It's a slow day here in the Hooterville of the Sonoran Desert, so I thought I'd lift everybody's spirits by posting this picture of Silas in his Pig Suit:

                                           

                                                   

This onesie has little pictures of pigs gardening - hoeing, planting, chasing away bunny rabbits. I have no idea why this outfit is so cute, but it is.

As you can tell, Silas is tickled to be modeling it for you.

This was the backyard of our little house on 6th St. in Athens, AL, seventeen years ago. That green stuff on the ground is called "grass" - it's a major weed back East. It just sprouts up everywhere, and people are kept busy driving or pushing small blade-rotating devices called "mowers" back and forth over it just to keep it at a manageable height.

These "mowers" are driven by small internal-combustion engines, usually built by Briggs and Stratton, whoever they are. They don't work well - in fact, they don't even work often (here's a testimony) but the head of the family is enslaved by his "mower" moreso than his car. If he doesn't want to drive his car, he doesn't have to - but his wife will force him out into the yard to operate his "mower" at any time that she suspects that he is resting, playing, or watching The Game.

(I've often wondered about this - the wife used to push me out the door and tell me to go mow often. In fact, it seems like every afternoon, from March till October, when I would get home from work, I'd no sooner sigh and start to look for my slippers when I was shoved outside. I'd be mowing the front yard in a cross-hatching pattern, and I'd look and see that all of the other husbands were in the same situation - ejected bodily into the yard until they had performed this (seemingly) daily function. I can't help but wonder - what were those women DOING in there, such that they couldn't have us in the house? Were they all putting on high heels and half-bras, and doing those poses that I used to see women doing when I looked in girly magazines as a kid? I mean, obviously (since I saw them in the magazines) women like to lay around the house like that, but I've never caught Ethel in any of those poses. So I'm forced to assume that that's what they are doing inside, while we poor guys are outside, pushing the mowers back and forth, back and forth, and restarting them every time we'd hit a patch of heavy grass, or wet grass, or a stick, or for all I know every time a cosmic ray would hit the carburetor.)

Having lived his whole (conscious, post-Pig-Suit) life west of New Mexico, Silas has no idea - when we lived in Anthem, he had to mow a patch of grass about 20 feet by 15 feet - and to hear him tell it, it was like the labors of Sisyphus, and he complained mightily about it. When I was his age, I had to mow a half-acre of swampland (this was called "the back yard") that was infested with mosquitoes; the blades of that crabgrass could cut your skin.

I've been thinking about putting some grass in the back yard, but Silas is about to turn 18, and he won't be around to mow it - wait. If Silas is still here in a year or so, then I'll probably put some grass into the back yard; this might provide the nudge that he needs to become self-supporting :)

Because, while he is a good kid and a real sweetie, he's nowhere near as cute as he used to be in his Pig Suit ; )