Cranks My Tractor

Janitor or Custodian?

Have you ever considered the difference between the two? I’m not sure what the real difference is, but it seems that I’m not the only one who gets mixed up. Traditionally, a janitor is entrusted with cleaning jobs, whereas a custodian is a person in charge of looking after a property or a child.

The confusion comes in because many janitors are seen performing other roles traditionally considered fit for a custodian. It seems a custodian is there on the premises of the property they are entrusted to maintain, whereas a janitor performs their duties in the morning or evenings. In the comparison, you can bring in the toilets, floors, security and changing of the light bulbs.

Still, very confusing…

People just don't do that anymore

Although I truly enjoy cooking, I also enjoy going to the Thai restaurant less than five minutes from my house. It’s my “Cheers,” you know the sitcom about the bar that ran on NBC from the early 80’s to the early 90’s. I don’t remember it being “political,” like so many television shows are now.

Cheers was good comedy and the reason that my Thai restaurant is my “Cheers” is not because I go there and drink, but because when I go in everyone knows my name. It is nice to be smiled at and spoken to and your humor laughed at. I’m sure my 12th grade English teacher would be cringing if she saw that last sentence.

Sometimes I do think that they don’t necessarily understand everything that I say. They speak and understand English very well, but they are not necessarily used to hearing it spoken with an Alabama brogue. So they smile and laugh a lot. I like that, as well as the food.

Mabel and Her Tomato

One of my favorite things to do is to sit or stand at the antique mall and go through all the postcards. I’m sure they were bought by the pound or bundle at an estate sale or yard sale for pennies a piece and brought to the antique mall where they can sell two or three and get their money back. The best I can tell, I’m one of the only ones who sit and go through them.

They go back to the early 1900s and have beautiful pictures from places I’ll probably never get to see. I like to think of them as “Poor Man’s Art.” Usually, I’m only interested in those that have not been used. Yes, there are a lot that have been written on, with penny stamps and more. I suppose some people would buy them for the stamps if they collected such things.

On this particular day, I was finding a nice handful of linen postcards from the 40’s and 50’s with some really cool things on them. I use them. I don’t frame them. I don’t store them. I put a stamp on them and send them to my children.

Smoke and Words and the New Year

As I admired the new gasket I had just installed on my ceramic smoker that sits on my deck, I could almost taste the steaks. I hadn’t replaced the top and bottom gaskets on my smoker since I received this wonderful gift many years ago. The old gaskets had pretty much burnt to nothing and smoke could easily ease out from where the lid meets the bottom of the smoker.

Keeping the smoke and heat in is important to the smoking, cooking and regulating the temperature. Thus, I had been wasting smoke for years and either too lazy to buy a new set of gaskets or waiting on someone to give me some. I got a set for my birthday and it seemed the perfect time to install them during the holidays.

Everyone has traditions for the holidays and we have steak on Christmas night. The process of taking the smoker apart, removing all of the old crusty parts, cleaning and reassembling is pretty time consuming I learned. However, it was very gratifying. Once installed, my smoker didn’t make that “pinging” noise of the ceramic top and bottom hitting each other when I closed the lid.

A Strange White Substance

Recently, a friend of mine told me his daughter was stopped by airport security in Charleston, South Carolina, because they thought she was a “mule.” Knowing this fellow well and his daughter since she was tiny, I first needed clarification of what a mule was and why someone would think this nice college freshman was a mule.

I know that a mule is what you get when you cross a female horse and a male donkey and they are hardworking and Clint Eastwood paired up with Shirley MacLaine in the movie “Two Mules for Sister Sarah.” The pairing of Eastwood and MacLaine bothered me in later years and didn’t really help me with my mule problem.

Stubbornness is associated with mules, but I don’t think they simply stop you in security lines for being stubborn unless you are not cooperating with them by letting them see all your underwear and baggage and what you are taking on the plane. I asked him, “Was she not cooperating with them?” He noted that she was very cooperative, but that they were very concerned with the strange white substance that she was taking on the plane with her.

Sticky Rice, Mango and Tears

On Friday nights, I like to go to the Thai restaurant about five minutes from my house. I always sit at the bar and wait on my take-out order and talk to all of the servers, the other regulars and Moony, whose name I never spell or say correctly. I’ve known her for years – she and her husband own the place. They are good people, who work hard and make good food.

Moony has two children, a daughter in high school and a son about to go away to college and chase his dreams – just like mine. Her son loves computers, gaming and will play soccer in college. My son loves computers, gaming and music – he will chase his dreams and a college education in Nashville, Tennessee.

I’m never in a hurry when I go to get take-out, if I were, I’d call ahead. I never call ahead, because I like sitting at the bar and playing with the remote control surfing the channels. I seldom get to do that at home.

Dear Son

With my son nearing the end of his senior year in high school, I wanted to write him a letter and put it in his brown paper bag lunch this morning, but I didn’t. He will read this though, and hopefully understand what I am trying to say.

“Dear Son,

I’m sure you noticed something a little different about your peanut butter and jelly sandwich at lunch today. At least I hope you did. I understand that you are used to having it the ‘usual’ way, but last night I needed to make it a different way.

I needed to ‘hear it.’

Where have you gone Fried Green Tomatoes?

My bad cholesterol is high, my good cholesterol is low; my prized cast iron skillets seem to cry when I brown “beet burgers” where fried okra and catfish used to dance and play. The closest thing to fried green tomatoes I’ve had lately is watching the movie based on Fannie Flagg’s book.

Parts of that movie bother me, parts of it make me happy, and thus, I suppose it is a good movie because it is very similar to our day to day lives. I’ve been to the place where they filmed the movie – the little restaurant in Juliette, Georgia, and it will always be one of my favorite places.

The movie feeds my heart, but leaves my stomach yearning for thick sliced bacon, fried eggs and those green tomatoes dancing on the floor of one my cast iron skillets. Haven’t you ever had fried green tomatoes for breakfast? The hair on my arms stands up just thinking about it.

In About One Minute

The hardware store is an oasis for me; I like being there and I enjoy the folks who work there. They have popcorn on the weekends and sometimes they have coffee. It’s not the same as it was growing up, but it’s about the best I can do.

Standing in line with a can of wood filler, some stuff that dries out rotting wood and a sanding block, I was in a daze. I was not studying the display case with all the pocket knives and I was not smelling soap or shaking pickle jars. I do these things often. The girl at the checkout always assures me that I can make the “handmade” soap myself.

Also, I know my pickles are way better than the “homemade” pickles they are pushing at the hardware store. This is an assumption of course, because I’ve never bought the “impulse pickles” at the hardware store. What else can you call them other than “impulse pickles?”

We Dare Defend Our Watermelons

It seems like I’ve had watermelon on my mind a lot lately. At work, we talk about how watermelon just doesn’t seem to be as good as it used to be and how thin skinned a lot of these politically correct seedless personal sized watermelons seem to be.

Honestly, I think it’s true that watermelons used to be better. Maybe we all used to be better when our skins were a lot thicker, our insides were a lot sweeter and full of seeds. There is nothing wrong with spitting watermelon seeds; in fact, I think that it is very medicinal.

Being home in Alabama, I realized that it was National Watermelon Day or something similar, perhaps it was “Thin-skinned, Seedless, Not Very Sweet Watermelon Day.”