Food on Friday

Well. Have I mentioned that I have a younger brother? 28 months younger. That means he was 40 in June.
And I think he might have accidentally become a grown up. Well as grown up as anyone in my gene pool will ever be.

We are like night and day. I am light and he is dark. I am well behaved and he was....naughty. Really. I ate everything and he ate nothing. Everyone liked me best and well, everyone liked him best. He could ride my bike and I couldn't. I loved school and he hated it. I loved reading books and he felt tortured if he had to read a book. My eyes are brilliant blue and his are blazing hazel. He loves beer and I love fries. He was as small as I was tall.

He once told my mom that he was "gonna live with her until he was five hunert years old"....imagine her panic. I would never have said that. Man, he loves his mom. Wait, I love her, too. But she likes me best. Promise.

He drove me absolutely crazy when we were little--well, younger because I was never little. He never sat still ever. Ever. Ever. He was constant motion. If he was in the house, he had to have a tennis ball or those blue rubber balls that people used to play racquetball in hands. And he would throw it against the wall and catch it a million times. Without looking. If he was outside, he was playing some sort of game, usually winning, or riding his bike and jumping the homemade bike ramp the neighborhood kids had made at the edge of the neighbors driveway. And jumping the highestfarthestfastest.

We called him Scotty. My dad still slips and calls him that. One time he found snakes in Grandma Hillbilly's yard. She gave him a butter tub to keep them. Later, we're having supper when Gram looks up and notices that the lid is ajar on the butter tub. "Scotty, why is the lid off of the snake tub?" To which he calmly replies, "Gram, they have to have air to breathe." She promptly jumped onto her chair while Grandpa checked the tub. And you guessed....no snakes. Screaming and screeching begins and snakes are quickly found and banished outside. I don't think Gram ever quite got over that little incident. New rule...no snakes in the house.



WARNING....I have a bejillion of these shots. DO NOT leave your camera lay anywhere near him. In the olden days, I would develop a roll of film and find shots like these THAT I HAD PAID MONEY FOR. Now I just delete them.

Last weekend, he and Grandma Cindy met us at CG's apartment with a load of stuff. He had some wisdom for CG....not all of it appropriate or shareable with my lovely audience. But he also had something for us. A Christmas present.

A Christmas present? For real. He usually shops with my mom one afternoon near Christmas. Well that might be a lie. She shops, hands him a bill and he pays her. But this time he surprised her almost as much as me.

He bought The Hays Crew this:
No lie.
A Traeger Grill.
Just like this one. All by himself. No help from my mom.
I was very excited. It almost topped the Christmas I got my Kitchen Aid mixer. Almost.
He gave his brother-in-law and his nephew the thrill of their life. Frick can't wait to get it put together so he can grill something.

Thanks, Scotty.


Food on Friday? Yep. Just sayin'.