Maybe it’s my shampoo. I’m a guy, and all I ask of my hair is that it stay clean and in the vicinity of my head, so when I buy shampoo, I get the biggest bottle of whatever they sell at the dollar store. This “White Rain” stuff I’m using now doesn’t even claim to have a fragrance.

But for the last few days now, whenever I take Pepper for a walk and we get to a park or grassy area, I get absolutely swarmed by these little flies of some sort. They’re smaller than houseflies but bigger than gnats, so I don’t know if they’re fruit flies or something else. They don’t bite, but they swarm around my head and land in my hair and make it completely impossible to just hang out at the park for a while. I have to keep moving at a fast walk to generate enough breeze to keep them off me, or I end up standing there swatting at my head like a crazy person.

I took a picture of them, but my camera isn’t very sharp at close range. (As usual, click on the pics to popup a full-sized version.) That was at the park, with about 50 of them swirling around my head. It’s just my head, not the rest of my body, which is why I suspect my shampoo. I still see other people sitting in the park, so I don’t think they’re bothering everyone else like this. I’m going to put on some Off later and go down to the store for some different shampoo.

A couple other recent pictures; here’s one of the devil dog in one of her favorite sleeping positions in her chair:

Other cameras cause red-eye; apparently mine causes green-eye. Not sure what’s going on there. Here’s one I took the other day, after she chased a rabbit under this corn header. She couldn’t get under there, so she just ran around and around it dozens of times, hoping to scare it out. I finally had to tell her to give up so we could head home. (Turns out my camera isn’t fast enough for “action” pictures either.)

These three puppies came out to play on the south side of town one morning. I have no idea what they’re looking at in this picture, because Pepper was standing at my feet. Maybe they’re camera-shy.

I got a kick out of this: two lawns, side by side. Want to bet these neighbors don’t especially get along?

Every time we go for a walk, I’m reminded of how much I don’t miss mowing my lawn. That’s the main noise you hear in town this time of year: mowers running everywhere. I even hear them regularly here in the middle of town, for some reason.
I swear I will never mow my lawn again, no matter where I live. I won’t have a lawn unless I can afford to pay someone to mow it, or build a robot mower. (In fact, the coolness of a robot mower might be the only reason I’d have a lawn.) Otherwise, I’ll turn the whole thing into a European-style garden with paths and plants, have sheep to graze it, put down artificial turf, or just pave the whole thing. Never again will I look out at my lawn and think, “Oh man, I have to mow today.”

I’ve started carrying my camera around town with me, to take pictures of whatever looks interesting, now that it’s spring and the sun comes out once in a while. So here’s some photo-blogging, comments below the pictures….

This is on the southwest edge of town; someone converted an old barn into a house. It looks pretty cool. I wonder if there’s a room in the silo?

The rest of these are from the cemetery on the west edge of town. I walk Pepper out that way a lot, because there’s a small creek on the other side that she can go hunt in. So I took pictures of some things while she was playing the other day.

When I first saw this one, I wondered who thought his gravestone had to be twice as tall as anyone else’s, but no, it’s just the statue at the entrance, commemorating the people who started the cemetery.

You know, I’m certainly no feminist, but I’m glad we don’t do this anymore. No, I’m afraid the other side doesn’t say, “Charles, Husband of Catherine.”

“He done what he could.” Kinda says it all, doesn’t it?

I wonder how two people “Born In France” in the 1910s end up in Barry, Illinois. Probably an interesting story there. Apparently Mrs. Kibler is still alive. There must be a lot of widows around here, because there seem to be at least ten stones like this for every one where the husband hasn’t been added yet. I know women have a longer life expectancy than men by a couple years, but walking around the cemetery you’d think it’s more like twenty.

This one broke my heart. At first I saw Aug. 12-Aug. 14, and thought, “Gosh, twin sisters died at birth, that’s really sad.” Then I realized, no, it says August 1916 to August 1917. Twin baby girls, one just past her first birthday and the other not quite there, lost within a couple weeks of each other. How horrible that must have been for their parents.

To wrap up on a lighter note, I love this one. “Ok, what should we put on Bob’s stone? Rest in Peace …. maybe something from a prayer ….. no, I know: ‘Fix It Man!’” And then the CB radio. It seems out of place on a headstone, but hey, it sure tells you more about Bob than something flowery would have, doesn’t it?

Ok, I admit it; that’s a shameless attempt to draw more visitors to my site. But seriously, I just don’t get the 4:20 thing. Not the pot-smoking; I understand that, although I’ve never had any desire to do it myself. It always seemed to make my friends mellow out, and I figured if there was one thing I already had plenty of, it was mellow. On the other hand, I think it’s fairly stupid for it to be illegal. There are far worse things you can put in your body, some of them legal at any age. Since I really don’t care about it one way or another, I think I can be objective about it.

What I don’t get is the desire to write 4:20 on every public surface from walls to speed limit signs. I used to drink a lot, and I’ve known plenty of people who get drunk, and none of us ever had any desire to get a can of spray paint and write Beer:30 or 90 Proof or Vodka Rocks! on a wall in an alley somewhere. We drank because it helped us have fun — or in some cases, to drown sorrows — but not because we were trying to make a point about anything to the rest of the world.

I see it drawn a lot of different places when I’m out walking Pepper, and it makes me wonder if there’s a parallel: is it simply a primitive need to mark territory, the way she thinks she has to pee on something every twenty yards or so, whether she’s got any in the tank or not?

It’d be tempting to say it’s because pot is illegal; but for most of the people doing the scrawling, I’ll bet alcohol is illegal too at their age, but you don’t see them proclaiming to the world that they drink. Why is pot-smoking in particular the one thing they’re so proud of that they need to advertise? Why is there no graffiti about meth use, pirating music, or breaking curfew?

I just don’t get it.

I think if I had a pair of ice skates, I could skate in the park next to my house today. No, there’s no pond there; there’s just enough ice frozen on top of the grass that it holds my weight without even cracking. It’d be a little rough, and the slope might be an issue on skates….

Even Pepper doesn’t like it. She loves the cold and the snow, but not so much the sliding around and being unable to keep her footing. She has a hard time even standing on three feet to pee on all the things that need peeing on, and that clearly bothers her.

The diet is still going fine. Sorry to anyone who’s actually reading this regularly; I know I’ve been falling down on regular updates. I just haven’t been cooking anything spectacular enough to bother talking about. I did cook a huge meatloaf the other night, with venison burger, turkey burger, and pork sausage, plus diced onion, celery, and yellow bell pepper, but other than that, it’s been eggs, roasts, salads, stuff like that.

I weighed myself this morning, and was 238. My scale isn’t that accurate — stepping off and right back on can make a 3-4 pound difference — so I don’t bother with it very often, but I was curious. Inches around the waist are a better indicator of fat loss, and I’m starting to notice a difference there. Mostly I feel a heck of a lot better, and that’s the main thing.

I did have kind of a nagging low-level headache that wouldn’t quite go away, and then I remembered that I’d run out of potassium salt (Morton Lite Salt) and was using the regular kind. Potassium is the one thing that low-carbers sometimes don’t get enough of, if they don’t make sure to get plenty of vegetables, so I use the Lite Salt to supplement it. When you’re low on potassium, it can lead to muscle cramps and pain, and I think that’s where the stiffness in my neck was coming from. I got a new can of KaCl a couple days ago, and poof! No more headaches.

More to come later today…..I think!