Yes, my sister and I sing the flag decal song. It ought to be played on the radio, and the saga about "Sam Stone", too. Sam Stone is really relevant now with all the young men and women serving around the world who are coming home with shattered bodies and shatter minds. Jeez! SAM STONE - written and performed by John Prine Sam Stone came home, To his wife and family After serving in the conflict overseas. And the time that he served, Had shattered all his nerves, And left a little shrapnel in his knee. But the morphine eased the pain, And the grass grew round his brain, And gave him all the confidence he lacked, With a Purple Heart and a monkey on his back. Chorus: There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes, Jesus Christ died for nothin', I suppose. Little pitchers have big ears, Don't stop to count the years, Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios. Mmm.... Sam Stone's welcome home Didn't last too long. He went to work when he'd spent his last dime And Sammy took to stealing When he got that empty feeling For a hundred dollar habit without overtime. And the gold rolled through his veins Like a thousand railroad trains, And eased his mind in the hours that he chose, While the kids ran around wearin' other peoples' clothes... Repeat Chorus: There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes, Jesus Christ died for nothin', I suppose. Little pitchers have big ears, Don't stop to count the years, Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios. Mmm.... Sam Stone was alone When he popped his last balloon Climbing walls while sitting in a chair Well, he played his last request While the room smelled just like death With an overdose hovering in the air But life had lost its fun And there was nothing to be done But trade his house that he bought on the G.I. Bill For a flag draped casket on a local heroes' hill Chorus There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes, Jesus Christ died for nothin', I suppose. Little pitchers have big ears, Don't stop to count the years, Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios. Mmm.... ------------------------------ Annie

Hmmm... do you really want to know? What gets me is not what I find but what I lost. I wanted to make soup and thought I had a chunk of ham. No ham to be found so I bought some... the next time I looked in the freezer there was that ham sitting there right under the ice cube bin. The bottle of peppermint schnapps is about 5 years old... still in excellent shape if about gone. Dolly is down to the last couple packages of road kill venison... she loves a frozen block of meat to lick on a hot day. I have three hearts and two tounges that are coming out. Bag of pickle spice on the way from Penzey's and they will be pickled soon. I'm back on 7 day work weeks so what soon is I don't really know. Promised myself some steaks when I get the freezer cleaned good. Somehow I lost a quart bag of jalapeno peppers. They were in there and then they were gone... perhaps behind the ham? : ) lyra

My DH and I are both 67 and both our sons phoned us today to say that they want us to self-isolate. Huh? They're not the boss of me. :) But we are both staying pretty close to home, but we're healthy with no underlying health issues. In Britain they want everyone over the age of 70 to self-isolate and not just for 2 weeks but for the duration of the outbreak. ETA - effective tomorrow night all rec centers and libraries will be closed for the forseeable future.

One of the things I often wonder is whether or not the wild animals have taste buds like ours. Case in point: have you ever eaten a persimmon that wasn't ripe? It is the most sour, most horrible tasting fruit in the world at that point. Yet coyotes will eat them by the dozens all summer long, stripping all the lower branches of fruit. Sometimes I wonder how coyotes would survive the summer if we didn't have all the native persimmons. I am sure parts of Oklahoma have rats and that they plague gardens and orchards, but we don't seem to have them here that often. Sometimes if somebody around us tears down a really old farmhouse that has sat empty and unused on their property for decades, everyone will have a sudden influx of rodents in their yards and outbuildings and will have to deal with them, but that doesn't happen often any more because most of those very old buildings have been torn down, knocked down or burned down. We do have huge hordes of wildlife since our back property line is less than 1/4 mile from the Red River, but the good thing about a large wildlife population is that you have lots of coyotes, bobcats, foxes...and even the cute little ringtailed cats....to prey upon all the rodents. Oh, and snakes. Snakes eat a lot of rodents and I blame our plentiful snake population partly upon the huge pine vole population in the woodlands. I once grew tons of fruit---blackberries, strawberries, peaches, plums, figs, etc. and got tired of fighting the wildlife tooth and nail for every ripe fruit. In fact, the hardest thing was to protect the fruit from them until it was able to ripen. As our shade trees get larger, they have begun shading out our fruit trees that we planted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and I'm okay with that. We just cut down the fruit trees once they are too heavily shaded to produce. We have a large grove of native persimmon trees and lots of native dewberries, and we leave all that fruit for the wild things. It never was our intention to come here and take away plants that feed them. We've let a small clump of native sand plum trees (ironic in our heavy clay to have sand plums) become established alongside our driveway and we can make plum jelly from those plums, which are not eaten heavily by the wildlife like the larger cultivated plum varieties are. I do miss picking fresh peaches from the trees and standing there in the yard eating a peach with the warm juice running down my chin, but that's life....unless I am willing to sit in the yard 24/7 with a gun and shoot all the squirrels, we're never going to get peaches again. We used to have a great squirrel-chasing dog, but she died long ago and our younger dogs just aren't as persistent as she was. They'll chase a squirrel up a tree, bark at it, lose interest and forget the squirrels. Sheila would chase the squirrels endlessly---as they jumped from tree to tree, she followed them, and she made it clear that she'd follow them to the ends of the earth. When she was still alive, squirrels didn't get our peaches and plums, but she has been gone for longer than a decade now, and the squirrel population doesn't fear the 4 dogs we have now. If I was serious about growing fruit here, I'd grow each tree in a fruit cage---a fenced pen that includes a fencing top over it, and absolutely no space wide enough to allow the wild creatures through. Young squirrels can squeeze through really tiny spaces though. I had to grow my sweet corn inside a corn cage for almost a decade to protect it from the raccoons or they'd get every ear. Perhaps it is easier to get a great harvest of some kinds of crops in the city---out here in the country, you have to fight the wildlife endlessly.