The Goated Earth

I'm sure you're all on the edge of your seat, waiting to see the outcome of today's lottery ticket(s). You've probably been sitting there all night, falling asleep in front of your keyboard. I'm not the only person who still uses a desktop computer, am I? Because my mom had one that made my New Delly running Windows 7 Professional look like a state-of-the-art contraption that nobody would EVER call with an accent to tell me that it had a problem and they needed my credit card information to fix it. Uh huh.

My mom used to fall asleep in front of her desktop, too. She said she would wake up with her right arm stretched out, and her head laying on that bicep. Okay. Mom never said "bicep," of course. What do you think she was, an anatomy professor? Nope. Fourth grade teachers don't talk like that.

The way she described it, I'm pretty sure Mom made a prettier sleeping computer beauty than I. Because when I fall asleep at my New Delly, my head slumps over. It's like I'm sitting normally, but my chin tries to fall on my chest (a soft pillow, to be sure), so it's probably kind of frightening to stumble upon me like that. I think The Pony did that pretty often, and it must have scared several years of maturity out of him. He would go back out of my dark basement lair, and holler, "MOM? HEY MOM?" Since I don't have a door to knock on, you know. I guess he though maybe I'd expired, and he didn't want to come too close and make sure.

Anyhoo...what was going on here? I might have nodded off for a moment. Oh, yeah. The lottery. Well,

Maybe we could best describe it in terms of SCORCHED EARTH. Okay. No need to be so sensational. Let's just describe it as GOATED EARTH. Imagine it, if you will. A landscape kind of like THIS:

Nothing grows in a goat pen. Well. It DOES. But as soon as it grows, the goat eats it. So you are left with trampled-down dirt, and rocks that even goats won't eat, and trees with the bark eaten off of them, and a feeder for holding hay that goats purely love to headbutt and destroy, and most likely nibble on that metal roof of it when feeling a mite peckish.

Farmer H took that picture to show a tree that blew down during our latest storm on Sunday night. I wasn't really sure what tree he was trying to show me. But I think it's the one behind the foreground log. If you look closely, it has a splintered trunk.

Anyhoo...what was the subject today? Oh, yeah. My addiction wonderful scratch-off tickets. I did NOT have a $100 winner today. Can you believe that? I'm shocked. SHOCKED, I tell you! I bought the ticket, but it was a LOSER!!! I did, however, win $20 on its companion. I plan to trade that in and pony-up ten more bucks to get another big ticket on the way to Oklahoma. No need to dial back on the lottery tickets when you're headed for a (or 8-10) casino(s).

That losing ticket would probably taste like a delicacy to Billy the goat.