I went to the local pizzeria and had to take a picture of their menu board: I wonder if they'll do a half scorn/half pepperoni? Note the name of the pizza: Americana. If they were French, I'd swear it was in retaliation for Freedom Fries.

One of my good friends of an entreprenuerial bent read about our over-abundance of potatoes. (And now we have witnesses. Friends came up from London a day before the bbq and witnessed the vegetable delivery. One of them asked if they always used a dump truck to deliver the vegetables. I explained that it was apparently the most efficient way to deliver the metric ton of spuds that we received each week.) Anyway, our friend from California - apparently convinced that all we needed was a better grounding on the glory that a potato could achieve if properly flattered and loved - sent us a package with materials officially endorsed by the Church of Tubers, to try and remake us into born again potato lovers. Besides the obligatory Mr. Potato Head (which the Critter immediately claimed as hers), there was a copy of The Potato Book, by Alan Romans. I got a little excited, because I thought that I'd be able to at least find a new recipe for this week's delivery. Oh, how wrong I was. The Potato Book is not a book about how to cook the lovable little root. It's about the history of the potato. And it contains a catalog of over 150 of the most common and "interesting" varieties of potatos. With color photographs. Alphabetized and indexed for convenience. Because, you know, you might need that. And just in case you're wondering who, exactly, the target audience the author had in mind when writing his opus, take a look at the top book listing on Amazon under "Customers who bought this item also bought..." I'm so not eating anything grown with the "Liquid Gold" method...

When I visited Tennessee last week, my grandmother had put together a few things that she thought I might want to have. Lord only knows where she actually kept these things once she moved into the nursing home, but I got a real kick out of seeing some of the photographs and letters that I had written before. I shared these with my Bride when I got home. Note: Nanny is the name my older sister christened my grandmother with, and Crystal, Buck and Topsy were all dogs that my grandmother owned at the time (a Saint Bernard, a German Shephard, and a horribly angry miniature fox terrier, respectively). Apparently, I was writing on the side of the Mt. Kiliminjaro at the time, causing my page to slope as I wrote. My Bride couldn't make it further than the "Buck sure is a pleasure..." line before devolving into helpless convulsions of laughter. Apparently, she never met a child who talked like John Wayne before. But look at this face. How can you mock this face? Is this not the most adorable face you've ever seen? And look at those pants. Are they not marvelous? If I had a pair of pants like this today, I'd still wear them. I think I'll skip the pictures she found of my high school years for now. When we were married, I told my Bride that all pictures from that era had been burned in a tragic and strangely localized fire.