Yesterday completely got away from me as I am trying to take care of a number of things before I leave on my trip. We always watch Jeopardy and before the show started, Hubby said a rumor was going around that the reigning, record-breaking champ would be beaten. I’m not sure who leaked the news, but it validates the concept of, “Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead”. There are things that are difficult to keep to oneself.

Anyway, if there happens to be someone who didn’t know, the guy as champ had won for 30+ days, racking up more than $2 million. He was short of beating the highest winning record by $60,000; however, he achieved his amount in half the time of the record holder and he broke the record at least once of the highest single day amount. The guy created quite a controversy because he is a professional sports gambler. He also has an incredible body of knowledge and made few errors. He knew some really obscure things. He bet aggressively and often hit all the “doubles”. That was his actual undoing last night as he got the first “double” so early in the game, he couldn’t bet much extra. His female opponent got both in Double Jeopardy and answered them correctly. Both opponents basically matched his pattern of going after the high dollar clues first and in the entire game, there was only one wrong answer. That is not something you see often.

Quite simply, he usually outplayed his opponents by a factor of about 10:1. You had to feel a bit sorry for people who finally get their shot at Jeopardy and came up against someone like him. One of his habits was to bet odd numbers for final jeopardy, and Alex of course asked about that after several days. Each number he bet was done to add to his total to give an ending number that had some personal significance to him. It will be interesting to see if the new champ continues to play in this pattern or if she will follow the more traditional method of going through the clues without deliberately seeking out the “doubles”.

For we Baby Boomers, most of us remember when there were no fitted sheets. The first ones were created around 1960 and didn’t become widely available for a while. Aside from the fact you weren’t allowed to have them in Army Basic since one of the things you learned was to tuck a sheet so tightly you really could bounce a coin off the bed, they were probably a little more expensive. Anyway, as their popularity grew there came a change in design that puzzles me. For a long time, only the corners were fitted which did make it easier to pop the corners down and you were done. Somewhere along the line, they started elasticizing all sides of the sheet and it is more difficult (at least for me) to determine where the ends of the sheet are as opposed to the sides. If one has a round bed it doesn’t matter, but for rectangular, as most people have, it can be confusing. As you may have guessed, in changing the sheets on the guest bed to prepare for my sister’s arrival, I maneuvered the bottom sheet two or three times before I got it right. Perhaps it’s either less expensive or easier to set the machines to apply elastic all around; I can’t think of another reason to do this. I do sometimes have the issue as well of the thickness of the mattress straining the corners of the sheets. I have seen the “deep pocket” fitted sheets which I suppose were created for this purpose. I don’t have such a problem as to seek them out and I imagine they are probably carried mostly in the higher end stores. The other aspect of the elastic all around is in trying to fold them neatly. I admit I don’t put a lot of effort into it, even though I do like my linens to stack well on the shelf. I will also admit this is not an overly important matter; merely one of those things I do occasionally ponder. Maybe I’ll raise it as a topic at Happy Hour this evening. For all I know, someone in the group may have an actual answer.

I don’t recall when I first heard about the variety of short story of Flash Fiction, but I was startled at the time. To limit to no more than 1,000 words doesn’t give much room for character/plot development. Most of my stories run 3,000-plus words and some are longer. (https://charliehudson.net/story.html). In pondering the concept, I thought about the number of song lyrics that in actuality do tell a story and those certainly fall within the guidelines. I decide to take one of my stories, “Walking Away”, to see if I could compress it and still maintain the essence. I did manage to get down to 999 words, although I’m not sure that quite meets the spirit even though the word count does work.

In fact, I haven’t written a short story for a while and for some reason, I am often inspired to do a new one when I am traveling. Perhaps it’s sitting around in airports observing and listening to people. It’s not eavesdropping per se, when you consider how tightly spaced most airport restaurants are and when I’m alone, I always sit at the bar if there is room. Then there are so many people these days who carry on conversations on their cell phones with seemingly little regard for whoever may be listening. As a writer, one absorbs these conversations and next thing you know there will be a scene or character created for some future use. Now, I admit, my short story, “Flight Delay”, was pretty much dedicated to a somewhat whimsical aspect of airport travel. The real truth on that one was based on an event which I did ask permission to use. I was determined to find a way to shape a story around the opening line of, “Last night I spent the evening with a lesbian Wiccan couple.” That’s not as easy to do as you might think.

One of the writers on Twitter sent put a request for folks to also exchange Facebook info and I did. This morning, she posted about hay in their barn and that did bring up the memory of the hayloft in my paternal grandparents’ barn. I have previously posted about my sympathy for the economic plight of family farms balanced by my recognition of why corporate farming is what actually feeds the country. Anyway, in spending part of each summer at the farm in Arkansas, there were certain givens. One was playing in the hayloft. This was of course before we realized how allergic my brother was to such things. Gathering the eggs from the chickens was a fun chore. Unless you have done this, you probably don’t know that when pigs are crowded into the trough feeding, you can stand behind them and pull (gently) the curl out of their tails and watch them curl back up. Sitting on the fence watching Papaw herd the cows back from the pasture in late afternoon was a daily treat, too. Arkansas, by the way, is hot and muggy in the summer and we would definitely nee to wash our sweaty faces more than once a day. Three hefty meals a day was in order, but snacks were mostly taking a ripe tomato from the box Mamaw kept by the back door. There is something special about eating a garden fresh tomato in the same way as you do an apple.

The annual killing of chickens to put up in the freezer was a pretty messy affair and I’m not sure we thought that was fun. There was also a lot of canning that went on and we didn’t help with that so much as we stayed out of the way. In truth, I suppose I did occasionally wonder why it was referred to as “canning” when what you actually use are mason jars.  I imagine there were times we claimed to bored although there generally was plenty going on to keep our attention.