apropos of anything

It seems the Lord has given up on the mysterious ways and now speaketh via enormous vaulted signs, at least on GA 316 from Atlanta to Athens. He’s awfully informal and terribly lax on the capitalization. “Don’t make me come down there,” says the billboard. You’d think grammar wouldn’t be a problem for the Almighty.

Further down the road, there’s the occasional billboard beseeching parents to give the same consideration to their children’s eternity as they do to their education (what with 316 being the Road to UGA and all, even supposing that if parents truly cared about their children’s education, they’d be sending them Georgia Tech instead), and a couple of billboards about Sunday church services. I always thought you could easily see the red state side of Georgia in Atlanta, and even more in Augusta, but neither of those teeming metropolises have anything on Winder, Braselton, and the like. I saw more “W the President” stickers in a few hours than I think I’ve seen in the entire last year. I loathe the “W the President” stickers, so much that if I see one on the car of somebody who’s trying to merge or turn into my lane, I won’t let them.

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There was a summer when I was in high school, I can’t remember which, when Musab, Sumaiya, and Muneeb came to visit for a few weeks. One afternoon, my mother made Sumaiya and me peel and devein shrimp as part of her efforts to train us “properly.” (Other similar attempts included sewing lessons and enforced cross-stitching.) We hated it because the boys were outside, doing goodness knows what, while we pulled urinary tracts out of crustaceans that left bits of their legs on our fingers. Sumaiya swore she was going to put it in the marriage contract that her husband would have to peel and devein his own shrimp, and I have since run speedily in the other direction whenever somebody so much as mentions raw shrimp.

Yesterday, though, I actually did it semi-voluntarily (the semi because when I bought the shrimp, I thought the giant slit on top meant they’d been deveined already)… and it’s not as bad as I remember it. Either that means I’m growing up and learning better how to deal with responsibilities, or raw shrimp isn’t so bad once you’ve spent an afternoon cleaning three chickens and the next three days working the smell of chicken guts out of your fingernails.

Not that I’m planning on cooking shrimp every week, or anything.

I also made AM’s Summer Berry Pie last night. I’d actually bought the berries last week so I could make it for Sumaiya, but I didn’t get a chance to do it, what with my perpetual lack of sugar. When you have almost two pounds of berries, though, you can’t exactly let them get moldy in the refrigerator, so I finally remembered to buy sugar and made the pie anyway. It’s not exactly AM’s pie. For one thing, mine’s not as good. I glossed over a few steps, being too rushed to take as much time with it as she did, which means it’s not as shiny, nor as seed-free. I think mine is crumblier, too; that’s actually the one part I don’t understand, as I’m fairly certain we both used the same amount of crumbs and the same tablespoons of butter.

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After pushing it off for months, I’ve managed to schedule an eye exam for Monday afternoon. I’m so desperately in need of one that I’m looking forward to it, even though the doctor is most likely going to look sternly at me and lecture for fifteen minutes. I think this time around I’m going to ask for a glasses prescription in addition to the contacts prescription so I can wear glasses on the weekends and let my eyes breathe a little. I haven’t worn glasses since… the tenth grade, I think. They were too big for my face, a la Steve Urkel, and I hated them, but I’d hate even more to damage my eyes permanently.

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