What Manly Things Did You Do Today?

I bet it was really awful when you had to walk 5 miles to school in that heat, with no shade, uphill both ways!

 

Doing laundry. Ground up 3 pounds of chuck, a pound of sirloin and a quarter pound of pork fat - first experiment making my own meat mix for burgers. Came out with ten 1/3 pound burgers. Going on the grill today along with some dogs, brats and chicken, all over a nice hot charcoal fire sprinkled with mesquite chips.

Happy 4th everyone!

 

Silly man, everyone knows there's no school in July!

...now let me tell you about our winters way back when...

 

Oh... so you were of school age after February was invented?

 

Well of course silly Penguin, but back in my days February was a real month with 30 days just like every month. Not one of those wimpy short months we have today.

 

I see. And does that remind you of the time you caught the ferry over to Shelbyville 'cuz you needed a new heel for your shoe? So, you decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So you tied an onion to your belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Give me five bees for a quarter, you'd say.
Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was you had an onion on your belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...

 

Did laundry and made a meatloaf. (@Dapper-in-a-can-man)

 

Ladies and gentlemen we have a winner!

to you and Homer's dad!

 

You do know the patriotic thing to do, right?

 

Today: Assembled two dozen teriyaki chicken kebobs onto bamboo skewers... Got four flats of baby back ribs rubbed down and on the smoker. I have 10 pounds of sliced round marinating with cure that will be heading for the smoker soon. This will yield almost 6 pounds of jerky. Yeah I've been busy...

 

Sharing? Hmm... I don't see that in the Constitution anywhere....

 

Mmmm..... good!

 

Today I fed the snakes. Nothing more manly than that is there? Well ok so SWMBO fed two of them. But they are the wimpy snakes. Well ok so they all are but still........

 

I had to pretend to be the stoic patriarch of my insane family.

 

I really don't want that to be a metaphor.

I'll stop right there.

 

And yet there was more material waiting with "wimpy snakes". Actually it isn't a metaphor unfortunately. It's a Ball Python, Cornsnake, Spotted Python and Dumeril's Boa.

 

Ball Python huh?

 

Warning to snakeaphobes......don't look!

 

I spent most of the day building my wife one of those Little Library things. She's been wanting one for over a year now. I finally started it today. I might redo the roof since I messed up the angle. Now I need to see if I can figure out how to build a decent door for it.

 

Never heard about the Little Library concept until you mentioned it here. Read up on it and that is one fantastic idea.

Large libraries seems to unfortunately go the way of the dinosaurs and with the exception of some rather specialized needs like microfiche and certain study-related material the internet and various e-readers/tablets just proved to be too competitive in an increasingly digital market.

I remember the excitement every time we, as a family, went to the library in our town.
I remember spending hours going through the shelves and how you 'graduated' from one section to another as you got older..
The upstairs floor held the tech/foreign language/non-fictional sections. I sat on those floors reading everything from Carl Sagan, various foreign literature books (fiction and non-fiction) - to Guinness book of world records (that fascinated me greatly) - and often had to be coerced to leave for home again.

To this day I attribute my love of reading and literature in general to that little two-floor, brick house library and even though I know that you can't stop progress I do feel that we stand to lose something really valuable with the disappearance of the traditional libraries.

Phew. End of rant.

Great project