Arnold Schwarzenegger looked like the cat that ate the canary in that venue. A competent speech from a, hmmm, solid person. "Don't be economic girly-men."

Laura Bush has grown since the last campaign. Very pretty, erect and confident.

The Kerry girls appeared a real credit to their parents. These Bush girls are giggly, their clothes are inappropriate for the venue, their material is terrible, and the impression they are making is embarrassing.

UPDATE: I've read "But they're just 22." Right. College graduates.

Obama was an inspiring speaker, Clinton is an excellent speaker, John McCain is a man I'll closely listen to, but Rudy Giuliani is the man I want to dance with.

All right, all right. I have a weakness for Italians.

Lucy is one ticked-off little biddy.

She had her beak and toenails trimmed today. You'd have thought they were preparing her for dinner.

If she were quiet and cooperative, the whole process might take four minutes, if they were being extra careful. What with all the screeching and battle and rests, the whole lot of us are worn out when it's done.

I told the vet that if she were a good-looking 20-to-30-year-old man it would be a lot easier. That's Lucy's type.

Where did she learn that?

Lyman came in yesterday with a cucuzza squash. I would never have imagined that Louisiana has the largest farm of that kind in the world. Hype, maybe, though it could be true.

Bloomberg, Giuliani and McCain speak tonight at the convention. Wading through Google-ups I can't find the schedule for all the protest info. Does someone know the approximate time these gentlemen will be speaking?

It was much easier to track the DNC.

Fine. Many men would like nothing better. Now whatcha gonna do, honey?

(Girl's in the wrong city. She should move to Los Angeles. She'd be well on the road to her dream there.)

Kitchen Hand in Melbourne, Australia, has a post here that combines possums and parrots, so how can I not link?

He cooks and gardens, among things. I check there frequently for his recipes, though I don't have a clue as to where I'd find skate. These mussels frustrate me no end.

His site slipped onto my blogroll there on the left a short while ago.

A 4-foot pet monitor is loose in town:

Neighbors suspect the lizard is what ate two new roosters a resident on Camellia bought recently.

"He got two brand-new roosters," neighbor Michelle Bumgarner said. "They didn't even get to crow the next morning."

The old mattress on the guest bed was a cotton mattress, covered in blue ticking, with a roll and roping at the edges. The springs were covered in blue ticking with roping. When were sets like that last made?

The bed, end tables and chest of drawers date from the forties.

The new Bemco bedding arrived today for the guest room.

I inherited an odd-sized lovely four-poster bed when we married. The mattress size is 51 x 75 inches (well, 50 7/8), not on the showroom floor. We measured the top of the box spring, and ordered the set custom-made at considerable expense, to us, anyway.

The poor fellows who delivered the set couldn't get the springs in for anything, even after removing the little plastic corners.

"Stand the mattress up in the room and go on, we'll handle it."

The size was only a smidgen off, so Lyman and I paired up and plonked our hineys on each of the corners to set the springs. It worked.

Then we placed the mattress. It is not a pillow-top. The crown of the mattress is 32 inches off the floor.

I guess we'll pretend to have a big house and have the carpenter build a step.

My gosh, that sure looks high.

The moral of the story is to always measure the springs at the bottom, especially if you're measuring bedding fifty years old. I'd like to say also measure the depth of the bedding, but we didn't have a lot of choices, so do the best with what you can. The old mattress had to go.

Continuing the theme of teenagers and birds, and adolescent birds, Lucy's relationship with the telephone has taken a step. Now she says "hello" after we have punched a number in.

Since she has "What you doing?" down pat, she only has to learn "Nothing, what you doing?" to be able to communicate just as Lyman's boys did at a comparable developmental level.

Next comes "You want to do something later?" followed by "I don't know. Do you?"

Serious local trouble here. Reaction here.

This bears close watching. Four or five shots?

UPDATE: Here is another story from the local weekly, the Concordia Sentinel, with more details.

UPDATE II: The promised rally here.

Another phrase for when I feel exhausted and blue:

"I feel like I've been whipped with a dead snake."

(Link via Obscure Store)

Geez, I never thought I could feel sorry for a cockroach.

The house next door is an attractive two-story, modeled after a New Orleans townhouse (the Thomas Toby house, now known as the Toby-Westfeldt house, first house built in the Garden District, 1838. Can't find a good picture). At 4 the other morning, alarms began screaming and talking, and fire trucks and police cars arrived in front of it. They were there for some while.

Lyman talked to the owners later. It was a false fire alarm. It is a beam-based alarm that goes into fits when smoke or other particles block the beam. Firemen examined the house thoroughly and found no trace of smoke or fire.

They finally resolved that the alarm must have been set off by harvest dust.

Just another quiet night in rural America.

UPDATE: Interesting note here on Thomas Toby's association with Texas.

Boudreaux's Butt Paste has gone big time:

On the NASCAR Busch circuit, Boudreaux is one of several sponsors of Crosby, a middle school principal in Slidell, La., and longtime driver of just about any type of vehicle that can reach unholy speeds.


Last year at Talledega, Ala., Crosby's "butt car" gained as much attention as the eventual winner of the race. Considering that millions watch racing, Crosby and Boudreaux have been inundated with variations of "Butt Paste? What's that?"


"It's a joke at the track that if you put it on the rear end of the car, it'll go faster," Crosby said.

Lucy seems to like the word 'apple'.

Every time I give her food, I pronounce its name carefully. She hasn't picked up 'corn' or 'pepper' or 'bean'. Just 'apple'.

When she goes on one of her vocalizing streaks where she experiments with her voice with all kinds of sounds, from high-pitched chirps and screams to belly-growls, she always plays for a while with 'apple'. She prolongs the syllables and plays with the p's in her throat. It's interesting and odd, evocative of Eve and learning to read.

Do all teenagers say "hunh" when you ask them a question?

"Lucy, what are you doing there?"

"Hunh?"

Hers is a pretty "hunh", drawled as you might expect from a young Vivian Leigh.