Summer slips toward September

A few odds and ends ...

We went to Madison yesterday to do some shopping. At three different places (a Barnes & Noble and two different Michael's arts and crafts supply locations) we practically shut down registers when coupons (Michael's) did not want to work. Managers came over, agreed that the coupon was good and then they had to enter every single item -- all gajillion numbers -- one by one. The 45% discount was great for quality acrylics that Tom uses, but it took forevvvvvver.

Then at B&N, I had a clerk on her first day, and she could not figure out how to deal with used books that had been marked down to one dollar. Now this was not her problem,  IMHO, because the computer-register doesn't do the work for her. Again, it was something that had to be done manually each time. Add to that a coupon for another item ... well, she was terribly embarrassed and apologetic, but I just told her to be happy it happened with a nice person like me who was in no hurry, who had fought with computers before and was not going to get agitated about it. I just hope she didn't take her lunch break and never come back!

 (That happened once at the law firm where I worked. They hired a woman to do the job that I later held, and when she left for lunch the first day, she just kept going without saying a word.) 

At any rate, Tom got his paints and a couple of canvases at a great price, I got some supplies for a wreath I am making [experimenting with making?] and we got the books.

And we got to eat Indian food! Tom also picked up a Madison guidebook with a great restaurant list, and I intend to check it out carefully. We need more ethnic variety in our diet.

Michaelangelo is due on Thursday for a long Labor Day weekend visit. Among other things, this will involve attending the annual Wisconsin Cow Chip Throw and Festival, a kind of tradition for us. There was some discouraging news about this year's toss in the paper this past week:

The news has been lousy with stories of the hot, arid summer of 2012 devastating lawns, water budgets and food production, but no one has reported the drought’s impact on one crop of particular importance to Sauk Prairie — cow chips, also known as cow pies, dung or poo.
“Due to the weather, the cows weren’t producing,” said Ellen Paulson, chairperson for the Wisconsin State Cow Chip Throw committee. “When it’s hot, according to what I’m told, the cows don’t eat as much. And what was produced, they just dried up too quick.”
In a normal year, the cow chip throw’s volunteers get together in late July in a field on Highway O outside Sauk City. There they collect the chips for the annual throw held every year for the last 38 years on the Saturday before Labor Day.
This year the cow chip committee canceled the chips harvest.
“We canceled it because there were no chips to be had,” said Marietta Reuter, who’s helped organize the cow chip festival for more than two decades. “To send 18 people to find 12 chips would’ve been a big waste of time.”
Reuter added, “This has been the biggest struggle in the 22 years I’ve been doing this.”
The cow chip throw committee is rather discerning when it comes to its dung selection. As area farmers changed their cattle from grass-to-grain diets, the committee would find a new field with grazing beef cattle for their annual harvest.
“They eat a high-fiber diet of grass out in the pasture,” Reuter said. “We need that grass in there to give it the fiber, to give it a thicker chip.”
When the drought hit, the field’s grass yellowed and withered, and the cow’s diets were supplemented, said Slotty. Due to the heat, the cows stuck to the shade, ensuring whatever chips were produced were concentrated in one spot and trampled.
The extreme heat got whatever was leftover. “The chip’s life cycle progressed very quickly in a 100-degree heat,” Reuter said.
The committee is confident it has enough chips for this year’s throw, scheduled for Aug. 31 for the corporate event and Sept. 1 for the public.
“We generally pick more every year than what we need,” Paulson said. “There’s always a stash from the year before just in case something like this happens.”

The joke here is that the motto of the event is Chips Happen. Apparently not in a drought!

On the book sales front, Tom continues to kid me about becoming rich. That won't happen. I'm not sure my book sales would even let me become poverty-stricken. Is there something lower than that? At any rate,  I am happy to report that again this month enough books have sold to cover the shortfall for my health insurance. And someone bought a copy of the mystery in the Nook format! That makes a grand total of two e-books! (See what I mean about being below poverty-stricken?)

Which reminds me for some reason of a friend from Chicago, a remarkable Native American artist who had been an actor in his youth. Robin died a year or so back and is sorely missed. He had quite a way with words. One of his expressions was about "feeling lower than whale ____" Which I guess is about as low as a thing can be.