The news on NPR this morning made me bounce with glee as I drove in to work.

There is a semi-famous (or possible infamous) statue a couple of miles south of here on I-75 that is known as the Touchdown Jesus statue, because of the way that Jesus has his arms up in an “It’s good!” sort of gesture.  Whenever John and I would drive past it, we would also throw our hands up in the air and proclaim, “It’s good!”.  (The megachurch that is associated with the statue is also semi-infamous, and I have heard rumors of drug associations and money laundering, as well as other things.)

Anyway.  It seems that the Touchdown Jesus statue was struck by lightning during a storm last night and burned to the ground.  Let me just repeat that because I think that the irony is just too delicious.  A statue of Jesus was struck by lightning and burned to the ground.

Here is an article about it.

And here it is on YouTube.

I guess it went up so easily and burned so thoroughly because it was made of molded plastic and fiberglass and not (as I had assumed) concrete or something a bit more durable.

I kind of want to drive down that way now, so that I can gawk at the smoking ruins.

And in just breaking news, John made a tiny little micro cannon for the boat and called me downstairs to watch him fire it.

He milled it out of a section of brass rod, and yes, it really fires.  You put a little wick in the hole near the closed end, pour in a little bit of black powder (triple-7, actually), tamp it in with a little brass rod, put in a bebe, tamp that in, and then balance it on the back step and touch a grill lighter to the wick.  POP!  We think that the bebes were at least clearing the patio, though we couldn’t tell if we were actually hitting anything other then the ground.  There is really no good way of actually aiming the micro cannon.

Now we just need a swivel mount, and a boat to mount it to.

Heh.

John comes up with the coolest things sometimes….

It has been raining a lot here lately.  On one hand, that is a good thing, because it means that we have had to turn on the weeper hose to water the vegetable garden exactly once since we planted everything.  And on the other hand, it is annoying because lots of rain has caused high humidity, which in turn has caused us to turn on the a/c a lot earlier and a lot more frequently then I normally like to.

The garden is doing great.  All of the tomato plants have green tomatoes.  (Rather disappointingly, the early girl tomatoes didn’t flower and start to fruit any earlier then the rest of them.)  The bell peppers all have several one-quarter to half-ripe peppers.  The zucchini and eggplants are flowering.  The banana peppers have some just-about-ripe looking peppers.  We have already started to use the fresh herbs.  The cats love the fresh catnip.  And two fresh jalapeno peppers have made their way into a stir fry.

The berry bushes on the other hand look kind of sickly.  And today while I was weeding I spotted just one half-ripe raspberry.  Maybe they just need a year or so to grow bigger and they will produce well next year?  Or maybe they will just all die before next year?  Or maybe it just isn’t even close to berry season yet and I should stop wondering.  Who knows.  Only time will tell.

If you were to watch me working in the gardens in the summer, you will observe that for someone who professes to hate weeding and to prefer “the wild look” (for the flowerbeds at least) that I seem to actually do a lot of weeding.  Well, I do do a lot of weeding, and I do generally dislike it, and tend to not do it as much as possible.  However, there are some things that I will always pull out of the ground:

• dandelions
• those things that look kind of like dandelions but have spiky leaves
• crab grass
• inappropriate grass, which is lawn grass that is not in the lawn
• this kind of fast-growing, low slung yard-creeper stuff that will take over if you let it
• clover (or some kind of clover-like thing)
• anything in the herb/vegetable garden that is not an herb or a vegetable

Usually I just throw the weeds on the middle of the lawn, where they will be chopped up by the lawn mower.

Usually I weed just once a week (or so) for about an hour at a time, so I guess that I can’t complain about it too much.

Last night I woke up sometime very early in the morning to the sounds of something scrabbling around in the master bathroom.  I didn’t know what it was, but I was sleepy and in no mood to get out of bed to investigate, so I dismissed it as “one of the cats playing”, and fell back asleep.

This morning, we couldn’t find Percival.  He shows up sometime during the morning shower-coffee-computer routine for a little bit of petting and playing, so it was unusual for him to be AWOL.  Then I remembered the scrabbling sounds that woke me up the night before, and went to check the bathroom window.  The screen was loose and pushed out a little bit.

When we open the windows to let in the breeze, we open them at the top, and only open them a couple of inches at the bottom.  This is because Percival likes to reach up to the windowsill, hook his paws in the opening, and haul himself up to look out.  Sometimes he will try to squeeze his head into the opening.  So, we try to keep the bottom of the windows open only a few inches, so he can’t get out.

The window in the master bathroom is kind of small, and about 4.5 feet off the floor, so we weren’t as worried about it.  How could Percival get all of the way up to it?

Well, he did somehow.

And the garage roof runs under the master bathroom window.  The scrabbling that woke me up must have been him trying to get back inside after he squeezed out and the loose screen closed behind him.

Long story short, and happy ending.

John found him again pretty easily.  He had gotten down off of the garage roof somehow and was huddled up under a piece of plywood next to the shed.

The window in the master bathroom is now open only about a half-inch on the bottom.

Percival tried to follow me out onto the back deck this afternoon, so it seems that he has already forgotten how freaked-out he was by the wet, pre-dawn, outdoors this morning.