Ol’ Tennessee

Here’s a great post with great photos about Tennessee in the Depression.

My Tennessee grandparents had it pretty lucky, relatively. My maternal grandmother’s family came down with a bump. Her father had been a partner in a store and a cotton gin and they lost it all one way and another. But he still had friends, and so was able to get various appointments, including a live in position at a Middle Tennessee women’s prison. My grandfather’s family raised hogs and “this, that and the other” – he said they were so poor the depression didn’t make much difference to them. But he said they weren’t hungry. His family began raising tobacco during the depression, and thing began to get a lot better.

HT Music City Bloggers in a post with lots of other historical links.

Which way do you go?

Busy Mom posed the question over a week ago:

Dishwasher.

Utensils.

Handles up, or, handles down?

Discuss.

And boy, did they ever. Fifty-three comments and counting. I didn’t add to it and I didn’t read through all the comments, but a quick scan suggests that most of her readers are the dead wrong handles up type people.

-0-

When my grandfather was dying, VolMom had to do a lot of things for him and I suppose that she mostly did them the way he wanted them done. But they didn’t see eye to eye on the dishwasher thing. Her view was that handles up is a lot safer. But I reckon that she got this method of loading from her husband, ’cause I know that’s not the way her daddy taught her to do it.

I’m not taking sides, but:

• The man is dying, can’t you load his dishwasher the way he wants? You bought the man a new alarm clock every day to satisfy some bizarre notion during the last week of his life – why not just put the handles down?
• Your daughter is both loading and unloading your dishwasher , so what’s the biggie? Who knew that someone dosed up on oxycontin washed down with bourbon could care so much.
• Handles up is just wrong.

Anyway, I knew there was a dishwasher difference, but I didn’t think much about it until I loaded his dishwasher while I was visiting. He hobbled into the kitchen from the other room. And that took some monumental effort from a shrunken and bent, 83 year old end stage cancer sufferer. But he came to ask me how I was loading the silverware, and that took much less effort than bending over to reload the dishwasher which he would have done.

And to be honest, I kinda went into a teenage defensiveness stance. We lived with him while I was in high school and he was always a bit of stickler for household chores and I blanked on which way he liked it under his stern questioning.

“Handles down,” I said. “Otherwise the food just pools up at the bottom and besides sharp knives might slip through the basket and get into the washer blades.”

He just grinned. He probably told me this himself a hundred times. “That is right,” he said emphatically. “You a good girl.”

Cuba libre

A Nashville blogger (and kick ass funny one at that) may be getting the nod to head to Iraq.

Apparently, he’s read the travel brochures and isn’t keen:

My biggest question is why do we keep invading crap holes?

We’ve got nice tropical paradise with a dictator, just 90 miles south of Key West. I could swim on to the beach with a pistol in one hand and a mojito in the other.

For some reason, I just can’t shake the Daniel Craig as Bond image from my head. I assume that he has both the pistol and the mojito just under the water protected by a zip-lock baggie and an Aladdin thermos respectively.

And the other thought I have – and at the risk of sounding like a paleo-con, invading crap holes instead of tropical locales is just one more area where Bush diverges from the Reagan legacy.

And finally, I hope it ain’t so, but if it is so – Short and Fat – I wish you luck and full requisitions of the appropriate body and vehicle armor.