Okay, so I'm driving around, trying to get into the Christmas spirit and wondering what I am going to blog about instead of my usual litany of complaints. And I decide today, being the last day before a week or so off, I would announce next year's project, which I have dubbed Mojo's Exciting Year of Crap.

This is how it's (hopefully) going to work, although some of the details are still a bit mushy in Mojo's fertile and creative brain. Once a month or so next year, Mojo is going to resurrect the Craptacular, bigger 'n' better than ever, to excite and entrance my many fans and to (incidentally of course) clear my house of some of the ensuing detritus that has accumulated since the LAST Craptacular.

The whole point of this next year's Craptacular--ooops, sorry, I mean, Mojo's Exciting Year of Crap (gotta get that branding started early, don'tcha know), is that all the money won in the various auctions will be going in an accumulating pot or kitty or whatever I shall call it--right now I'm sort of stuck on "The Vat o' Charity" but I don't think I like that so much. During the year I will be holding special secret contests and trivia games and hidden clues and whatnot, and YOU, the oh-so-excited Participant, shall work your way up through the ranks until the whole muddled mishmash is SOLVED and we all have some freakin' big celebration.  MORE Mojo! »

Today is a mishmash of things. First, Mojo's triumph, yet again! She has once again reigned victorious in a contest to see whose parents embarrassed them the most as teenagers. Mojo just about ALWAYS wins when she brings up her Greek Pottery Story. I'd like to thank my Favorite Father for giving me such an award-winning anecdote of teenaged horror. Thanks, Dad!

Second, I was over someone's house and they have this honkin' big brick patio out the back door. While I was there this squirrel comes down from the trees and starts LICKING THE BRICKS. Very intently. It takes me a while to figure out that they use rock salt to melt the snow and ice from their patio, and the poor little guy likes the salt so much he comes over and licks it off the bricks.

Wild animals will do almost anything for salt. Porcupines will destroy just about anything touched by human hands. For a while I had a salt block out in the yard on an old stump. I never saw the animals ever TOUCH the darned thing, but now that it's melted into the wood they've been chewing on the stump. It's a little slower than a stump grinder, but effective and cheaper.

That's it for now. Tomorrow promises to be Stove Day, pending my phone call today to see if they're going to bother to show up this time. Hence my excitement and joy is instead replaced by caution....

Mojo