Morning all...

If you have Weatherbug, select the Science Museum downtown as your source, and check out the great shots of the Hotel Roanoke they have had lately.

Important Market Alert! Butternut Squash have made their appearance at the market. That means fall is upon us. Ignore those pumpkins at Kroger - theyre from Mexico, and don't realize how early they are. The Squash are right on time though. Once we settle into days that reach the mid-70's or less and nights in the 50s or lower, I'll post a recipie I have for Butternut Squash Soup, and it is heaven.

Maybe, just maybe - I'll even post my recipie for my Pumpkin Soup made in the pumpkin itself. You want to talk about a fancy presentation.

A word on why I am not protesting at the AMWV today. There's no point to it. You can't effectively protest a belief. And thats what it is, its the belief that the AMWV will save downtown (from what I dont know) and bring Roanoke to national acclaim. Thats like protesting someone who believes hot dogs are evil, it serves no purpose other than wasting your time. They are obviously delusional, and probably scary. Now if someone from the AMWV wanted a reasonable sit-down to discuss the thing, then maybe there would be a point to it. But thats not protesting, thats lobbying.

But rest assured gentle readers that I am, and will remain on, this case.

In other news, there is an article in todays paper about kids starting Lemonade stands to raise money for the hurricane victims. Which is cool, good kids. But back when I was a Lemonade Czar, we did it for the money - and we did it all summer. At halloween we went around for candy with our UNICEF cans, little sugar for us and some money for the kids. Between Halloween and Thanksgiving we were given two little cans for UNICEF and we filled them as best we could. That was really it for fundraising.

Local fundraising was done in a most interesting manner. We got a box of 12 chocolate bars, which always smelled lightly of chocolate and heavily of cardboard. It was a long box, as the bars were laid out 2 high. You (or an adult with a strong knee) would crack the box in half, pull out the cardboard handle and off you went. House to house, door to door hocking your chocolate wares. Of course you always had one yourself (although I know several people who had more than just one.) It was a quarter-pound of chocolate for a buck, with or without nuts. At the beginning of the fundrasier, you were asked how many boxes you wanted. Which is a really inappropriate question to ask a kid when chocolate is involved. Plus - this was after we had looked at the prize catalog. Which made it twice as bad. I know kids who would take 30 boxes of chocolate, at 12 bars a box, total of 360 bars of chocolate, hoping for the Big Kahuna prize on the back of the catalog, usually a bike or tv or something like that.

And when it was all over, they would bring back 26 boxes. No one ever got the big prizes, I frankly don't ever remember getting any prizes. Now they did have low level prizes, but I probably did not want them.

How many skull rings can one boy own?

Anyway - thats today.. for now..