a few of my favorite things

Instead of painting ceilings tonight like I wanted, I am waiting for joint compound to dry, and hence, jotting down a few of my favorite things.

The website www.doityourself.com arms the willing with some know-how and companionship for fixing things. I have gleaned from there quite a bit about my furnace. Tonight I got a multimeter to test voltage getting across some of the components in my heating system, and let me tell ya, I think I can take on the world.

I like a grapefruit that has a half a cup of juices to squeeze out after you've eaten out the fleshy goodies. It is not a requirement for an excellent grapefruit, but it is a nice bonus.

I really like sweet olives. Sweet Olives, where have you been my whole life?! The other evening Trent and I were wondering about a delicious fragrance in my backyard. What is that smell? we wondered. It smelled like peaches, we decided. Mmmm, that smells just like sweet peaches, we exclaimed. But we could find no blossom among the flowers that gave off such a scent. Plus, this was not just some faint whiff of some remote blossom.

(You might wonder about flowers in November, so real quick, let me list off some in our backyard that are blooming now: ginger, camelia, azalea, canna lily).

Curious, I emailed my neighbor to see what he knew. Maybe, I thought, they have a cobbler in the oven. He knew nothing of the scent or its source. Google was my next go-to-resource. Nothing informative, but I did find some local LSU Ag Center faculty who contributed to a column that indicated to me they knew which way was up in local horticulture. I sent them a message, like one ant in the colony transmitting brain signals to a couple others. One of them wrote back soon about two likely candidates for such a smell right now.

And sweet olive was the winner. When daylight came, I found a small sweet olive tree in our backyard, with little white flowers easy to miss. I also found three largish sweet olive trees behind my neighbor's property. Let me tell you, what a fragrance. And at this time of year, what a treat.

Olive is a great name, but we have no name set in stone for our XX offspring in utero.

I am thankful for self-employment. A gal checking me out at Lowe's today thanked me when I wished her a Happy Thanksgiving. "Do you work?" She asked. I was a little puzzled. When you turn 1,000,000,000 seconds old, your lightning fast neurons take tours to Svalbard and other exotic locales. "I work a lot" I replied. I had a multimeter in the bag and a 10 foot 1x4 so I thought it was an odd question. "I mean, are you working..." and then I understood that she meant to ask if I was scheduled to work on Thanksgiving. But again, my answer was awkward: "I work for myself, so I work every day." But I assured her that I'd be spending some quality time with the family, and work hard to make Bonnie happy, which is the best work of all (I left out those last details in my conversation which was coming to an end as I was hustling out the door).