fail-fail-succeed. it's the new duck-duck-goose.

so last week this was in the newsbulletin at work:

Fishbowl Wanted
Need a one-gallon fishbowl.
Call Betty Sue at x0000.

i am considering calling betty sue [name changed to protect the idiot] to tell her about the dollar general store. i do wonder what's going on with betty sue's fish. would this one-gallon fishbowl be a step up or a step down? are they a growing family looking for a place to spread out? did they get in over their gills and have to swim away from the mortgage on that five-gallon baby with the castle and little diver man?

so last month i made some banana bread and it didn't come out exactly right. it looked okay at first, but it sort of fell and became a bit compressed and if not exactly soggy, well simply too moist. i thought i had taken it out of the oven too soon. i made some more and virtually the same thing happened but i put it down to taking it out too soon again, and also thought i might not have gotten the bananas totally mixed in well. (it's also possible the harvest gold oven is dying.) tonight, i made another loaf. it's in the oven now and i will be leaving it in there until it is very nearly burned, thank you, but this time, i was out of non-stick spray and didn't have quite enough butter for the recipe, much less any to spare for to grease the pan. so i had to short the recipe a wee bit on butter and use parchment paper in the pan, giving me two whole brand new excuses for failure.

so last weekend i was down to the shopping center to pick up the pizza from jet's [bbq chicken pizza, probably completely terrible for us, too bad!] when i saw something that fascinated me. here, take a look:

can you see what they did there? they parked some grass! they reclaimed part of the parking lot as green space. you can tell it's reclaimed by the way the curb runs there behind the grass. this is just absolutely fabulous. they looked out at the parking lot and saw that it was too big, so they reclaimed one entire row at the back. i am so not a fan of parking lots. how many times do you see a parking lot full? the last time i remember a full parking lot was when i was a teenager and there was one mall in town and everyone went to it at the winter solticefest and it usually took a good 20 mins or so of driving around just to find a parking spot. but that was [insert insanely large number here] years ago. now there are just too many parking lots and most are half or more empty all the time. i don't know how to get it started, but i am going to see about a campaign to get businesses to park some grass.