The Baboon Congress

Leaving the Best for Last

105 Comments

Today’s guest post is by Steve.

My father adored watermelons, both for how they tasted and because they represented a particularly happy period of his childhood. He would eat a watermelon slowly according to an oddly complicated plan. His approach to this task had all the formality and precision of the Japanese tea ceremony.

Dad would begin his attack on a slice of watermelon by excavating the red melon meat right along the rind, starting with the far end of the watermelon and working cautiously forward toward what had been the center of the melon. Digging carefully, tunneling in alternatively from the left and right sides, Dad would clean away all melon meat along the skin. Then he would begin digging away at the part of the melon with the seeds in it.

A Man, A Melon, A Method

That ultimately left the part of the watermelon that had once been the center, and that middle part would become increasingly isolated and unsteady. But Dad’s plan included leaving long strips that braced the center and kept it from collapsing. (These bracing strips resembled the “flying buttresses” of medieval architecture.)

At some point nothing would remain except the melon that had once been exactly in the center. Eating slowly, with reverence, Dad would finally consume the delicately flavored redness of the heart of the melon, savoring each bite.

Of course, all he was doing was “leaving the best part for last.” I just never saw anyone make such a ritual of doing that. And of course, as my father’s son, I’m the same. I always save the best for last.

Children, as we all know, want to eat their cookies before choking down their vegetables. One reason I eat my veggies first is that I’m proving to myself that I’m no longer a child, lacking restraint and discipline. (But does it say anything about my character that I take credit for consuming my meals like an adult? Am I that desperate to find something to feel proud about?)

I’ve been amused to see how thoroughly this principle of saving the best for last has permeated all aspects of my life.

For example, it dictates the order in which I read e-mails. If my “In-Box” contains several new messages, I do quick calculations, scrolling up and down. I will first delete the spam. Appeals for money for good causes get quickly examined and zapped. Then perhaps I’ll deal with the “hilarious” forward from that silly woman who thinks I enjoy emails featuring cats with speech defects. I will next take time to read messages from groups I care about. Pretty soon the only messages left unopened will be notes from friends who wrote directly to me. Even when I am reading notes from friends, I prioritize, reading letters from some friends first and saving the most special ones for the very last.

Each morning I fire up my computer and work my way through a series of web sites. This is not “surfing.” I’m not free-lancing but moving steadily through sites that are part of my morning ritual, especially news sites. I enjoy all these sites, or I wouldn’t read them every morning. But some are less fun than others, and those are the first I read. Finally there comes that delicious moment when I cannot postpone it any longer: I click on “Trail Baboon!” It is always dead last among the sites I routinely visit.

Shall we eat a can of fruit salad? All that pineapple and pear stuff dominates these salads, and that is just fine. I eat it first, trying to avoid the grapes. Then I’ll eat more of the light stuff, including those tasty grapes. Toward the bottom of the salad I have to be careful, because that’s where they brilliant red Maraschino cherries lie. Aha! There they are! If I’ve been cautious, my last two bites will be pure red!

Ah, look: Here is the morning newspaper! But before reading, I must reassemble it. I chuck out the advertising inserts. Then I arrange the remaining paper, putting the A section on top. The A section is a stone drag bore because it only has stories I already heard about on public radio or the internet. After the A section, which I burn through quickly, I’ll read the local news section next, for it might have news that is actual news to me. Next I turn to Sports . . . but here things get complicated. I generally like this section, for it has a lot of fresh content. But my local teams have been playing so badly that reading about them is a form of abuse. After one of my teams has another miserable game I will put the Sports section on top of the stack to be read first, and yet I am such a sappy optimist I often read the Sports last or next-to-last. At the bottom of my reassembled daily newspaper I’ll put the Entertainment section, saving the best for last, for I enjoy the movie and book reviews, and my paper has a good high-tech product reviewer whose work appears here.

It would feel queer to read the paper in any other order. Once in a while somebody who doesn’t know me will screw up my program by asking to borrow the Sports or Entertainment section when I am systematically working my way through the sections in order. I disguise my outrage because most folks wouldn’t guess how important it is to read the newspaper in proper sequence. And to tell the truth, I’m embarrassed by how rigid I have become about this. If somebody forces me to violate the proper order of reading the paper, my nose might be out of joint hours later.

I am not a narrow-minded person. I can enjoy all kinds of people. If you tell me you dive right into the best part of something, saving the worst for last, I wouldn’t automatically have a low opinion of you. But, golly gee, that’s just so WRONG! Could anyone who saves the worst for last be trustworthy? I’m not sure!

Do you save the best for last? How does that affect your life?

105 thoughts on “Leaving the Best for Last”

  1. wow, thanks, Steve! very interesting look at your routine! the photo is fabulous! my Dad was a little like that also – took his time opening gifts, so slowly slitting the paper with his pocket knife. husband Steve has a definite routine every day – me – i’m not so good at routines. mostly i forget but sometimes i just want variety.
    with milking i’d love to leave the easiest milker to last (this year that was Kona) but she wants to come out first, so i let them decide the order.
    this will be a fun discussion today, i bet – thanks again, Steve!

    OT: Ben asked a bunch of questions yesterday after i had closed down for the day (pretty early)
    So are you enjoying the time off from milking? No – i really miss it already
    Big plans? will go with girlfriends for an overnight somewhere 🙂 that’s as big as it gets..
    Do you normally drink goat milk? Absolutely. i have skim cows’ milk in coffee this morning – a tragedy.
    Do you skim the cream off your goat milk? Does it *have* cream?? Our Alpine Goats’ milk has as much fat as cows’ milk (some breeds more, some breeds less) but the fat globules are much smaller and more tightly suspended so you’d need an electric separator to get the cream out. i have a friend who has one and she makes butter and uses the skim for cheese.
    You milk by hand, right? Better be squeezing some tennis balls or something; your hands might be out of shape by March. yes, milking is one of life’s pure pleasures for me but i am retired and not licensed dairy and only milking five in spring so i will definitely be working at keeping hand strength!
    (I was going to say during the break would be the time to get the vacuum pump overhauled…but never mind. Maybe rebuild your milking stool or something relevant.) ha, ha! i will have winter projects – like finding a new lid for the milk pail and maybe building a cheese press because i want to start making more hard cheeses this summer. But spring and the end of March is coming soon.
    so, i Steve’s way, i am leaving the best til last – and waiting patiently for the kiddos.

    sorry for going on 🙂

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    1. I’m glad that Ben asked those questions and that you answered them, Barb. I have a very limited knowledge dairy practices, but did visit some dairy farms when I worked as a sustainable farming network manager. I’m sure you know, Barb, that one of the big things in sustainable farming is to educate the public about farming because most people don’t know much about where their food comes from Thanks for providing details about your dairy, Barb.

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    3. thanks, Jim iCG and tim – thanks to the goats’ short gestation period (150 days) i don’t have long to wait til i can begin milking again.
      tim, maybe you want to bring you daughter up to see the kiddos in April? kids aren’t THE reason i’m doing this, but they sure do make cute babies.

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  2. Good morning to all. Okay, Steve. Very interesting. I will not mess with your paper. At least you have a system for doing things. I am not very orderly. I do eat my desert last, but most people do. When it comes to other things, I usually start with the best or most interesting and I might never get to the less interesting.

    My email inbox is a mess. Every once in awhile I delete messages I know I don’t want to save, but there are some that should be deleted that never get deleted and there are a lot of them that I don’t know if I should save or delete and they just stay in the inbox. I did start files for saving important messages, but those files only contain a few messages and many messages that belong in them are still in the inbox.

    I try to save some of the good stuff, such as candy, for later consumption. However, I don’t hold off too long and tasty treats will not have a very long life if they are within my reach. I do try to avoid eating treats that are not mine most of the time. If you have a special treat that you are saviing, it would be best if you hid it from me.

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  3. Morning all!

    Wonderful post, Steve… and great picture. I am also a “save the best for last” kind of person, although I have always thought of it as “get the worst over with first”. Then the stuff that I’m not wild about doesn’t hang over my head. Nasty homework assignment? Do it first and get it out of the way. LIma beans on the plate? Eat them all first (and quickly). However, if there is nothing particularly loathesome on the schedule, then I can be all over the board.

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    1. That’s really interesting, sherrilee. I somehow think “save the best for last” and “get the worst over first” are not quite the same concept. But obviously, they are VERY similar and represent the same basic bit of psychology. For me, it seems that I save the best for last AND try to get the worst over first.

      With regards to facing up first to nasty stuff, I use psychology that I can’t use with the general approach of saving the best for last. If I do something really unpleasant, it is like I have “points” or karma or psychological credit that I can use. “OK, since you sat down and paid all those bills, you get to order that thing you want in the LL Bean catalog!” In other words, doing unpleasant things can be a rationale for allowing myself indulgences. I’ll bet others do this, too.

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    2. I save the best for last, as well…
      For me, it’s all about the taste that lingers when it’s all said and done.
      Do I want to be left with the taste of cheescake or lima beans in my mouth?
      Or put the paper down to ponder world crises or an uplifting story of great humanity?
      And would I rather close down my inbox thinking of how to rid myself of belly fat or about how a dear friend is faring these days! No one REALLY wants to have to savor the lima beans, do they?

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  4. I am a “get the goodies first and leave the rest for later” sort of person, while my husband saves the best for last. Sometimes I find his slow, savoring nature a tad annoying. I jump in, he hates to be rushed, and I am sure he finds my impulsiveness a tad annoying, too. Our son is turning out like his father, and our daughter, like her mother, just can’t wait. Off to Bismarck for a morning of shopping. Will check in later this afternoon.

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    1. i find in a relationship it is ofen one of each mentality that happens. who needs two super organized purposeful people in one relationship? its much better to have one who is correct and the other one who is super organized and purposeful

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      1. As the super organized & purposeful half of a relationship, I have to see that’s some mighty thin ice you’ve placed yourself on, tim! 😉

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  5. One of my mother’s favorite tales of her childhood: very often her father bought his several kids bags of jelly beans. She hated the green ones so she ate them first. She could have traded them with her siblings, but they would only trade at a 4 for 1 rate. So, even though she hated them she ate them rather than give them away and ate them first.

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  6. i have the bath in the morning with the blog and the radio on ritual in my life but i find if i save the best for last in the paper i may not get to it at all. on sunday morning i go for the sports the travel the op ed the variety and the business sections. the news is interesting but i get into trouble with my new huffington post updates on the computer. they skyrocket to 999+ in no time waiting for me to get to them and i doubt i will ever zero them out. interesting stuff. watermelon is one of my favorite expenditure of time if it is a sweet one but i have never even thought about going through that type of dissection of the beast.. i do eat asperagus tips last. that is one my dad said to watch. see if a person eats the tip first or last and you will a lot about that person.

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    1. The “save the best for last” program assumes that there will be sufficient time and opportunity to consume everything. If you aren’t sure there will be enough time to get through the newspaper and your intense interest is in sports, you should go right to the sports section in case your reading is interrupted and you only get to read a small bit of the paper.

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      2. Ricky and Kevin Love . . . I’m staggered by the potential they represent. They’re already beating some of the best ballplayers in the world. When the TWolves do almost anything, I have to put the Sports section at the bottom of the stack because I’m so excited about them!

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      3. I was afraid that Ricky would not be able to get the job done in the NBA, but it looks like his skills are increased by playing with NBA players. It really seems to be very good to have a guy with his skills out there at the end of the game.

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      4. the other rookie rickey williams is good too and anthony randolph is back in the game plan, he was the invisable man last year. tolliver is a name out of nowhere and to have wes johnson, beasley milicic and ellinton waitin g for a chance to prove themselves is a whole new ballgame., i love the way we get to reinvent ourselves here in minnesota. in new york or la they whine and spend more here we try to figure it out and do our best. the superstar mentality doesnt come here and wouldnt work here. i do like the minnesota sports culture.

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  7. I know a person who saves a small portion of a treat for a very long time before eating it. In fact they might never get around to eating the last few bites of some treat they are storing. There is no chance that I would do that.

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    1. it always ticks me off when i forget something i saved because it was special and then it turns into a spot of slime and mold. it happens too often to dismiss as a learning experience.

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      1. I wonder if you need to a have your hearing checked, tim…
        Whenever there’s ANY kind of special treat lurking in my kitchen, it screams my name in a voice that makes all the other voices (“it will make you fat”, “you already had some”, “you’ll spoil your dinner”, “you should save some for the hubby”) inaudible… not to be ignored!

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  8. I am a save the best for last but mine has a different flavor, more like “you are not worthy for the good stufff right off the bat” (thank you mother for that message). I don’t always earn the good stuff or get around to it.
    Over the last several years my system has broken down resulting in piling up of both good and bad stuff. This resulted in total gridlock.
    With incredible grace my son returned for Christmas with the goal of breaking the logjam. He recruited friends and mostly worked when I was not around. Many things went the way of the world even the best for the last and the super bargains…Only a few expiration dates were from the last century.
    I am starting the new year off as a much more functional person!

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    1. woo hoo. nothing feels better than a clran slate. but try not to think about those things that are not appreciated fully by the rats at the landfill

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    2. Curious, B-A – are you talking refrigerator clean-out, or more than that? Would love to know his logjam-breaking techniques. 🙂

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      1. its easy. give it to someone who not only doesn’t have sentimental attatchment. they are kind of resentful of all the crap sitting around and it is a done deal. you lose all sorts of cool stuff. but there is always next summers garages sales eh beth ann

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      2. Tim is right there is nothing like a righteous new college graduate. BIR they didn’t even get to the refrigerator but they did go after piles and cupboards. There are new shelves and things that were moved from where they were for 30 years so present cleaning options. Tim, they don’t know about the garage sale stuff-it’s mostly in the garage :
        )

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    3. It’s amazing how clearing space (whether physically or emotionally) makes you a lighter person. My guess it you’ll find yourself more focused and calm now that you’ve been relieved of all that “stuff”. It’s not an easy process for some and I hope you’ll reap big rewards from it B-A. Way to start out the new year!

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  9. Not my morning for typing:
    I hated vegetables as a child too, still hate some. I eat the ones I hate “along the way.” A bite of cooked carrots, something else, some carrots, something else, etc.
    My kids and Easter Candy: Nate ate it all right away and got sick. Becca sorted them by type and color, but mostly by color. Then ate the candy over next few weeks, in front of her brother.

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  10. vegetables are not my favorite either. i had a tough transition to the life of a vegetarian for the first couple of years. i was malnourished and it took a while to acclimate to eating to my taste and desires rather than a nutritionally driven agenda. i find if i screw around with my veggies and put a sauce or a bunch of spices in there i can handle it. chinese hoisan sauce. thai sauces and of course italian red white or garlic asuces are wonderful. i can eat cardboard with a good pesto. i am interested in learning to do indian and ethiopian and central american spice variations on rice beans veggies and root veggies. i love potato onion garlic doings and tend to throw veggies in with em rather than the other around. broccoli chesse with crap chees was a request the other day form the peanut gallery. good garbage food. broccoli and garlic with hoisan is kind of like cheating but awfully good. in china the chines food is very simple. like lettuce boiled with garlic in one bowl. rice in another. life can be simple. my mom used to cook the snot out of everything and ended up with vegetable juice with a few boiled vegetable skins floating in it. you couldnt save the best for last because there was no best to get to. ah dried up fish sticks and peas boiled into submission with blackened bottoms where the water boiled away for 5 minutes while she wasn’t looking. and then of course the was wonder bread. what order do you eat that in?

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    2. What! Nice fresh vegetables taste very good all by themselves as far as I’m concerned. Too much cooking certainly isn’t good.

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      1. You are right, Jim. They have to be good and fresh, though – what a difference between peas fresh from the garden (preferably eaten raw while you’re still in the garden) and a can of peas!

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    3. I’m not sure you can call those vegetables after your mom was done cooking them. Sounds like they bear no resemblance to their originals as found in the garden.

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    4. Anyone else grow up with a mother who pressure cooked everything? It’s a wonder I ever learned to love any vegetables after that!

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  11. Wonderful, Steve – glad to see someone more compulsive than I am. I’m afraid I’m one of the “save the best till last” bunch. It comes out mostly in how I organize my day/week. I don’t allow myself to read till the “chores” are done, and the chores are everything else. Which means many days I don’t get around to reading. You’d think after a while I’d catch on! Maybe this could be my new years resolution – to read a little first, so I make sure to get some reading in.

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    1. Oooh! Those are cutting words! “I’m glad to see someone more compulsive than I am.” So there isn’t a debate about my being sane — the only question is how messed up I am!

      Actually, I enjoy playing head games with all aspects of life, making bets, making bargains, making predictions. Keeps things interesting.

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      1. 3 to one you end up doing stuff just because there is a bet in place. its fun trying to come up with something to bet on and placing odds at an appropriate level to cover it. i ave guys who bet on where the baseball is going to end up when it is tossed back out to the pitchers pound between innings. the grass, the dirt, up on top of the mound etc and the odds are different for where it lands during your inning. we used to sit in the club house at the end of a round of golf and bet if there would would be a guy in the next foursome who had a golf glove anything but white. huge extra money if it was a color other than black.how many rocks to hit a telephone line. ever play lagging for quarters in the hall. my sons friends thought that was great when we got shanghaied in an airport for extended hours with a baseball team ( the coaches weren’t to hot on the idea but they were kind of nerdy guys anyhow) you can drop paper clips to ge tnear a spot on the floor. boredom is only for the unimaginative.

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  12. Very interesting post. Thanks, Steve.

    I think I used to be more of a “save the best for last” type person, but as my self-discipline has disintegrated over the decades, that has changed. Unfortunately, when it comes to food, that has bad consequences – I’ve gained a fair amount of weight, a good chunk of it from last summer when it was too hot to even move (so I didn’t) and nothing but ice cream seemed to satisfy (so I ate some at least once a day).

    I’ve also gotten tired of delayed gratification (which seems related to saving the best for last). It dawned on me a few years ago that most of my adult life has been one of delayed gratification. Have the opportunity for a trip? Better to use that money for home remodeling. Have some free time? Better use it to accomplish something – don’t waste it by going to a movie or something frivolous like that. It seems like often if I promise myself some sort of reward for “good” behavior i.e. accomplishing something, then by the time I accomplished the task, then I don’t have the time or energy to reward myself. Or the task is so big that I never finish it and so don’t get to the reward.

    One time this past year, I had an onerous task that had to be done and I was going to reward myself after I finished it. But I couldn’t make myself get started on the dreaded task. So I goofed off – did some fun things. And then, the dreaded task didn’t seem so bad and I dove into it with gusto. So for me, at least sometimes, rewards first can work.

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  13. Just realize I’m the opposite with the Sunday Paper, I do my favorites first. Mine ritual is: comics first, (but front page, back page, then forward from there so I have my favorites on page 2 last!) 🙂 Then Homes, Travel, Twin Cities, OpEd, and sometimes I don’t even get to the front page and business.

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  14. To try to make order of what I do might be madness – I am a mix it all together kinda gal, some of the yummy stuff with the less yummy stuff. Comics first (always), then the rest of the stuff – but sometimes news comes first. I try to salt in the tasks I like better at work with those that are less fun, same at home. If I try the trick of “if you do this odious thing I will reward myself with this fabulous thing” it sometimes backfires – as noted by some of you…sometimes it works, sometimes not. Dessert pretty much always comes last at a meal, but that doesn’t keep me from snitching a bit of really good cheese or a little taste of something while I’m prepping the meal. Yesterday’s sledding with Daughter came in between some necessary tasks and some other treats (after cinnamon rolls and a morning when I could sleep in, also after some household tasks, but before I sat down to finally address my holiday letters…which is both a task and an enjoyment…see, I can’t even keep my onerous tasks and treats separated…).

    Another morning of sleeping in today, and probably won’t get much necessary stuff done. First up after I convince myself to get out of jammies (which is becoming an increasingly onerous task) is to go with Daughter down to The Works (a smallish science/engineering hands-on museum – last time we went we got to make small catapults for shooting cotton balls…), which will be a fun treat for both of us. They have fun little bug robots that you program to go through a maze, and stuff you can build, and fun with circuits and…not sure who has more fun when we go, Daughter or me. 🙂

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    2. One of the joys of being self-employed is the working in the jammies! The only down-side is the unexpected visitor who knocks on my door mid-afternoon and catches me. I always feel the need to explain myself to them… REALLY, I’ve been working!

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      1. reminds me of the woman who like to work in the nude in her home office. she kept the heat turned up and was quite comfortable going about the daily routine without being encumbered by clothing.
        one afternoon she was doing some research on her laptop the doorbell rang and she went to see who it was and looked out the peephole in the door. there she saw a man in the doorway with his back turned to the door.
        ” who is it?” she asked. ”
        “blind man” was the reply.
        well she thought, as long as he has no vision i dont need to be bothered covering up. so she opened the door and he looked with eyes as big as saucers.
        “hey lady where do you want to hang these blinds?”

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  15. Greetings! Generally, I’m a “save the best for last” kind of gal. When I was a young child, my food could not touch another food on my plate — it was ridiculous. I always ate everything on my plate (my mother’s Catholic guilt trip of “those starving kids in China”), and usually saved my favorite for last. Which occasionally was dangerous in a household with lots of kids. Voracious siblings would see the meat left on my plate as I ate through the vegetables — salivating barbarians, forks poised and ready to spear it if I wasn’t looking. Plus you had to eat fast if you wanted to get any seconds — if there were any left. Mealtime when I was growing up was sometimes a chaotic affair.

    As my older sisters got to be creative teenagers and if Mom and Dad left for a meeting or something — it got wild. Experiments with flatware as trebuchets or catapults would ensue as stuff flew over the table. It probably didn’t happen that often — but those were certainly memorable times.

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    1. i used to have fun with people like you flicking peas into the mashed potatoes and letting the bread touch the corn. oh i was a prankster

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    2. I remember as a kid eating the white “bread” crust first, then rolling that white pasty stuff up in a little ball.

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  18. I just remembered an incident from my childhood that i think was pretty influential to my “can’t wait” attitude. When I was quite young-before I was in Grade 1, my mother bought a really nice shorts and tops outfit for me to wear, but wouldn’t let me wear it except for some vague and unspecified special occasion. I could hardly wait to wear it, and when a special enough occasion rolled around, wouldn’t you know that I had outgrown the outfit! I distinctly remember yelling at my mother in my disappointment and disgust for not letting me wear the outfit sooner. She just smiled at me, thinking I was cute or something. By, was I mad!

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    1. my mom used to buy sunday clothes she wanted us to wear and i would laugh when i only got one wear out of them before she had to go get another outfit for the next occasion. christmas easter first communion or some such celebratory event required suit coat presentation. i loved wearing black loafers and beat the crap out of them in no time at all. way cool in my black slip ons. my brother goody goody never scuffed his shoes or wore them out and always preferred sneakers to street shoes. he was not nearly the chick magnet i was in our youth.when i travel i tend to save the good shirts for special days and wear the regular shirts for everyday stuff. i have an interesting combination of zero give a dang and kind of wanting to have an excuse to wear nice stuff. i do get ticked with myself when i do stuff like changing the oil in my car in my good sports coat.

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      1. After my father in law passed away I was cleaning out his closet. Full of suits (I think he kept out growing them) but in the pocket of each there would be a pen, a church bulletin or funeral bulletin and some sort of hard candy. I had to laugh, I mean we’re talking dozen of suits.

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    2. I, too, grew up with Sunday clothes. Usually outgrew them way before they were worn out or even broken in. Same thing for new shoes. As a matter of fact, I remember feeling guilty about outgrowing shoes and wearing them when they were hurting my feet.

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  20. I’m all over the place with this one. It depends on what I’m doing.

    I read the paper straight through, front to back.When it comes to work or play, I’ve always felt the need to get the work done first. I’m a little more like VS in this way. I’d hate to have to go back and finish something after the fun has started. I’m trying to be more disciplined when it comes to food, but I’m a pretty serious sugar junkie and those cravings can weaken the strongest resolve.

    When eating M&Ms, I eat all the brown ones first, then orange, then yellow. This leaves blue, red and green, which I enjoy looking at instead of eating. When I do eat the blue, red and green ones, I make sure there are equal numbers of each color. I hope this isn’t some kind of pathology or something…

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    1. I used to do that equalization thing with M&M’s, but without eliminating three colors first – I just wanted equal quantities of all six colors and then the universe was in balance. I think I stopped when they stopped making the tan ones and replaced them with blue. At that point chaos just took over and M&M’s would never be orderly again.

      Come to think of it, everything else started disintegrating into chaos at about the same time. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

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    2. sometimes its really scary knowing what goes on in other peoples heads and to discover it goes on in a relatively large percentage of their heads makes me understand why i don’t understand so often

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  21. For the most part I go right for the thing that has the most appeal, certainly with food and especially with e-mail, and paper mail too for that matter.

    I do remember a time, though, when I used to read the Sunday comics from back to front, because Bloom County was on the front page, and I saved that one for last. And sometimes, just sometimes, I eat the asparagus tips last.

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      2. Does a magazine make sense when you read it from back to front? There was a movie like that a number of years ago, where they started at the end and worked backwards. I was very confused by it.

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      1. I am VERY left-handed. So can you let the pages slip by with your left hand, instead of turning each over. Get what I mean. I am in a fog, so I leave it to you to figure out.

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  22. new years resolution . franklins 13 virtues. gonna plug it in. this disapline steve has for the topic today will be dealt with along the line i am certain. 13 times will get me our does of each this year.and a little lesson to carry with me until it comes around again. been meaning to do this for years. this is the year .tempernce is the starter and i can handle that this week. silence next week will be a bitch. but there must be a lesson in there somewhere.

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  23. Evening!
    I’m just catching up for the day. There are so many great comments through out the day I hardly know where to begin.
    Very interesting story Steve and I’ve never seen a watermelon eaten like that. Sorta crazy in a good way.
    I don’t think I have a hard rule on this. Mostly I like order and specific ways of doing things but sometimes I feel the need to shake things up and I’ll eat dessert first. Life is short you know.
    And fashion; cotton, two pocket, button up shirts, solid colors. Sleeves are optional (but usually cut off). Although at my families Christmas I wore a yellow shirt, with sleeves and my pink John Deere hat. My son refused to be associated with me.
    Per tim regarding boredom: absolutely, you are RIGHT ON! Just last week the whole family was at MOA. While daughter and I waited for son and Mom we rode some of the escalators all the way up to the top, then all the way back down. Again, son rolled his eyes at me. And I told him again, ‘You have to amuse yourself or what’s the point?’

    Great stuff people–

    Just getting the friendship bread out of the oven and the house smells terrific!

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  24. When you are drinking wine, you should probably open the best bottle first. By the time you get to the last one you’re less particular.

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    1. John 2:7 Jesus said unto them, “Fill the waterpots with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. 8And He said unto them, “Draw some out now, and bear it unto the governor of the feast.” And they took it. 9When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, not knowing from whence it had come (but the servants who drew the water knew), the governor of the feast called the bridegroom 10and said unto him, “Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine, and when men have drunk well, then that which is worse; but thou hast kept the good wine until now.”

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      3. “We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”
        – Benjamin Franklin

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