Today

Quite a good day today. Saw some of the Peanut Festival Parade in Floresville, which now seems to be several hundred times more lame than when I was a kid. Neither my son nor a friend of his who was with us was impressed, either. It was amusing, however, to point out to my son the exact spot where I was sitting when I was four years old and a &^%$#@! clown screamed right in my face. I have hated clowns ever since. We were really there because my daughter's Girl Scout troop was in the parade. I also pointed out to him the house where I lived up until I was about 4 or 5, and in which my grandmother still lived for several more years thereafter.

Following lunch, we drove all the way to Furniture Warehouse in Seguin and bought a new mattress. From my working some overtime, plus my wife working another part-time home care job during the day before her regular job, we were able to shell out around $900 for it. The old mattress was older than I am, inherited from her parents, and it was way past time to put it to rest. We moved up a few orders of magnitude in mattress technology; we didn't get anything super-expensive like the Serta, but we did get one that has the individually wrapped springs and a memory-foam layer across the middle of it for lumbar support.

I smoked my last bowl of Bayou Night on the drive home yesterday, to find a fresh pound of the blend waiting in the mailbox for me. So I have not had to miss a day without it this time. This time I'm not going to store it in vacuum-sealed bags. I'm going to just Pump-n-Seal it into Mason jars and see how it goes. I am enjoying a bowlful of the fresh stuff right now and may perhaps light up another since it's a while before bedtime.

I got my semi-annual shoe allowance yesterday so I went and bought a new pair of boots. This time I got them with slightly higher tops to improve my Chihuahua resistance, and as usual I immediately put extra insoles into them right off the bat (something I've learned from experience). They're waterproof but I hosed them down with silicon spray anyway and they're sitting in a corner curing right now. The spray help them to shed water even better, especially in dew-soaked grass.

My back is still hurting me some but it's much better than it was a week ago. I'm hoping the new mattress will help it.