Happy Monday

One of the things I just love about working at the garden store is it's filled with people like me. Not personality-wise, I mean, but hardly anyone there would qualify as the cool kid in school. We all have our quirks and foibles and nobody even blinks an eye. In fact, our eyes don't blink so much, all the eccentricities are welcomed warmly into the fold.

I make my peanut-butter-and-jam sandwiches, er, a little differently from most people. It all started from when I went to summer camp as a kid. Because of the risk of peanut allergies (and it wasn't alarmist like it is today; today, it seems like there are noisy neon signs that blink Danger! Danger! Danger! anytime someone even says the p-word), we had to use one knife for the peanut butter and another for the jam. We also had our own knife at our own place setting that we could use to mix the two together, but only once the peanut butter had made it safely onto the toast on our plate.

This all seemed like far too much work to me, using one knife to smooth peanut butter onto toast, a second to glop jam on, and a third to spread the two together into what was supposed to resemble a picture-perfect breakfast sandwich, so I made up my own method. I spread peanut butter on one side, jam on the other, scored a line down the middle, and folded it. It was the perfect mix of peanut butter with jam, and because I'd folded it, there was the bonus of added neatness because sticky jam fingers are just the worst.

This habit has been with me for, oh, about two decades. Every time I make a peanut-butter-and-jam sandwich in front of someone- even my family, they all look at me a little weird. An eyebrow inevitably goes up, and a comment usually follows, something along the lines of, "Do you want to talk about this? Is anything bothering you?" No, nothing's wrong and no, I don't need to talk about anything. Some habits just die hard.

My mom and I frequently make coffee bets, the likes of which I'm down by three coffees at this point. Our latest one is whether or not the waterlogged pot will still be hospitable to the lonely Dusty Miller and marigold that didn't completely die in there. When I say waterlogged, I don't just mean the water in the soil hasn't fully evaporated; I mean that an Olympic-sized swimming pool is dryer than this pot.

I'm feeling pretty good with my chances on this one.