Hobo Jungle

[BillyJoeBob]

Dirt Man
Happy Birthday

[MurphOnMillerAve]

On your birthday, Pete, and every day, may you continue to be blessed w/a life full of happiness, good health, and family and friends who prosper and love you.
Murph

[webenda]

Wonderful Dandy Lion photo Pete. Glad you are having such a good time on your birthday vacation.

In many gardening circles the dandelion is considered an undesirable. Dandy Lions don't care. No matter how many times they are mowed down they always come back. They seem almost joyful as they fill their place in life. Did you know they are in the same family as Asters? (Family Asteraceaeit)

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Meanwhile, I'll pray to Buddha and bow toward Mecca and do a novena and spin my prayer wheel and stick supplications on paper in my western wall and dance at dawn in a white robe around a picture of Stonehenge and contemplate my navel and sacrifice a pig, all so I get a week without rain.
Wish me luck.

In a white robe?? Get real....nude and painted blue is the way to go!

[rogruth]

Rufus,

You definitely have a sense of humor.It shows often.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Rufus,

You definitely have a sense of humor.It shows often.

Thanks! Visiting MTJ, a place where I can count on a cast of characters with both wit and humor, provides a bit of much needed therapy and escape,

[MurphOnMillerAve]

...In many gardening circles the dandelion is considered an undesirable. Dandy Lions don't care. No matter how many times they are mowed down they always come back. They seem almost joyful as they fill their place in life. Did you know they are in the same family as Asters? (Family Asteraceaeit)

Oh yeah, well, I'll bet you didn't know dandelions had a place desirable yet undesirable in my family. Yup. Ya'see, when my paternal grandmother would come to our home to visit during the summers, she would ask that my father not mow the lawn before she got there.

Before supper, much to my pre-adolescent horror (back in the '50's), she would go out into our back and front yards and harvest dandelions for salad! Also, she took some home to cook. T'was the green parts she wanted; the flowers were scuttled. The other (besides me) li'l rascals in the 'hood would some how always manage to be peering from their windows as she commenced her ritual which, I was certain, she relished all the more because of my objections and embarrassment.

Naturally, as things so often turn out later in my life, I'd give anything to have her in my own yard, nowadays, just sittin' and relaxing or out there picking all the dandelions she might want. I'd even help her clean and cook 'em. However, all that's gone, now, except for dandelions. They populate my lawn by the multitudes, and I have to pay a guy to take care of their removal. Of course, when I see their little faces, now, peering up at me from the green expanses they dominate, they have become joyful things to me because I think of Grandma and her salads. What little we understand and appreciate when we are kids.

Here she is on one of those visits (note the scruffy lawn,) with my father on her L. side and my uncle on her R. They're all gone, now.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Oh yeah, well, I'll bet you didn't know dandelions had a place desirable yet undesirable in my family. Yup. Ya'see, when my paternal grandmother would come to our home to visit during the summers, she would ask that my father not mow the lawn before she got there.

Before supper, much to my pre-adolescent horror (back in the '50's), she would go out into our back and front yards and harvest dandelions for salad! Also, she took some home to cook. T'was the green parts she wanted; the flowers were scuttled. The other (besides me) li'l rascals in the 'hood would some how always manage to be peering from their windows as she commenced her ritual which, I was certain, she relished all the more because of my objections and embarrassment.

Naturally, as things so often turn out later in my life, I'd give anything to have her in my own yard, nowadays, just sittin' and relaxing or out there picking all the dandelions she might want. I'd even help her clean and cook 'em. However, all that's gone, now, except for dandelions. They populate my lawn by the multitudes, and I have to pay a guy to take care of their removal. Of course, when I see their little faces, now, peering up at me from the green expanses they dominate, they have become joyful things to me because I think of Grandma and her salads. What little we understand and appreciate when we are kids.

Here she is on one of those visits (note the scruffy lawn,) with my father on her L. side and my uncle on her R. They're all gone, now.

My grandmother used to make some wicked good dandelion wine.........

[2railjon]

I'm with you on that, Rufus! I've helped my father make many a batch of dandelion wine!!! Here's a link to some recipes for you rookies!:

http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/dandelion.asp

[webenda]

Murph,

Love your family photo. Your gandma looks wonderful.

Your words cause me to think that you are not big on culinary adventures.

For the rest of you: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Dandelion- ... etail.aspx

For the rest of you? Yeah, I'm with Murph.

I remember eating with my wife in the Chinese district of Calgary, Canada.
There were little tentacles with tiny suction cups in the soup. I ate one and then
manuvured around the rest of them. I watched with amusment as my wife chowed
down on everything found in the soup. She loved those little chewy tentacles.

[Tramp]

Wayne, one of my favorite snacks with beer is fried squid heads. That's the tentacle part I'm pretty sure was in your soup. Unless it was baby octopus. I make them at home whenever I can buy them at the market.

Murph, dandelions in my yard grass drive me obsessive. I dig the damn things up all summer, but at this point I've basically won. But if I left off digging for a year . . . yikes. My mom made every kind of odd food in those days (60s). Kids laughed themselves half silly about the sandwiches I brought from home to school, full of dandelion greens, chunks of different peppers, hard brown bread, etc. I told the kids such foods made your penis bigger over time.

Rufus, are you referring to that French movie?

[rogruth]

Wayne,

I'm with you but probably much pickier.

[Dewey1]

Tramp
Given all the turnip greens, kale, creezy greens and spinach we grew and Mom made me eat [ during the Great Depression] I should have been in porno movies instead of the textile business. But as I got older I could care less how it looked in the locker room as long as rigidity got the wrinkles out .

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Rufus, are you referring to that French movie?

No. My grandmother regularly put up a shelf of jugs of dandelion wine down in the root cellar for several years. She also made gallons of pickles and canned just about anything that could be grown.

The stairwell into the basement, already a hazard, would become an obstacle course of crocks of all sizes filled with cucumbers undergoing the pickling process every year. I am still unsure of who actually ate all of these pickles,

In any case, that page of my youth provided the impetus for my constructing this building: http://kapplerusa.com/y2k/kp-gallery-mbrechbiel.htm

[Tramp]

Rufus, I was referring to the French movie where the fellow strips naked, paints himself blue, ties dynamite around his chest and greets his antagonists with a lit cigar. KInd of like 1 and 7 rail Jon. Worked well but then it's a movie.