;)
On Monday, September 28, I tried out a hot dog from Ididadog for the first time and documented the moment with my Canon G10 pocket camera. Later, that same day, I lost the camera - that is why you have not seen this week-old image until now.
Margie and I first became aware of the Ididadog hot dog kiosk about the beginning of September. Despite her pain, suffering and the resultant lethargy, I was actually able to use this news to excite her enough to hobble out of the house on her crutches and into the red Escape. Eager to try the dogs, we hurried over to the well-camouflaged kiosk on the Palmer-Wasilla highway, right across from the bowling alley, but we found a sign posted on the drive-through window: Closed. On Jury Duty.
Some damned alleged criminal had robbed us of the opportunity to try the hot dogs.
I checked back a few times afterward, but always found Ididadog closed until this day. So I bought myself a quarter pounder Polish Dog with mustard, onions, dill pickle relish and saurkruat, with potato chips grown and made right here in this valley, plus Pepsi.
Oh, it was exquisite! Superb! It reminded me of being in Chicago, hanging out outside of Wrigley Field.
If fortune should smile upon me, I will buy many hot dogs here in the future.
This is what Wasilla has long needed - a really good hot dog stand.
;)
Later that day, after my coffee break, I stepped into the house, came out here into my office, but then had to go back in to help Margie with something, I forget what. After that, I could not find my G10 pocket camera. I looked and looked, but I could not find it.
"Oh, well," I thought, "it will show up in an hour or two." I typically lose the camera three or four times a week and within an hour or so it always pops up, right were I left it.
Not this time. The whole day passed by. Night came.
No camera.
I grew very worried.
This is among the images that was lost within it. Melanie and Charlie, the day before, when they had come out to visit us.
;)
After I ate the hot dog, I stopped at the post office, hoping that someone might have sent me an unexpected check for $250,578.12. I figured that would solve my problems and allow me to write my books and go at this blog full time, as I want to, undisturbed by anything else.
Instead, I found some bills in my box, plus this car intentionally parked so as to take up one designated parking space, plus half of the walk way.
This happens frequently around here, although its usually one car intentionally parked to take up two parking spaces. It is what Melanie would call, "So Wasilla."
Some people think it is a really cool thing to do.
Others think it really cool to carry loaded pistols in their pockets.
Potentially deadly combination.
Furthermore, from the way she is parked, you can tell that the driver drove the wrong way through the one-way traffic lot to get the spot. Yes, it was a "she," because I saw her and she was not a teenager, either, but a mature adult - mature in terms of age, anyway.
;)
At some point before I lost the camera, I saw Caleb in the backyard, washing his bicycle. Afterward, Margie had him undo the hose and drain the water out of it, because most mornings now we wake up to frost.
Not as much as would be normal by this time. It has been an unusually warm fall, just as it was an unusually warm summer. We are about ten days to two weeks away from when the lakes usually freeze over, but I think it will take longer this year.
Even so, it was time to undo the hose.
;)
This is the last picture that I took with G10 pocket camera before I lost it. Many people began to doubt me, to believe that I had never brought the camera home but had left it somewhere. Yet, I had this recollection of taking this picture as I drove home from my coffee break in the late afternoon, so I was certain I had not left it somewhere.
In time, I myself began to doubt, to believe perhaps that I had never taken this picture at all, that I remembered something that had never happened and that I really had left the camera somewhere else and would never see it again.
This would be worse than forgetting something that had happened.
But I found the camera today. In a place that I looked at least 20 times. My work table. Under some papers. I had lifted all those papers up and looked under them before.
And just in case you wonder about the pictures that have appeared here in the meantime, I took them mostly with the other pocket camera, the G9, the one my kids gave me after I got hurt. The series of Kalib falling was done with my Canon 1Ds MIII, as was the one of Jimmy sitting on the scanner and maybe one or two more.
There is more that I want to say about this, but I have already exceeded my Cocoon mode time.
I must better discipline myself.
*Cocoon mode: Until I finish up a big project that I am working on, I am keeping this blog at bare-minimum simple. I anticipate about one month.