Lick It Up

Because life is brief
and many are the pains
which, living and struggling, everyone sustains,

let us follow our desires,
passing and consuming the years,
because whoever deprives himself of pleasure,
to live with anguish and worries,
doesn't know the tricks
of the world, or by what ills
and by what strange happenings
all mortals are overwhelmed.
--Nicolo Machiavelli, Mandragola
translated by Mera J. Flaumenhaft

Softball tonight. Forecasted thunderstorms seem to be holding off. Last game of the season. The Tribune Deadliners are looking to go undefeated and win back-to-back Fall C League Championships. Really, the title is already in the bag, but we would like to finish 6-0. I certainly will miss playing (until next Spring), but I'm happy to see the seaon come to a successful end. Monkey even got in on the action, playing in a game two weeks ago. It was good to see her back on the field. I'll report the score when I see y'all again.
A good friend of mine, Martha V., has recently called me out for a photo placed in a recent post. She is confused about the scraggly old sofa upon which Ripken and I lay. She thought we threw that one out. She is right, we do have a new sofa. That is an old pic. Sorry, I don't have anything more recent, right now. I am charging the batteries for the digital camera. I will soon post a picture of the new sofa. I hope you like it when you see it. Monkey is very pleased with it.
Speaking of the sofa, Monkey and I have recently jumped on the Lost bandwagon. We have been slowly plowing through rented first season episodes. We are halfway through season one. We have been recording (DVR) the new season, and we don't plan to watch the new ones until we finish all of the old ones. By the third season, we should be watching in real time.
I just finished reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick. Anybody ever read that one? It was the inspiration for the eighties movie Blade Runner, with Harrison Ford, but it must have been a slight inspiration, because I see very little of the movie in the book. I haven't seen the movie in a while. I plan on renting it soon to compare. The book was quite good. I don't really dig on science-fiction, but this book raised a slew of philosophical-type issues that it was fun to think about. Even better, the book raised those issues without beating me over the head. They were just a part of the book, rather than a big didactic diversion in the middle of the plot. I hate that. It's like a musical, where the story is simply humming along, only to stop dead in its tracks so some silly woman can sing a song, the words of which I just can't understand. If I wanted to see costumed people singing songs, I would pop in the video of the Kiss Halloween special from way back when. Dude, that was some scary shit, Kiss.
In order to maintain, at least for this week, the food theme that has inexplicably introduced itself to these ramblings (PB & J on Sunday, Hot Turkey Sandwiches on Monday, Chicken Nuggets on Tuesday), I made a fourteen vegetable stew last night. It was pretty good. It also has pork in it. The recipe left me with a stew, however, that had very little liquid in it. It was more like steamed vegetables. I adjusted it. It is better, but still could use more liquid. Keep that in mind if you ever make fourteen vegetable stew.