Derailed

There I was, cleaning stalls and thinking about normal things, and my train of thought suddenly jumped the rails and there was my mother and snails.  My mother had a pathological hatred of snails.  Many's the time she'd get me out of bed and into the yard at sunup to go snail hunting.  She said we had to be out there while the dew was still on the ground.  Were it up to her, snails would have been eradicated, or at least on the endangered species list.  I can almost see her dancing a tarantella on the lawn in the early morning as she stamped on the gastropod molluscs.  It was embarrassing; she didn't confine her hunt to our yard alone.  Just as she would pull weeds wherever we were, she killed snails when we were visiting, too.  While I would stomp alongside her, doing my part, I was a terrible disappointment to Mother.  I was more interested in a snail's method of locomotion and could watch them for hours.  As a kid, I thought snails were a form of slug that had found a little house to carry for shelter like a hermit crab.  Wrong.

I guess the point of this is that, of all the places I've lived, up here is the only place that has no snails.  Gophers, voles, ground and tree squirrels, deer, all determined to eat whatever I try to grow, but no snails.  In all these years, I've seen three banana slugs and not one snail.  Note to self:  get thinking back on track.

I'm sure anyone who paid the outrageous price for a ticket is crowing about the "great" Super Bowl 50 yesterday.  After so much hype, I felt it was a pretty lackluster game, and few outstanding commercials, to boot.  But that's just my opinion.

The sausage and peppers turned out even better than hoped for, so it was a good day, regardless.