This statue is standing on a cube labeled Jack Daniel. I’m not sure what the rainbow mustache means.

UPDATE: chili essay related to yesterday’s chili (and today’s leftovers) added to Food Fun as a wordy recipe….

Display at the MSU Museum….

Cold wind felt like it penetrated my skin as we walked to the library, making us prefer east-west to north-south streets. Saw a dandelion and a periwinkle in bloom. Poor things. Gonna be cold tonight (for here).

This was much too good not to post….

…and it is not referring to the latest Survivor winner, Sophie Clarke, either, whom the venerable Ozzy called a spoiled…you guessed it.

Whenever you have the chance, attend a multicultural, multiethnic holiday party, and if you are very, very lucky, you will see a cake as lucky and as artistic as this one.

Thank you, Xander. And everyone else.

Once upon a time…reflective glass balls…pretty much summed up the (Western/Christian) world. At this time of the year.

We found this display on the counter next to the cash register in the sushi restaurant we tried for the first time at lunch. Actually, this is just the top part of it. Water enters this reservoir, and drips down into the pools below. But, here, at the top, in the “shell,” there’s a plastic ball spinning in the flowing water that does a credible job of looking like a “pearl.”

Kinda cool to see this bubbly contraption once, but I wouldn’t want to live with one!

When I left to walk to the library shortly after lunch, the sky was spitting rain. A quarter of the way there, I thought I was seeing a white tinge to the drops. I soldiered (shouldered?) on, head down.

I got very good news at the library. Not long ago I forgot a library book in a no-name motel somewhere. The desk, when we (meaning the Kind Guru) made inquiries, said they only had a bodice-ripper in the lost-and-found.

Oh, no!

Anyway, since my lost book was a paperback, catalogued as a generic paperback, I can bring in another paperback, and they will take that in exchange for wiping my lending record clean.

Yippee.

Then, I walked out of the library…and the precip stopped within two-dozen steps. And half-way home, the sun tried to come out.*

I’m very lucky. Twice.

* Is this Michigan weather (as in “…wait five minutes”) visiting the Deep South?

For reasons that are a total mystery to me, Piedmont Park now hosts a carousel. The installation looks temporary, but today we found it…totally empty, unpowered, with leaves freshly drifted around the safety fence.

Such regal horses….

Sometimes the light is working for you.

Sometimes the light is there and branches are in the way.

And sometimes you keep looking, and you find light there and branches not there, and you know that luck is on your side.

I remember working in rural SC umpff years ago, and the liquor stores were closed if the polls were open. They know their priorites over in SC.

No, this is part of a line of restaurants, bars, clothing shops, and other stores, nearly all of them with promotions of some kind advertised in the window. This place went the other direction, advertising their cutback, admittedly in the slot where the band-of-the-day was supposed to be touted.

This is what I learned walking home from the polls.