Misanthropaea

Zombie Killer

I have no desire to sound completely insensitive to the tragedy involved here, so let’s just dispel that notion from the start. I may be thoughtless and insensitive, as some would happily suggest, but I do sometimes have my limitations. So when I read this headline a couple of weeks ago – a little nugget I’d found a link to through Facebook – I did so with great horror, not for the tragedy, but for the worst abuse of English I’ve seen in a while:

14-Year-Old Boy From Detroit Shoots His Mother Dead 10 Times As She Slept After She Tried To Keep Him Away From A Gang!

How does someone who writes at such an infantile level as this even have a job in any form of media? It ranks along side the

Indiana baby found in field after tornado dies

headline splashed in all its clumsy glory across the front page of a local paper after a recent spate of violent storms and high winds. And, again, not mocking the tragedy – only the abysmal misuse of language to describe it.

But let’s break down the initial headline, shall we…?

Apparently a 14-year-old boy from Detroit wanted to join a gang.  His mother wisely told him ‘no.’ Then, a hard day’s parenting finished, the mother decided to take a nap. As she rested, her son took out a gun (presumably found lying round the house), and shot and killed her. The mother came back to life, possibly with the intent of scolding the boy for either shooting her dead or for having disrupted her nap, whereupon he shot and killed her again. This scenario played out a further 8 times until the woman finally succumbed. Or she finally took a headshot which, as anyone knows, is the only true way to kill a zombie.

Perhaps a more appropriate headline ought to have been

Detroit woman identified as Patient Zero in zombie apocalypse.

Oblivionnihilious

When someone says they’re planning to drink so much that they will be ‘obliviated,’ do they actually mean to say ‘obliterated?’ Or do they perhaps mean to say they will become ‘oblivious,’ or ‘annihilated,’ or some combination of the two?

Or perhaps they’re just idiots.

Unorthodox Easter

I don’t know why I find this funny. I just do.

Fat Tax

As you both may recall, I’d finally reached a point a couple of years ago where I was determined to shed the excess weight I’d packed on over a period of time grappling with all the stress, anxiety, and depression resulting from matters of business, and my indelibly-linked personal life, spinning wildly out of my control.

Around the same time, I posted about my irritation with what I felt were some very misleading NutriSystem adverts being run which centred round Amy of Fayetteville, Georgia. For example…

Shortly after that post went up, I received quite a number of snippy comments and unpleasant emails from the wife of a doctor who was utterly outraged over what she perceived to be my complete lack of compassion for Amy and her deeply touching personal journey to lose 28 pounds. I subsequently deleted all the comments and emails after seeing it was an uphill battle of trying to talk logic and sense to someone who appeared to be belligerently, if not defiantly, choosing to disregard or even comprehend my point of view. That is not to say I expected this person to agree with me in any way, only that she try to understand my argument so that we could work from even just a smallish patch of common ground.

Unfortunately my intolerance for people who deliberately want to remain obtuse and unreasonable for no discernable reason other than ‘just because’ had reached its limit when I was told that I lacked credibility because the picture I posted was not actually of Amy.

And, to be fair, no. No, it wasn’t.

And it wasn’t for two reasons: one, I felt that my version, though quite clearly meant to be taken as humour, did, in fact, perfectly depict the sort of thing NutriSystem were trying  to market, i.e. magic fatlessness; and two, I was unable, at that time, to find an adequate image – or any image – of young Amy from Fayetteville, Georgia which better illustrated my point. Or illustrated any point at all.

That particular matter, as can be seen above, has now been rectified. I think it’s also fair to say that my illustration wasn’t too terribly far off the mark.

It’s unfortunate, however, that humour and sarcasm are simply lost on some people.

*Sigh*

Later, after I’d responded to this reader, pointing out that it was not my intention to seek or assert credibility in the matter, only to state an opinion, and, after assuring her that I felt the basic idea behind NutriSystem was, as a means to an end, perfectly legitimate and that, yes, I completely understood that some people really do need the support of such a plan – whether it’s Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig or whatever – to assist in attaining their weight loss goals, but that what I hated was their misleading advertising, her doctor husband then joined the fray and launched into me with the same myopic fervour: you have no credibility, you’re not a doctor, you don’t know anything, you suffocate puppies – you get the idea.

What I failed utterly to communicate to this couple, or what they simply chose not to recognise, was that, in my opinion, it seemed the image of Amy used by NutriSystem to depict the ‘before and after’ comparison was just ever-so-slightly deceptive.

In the ‘before’ image, Amy is clearly seated. However, the chair or sofa or whatever it was she was sitting on has been eliminated to accentuate her former girth all the more and, so, makes it seem – and read very that closely, MAKES… IT… SEEM – as though her weight loss was far more dramatic. That is not to diminish her achievement in any way. Rather it is to point out that, without a legitimate side-by-side comparison, the differences between ‘before’ and ‘after’ cannot accurately be judged. In fact, it would appear from the photograph that Amy lost considerably more than 30 pounds. And if so, good on her. Or maybe her 30 pounds were larger and puffier than the 30 pounds other people may be hoping to shed.

And it’s not to say losing nearly 30 pounds can’t make a difference in some people: it most certainly can. If they have a smaller build, indeed, such a loss can be dramatic. But… one simply does not immediately go from being Gardulla the Hutt to amazingly ripped, tanned, and well defined just by eating less food.

It doesn’t happen.

And if it does, it certainly doesn’t happen quickly and it most assuredly doesn’t happen without exercise.  Not unless you’ve spent time languishing in Dachau. Your arms don’t go from flabby ‘Lunch Lady’ arms to beautifully sculpted just by following the Glycemic Index Chart unless the food packaging is considerably heavier than most and therefor opening it constitutes an extreme upper-body work-out.

And though Nutrisystem don’t hide it, they certainly don’t go out of their way to clarify that these sorts of results are not typical for most of their users. They also don’t  provide a relative time frame in which this very astonishing transformation took place for our Amy. Or at least not in any of the advertising I’ve seen. Maybe it’s on a late-night infommercial. I don’t know. I don’t watch them.

So what I had objected to was the fact that people were being enticed by the illusion – read that carefully, the ILLUSION – that unwanted pounds will magically fly away just by eating NutriSystem food when, in fact, if you have a look at the fine print or simply analyse the claims, the weight loss breaks down to about  1 pound, maybe more, per week – which is actually normal for any diet claim. If you lose 20 pounds in 16 weeks or 200 pounds in 305 weeks, it still breaks down to about 1 pound, maybe more, per week.

Thankfully, in their more recent advertising spots featuring Dan Marino – an apparently well-known sport person of whom I’ve barely any knowledge beyond the confines of the adverts – NutriSystem have pulled back from their previously dramatic and misleading images.

Dan is shown to have returned to his so-called ‘playing weight’ (a figure which is left undefined) by losing nearly the same amount as our young Amy. Yet the transformation for him, whilst still a substantial loss – as you will not seen on the right – is nowhere near as visibly pronounced as Amy’s.

And why oh why must I bring all this up again? Well, it fills space, doesn’t it? Gives me something to whinge about, gives you something to look at other than the last post you’ve read just stuck there for days and days…

And because, despite periodic backsliding and occasional set-backs, most of which I have documented here at one time or another, I’ve managed to lose 62 pounds – or roughly half of my projected goal – over the past 20-odd months and, just like Dan, no-one can tell.

After analysing and radically altering my admittedly poor eating habits, adopting a primarily vegetarian lifestyle and cutting out as many processed foods as I possibly could, cutting my caloric intake down to far more sensible levels, growing my own veggies and herbs, biking, walking… the weight loss appears insignificant.

I haven’t gone from, as fellow blogger Rachel at Lessons Learned calls it, ‘Fatty McFatterson’ to being just a mere shadow of my former self in any sort of readily discernable way.

Do I notice a change? Of course I do. I can walk up stairs without wanting to fall over, breathless and red-faced; I can pick things up from the ground without straining and sweating; I can button shirts I could not previously button; my pants, once straining at the seams, now require a belt to stay up; I no longer have the symptoms of sleep apnoea; I can get up from a kneeling position without a system of pulleys and wires; but more people seem to notice when I’ve had my hair cut. And I still try to hide the waist size sticker on clothing from the store clerks (because that way they don’t know you’re fat).

So yes, I call shenanigans on some of the NutriSystem adverts, and on the tedious and annoying Fat Burning Furnace and it’s stupid ‘one weird old trick’ nonsense seemingly ubiquitous on the internet, and on Montel Williams and his saffron oil supplements and his green smoothies and his prohibitively expensive Living Well Pressure Cooker which accomplishes the same sort of thing a $20 slow cooker will, or supermegapoop colon purges, or acai berry miracles because they are all trying to sell people a magic antidote to adiposity.

And the real answer to the problem is simply eat less, eat healthfully, and exercise more. And, of course, don’t expect a radical or immediate change. There are very few things more demoralising and irritating than switching on the television and seeing trim, tanned, and toned models who have only seen stretch marks in photographs telling you how miraculous their weight loss has been by drinking some sort of cat sick-looking load of bile from a container they won’t recycle because it’s too much work or by taking pills to melt away the inches.

It doesn’t work that way. It works through hard work and perseverance.

Back in late December, at the height of the post-holiday sales events offered by many retailers, I decided to purchase a ‘home gym’ to help get past the plateau I’d been stuck on rather maddeningly for several months. I briefly toyed with the idea of just joining a gym, though I realised a friend of mine was correct when he told me, ‘Fat people don’t go to the gym.’

Skinny people go to the gym so they can stay skinny. Fat people buy gym memberships and then never use them, effectively paying a ‘fat tax’ to help keep the gym open because fat men don’t want to work out next to hot skinny women in purple spandex and look like a fat loser.

So I opted to take what amounted to a 4 or 5 month gym membership and buy a less costly version of one of those As-Seen-On-TV! contraptions hawked by out of work actors from the 80s. I had previously purchased an inexpensive treadmill so that I could go for walks or have a nice heart-attack inducing jog during the winter months, but it wasn’t going to do much for muscle tone.  Hence the TorturCiser300 found a home in my living room. 

I used it regularly throughout January and lost another 5 pounds – or about 1 pound, maybe more, per week – and could feel the difference. However, the unusually warm February got me motivated to paint the living room and start a few projects which, unfortunately, put me off my strict regimen. Now those things are nearly complete, I can go back to using it for more than an expensive coat rack.

I’ve got 60-ish more pounds to go and then I, too, can walk along the beach or past a pool in slow motion to the hard crunch of heavy metal guitars. Or not. Pink was never really my colour anyway…

Come And Get It!

A friend of mine discovered this and posted it to her Facebook wall in all appropriate shock and horror. Just how she discovered this, or what it was she’d been hoping to search for when it came up, so to speak, she did not say.  I found I was disturbed by the lack of a provided utensil in this image, initially, as it conjured up rather unpleasant ideas as to how one might be expected to consume this entrée once you’ve identified the primary ingredient. 

Interestingly, though, this is certainly a series of recipes I would like to see Sandra Lee try. It is, after all, semi-homemade…

Benefit Analysis

In continuing to seek a job which does not crush my will to live, I have applied quite a number of times to a local company whom I shall not name because they have simply annoyed me with their Wall of Silence but which might sound as though it could start with a ‘V’ sound and end with something similar to ‘era Bradley.’ After years of having struggled with alcoholism and being fired from every job he’d ever had, a long-time friend of mine got a position with this company the day after he walked out of rehab. And yet, with far more experience than he could ever hope to have, every application I have submitted has been resoundingly ignored and my telephone enquiries to their answerphone go unreturned.

Recently they posted a position for their e-commerce division which, amongst other basic duties, included proof-reading. I believe I am simply going to copy the image below (culled from a stop at Amazon.com the other day) and attach it to an email in lieu of a formal application…

Promotional Offer

If either of you are interested or have a bit of spare time and are so inclined, I have a reasonably short (by my standards) ‘guest post,’ found here, which the good people (or person, or Jillian) at Foodnetworkhumor.com recently published… 

Little Bastard

The eldest of my cats, Fuggles – yes, very good, he was indeed named after the brewing hop – as pictured on the right (no, the right) has just recently taken up the new and excruciatingly irritating habit, it seems, of only being able to use the litter pan when I am eating or otherwise giving any outward appearance of having  the merest desire to prepare and consume a food or beverage. Ordinarily this would not be something to concern myself with except that, due to the rather poorly thought-out present arrangement of my house, said litter pan is tucked away in the farthest possible corner of the kitchen near the back door.

This unctuous habit began to manifest itself sometime during the Holiday season and has now become a sadly entrenched part of our daily routine; I dutifully march down the stairs in the morning and into the kitchen where he and the three others (oh just leave it, please) anxiously await (read: demand) their breakfast. My highest priority, however, is to have coffee and so I set about grinding and measuring and fiddling with the carafe – only to be met with the abrupt eye-watering, choking stench of fresh poo shat out in what seems a protest of my insensitivity towards their lack of having been gifted with an opposable thumb and their inability to open cans for themselves.

If, on the other hand, I feed them first and make my coffee as they experience the fine moist exoticism of Mixed Grill, Fuggles will circle the room with vociferous mewling until I have begun to prepare myself a fresh cup and then immediately scamper to the litter pan with an almost audible sigh. Now, no matter where he is in the house, if I should enter the kitchen at any time for any number of things, he will appear as if by magic and begin to climb into the pan at the first indication that I might possibly put food or drink in the proximity of my mouth.

So I have taken up the habit of starting to, for example, make a sandwich and – just as he climbs into the pan – turn and quickly leave the room. If he does not trot instantly behind me with some confused and angered whinging – how dare you leave, you thoughtless bastard!? – I wait a few moments and then return to preparing my food. More often than not, he will run back to the litter though with nothing to show for his trouble. 

The most recent adaptation is for him to chassé into the adjoining living room and plant himself before me to stare, gargoyle-like, at me as if to indicate that it is time for him to go and could I please have the common courtesy of getting up and eating or drinking something in the kitchen before he explodes from holding back a bowel-full of pungent Mixed Grill.

Last week I made a veritable cauldron of chilli in the most enormous pot I could find. I’m thinking that after a giant portion of it, I will, next morning, serve His Majesty his delicious glistening heap of yummy Prime Entrée or Mixed Grill on a plate set out on the floor of the bathroom very near the toilet and see how he likes it… 

Family Pictures

Part of a photography assignment I had for Visual Comm was to illustrate various forms of lighting. Personally I felt that nothing illustrated Side Lighting better than the epic struggle between good and evil as represented by Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader…

Diddler on the Roof

Tuesday morning I awoke to the distinctive sound of aluminium ladders being rattled about and the piercing beep… beep… beep of some large vehicle backing up. I glanced at the clock and saw that it was 8 am.  Nice. I’d been in bed for six hours. Not asleep, mind you; just in bed. Monday had been, apart from 9 hours of irritation at work, my first day back to school and I’d been up late doing homework.

I staggered downstairs and made some coffee and watched out the window as a handful of workers scaled their wobbly ladders and started tearing off the roof of my neighbour’s house. I watched as they tossed rendered shingles and nails and tar paper into my side yard, on top of my day lilies and gladiolas and arbour vitae. I rolled my eyes in frustration because this was the second time in two years my neighbour has had a new roof put on his house – and by this very same company who had done such an absolutely shit job of it the last time.

As expected, I got a knock on my front door.

‘Uhm, yeah, we’re doing the roof next door.’

‘Mm-hm.’

‘And was wonderin if you could move your car so’s nothin gets on it and stuff.’

I took a breath. ‘Sure,’ I said.  ‘Maybe whoever belongs to that car—’ I pointed to the black SUV with the roofing company logo on it parked crookedly in front of my house ‘—could move so I can park there. Otherwise I’m not sure were else I’m supposed to park.’

And so they obliged me and moved their vehicle to the drive at the neighbour’s house, and I parked in the street.  Walking back to the house with my freshly-emptied rubbish bin in tow (because Tuesday morning is pick-up day), I glanced up at the roof and enquired of someone’s backside: ‘Just so we’re clear, we’re not going to have the same problem we had two years ago when your company did this roof are we? You’re not going to trash my yard and kill all of my plants, right?’

‘Uhm… no, sir.’

‘Mm-hm.’

Tuesday night when I came home from work, my headlamps flashed across the grass as I pulled into the drive and little Day-Glo green spots lit up. Roofing nails with their little green plastic collars on them.

‘Mm-hm,’ I muttered, picking up some of the nails and tossing them into the unkempt, disused planter box full of dead weeds in front of the neighbour’s house.  ‘Fuckheads.’

Wednesday morning I was off to work before the roofers began their day and so it wasn’t until nearly 5 pm that I again pulled into the drive – and came to a halt only just halfway. Lying in plain sight directly where my left front tyre would typically come to rest was yet another Day-Glo green roofing nail. I exited the car and picked up the nail and glanced about to see if anyone was still on the roof. Nothing. As I turned to go back to my still-running car, I noticed that my giant rubbish bin was covered with dust and bits of crushed limestone. The same sort of crushed limestone I have in the centre strip of my drive.

‘Mm-hm.’

I got back in the car and pulled the rest of the way into the drive and, exiting the vehicle once more, I marched over to the bin. Gravel lay scattered across the top, concentrated mostly on the right front corner, and across a metre-wide strip of the drive itself.  I glanced straight up at my own roof, some ten feet above me. Nothing. I turned and looked at the neighbour’s roof also some ten feet above me but also some twenty-five feet away. Also nothing. I glanced at the gravel again and then marched towards the front of the house and, because I was now staring angrily at how some of my plants were crushed to the ground, I tripped in the substantial divot that wasn’t there earlier that morning carved out of the centre of my drive not three feet from the bin. Grinding my teeth furiously I rounded the corner by the disused planter of weeds and discovered someone walking towards a truck parked in front of the neighbour’s house.

‘Are you one of the guys doing the roof on Bob’s house?’ I asked.

‘Uuuuhm.’ he looked around, apparently to be sure I was talking to him. ‘Yeah.’

‘Come here,’ I said.  He did and I marched him over to the divot. ‘Can you tell me what that is?’

‘Uuuuhm… no sir.’

‘Mm-hm. Well, that’s a divot,’ I explained, pointing. ‘A divot that wasn’t there this morning when I left for work. A divot that appears to be related to the shit load of gravel all over my rubbish bin.’ I swept my hand in that direction like I was showing a grand prize to a game show contestant. ‘Any ideas about either one of these?’

‘Uuuuhm… no sir.’

‘You guys didn’t happen to pull your big-ass truck in my drive again to collect the tear-off from the roof, did you?’

‘Uuuuhm… no sir. We always get permission first.’

‘Mm-hm. Then how do you explain this? Or all the nails everywhere?’

He brushed timidly at the gravel on top of the bin. ‘I don’t got no idea,’ he explained. ‘Looks like somethin fell on it.’

‘From where?’

‘Uuuuhmm…’ he squinted into the afternoon sun.

‘Certainly not from my roof. And Bob’s roof is twenty-five feet away. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that all this gravel came from that hole. The question is “Why?” ’

The man shrugged. ‘I don’t know what to tell you, sir. You can talk to our foreman but he ain’t here.’

‘Oh I plan to,’ I said.

I left it at that. As the man walked away I kicked at the divot in my drive and turned to walk to my back door – and noticed for the first time the dozens of crushed cigarette ends scattered in my side yard and all through my day lilies and gladiolas and arbour vitae.

‘Mm-hm…’

Thursday morning I woke to the industrious clamour of the roofers and stumbled downstairs for a cup of coffee. I watched out the kitchen window (as it faces the dull white panorama of the side of Bob’s house) as the workers climbed their ladders and began prepping for another day of destruction. I finished my coffee, donned my sunglasses because the rising sun burns straight down my drive this time of year, and strolled out into the morning to have a nice little chat. 

‘You got a minute?’ I called up to the first person I saw.

‘What?’ I took this response to mean Yes, please feel free to speak to me as I am enthusiastically all ears as opposed to I am sorry, I did not understand the complex nature of your enquiry.

‘Is there someone who can explain to me why there are crushed-out cigarettes all over my yard; why there are dozens of nails – not including the ones I’ve already picked up – everywhere and just how on Earth, or better still, why on Earth there’s this big gouge in the middle of my drive and gravel all over the top of a rubbish bin, a bin whose top, you might notice, is almost four feet off the ground? Can someone tell me why, after I asked you guys the other day to not have a repeat performance of two years ago, I come home to find my plants crushed and my yard trashed like I asked you not to do?’

‘Uuuhhmm…’ he peered down from the roof. ‘I can’t really say…’

‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘Yeah I guess.’

‘Do you think some random person just came along with a shovel and thought it would be interesting to dig out a bunch of gravel from my drive and toss it on top of the bin just to see what I would do? Do you think my cat – who is less than a foot tall – clawed out some gravel and threw it four feet into the air?  You guys have been the only people here. This obviously didn’t just happen any more than all these cigarettes and nails just happened. And obviously my plants didn’t just happen to fall over on their own.’

‘What am I supposed to say?’

I paused. ‘Really?’ I asked incredulously. ‘How about not treating me like I’m some sort of idiot whose just making things up. You can see this stuff just as easily as I can. What the hell where you guys doing in my yard yesterday? Did you back your truck up my driveway without permission again or where you just bored and decide to trash things out of spite?’

‘I don’t know what you want me to say cause everything you’re telling me is just goin in one ear and right out the other.’

I paused. I stared. I asked, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? That’s your answer?’

‘I can let you talk to my foreman.’

‘Okay, fine.’

Round the back of Bob’s house,  The Foreman was crouched down having a cigarette and filling a bucket from a garden hose. ‘Hey, Paul,’ the guy on the roof called down. ‘This guy wants to talk to you.’

‘Bout what?’ Paul didn’t bother to look up.

‘I dunno. He’s bitchin about some kinda plant or somethin.’

‘What about it?’

‘I dunno. He says he wants to talk to you’

‘For what?’ He glanced up at the guy on the roof.

‘I dunno.’

I watched this exchange in wide-eyed disbelief. I was ten feet away from Paul The Foreman and he wasn’t even acknowledging me.

‘You realise that I’m standing right here, right?’ I asked, growing more furious by the second. ‘It’s not like I’m invisible or anything.’

Paul looked up at me, cigarette smoke getting in his left eye, and he squinted. ‘What?’ he asked.

I took this to mean I am sorry, I did not understand the complex nature of your enquiry. Behind my sunglasses, my eyes narrowed and I snapped. ‘Are you fucking kidding me? This is how you guys deal with shit – by acting like a bunch of fucking assholes? Fuck you! I’m calling your company!’

Enraged, I marched into the house and dialled the number for the roofing company. I had laid it out – just it case – as I blearily drank my coffee earlier. No sooner had someone picked up on the other end when I saw the guy from the roof – not Paul The Foreman – approaching my back door, hand raised as though he were about to knock on the door. I told the person on the line to ‘Hold on just a quick second, would you please? I’m so sorry’ and exploded ‘GET THE FUCK OFF OF MY PROPERTY!’ at the roofer and slammed the back door in his face. ‘Sorry about that,’ I returned to the phone. ‘Let’s see. Where was I? Oh yes. I want to talk to a supervisor or preferably your owner about a complaint I have with one of your crews and their foreman.’

Within seconds I was dispatched to ‘someone in charge,’ called Tom, and I explained, as politely as I could, very angrily and in no uncertain terms to Tom just exactly what had happened. Tom was concerned and told me he would meet me to discuss the problem.  Thirty minutes later he arrived and I walked out to show him precisely what the issues were and explained:

‘What pissed me off, Tom, isn’t so much that your workers are clearly inconsiderate of other people’s property, it’s that when someone complains about your decidedly poor work habits or point out the fact that you destroyed something, you don’t look at them and tell them that you are somehow incapable of processing the information. The only thing that tells me is you have no customer service skills. You tell the person “I am so sorry for this, sir. You’re right. This should never have happened. I don’t know if I can help you but let me try to get you to someone who can answer your questions and hopefully put things right.”  I don’t care what happened back here or why; I don’t care if they had a fucking party with strippers and a couple of midgets. What I do care about is being lied to and treated like an idiot when I clearly have a valid complaint and the evidence to back it up. Want I want is an apology – a simple acknowledgement of wrong-doing – and for the mess to be cleaned up, because if this is how your company works, I wouldn’t hire you to roof a dog house.’

Tom quietly agreed, poking his foot in the divot in my drive, and offered me his card and his apologies when I was through. I accepted both and returned to my house, an ever-vigilant eye cast to Bob’s roof. Somehow I was not surprised to find there was no-one in sight.

When I arrived home from work late that evening, Bob’s roof was completed and new gutters had been hung as well.  I casually inspected the side yard as I walked to the door. No cigarettes, no nails, no tar paper, gravel pushed back into the divot, and it looked as though someone had made a valiant effort to right a couple of the crushed day lilies.

I smiled an evil and self-satisfied smile. Sometimes it’s nice to get your way…