Dahlia Watch Continues
Look, there's a purply-pink dahlia in the background that's kicking its ass. I think when this thing finally blooms it's going to be as big as my head.

The other day I wrote that when people say they don't read, I can't understand what that means.

I recently read an interview with an up-and-coming young singer and she said she never eats vegetables. I find this equally alarming. What does she mean? She won't eat Brussels sprouts or boiled cabbage? Or never. Like, not even salad? Does she eat fruit? I can't imagine not eating vegetables. I finely dice carrots and turnips and add them to my chili.

[That sound that you hear is 3/4s of the population of Texas keeling over at my blasphemy with chili.]

You know when you're on a road trip and you've been eating pizza and burritos for a few days and when you finally find a decent salad somewhere you're practically weeping with relief? Sometimes if I'm eating a lot of junk food and feel sort of blucky I eat a carrot and feel about 90% better.

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There's a wildly popular online retailer that I'm not going to mention by name but I have made it a point of pride to avoid doing business with them. Then my local retail situation changed and online retailer bailed me out in a pinch once so I've turned to them a couple of times.

God, they're lame.

Let's say you find an item you might want, you'll see a little highlighted area where they tell you if you buy in the next few hours, it could be in your hands two days later. Then you order stuff and find out that super fast delivery costs about 150% of what you're saving by using this online store. So you figure on regular delivery and you do your order. Then at the last minute they say something about how this order can't ship for a few days. Huh? Well, you think you've lived this long without it, a few more days don't matter.

Then comes the day when you buy a gift over TWO WEEKS in advance, you do your checkout and all is well except that today, close to a week later, you get a notice that part of your order has shipped — just part, not even the whole thing but don't worry, they won't charge you for extra shipping — and that they expect it to arrive about a week after the date you need it for your gift. WTF?

If I use these people again, please beat me with a stick.

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Finally, our neighborhood does an annual yard sale day and zillions of families have a yard sale at the same time so people can troll the neighborhood and stop and find sales on every street corner. I'm not sure how it's organized because I was never aware of this until last year when a friend who lives in the neighborhood adjacent asked me what date the big neighborhood sale was and I said, "Huh?"

This weekend is the weekend and I only know this because on the way back from the Farmer's Market this morning we passed about 15 yard sales. Our neighbors across the street had one going.

I'm not a garage sale person. Give or visit. No specific reason, just not my thing. I was surprised by the constant stream of cars all day long. I sat outside and read my book for awhile so I could study it up close.

More than half the cars were super nice, new, expensive cars. Yeah, I realize that garage sales are for everybody I was just surprised by the giant shiny SUVs and pickups and the tuna boat sized Cadillac. The other observation I have is that the average visitor didn't seem to take much effort in parking. They'd just stop about 4 feet from the curb, often blocking our driveway or the driveway across the street and get out and start looking around. It wasn't like they were there for very long but still, how hard is it to park at the curb?

I love to get rid of stuff. Maybe we can do this next time.