Them Damn Mexicans

I think I'm honestly becoming afraid of some people...

I was at the Fort Wright Wal-Mart yesterday looking to buy some produce (and as a side note, let me say that the produce at that Wal-Mart was unbelievably nasty. I already would NEVER consider buying meat from a Wal-Mart. Now I guess I'll have to add produce to that. Anyway...). I needed some jalapeno peppers for a homemade salsa I wanted to make. There weren't any jalapeno peppers, but I found a package of small, mixed orange and yellow peppers, and I started to pick them up when a man I didn't know grabbed my hand and said, "Don't buy those!"

"Why not?" I asked. Considering the state of the rest of the produce in the store, I thought maybe he knew they were bad or something.

"Because," he said as he poked a finger in my face, "it says right there on them, 'Product of Mexico.' Don't buy nothin' from them damn Mexicans--sneaking into our country and stealing our jobs!"

I looked at the man blankly for a few seconds, waiting for him to crack a smile and say that he was kidding. But the smile never came. Instead, his eyes got wider, as if he were waiting for me. So I blinked a couple of times, and then I said, "Uh, you know, these peppers are a PRODUCT of Mexico. That means that they were grown IN Mexico by Mexicans who did NOT sneak into this country. I'm helping them keep their jobs in MEXICO by buying these peppers."

"I don't care about none of that," the man said to me as he shook his head and turned away, probably assuming I was a lost cause. "I won't buy nothin' from them damn Mexicans."

And we let people like that vote in America!

Band Performance

So my older daughter is in 8th grade this year, and it's her first year in marching band. This weekend has been exciting for her and for us. First, last night the band performed half of their show at halftime of the first football game of the season, and this evening, after a full day practice, they had the official "Parent Preview Show." After a band booster picnic in the school cafeteria we all tromped out to the football field to watch the full show. It was exciting stuff.

Below is a video of Friday night's performance. Sorry the video quality isn't great, but I shot it with my digital still camera, which doesn't do that great with video. But for the out of town grandparents, at least you can get an idea of what it was like to be there.

I'll shoot a higher quality shot later in the season when they're all dressed up in their uniforms and have perfected the rough spots.



(I can't see the video.)

Update: My Daughter's Melons

The last time I made a post about my younger daughter's garden I mentioned that we were SICK of cucumbers, but that we had no signs of life AT ALL on the watermelon vines we were growing. A month and a half later, and things have changed quite a bit.

First of all, the cucumbers are GONE. We have one left in our refrigerator drawer, but the cuke vine shriveled up about four weeks ago and they're all gone. All said and done, we ended up with about 60 or so cucumbers, and we ended up eating about 40 or so of those ourselves.

The watermelon, meanwhile, finally started growing. I actually told Natalie that I was ready to give up on the watermelon, and I was going to pull up the vines because no melons were coming and they were growing into everything else, even making their way across the sidewalk and into our neighbor's yard, and through the fence and into the back yard. So I went to pull them up, but there was a single melon, about the size of my thumb, growing. And we finally picked that melon yesterday. And there are more on the way.

Here are some photos.