Frankly, my dear, I don't give a... (PG-13 post)

I've written several posts entitled "Why this is not a Christian blog". I may even post one eventually, but they are usually prompted by some issue or topic that makes it clear to me why, even though I am a professed Christian, I nevertheless do not fit in with the Christian blogosphere. I know some readers would be delighted if the blog were less Christian, others would kinda like it to be more so, and some don't care. I yam what I yam.

But here's one of my reasons for declaring that this is not a Christian blog:

I care absolutely nothing about being a Proverbs 31 Woman.

It's not that Christian writers themselves aren't quite delightful in making respectful fun of this absolutely unreal paragon of Womanly Perfection. They really are. There are lots of books out of Christian publishing houses, from serious to funny, about how we shouldn't keep flogging ourselves for falling short of that description, how it's an ideal, nobody can live up to that... etc. etc.

Great. All well and good. But, see, there's still a problem for me. All of them, the most serious, the most delightfully amusing, all of them assume that we want to be the Proverbs 31 Woman. That we want to shoot that high, and need affirmation for the level we can realistically achieve.

And that's where I leave the building.

I'm in danger of being kind of amusing about it myself. But however much I like writing likable stuff, toning it down to make it sort of endearing does not convey my extreme dislike for the whole Christian "We are so vile and corrupt, we all deserve death and eternal flames," culture. To be more honest, I have to be ruder than that.

Here goes :

I do not give a rat's ass about achieving Proverbs 31 Womanhood. The Proverbs 31 Woman not ONLY can go jump, she can take the whiny male fantasy that spawned her right along with her.

I'm just sayin'.

Bless them to us

On this wet, gray, but still rather warm day, a little wildflower (which I will look up later, between cooking, imminent guest arrivals, etc.) is blooming, and Scooter has accompanied me to photograph it -- vocally expressing his opinion about having to come out of the warm dry garage and guard me, since it was lightly raining on us.




To all who celebrate Thanksgiving, and to all who celebrate their blessings every day as an ongoing thing - have a Happy one!

IF you ONLY get ONE gadget - get this one!

I put the weather-dot-com gadget on my iGoogle page, thinking at the time that all I would get was the weather.

But they also run the child abduction alerts -- tailored for the zip code that you have put in to get your weather info.

This is a very very wonderful thing they can do to get the alert out there! It comes up, with any weather alerts, in red letters ....



.... and you click it to get the descriptive info you need to keep an eye out. All in plain, easy-load text.




I had this info within the hour it happened, and told the lady at our convenience store while I was getting my Diet Coke, so she could keep a watch too. If you only get one iGoogle gadget, I'd call this an important one -- and it does double duty!

I believe that (if this "share it" link works) you can get it here.

(By the way, the flood warning has come up since yesterday and appears to be a river surge coming in from the uplands after recent rains. It might cause problems directly along the river banks but shouldn't affect us much here.)

Really big clam

At about 2:30 this afternoon, I was at the edge of the marsh throwing a roast turkey carcass into the water so the crabs could pick it over. As I turned around, I noticed this fair-sized clam shell in the mud.

Clam shells (half-shells, strictly speaking) are fairly abundant on our beaches. Even big ones are the more ordinary pickings that beachcombers find. The size of this one was still pretty cool, and I guess my Inner Tourist impelled me to pick it out of the mud and bring it inside with the thought of keeping paperclips in it or something.

So I lifted it. It was stuck in the mud pretty well, and the outer layer of the shell chipped off, back there at the joint. It may be a fossil. Many are. Nature was doing her work and breaking it down into its recyclables by slowly prying the layers apart with algae or mold.

Drat, hated having broken it, but I kept the pieces, put my finger deep into the mud to really get under it, and lifted.

And lifted. That green part was exposed and the algae was working on it, but the white-ish part shows how much more was buried in the muck.


It. Is. Huge. This photo shows it next to my 1-quart pot. It's 6 inches long, and has enough layers of growth to indicate it celebrated well over 200 birthdays.

So, it's more fragile than I thought and I don't want to lose any more pieces. It'll need an easier life than it would have had as a paper-clip holder.

The pictures can be clicked for larger views. I've left them large, for anyone who wants to see such detail as my camera picks up.

Stats :

Length - 6 inches

Weight - Larry got curious and put it on his postal scale. The shell weighs 1.25 pounds (just a hair over, actually)

Capacity - I got curious and got out my 1/4 cup measuring cup. This shell-half holds 3/4 cup and a little bit more.

Frost warning

We've got a frost warning for tonight, so I harvested the last of the crops for this year. Peppers were my only success, though Larry's garden did better. This last batch didn't get very big, as you can see by the basic teaspoon, but they'll enhance a veggie pizza quite nicely!