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I have to tell you, when you live in LA there are few things that startle you. In ten years there, I saw a coyote on the streets twice. But that’s no big deal – you always hear about missing cats and how we, the people, had encroached on the coyotes’ space so, of course, they were getting their revenge any way they could.

Weirder still, I was at the Coffee Bean one day and upon walking out to my car I saw a chicken. Just a random chicken out clucking in a nice neighborhood. Maybe the chicken truck driver had stopped at the strip mall for a Baja Burrito? Or maybe those sweet folks in the yellow house weren’t able to afford market food given what they were paying for their mortgage? Maybe the eight foot tall fence concealed a working farm. Who knows? After I stood there, mouth open for about five minutes, the chicken just wandered off and I never saw another.

There was also a red macaw one day, flying in my neighborhood. And later the news reported a tiger walking the streets of Burbank. That one’s bad. Someone owned an illegal tiger and it got away. Well, you can’t just come out and say, ‘oops! Did Fluffy get out?’ ‘cause they are going to haul you to jail for that one. You and Fluffy are never getting back together after he has been out terrorizing the kiddies.

Yes, there’s all kinds of wildlife in LA and a lot of it ends up at the Humane Society. (No, it’s not the ‘pound’, and it’s not even an ‘animal shelter’ – the good folks balk at those terms!) I have two dogs from the LA system and my sister has had three.

As our mother is deathly allergic to fur, at the first moment of adulthood I went out and got myself a fuzzy pet. When my sister finally liberated herself, she moved in with my family in LA and we said she, too, could get a puppy. What the hey! We had hard wood floors! Bring it on.

Being a black belt, she picked the tiniest, cutest shepard mix and named her “Kiai.” It’s a karate term – the loud yell you use to startle your opponent. I am a firm believer that God loves irony, and true to form Kiai never developed a bark. Most dogs do, somewhere in that first year they lose the puppy yipping and a loud bark emerges from their own throat. Usually it’s the dog himself who is the first one scared by it, and it’s fun to watch.

With my two big dogs in the house, Kiai was quickly relegated to Omega Dog – last in line, last to eat, the lowest ranked creature in the house (even the toddler had been taught how to stare down the dogs.) And Kiai’s personality lent itself to the Omega Dog stature. She rolled over for everyone. Even the wimpy mail lady who was afraid of Chihuahuas was not perturbed by Kiai. We would go outside and tell her, “Bark! That’s the mail lady. You’re supposed to do something here!” But nothing.

The dog was afraid of all men. Not just submissive, but run-and-hide-in-the-closet afraid. I laughed that my sister had gotten the dog for protection, but – given that dog and her own black belt – the dog probably felt safer out walking with her at night.

Though Kiai grew up, she never expanded sideways. When she turned head on, she practically disappeared and we were afraid the neighbors would turn us in for not feeding our dog. If you’re a vet, you may be putting two and two together by now, but we sure didn’t.

Sadly, Kiai died at age two of some congenital heart problem. My sister was out of town and I was helping the dog sitter when this happened. Maybe it’s a good thing my sister wasn’t there when the vet first said, “Well, these heart conditions happen a lot in those coyote mixes.”

Yup, how did we not see that? All the pieces were there. But even her regular vet never said anything. Either he didn’t know or just didn’t think we were stupid enough to not know. But it was all there, in the way Kiai walked (loped actually), the fact that she never barked but could howl with the best of them. And – wow – we had a half-coyote under our roof for two years.

This could happen anywhere. Out here in the Tennessee country I bet we have just as many dogs crossed with coyotes. And there’s more than just coyotes out there too! While I doubt there’s any real risk of mistakenly adopting any half-parrots or chicken crosses or anything like that, I think the shelter should warn you about that big orange and black striped house cat you were about to take home.

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For some reason, people have forgotten what a qualifier does. And because of this these words have been tossed about like seals in a shark pool.

In case you were unaware, a qualifier lessens a meaning. For example: Sylvia can be a redhead or (qualified) sortof a redhead. In the second instance we know that Sylvia’s hair might be disputed as ‘red’.

I’d also like to point out that Word gives that nasty red underline to ‘kindof’ and ‘sortof’ as these aren’t real words. And I know that some of you may be cringing at the very use of them. But I’m okay with new words. I like words, legit or not. I am a firm believer that if you don’t know of a word for the situation, you should use existing words to cobble a new one together. But you don’t abuse the grammar. The rules are what allow us to know what’s going on. A smart man is quite different from a smarting one.

My little brother once said that bad milk had a foresmell. You know this, that very faint odor that tells you something is wrong with the milk (even though you often ignore it and take that first, sputtering sip anyway.) There’s no word for ‘an indicative odor that prefaces a fermented food’. ‘Foresmell’ follows the rules using a common word and a known prefix. I think we should adopt it and kudos to my brother for making it up.

So while we can accept ‘kindof’ and ‘sortof’ into the lexicon, the real issue is all the over-qualification folks are doing today. I had to break my friend Alex of a perennial favorite: kinda sorta. This one shames me as an English speaker for so many reasons. ‘Kind of’ and ‘Sort of’ are slang to begin with, though enough folks use them to give them meaning. But while I can clearly abide writing each of them as one word, dropping that last letter is cheap and lazy. (And that goes for any last-letter dropping. “Darlin’” is one of the worst! If you are fond enough of someone to use this term, don’t they deserve the ‘g’???)

Stacking two qualifiers is ridiculous. He kinda sorta doesn’t like ice cream. Really? By the time you get to the end of that one, I’m gone. I’ve never met anyone who needed even a single qualifier to tell about their preference for ice cream. You either like it or you don’t. But two such words? Is that like a double negative? I declare it so. The next time someone tells you they kinda sorta don’t like something, give them an extra serving!

In the South, we have “might could”. Yup, you might could make it to the semifinals of the Qualifier Crackdown with this one. Ack! I know a bunch of you out there right now should put your fingers to your foreheads, where you might could feel the knot you get just above your nose when you are sortof making that face.

In the end, we need qualifiers. In many cases, something doesn’t quite make the grade and we need way to say so. We also need a way to be nice. “I kindof don’t like it” is the acceptable alternative to “Wow, that’s fugly!” And the person we said it to can walk away with hurt feelings, but maybe without being openly insulted.

Unfortunately, qualifiers have spread like a virus, needlessly getting sloughed off on person after person until their use is rampant. We have to wash our hands of this plague so that future generations don’t think it’s fine to needlessly qualify things.

If we undertake this eradication now, we might possibly defeat it sooner than we may think. Yes, I bet you we probably could!

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There’s a serious crime out there. And it goes unpunished every day. In fact, to many people it’s invisible, but for those who see it, it makes us cringe and wish we could put a stop to the horror. I’m talking about Adjective Abuse.

I’m not talking about the kind of misdemeanor that results from the slightly off adjective. Though that’s often a bad thing, we can all live through “the grisly trees” or “a Curacao sky”. In fact, from the right author we just might call it poetic.

Adjective Abuse occurs when the word either changes the meaning to something you know wasn’t the intent or obscures the idea to the point of bad advertising.

Here’s the most recent one I encountered . . . Perhaps you have seen one of the wand-waving, rune-gathering games that are popping up throughout the nation these days. The one we played this week involved “The Ancient Book of Wisdom”. Um, right. The pages were printed on paper commonly referred to in business as ‘slicks’. It was folded in the middle and stapled. And a fresh clean copy was handed to each participant. There was nothing ancient about this book. (In fact, even the term ‘book’ is a misnomer, it was really nothing more than a pamphlet.) I’m pretty sure they intended this thing to be “The Book of Ancient Wisdom.” Though, since the company is quite new, I doubt there’s anything ancient about it, wisdom included. Though I guess they don’t really care about accuracy if you consider the way they are making money hand over fist – some of it mine!

It’s not just the odd place where this pops up. I know English teachers everywhere feel they are fighting an uphill battle, and the truth is: they are. Poor word choice is everywhere. Why would anyone want to do things right when wrong is so acceptable? I could fill a book rather than just an entry here, but I’ll refrain and keep it limited.

Another good one was at a convention where I was sitting in a booth selling my books. Some of the good folks coming by were quite excellent, while others asked questions along the line of: “So what you are saying is that the markings on the pages are ‘words’ and they tell a ‘story’?” Thus, it was no surprise that the glossy brochure had advertised a “fun, family-filled weekend”. I guess they were right. There were families there. But it seems they really meant a ‘fun-filled, family weekend’ or a ‘family-fun filled weekend’. In the end I am still hard pressed to figure out how to stuff a weekend with people instead of activities . . .

Most of my personal favorites come on food. These companies may not be using poor phrasing so much out of bad form, but in an effort to obscure ingredients. The FDA is really strict about names, Kraft cannot change their mac’n’cheese to “Cheese and macaroni” because there isn’t enough cheese in the product to carry that name first. While this practice has led to a handful of alternate spellings (we said there was cheeeez in it, not actual cheese!) my favorite word is ‘chocolatey’. The addition of the ‘y’ makes it an adjective and excuses the company from inserting any actual chocolate into the product. (I’m not sure how many folks must agree that a food tastes ‘chocolatey’ in order to get this moniker . . . . but maybe we don’t care if there’s actual chocolate as long as the combination of chemicals we are eating tastes a lot like cocoa. )

Still, Charleston Chew candy bars take this one step further.
“Chewy flavored nougat with a chocolatey coating”

Mmmmm, fun-filled tastiness.

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I’m not sure what it is about a good game that makes people go nucking futs. But there’s a clear and undeniable mental shift that occurs when sitting in the stands. And, honestly, none of it reflects well on us.

Within the past five days I have attended an NHL game, a college soccer game, and a JV high school football game. I am seriously played out. But doing so many games in such a short period has left some lasting impressions. Though everything one does at a game seems to be a mental regression, maybe there’s a good point to it. You know, even besides backing a winning team.

Where else can you stand up and yell “That’s it!” at the top of your lungs and not be looked at like you had a very sudden bout of Mad Cow Disease? Try yelling anything in the boardroom, or giving a good “Hell, yeah!” after a particularly interesting bit of info from your college professor.

Because of this, there’s a social ‘pass’, so to speak, at a game. Others won’t call you on behavior that would usually get you kicked out of your circle – say a good hard slap on the back because something great occurred, chest-butting a stranger, or ogling a series of girls in short skirts.

We make decisions we would think foul in other scenarios: Like eating pasty hotdogs with off-brand catsup or drinking hot chocolate made with boiling water and an oddly sweet brown food coloring. On top of that we say things like ‘huh, that’s not bad’ when we are charged $4.50 for the pasty hot dog. And we say ‘thank you’ when we don’t see any change from our twenty and all we got was three twelve ounce cups with four ounces of beer sloshed out of them by the time they get to our hands.

We do have to remember, though, that there’s a different level of what you can get away with at each type of game. At the JV game there’s a social element. You probably wouldn’t go unless you know someone who’s playing. But this actually diminishes the game quality. You can’t be completely nuts because you have to face these people the next day. And though you may have a social ‘pass’ with the people you attend the game with, it doesn’t exist with those you didn’t arrive with. So the JV game means no free reign stupidity like at a good pro game, the kind stocked with hundreds of other people who will never see you again.

There you basically have a ‘get out of jail free’ card for completely stupid behavior. You’ll likely never have to face a coworker who knows that you painted something on your gut then lifted your shirt like a drunk girl at Mardi Gras just to get your face (um, gut) on the jumbotron. And if you do, well then his gut was painted with the other half of the team logo you were sporting. Just make sure your gut isn’t the one bearing the butt end.

It isn’t just behavior that falls to the side when we’re at a game. There’s a huge market of paraphernalia –sit-on cushions and too-big fleece hoodies and logo blankets. Normally, if we bundled up this way and proudly displayed our butt pads we’d be ridiculed: called ‘granny’ or asked if we had hemorrhoids.

There are also logo tees and big foam hands, wigs and crazy head gear. Seriously, where else would otherwise respectable men and women be able to wear huge polyurethane cheese on their heads?

To think that all this started as a survival technique. People played games to stay in shape for when the raiders came. But those days are gone. The raiders aren’t a threat anymore. It’s really the Raiders fans that are scary. (I hear the police squads run drills – play games? – to practice for when these guys invade.)

Its clear that self-defense is no longer the point, but it seems even the game is no longer the point. It’s all about the fans – the crazy people who have a chance once a week for a whole season to yell like there’s a Heisman for it. For otherwise sane folks to holler at the coach (often on TV) as though this man might at anytime turn around and say, “Wow, that’s an amazing play, Bob, I think we’ll try that.” (I have to point out here that half the idea of a play is that it’s a surprise to the other team. And therefore anything you yell out is useless just by the sheer fact that you yelled it. But what the hell! It was worth a try.)

In the end, we all suffer varying degrees of stupidity at games. And really, who should complain? I like the bucketheads – a group of five dancing kids with painted KFC buckets upside down on their heads (that part shouldn’t have surprised you). These guys have been regulars at one team’s games for so long that they’ve had to phase out the kids when they get too big. It’s like a really creepy, cracked out boy-band kind of thing.

Recently my kids asked if they could join the bucketheads. And, well, it was a game. So I didn’t holler at the top of my lungs “What the hell are you smoking?” Instead I seriously said I’d consider it, then I asked them to pass the nachos.

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(Enjoy Part 1 from the archives!)

Today I learned something new: I learned that my state is dumb. Sorry, Tennessee, the rankings don’t put us very high up . . . in fact we hit the bottom ten. At least we weren’t dead last. That would be Louisiana and that probably wouldn’t be a surprise.

The creators of this study, Martek, show the top ten states as having a high likelihood of being near the oceans and cite fish consumption as a possible reason for higher brain health. Excuse me? Then how did Louisiana come in dead last? There’s a humongous quantity of fish being consumed there. Now, I believe almost all of that fish is fried, but California is getting a lot of its fish in Wahoo’s fish tacos, and that’s not going to rank too high on the old Omega-3 list either.

The low ten is heavily weighted into the south. Tennessee didn’t make the bottom on their own. Aside from a Dakota, there’s: a Carolina, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Loo-si-ana and yours truly, Tennessee. Raise your hand if you are surprised.

What gets me is that the researchers speculated about the aforementioned fish consumption, amount of sleep, fruit and veggie sales, breast feeding and use of ‘poor mental health’ days. Where is the examination of the fact that if you pull the education system rankings you find the same states languishing on the bottom? I really think that if you are going to rank things on smartness, you need to be smarter than that. Maybe our states are stupid because we don’t teach smarts in our schools the way those hoity-toity coastal states do.

One interesting tidbit caught my eye – that Louisiana ranked low in the use of ‘poor mental health days’. Really? Maybe this just means that Louisianans just don’t use their poor mental health days. Can I pipe up and guess that the highest uses of such days occurred in the west coast states, where consumption of tofu, bean sprouts and BS is incredibly high?

I’m also speculating that there are a lot of factors in the low ‘poor mental health days’ in Louisiana. Because I’ve been to Louisiana and they don’t seem all that mentally healthier than anywhere else. Maybe they don’t know these things exist and therefore don’t claim them. Maybe they need their jobs and don’t do stupid things like take ‘mental health days’. Maybe they realize that by calling their boss and suggesting this they’ll get laughed out of town. It seems to be only on the west coast where we say, ‘Oh yes, take a mental health day! I’ll hold down the crowd at the Oxygen Bar without you! Come back refreshed!”

In an effort to clear some of this up, I pulled old rankings, too. It seems in 2006-2007 Tennessee was at a respectable #30. I understand it isn’t great, but it’s spitting distance to the average. Unfortunately, it seems to mean that we aren’t just dumb, we are getting dumber.

Damn, I’m feeling my neurons shrivel as I sit here. Do I move back to California? Where my kids won’t get a better education (Cali ranks low forties on public schools!) Or do I sit here in my stupidity, getting dumber as the days go by, but enjoying my clean air sunset, grateful that I can buy cereal for less than five dollars a box, and conversing with my neighbors who seem to be smart enough not to call in ‘poor mental health days’ at work?

Oh, wait, I think I just answered my own question!

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At this point, none of us should be surprised that a Caesar salad has a thousand calories. We should also be well aware that the bulk of those calories is in the dressing. Even if you didn’t see the movie “Supersize Me” you felt its ramifications and learned a little. We all know that the chicken fingers will stiffen your arteries until they resemble corroded lead pipes and we all know that as bad as that is, it’s really the sauce that will kill you.

That having been said, we all know it’s the sauce that makes the food. Even KFC is hawking grilled chicken these days and even they are recommending that you drown your heart-conscious fare with a side of high-fructose-based sauce – just choose your flavor.

I – for one – am in favor of sauce. Like every other human, I want dressing on my salad. And I know that there’s not much we can do about it. Liking dressings and dips is/was an evolutionary advantage. (This is where I have to say that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution wins my vote. I can’t get behind a God that would build us to crave something so bad for us. I can’t get behind the other option there either: That God built us in his image. Because this makes God a mildly obese man, chowing on burgers slathered with mayo.)

Really, liking these bad things was an evolutionary advantage. It’s only within the last hundred years (a mere evolutionary blip) that food has become widely available to a large portion of the population, rather than something we spent most of our existence trying to procure. Before that, people who craved salt, sugar and fat were the only ones who got enough of these scarce resources to survive. Now, we are left with the appendix-like need to eat these things, even though they aren’t rare anymore. Meat no longer has to be hunted: it waits for us, wrapped in plastic and begging for sauce.

While dieters everywhere debate the ‘sauce or no sauce’ issue, I say we go right to the heart of things (no pun intended) and debate the real point: Which sauce?

There’s your standard sweet’n’sour that every restaurant has a version of. Then there’s a slew of mustards. And you would think mustard would be a good choice – no fat, right? While it’s a better choice, it’s still full of corn syrup and emulsifiers (yum!). But again, that’s not really the issue. The issue is: yellow mustard? Hot mustard? Or Honey mustard?

The grocery store condiments aisle has quadrupled in size in recent years. While we aren’t gorging on McDonalds and thinking it’s okay like we used to, we seem to have simply moved the gluttony home. We are no longer limited to ranch, vinaigrette and French. Nope, now there’s Garlic Ranch, Barbecue Ranch, and my favorite Bacon Ranch. Because what really was missing from dressings? You guessed it! More fat!

There are more specialty sauces, too, when you do eat out. A friendly server at a Red Robin noticed that our table had a slew of little sauce pots and thought she’d just bring us another. For half an hour she tormented us, making us guess what was in the special sauce. We didn’t figure it out, but she took pity on us: it’s barbecue and mayonnaise. And it’s gooood.

Mayo is truly the best and the worst of the lot. It had to be the French who thought it would be a good idea to whip together cholesterol with cholesterol. And boy were they right! Mayo is the base for many great things, and sauce connoisseurs layer it with everything. But have you tried mixing it?

My friend Alex swears he did this at a New Orleans restaurant and caught the attention of the Chef, none other than Emeril! He mixed teriyaki and mayo. If you haven’t tried it, you should. It’s got salt, sugar, fat and fat, everything an evolving homo sapien craves. For a while we called it ‘Teriyakaise’ until a more enterprising friend suggested ‘Mayonnasian’.

Though mayo is the perfect base for everything – I like it with honey mustard, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find a sauce that isn’t just that-much-better when mixed with the blessed mayo – others are taking mayo into whole new worlds. Our thinking had been small with ‘honey mustard mayo’ and ‘Mayonnasian’, recently someone mixed the ultimate combo – mayo with bacon.

Yes, in grocery stores across America, on the shelf next to your standard mayo and its red-headed step-brother, Miracle Whip, you can buy ‘Baconnaise’. Even better, you can get ‘Baconnaise Light’ because you still want to be alive to see what you can dunk your fried chicken into next year!

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It’s fall. And fall means football. For a lot of upset people it’s a good time to start up the old ‘that’s not right’ argument. But what is it that isn’t right??

First the complaint: many teams (elementary schools all the way up to the NFL) have Native Americans as their mascots. Many feel that this is a huge insult to the Native American population – that it’s racist or painting the Native Americans as animals (the standard for mascots).

This is a coin with so many sides that it really comes in as a dodecahedron.

We have to start with the term ‘Native American’. It’s all wrong. It’s a group collective term for a group that isn’t a group. Let’s face it, had all the Native Americans (for lack of a better term) been a real group, the Americans never would have defeated them. Then take the fact that the people we are referring to aren’t ‘native’ ‘Americans’ – I’m a native American. I was born and raised here and so were my parents. The Cherokee and Lakota are native whatever-it-was-before-it-was-America-ans.

But all the misnomer-ing aside, the complaints aren’t valid either. Lot’s of the hue and cry is about the fact that it’s racist. But this may be a case where if you’re going to complain you have to take on the whole enchilada or just shut up.

So, if you think it’s really wrong to call a team after a race/ethnicity of people, you’ve got a lot more teams than just the Washington Redskins to go after. You have to take down the Minnesota Vikings and in College, Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish and Texas Tech’s Red Raiders just to name a few. If you want to go the whole ‘people’ is wrong as a mascot route, then half the NFL is has to change their names . . . Bye-bye Cowboys, Patriots, Texans, Saints, Titans, Giants and Buccaneers.

Now, we can divide this group further and say it’s okay to name the team after a profession. That’s a chosen thing, and therefore it’s fine. Ok, the Cowboys, Patriots, Buccaneers and Texans are probably fine (though many Texans would argue that being Texan isn’t something you choose, it chooses you. But that’s another really big can of worms.) The ‘Saints’ moniker is debatable whether it falls in this category or not – do you choose to be a Saint? I thought God chose that one for you . . . Does that count? But the Titans, Vikings and Giants all go on the chopping block with the Redskins.

There’s a lot of delicious irony baked throughout the yummy goodness here. No one is hollering ‘lawsuit’ over the Vikings. Why? Because they realize that the team mascot is supposed to represent something strong and good that wins. So it’s really the folks claiming that it’s demeaning to be a team mascot that have made it demeaning. Until then, it was a good thing.

There’s still the larger mystery of having a mascot in the first place. Why? Other than being able to dress one person who didn’t make the cheer squad in a fuzzy costume with a foam head, what’s the point? There doesn’t even seem to be a good correlation between the mascot and the wins. Seriously, the Ravens are doing well?

And why “Go Marmots!” rather than “Go Jefferson High!” ? Oh, wait! I know how this all started, it originates from the Native American idea of the totem animal, a spirit guardian that leads the protected on to victory. Well, that’s just kinda ironic, huh?

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(If you missed parts 1 & 2, they are in the archives!)

Going green is one of those things that can be small or big. Small works for most of us. We can recycle more, unplug more, conserve just a little more – and anything that we can add to what we are already doing is a big boon for the environment. If each of us did a little, we’d see huge results. But personally, I like going big.

In the spirit of going big – and in the spirit of eating tomatoes that taste like some thing other than wet sand – I decided to grow my own garden.

Why not? I have everything I need. I have children to help with the manual labor. I have a climate with a natural, almost year-round rainfall. And I have a Home Depot nearby with a seasonal vegetables seed rack – complete with pretty pictures of the foodstuffs that will soon be sprouting in Technicolor in my own little patch of culinary heaven. Easy as pumpkin pie!

It’s amazing what happens when you decide to grow your own food. While I don’t think we would have qualified as ‘certified organic’ (I didn’t know if our soil had been completely pesticide free for five years!) I wasn’t personally going to be adding any nitrates to the dirt nor spraying my precious veggies with petro-chemicals!

I found I wanted to pick up implements for yardwork and do the backbreaking (or at least back-hurting) kind of labor necessary to prep the soil. I not only turned all the soil with a hoe, but I got the kids excited about it, too!

Let me confess here, this wasn’t a large patch. We were too smart to get in over our heads on the first try. We were all willing to call it an experiment, and then go big the next year after we figured out what worked for us.

The kids also got excited about vegetables. They even convinced me they wanted to eat squash. And who knew, if they grew it themselves they just might eat it! They wanted string beans, too. It doesn’t get any better than that. And vegetable seeds are cheap! It only cost me fifteen dollars! Well . . . and a new hoe (make that 3 new hoes – two in a small size), four pairs of gardening gloves (don’t ask about the fourth pair), and six bags of soil.

We were all set. It was a sunny day and we had turned the whole garden patch. Rough, black dirt gleamed in the afternoon sun, and though I said we should wait for another day to plant, the kids told me it was stupid to wait. The voice inside me told me it was stupid, too. If the kids want to keep working, then who was I to be a lazy butt?

So we planted neat rows: a little of everything, just to see what took root and what would grow in our area. We planted corn, broccoli and cauliflower, two kinds of lettuce, pumpkins, watermelon and the aforementioned squash. We put in stakes for the tomatoes and string beans, then added markers for each kind of veggie. The kids polished it off by hand-lettering the stakes so we would know what was coming up where.

It was brilliant. Rows radiated out from the center of the patch. And we waited.

The corn came in first. The beans sprouted next. Then the broccoli and the two kinds of lettuce. The tomatoes – the veggie of my inspiration – lagged. The broccoli looked suspiciously like the lettuces. The beans didn’t get more than four inches tall, no where near enough to start wrapping them around the climbing poles.

Two things started to come in where the cauliflower should be, and I suddenly remembered that I was going to need to weed this garden. But that was fine. I could do it. That is, until I stood there in front of my little patch of organic goodness and realized that I had no earthly clue what to pull up.

I tried to be methodical about it. The two things that were coming up in the cauliflower patch had to be cauliflower and a weed. But which one was the weed? One of the things looked a lot like what was in the lettuce patch and the other looked like what was in the broccoli patch. Okay, I should pull the one that looks like lettuce, after all, both broccoli and cauliflower are crucifers, so they should look alike. Only they didn’t look anything like a crucifer, they looked like, um, lettuce? Maybe?

Had the kids switched the stakes? Had I? I thought back to planting day. No, many seeds were easy to distinguish. We had torn open each pack as we planted it, so we would have had to screw up the packets with the pretty pictures. Pretty hard to do. Had Home Depot scrambled their seeds? While I would love to pass the blame, it was a really unlikely scenario.

I decided to wait. Surely as the little buds matured they would look more like things I should eat, and then it would be easy to tell which was a weed, right? Sadly, no. As we waited, we watched our garden turn into a patch of a single kind of plant that bore no resemblance to anything edible.

It’s a good thing we didn’t get in over our heads with that one! Ha! We got not a single veggie from the whole thing. Not even a pumpkin or watermelon, which enterprising gardeners had repeatedly warned would take over my whole yard.

Sadly, the garden was a complete bust. The little plants made a nice patch of pink blooms three months later and to this day I have no clue what they are. The experiment, however, was a huge success. We did discover what works for us – apparently the produce section of our local grocery is the best place to pick veggies and we should stick to recycling our plastics!

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