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I think the most tiring thing about my job is restraining my sarcasm. I'm too tired to explain in any real detail right now, but today was another one of those days where I found myself having to keep a tight leash on my tongue.
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Dinner tonight was KFC, and the KFC I go to is perhaps two blocks south of where my paternal grandfather's house used to be.
Forty years ago I used to sit on his front porch on summer Sunday nights like this one and think and watch the traffic go by. There was a porch swing, and I was able to sit there by myself and not bother anyone. The kids were never allowed to go into the front yard there, because it was right on a busy street--perhaps five feet below street level--and some years before a car had left the pavement and wrecked against one of the trees; the last thing anyone wanted was for that to happen again with kids in the yard. (Rather than force the city to put a guardrail in, our parents just kept us out of the yard.)
Anyway, tonight as I was driving away from KFC I caught a whiff of air that took me back to the 1970s, reminding me of what it smelled like on a summer night on Pops' front porch. It's the smell of warm asphalt and grass, clean air with a hint of auto exhaust. I only smelled it one other place: in the summer of 2003 I--for a little while--was taking my lunch breaks on the nursing home's front porch, and on weekend nights it smelled exactly like that. That place was on First Avenue in Cedar Rapids, and it was common for kids to cruise the strip.
Pretty amazing.
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The dentist office I went to the other day was built in an old Victorian house here in the Fungal Vale. It's old enough that it has a carriage house with a hayloft; I could only tell there was a hayloft by the set of doors up above the main door, which had no stairs or anything leading to them but which were placed just so to be a place where bales of hay were delivered.
There are a few houses here of that vintage which still have their carriage houses, though they were naturally converted into garages early in the 20th century as horse-drawn carriages were replaced with automobiles. It's interesting to see them.
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Last night I made brownies. I added perhaps a cup of Reese's peanut butter chips to the batter. Now, because this stuff is pretty warm before being baked (the recipie is Aunt Charlotte's saucepan brownies) I think the chips melted before I even finished mixing them in, and the resulting brownies are perhaps the tastiest brownies I've ever made in my life. You can't really taste the peanut butter, but you know it's there, and damn.
So, that's a winner, even though it didn't turn out the way I expected.