My best friend said, “Let’s go to the flea market,” and I agreed because there is not much else to do in Brownsville, Texas if you are not doing something that you are doing that is not on the TOP 100 THINGS TO DO IN THE SOUTH PADRE ISLAND/BROWNSVILLE AREA list. Someone recently implied that it must be a sorry place that announces fresh produce as one of its major things to brag about. I beg to differ. This place is paradise. My best friend has lost 150 pounds and if it weren’t for the fresh fruits and vegetables that are so plentiful here, her diet would have been outrageously expensive or so bland it would have been impossible to stick to. My best friend looks beautiful and is now doing some modeling.
I absolutely love my BFF. She is awesome!
She has invited me on her trip into Checkmeoutnowland and I have lost 3 inches at my waist and 15 pounds so far. I want to look good on the beach this summer. I have begun on my New Year’s Resoluting already because I can’t afford to waist time waiting for the 1st of the year. (I figure I need a headstart with all I gotta go.) My new resolution is to get in shape and stay there awhile instead of just look good at the event I aimed for and then go back to my regular lifestyle of eating popcorn while I watch exercise tapes, riding my bike to the nearest ice cream shop, asking the nurse to weigh me again AFTER she takes a blood sample to see if it makes the number lower, ordering a bacon cheeseburger, fries and shake with a DIET Coke and so on. If there were not such a proliferation of fresh fruits and vegetables to choose from, I would not be succeeding as well as I am now on this self-imposed deprivation or as you call it, dieting. These are some of the vegetables we have available here now a week before Christmas.
A friend whose moniker is Sunclay informed me about what it is like up north and told me the ground is frozen up there. I can’t comprehend that. Frozen dirt? WTH?
I haven’t traveled anywhere really and never up far up north so I can’t comprehend cold or the seasons of fall or winter. The seasons we have in Texas are: almost summer, summer, late summer, and winter where it may go down into the 30’s for a day or so.
We are thankfully NEVER at a loss for incredibly sweet, luscious fruits.
Juicy citrus is the norm here.
There was an episode of Gilligan’s Island where a crate of radioactive vegetables washed up on shore and the vegetables had extraordinary effects on the person who ate them. Mary Ann ate the carrots and could see for miles. Seeing the size of these carrots, bought today – Dec. 20th, at the local flea market reminded me of that episode.
I placed the salt and pepper shakers next to these fruits so that your mind could be blown too when you find out that these are Valley lemons not oranges.
These fruits reminded me of that catalog I loved to look at so much, Gardener’s Choice, where you can buy freak trees and plants such as this. I always suspected that the genetic engineers there came up with their freaky ideas after work at the lab while sharing a bottle of Jack.
Again the Rio Grande Valley has the lowest gas in the nation. People in other parts of this great country are still paying over 3 dollars a gallon in some places.
We were in Harlingen trying to get a Halloween costume for our daughter where I was again hit by the “Worst Mom in the World” syndrome. This syndrome is common among parents who are first-timers and discover that if you wait too long to get something you may deem yourself a loser in the parent game. It has happened to me twice at Easter time when I could not for the life of me find an Easter basket in the whole town of Brownsville, apparently I had waited too long and the good parents went and bought them all from all the stores in all the town. I said to myself, “Well, I learned my lesson.” Then it happened to me again the very next year.
This time it has happened again but on Halloween. All Walmarts, the specialty Halloween shops, Kmart and Targets are dangerously low on Halloween costumes and I am afraid that if you have not bought yours yet for your little one you are going to be doing the crafty make-your-own this year. I was searching for butterfly wings and was disappointed store after store in town after town in this beautiful valley then only after purchasing a replacement headband that had little ears on it, (I figured she could be a kitty if we painted whiskers on her) did I have the blessed luck to look in a shopping cart of mismatched and miscellaneous items where I found the elusive wings. I almost cried from relief and I said, “Thank you, God,” at least ten times thanking Him for the wings and for the bottles that a girl gave me that will allow me to do my art project for the upcoming Mercado on South Padre Island. I did my first bottle already and it looks AWESOME!
This guy was smart and got his costume early.