Today is Friday. Whew. Another week under the belt.

Dick always takes Chelsea in for a nap in the mornings which on Friday's gives me a chance to clean the kitchen and get floors scrubbed and dry without little or big feet tromping on it.

I left at about 11:00 to go into Sheboygan Falls before my lunch with the Wells Fargo people at Dairy Queen at 12:30. I stopped at Evens to pick up some iron appliques for a small repair job and then went to Mother's to drop off her money, some papers and the quilt that I made for new little Elizabeth Neeb. As soon as I am sure that Becky has seen the quilt I will post a picture on the blog.

On the way home I was listening to public talk radio. The moderator was interviewing a man about the dangerous Lion Fish. This fish originally was in Australia or somewhere and is a fish who's stingers, even if they only brush your skin leave a very very painful rash.

For some reason or other, this reminded me of my Dad. Dad LOVED plants. At one time he had a real obsession with cactus. Mother still has a lot of the cacti that he collected (sometimes "illegally") over the years. She kind of wishes they would die. But we Deeley's somehow or other cannot bring ourselves to just throw out living things, even old and rather raggedy cactus so she brings them outside in late spring and hauls them back in to the basement in the late fall. Actually, Jeff or Randy do the hauling now.

For years unusual Cactus were a nice gift to give Dad for his birthday and/or Christmas. You would be very surprised, if you have not looked, at the variety that are out there and how lovely they can be. Some of them even bloom.

By "illegally" I mean that he was known to break off a piece to start at home of plants that he would see that were interesting in public buildings.

One year he came out to visit me when I lived out in California. We took him out to the High Desert to visit a friend of my in laws and to do some jeeping. He was in his glory, collecting cactus and rocks to bring back home. This was just fine until it came time to take him to the airport. I offered to box his treasures up and send them but he insisted that he wanted to take them with him. So we packed them. I could not lift the suitcase. Then to add insult to injury, He looked at me and asked. " Whatever do you have in there?" Between him and my ex we managed to get them to the airport and checked in. Wonder of wonders they let them go through. I was frankly amazed. Now days they would have looked and probably told him he couldn't take them.

Now for the reason that the Lion Fish reminded me of cactus. There IS a reason.

Nora and I always had the job of dusting and cleaning the glass shelves that Mom and Dad had in all of the windows of the dining room. These shelves had various plants, ranging from African Violets to cactus. There was one cactus that we SWORE you just had to look at to get the little tiny stickers embedded in you skin. I don't know what it was but we called it the Killer Cactus. I never once managed to dust those shelves without getting those mini spines in my fingers.

Have a nice Saturday. We are going to see Michael Feldman at the Weill Center. Should be a fun morning.

Love

Mary