of times, and I will again but it's difficult to type with all your fingers when you're holding a little ice pack on your finger. I watched the Kurt Russell movie "Dreamer" last night before returning it to Netflix tomorrow (I cancelled the disc part and kept the streaming when they raised their prices and they've sent me an email demanding it back, pretty politely but I got the message) and it was filmed in Lexington. It's a pretty good family movie and it was fun to see Keeneland racetrack and other things like a fancy stone fence that looked familiar. I miss my girls, wish they lived closer so I could go and visit more easily.

September10--Byzantine, Plate with the Battle of David and Goliath. Sela's hands ached and her fingertips were black from polishing silver all morning. She tried to convince her sister Rita that they shouldn't polish the daylights out of everything. "But they say on Antiques Roadshow not to remove the patina, really they do," Sela had said when she sat down to see all the family silver and the bronze statuary from the library lined up in ranks on the table. There were four different kinds of polish on the table too. "Don't be ridiculous," Rita said, "no one wants dirty, tarnished metal. They'll think it's junk." Sela shook her head but knew it was fruitless to argue with Rita. Rita always knew best and she had the starch in her backbone to back it up. Sela was the family noodle. "Or doormat," she said under her breath while she polished away hundreds of years of patina and dollars.

Now it's time to go make a pot of chicken soup so I have lunches next week.
--Barbara