Weight-lifting slippers, Big Two-Hearted River and random pictures

 

Shamelessly stolen borrowed from Midwest Chick.

I recently learned that elite weight-lifters like TB wear special weight-lifter slippers while working out.

Say no more. I was on it like a duck-on-a-Junebug or like flies-on-'tater-salad. 

I was undoubtedly the envy of every other weight-lifter at the gym.

It was a LOT faster to get changed into my gym-togs. I slipped out of my sandals and slid my feet into these fox-fur (faux-fur) lined bad-boys. Camo shorts and a torn tee-shirt completed my redneck-chic ensemble...which coincidentally is the same redneck chic I sport outside of the gym.

I may have a future as a fashion "influencer". 

Sadly, I was unable to find the Tahini at the local grocery store so I had to make do without it.

Count me as a skeptic regarding most "ethnic" cooking. Folks made-do with what was in-season and what was abundant. It was an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of flavors that changed week-by-week...sometimes day-by-day.

I have to confess that I really like the way even a few plants of dill make the garden smell. 

A fun video

It amazes some people that places like this still exist in the United States east of the Mississippi River. The Big Two-Hearted River was the title of an Ernest Hemingway short-story. It is a real river in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. It is not big.

This is reader CoyoteKen's stomping grounds. 

Bonus images

Chinese Cabbage seedlings cv. "Citrus". Surprisingly, unmolested by the ducks.

A cucumber in a wheelbarrow. I ran out of hands and parked the cuke in the wheelbarrow. Then, I realized it was photogenic, returned and snapped the photo. 

The tomatoes on the right side of the frame were sold to me as Rose de Bern. RdB is an 80 day tomato that is very large, round an pink. I was deceived! That cannot be RdB.

On the other hand, the seeds I saved from a winter squash I purchased last fall is over-performing.

Speaking of over-performing...

It is an article of faith in the prepper community that "you never want to become a refugee".

The backstory is that this man, a software engineer from San Francisco, Ca, convinced himself that he was in mortal danger in "Trump's America". Because emigrating in the ordinary fashion requires paperwork and takes many months to execute, he opted to emigrate to the Netherlands (a bastion of Progressive ideals) as a political refugee because it was expedient.

He was distressed to find himself interred with hundreds of other undocumented refugees who had also chosen the most expeditious path. Many of his fellow refugees were from Islamic countries where the norm is to stone LGBT+ people, throw them off of buildings or to glue random body orifices shut with super-glue.

The fine Progressive of the Netherlands understand this and he is safe as long as he stays within his room but he cannot safely venture outside of the building to buy groceries or travel to the US embassy. 

In retrospect, he determined that he was poorly calibrated when he decided that he was oppressed when he lived in San Francisco, California (a notoriously conservative metro region) making +$150k per year and he wants to come back to the United States.