Listen Up, Indiana

Everyone in Illinois knows there’s no Pawnee in Indiana.  So, don’t let this Poehler show go to your heads.  Some of us know the truth.

(Interesting side note: Pawnee, Illinois was supposed to be Horse Creek, Illinois, but the postmaster thought the name was stupid and suggested “Pawnee” instead.  No actual Pawnee ever lived in Pawnee, or in Illinois at all, though I’m sure some of them have stopped to go to the bathroom at the truckstop there off I-55 while on their way to see the Lincoln sites in Springfield.  Another interesting side note: When we traveled to Pawnee to see my Dad’s new church, the Butcher, who was nine or ten, saw the watertower and shouted out, “Oh no!  We’re moving to Peewee?!”  We still tease him about that.)

“These be her very C’s, her U’s and her T’s and thus makes she her great P’s”

(Ha, I’m convinced they have kids read the shittiest Shakespeare to dissuade them from every getting to the fun stuff.  The real conspiracy is not whether Will was actually DeVere, but why we purposefully try to make kids hate him.)

I actually kind of like Britney Spears’ “If U Seek Amy” and am glad to have a history of great secret cussing.  That includes James Joyce!

The Butcher is a Winner in Need of a Gameshow

So, the Butcher is finally back home after his stay in Jordonia.  And I’m glad, if only because it’s hard for me to justify making a big pot of chili like that if it’s just me to eat it.

And last night we were watching TV.  And when we watch TV together we are always watching at least two, but usually 3, things.  And we can do this because the Butcher either knows or can easily figure out the plot to anything on TV.

It’s like how we were talking the other day–it’s not that I’m brilliant; I’m just a good test-taker.  I can imagine what the test taker is thinking and the ways he or she might be keeping the correct answer apparent, but slightly hidden.

Well, the Butcher has that skill when it comes to television shows.  He can see a twist miles away.  And so each show becomes an effort to map the plot and then make sure that you return to it often enough to see if you’re right about it.

Anyway, last night he had Criminal Minds, Law & Order, and CSI: New York (a show he doesn’t even watch normally) all figured out before the half-hour mark.

Some People Say a Man is Made Out of Mud

So, of course, since we planted the lilac last night, I ran into my friend “Mud Blob.”  Mud Blob lives just under the grass in my yard and waits patiently for the day when you may need to kill an intruder, which you will be able to do by picking up Mud Blob and throwing it at the intruder, who will be taken out by its sheer weight.  Mud Blob is the lead of soils.  Each handful weighs about ten pounds.

Mud Blob even could have a theme song.

Who lives in the yard and under the trees?

Mud Blob Dirt Pants.

Blobby and dirty and muddy is he!

Mud Blob Dirt Pants

Okay, obviously, it’s a little derivative, but I’m still working on it.

I turned to the internet to learn more about Mud Blob.  And, though I was able to find what appears to be some kind of Farmer/Scientist Fetish Porn site (SFW), I wasn’t finding dirt that looked particularly like the dirt in my yard.

But then I went to the Web Soil Survey and mapped my house and learned that I have Newark Silt Loam all in my yard.  It’s about 80 inches down to the rockbed, but the water table, as we discover often, is just 6 to 18 inches down, and the soil drains poorly–which is why, I suppose, it clumps together into Mud Blob.

The USDA says elsewhere about Mud Blob (You can call him “Newark” but he’ll always be Mud Blob to me), “The Newark series consists of very deep, somewhat poorly drained soils formed in mixed alluvium from limestone, shale, siltstone, sandstone, and loess. The soil is on nearly level flood plains and in depressions. Slope ranges from 0 to 3 percent.”

I had to look up “alluvium” which basically just means “deposits of mud formed by flowing water.”  And it’s very crumbly.

But people grow stuff on it, so that’s good.