You may have noticed that each Blanket Of The Month entry is longer than the one that preceded it and it’s all because of you! After all these months in your company I’ve overcome my shyness and just feel so comfortable around you I’ve become positively chatty! (Even my gay readers have to admit that’s the gayest sentence they’ve ever read). Don’t you worry, I’ll gladly talk about blankets but our relationship is so much more than that now.  I feel I can share my life with you – in fact, you’re welcome to be me for as long as you want – that will free me up to concentrate on my three real passions – off-roading, clogging and stump removal.

I’ll be frank and you can be Sinatra, October was not good to me. It ended last night with Halloween and coincidentally the month began with a court appearance versus a witch. In-between I masterminded two massive business deals for friends who apparently were so overcome with rapture of the deep profits that they neglected to offer me so much as a farthing.

Fortunately, I am a man who does not let failure go to his head. I am channeling my frustration and rage by personally digging up my entire front lawn armed only with a pick and shovel. Why wouldn’t I hire laborers to do this backbreaking work for me? Two excellent reasons: I’m cheap and I’m stupid.  And why would a cheap and stupid man dig up a perfectly good lawn? You just asked a great question that deserves my very best explanation! I live in Phoenix, Arizona – part of the vast parched Sonoran desert. Grass has absolutely no business in a desert – every single blade is an abomination and a slap in the face via Bermuda to Mother Nature.

I am going NOT green and creating a more natural environment that is a true celebration of native habitat – a barren Godforsaken expanse of naked scorched earth and sun-blasted rock fit only for lizards, rattlesnakes and scorpions. I am now in the third day of demolishing my entire front yard with at least four more days of destruction ahead of me. I have mightily swung my pick so many times that I am now permanently bent over and look like a Jewish anteater. My back and legs are infernos of agony and my arms are worse. My face and hair are caked with dust, my clothes reek of sweat but in the end all my toil will pay off for I will have a desert landscape so grotesquely realistic, so horribly natural, so unspeakably bleak it will kill all hope in any human that gazes upon it.

Which naturally brings me to this month’s blanket. An eyedazzling Racine shawl circa 1895-1900 and I apologize, but I only have one picture of it. Interesting angle I photographed it at. And the fuss they made about Ansel Adams! Just like my yard, I say dig it!