2019 - Day 229/136 - Saturday...Shell Game...

Ugh...this is my second attempt to get this entry published. I have absolutely NO IDEA what happened the first time, but apparently this is the best I can do for tonight. They have been working on the roads around the house for a couple months, and we go from a mudslide to a dustbowl, depending on the weather. I think we are in dust bowl mode for the near term. Last week they came out and 'oiled' the roads. Not oil like they used on the roads when I was a kid, not the black oil stuff, but a clear kind of oil that is in a perpetual state of 'wet', but it is not really wet. It just looks wet. I is almost like a shellac, like it has just put a layer of clear polyurethane on top of the dirt. Whatever it is, they tried to also camouflage the mailbox. The mailbox ended up about three feet from the newly elevated road bed, and all catty-wampus, and there was so much dirt on it you could hardly see it. Jody suggested I try to get it back into a proper position, so that was a pretty good challenge for me. These are the before and after pictures, so I don't think I did too badly. I have five sprinklers running right now, and I hope to make some good progress before bedtime. I did a little bit of watering this morning, but it was too hot to keep going, so I will see what kind of progress I can make.

Shell Game -- Noun. fraud; especially a swindle involving the substitution of something of little or no value for a valuable item. "He had tried to cover the risk of an adjustable-rate loan through a shell game of refinancing that finally caught up with him." Paul Reyes, Harper's, October, 2008

Did You Know? The shell game, a swindling trick in which a small ball or pea is quickly shifted from under on to another of three walnut shells or cups to fool the spectator guessing its location, is a version of one of the oldest and most widespread forms of sleight of hand. Conjurers have performed this trick, which is also called thimblerig, throughout the world for centuries. The version that became popular in the United States in the late 19th century used walnut shells and peas. Shell game thus became the popular term for the trick, and the trick itself became so well known that the term is now used figuratively to describe dishonest actions that are done to deceive people.