Pure happiness is going to the malt shop where your beautiful and vibrant red-headed friend treats you to a chocolate malt for your 50th birthday. Aaaah. It rained buckets while we sat at a corner table, all windows, jabbering our lips off. Then the sun came out, blue sky and white fluffy clouds, typical Florida afternoon. I am now ready to do this every Friday afternoon, Red's day off from being a brilliant college professor, and more.

In case you haven't noticed, I use nicknames for friends and family. To protect the innocent, of course.

Then, I scoured the earth (the earth being the Old Northeast, St. Pete) for a garage apartment for DTD. She's ready to rock 'n roll, i.e., move. If anyone out there in cyberland hears of a darling little garage apartment for rent, with DTD'S name written on it, please call me. Time is of the essence. Thank you. BTW, I am doing this because DTD is too swamped with school and work. And maybe I will fall into a real estate career...somehow. Everyone I ever heard of says I love houses so much that I missed my calling to be a real estate agent. This is true.

Oh, and my grandparents' old apartment house is being restored, and DTD wants to live there, in her great grandparents' old apartment house. Now THAT would be cool. I need to investigate further.

Meatloaf sandwiches were the ticket for dinner tonight. Since I had meatloaf. You know, I never had a meatloaf sandwich in my life until I was out of college. I was helping this really neat lady in her home and she offered me a meatloaf sandwich. I was puzzled, but I'm also not one to refuse anything with meatloaf in the equation. Of course, I'm not one to refuse food, period. As long as we're talking good old Southern cooking. And this lady was from the deep south. So, I had my first meatloaf sandwich and the rest is history.

But my good white bread, Rudy's Bread. Something is amiss. The last two loaves I bought, the bread is all dried out. Yeah, let's just say it...it's stale. I don't know why this is. The store sells it defrosted, but I stick it back in the freezer when I get home, 'cause little ol' KEM and Mikey can't eat a whole loaf of bread in a snap of the fingers. Eh, but the red grapes were wonderful. This other lady shopper said to buy them, she had them the other day and boy, were they good. I love tips like that. And here's one for the store. TASTE your produce before you put it out for some poor unsuspecting customer, who, of course, would be moi.

Every single day of life consists of the good, the bad and the ugly, with hopefully the good tipping the scales. I keep waiting for days of good only, and they are rare, but I just had one on my birthday, so they are not impossible. Man, my birthday was two weeks ago already. The next thing I know, I'll be 51. In only 50 weeks I will be. Red and I were laughing today because my brain is wired like one of her young daughter's. We think outside the box.

Okay, this is a blog of mostly pure jabber, as you see I enjoy from paragraph one. Tomorrow I am going to eat my meatloaf sandwich sans the bread. Ain't that sad?

Now I'm going to go eat a hunk of chocolate that says Happy Birthday on it. I don't see anyone else making good use of it.

Full o' Fat KEM