Dear Family: and other things...

***DON'T FORGET - Green River Brewfest, Saturday September 22nd, noon-SIX pm at Ryan and Casey in Greenfield, MA. Vendors, music, lots of free samples, and a knitting corner that I hope expands to take over the parking lot. Be there or be...someplace else, but we'll be having more fun!***

I know I am difficult at times, and often most complicated at holidays and birthdays. What does she need? What does she want? Well, I am putting you on notice. A big old pre-holiday season alert. I want this. I want more and more and more. I want it every day, every morning, noon and night. I love love love this fish. This is why I schlep to Springfield for the BigE every year. This fish keeps me up at night, in a GOOD way, for weeks after and before the next Exposition. Dreaming about it. Lusting for it. Wishing it were here. So just to let you know, they sell it online even, and you could have a lovely six pack of Kabobs shipped down just in time for the holidays. And I might - might - even share. I can be easily had for exquisite smoked salmon and a good root beer.
As it may appear from the above, we went to the Big E yesterday. The BigE is also known as the Eastern States Exposition, and is like a big old multi-state fair. Like all state fairs it has a midway, hawkers selling everything from snake oil and custom cowboy boots ($400 a pair) to The Famous Boerner V-Slicer and the ever-popular Super Chamois. There's booths selling every possible type of unhealthy, unholy, cardiac-destroying fare from french fries and corn dogs to donuts and candy apples, not to mention the famous BigE Cream Puffs. There's exhibits of all kind - commercial exhibits of hot tubs and tractors, agricultural exhibits including a chick brooder stocked with hatching birds, and the coolest of all, the Avenue of States which consists of miniature versions of the New England (ME,VT,NH,MA,CT,RI)statehouses in a row, all filled with the best each state has to offer (like Maine. They've got Bold Coast Smokehouse, for example...hint hint, dear family...)
We wandered through the exhibits, seeing all sorts of demos of all sorts of products, and people selling all sorts of things including my kid selling cell phone service (I am still waiting for my smartphone, Dan. 7 hours of labor and who knows how many sleepless nights ought to count for something...). Last year Mr Wonderful stood entranced by the Chinese juggling troupe on the Court of Honor Stage. This year he was sadly disappointed. Wrong day, or wrong year, in their place was JIGU: Thunder Drums of China, which while neat did not have the appeal of the jugglers, so we moved on. Poor Mr. W. It was the last day of his vacation. He's spent most of the week working around here, when not escorting me to Maine to see Brad, or Springfield so I could eat my way through Bold Coast's coolers.
In fact, he's laboring pretty intensely to create food production here. When we first moved in we inherited a series of badly overgrown perennial gardens which we've continued to ignore. This was traditionally my job and I have completely ditched it in favor of writing book and patterns and knitting stuff. We'd left behind fruit trees, berry bushes and a garden that fed us. It'd taken years to get anything producing at the old house which was nothing but a giant sand bank and needed constant soil amending. It was daunting to think we had to start all over again from scratch; all new nursery stock, all new labor, all new everything. Cutting down the trees last winter did not help the overgrowth, as once the sun hit there was no stopping the weeds from taking over. Because of the artistic placement of some rocks it was difficult to just go on in and mow it down, unless you wanted to wear half of the mower blade as an anklet. So Mr. Wonderful dedicated this vacation week (when not being my personal driver and ATM) to cleaning up the side garden and preparing for food production. He built garden boxes for raised beds, laid landscapers black stuff to keep weeds down, chain-sawed out a stump or two, and generally could have made a film, loosely titled "Mr. Wonderful Builds His Dream Garden". Things around here can be comical at best. Pulling rocks out of the yard with the Civic, or using a chain saw to do a job it was never intended for can lead to some entertaining moments. All in all it was a wonderful feeling, both of us here working at whatever we were working at, moving through the days like the twisted co-dependent people we are.
So now it's Tuesday, and after a prolonged lie-in with the snooze button at length he dragged himself up, showered and left home. He's gone back to work at the place away from home, and I'm here writing up patterns just like last week but...well...I miss him. Girl says we're "sick, just SICK". Poor kid. Her parents like each other. How twisted is that??