Charbonneau at Tanasbourne near Windemere by Salishan

 

So I sat down today and I thought to myself 'Self, you haven't read 'The Redstocking Manifesto' since you were 20.'  So I found a copy of that sapsucker online and I read it.  Know what?  I still agree with it.  Except for the part where everyone's problems have to be worked out as a community. Otherwise, we need that shit today and it needs to be shouted from the mountaintops.

.....from which vine I swing gracefully to the subject of Idaho.

Oh Idaho.

Today I was walking down to my favorite female owned and operated business, gonna git me some duck eggs, and at the crosswalk, as I politely waited at the corner, all four directions of traffic came to a halt, and I was waved on with many a big beardy smile and a-twiddling of 'g'head!' fingies on the wheel. And I do not have a problem with being allowed to cross at an intersection. Allah did not mean for people to do burnouts on me. No, I noticed because I was in a mood to notice shit like that, having just read 'The Redstocking Manifesto' again.

After all these years, are acts of male courtesy like that just a matter of 'Grown People Being Nice To Old People'?  Or is it 'The Same Old Shit Where We Pretend To Be Nice To Old Ladies So We Don't Get Arrested When What We Actually Want To Do Is To Burn Them All At The Stake Because They  Aren't Pretty Anymore Plus They Can Be Cranky'?

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Which brings me to what's really bugging me:  I have to get an operation in four days.  They're going in through my throat to get to my cervical vertebrae, and then they're going to pry them apart and Dremel out the spinal canal for a few inches, suck out all the crud, and then release me back into the wild. 

Why the rush? Yes, I have spinal stenosis, like I mentioned awhile back - it's just that none of us realized how severe it was. And it's gnarly in there.  Cue the surgeon with the DremelRRRRRRIIINGDEDINGDINGDINGDINGrrrrrrrr *sound of chunks hitting the walls*

In another year, they'll be doing the same thing to my lower back. 

My, how I'm looking forward to that. I mean of course I am; I can barely walk some days, but still...it's surgery. In a hospital. 

God how I wish I'd never seen Hellraiser II.

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Hell yeah, Rogers.

                                                             

No longer titty pink!

!!!HOORAY!!!!!

And some coleus that need to be potted up.

How guns are sold here. Just kind of stacked on grocery shelves, no clerk, little kids roaming around with boxes of ammo....

 

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Milton-Freewater After Dark

 This:

RANDOM SHOTS WHAT I SAVED

Seen here:

....better keep that problem weenis under control, ya perv

BEHOLD

the Jack Links Bigfoot.  A sexy beast indeed.

The full image of what is on my John Cleese T-Shirt. Men fear it, women swoon.

BEHOLD: The picture what I tooked offline showing the old Rancho FirstNations 4 feets underwater - circled by a circle up there on the center right.

OMGWTFBBQ.

ALSO NAKED vvv and including A POME

Motherfucker was crazy about guac, children.

If only Micky would find me some. 

Fuckin' rat.

BEHOLD:  Leonard Nimoy has recipes. 

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You'd think Spring would have sprung here. We've experienced warmer temperatures, things are budding and blooming and all that happy crap, but NO.  No, coming in about 45 minutes there will be a sudden 'freeze event' occurring - the temperature is going to plummet to 20f and stay that way until 9pm, and then an hour later it's going to do the same damn thing and last until 10am tomorrow morning.

WTF.

We've also experienced at least four 'downburst' events. One just happened a half-hour ago. The sky gets dark, the wind drops, and then suddenly the rain comes cannoning out of the sky, the thunder is non-stop, and cars have to pull over to the side of the road. This one, like all the rest, lasted about ten minutes, and then all of a sudden someone hit the switch and hey! No more rain! No more hail! The sun is shining!

I am trying to grow tomato plants in containers, and I had to go hustling outside and run the things in 
like a noodge, like I'm raising baby chickens or something, while the rain beat down. And now we're expecting not just one but TWO FREAK FREEZES and I am just done. 

Honestly what does the Universe expect of me. 

Shit. 

Please.

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OK it is forty minutes after I wrote the weather stuff up ^^^ there.  The Temperature is supposed to be dropping.  It is not. It has risen to 60f.

The sky is once again black.

The wind is howling (actual noise!) in from the West, straight down the street.

It blew my doormat away.

                                                   FUCK THIS DRAMA

I am going to go crack a beer.

You should too.

Westward Hoes

A few years back I mentioned that I had a John Cleese t-shirt - and y'all lost your shit! OO OO lets see the John Cleese t-shirt! 

So today, finally, in an act of shocking revelation, I will reveal a rumpled, poorly-taken photo of myself wearing that selfsame garment!

But first, a little backstory.

I really wanted a Cleese t-shirt. First I hit up Mr. Cleese.com, of course - only to find out that yes, Mr. Cleese sells swag, but Holy Fucking Shit it costs a fortune. 

Clearly he is not wealthy enough.  

I was a bit peeved by this. 

So what I did was, I searched Gleegle images until I found a picture of him that was super, extra cheesy. I saved it, and then I went to Walmart.com and had them make me a t-shirt. You just shoot them the image you've saved - any image you want! and the size you need, and they do the rest.

Except they got the size wrong. 

My John Cleese t-shirt is quadruple extra large.

As you can kind of see, it fits me like a deflated kiddie pool:

Mr. Cleese would be appalled. * Hee hee hee.   

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Holy SHIT I forgot Aretha Franklins' Birthday! GOD I SUCK

OO but look what we have here!  Vibrant and glorious, in splendor like the sun!  

There are safety gays and safety gals! 

Tight buttocks and big hair!

Extra Mod set - check!  

So here you go, my darlings:

Yeah you BETTER watch it.

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It may or may not come as a surprise that The Biker and I spend about $20.00 a month on incense. We do. Really.  

I was going somewhere with this information, but I forgot where.

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I can saunter down the street in my lounge pants, Crocs, and Star Fleet Academy t-shirt, and purchase duck eggs. I can. At the same place you can get goose eggs and free-range chicken eggs too - and those chickens are really free range; you can drive past the lady's house and see them out running around.  The same place sells local honey, local sourdough bread, cupcakes, pastries, and local cheese. 

What is this wonderful place?  An antique store - and a good one, too. They make a fair bit of money off us.

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...except for when it comes to bread. Oh no  no no no no.

I still make all our bread every three or four days:

I make almond biscotti too.

Yeah that's right.  

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*

This is definitely the image I'll be wearing on the next Cleese T-shirt I get.

 

Nero on fiddle, me on bass

I've been battling depression lately.  It's been pretty bad. That's where I've been.

Every single time I've gone to post these past weeks my country - well, Trump - has committed another atrocity. I do a lot of trivial shit here at Steve. Nothing kills the inspiration to revel in trivial shit like global atrocities. I mean, I already had climate anxiety and now this constant barrage of....yeah, well.

I made the mistake of trying to divert myself by lurking on Reddit. THIS WAS A BAD IDEA. I'm going to go as far as to say that if you are prone to depression, avoid Reddit like the very plague. Not because of the site content so much as how Reddit operates; which is, like the actual fucking Borg. I have a lot to say about that, but for now I'll just say that it made my depression far worse, very quickly.

I'm on a news fast now, and I'm feeling better for it. 

              If the world goes to shit, I'll find out when the mushroom cloud rises over the horizon. 

 

   

It gets dark. But not quite as dark as originally written, so that's ku.

I am a genius and if you've ever doubted that stop it this instant. I just figured out how to cure fungus gnats in houseplants without resorting to chemical means or using a vaccuum cleaner. How did I achieve this miracle?

I found some little house spiders - the kind that make the tiny little webs along the baseboards and in corners? - and re-homed them to my plants.  Two days later the Biker and I are noticing a distinct lack of gnats flapping around. A week later and I found two little spider middens in my plant tower, full of little gnatty corpses.

Am I worried that the spiders will get fat and huge and start preying on dogs?  No. We don't have a dog.

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Where have I been.

I have been to St. Lukes Imaging Center, where I was stuffed into an MRI machine. This made me feel kind of like a sausage. They were terribly concerned with my head for some reason (I went in for spinal problems) and so they out my head into a plastic cage - thingie, which was not as unpleasant as it sounds. I had a mirror contraption so I could see the in and out of the MRI chamber and be reassured that I was not being digested by modern science, and that was nice. I also had a little breeze blowing in there, which I found odd but not at all unpleasant.  The scanner-bed slid me back and forth like a pizza at unannounced intervals, which made me yip. At one point I felt as though I was slowly being brought up to the boiling point, and I almost bailed.  Apparently the MRI waves heat up the iron in your blood.

No shit. That's what they told me. It did not make me feel better. It made me feel like I'd pissed off Magneto.

Turns out I have spinal stenosis.  Whaddya gonna do.

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I wrote some other stuff here about the Epstein Files and me wanting to go live in a fucking barrel, like Diogenes, only without Diogenes hope in finding an honest man. Wow, look at me all referring to Diogenes and shit!  But I decided not to put that vibe out there. I will, however, reiterate my closing declaration:

It's time we fucking RISE.

Shirtless, Shoeless, No Propeller

A wonderful thing just happened here at the El Apartmento!

BEHOLD:

I got it halfway out of the package and I was giggling!

The Biker came over to see and his eyes lit up!  I told him "I want you to be the first to go through this" because I love him 'n shit. And I handed it over.

 Then I hung over him and was a nuisance until he read it.

 

If you are not a fan of Tony Bourdain, you won't like this. It is pretty Bourdain (tm). 

If you are a fan of Bourdain, get this book IMMEDIATELY. It is pretty Bourdain(tm).

 

I read this book in one sitting and loved it. But honestly, I won't be cooking out of it right away.  

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Dear Mme. Arcati:

Elizabeth Davids' A Book of Mediterranean Food has just arrived yesterday and I cannot put it down!

I made her Pate of Chicken Livers this morning, and it is ASTOUNDING.  The only thing I did differently was to use a Glad Reuseable 

container instead of a small earthenware crock because I am plumb out of small earthenware crocks. 

Note that I could not wait to try out these recipes.  What a stellar  recommenation this was! 

Thank you!!!

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Ashley Gavin. Because lesbians make everything better!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yId_uC-Iaw8

https://x.com/AshGavs/status/1252638120182456324

 

 

Misadventures with Wine + stuff

NOTE:  I pulled the trigger in this one before I could talk myself out of it. 

We are not wine drinkers here at the El Apartmento. Not by any stretch of the imagination.  But we are wine consumers, in that we use the stuff as a cooking ingredient.

As ingredients, then, we prefer to use a garbage Merlot, and a garbage Chardonnay, the nastiest, cheapest ones on offer, in case I didn't make myself clear.

Not thinking, as seems to happen a lot lately, I put 'garbage white' on the grocery list, presuming that The Biker would get the usual.

He did not.

He got a Moscato.

He got Barefoot Wineries White Moscato..

He did not look when he bought it.

And I did not look when I opened the bottle. 

 

I was feeling saucy that afternoon, so I tipped a little into a glass and took a sip. All my jungle instincts kicked in as it hit the back of my tongue. I turned to the sink, spat it out, dumped the glass, grabbed the bottle, ran for the terlet and flushed it all. One long fluid movement from sip to flush, like a ballet. 

Like this ballet.

I don't blame the Biker a bit. And I never said a word about it. 

 But today I did this:

OO!  OO!  Wha'd it taste like wha'd it taste  like OO OO

OK FINE I WILL TELL YOU.

It tasted like straight Karo syrup and mouthwash.

It even had a texture. 

It was like   

I'm not saying what I was going to say because it's too grosFINE OK.

It was like a slug. It was like as if someone had stepped on a slug, in your mouth.

See, you had to know, and now look at you.

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I figured out how to tell the Conservatives from the Liberals here in Idaho. 

Any institution that has a lot of Hispanic people?  Is Liberal.  Or Liberal-er.  Or -ish.

Unless it's the Catholic church.  Catholicism here is its own special brand of....this: "That Guy In Rome": A Catholic Town in Idaho Where The Pope is a Heretic | Religion Dispatches 

Have I made you uncomfortable?  Good. I know I am. Now I have company.*

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OK here's what I've figured out:

A Vape place is a tiny hole-in-the-wall joint, usually with a drive-thru out back, that sells primarily vape juice and vaping thingies. (Not something I do, so yeah.) They might sell a little pop, they might have an expresso machine.  They all exhale a weird candy aroma, like those cherry-scented things they used to put in gas station toilets.

A Tobacco store sells conventional nicotene products - as long as they're made by Philip Morris. They also carry marijuana paraphernalia, doper lifestyle accessories (like a lighter shaped like a MAC 5 - ask Savannah, she has one in her purse) and black light posters, incense, and things that Snoop Dog has signed. Also craft beer, garbage beer, garbage wine and malt liquor. Oh and let's not forget the massive cases full of Kratom in various forms.

A liquor store sells liquor, beer, wine, malt liquor, mixers, pop, and a little bit of all the above ^^^. Also ice cream treats.

Unless you're up the road in Weiser, where it's just all one thing and they either call it Such and So's TOBACCO STORE or VAPE PLACE... and liquor, in little teeny letters. Along with a bunch of lottery ticket ads.

It would seem that people here are desperate to run shit through their livers. And also obvious that they feel guilty about it.  

There's a hierarchy of sin, too. 

Vape stuff is off the radar, but something really sketch is going on in those places, so black out the windows and put bars over the doors. 

Tobacco is bad for you, but at least it's not beer or wine, which is  bad-ER for you, so here, let's put that in a bag (seen above) so that nobody at all will guess in one million years that you have just bought alcoholic beverages. From the tobacco store.

But hard liquor, now, hey, that's REALLY SUPER EL FUCKING BAD SENOR so let's just put 150 signs advertising lottery tickets all over the place and advertise the tobacco and vape shit, wink wink. Nobody in two million and a half years will ever guess that you stopped in to buy HARD LIQUOR. You just go on now, clutching that long, skinny paper bag that nothing else in the world comes in, BY THE NECK, and we'll all...presumably pretend that this never happened, or something.

Man, Idaho, you are a TRIP.

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*From my hometown, making me proud. They've been around for years. This is the ideal that I grew up with, in my town, in my neighborhood.

Thank God.

Or whoever.

This church is going viral for their openness and their sign game is epic (25 pics)