SPIT SPAT SPUT

We've had a weekend full of "firsts." The first snake of the season, at least 3 feet long, a gopher snake, was under our front porch. Suzy and I saw him as we were about to leave for shopping, so we stood and watched as he gradually slithered away toward the lot next door. The first ground squirrel we have ever seen on our lot appeared to be after seed fallen from our birdfeeders. And the first different lizard-type critter we've ever seen on our lot. He was so quick, all we could do was get glimpses of him, never enough to have a complete look so we could identify him from our Audubon book.

Did we have a camera readily at hand for any of these sightings? Not on your life! We're going to have to get a little pocket-type camera with a zoom lens to carry with us every step of the way, every day. We're tired of missing good shots.

Another first, and not a good one: Saturday our air conditioner failed. Refused to work. Done, right at the start of the summer.

This is the A/C when it was being installed last year.
Fortunately, the weekend was relatively cool (mid-90s), but the week is expected to be well into the low 100s. Tuesday the fellow from Sierra Vista came and fixed it, so we're COOL!

Another "first" -- Sunday evening I cooked a whole chicken on a spit on our barbecue. Suzy reminded me that I had actually done that before, in a different time on a distant planet, but it was certainly the first time this century.

(Doesn't that sound astounding? "The first time this century." On January 1, 2001, each one of us woke up in the morning for "the first time this century!")

Before cooking, we had to rub an herb and garlic mixture under the skin (Suzy says she has never before been so intimate with a chicken!), then tie it up with string to keep the legs and wings from flopping around. I put a drip pan under the bird on its spit, forgetting to put any liquid in the pan. As a result, we had a significant bonfire when the fat in the pan caught fire!

So this is how the chicken looked after cooking. Slightly charred!

At any rate, we had invited a friend from the park to join us for dinner. Linda has been through hell these past weeks. She was visiting family in southern California in early May when she got a phone call from neighbors here telling her that her husband, Jim, had just had a serious stroke. She flew back to Tucson immediately to be with Jim at the University Medical Center in Tucson. She was shown a scan that indicated that a large portion of Jim's brain was dead as a result of the stroke.


They are coping as best as they can, but we felt inviting her to dinner was the most help we could be for Linda. And it seemed to be. It was Linda who inspired the title of this blog, "SPIT SPAT SPUT," after I said this was the first time I had "spitted" a chicken. Linda wondered if it might more properly have been that I "sput" the chicken, so then of course I countered with "spat."


We were all pretty free-flowing by this time and took up the challenge of what is the past tense of "sightseeing." We all know about sightseeing, but would having done it last week be "we sightsaw?" Or maybe "he sightseed?" We settled on saying that "we looked around a bit."


Recently I posted this picture of Suzy and me sitting on our glider.

Some of our readers sent comments about the white stockings. They somehow keep blood circulation going while recovering from the knee surgery. That's OK, but they also keep slipping down! I think I need a garter belt! One person I met suggested that he and I (since he also was wearing the stockings) ought to look for panty hose! One of our readers, Ron, wrote about a spray that will hold the things in place on my thighs, but which does not leave sticky traces on the skin. I'm hoping my visit this week at the surgeon's office will clear me to get rid of them once and for all.


How's the recovery going? Surprisingly well. I am able to walk without a cane a good part of the time, even going up and down the five steps on our entry stairs. Other times, when I first stand up after sitting, it takes a minute or two to convince my knee to be part of the action.

Now I want to take a line or two to thank all those folks who recently joined our blog as Followers. I won't list you all by name, but you folks know who you are, and we want you to know that we cherish all of our Followers! We hope you'll stick around, enjoy our ramblings. and leave us a comment to let us know you are there.

As for Followers, we now have 74. Can't tell you how we got to that number, as we have gotten several new folks recently, but the total number hasn't grown by the number of new folks. We must have lost some of our earlier Followers. That's OK, because we know we can't satisfy everybody, we can't keep everyone entertained, and we don't want to. So some will leave us. By the same token, we have stopped following some of the blogs we started to follow,  simply because we didn't feel they were telling us stories that we wanted to keep up with. You don't appreciate Edgar Allen Poe? Read Dean Koontz! Don't mean to be flip, but we can't all be in the same place at the same time.


So, that's today's ramble from ... Our Life on Wheels.