Thursday, November 17, 2005

Waiting Waiting for my Trophy

If you’re looking for a serious article about politics, war, taxes or the “main stream” pundit blog; you won’t find it as I ramble on about an award I received this past week.
I’d visited one of my regular stomping grounds, Old Whig’s Brain Dump, and left a silly comment of nearly no social redeeming value to let him know I’d visited. It turns out that there is some kind of glitch in the software that records the URL; extending and adding characters into the address, mine having a “double http://”.

I guess there are many things that he could have considered; however, nominating me for an award was not on my list as I read that I had received the “Boner Award”. I immediately called my mom to let her know that I’d won another trophy to put on the shelf. I don’t get too many trophies so almost anything is worthy of being placed on the trophy shelf; lost buttons from my shirt that get picked up, a can of Office Depot Duster to keep my keyboard clean or my replacement ink for the printer.

I’ve written on the subject of Trophies before and acknowledged that some have much more meaning than others. If you have a chance use the link and read my short story, Looking for an old photograph, that I wrote back in January, one of my personal favorite pieces.

I once received the “Chili Cook Off Boot Trophy”. I was to represent the Sunday School organization at our yearly Go Texan social. I wore my cowboy boots; something reserved for that one day a year because they make my feet sore, along with a pair of starched and pressed cowboy cut blue jeans. I did spend a few minutes in the kitchen with a can opener to take the lids off some chili cans preparing my “entry”.

Technically I had a part in the making of that chili since it came from the Church Cannery where Lucy and I had been line workers during its production. Lucy had purchased the top sirloin meat at a market down on Shepherd which would make it superior to the store bought stuff; she was right, great tasting chili. How could I go wrong, put the canned chili in a large cooking pot, warm it up and “Wa-ha, parder!”. In case you missed it, that was my John Wayne sound effects; oh shut up, it did too sound like him.

I left the kitchen for only a few minutes, enough for Lucy to ask, “What’s burning?” and returned to find that I had set the heating element under my pot a tad too high. I quickly turned it down, stirred the stuff around so that the burned part would be evenly mixed. I thought it made it taste more “authentic”, kind of a smoky over the open fire touch. I never thought it would win an award. Several folks who’d eaten it complained that they didn’t feel so good, not a good thing when you’re going for the “gold”.


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I keep my Boot trophy on the shelf, right there with my hard copy edition of Collier’s Encyclopedia. For you younger folks, think of it as the version that works with Windows 1950. Lucy says we should get rid of them and use that space for something else; but, that would be like throwing away a piece of history.

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